"Wombat" by Mattia Ravasi

***AS SEEN IN*** PLANET SCUMM ISSUE #12
**WRITTEN BY MATTIA RAVASI**
*Illustrations by* *Kels Hyde*, *Maura McGonagle, and* *Sam Rheaume*

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There was a time when I thought a great deal about wombats. I looked for them every time I visited a natural history museum—La Specola in Florence, Oxford University, Bristol Gallery. I stayed for hours studying their friendly muzzles. Then I became a wombat.

A romantic debacle compelled me to seek shelter in Milan’s Civic Museum for six consecutive days, walking past curators left unmellowed by familiarity, by the end fully convinced I was planning a terror attack. All day I stood by my favorite case, ignored by visiting schoolchildren in favor of the undoubtedly cooler reptiles and bats. My wombat friend was large but not freakish, neither bigger nor cuter than a local nutria. He’d been embalmed with his head up and mouth agape, as if he’d been taxidermied in the middle of answering a question.

I was wondering what I would do the next day—the museum closes on Mondays—when I found myself staring at a different case, the birds of Antarctica, with the wombat’s ghost smeared over my sight. A day of rest suddenly seemed like a sensible idea.

Then I realized the ghost was my reflection, given back by the glass of my case. I had become my wombat, its air of gentle surprise for once consistent with its inner life.

Well before anxiety, I experienced contentment. You never notice it, but the constant shuffling of feet, scratching of itches, rearranging of tufts—let alone the mechanics of lungs! Intestines!—exacts a toll on your stamina even when you’re under the illusion of absolute stillness. Getting rid of it felt reposing.

Had Mattia never come along, I might have embraced the life of the wombat.

***

It was two days before I discovered I had company. The others had been together long enough to wear out most conversation topics. They had no way of knowing I was there, as it did not occur to me to speak.

During my first night I thought I heard a word—“plan!”—but I could not locate its source, and ascribed it to my rapidly deteriorating sanity.

Monday I spent in silence. On Tuesday afternoon, a couple with children walked by our case, giving us the type of glance that doesn’t see you so much as it confirms you’re not a tiger.

“Lorenzo is out of San Vittore.”

“Good for him! He looks much trimmer.”

“Ughugh,” I said, which was welcomed with surprised shouts and a few curses.

My fellow exhibits taught me how to speak, a matter of forming sentences in your mind and letting them run all the way to a full stop. (It’s not that simple. Try it without moving your tongue). I couldn’t look directly at them, but I saw their reflection in the glass.

Giulia was a dunnart, a mouse with tiny feet and huge black eyes that looked cute at first, turned sinister after I was forced to stare at them all day, until finally they grew back on me. She’d been studying art at the academy in Brera before her change. She would turn quiet for days whenever she saw visitors wandering the museum with a sketchbook.

Renato was an echidna, and the most miserable among us. He was a widower who only stepped inside the Museum one summer to escape the savage heat. “And the AC wasn’t even working!” he’d repeat at least twice daily. On top of this he was the ugliest, not by design but because of some taxidermist’s miscalculation. They’d forgotten his face or been forced to scrap it, so that he had no eyes or mouth. His pointy snout looked like the phallus of a libidinous sea creature. Eyes would have done him no good, for he alone did not face the front of the case, but its side. All he could look at all day was the same piece of plywood.

Finally, we had Tania. We chose the name and made it a woman’s, based on the pitch of her voice, though it came to us in such dragged laments there was really no way of telling. Tania was a sloth, hanging upside down from a plastic branch above us, and she only said a word every few days. It was hard to reconstruct her sentences, much harder than this story will make it out to be. Her lethargy made no sense: sloths may be slow but the bodies we inhabited, as far as we could tell, in no way influenced our personality. Our guess was that she’d been a problematic person before her change, too.

***

Lorenzo went back to jail. Gemma explained to the kids that Dad would not be home for Christmas, perhaps not for Easter either. The youngest stared at us. His brother looked bored and confused, as if mom were teaching him how to tie his shoes all over again.

Milanese lives were our only food, anchoring us to a reality beyond our case. Mostly we had to improvise.

“Hilfiger cargo shorts,” Giulia would say. “Ralph Lauren shirt and sandals. In January! Australian or WASP American, on his grand tour of a continent he thinks he knows but doesn’t. Later today he’ll get mugged in Centrale station.” Being an artist, she knew how to capture a person’s essence in a few strokes. I chose a more whimsical approach, inventing outlandish tales to explain the angry old lady who came snooping every week. “Her husband was a curator and a gambler who hid all his winnings somewhere in this hall. But he couldn’t tell her where before he caught a 91 bus to the face! She is still looking, hoping to find his treasure.” My stories had Renato giggling like a boy.

