“To your left is the most peaceful one I think,” said Davis from behind me.
In the former porcupine enclosure stalactites dripped from the ceiling, icicles of rock formed out of millions of tiny pebbles. Davis took the wads of napkins out of his front pockets and dug until he came up with a fistful of pebbles and a few stings. He popped a sting in his mouth and offered one to me. I shook my head. “Suit yourself,” he said before placing the pebbles on a bar table at the far right side of the enclosure. The man who emerged from behind the hanging garden of rock was hunched, one side of his back considerably higher than the other. He took one of the pebbles on the table and moved off toward a stalactite. “He’s got rubber cement today,” Davis noted. “That’s rare.” The man affixed the pebble and then returned to the table and chose a different stone.
“Always one at a time,” said Kim. She took two carrots out of her bag and placed them on the table. When the man returned, he took the carrots instead of a stone and disappeared through the maze of rock, returning a few seconds later empty-handed. He didn’t raise his eyes to us.
“Sit down or move out of the way,” said a voice like a rusted bedspring. Behind us, a man wearing an army beret and sunglasses flicked us on our way with his wrist. “If you’re going to watch, sit down and watch,” he said again. “Don’t block the view.”
We obeyed. The tunnel curved to the left. After we rounded the bend there were no enclosures on the right, only bare trees stenciled against the gray sky. The Inhabitants of the enclosures on the left, a long row of them, were blocked from view by blankets and sheets, paper bags ripped flat and taped together, netting stuffed with newspaper and magazines. I remembered Michael’s story about these Inhabitants just as the first sound started up.
A quiet moaning on one end dipped into a rhythmic “yah, yah, yah,” a low beat that carried the sound farther, “yah yah yah, yah, yah, yah,” a drumbeat made in the diaphragm, passed where we stood, where it morphed into a sound like a Disney princess in ecstasy. The high note of finding the prince at the wishing well held, one voice after another taking up the exact same pitch until the sound was a shiv in the skull, until farther up the room it transformed again into an agonized groan of mourning and then collapsed in a single, hysterical shriek. Then there was silence except for the sound of metal against rock, a scraping I couldn’t see.
Kim left the two cushions in front of the newspaper-stuffed netting. Davis and I followed her onward through the strange silence into the open light of the atrium where the Minnesota Trail and Tropics Trail met, where there used to be an information booth and picnic tables. A zoo employee had painted a seahorse on my cheek during one visit. I remembered the cold bristles of her brush on my skin, the gentle way she held my head to keep me still. Her care had been simple, straightforward, neat. Nothing seemed straightforward anymore: the tenderness between those women mixed into the pain they were causing one another, the beauty of the stalactites beside the bent man who wouldn’t raise his eyes, the horror of those sounds behind the curtain, Lana’s unwillingness to face me, and Rodney’s careful distance. This place felt so wrong, so broken, but what, really, did I know about what people needed to survive? About love or sex or desire? I’d been a privileged, white, suburban girl before the Rending and, as Talia had pointed out, I’d been mostly shielded from violence after the Rending. There were the Babies, sure, but I’d made nice little Nests for them and I felt so proud about myself for that. And my little job collecting objects from the Piles. I’d felt so useful. But I was three weeks away from giving birth to my own Baby and my moral compass felt broken.
Davis and Kim left me at the entrance to Discovery Bay, where clearly Michael held court. The room featured two large former aquariums, one that had once held dolphins and another that had held coral and fish and a few sharks that swam near the surface, showing the children below their perpetual razor-sharp overbite. Michael stood in the middle of the room where, in an interactive estuary, rays and tiger sharks used to swim in slow rotations, children bellied up to the water on rocks, hopeful fingers pointed toward the dappled bodies below. The water, of course, was gone and so were most of the rocks that had once framed the pool; the setup now resembled the kind of stone circle you might find in Ireland, a worn attempt at magic.
There were one or two people consulting with Michael within the circle; others sat on a few remaining benches. Many of them held papers or objects in their hands and cast occasional glances toward the center of the room.
