Fierce Kingdom

by Gin Phillips

  She will lift the covers and open her arms, and sometimes he will duck his head against her shoulder or neck, squinching his eyes, and he’ll say, I’ve disappeared, and she wishes it worked that way. That she could pull him against her and make him vanish.

  Another squeal from inside the building, and it sounds strangely like a parrot, although there are no parrots in there.

  Lincoln’s breath is damp and loud. A plastic bag is blowing over the chain-link fence, swelling and collapsing in the wind like a jellyfish caught in a wave.

  She inhales and exhales. Inhales and exhales.

  She thinks she will hear footsteps—that is what she is listening for, because that is how it works in stories, but she never hears anything like feet stomping. She has been sure that he would be wearing boots, something with a loud tread, but there has been only silence for long, long seconds when she hears the wheeze of the glass door being pushed open—it is a much more involved sound than she has ever realized, a long whistling sound and a short groan and a sucking of air—and even then, after the door is open and done complaining, there are still no footsteps.

  There is, instead, the soft sound of the door as it slides shut, and then there is nothing, and she looks across the pen at the chain-link fence, at the pine trees, and she searches for the floating plastic bag, but instead she sees a leaf levitating in midair, hooked by a spiderweb. She begins to wonder if there was no one there at all, if it is only the wind, or if, even, she has only imagined the noises.

  Then the voices start, one quiet and the other not.

  “Nothing,” says the loud one.

  “Haven’t you ever gone hunting?” says the softer voice, hoarse, like he has been coughing. “Shut up, dumbass.”

  Two of them. There are two men. They must be standing on the wooden deck overlooking the exhibit space. That means they are separated from her and Lincoln by the waist-high railing, a dozen feet, and the rock mass that is so solid against her spine.

  She can’t help but picture them based on those few patterns of sound. The soft-voiced one leaves her imagining a tall boy in her high school calculus class. He was crazy smart but usually stoned, and his hair was always too long in back, raggedly cut. He never spoke unless he was called on, and when the teacher did call on him, it was always because she had noticed he was staring at the ceiling or tying his shoes, in some way aggressively ignoring the lesson, and Mrs. Vinson would yelp his name, voice sharp and annoyed, and she would ask him some specific question that he could not possibly know, only he did know it, every single time. He never missed a question, and he always spoke a little too softly, so that you had to strain to hear him, but you always did strain to hear, because there was this constant, unspoken contest between him and Mrs. Vinson, of whether he would ever be caught ignorant, and he never was.

  “If there’s no one—” says the voice that wants to be heard.

  “No animals.”

  “It’s not like—”

  “No more animals.”

  The loud one she imagines as overweight, and she suspects his head is too large for his body. Shirt untucked, stumpy fingers. The kind of person who feels like he doesn’t quite fit, so he pushes harder to make himself fit, and that only makes everything worse.

  She doesn’t picture them as Arabic—she has been wondering, of course. But they do not sound like that kind of terrorist. They sound like young, obnoxious white men—aren’t they always young white men?—and she is not sure whether this makes them more or less dangerous than fanatics on a jihad.

  She hears the second door open, the one that leads to the orangutans. There is the smallest noise from Lincoln, a shift of his head, and she can tell that he is about to say her name—“Mommy,” rather, which has become almost her name—and she shushes him, stroking his head, and he does not speak, but she wonders how long his silence will last.

  His tennis shoe is digging into her thigh.

  The leaf is swinging impossibly slowly on the spiderweb, and she wishes that it would stop altogether, because she does not like the movement. She wants everything to be still.

  She wants the whole scene to turn into a painting, where no one can move.

  “You never wanted to shoot a lion?” asks the loud one. The heavy one. “Go on safari? I know you did.”

  “That wasn’t a lion.”

  “No, but what the hell was it? All black and white and shaggy and those teeth on it. That thing wasn’t a monkey.”

  It was a colobus, she thinks. She loves their white beards and sad eyes and the way their fur makes curtains hanging from their arms. They dangle from their rope swings in a corner exhibit between the lemurs and the gibbons.

  “Shut up,” says the almost-boy-from-her-calculus-class.

  “There’s no one left,” says the loud one. “And, seriously, the way that boar came apart, you’ve got to—”

  “Shut up. There’s some left. Come on.”

  She notices the tension in her muscles, the way her body has hardened into a shell. Her teeth are clenched again. Lincoln is drumming a pattern against the nape of her neck, his fingertips light, but other than that he is motionless.

  “It’s cheating, bringing that thing,” says the quiet one, annoyed. “Where’s the challenge? You fire off thirty at a time, where’s the skill?”

  “Jealous?” says the loud one.

  Why are they still here talking? Why have they not walked through the door that they opened ages ago?

  “Are you blind, honey pie?” says the loud one, suddenly much louder. So loud that she feels her head jerk. “Are you a mole rat nosing in the muck? Are you a gunked-up eyeless fish or some squirming, mewling larva?”

