Lana looked up. She found my face among the row of faces. Then she looked at Rodney. Finally, at Michael. Then she turned away.
“You’re not going to get her to dance that way,” whispered someone conspiratorially. I looked into the face of a mousy, balding man whose small brown eyes were framed with red cat’s-eye women’s glasses. “She’s very unpredictable. But I try to do all her patterns.” He held out a napkin covered with scribbles that vaguely resembled the patterns on the floor of the enclosure. “It looks like chaos, I know. But there’s chaos theory. There’s a pattern here. It will all become clear soon enough.” He looked at Michael.
“Lana!” I shouted again.
“Right, Michael?” asked the man with the napkin.
“Exactly,” said Michael.
“Lana! Look at me! I’m right here. Look at me.” I waved frantically, pressing against the rail like a Titanic passenger who knows what’s coming. “Lana!” She stood. Turned her back to me fully. Gently pulled her head to the right to stretch her neck. “Lana!” She pulled her head to the left. “Lana!” Her arms overhead. Then circling backward, windmilling. The man in cat’s-eye glasses was now looking at me studiously. The mother of the triplets sucked the end of one of her pigtails. Michael was rocking back and forth, his gaze moving between Lana and me. His face was opening in this strange way. Eyes widening, nostrils flaring. I tried a different tack. Kept my voice light and singsongy. “I know you see me. People clearly think I’m crazy. I bet you’re loving this. Ha ha ha! Really funny, Lana.”
“Laaaa-naaaaa,” sang the woman with the pigtails. “Laaaaa-naaaaa.” More Watchers were gathering.
“La-NA,” said the man, clapping his hands in her direction with each syllable. “La-NA!”
“Laaaaaa-naaaaaa,” Pigtail Woman continued.
I tried stern, raising my voice so I could be heard above the gathering murmurs: “Lana! We’re here. We came a long way. You need to look at me. You need to turn around. Now! NOW!” I shouted, loud enough that pain rose up the back of my throat.
But the “now” was lost in the cacophony of other voices. “Lana, Lana, Lana,” they murmured and shouted and whispered and crowed. Not one chant but a terrible noise that had her name buried inside of it.
Lana lana lana lana lana lana lana: the press of noise and the press of bodies, leaning toward her and toward me, hungry for whatever was going to happen between us, not curious not interested not rubbernecking but hungry. Something here they needed as sustenance. The neon yellow of Mona’s visor. The cast-iron eyes of the visitor. A snatch of a navy-blue security uniform. Buzzed blond hair.
Lana lana lana lana lana lana: no longer her name, only a sound. Bodies so close I couldn’t turn, belly pressed hard against the rail. “Lana, lana, lana,” they called and yodeled and whooped and screeched. Sweat on my shirt, on my lip. Sweat running down between my breasts. I opened my mouth, so dry, and couldn’t find her name, couldn’t hear my own voice anymore. She stretched out one leg, toe pointed. None of this touching her.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The gray armor of the sky hung above me. I lifted my hands to my belly. Still pregnant. I touched gently my face, my neck, my breasts, my arms. Nothing hurt.
“Look who’s awaaaaaake!” That voice hurt. I turned my head. Talia stood with her hands on her hips. “Good morning, Mira!” Behind her, Chester, Sylvia, and Ida sat around a small fire.
I pushed myself to my elbows. “Where are we?”
“Don’t try to move too much yet,” said Sylvia. She came over and helped me work myself into a seated position. I felt dizzy but OK. Ida brought me a mug. The ghost fruit tea, which I’d come to despise, actually tasted good. Familiar and warm, like Sven and Marjorie. The way they moved and communicated like a single being, how much was unspoken between them.
“Where’s Rodney?” I asked.
“Poking around,” said Ida, resting her hand on my knee.
“Collecting intel,” said Talia.
“Whoring,” said Chester. He raised an eyebrow at me. I should have laughed. But everything felt so strange and fucked up, so like the Rending all over again, and I felt so far away from Rodney that whoring seemed just as likely as anything else he might be doing. Rollerblading. Crocheting. Scrapbooking.
