Summary
Early in the morning, Mack stumbles up to the enclosure. He gives off a sharp smell and his eyes are red. He tells Ivan that they’ve been through a lot together. They don’t see him for two days. When he returns he doesn’t mention Stella and tries to train Ruby, but she refuses to obey his commands to walk. He gets fed up and pokes her with a claw stick. She still refuses to move. He swipes at the air over her head, causing Ruby to let out an angry trumpet sound and smack Mack with her trunk. He curls into a ball and howls.
After Mack goes to his office, George and Julia discuss whether Mack will hurt Ruby. Julia suggests calling someone. George says he needs the job, particularly with Julia’s mother’s doctor bills. Later Julia gives Ivan three pots of finger paints in yellow, red, and blue. At night, Ivan pulls dried paint off his fingers. Ruby wakes from a nightmare. She says she is worried that Mack is mad. Ivan, admitting that gorillas are terrible liars, says he probably is mad. Ruby reminds Ivan that he is supposed to save her. He says he is working on it. She asks if he thinks she’ll die in the domain like Aunt Stella. Ivan considers lying, but admits he’s not sure if he can stop that from happening. He then corrects her, as Stella once did to him, saying it’s not a domain, it’s a cage.
Ivan tells a story about a baby elephant going to a zoo. She got there because a friend promised he would help her. Ruby falls asleep eventually and Bob asks Ivan how he is going to make the story come true. Ivan says he doesn’t know. Bob falls asleep too but Ivan is wide awake, remembering what the humans did to his family: he and his sister were clinging to his mother when the humans shot her. Then they shot his father, and chopped off the dead gorillas’ hands, feet, and heads. Ivan comments that there is an old musty store near his cage that sells an ashtray made from the hand of a gorilla. In the morning, Ivan reflects that although he is peaceful, inside him is the angry Ivan from the day he was captured. He could tear off a man’s limbs.
Days pass with Ruby obeying Mack and Ivan making paintings. At night, Ivan is working on a project, making many paintings for Ruby. He becomes frustrated by how the colors and shapes are wrong. He wishes he could use human words to express himself. Meanwhile, during the day, Ruby plods around in circles without enthusiasm.
Mack says she isn’t making him as much money as he’d hoped and will have to cut back on food for the animals and turn off the heat at night. Bob thinks it is unnatural that Ivan is so obsessed with night painting. He asks what the plan is, but Ivan won’t say.
One morning, Mack notices one of Ivan’s night paintings hidden under Ivan’s plastic pool. Mack says it’s pretty good and that he could sell it. If it sells quickly, he’ll give Ivan more supplies. Ivan is disappointed that he has taken Ruby’s painting.
Bob and Ivan watch TV together. They see an ad for a zoo. He knows it’s not a perfect place, as it still has walls, but it is preferable to a cage. He realizes the zoo is what he needs to paint. He paints from memory, remembering the images from the ad. To hide his paintings from Mack, he pulls the stuffing out of Not-Tag and crumples the paintings into her body. Mack gives Ivan a pile of paper and buckets of paint after his last painting sold for forty dollars. Ivan paints for Mack during the day and Ruby at night. But he is dissatisfied with his large painting; the zoo image is missing something. While watching Julia do her spelling homework, Ivan gets an idea.
Ivan lays out sixteen pieces of poster board: with four down and four across, he makes a perfect square. With red paint, he makes an H across the posters. He tells Bob he is planning to spell the word Home.
Analysis
The sharp smell Ivan detects from Mack, coupled with his red eyes and erratic behavior, suggest that Mack is on an alcoholic bender as a means of coping with Stella’s death. As his mental and physical health deteriorates, he neglects his animals and worsens their mistreatment, returning with a claw stick to threaten Ruby until she obeys his commands.
The claw stick, which becomes symbolic of animal mistreatment, causes Ruby to attack Mack with her trunk. Julia and the animals worry Mack will be angry and do something worse in response. George would like to intervene at Julia’s request, but is bound to submit to Mack’s authority as his boss. Meanwhile the stakes for Ivan increase: he promised Stella he would save Ruby, and when Ruby asks him if she’ll die like Stella, he isn’t able to lie.
However, Stella’s death and Ivan’s need to console Ruby with storytelling brings his trauma to the surface. He understands the situation he and the other animals are in. When Ruby uses Ivan’s preferred word “domain” to refer to their confined territory, Ivan corrects her, finally admitting to himself that it’s a cage.
Ivan awakens to the extent of the animal mistreatment he has undergone. He recalls how his parents were shot and decapitated before him, and how there is a store in the mall that sells a gruesome ashtray made out of gorilla's hand. Remembering these harms, Ivan discovers that his angry self is still alive within him.
Ivan is inspired to figure out a means of freeing Ruby from the fate that befell Stella. The theme of artistic expression becomes relevant in a new way: rather than simply being a means of making him feel calm inside, Ivan can use art to protest his mistreatment and communicate something vital.
