by Neil Clarke
Bell did the rest of his chores for the day. In the evening he checked on the grub. It was still there, happily curling up the sides of the glass jar. Bell had studied entomology in college, and he’d never seen anything like it; the insect’s sheer bulk seemed to push the cubed-square law to its limit. Perhaps beyond its limit. He hadn’t thought insects could be that big. When he opened the lid, the grub reared up at him, strange mouth-parts writhing.
Bell was in charge of the castle, the petting zoo, and the convicts. This had not always been the case. He was in charge of the castle because he was the only zookeeper who’d taken college-level entomology. The petting zoo was meant as an insult. And the convicts were punishment.
The convicts came in most weekdays. You could point them out in the parking lot—men and women who were there too early, hours before the gates opened. Bell would feed the insects, drink a cup of coffee, and then walk to open the front gates.
“Here for community service?” he’d ask.
“Yeah,” they’d say.
Sometimes there were two or three. Sometimes none. They handed Bell their paperwork, and Bell passed it to the zoo superintendent at the end of the day.
The number of hours worked was the all-important statistic. Because they all had a number they were working down from. 150 hours, 200 hours, 100 hours.
Sometimes they talked about their crimes, and sometimes they didn’t.
Bell never asked. Not his business.
Bell often talked to himself in the bathroom mirror.
“In this world,” he said, “you are not an apex predator. Humans are, as a species, but you, yourself, are not.”
You do not always win. Problems are not always solved.
There are defeats and surrenderings. Small but important.
Last winter, they gave up heating the bedroom. They sealed off the back of the trailer and slept on the sofa. They learned the science of climbing into the bathtub. The bathtub was metal and descended a few inches through the floor, arctic air right beneath. No matter how hot the water got, your butt and legs would start to freeze if you sat still too long. You had to lift yourself up now and then, let the hot water get under there. Lower yourself. Wait. Repeat.
“It’s like not even being part of the food chain,” Bell said aloud one cold night, eating burritos in the kitchen.
They hadn’t spoken to one another that morning. His remark about the food chain was one of two things they said to each other all day long.
Sometimes he opened up the bedroom door and exhaled just to see his breath cloud the room.
He wanted her to ask about his food chain remark. Wanted to explain it. Wanted her to understand.
“The food chain—” he began.
“I get it,” she said.
That was the second thing that got said. Her breath made a cloud even though they were in the kitchen.
Bell didn’t dare tell Lin how much he loved his job, not anymore. He told the mirror, instead.
“I love my job,” he said. His reflection said it, too, it seemed.
Like the zoo, their life at home had been built on various pretendings. Pretending there might be gas money. Pretending they could afford to eat better, but chose not to. Pretending that Lin still thought it was important to have a job you liked. Loved. Whatever.
She had quit pretending. Somewhere behind her mask was the Lin who thought “If you loved me you’d do what it took for me to live a better life,” and that Lin had surfaced. Unmasked. Through fucking around.
Classified ads appeared, taped to the fridge.
Sales. Landscaping. Power-washing trucks. All kinds of things you could do with a degree in biology.
“It’s easy,” Bell told her, “to lose track of what’s really important.”
She didn’t have to say that having heat and electricity were important, too. Instead, never breaking eye contact, she grabbed her coat and her vibrator and locked herself in the bathroom.
Library clerk. Barista. All things that paid more than working at a zoo. Mexican cook. Skycap for a Mexican airline. Didn’t matter if you weren’t Mexican.
It was amazing, thought Bell, how much pretending went on in a zoo.
The public pretended the cages were jungles, savannah, desert, or snow.
The animals pretended that they were not interested in the public. The public and the zookeepers worked together at pretending that the zoo was not, when you got right down to it, just carefully-engineered cruelty.
Sometimes the animals forgot to pretend. Like when babies were born and wouldn’t eat. Because they knew captivity when they saw it. Felt it. Forgot to pretend life was worth living.
Like when the llama attacked Bria Vagades.
Bell was there when it happened.
It wasn’t like an animal attack in the movies, all snarling and snorting, blood and fur. It looked almost comical. One second Bria was lifting the rock-shaped hatch which concealed the garden hose, and suddenly here came Nunez the llama, ridiculous and splendid with his two-tone black-and-gray coat, rearing on his hind legs, waving his front hooves like a boxer. He was on her before she saw him, and she screamed.
“Ow!” she screamed, and “Fuck you, Nunez!” before she got a grip on herself. The zoo was closed, but there were strict rules about losing your cool where the public might see, might panic.
Nunez lost his balance, came down on all fours, still advancing, sniffing the air. Reared up again, hooves waving as Bria covered her head, backing away, feeling behind her for the door.
“He didn’t want her in the enclosure,” Bell told John Lorraine, another zookeeper, later on in the cafeteria. “It was obvious.”
“It’s never obvious. It’s sloppy, is what it is, assigning human motives to animal behavior.”
“Territoriality is an animal behavior,” Bell answered, chewing peanut butter crackers. “It’s an animal motive.”
