Page 28 of A.I.AM.

Outside, a bell began ringing. Gaspar hurried into the yard and discovered Twiggy, the female elephant, pulling the old dinner bell with her trunk. She had arranged a semicircle of lawn chairs facing a portable television. Every chair was empty except for one occupied by a cardigan.

“Mr. Rogers?” Gaspar guessed rubbing his forehead.

Twiggy nodded enthusiastically, rang the bell again, and accidentally launched the clapper into a bucket. The bucket flipped over, rolled down the path, and collected a bewildered duck.

Gaspar once again tried to explain the outage using slow words and a diagram in the dirt. He stopped realizing that he was trying to explain technology to an elephant with no opposable thumbs.

Twiggy listened, then erased the diagram with one foot and drew a television, a smiling stick figure, and what might have been a trolley. She tapped the trolley firmly.

“I know,” Gaspar said. “Reruns. But I can’t show reruns without the internet and we have no internet!” Twiggy leaned toward Gaspar with the disappointed dignity of a host whose guest had ruined dinner.

Then Steve, their only tiger arrived, dragging an orange extension cord from the direction of his habitat. Coco the bison followed with a bowl clamped gently in her teeth. The bowl was full of unpopped corn kernels. Both stopped in front of Gaspar.

“Hallmark movies?” Gaspar said with exhaustion. “We can’t. I can’t.”

Steve sat. Coco set down the bowl. Gaspar had never seen two animals communicate so clearly without moving. Their stillness said that somewhere a baker had returned to her hometown, a handsome carpenter needed help saving a gazebo, and only Gaspar stood between them and the final snow-covered kiss.

“There is no internet. That means we cannot play your shows. Besides, why do you two like that junk? Never mind. I don’t want to know what you do in your personal time.”

Steve looked at the extension cord. Coco looked at the corn. Twiggy put the cardigan over the tiger. Steve tolerated this for four seconds, then sneezed. The cardigan shot into the air and landed on Alvin, who had silently appeared beside the chairs. Only his eyes and the end of his tail remained visible. Alvin did not move. Everyone took this as evidence that his plan had entered a new phase.

By nine o’clock, Gaspar’s office had become a complaint department. Semu tapped on the window. Twiggy rang the bell. Steve paced in a rectangle with the precise dimensions of a television. Coco pushed the bowl of corn across the floor every time Gaspar looked away, so it seemed to be advancing on its own. Alvin sat beneath the cardigan and watched the mail cart with unsettling interest.

The flamingoes were squawking, the giraffe was pacing back and forth, and the Komodo dragons were chewing on the extension cord.

“I’m in hell,” whispered Gaspar to himself. The other men just chuckled. “You assholes could help.”

“It’s more fun to watch,” grinned Ghost.

Gaspar gave pretext of calling the internet company from the landline, knowing they would never answer. A recorded voice told him his wait would be approximately forty-seven minutes and that many common problems could be solved online. Gaspar stared at the receiver.

“That’s very funny. I bet they stayed up all night to record that one,” he said. Semu signed through the window.

“Not funny. Bored.”

The recorded music began. It was a cheerful tune played on instruments designed to make reasonable people confess to crimes. Gaspar put the call on speaker and tried to work. Every forty seconds, the voice thanked him for his patience. Every forty-one seconds, Semu tapped the window and signed that patience was not an episode.

The animals then decided that they were going to fix their own problem. They would organize activities.

The first organized suggestion came from Steve. He pushed a laminated flyer under the office door. It showed a winter village, a bakery, and two people standing much too close while holding one cup of cocoa. Someone had written MOVIE FESTIVAL across the top in claw marks. Coco pushed in a second flyer showing the same village, bakery, people, and cup, only mirrored.

“When the hell did they learn to spell? And those are identical,” Gaspar said in exasperation.

Steve turned one flyer upside down. Coco nodded as though a major programming problem had been solved.

Twiggy proposed a neighborhood hour. She placed traffic cones along the main path, hung cardigans from fence posts, and tried to run a toy trolley between the reptile pond and the feed shed. The trolley traveled six feet, struck an acorn, performed a complete somersault, and landed in Alvin’s water dish. Alvin climbed aboard. The trolley sank. Alvin remained seated underwater, and the remote control raised above the surface.

Semu proposed live theater. She assigned Gaspar the role of Hostile Leopard, a part he understood only after she handed him a spotted blanket and pushed him behind a shrub. Semu crouched on the other side with a plastic crown. A crowd gathered. Gaspar leaped out and growled. Semu roared, chased him around the office, and swung from an awning that had never been tested for a silverback.

The awning folded like a hand fan landing Gaspar in a wheelbarrow.

Gaspar climbed out of the wheelbarrow and found the landline cord stretched across the path behind him. The hold music was still playing from the office. The phone had followed him out the window and now dangled from the awning.

“Your call is very important to us,” the recording said. Gaspar put the receiver into the flower basket.

At ten o’clock, a committee formed, apparently without his permission. Semu chaired it because she had the clipboard and, let’s face it, she was the strongest. Twiggy contributed a stack of index cards, each bearing a drawing of a sweater. Steve and Coco gave a joint proposal that consisted of fifty-six movie titles, all involving Christmas, bakeries, princes, small towns, or some combination of the four. Alvin gave a catalog page featuring an ostrich-leather purse. Under the purse he had drawn a skull and a coupon code.

Gaspar read the page twice. Alvin smiled in the particular way alligators do, which did not improve the atmosphere. The longer he stared at the alligator, the more he realized that he smiled like Trak.