“Where were you guys? Where did you go?” I finally managed to ask.
“Rodney and I thought it would be better if we arrived separately. So that if anything happened …” Chester trailed off. Then he looked at me squarely. “I’m glad you’re OK, Mira.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Where are we?”
“On a hill,” said Talia, as though I was incapable of noticing the slope in front of us.
“Former camel enclosure, sweetie,” said Ida. “It’s where all the cool kids hang out.” She squeezed my knee gently.
“There are also camps in the other fields,” said Sylvia, “pronghorn, wild horse, gazelle.”
The scene in front of us made me think of documentaries I’d seen of refugee camps: a patchwork of color, matted grass, smoke lifting from a smattering of fires. Rising along with the smoke were the sounds of life lived close together: the low murmur of voices and the reshuffling of belongings punctuated with the snap of wood breaking or a bark of laughter or a shriek of delight or fear. Talia’s initial greeting to me had been ironic; it wasn’t morning, it was late afternoon.
Chester prodded a wrapped sweet potato out of the fire; Talia and Ida wandered away to get water and then wandered back again. Sylvia held the French cooking book open on her lap, though whether she was memorizing the veins of a leaf or the recipe for bouillabaisse, I couldn’t be sure.
“How did I get here?” I asked finally, of no one in particular.
Sylvia laid down a finger to mark her place before looking up. “Rodney brought you after you passed out. An anxiety attack, I assume.” Then, more kindly: “It sounds like it was a very stressful situation.”
I stared at the fire.
“It looked really romantic from a distance,” added Talia, “Rodney staggering up the hill with you in his arms. But less romantic with the belly.”
“Right,” I said, running my thumb over the tiny indentation my belly button still made. “Definitely less romantic.”
Haze turned to dusk and dusk to gloaming. A man walked by with a squirrel hanging like an extension of his arm. Farther down the slope a man and a woman carrying a roll of carpet between them paused to adjust their grip. Chester wrapped another potato and nudged it between the coals. Rodney did not return. When I yawned, Ida led me to a nest made from the blankets we’d brought; above the blankets hung the cloud sheet from the top of Moe.
“You brought this?” I said.
“Rodney did. Lie down, sweetie.”
I obeyed and she sat beside me, hunched slightly below the sheet. With gentle fingers she unrolled my hair from its loose knot and used her fingers to comb it over the blanket I’d pulled to my chin. Then she set to work with her fingertips, smoothing all the tiny curls along my hairline.
The sobs seemed to come up from whatever I was growing inside me, and once they started I couldn’t stop. There was a fault line cutting me in two and I was shaking as everything crumbled down and in.
I fell asleep crying and when I woke again in the middle of the night Rodney was beside me. Without stars or moon, without city lights refracted by the clouds, darkness after the Rending could be absolute. But I’m almost certain that when I opened my eyes, Rodney was studying me, his eyes trained on the contours of my face. I closed my eyes again and by the time I woke in the morning, he was gone.
The next day, I still couldn’t bring myself to talk about Lana, to tell them about the way she had refused to turn, though I’m sure they’d already heard the story from Rodney. I couldn’t bear to think about the way my own voice had cracked, how desperate I had sounded, how painful it had been to watch her refuse me. The terrible sound of all those voices echoing her name. I was too tired to think about what my
failure meant or to consider the hovering guilt I felt for having dragged my friends to this sad, strange place.
They didn’t ask me to tell them. They told me in stops and starts what they’d learned in the few hours I’d been away from them the day before: the food was grown over by the former farm, mostly the same root vegetables we produced. They had ghost fruit too, though it tasted slightly different from our varieties, and stings, the fruit Michael told us about, which looked and grew much like grapes but were rock-hard and dissolved into bitter threads of saliva. They explained where the latrines were, where the dismantled and reinstated Pile lay, and pointed down the hill at figures moving slowly in the morning light: who talked too much, who seemed OK, who was hoarding food.
