I Am Not the Messiah!: Mr Z Tells All

SINCLAIRE

Copyright © 2019 James Sinclaire.

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-2496-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-2495-8 (e)

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 07/23/2019

I am not the Messiah is the intriguing memoir of James Sinclaire, otherwise known as Mr Zootherapy. In his own words, Sinclaire tells us for the first time about the Gorillagram that started it all off, his brief marriage, and his life in New Zealand, culminating in, and going beyond, the dramatic shooting that ended his career. But the real star of this book is Zootherapy. This book tells us how it started and evolved, and how it became the force that it is today.

Most of the action takes place in New Zealand but this memoir alludes to universal psychological and philosophical themes. It can be read as a self-help manual and no knowledge of Zootherapy is assumed. The complete text comprises about 81000 words.

Opening quotes

‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘’

That which we call fact may well be a veil spun by language to shroud the mind from reality. Language and Silence, George Steiner

Man is a fraction of the animal world. Our history is an afterthought, no more, tacked to an infinite calendar. We are not as unique as we should like to believe. And if man in a time of need seeks deeper knowledge concerning himself, then he must explore those animal horizons from which we have made our quick little march. African Genesis, Robert Ardrey

It is not, for example, the province of the reasoning faculty to decide how a baby ought to be treated. We have had exquisitely precise instincts, expert in every detail of child care, since long before we became anything resembling Homo sapiens. But we have conspired to baffle this long-standing knowledge so utterly that we now employ researchers full time to puzzle out how we should behave toward children, one another, and ourselves. Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff

[B]ald eagles fly as high as they possibly can, up into the thinnest air, making the elegant flight patterns of intended mating all the way up, then cleave to each other and fall, fall, fall, mating as they fall fluttering, plummeting down toward the great rock mountains. …[E]agles, geese, wolves, and many other creatures of land and sea and air are stuck with all this obsolete magic and mystery because they can’t read and they can’t listen to lectures. All they have is instinct. A Tan and Sandy Silence, John D MacDonald

From the Oxford English Dictionary, 2030 edition

zoo-

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before a vowel properly zo-, repr. Gr. ζåo-, combining form of ζ ov animal, occurring in numerous scientific and technical terms, of which the more important will be found in their alphabetical places. (The second element is usually and properly from Greek, but in a few recent words from Latin or English.)

In biological and botanical terms the prefix sometimes denotes the power of spontaneous movement (formerly supposed to be a distinctive characteristic of animals): see zoogamete, zoogonidium, zoosperm, zoozygosphere; zoospore.

Additions 2027

Add: Zootherapy, psychological therapy encompassing the imaginative assumption of animal characteristics, especially outlook.

2001 Encyclopædia Britannica Originating in New Zealand, Zootherapy is spreading like wildfire across the Anglophone world. 2013 Economist 22 July Pastoral production has taken second place to Zootherapy as [New Zealand’s] principal export earner. 2028 P. CARRUTHERS, Our Humanity 264 Largely thanks to Zootherapy, violent political conflict is a thing of the past.

Prologue: New Zealand bush, 2022

The year 2022. Somewhere in the bush country in New Zealand’s north island. Gorse-covered hills enclose a clearing, sheltering a patch of meadow from the soft, warm, sweetly-scented breeze. A bell bird calls plaintively from a distant tree. At one end of the clearing, at the bottom of a gentle slope, there’s an easel upon which is a cardboard target: a silhouette of the top half of a man, to the chest of which has been pinned a plastic bag filled with water. At the other end of the clearing stand two men a few metres apart from each other, both facing the target. They pick up their rifles and aim. After a second, there’s an electronic beep coming from a loudspeaker near the target. There’s a sharp, spluttering sound from the rifles and at the same moment a plastic bag of water bursts on the target. The taller of the two men, heavyset, with short black hair, greying temples, picks up a pair of binoculars, and gives a thumbs-up sign.

