It was an uneventful crossing. The ship’s first port of call was Messina, sentry for Europe, Africa, and the Levant, and the sight of a giraffe’s head poking up through a hole in the deck lined with straw to prevent chafing was like a third mast, rotating, blinking, periscopal. As the port’s towers and waterfront came into view, Messina was the first northern city her keepers, Hassan and Atir, had ever seen, and it appeared like a white arm curled into the sea welcoming in, but also keeping out. Though it was docked, no one could leave the ship. Because of the plague, a scourge of the fifteenth century, the city was still on its guard against contagion, any contagion, even if it might be a kind they had no name for. If anyone on board the ship wanted to buy so much as an orange or a handful of olives, their money, whether Egyptian piastres or Turkish kuruş, had to be disinfected by dropping coins into pots of vinegar before they could be touched by the local Messinesi.
Their next stop, Marseille, also had strict rules of quarantine. When the passengers were cleared to leave the ship, they had to move to the lazaretto. Fishermen stopped sorting their catch, stevedores rested their crates, children ran to the roads that led away from the docks. They stared at Atir’s facial scars, parallel crescents etched above his eyebrows, and he stared back at them.
Within the fortress both men began to get a sense of how different life would be in France. One sat on chairs around a table, not on the floor, did not share food, did not eat with fingers but rather with forks and knives. Everyone had their own plate, bowl, glass. It was considered rude to use anyone else’s. When they were finally allowed to leave the fortress, the sound of the giraffe’s hooves on cobbled streets drew crowds.
Witnesses wrote about the giraffe as if she had human attributes, like shyness and flirtatiousness. She seemed to feel some affinity and affection for horses, though they were frightened of her. The giraffe, like all animals, had never seen herself and didn’t know how to recognize her reflection. Her sense of herself, based on a small number of clues, was built on the appearance, sounds, and smells of other animals, so to herself she was not a giraffe, since she’d had no memorable experience of interacting with others like her, and didn’t know what a giraffe might be. If Zarafa had stayed in the wild, she would have recognized fellow giraffes, and identified predators and the dangers they posed, but from the moment she left Khartoum, Zarafa would never have seen another creature like herself, and as a stranger to involuntary speciation, would identify a horse as kin.
The five-hundred-mile walk from Marseille to Paris took three months and ended at her new home at the royal zoo. Le Jardin des Plantes had a violent and bloody history. During the French Revolution, Étienne Saint-Hilaire, a scientist who accompanied the giraffe on her journey to Paris, had written about the unhappy past of Le Jardin, a scene of massive slaughter, comparing it to entertainments staged at the Circus Maximus in ancient Rome.
After the 10th of August 1792, when mobs attacked the Tuileries palaces, the menagerie of the late guillotined King at Versailles was pillaged: a beautiful dromedary, several small quadrupeds, and a great number of birds were either eaten or delivered up to the flayer. Only five animals, among them an Indian rhinoceros and a lion, escaped the massacre. But they had the misfortune to belong to the King and so were considered souvenirs of tyranny. They were deemed useless, had to be fed, and dangerous to the city. Their death was decided, and the Minister of Finances offered their skeletons to Le Jardin des Plantes.
Perhaps ghosts led to Hassan’s flight. Once in France, he grew increasingly depressed, etiolated, and confused. If he strained to hear a muezzin call from across the sea, all he heard to mark the hours was church bells, an altogether new sound for him. Patterned shadows on walls from screens that separated men from women didn’t exist in the land of goose liver and tall hats. Women wore dresses shaped like bells and took up too much space, their legs inside somewhere, hidden clappers, the top halves of their bodies almost naked. They could go anywhere alone or in odd groups, say or do, it seemed to him, almost anything they wanted to. The French language surrounded him like a shallow lake. He strained to find something to stand on, yet still keep his nose above the surface. In the name Simone, common and heard often, he heard the Arabic word simoon, a desert windstorm, and pulled his scarf tighter. When despair became over-whelming, he returned to Egypt.