I nodded and sipped at my tea. Tried to eat a little reheated carrot-turnip pottage from the night before. Thirty-seven weeks today. At one point I caught Sylvia measuring me with her eyes but she didn’t say anything.
“We’re just going to try to make ourselves useful,” said Chester. “Sylvia and Ida are going to offer medical services and Talia and I are going to check out the farm.”
“Turnips!” said Talia, “Yay!”
I shoved myself to a standing position. “I think I’ll just walk around a little,” I said, “try to get my bearings.”
And just like that we dispersed, eased ourselves down the hill and into the rhythms of a community completely unlike our own.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In many ways the Zoo was exactly as Michael had explained. There were Inhabitants and there were Watchers. The gifts of food and water and supplies that the Watchers provided kept the Inhabitants alive. But the Watchers didn’t just watch to be entertained and though the Inhabitants might have been free to leave on a practical level, I also knew now that something held them where they were. Something kept Lana from acknowledging us.
The Zoo layout was a giant loop. The large indoor building, which formerly housed the Minnesota Trail, the Tropics Trail, and Discovery Bay and now housed the majority of the Inhabitants, was at the opposite end from our paltry campsite. The rest of the loop was outside and wound through the remains of grassy hillsides and playgrounds, ponds and amphitheaters.
At the bottom of the hill I took a left and wandered past slopes studded with tents and lean-tos, structures that would have fallen at the slightest hint of inclement weather. They looked delicate and fragile, like the forts Bim and I used to make by attaching blankets to door frames with masking tape. People stopped to watch as I passed—mid-stretch, mid-conversation, mid-bite. Some of them smiled or nodded, others stared slack-jawed or clucked to get the attention of a friend who hadn’t yet noticed my elegant waddle. Most people, however, watched me with a gaze reminiscent of Michael’s: studious, patient, controlled.
Sound felt different, too. The Zoo was mostly quieter than Zion but occasionally a sudden noise or series of noises pierced the fabric of calm; Zion had more of a low, steady rumble.
I paused to open my notebook: lightning, lightning bugs, heat lamps.
When I paused, footsteps behind me paused too. I turned; behind me, a bald man with a red beard balanced a basket on top of his head. He met my gaze, blushed, and averted his eyes to a trash can chained to the ground. “Hey,” he said softly.
“Hey,” I said. I moved to the side of the path slightly and made a your-table-is-right-this-way gesture. He nodded and walked by me quickly.
I missed Asher: his patched khakis, his appreciative winks, his plaintive requests to find him a decent wrench in the Piles because the lack of one really was about to kill him.
The carousel was mostly just a disk of poles, stripped of their animal counterparts. A tapir and an ostrich remained. I climbed on the tapir and pressed my forehead to the pole. There was a bit of sticky pink residue behind one of the ears; I wondered if someone in the After had scraped it off, just for the taste of chewing gum again.
I ghosted my way past the moose enclosure, where people were harvesting stings. Then the bird amphitheater, the tiger enclosure, the central outdoor courtyard where kids used to frolic through geysers that sprang up under the watchful gaze of bronze bears. There were no bears. Around the edges of the courtyard were piles of smaller objects. It looked like a flea market, without tables or any kind of organization. The man with the red cat’s-eye glasses was squatting in front of a microwave, holding the glass plate up to the sky as though checking for the manufacturer’s stamp. A few yards away a dark-haired woman unloaded objects from a yellow gym bag: a funnel, a pinwheel, a PlayStation controller.
“Davis,” said the cat’s-eye man, waving his arm rather robotically.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“I’m Davis,” he said. “That’s Kim.” He gestured at the woman with the gym bag.
Kim flinched just slightly as though the mere gesture were an assault.
“Have you seen all of it?” asked Davis.
“Most of the Tropics Trail,” I said. “And we’re camped over in the camel enclosure. I’m just poking around I guess.”
“Have you been over to the Minnesota Trail yet?” I shook my head. “Kim.” The woman continued to dig through the bag. “Kim!” Davis shouted. She flipped her head up as if she’d been tasered. “Do you have anything for feeding or offering, Kim?”