‘Gotcha’ he says. ’The old belt and braces approach’, says the other man; a compact, muscled, stocky figure, pale, with short closely cropped blonde hair. They both walk toward the target. Nearby, wedged under a garish red plastic hamper are discarded cardboard targets and burst plastic bags. There are no bullets nor bullet holes; just tiny darts, with transparent flights, almost invisible, sticking out of a small circle on the target boards.

‘Yeah; I reckon we’ve earned our alcohol-free.’ Their accents are English. The taller man grabs a couple of bottles of zero-percent beer from the hamper. They sit down on a blanket on the grass, twist off the tops and begin drinking.

‘Can’t get used to the sun going in a different direction’ says the shorter man.

‘I know; I did a job in Melbourne once, did surveillance dawn to dusk. Saw the whole thing; I knew something weird was going on, couldn’t work it out at first.’

‘Yeah, and it’s summer – in November!’

They finish drinking, and gather up the targets, darts, beer bottles, bottle tops, packing everything into boxes and black plastic bin-liners.

‘Mickey Mouse bullets, Mickey Mouse beer, Mickey Mouse car;’ he sighs, ‘I guess it fits; a Mickey Mouse op.’

‘But one you can actually talk about. While sipping wine with some luscious chick on the Riviera…’

The men put their boxes, bags and loudspeaker and all their other bits and pieces into the boot of the car: a white rental. Then they scan the grass looking for anything they might have missed. Finding nothing, they get into the car, and the tall man looks just a little comical as he gets into the driver’s seat, extended as far back as it will go.

They belt up. Before starting the car, the compact man consults his smartphone.

‘Figure on three hours to…’ he stumbles over the word ‘Rot-or-ua.’

‘It’s Rotorua,’ says the tall man, pronouncing it correctly, with a long initial ‘o’. ‘They call it Stinktown.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘You’ll find out.’

‘You’ve been before?’

‘After a little business across the water I needed to hunker down for a while. Spent a few days there. Lots of visitors, always busy. And far enough away from our upcoming performance, which is probably why he wants to see us there.’

The compact man continues. ‘OK, Rotorua. Meet up with the big chief. There’s hot pools there?’ The other man nods, ‘Splash around in hot pools. Our last days of freedom before going down to the big city.’

‘It’s the capital but it’s not that big.’

‘Wellington. What do the locals call that?’

‘I dunno. Gumboot City, I guess.’

The compact guy starts the car. They give each other a high-five: ‘To Gumboot City!’ the tall man says. ‘To Gumboot City!’ echoes the compact man. They move off slowly, bumping over the grass. Everything is exactly as if they’d never been there. Nothing, not a scrap of cardboard, burst plastic bag, nor a bottle top, nor any of the darts – nothing – remains of their presence. The sun slowly continues its clockwise descent, falling below the tops of the trees; the bell bird resumes its plaintive call.

Introduction: the year 2031

Zootherapy itself is as simple as this statement: see the world through animal eyes. But we’re human and our overwhelming preoccupation is to make the simple, complicated and the short, long. So much so that anything too simple and short, we discredit on sight. That perennial standby question posed in music exams comes to mind: what makes the old song Frere Jacques less compelling than that of Beethoven’s setting of Ode to Joy in his Ninth Symphony? It’s not the words or the melodies, but what’s made of them. Simplicity has its merits, but spinning a long tale out of a single insight is not always cynical. In that spirit, I present the unexpurgated, complete and utterly truthful story of the genesis of Zootherapy. Let it deepen, but not substitute for, Zootherapy’s simple, subtle, insight. A warning: if you are new to Zootherapy and are aware only of its laudatory reputation, try to forget what you know. And don’t read this book with the expectation that your problems will go away, that you will be any happier after practising Zootherapy; or, indeed with any expectation at all. As well, you must be clear that:

I am not the Messiah

I am not, nor have I ever been, The Messiah. I have no divine nor supernatural powers. Let me ask, upfront and clearly that, if there’s nothing else you take from this tome, you take on board this: I am not, nor have I ever been, The Messiah.

True, there is world peace, which is to say, the absence of deadly, large-scale, political violence. True, too, that I had something to do with it. We don’t, any more, threaten each other with nuclear weapons. States don’t fight. Terrorism has ended. Civil wars are passé. Even quarrels between individuals rarely turn deadly these days. And maybe we do need reminding that it wasn’t always like this and that, relative to humanity’s brutal past, we are living in an enlightened age.

