I looked at Drake. He squeezed my hand and shook his head imperceptibly. Knight let out a tiny sigh.
Mona took a suck out of what looked like a homemade Camelbak. “But after the Rending—and this is what kills me—we found each other. Harriet and I. We found each other in Athleta” (she drew out the worth for emphasis the same way as before). “We just kind of nodded at each other but then, four days later, we ran into each other again at REI. The big stuff was gone. The tents and the kayaks and the bikes.” She abruptly looked up at the sky again and yelled, “BIVY SACK!” and then leaned toward me and put her hands on either side of her mouth. “But Harriet and I, we knew it was about the clothes.” She took her hands down from her mouth and ticked off the types of important clothing on her fingers: “Stuff that dries fast, stuff that traps heat, stuff with a little thermometer built into the cuff.”
This woman was like Talia on crack. “I’m not immune to social cues,” she said again. “But when that baby is born you’re going to want a coat with thermal heat technology. You’re going to come to Mona and Harriet. And maybe we share and maybe we don’t.” She raised her eyebrows at me and picked up her pace. Her fluorescent body and swinging ponytail disappeared into the bodies in front of us.
I’d been so busy listening to Mona that I hadn’t really paid attention to the other bodies. Ones who had slowed their pace or quickened it, ones who had crossed over from the other side of the road to walk in the opposite direction with us. The people in front of me walked forward while turning occasionally, their faces like cottonwood leaves catching sun. There were the faces and also the smells. Body odor that was dull and musky, thick and fruity, sweat that had soured and sweat mixed in with earth. Thin remnants of manufactured scents, too. And dust and oil and rust and age, the scent of clothes folded in upon themselves for too long, new organisms taking root in the creases.
Of course I’d been surrounded by Zionites; I hadn’t forgotten people. But this press of newness was a scene I could only absorb in tiny bits: a pink rose embroidered onto denim, an unraveled hem, moles and pearl earrings and blue eyes large behind thick lenses; black Converse sneakers with yellow laces, a head scarf, a thinning red beard. It was as though one of the Piles had come alive and I was in the center of it.
My instinct was to cover my belly with my hands, to protect it. But Drake and Knight held my hands firmly. And then something else began to happen. The people began to reach out to touch me. Sometimes just fingertips, once what was certainly a palm. A brushing, a rub, a poke. When I turned, when I looked down, there was nothing, no hand; I couldn’t see who had reached out. Although I knew rationally that those sensations were coming to me from outside of my body, the lack of a visible contact made the sensations feel like they might be coming from within. And so, I stopped looking. I fixed my gaze above their heads and let myself imagine, for that half-hour walk, that what I felt was a human being, kicking, turning, finding purchase on the inside of my skin.
When we reached the outskirts of the massive Zoo parking lot, Drake and Knight stopped abruptly.
“We’ll take her now,” said Drake.
“Now we will be the guides alone.”
“You can go back to your places.”
I turned to look at Rodney. He was less than a foot behind me. “I’m here,” he said simply.
Around us, the crowd dispersed.
Chester, Ida, Talia, and Sylvia were gone.
My mouth opened to speak and Rodney pressed his own words in to stop me: “I’m here,” he said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The crowd moved off along the road at the back of the parking lot and when everyone else had gone, Drake and Knight dropped my hands. Oddly, the sudden absence of the crowd and the touching felt deflating, like absence in the worst sense of the word. I felt untethered, consciously aware of the vast amounts of air around my limbs. Below a sky the color of dirty dishwater, we moved through a maze of forgotten cars, doors hanging open like broken jaws, past the one parking sign that remained of a bottlenose dolphin curled into a gray comma.
We followed Drake and Knight into the Zoo, through a door marked PERSONNEL ONLY and down a hall of gray cement and whitewashed walls. A series of thick skylights turned the space dim and drowsy. We reached an unmarked door and Drake bowed slightly, his right eye staring firmly at my face and his left eye wandering toward the door I was ostensibly supposed to pass through.
“You alone,” said Knight.
Drake made a tsk-tsk sound and wagged his index finger at Rodney, who shrugged at me and then slid to a sitting position against the wall. Satisfied, Knight and Drake headed back down the hall the way we’d come.