  “I’m not blind,” says the quiet one, and the annoyance is gone from his voice. Although it does not sound quite like his voice. He is talking slower and deeper. Like he is playing some part. “I’m thinking.”

  “Same thing, honey pie.”

  There is something strange about them, she thinks. About their voices. About “honey pie.”

  “You really think there are more?” asks the loud one.

  He sounds normal again, with no trace of the drawl she heard in his voice a moment before. She waits for the quiet one to respond, but he doesn’t. The silence is so much worse than the talking. Have they seen some flicker of her hair floating past the boulders? Are they right now raising their guns, lifting a leg to vault over the railing? Or did the quiet one only nod his answer? Are they standing there now tying their shoes or adjusting their ponytails? Do they have ponytails and what about knives and are they smart or stupid or insane and is there a plan is there a strategy are they suicidal are they sadistic what do they want?

  How is she supposed to know anything? She cannot even see them. The enemy is right here, and this is her chance to find out—something, anything—that will help her make sense of it all, but all she has is pieces—monkeys and honey pies and calculus—and none of them fit together.

  She hears the creak of the wooden deck under their feet.

  “Come on,” says the quiet one.

  “Sir, yes, sir.”

  A huff of laughter. Then the door closes, with one air-sucking whump and a small echo. She realizes she is making a low, steady shushing sound next to Lincoln’s ear. She sounds like a child pretending to be the wind. She does not stop, though, because he is being quiet, and she is not ready for him to speak. Her arms tighten around him. If she could, she would freeze them both for a solid hour or two, for a day, forever, long enough that he cannot remember the sound of the voices.

  Lincoln jolts in her arms, the top of his head tapping against her jawbone.

  “I’ve got the hippos,” he whispers.

  She opens her mouth, but only a kind of quiet grunt comes out. She swallows and tries again.

  “Shhh,” she says.

  “I’ve got the hi
ppos,” he repeats, even more quietly.

  “Oh,” she manages.

  It’s one of the first puns he came up with—he means he has the hiccups. She has thought of this as his first joke, but she remembers now—as she looks down and focuses on his face and on his breath that smells of the almond butter that he must have had for snack—that before he could even talk, he would pretend to lean in and sip her coffee so she would say, Babies don’t drink coffee! And he would shake with laughter.

  He thought it was hilarious to put his feet on a book.

  She scoots him away from her slightly, settling him onto her knees.

  “Try holding your breath in your mouth and then swallowing it,” she whispers.

  “I have the hippos,” he says again, frowning.

  She blinks at him a handful of times before she realizes it: she always laughs when he makes the hippo joke. That is the thing: he knows she will laugh, and she has not laughed, so he is trying again.

  “Silly,” she whispers, and she makes a sound that she hopes is a laugh.

  Gunshots crack through the air. She no longer thinks of them as balloon sounds. She flinches, but even as she does, she knows they are not particularly nearby. They are close together, though, a handful of shots, barely a pause between them.

  She thinks of the quiet voice telling the loud voice that he was cheating. Thirty at a time.

  Lincoln hiccups again. He does not mention the gunfire, and neither does she.

  She stares at their view. Only the trees are moving.

  Her phone suddenly comes to life. It rattles against the hard ground, announcing its presence even when it is silenced. She watches its glowing screen, picking it up to stop its buzzing.

  It will be completely dark soon, and the screen will be even more noticeable. The phone is becoming a bigger problem.

  I’m outside the zoo now, her husband writes. The police have everything blocked, but there are a group of us up on Essex St., waiting. About ten of us so far, all of us asking about somebody still inside. So must be other people in there with you. Police won’t say anything.

  She considers the message, not sure how much she should tell him. She knows there are other people in here. She has seen them sprawled across the sidewalk. And also the police are wrong: it is not only one shooter. She must tell him that, but that means telling him the men were nearly close enough to touch.

  She has to answer him.

  Are they inside the zoo? Police? she types.

  Still don’t know. Can’t even see the zoo entrance. They say to wait here. Say they’re taking care of it. Not sure what else I can do.

  She feels a familiar flash of annoyance—she suspects he actually expects her to tell him what to do. There are times when she feels like she is in charge of everything—what Lincoln needs to bring on his field trip and when the exterminator is due and when the milk is about to run out—and why are there a thousand small things that fall to her and why is Paul so happy to let it all fall to her? Even now he would make her more responsible? More culpable?

  She looks down at his message, and the oblivious black font of it is intolerable.

  And yet she longs for his handwriting. He leaves her a note on the kitchen counter every morning: I am in love with you, especially your butt and You are my #1 draft pick. He makes her coffee so that it is hot when she wakes up, even though he does not drink it.

  He is the least self-conscious dancer she has ever known.

  We are fine, she types. At least no mascots here.

  Worst possible scenario, he answers immediately.

  She can almost make herself smile.

  The story online said they think there’s one shooter. There are two. I heard them walk past, she types.

  He takes longer than she expects to reply. He is surely imagining more terrible things, even knowing that they did not happen.