‘Thank God’, some say. More say ‘Thank God for James Sinclaire’, and still more – too many - say ‘Thank James Sinclaire’.

But I am not the Messiah, nor even a messiah, nor a prophet, nor one of God’s top emissaries - all of which titles I’ve been granted by certain people in the recent past. If war is unthinkable now it’s got nothing to do with any spark of divinity that I might or might not possess. It’s because of a sequence of events that began in the benighted year of 1986, not in the parched, shimmering landscape of an ancient Middle Eastern desert, but in a rambling old rented house within easy walking distance of the bus routes along the busy main road heading south from the centre of New Zealand’s capital city.

Gorillagram 1986

The year is 1986 and humanity, in every sense except the narrowly technical, might as well still be in the dark ages. War and the threat of war are accepted as ways of resolving conflict. There’s the shadow of nuclear catastrophe, with weapons proliferating everywhere. Like the ancient Greeks we thought then that war was an inescapable part of human destiny; a curse on humanity to be sure, with its arbitrary killing of innocents, its refugees and destruction, its endless suffering - but an inexorable part of being human. So how did world peace come about? The actuality, not the dream?

It’s some time between 10 and 11am one weekday in the early summer in a damp, drafty house in Newtown, then a downmarket inner-city suburb of Wellington, New Zealand, not far from the General Hospital. I’m a post-graduate, part-time student, doing a Master’s degree in Sociology and Economics at Victoria University of Wellington, and I’m typing my thesis on one of the first mass market word processors (an Amstrad PCW 8256 I’d had sent from the UK and of which I am very proud). Four of us share the house; there’s me, Angela and Steve, the professional couple who are away at work. And then there’s Tom. From down the hallway I hear dry, strangled retching from the bathroom. It’s Tom, a final-year postgraduate student, presumably after another heavy night out. The toilet flushes. Then the phone rings on the wall outside my bedroom door.

It’s Tom, ringing from the bathroom on his new mobile phone – all of ten metres down the narrow hallway. He wants to talk. Sighing, I make my way to the bathroom. Tom’s kneeling beside the toilet, in his dressing gown, his mobile phone beside him. It’s the size of a man’s shoe, heavy as a bag of sugar, expensive to buy and to use, and rarely seen in the circles in which I move. In fact, it’s the only mobile phone I’ve ever seen.

I glance at the toilet bowl, and pull the chain again. I try shallow breathing. Tom sees me wince.

‘It’s OK James, I’ve finished.’ Vomiting, he means. ‘I need a favour’, he says, as I help him get up and lead him back to his room. We step through the haze and thin, pungent smell of stale cigarette smoke, around the clothes scattered on the carpet and the beat-up armchair. Lurid purple curtains, closed against the daylight; this is the biggest, best room in the house, befitting Tom’s status as an ambitious but not very diligent final-year law student and eldest son of a big-shot corporate lawyer in Auckland (and something of a tyrant toward his eldest son, we’ve gathered from hearing Tom’s end of their frequent phone conversations). Tom flops onto his bed. There’s a humming sound from the computer on his desk, around which are strewn floppy disks, a couple of yellow legal pads with writing and doodles, and a fancy new dot-matrix printer. There’s a heavy, Victorian wardrobe, its doors wide open.

I sigh: ‘What sort of favour?’

‘It’s a birthday, for some bureaucrat or other.’ Tom points to the cluttered dusty surface of the dresser. I can’t see much, so open the curtains; there’s a memo addressed to Tom, in a catchpenny font, headed From Dave, Ministry of Fun, To Tom Wilkins. (I should say, especially for those unfamiliar with Anglophone irony, that the Ministry of Fun is not an official government department. It’s a smallish, private, Wellington-based business that organises office functions; things like farewell dos and Christmas parties and book launches.) Tom does some work for them on a part-time, temporary basis during vacations.