I wanted to kick Rodney. Hard. I presumed it was Michael behind that door, presumed that Michael wasn’t violent, that this would be a quick matter, settled through rational conversation. I realized that had been my plan all along. That I would come and ask nicely and Michael would give me what I wanted. But who the fuck knew. Talia was right. Somehow I’d managed to skirt through the first five and a half years after the apocalypse in relative safety. But the knives on the belts of the twins were knives. And a mob of people is a mob of people. And the fact that I thought I had to ask anyone to return my friend to me was incredibly fucked up. The fact that Rodney would let almost-thirty-seven-week pregnant me into a room of unknowns made me want to grind his testicles under the heel of my dirty canvas Keds sneaker. I stared at Rodney and for a split second I took in not only the familiar forest-green vest and unlaced work boots but also the dark shadows below his eyes. Sitting on the floor, all the height and girth taken out of him, Rodney looked weak, surmountable, human. How much of my bravery and confidence came from the simple assumption that he would protect me? He studiously rolled his hands on the tops of his wrists, as though the cracking of the bones and ligaments gave him some kind of comfort. He didn’t look at me.
I pushed open the door.
I went in expecting something akin to the Cave of Wonders in Aladdin. I went in expecting Persian carpets, Ming vases, golden ashtrays, and spittoons or perhaps Tiffany lamps, a silver tea service, peacock-feather accents. What I found was a room similar in aesthetics to the hallway. The cement floor, the white walls, the large square drain in the center of the floor—all this was visible because the wall on the right side of the room was missing. The room bordered a Zoo path, providing an unobstructed view of a shitty-looking duck pond. A few electrical cables hung from the ceiling and from these cables dangled dream catchers and prisms and a few small trinkets. In the middle of the opening sat a card table covered with piles of neatly arranged papers; a cup held a few writing utensils. Michael’s hands were poised over the keys of a typewriter. He didn’t turn when I entered; instead, he began punching down the keys with exclamatory fervor. I thought of a documentary called INSECTS! that Bim liked to check out from the library. One scene featured a katydid eating, the sound of its jaws cutting through leaf magnified one thousand times. Munch, munch, munch. Munch, munch, much.
Above Michael a naked Barbie dangled from a cable, its torso inked bright red, half its hair shorn. Against the opposite wall stood an uncomfortable-looking wicker rocking chair. I concentrated on imagining Michael as a katydid. Munch, munch, munch. Munch, munch, munch.
After a few minutes he pulled the paper out of the typewriter with a whiz-zing flourish and turned to me. “Mira,” he said, nodding empathetically, as though he’d worked me in for an emergency therapy session. “You’re probably wondering what I use the industrial-size freezer for.”
I hadn’t been wondering that at all. I hadn’t really even noticed the freezer that lined the back wall of the room until he mentioned it, had assumed it was simply counter space.
“Food prep,” said Michael in answer to my gaze, “for los animales. When los animales existed.” His Spanish accent felt precise but strange, as though it had been soaked in French or German first. He lifted the top of the freezer. “Not anymore. A different kind of preparation for a different kind of an
imal.”
The inside was filled with paper. His stories. The stories of others, theoretically, though who knew how the words spoken by others had been altered as they slid through his brain. He didn’t leave the lid open long but I could see that the papers weren’t haphazardly stuffed in; they were organized. Some in files, some in milk crates, some papers clipped, some sheaves bound with actual safety pins.
“That’s that,” he said, letting the lid slam shut. He licked his thumb and rubbed at an errant spot on the lid, but behind the rubbing motion there was a shaking. Something about the way his other fingers clenched and curled, the way the movement ran up through his wrist. He noticed me watching and abruptly stuffed his hands into the pockets of his suit coat.
“Where’s Lana?” I asked.
“She’s here, she’s here.”
“I know,” I said, “but I’d like you to show me where.”
He stepped closer and put his hands on my shoulders. I tried not to flinch. “Let me look at you, Mira.”