“Why?” Three different headbands kept her hair pressed tightly to her scalp.
“So we can show her,” said Davis.
“Mira,” I said.
“So we can show Mira,” he confirmed.
She eyed my belly quickly then zipped the gym bag closed. “OK, but I need to go to the Pile first.” She slung the bag over her shoulder; as she walked, her body crumpled slightly, though I couldn’t tell whether it was the weight of the bag or an injury that caused the limp.
Davis and I followed. It felt strange not to be carrying anything; I was used to pushing the buggy or bearing the weight of my collecting backpack whenever I headed anywhere in Zion. Davis didn’t carry anything either but he compulsively patted his pockets—jeans and shirt, front and back—where he’d stuffed the napkins with his scribbled notes. Neither spoke but each glanced at my belly so often that by the time we arrived at the Pile I wished that I could simply remove the swell from my body, offer it to them as Show and Tell.
Kim made a beeline for two chairs with torn bottom cushions but pristine backs. She removed a butter knife from her bag and set about trying to unscrew the bolts that held the backs in place.
“It’s hard to find textiles,” said Davis, pushing one of the napkins farther down into his front pocket. “Pillows, blankets, clothing, batting. Most of it’s gone. Picked over. Kim’s smart. She’ll use those backs as pillows or trade them.”
“Offer them,” said Kim through clenched teeth.
“Offer them. OK. Offer them,” said Davis.
The Pile was about two-thirds the size of Curly. Because it had been undone and reconstituted it had less height but more girth, as though it had begun a slow melt into the ground. Fewer colors and textures. Heavier, more industrial objects. Though sometimes I found only a portion of an object on Larry or Curly or Moe, rarely was there rust, splinters, serrated edges. Our objects were dismantled but many of these looked broken, worn beyond use.
“Smaller stuff that people don’t want they take to the market,” said Davis. “That’s where we were when you found us.”
Kim finished unscrewing the last bolt from the second chair back and managed to stuff both pieces at least halfway into her bag. “OK,” she said, sitting up.
“Who’re you going to offer it to?” Davis asked.
Kim shrugged. Her middle headband, made of silver sequins, sparkled against the frieze of her face.
Davis and I followed Kim’s determined limp from the Pile to the Minnesota Trail.
“Kim used to be an Inhabitant,” Davis whispered.
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t here yet. Probably she wasn’t showing any signs so people
stopped watching.”
“Signs?” I said.
“I don’t know why she doesn’t go. Doesn’t seem like she likes to be here. But she’s really good about bringing offerings to the other Inhabitants.”
“Signs?” I asked again.
“Here we are,” said Davis.
Unlike the Tropics Trail, which was missing most of its roof, the Minnesota Trail remained the dim tunnel it had been in the Before. The enclosures on the right were open to the gray sky beyond (and so not truly enclosed at all); the enclosures on the left still backed up to walls darkened with dead foliage or faux branches. Had I raised my hands above my head I could have grazed the ceiling. In the Before, this made the experience with the animals feel close and exciting; now it was simply suffocating.
From a distance the eight or nine women in the former wolf enclosure looked like apes checking each other for lice, a flurry of hygienic bonding, like Lana’s care for me after I told her about Bim’s birthday. But really the women were cutting each other: gently, carefully, methodically. Thin, inch-long openings of red. They searched out skin that wasn’t already thickened with scar tissue and cut with an X-Acto knife they passed from one to another with a heavy reverence. The ones who weren’t being cut or doing the cutting bent over the wounds with ointment, salves, and poultices. They kissed one another often: temple, scalp, forehead. On the wound or near it. It wasn’t the cutting I couldn’t bear—it was the tenderness. A few Watchers stood quietly, their faces open and vulnerable, earth newly pocked with rain. Kim placed a spice jar full of rosemary on the ground in front of a woman pressing a navy bandana to her shin. Davis opened a piece of paper from his breast pocket and drew a few hash marks in a curving design, an image of the cuts without the bodies below them. Bile rose up the back of my throat. I started walking again.
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