Knight and Drake were on their knees, tinkering with a large dog kennel. When Knight turned to reach for a roll of duct tape he saw me, raised his arm, smiled. Drake noticed his brother’s movement and did the same. I raised my arm and wiggled my fingers half-heartedly. Then I turned and headed for the Tropics.
The woman in the tortoise enclosure was dozing with her head resting on an arm stretched out in front of her, winning at the five-hundred-meter freestyle in her sleep. As I rounded the bend in the trail, I noticed that the waves and boat and porthole were no longer etched in the glass; the mud or excrement covered the pane again, thick and unyielding. In the Komodo dragon enclosure, Lana was stretching. Lifting each leg, one at a time, pressing knee to nose. Then she rotated each leg in its hip socket, each foot at the ankle, each hand at the wrist, her head on the spindle of her neck. She did all of this facing away from the Watchers, a few feet from the faux stones at the back of the enclosure. From time to time she bent to drink from a fluorescent-pink water bottle at her feet. Along the back of the wall, disposable plastic water bottles, dented, labels peeling, stood like a row of sentinels. I held onto the railing and imitated some of her movements, raising myself up onto my toes, lowering my body slowly until my heels touched the ground. I tried a plié when she pliéd. I tried to remember fourth position and fifth. I didn’t call her name or try to get her attention, I just tried, in the smallest possible ways, to make my body like her body, to put myself in her shape.
This was ridiculous given the current state of our bodies. Her naturally willowy frame had been further whittled by the dancing; my body looked like an advertisement for words like ample and full and abundant. For Halloween she could be Jack Sprat and I could be his wife, the one perpetually unable to eat any lean. This is happening, I told myself. This is happening. I opened my notebook and wrote JACK SPRAT COSTUMES in large block letters. Then Lana started to dance.
She was liquid and fragile, bow and scythe, angles and languor. With her toes, with her heels, with elbows and knees, sometimes on her back with the knives of her shoulder blades, she etched the dance into the sand of the enclosure. The movement was symbol, was emblem and totem, was myth and open door. Watching Lana wasn’t like watching ballet in the Before. There was no clear pattern of rhythm or structure, no narrative woven into the unfolding from slouch to roll to leap to stretch. Ironically, it was like watching fish in an aquarium or the sleek otters that used to roll against each other in lithe piles on the other side of this very path. I was watching an animal move instinctually through her world, and the otherness of that movement was mesmerizing.
As she finished, something of a half-smile swam across her face. Or maybe it wasn’t a smile, maybe it was simply that the weight that had been pulling on her features had been momentarily lifted. She looked at me then and I thought I saw an opening, a tiny uprush of hope in her eyes. Then she turned away.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A week passed. Each day I circled the Zoo until the space became almost familiar. Talia and Chester helped out where they could: washing root vegetables, carrying loads of stings to storage spaces in the old Zoo cafeteria, shoveling out new latrines. Chester returned to his mute genius status and learned what he could by listening to the Watchers, who talked at him almost perpetually. Ida and Sylvia joined forces with the only medical personality at the Zoo, a chiropractor unfortunately named Greg Cracker. He was the only person I’d encountered since the Rending who elected to use his last name. He wore gray sweatpan
ts and a Christmas sweater (with real tinsel somehow woven into the perky-looking evergreen tree) and he looked completely incapable of manipulating the human skeleton. But Sylvia was in heaven. She would have split open his skull and stepped inside if she could. Instead she started sleeping with him. When I, upon learning this news, made a little retching noise in the back of my throat Ida looked at me seriously and said, “He’s a nice man, Mira. He’s a nice man.”