Atir did not, as far as has been recorded, suffer from homesickness, regret, or longing. He moved into La Rotonde, a hexagonal brick structure that was to house both himself and Zarafa. During the day he groomed Zarafa with a comb attached to a long pole, and the expression “Do it or comb a giraffe” entered the language. It was used when someone was reluctant to do a task, a retort issued to a footdragger. To reach his quarters, Atir needed to climb two ladders, but once in his perch he was eye level with the giraffe. It was a thrilling view, and with this promise, Atir became known as a seducer. Women flocked to his aerial roost in Le Jardin des Plantes.
When Zarafa went on public view that summer, she had sixty thousand visitors, but, as popular as she was, and as well intentioned as the king might have been in allowing the people to see his pet, in political satire the giraffe became a symbol not of the king’s largesse, but of his censorship of the press.
There was competition in the realm of exotica. Passing through the city were a pair of serpentologists who exhibited never-before-seen clutches of reptiles from Africa and the New World; a beached whale was reported at Ostend; and perhaps the most spectacular of spectacles, six Osage Indians were brought from Missouri. How much freedom of movement was afforded the Osage is not known. They might have been given French or American jackets, shirts, shoes, and trousers and shepherded up the steps to Notre Dame or Sacré-Coeur, or down into the catacombs. They might have visited Atir and Zarafa as well, and been allowed to touch her fur, perhaps the first wild creature they’d had contact with since leaving the Ozarks.
Saint-Hilaire was interested in symbiosis, a relationship between two species that can be mutually beneficial to both or be beneficial mainly to the parasite, not the host. Sharks and pilot fish, he knew, had a symbiotic relationship. The pilot fish swim alongside the sharks and consume parasites who would otherwise infect or disable the sharks, and in return, are protected from possible predators because there the pilot fish are, swimming happily along, in close proximity to the sharks’ jaws. Predator nations and prey can shift into symbiotic gear, at least temporarily. The gift of the giraffe, however, didn’t allay the sultan’s anxieties. The French entered the war on the side of the Greeks.
THE AQUARIUM
I’ve long found the edges of the city, those liminal spaces, the ends of what you could call a city, worth exploring, and the New York Aquarium occupies one of those margins. It’s right next to Coney Island, as far south as you could go in the city before the hurricane, at least without getting your feet wet. The next landmass due south is the Turks and Caicos Islands, thirteen hundred miles away. The aquarium reminds me of the kind of optimistic modernism found in much of the architecture of the 1964 World’s Fair, built just a few years later. Behind the aquarium lie projects. The Atlantic Ocean laps the shore a few yards from its front gate. So there you are at those gates, one foot in nature, the other in culture’s version of nature, a sort of parking lot for some pieces of nature.
The gate is almost a whisper compared to the brass band that is its neighbor to the west, but the aquarium hides a spectacle of twelve thousand hostages, and, at the same time, is a panorama of preservation. It’s a highly collapsed microcosm, a UN of sea life complete with tanks and simulated environments that reduce the seemingly infinite oceans to a few cubic meters of water.
In the early days of the aquarium, when it was located at Castle Clinton, the fish were collected in a more haphazard way. According to the WPA guide to the aquarium, “Wireless operators on ocean freighters obligingly carry to far-off corners of the world castoff clothes, whiskey, and other goods given them by the aquarium, and barter them for rare fish
to add to the aquarium’s collection.” But now, it’s against the law to swap a bottle of Lagavulin for a dolphin. As with zoo acquisitions of animals, the creatures here were bred in captivity or rescued.
As I walked around, I wondered, How are the animals selected? Why hammerheads, for example, and not giant squids? What’s the system? Some animals were rescued or endangered; others came with certain iconography. Seals and penguins were chosen rather than the ordinary dinner-plate herring or mackerel. The two long-tusked Pacific walruses were flown from the Bering Strait to Brooklyn; wounded condors from the Andes occupied a perch on a 787 to JFK, to be transferred to a small craft destined for the Berkshire Bird Sanctuary, where they could safely roost on discarded construction-site spools; eleven elephants were flown from Swaziland to a zoo in Tampa, Florida. (Though they were heavily sedated, a keeper had to be assigned to stay with them in the plane. Elephant urine is corrosive to metal.) They landed in the confinement of artificial rocks, moats, and undisguised fences, but these man-made, constrained environments will save their lives.