He studied me carefully but he paid almost no attention to my belly. He looked over my face as if he were studying a map. He looked at me for what felt like a century, though it must have only been five minutes or so. Longer than I remember anyone ever looking at me. I tried to imagine what he was seeing: my brown eyes that wouldn’t possess even the slightest hint of green in this light, the masses of freckles that covered my nose and cheeks, my hated cheeks that had always made me look slightly cherubic, thick brows and thick lips (unplucked and chapped, respectively). And framing my face all the little wispy hairs that slipped out of whatever knot I wound my hair into, hairs that curled and framed my face. And of course I couldn’t help looking at Michael: his upper lip curled around the row of tiny white teeth, his frozen black hair, and those blue eyes with lashes that looked like they could embrace you all on their own. He studied me sincerely, curiously. I vacillated between wanting to spit in his face and wanting the moment to continue. How long had it been since Rodney looked at me this way? Maybe that wasn’t fair. The gaze wasn’t that of a lover, it was the gaze of a compassionate scientist, someone engaged in observation but who isn’t too caught up in his own hypothesis, someone wise enough to learn from whatever events unfold.
Michael released his grip on my upper arms and plunged his hands into the pockets of his coat again. He rattled the pockets energetically and whatever he was carrying inside made a happy little clicking sound. Then he took out one hand and put his thumb and forefinger on my upper back, one fingertip on either side of my spine, to guide me toward the door. I thought of Rodney’s hand on my lower back when we first met, the warmth of his palm guiding me away from danger. Michael’s thumb and forefinger pressed against knots on my back I didn’t even know were there. I gasped and hated myself for gasping. I opened the door.
Rodney stood as we exited. Nodded at Michael, who returned the nod. But Michael kept his fingers against my back and Rodney didn’t tell him not to. Rodney did not take my hand, but then again I didn’t offer it to him.
And there was no one to tell me what this gap, this lull, this dead space in our relationship meant. I understood that relationships went through rough patches. I wasn’t an idiot. When, months earlier, I had seen Lana fall obsessively in love with Michael, I realized Rodney and I were no longer there, no longer in the confettied-rose-petal days of early courtship. But that change had felt natural to me, a shift from excitement to contentment, a shift from turning obsessively toward one another to turning back outward to see the world. But somehow that place of comfort and ease had slid into this other place where we now resided, this place that seemed a graveyard of a million tiny deaths of affection: the way he hadn’t spoken up for me at the last community meeting, the way he had walked ahead with Chester, the twenty times he could have grabbed my hand and hadn’t. And it wasn’t just him. It was me. Why hadn’t I gone to him first when I saw the picture of Lana? Why hadn’t we discussed a plan together? Why hadn’t I talked to him more openly about the Baby, about my inability to build a Nest for it, to give up the hope that it might be a living being, full of breath and shrieking? As the ring he inked on my finger faded I should have asked for something more permanent. Why couldn’t I admit to myself that I wanted permanence?
Michael touched those two places on my back and I thought of my parents and their particular distances. I would never be able to go back, would never understand exactly what those distances had meant, would never know for certain whether they had loved one another. And I’d never be able to go back to the way they’d loved me or the way I’d felt loved by them, in the Before. Love ended, just like everything else—so I hated myself for wanting the endless, unconditional kind from Rodney anyway.
Michael increased the pressure on my back. There wasn’t room for uncertainty now.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The scent of the Zoo had thinned considerably in the years since the Rending but it hadn’t disappeared entirely. The Tropics Trail no longer boasted tropical temperatures but it still retained the ruddy odor of hay and excrement, the kind of scent that climbs inside your nostrils and then collapses lethargically. The flashy tropical plants were all dead or had disappeared but some of the filler plants remained, casting shaky stems toward the half-glass, half-cloud sky.
The last time I had been at the Zoo I was twelve and Bim was five. It was his fifth birthday, in fact, and he’d been permitted to bring five friends along. I was supposed to be helping my mother and father keep an eye on the hyperactive mass of Boy but I mostly sulked, complaining about the smell and occasionally striving for a moment of communion with some raisin-eyed creature behind the glass. Bim and his friends each wore a neon-green shirt with an electric blue poisonous dart frog on the front. Theoretically the T-shirts were party gifts but really they were a way for my parents to keep an eye on six bodies in constant motion.