The memo is a request for Tom to do a Gorillagram at 3pm that day at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. The street address of the MAF building is given, and so is the location of the cafeteria (on the twelfth floor) within it. There’d been a family row a couple of weeks before, apparently, when Tom had failed to show up in similar circumstances and word had reached his father. I think I know what Tom wants me to do.

‘You want me to call and say you’re sick; you can’t make it?’

‘James…’

A pained expression. He looks directly at me. It dawns on me. He wants me to do the Gorillagram.

‘Oh no. Oh no. No way. Sorry Tom.’

‘James,’ That look in his eyes! I almost feel sorry for him.

‘Tom, I can’t do it man. I can’t sing. I never - I’ve got my assignment due in. I’ve-‘

‘It’s $25, for less than an hour of your time. I’ll pay for a taxi there. Ten minutes to get there, ten minutes there, and ten minutes to get back. Thirty minutes, that’s all I’m asking.’ He must have seen the expression on my face. ‘Taxis there and back. Five dollars each way; you keep the change. Just to dress up as a gorilla and sing ‘Happy Birthday’. You know the words.’

‘I can’t sing.’

‘Are you kidding? What about at Angela’s birthday party?’

‘That’s different Tom; we were in a group, singing together. We’d all been drinking.’

‘This will be the same; they’ll all join in after a couple of seconds – I promise you. Here.’ Tom was peeling off ten-dollar bills. ‘Forty dollars; they only pay me fifteen; here’s forty. You keep anything left after the taxi.’

Forty dollars, of which I’ll get to keep at least thirty; very useful. So I agree and, with a touch of trepidation, accept the money. Tom points to the wardrobe. ‘It’s hung up in there’, he says, ‘the head’s on the top shelf.’

I experience the mild disorientation arising from car-lag as I approach the MAF building on Lambton Quay: and a journey to town that would normally be at least half an hour by bus takes just a few minutes in the taxi, slicing through the sparse, working-hours traffic. It adds to the unreality of my situation. Now I’m on the twelfth floor, facing the mirror above the wash basin in the gents’ lavatory. I’m alone, I’ve taken my shoes off and am contorting myself in the confined space as I step into the gorilla costume. Almost done. Now I pack my shoes and jeans into Tom’s battered old suitcase that held the costume. I’m sweating and flustered, probably because I’ve given myself too much time to worry. Anxious to get it right, I clutch the Ministry of Fun’s instructions to Tom.

I repeat to myself the name of the recipient of the Gorillagram and his work group: ‘Don Hedley, Biometrics; Don Hedley, Biometrics; Don Hedley….‘ And I take the gorilla head out of its plastic bag and put it on. I have to twist it a fraction so that the cut outs for its eyes align with mine. Ah, I can see now, though with limited peripheral vision. The head’s a bit of a weight, and it’s hot and stuffy in there, with a sweet and pungent smell of rubber. No problem, I think: it’s only for a few minutes.

I glance up at the mirror, and I’m astonished - nothing could have prepared me for what I see: a hairy black gorilla stands there, facing me with muscular arms and a smooth glossy plastic eight-pack abdomen. A moment’s disorientation and, tentatively at first, then more forcefully, I beat my hands against my chest. I grunt, more and more vigorously and then there’s a moment of high comedy, when as my grunts turn into howls and reach their peak volume, I see behind me in the mirror the door to the lavatory opening and a man about to come in. He’s a pale, mild-looking, MAF employee, with rolled-up shirt sleeves, and gold-framed glasses. He’s not expecting to see a costume gorilla in the washroom. I smile, trying to reassure; but of course he can’t see that. He reacts quite calmly, and backs out; not so much startled, but more resigned; presumably to having to use the washroom on another floor. I’m alone again; in my normal voice I re-start my mantra of the day: ‘Don Hedley, Biometrics’.

It’s a short distance from the washroom to the MAF cafeteria, and I stride across it boldly and through the doors. First impression: it seems like a happy shop: relaxed chatter, little ceremony, nothing pompous – all very kiwi – but grounded. True, these are people who work in the city, for the government, but they have some connection to farming and fishing. Few jackets, some ties; the men sport rolled up shirt-sleeves. There’s no hierarchy apparent in the cafeteria; I suppose I’m comparing it with the Ministry of Welfare. For a fraction of a second I wonder why everyone’s staring in my direction. I hear – slightly muffled by the gorilla head - the chatter dying away as a result of my entrance.