One of the most animated exhibits, the one that draws by far the most visitors, is the shark tank, but a disturbing sign near its cavernous entrance tells you that sharks are more like people than fish. They reproduce through internal fertilization. Sharks mature in their teens, though many humans, it could be argued, don’t grow up until much later, if ever. Most sharks bear young only every few years. Sharks produce fewer pups, or as the sign says, “babies,” drawing an alarming image, and they are born alive. Neither we nor the sharks are kosher to eat. Sharks have no scales and are the treyf or pigs of the ocean, along with shellfish, catfish, and other bottom dwellers. We see them much as we see pigs, as creatures of unbridled appetites and ferocity, and yet with potentially homologous personality traits. As the sign says, we’re not such strange bedfellows, the sharks and us.
It’s feeding time, and dead fish are dropped into the water, but for some reason the sharks aren’t interested. As they circle close to the edges of the tank, as animals tend to do in confinement, they swim right up to the glass, and a couple of big ones shit right in front of a group of children. The kids, noses and hands pressed against the glass, go nuts. They’re dying with laughter. Sharks have been cast as ferocious hunters. This is not supposed to be part of their act.
It’s hard to look at them with a marine biologist’s eye and see a statistically harmless-to-man endangered species. The sharks in the tank have tiny eyes, rows of teeth going every which way, and look completely true to the mechanized fish automatons of Jaws or Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus. We fear nature outsized and out of control, and this is what the independent and bigger-than-us eatingmachine sharks seem to represent. One of the most horrific moments in Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, perhaps one of the most frightening moments in all oceanic narratives, is when the crew is hundreds of nautical miles from Peru, and one of the nine giant balsa logs that make up the raft has taken on so much water it no longer floats. It drags the edge of the raft down. Heyerdahl takes out a knife, slices off a piece of balsa, and drops it into the Pacific, where it quickly disappears. The crew has no choice but to cut the saturated log loose, and it sinks to the bottom of the Nazca Ridge. Is this what will happen to the remaining eight? The sharks seem to sense this is a distinct possibility. They circle the raft.
The tank also contains stingrays, members of the shark family, and it’s difficult to watch them without thinking of Leni Riefenstahl riding stingrays when she was in her seventies. The rays ripple and flop around at the bottom of the tank. If interested in still pursuing such recreation even at 110, Riefenstahl would take the F train to Coney Island, get in the tank, and swim around. These docile specimens would be as easy to ride as bits of sample carpeting, but then she’d be pretty old, so that might be all she could handle. Following the dip in the shark pool, she might go next door for a ride on the Cyclone, camera in hand. She would avoid the freak shows, the Sideshows by the Seashore; apart from the strong man, freaks are emphatically not her subject. She might wander over to the Human Slingshot in the Scream Zone, or, if it’s New Year’s Day, join the members of the Polar Bear Club in their annual icy swim. But if the Polar Bears are old and Russian, as is sometimes the case, she will not photograph them.
When I emerged from the shark tank, it was raining, so I ran across the plaza to the hall of Alien Stingers. The seascapes and aquatic environments no longer contain statues of Neptune, mermaids, sunken ships, treasure chests, rusty anchors, or painted backdrops that reflect the world of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, a locus of marine fantasy. Now tanks and environments are signs of the geographic origin of their inhabitants.
In an alcove near the jellyfish wing we are told, “Coral reefs are like underground cities.” They provide an environment that balances food, shelter, and protection from predators, and in doing so creates automatic controls over population explosions. The closest thing I’ve seen to an underwater city, one that even resembles the aquarium’s reef cities, appeared in Amphibian Man, a Soviet science-fiction movie made in 1962. Amphibian Man, part human, part shark, escapes his father’s underwater lair to explore a small coastal town. Though it was shot in the Crimea, standing in for Argentina, Amphibian Man represents a kind of transenvironmental The Russians Are Coming. Amphibian Man’s father, a utopian scientist, plans to build a classless utopian underwater society, but his son has his reservations. Once on land he meets a levelheaded socialist, a newspaperman who doubts that human nature, fundamentally greedy and sharklike, will be any different underwater.