Bim and his friends had ducked and darted, staining a railing with sticky fingerprints before spinning off to crawl through a faux hollow log or rail their knuckles against the glass to summon a shrug or snort from a tapir or gibbon.
Now, ten years after that birthday party, the Watchers moved placidly, casually along the same paths. There was none of the frenetic energy of the Before: no strollers, no waving of errant grandmas into photo frames, no children climbing onto statues of extinct creatures, no disappearance and reemergence of tiny heads. No tiny heads. It wasn’t the Inhabitants I noticed first, it was the Watchers.
The trail sloped downward and curved slightly to the right. To our left as we rounded the bend was the former tortoise enclosure. At the back of the habitat, curled into one of the indentations in the wall meant for amphibian bodies, an older woman sat with her tank top pulled over her knees. She pressed her mouth and nose into her shirt so only her eyes were visible, staring at a focal point somewhere in the sand a few feet in front of her. Her white hair was so thin that even her slight rocking motion made it waver in the air.
A fiftyish woman with her hair in low pigtails was bending over the railing, shaking a package of oyster crackers at the Inhabitant. “Here you go! Crackers! Crunchy crunchy crackers!” She shook the cellophane again. “Yum yum! Crackers!”
The Inhabitant raised her chin, spat, and then buried the lower half of her face in the shirt again. Pigtail Woman set the crackers on a rock near the railing then swept her sleeve across her eyes.
“Maybe she doesn’t WANT the crackers,” said Michael, too loudly. He reached over the edge of the enclosure and with an index finger pressed one of the crackers into oblivion. The Inhabitant was surprisingly quick. She scuttled out of her resting place, grabbed the crackers, and crept back in five seconds. Michael began to smile and then bit his lower lip to keep the smile at bay. I saw the dark nipples below her filthy tank top, the skin wrinkled and sagging from her upper arms. Her eyes did not invite pity.
Other Watchers lingered to see if the Inhabitant would eat her crackers, but Michael’s fingers pressed me on. Rodney trail
ed a few feet behind us.
Another forty feet down the path, on the right, the glass of the former crocodile enclosure was darkened, covered with some substance on the inside. I quickened my pace. Where the hell was Lana? But Michael grabbed my upper arm. “Watch,” he instructed.
A line made its way through the darkness on the glass. The line rose and fell, rose and fell. Then another line, beneath, following the same pattern as the one above.
“Someone’s writing,” I said.
“Drawing,” corrected Michael.
Above the first wavy line a bowl appeared. Then a mast. A sail. Into the middle of the boat, a circle. The Inhabitant holding the tool then focused—her? his?—attention on the circle itself, picking away at the substance (was it just dirt? dried excrement? clay?) until the entire circle became transparent.
Then there was an eye. Staring at us through the porthole. It wasn’t Lana’s eye. Then it was gone.
Pigtail Woman applauded, wiped away a few stray tears. She stepped up to the glass and pressed her eye to the porthole. “Hello?” she said. “Hello?”
“She had triplets in the Before,” Michael whispered, nodding at Pigtail Woman with his head. “All boys. She’d sent them out to do their chores. Mowing, Sweeping, Weeding: that’s what she calls the boys now. In case she talks to you. That’s what she means.”
I nodded.
“You’re OK in there,” she was saying to the form behind the glass. “You’re OK.”
“This way,” said Michael. “Almost there.”
Lana was in the former Komodo dragon enclosure. The Komodo dragon was perennially every child’s least favorite exhibit in the zoo because the Komodo dragon did absolutely nothing. It was usually either doing nothing on the large faux fallen tree that stretched the length of the space or doing nothing below a warming light.
It wasn’t the lack of Komodo dragon I noticed so much as the lack of the warming light and the absence of the log that had formerly occupied so much of the ground. The sand was different too, swirled into stops and arcs, zigzags and divots. At the back of the enclosure, Lana was working a pair of ballet shoes onto her feet. I called her name. A number of Watchers stopped their leisurely progression to stare at me. I called her name again, loudly.
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