  They walked past you? he types.

  They didn’t see us. But tell the police there are definitely two of them. I only heard voices, though. Saw nothing.

  I’ll tell them, he types.

  She knows he wants to say more, but she doesn’t give him the chance. She types that she needs to pay attention and that she loves him, and he tells her the same, and then the phone goes black again. There is a relief to the blackness.

  “Hippos gone?” she asks her son.

  “I think so,” Lincoln says.

  She is trying to work herself back into the right mood to talk to him—quiet, as quiet as possible—to make everything normal and all right. A considerable part of parenting is pretending moods that you do not entirely feel. She has thought this before when she’s listening to little plastic people act out a battle scene for hours at a time, but now it seems like maybe all those eternal battles were a good thing—maybe they were practice.

  She is good at pretending. She will start doing it again any moment now.

  She stares at the grass. She thinks she sees a snake, but it is only a stick. Also the sirens have started up again, although these are definitely not coming from the parking lot. They are intensifying, coming from a distance and getting closer. She has a feeling that she’s hearing a fire truck—or two or three—not a police car, although she is not sure how to define the difference.

  When his words were still choppy, Lincoln was always calling the fire department from his car seat, clenching his light-up plastic phone in one hand. Hello fireman. There a fire in big city. Bring helmet. And boots. And coat. And axe. And hoses.

  She is not sure why she cannot stay here in this moment. With this child. She seems determined to resurrect the old versions of him. They float up around her, wobbly and warm.

  “I hear sirens,” he says.

  “Me, too,” she answers.

  He nods. “Do you think the zoo might be on fire? From the guns?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The men might have bombs.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Those were the bad men?” he asks. “The ones we heard talking? The one who was talking about animals? And larvae?”

  She remembers that he learned about larvae in school. Maybe when he was studying butterflies. He listens and ponders and turns a thing round and round in his mind, like polishing a stone, and then he spits out the finished product. She thought his silence meant that he was distracted by hiccups, but really he was only shining up his other thoughts.

  “Those were the bad men,” she confirms.

  “They laughed.”

  He struggles with this in stories. He thinks evildoers should not smile. How can bad people be happy? he asks.

  She runs her finger across the top of his knuckles.

  “Remember how sometimes bad people are happy when they hurt people?” she asks, and even as she asks it, she thinks of him saying to her, You know, Mommy, we read about bad people but I do not know any bad people. All the people I know are good.

  “So those men were laughing because they think it’s funny to hurt people?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says.

  He shakes his head.

  “Villains,” he says.

  She looks at his face, which is calm and thoughtful. His long eyelashes swoop down as he blinks, and everything about him is plumped out and soft. Their pediatrician called him an “objectively handsome” child.

  After he was born, she said he was the George Clooney of babies. Paul told her that Muddles was the George Clooney of dachshunds, and then she told him that he was, of course, the George Clooney of husbands, and he said that she’d surrounded herself with George Clooneys. That day she had been trying to eat coconut soup with Lincoln asleep on her shoulder, and she dripped soup on his back and he smelled of lemongrass all afternoon.

  The wind is picking up. She feels chill bumps rise along her arms.

  “Ar
e you cold?” she asks Lincoln.

  “No,” he says.

  That is probably true. He is a furnace.

  “Tell me if you are,” she says.

  “I will.”

  If only it were that simple. If only she believed that he would always tell her what he needed. What he thought. What he wanted.

  The pine trees around her have chain link wrapped around their bases. The dead porcupine must have eaten bark. There is a fine layer of pine straw over the grass—she didn’t notice until after they sat down, but now she feels the sharp edges of it pricking her legs and her palms. She hears a helicopter in the distance, and she scans the sky, but she sees nothing. She hears them often, the helicopters, on their way to the hospitals downtown, and there is always something both comforting and chilling about the pulse of the rotors: the sound means someone has been badly hurt—a mother rear-ended by an 18-wheeler? a teenager who jumped from a bridge?—but it also means that there is a protocol in place. A solution in motion.

  The helicopter is fading, and there is another sound. There are seconds where she follows the helicopter, straining to hear it, not willing to let it go. But she has to let it go, eventually, because the other sound is getting louder.

  A baby crying.

  A baby.

  She does not want to believe it at first, but the wailing only gets louder, and she knows nothing else can explain the sound. It does not sound like a real infant—the cry is rusty and nasal, more like a doll baby when its stomach gets squeezed.

  She knows it is not a doll.

  She sees a movement outside the fence, over near the bamboo. First it is only a shifting in the darkness, not so different from a tree bending, but then a shape separates, becoming distinct from the shadows, and the shape is a woman, long hair blowing. Her arms are across her chest as she walks, hesitantly. The woman is still enough of a shadow herself that the broad curve of her arms might be empty or might be nothing more than a bulky sweater or a purse.

  But the bawling makes it obvious. It is not a purse that the woman is holding pressed against her.

  “I hear a baby,” says Lincoln.

  “Shh,” she says. “Be quiet.”