I surprise myself by proclaiming, in a loud, confident voice:

‘It’s someone’s birthday today!’

Murmurings from the MAF employees.

‘Come on! Don’t be shy!’ I continue, ‘Is there a Don Hedley here today? Don Hedley, from Biometrics: Mr Donald Hedley, where are you? Stand up, stand up wherever you are!’

Looking around, it becomes obvious who my victim is, as his neighbours point exaggeratedly at his head; then very quickly everyone else looks at the embarrassed Mr Hedley. His co-workers jeer at him, good-naturedly.

I hear my own voice: ‘Well I don’t know where Don Hedley is but here’s a special song for the man over there with the glasses and the red face!’

Everybody laughs. I begin singing ‘Happy Birthday’; several others join in before I’ve finished the first line – as Tom had promised. At the end, applause and cheers break out. There is great hilarity in the cafeteria as I go up to Don and hug and kiss him extravagantly.

I don’t forget my lines: ‘And that’s from all your friends and colleagues in the Biometrics Group!’

I wave jauntily to everybody and, before making my exit, turn to face everyone and beat my chest, whooping loudly. I leave the canteen to applause and laughter.

I did it! I hear the laughs and applause as I exit through the fire door to the stairwell, pick up my things from lavatory, descend the stairs, and yank off the gorilla head. Outside the back entrance of the MAF building, still in my gorilla costume, in my elation, I hail a taxi to take me home. I get into the front seat, the gorilla head on my lap.

No trumpets sounding, no heavenly portents; still the same scrubbed blue sky and intense sun; it’s just a normal working day out there! At least, there are no visible differences, but I feel a vividness in the air, a clarity to the city scene outside the car. I’m buzzing with adrenalin but the taxi-driver, a Fijian Indian by his looks, shows no reaction to my costume. He’s seen this and more before, I guess. There’s no wild acclaim either from the Wellingtonians in their business outfits earnestly striding to and from meetings as we drive down The Terrace, nor any reaction from the bus passengers looking out of the windows or car drivers as we drive along Adelaide Road, and wait to turn off into my street.

But I am changed. I pay off the taxi (rounding up the fare!) and go back to the house and my room. Car-lag again, adding to the unreality: it’s been less than two hours since I set out. Who would have thought it? I’ve sung ‘Happy Birthday’ to a crowd of people. I’ve saved Tom grief with the Ministry of Fun and his father. I’ve also earned myself some very useful dollars. From such small beginnings….

Lesson 1

• Putting on a gorilla costume can give you confidence.

This is the first, irreducible, inescapable core discovery of my single Gorillagram experience. Until that day I’d never felt comfortable standing up in front of an audience and performing. This marked me out from my kiwi-raised colleagues: they might not be very proficient at writing long screeds in correct English (something that I can do, having been educated in England), but they are enviably adept at speaking off the cuff at meetings, farewell does, funerals and any other sort of public occasion.

There was a broader lesson:

• Instantaneous change is possible! It can take just as long as putting on an animal costume. It can last as long as you want it to last. Don’t prejudge what will happen when you put on the costume. Believe this and that’s 50 percent of the battle.

The gorilla costume had been hot, cumbersome and uncomfortable; too big in places, too pinched in others. Its hair was a spiky polyester. The head was heavy, had a sweet, chemical smell, and the eye-holes blocked some of my peripheral vision. None of this had mattered. So:

• The costume doesn’t have to be an exact fit.

Not exactly earth-shattering; just the boring, literal truth. But it gets me thinking about animals in general. How comfortable are real animals in their own skin anyway? Surely they can’t be in perfect health all the time, and there’s not much they can do about it. If I have a toothache I make sure all my friends and colleagues know about it. But animals function despite not being 100 percent fit. They have to, I guess; they’re always hungry and always under threat. They have to