“What’s sloppy,” John said, “is pretending to understand why all the time. Why they do anything they do.”
“Because it’s mating season,” said Bell. “That’s why.”
John Lorraine’s eyes narrowed. “And she went in the enclosure by herself? That’s sloppy, too. These animals aren’t pets.”
But Bell knew some of the animals were like pets. Bad pets. Pets you couldn’t trust. “You should write a fucking memo,” he said.
“You should shut up.”
Bell agreed. He said “Yep.”
The grub wasn’t like a pet. The day after Bell placed it in one of the large terrariums, it began to construct a papery cocoon.
During his evening break, Bell sat in the back room and watched the grub work. He checked the zoo’s entomology books but couldn’t find a match. None of the pictures looked anything like the strange insect in the terrarium. The cocoon only deepened the mystery. Whatever this thing was, it was a juvenile.
There were four main groups of insects that had a larval stage of development: Coleoptera, Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera, and Diptera.
The thing in the terrarium was no caterpillar, so Bell could rule out Lepidoptera. The grub’s size seemed to rule out Diptera. Which left Hymenoptera and Coleoptera. Wasps and beetles. But it didn’t look like any wasp or beetle grub he’d ever seen.
Most grubs didn’t have eyes. Most grubs didn’t have mouthparts like that.
At the end of its third day in the terrarium, Bell arrived to find it had sealed itself into its papery chrysalis, and just like that, the grub subtracted itself from the world.
The next day, there was an addition to Bell’s army of community service workers. A late arrival.
Bell was on one knee, mixing food for the lemurs when a shadow fell over the bucket. Bell shaded his eyes and looked up.
“They told me to find Bell. ‘Report to Bell,’ they said. Said Bell was young. You look like you might be him.”
The shadow had a voice like raw sand.
Bell stood and shook hands.
Shaking hands, the firs
t thing he noticed was scar tissue. Burn scars splashed across hand and wrist. Both hands, Bell observed. Both wrists.
Leather-skinned. Scrambled white hair. Eyes blue like a cutting torch. If a bomb could explode and come back as a person, it would be this guy. Just looking at him, sunburned and fire-burned, made Bell thirsty. They sat down over Cokes at the Savannah Café, where Bell learned that the bomb’s name was Cole. Learned that, at sixty, Cole was by far the oldest community service con to grace the zoo.
Then he put him to work hosing down empty cells in the elephant house, beginning with the Cape Buffalo.
“Bullshit,” rasped Cole, when he saw the cell.
Bell must have looked startled.
“Literally,” Cole explained, waving the hose at the floor. He smiled, revealing teeth like rubble. Smiled and winked.
It was like being winked at by war.
Just as the lions were star attractions for the tourists, Cole became a star attraction for the staff.
He was scary, like the lions. Like the lions, he seemed to keep most of his energy bottled up in some soft, invisible engine. It was an uneasy feeling, locking eyes with a lion. Same with Cole.
You couldn’t talk to a lion, though. Couldn’t ask him how he came to be at the zoo. But you could ask Cole, if you were nosy enough.
Bell didn’t ask.
Bell stood in the dark tunnel with Cole. “The baboons are smart,” he said. “You have to be careful.”
Cole nodded.
“They can throw their poop at you. They can bite. You have to lock both sets of doors. There is a procedure you have to follow, and you should never be in the enclosure with them.”
Cole nodded again.
“It’s very important. Do you understand?”
Cole nodded again, but Bell wasn’t so sure. Several years earlier there’d been an incident in the cat house. The exhibit had been in the midst of repairs, and the lion had been allowed access to its run overnight. This normally wouldn’t have been an issue except that the adjacent run had been under construction. The door separating the bobcat run from the lion run was made of thick plywood—a temporary measure which was fine to keep the bobcats in. But insufficient, apparently, to keep the lion out.
The next day, they found the plywood partition shredded, and the lion sleeping in the bobcat cage, blood coating its muzzle. All the bobcats were dead.
Zoos are dangerous places.
Dangerous for the animals. Dangerous for the zookeeps.
Cole had a thousand hours of community service. Bell had never seen a number that high. It would take him a year to finish it.
When Cole had been at the zoo for a week, the zoo superintendent pulled Bell aside. The superintendent didn’t like Bell much. She wore a serious expression. “The older guy, Cole, is he a good worker?”
“He’s fine.”
“He’s going to be here for a while.”
“Yeah,” Bell said, “I know.” He could see the gears moving behind the superintendent’s eyes. A free long-term worker. A worker that didn’t need paid.
“Perhaps we could give him more responsibilities,” she said.
For weeks, Bell checked on the cocoon, waiting to see what would emerge.
It happened on a Monday. There was a buzz in the room when Bell entered. A buzz like one second before an electric light went bad; only this light kept going bad, second after second—an electrical hum that did not fade. Bell looked in the terrarium and saw it.
Huge.
Winged.
Bright red, but the mouthparts were black.
“Hymenoptera,” he whispered. “Of some kind.”
The summer stretched on. Bell trained Cole how to be a zookeeper. On their breaks they sat in the back room.