There’s something fragile about the Saarinen-like shell of the aquarium. The buildings that make up the park—the Aquatheater, the Sea Cliff exhibit, the Bathysphere, and the Shark Tank—could easily be fractured by an earthquake, a tornado. Man-made catastrophes, a missile, a drone, though unlikely, would reduce the plaster and glass to dust in no time. But because the aquarium, like many aquariums, is close to the ocean, Coney Island is in the blaring red zone, or Zone A, so far out in Zone A, it should be coded in some pre-alphabet symbol. Before the hurricane hit, the urbanized fish, rays, jellies, and marine mammals must have waited for a possibly liberating storm, when all the urban fish would just keep swimming, swimming, and happily join the Gulf Stream waiting for them out beyond Montauk.
There are many precedents for animals escaping during natural or man-made disasters. In June, flooding at a Duluth zoo led to seal and polar-bear escapes. Cobras with Houdini-like powers have liberated themselves from the Bronx Zoo, crocodiles went missing from the New Orleans Aquarium during Katrina. During the Second World War, the Berlin Zoo and adjoining aquarium, the site of the Nazis’ last stand against the Soviets, was bombed. Most of the animals, numbering over three thousand, were killed in the attack, though ninety-one animals—leopards, panthers, jaguars, and apes among them—escaped, crossing the Spree, if they were able to, and headed into the Tiergarten. Animals in the Baghdad Zoo in the recent war fared no better. During the 2003 American bombing, four lions escaped and roamed the city until put down by marines.
So not all aquarium dwellers would find freedom in the crashing waves. The representatives from the Arctic, those from the tropics, those accustomed to a lifetime of four daily feedings might think, as glass breaks and water meets water, What, me hunt? Forget it. They wouldn’t last long. The walrus, for example, known as the “loudest voice in the Arctic,” a thought that hints at what total silence must be like, would be in big trouble. The aquarium’s explanatory text describes how the walrus uses “muscular whisker pads” to blow mud from shellfish on the ocean floor and then feast. But walruses would have to swim two thousand miles to get to their native habitat, Greenland, Ellesmere Island, Baffin Bay. And then the Arctic sea ice is melting at an alarming rate; the fish all have lead and mercury poisoning. So escape has its drawbacks. The walrus area is totally enclosed by glass and netting that extends maybe fifteen feet high and overhead, hinting that the three-thousand-plus-pound walruses, t
he Père Ubus of the animal kingdom, have the potential to become airborne. The hurricane hits. Water rises, and the walruses gnaw through the netting, and they’re off. But they’ve spent their entire lives in a man-made environment listening to the constant five-minute cycle of screams from the Cyclone at the top of its track, at the top, then down, alternating less screaming in the troughs and dips, but interspersed is the barking of sea lions and seals. The two walruses might, as they swim toward Nova Scotia, feel nostalgic for the rounds of seal barking/Cyclone screams/seal barking/Cyclone screams.
After the hurricane, the Cyclone became silent anyway. The roller coaster and the Wonder Wheel were weighted down by tons of sand and garbage. The owners said very simply that this is what water does to wood: warp and bow. Metal rusts and corrodes. Barnacles take root, and the closed aquarium faces an amusement ghost town. This seemingly protected underwater city was no more invulnerable than the zoos of New Orleans, Berlin, or Baghdad. Maybe there are no true preserves possible, no zone that keeps out vandals, floodwaters, bombs, or real estate developers, and such a concept is a fantasy with an expiration date.
The developers’ bulldozers were poised on the edge of Stillwell and Mermaid, waiting for the end of gas rationing. This is a break they couldn’t even have prayed for, it’s such a gift. Their plans and computer-generated models were delayed and kept at bay because this is, or was, a city landmark. At one point, it looked like the wrecking ball was going to be allowed to finish what the hurricane initiated, but then Coney rides were revived, and the aquarium is being restored. It will eventually again be a kind of aquatic environment where Amphibian Man can put up his flipperized feet, get his silver-sequined suit dry-cleaned at Oceana Cleaners or Professional Magic on Brighton Beach Avenue, where they speak Russian and might recognize him from their childhoods. He, like those of us who love these marginal parts of the city, will feel right at home.
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