The people who came to us often, those bringing enough clues to construct larger narratives, were mostly lonely clerks or unimaginative families from nearby Lambrate, from Via Padova and Viale Monza, places that erode your patience and your trust. A tattooed mother herding six kids around every Sunday, addressing them in a kind, trembling voice that betrayed dreams of killing sprees. An Egyptian dentist showing his daughters around, little Fatma forever in awe of the panthers and bears, Mariem exhibiting more sass and contempt every week. She’s fifteen, Khalil, with excellent grades! Let her do what she wants with her Sundays.

Three drug dealers used our hall as a marketplace, but they saw so little business I doubt they made enough to repay their daily tickets. One of them was skeleton thin and sweaty even in February. One day he stopped showing up.

***

“Smash!” Tania once shouted in the middle of the night, making us fear we had enraged her.

***

I got my first hunch about Mattia when I saw him push a cart of tagged minerals to the elevator at the end of our hall.

“New janitor,” Giulia said, for Renato’s benefit.

“What does he look like?”

“Queasy.”

He stopped and looked around but not at us. Why would he?

***

By April our dealers had gotten arrested, or run through their supply, or found a better place to sell. Lorenzo was back, but things with Gemma weren’t good. A Chinese gentleman from Via Sarpi had chauffeured her home a couple of times. Lorenzo got word of this and made a scene, stomping and wailing across Chinatown.

A Peruvian family became regulars. They had this horrid kid, always pointing at me. “That’s a wombat! Their poop is square!”

When the shape of your stool becomes your most recognizable feature, it means it’s time for a change of air.

***

“Uè!” I shouted the next time Mattia walked by. It had been so long since I’d last seen him I could only conclude he’d been avoiding our hall on purpose.

He looked at me, begging me to be a normal dead wombat.

“Help us!”

He ran.

“The,” Tania sighed.

***

He came back later that week, after closing time. I had asked my friends to be cool, but they’d been waiting too long for this.

“Take us out of here!”

“I’m going to sue this place closed. No more science and animals and such nonsense!”

“Have the other animals ever spoken to you?”

Janitor was perhaps the wrong term, but Mattia’s claim that he was an associate researcher was an obvious lie. Whenever we saw him, he was pushing carts. Once they made him clean up when a kid puked up hamburger on the panther’s case.

“This is crazy,” he said.

I shall spare you most of the hours of free therapy we gave him. Here’s a tasty nugget:

“Are you sure no one else can hear you?”

“Yes.”

“But then you basically only exist in my head! It’s as if I made you up!”

The mind boggles at the extent of such perverted egotism.

“But what can I do for you?” Mattia asked, eventually.

Surprisingly, we’d failed to discuss this among ourselves.

Renato had a strong opinion.

“Help us find our dealers!”

***

The following evening, Mattia brought us all the newspapers he’d been able to gather. Some were fresh; some, weeks old. Every time a drug crime was mentioned, he put the article to the glass and showed us the faces of the arrested. We didn’t find our dealers.

***

“I could write about you,” he proposed in August. “I can’t tell people you’re here, they’d lock me up, but if I write a story and pretend it’s fiction, no one will care that it’s crazy.”

Like chimps with their feces we heaped insults, accusations, curses to the Virgin upon Mattia, questioning the soundness of anybody who would assume this to be a satisfying alternative to anything whatsoever.

“What we need to do,” Giulia said, “is go about this scientifically.” She alone saw Mattia as a realistic chance for escape. Renato had remembered that leaving the museum would only take him back to a lonely world. I had more company inside this case than anywhere in my biped life. “Look around the museum. See if any other case has people in it.”

“Glass!” Tania shouted.

***

“I’ve tried chatting up the entire building,” he reported two nights later, somewhat resentful. “The axolotl gives me the creeps, but if someone’s in there they’re not answering. Perhaps it’s just an absurd animal. Other than that, nothing. But watch this.”

Out of his pocket he produced a white crystal as long as his hand. Its clear surface hid turbid depths, like milk thinned with water.

“The geology wing is one floor above us. I took measurements, counted steps. Right above your head there’s a storage room where they keep uncatalogued minerals.”

He pushed the crystal closer to the glass. The tag tied to it read “Russian obsidian? 8/49.”

“August ‘49?” I asked.

“Strange, right? All the other minerals are six months old at most.”

Renato mumbled nonsense in his thick Milanese dialect.

“OK,” Giulia said, “So what? Hey!”

Mattia was gone.

We didn’t for a second believe he could have darted away. He lacked the physique.

The voice from our left still took us by surprise.

“Oh, no!”

It came from the furry, spherical chinchilla.

“Mattia, you impossible imbecile!”

“OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO ME!”

“Porcco—”

“It’s your fault, you horrible creatures!”

The world exploded. There was a crash and a blinding light. It speaks of the power of Italy’s fear-mongering media that after spending months as a museum wombat, away from the internet and television, my immediate assumption was still that ISIS had bombed the Civic Museum.

“What are you doing down there?”