Which was more than I could say for my man at the moment. It wasn’t that Rodney wasn’t nice. But most of the time Rodney wasn’t there. Sometimes I saw him helping Drake or Knight with a project or unloading or packing up objects from the market in the central courtyard, but mostly during the day he was absent. In the evenings he sat with us around the fire. Ate, held my hand, rubbed his thumb down each of my fingers. He fell asleep beside me every night, often aligning the edge of his foot to the edge of mine, but he didn’t touch my belly or my breasts, didn’t snake his hand up under my shirt, didn’t press his body against me in the morning. He didn’t want to enter me but he didn’t leave me either. I didn’t know what the silence between us meant. He didn’t shave. Day by day, his whiskers covered the branch on his cheek until it disappeared completely.
I had thought that once we reached the Zoo, there would be clear sides, an obvious battle, that the plan Talia had asked for on the road a week earlier would assert itself. But the fact that Lana refused to communicate complicated everything; she didn’t look happy but she also didn’t indicate any desire to be rescued. Meanwhile, while no one particularly liked the Zoo, though we all used words like creepy and horrible and messed up and strange to describe it, though none of us wanted to stay for long, we were all compelled by difference and mystery. I think we fancied ourselves ethnographers, anthropologists, international travelers; benign and patient observers of a different land. Taking Lana would almost certainly change our benign status.
And there was the small matter that I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant and I had no desire to give birth anywhere near the Zoo.
“Maybe tomorrow we should just go into the enclosure and tell Lana we’re leaving. Just be direct. Maybe she’s just waiting for our direction.” I said this abruptly on the seventh night. I was scraping all the gunk off a piece of aluminum foil we used every night for wrapping sweet potatoes and laying them in the dying embers of the fire.
“That seems unwise,” said Chester. He was trying to cut his fingernails with embroidery scissors. Mostly unsuccessfully.
“Why?” I said. “I want to touch her. I want to be near enough to her that she has to respond.”
“And if she doesn’t want to go?” said Rodney.
“We convince her to go.” I folded the cleaned foil around a potato.
“And what, exactly, is everyone else doing while we’re in the enclosure communing with Lana?” Chester flicked a cut nail into the fire.
“They can watch,” I said, shrugging. “They like to watch, remember? It can be like an episode of The Young and the Restless. I’ll pretend to wake from a coma and Talia can be my evil twin.”
“And you think, assuming she wants to go, that everyone will just watch that happen. That Michael will just wave as we all happily skip off down Highway 77 into the sunset.”
“Well, technically there is no sunset,” said Talia.
“The Inhabitants are free to go at any time,” I said, sounding like a mini Michael.
“Sweetie,” said Ida, “most of these folks think Lana’s got some secret stored up inside her. They think one of these days she’s gonna dance it out. You think they’re going to let her walk away?”
“I think ‘secret’ is a bit of an exaggeration.”
“Mira.” I could feel Sylvia’s level gaze from the other side of the fire. “Ida’s right. These people aren’t just watching for entertainment the way that Michael claimed. He said it was all about wanting to be in another world. It isn’t. They’re taking notes. They’re looking for signs.”
“About what?”
“Who knows exactly. What the Rending meant. Why it happened. Whether it will happen again. Probably the same questions we ask in Zion. Only they think they have evidence.”
“Why do you think people wait to talk to Michael all day?” added Rodney.
“I understand that the Watchers are paying close attention,” I said. “I get that. Maybe even obsessively close attention. Fine. If they think Lana’s so important, it’s not like they’re going to kill her.”
“Mobs are strange things, Mir,” said Chester.
“A lot of these people are strange things all on their own,” said Rodney. “Belief makes people do crazy shit.”
Chester shrugged. He was holding the tiny scissors between his thumb and index finger, letting it swing back and forth. Firelight ticked off the metal. “Lack of belief in anything makes people do strange things too.”
I tossed the wrapped potato into the flames. We watched the fire pucker and splutter. Another sheet of foil lay open across my knees, a shadowed square of light.
“So we’ll get her at night, then. When the Watchers aren’t watching.”
“And none of the hundreds of people in the Zoo will notice? Drake and Knight won’t notice? This isn’t Mission Impossible, Mira.” I had kind of been imagining Mission Impossible.
Talia started humming the Mission Impossible theme.