When the insect first hatched, the question became what to feed it. Bell tried a little of everything: sliced bananas, and apples and small chunks of meat. Some of the fruit on the table came from exotic locales, and it was easy to imagine the grub stowed within the corpus of some melon from Central America—and it was easy to imagine how such a melon might go quickly bad, and soft, and end up on the zoo’s table as discarded produce.
Weeks passed, and the insect thrived.
Even Cole took an interest. “Pet wasp?” he said as he helped Bell clean out the nearby lizard cage.
“I’m not convinced it’s a wasp.”
Several days later Bell found Cole looking through the glass. Cole was the one who noticed it first.
“What’s that?” he asked.
Bell looked. “I’ll be damned.” The wasp-thing sat perched on a small branch in the terrarium, oddly-jointed legs flexed, wings slung like swords over its narrow back. Hanging beneath the insect, dangling from a fibrous string, was a small pod of what looked like dried brown foam.
“What is it?” Cole said.
“I think it’s an egg case.”
Cole surveyed the terrarium again.
“So there’s two of them things?”
Bell shook his head. “There’s just the one.”
“Maybe she was already fertilized.”
This particular convict was smarter than he pretended to be. Bell caught his reflection in the glass, blowtorch eyes darting back and forth.
“It’s not likely,” he said. “She is female, but the reproductive stage usually begins after metamorphosis, not before. And this thing has been alone since it hatched.”
“Santa Maria of the bugs,” said Cole, cracking a shipwreck smile.
Bell laughed. “It’s less than a miracle in the insect world,” he explained. “It’s called Parthanogenesis. Some kinds of Hymenoptera can—”
“Hymen-who?”
“It’s an insect clade. Ants, bees, and wasps. Certain species can reproduce without males. Worms can do it, too, and some lizards. But Hymenoptera are the champs.”
Cole straightened.
“Let’s hope that doesn’t catch on.”
Bell thought it over. Reproduction and marriage and wives and such.
“Might not be so bad,” he muttered.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
Bell contacted the university. He wrote a letter to the biology department describing the insect and the circumstances of its arrival. A week later he received a reply. The note was short and polite: “It’s probably a mud dauber.”
Bell wadded the letter and threw it in the trash. “I know what a mud dauber looks like.”
One evening a few weeks later, he found the insect dead. Even in death it looked formidable, with a head the size of a dime, and a body like a smooth, slick walnut.
For the first time, he dared to touch it. With its legs spread out, it was nearly the size of his hand. He jabbed a pin through its abdomen and stuck it to a small cork. The legs sagged under their own weight. He looked inside the terrarium at the egg case, wondering if anything would hatch from it.
Months passed, the egg case forgotten. Bell and Seana took turns training the old man. Seana didn’t like Cole, and didn’t pretend she did.
In the spring, the eggs hatched. There were a million tiny grubs, just like the original, only smaller. Bell watched them wriggling through the sawdust he’d put in the terrarium.
“These more of your wasps?” Cole asked.
“They will be.”
They watched them writhing for several minutes.
“What do they eat?” Cole asked.
Bell thought about this for a moment. The adult form of an insect often ate a completely different diet than the juvenile.
“I have no idea,” he said.
Feedings could be tricky.
When Bell was first hired by the zoo, he’d been put in charge of feeding the raptors. Raptors weren’t dinosaurs though, like you’d think, with a name like that. It turned out, they were big damn birds. One of them was a golden eagle.
All went well for the first few days. The golden eagle ate about five rats a week, but it was fed every d
ay. Which would have been fine except that the uneaten rats had to be removed from the enclosure.
This idea didn’t bother Bell until the moment he first went to do it. He stood at the cage door and looked at the big damn eagle, and it occurred to him that he was about to go inside a big damn eagle’s enclosure and take out its food. It occurred to him what might happen if the big damn eagle felt suddenly partial to that food.
He stared at the eagle. He stared at its talons—two-inch daggers strong enough to pierce bone.
Bell walked down to the zoo superintendent’s office.
She was unmoved by his concerns.
“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with it,” Bell said.
She waved that off. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.” Then she went back to her paperwork.
“But how do you know the eagle won’t attack?”
“It’ll be fine,” she said, not bothering to look up. “Nothing like that has ever happened before.”
A preamble to every scar story he’d heard at the zoo.
“I’m not going to do it,” he said.
She looked up from her papers. She sighed. She weighed her options. “All right,” she said.
The next week he was put in charge of the petting zoo. This was meant as an insult.
When he complained, pointing out that his particular skill set could surely be put to better utility, she only nodded sympathetically.
Then she put him in charge of the convicts, too.
Bell divided the newly hatched grubs into three groups, in three terrariums. In one terrarium, he dropped only fruit. In another, he dropped chunks of bread. In the third terrarium he dropped meat.
Insects tended to specialize in their diets, so he thought there was a good chance that two of the terrariums would starve. But then at least he’d know what they ate.
The grubs, however, surprised him. All three aquariums thrived—though the grubs given meat grew fastest.