Tania, and the branch she hung from, had collapsed against our case’s glass, shattering it and falling to the floor. She lay on her back, claws in the air.

Did she do it on purpose? Had she spent the past year gathering all the microscopic energy inside—movement of the electrons in her atoms, the impact of every mote of dust in our immobile environment—to attempt a single liberating motion? Had she sacrificed her speech to pursue this goal, excluding herself from our conversations to give us a hopeless chance at freedom?

Or did her plastic branch simply break?

***

She was found next morning by two of Mattia’s mop-wielding research fellows.

“What happened?”

“Dear. We need a new case.”

“Do we leave this one for today?”

“Kids will cut their hands on a shard, or get crushed by the tapir. Let’s bring the animals to storage.”

“Look at this!” One of them picked up Renato. “And people say there’s a God.”

“I don’t think that’s supposed to look like that. It’s just a very bad job.”

“No wonder it was turned away! It’ll scare the children.”

“Tell you what—let’s trash it. We’ll say the sloth brought it down and that it got smashed.”

We screamed at the top of our lungs, called Renato’s name, begged Mattia to do something. But what could he do?

***

We were brought to a dark room on the top floor. Other animals were there—an eagle with a broken wing, a salamander that had started to smell—but Mattia’s inspection had been thorough: there was nobody inside them.

We spent three days in that room. Our greatest fear was that they’d put us in separate cases. We thanked each other profusely, I’m not sure what for. Mattia forgave us; we forgave him. We reassured Tania that what happened to Renato wasn’t her fault. Her intentions had been pure.

At dawn on our fourth day the door opened and we stopped talking.

An old man walked in, clawing the ground with one of those tetra-footed canes. I thought he must be a visitor who’d gotten lost on his way to the toilet, except the museum was certainly not open at half past six.

“Uè, ciula.”

He looked exactly like I’d imagined him, walrus mustache and all.

***

The janitors had dumped Renato in a bin down Corso Venezia. He heard them walk away, wondering if he was going to get compacted or incinerated, when suddenly he was overpowered by the most uncomfortable feeling. His sciatica had returned. There were people around, but Milanese brains are trained not to register old men lingering by, or inside, garbage bins.

He spent the following days planning his heist.

“How did you work around the Museum’s alarm?” I asked him.

“I didn’t,” he said. “We have to leg it!”

It was a titanic effort. Giulia fit snugly in the pocket of Renato’s shirt; Mattia found an unhappy place between his belly and the elastic band of his underwear. Tania he could carry slumped over his shoulder, using her branch to balance her. The only problem was me, heavy and cumbersome. And the police were coming.

Did I tell them to go? Did I sacrifice myself for the team? Of course not! Seeing Renato walk around filled me with the ugliest jealousy.

He left his cane behind and hoisted me under his armpit, then wheezed his way heroically to the elevator. Once we got to the ground floor, he didn’t walk out of the museum’s smashed doors so much as he let my weight propel him forward.

He was crossing the Museum’s gardens when we heard the sirens. “The fuzz!” he said, with such familiarity and contempt I wondered what kind of life he’d led before retiring. A few steps later we came back.

***

Was Tania a woman?

We never knew. It turned out she was a pigeon! She flew away as soon as she changed back, heading south to the Duomo or the Torre Velasca. She must have gotten into our hall one summer day, when they opened a window to compensate for the faulty AC. Her avian nature might account for her broken speech—but does this mean pigeons can speak? That they plan escapes? I remain puzzled.

***

At Renato’s suggestion, we pretended we’d tackled him on his way to freedom. When the fuzz came three minutes later, we got an abundance of suspicious looks, and no thanks. The cover story helped Mattia keep his job after not showing up for three days.

Renato spent a month in San Vittore. He got to know our friend Lorenzo well. Turns out he’s a new man, and has been working hard with the prison’s psychologist. Gemma and the kids have moved in with the Chinese gentleman, who has a loft with a view on the Porta Nuova skyscrapers. Lorenzo understands her anger and disappointment, and hopes she will come back to him.

I wish him every happiness. Then again, a loft on Via Sarpi is not something you give up lightly. Perhaps Gemma is better off this way.

***

Mattia found the crystal in his pocket upon turning back. He swears he’s gotten rid of it, but he’s a schmuck, and I would be surprised if it didn’t turn up someplace where it could mess up more lives.

We see him often. He stops for breakfast a few times a week in the Via Borghetto café where Giulia, Renato and I spend much of our time. You’ll never guess who runs the place. One of our dealers! The lost ones! He inherited it from an uncle and he’s been trying to make it work. We don’t know what happened to his friend. We lack the courage to ask.

It’s not the cleanest establishment, and it tends to attract old prostitutes and hustlers, but in the pictures Giulia draws these people never look nasty. The three of us sit at our table in the corner. Giulia sketches, and Renato and I play cards sometimes. Hardly anyone ever looks our way.

Issue #12 | FULL STORY, "WOMBAT"