“Shut up, Talia.”
She shut up. When she spoke it was in a voice entirely devoid of light. “I notice you still don’t really have a plan.”
I sighed. Crumpled the foil around another potato. “What’s your plan, Talia?”
Her response was quick: “I think you should talk to Michael. He’s a reasonable person. Convince him it’s a good idea for her to go.”
“You think he’s reasonable because you still want to get in his pants,” I retorted.
I waited for further scoffing remarks from the others. There was only silence. Somewhere down the hill, the sound of poured water. Hammered wood.
“She has a point, Mir,” said Rodney finally.
“I agree,” said Sylvia, her words like a ballot slipping in a box. “It’s worth a try.”
“If it doesn’t work he’s on to us,” I protested pathetically.
“On to us?” Rodney laughed, scorn at the back of his throat.
Chester added, more gently, “Mira, he’s been on to us since we set foot in the Zoo. He knows why we’re here. He knows what we want. We need to have a real conversation with Lana and it would be best if Michael could facilitate that.”
“Fine,” I said. I threw the half-wrapped potato into the flames. As I stood up the patches of exposed, dry skin caught and flared.
Rodney followed me to bed soon afterward. We lay below our blankets, not touching, not sleeping. I didn’t like that I was breathing in the same air, molecules from his lungs filtering into mine.
Though we’d placed a tarp below the blankets to keep saturation from seeping upward and into our dreams, the cushion between our bodies and the ground was thin. A rock sliced into my left shoulder blade. The right part of my lower back was on distinctly higher ground than my left. I blamed these discomforts on Rodney. My belly, though it didn’t even create that much of a disturbance in the duned waves of the blanket, felt huge and monstrous. Above us, on the sheet from Moe, the contrast between the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky was barely discernable.
Farther away, someone was trying out notes on a flute or a recorder. There was a rustling as Ida and Sylvia crawled into their sleeping space. Talia’s voice breaking a whisper to say, “But then what I said was.” The scraping sound of Chester’s pocket knife against a stick as he listened. Then there were the softer sounds, difficult to place: a blanket snapped open? Leftover tea splashed onto the earth? The hinges of a lawn chair expanding? The cap of a water bottle raking into its grooves?
“I think you should go alone tomorrow,” Rodney said. “I think I make things worse.”
> I didn’t respond. This was the man who’d quieted Massey and the other visitors just by walking into a room. This was the man who cleaned animal carcasses in sure, quick motions. This was the man whose body was a plow, who entered me with the force of reined thunder. I’d seen doubt in Rodney but never cowardice.
“He wants to have a conversation with you, Mira. I don’t know why. But I can tell he’s waiting. He’s not going to hurt you.”
Mira of a year earlier might have believed that. But I thought about Cal’s anger and Kim’s limp and Lana’s back as she refused and refused to turn and face me; I thought of the screeches echoing down the Minnesota Trail, of the slices of blood, of the blue eye peering through glass stained with excrement.
“He isn’t a good man,” I said. Then I rolled away and sank my breaths deep and slow until they resembled the rhythm of sleep.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I found Michael holding court in Discovery Bay. He stood in the middle of the circle of stones; on the floor in front of him, a woman wearing a beige velour jogging suit was arranging pieces of green construction paper into a pyramid shape. Each sheet of paper had a Roman numeral drawn on the front. When I entered the circle of stones she jumped to her feet and splayed her arms and legs out as if that might prevent me from seeing her project.
“It’s OK, Oakley,” said Michael, but Oakley maintained her posture for a few seconds longer, her eyes like thistles in the middle of her smooth, round face. Finally, she crossed her arms on her chest and leaned her weight over her right hip as if to say I had some explaining to do.
“I need to talk to you, Michael.”
“There’s a protocol,” said Oakley. She nodded her head in the direction of the three other Watchers who were sitting on the nearby bench.
“I don’t really care,” I said. I put a hand on my belly and Oakley shrank back a bit.
The Rending and the Nest Page 20