by Neil Clarke
If the zoo hadn’t been closed and nearly deserted, if Bell hadn’t known for sure that no one was likely to venture into the petting zoo, let alone climb into the loft, then maybe it would have happened differently. Maybe Bell would have kissed her back, because kissing would have been all that could happen.
But the zoo was closed. Bell did know. And it did happen the way it happened.
“I can’t,” he said.
She pulled away.
“I want to,” he said.
She looked at him, waiting.
Beneath them, the horses shuffled. Made noises. Kicked their stall doors and talked to each other in soft equine language.
He thought of Lin, home in their trailer. “I can’t,” he said again.
A black mood seized Bell on the way home. He drove the darkening highway, following his headlights into space. He pushed the old beater faster, watching the speedometer climb to seventy, then eighty. He took the curves without easing off the accelerator. The tires squealed, but held the road.
His mind was a movie of loves and hates. He loved and hated his job. Loved the animals, but hated the conditions. Hated that he couldn’t afford to live on what he was paid. When you’re young, he thought, they tell you that if you get a degree, everything else will fall into place. But it’s not that simple, is it?
Nothing—not one thing—had worked out like it was supposed to.
He thought of life at home, a second maze of contradiction. He was tired of being alone and together at the same time. He wanted to be free, but there was no freedom. No way out. He felt like an animal with a trapped limb. He understood why animals chew their own legs off. He had a recurring fantasy of being robbed, and putting up a struggle. If he were held up at gunpoint, he had decided, he would not cooperate.
He didn’t know what to think of Seana, yet. So he didn’t, at all.
Red like rupture. Blood squirm, a coagulation of grubs across brown terrarium stones. The egg cases pulsed like clotted hearts, spilling strange new life. Bell stared through the glass. Each cage told the same story.
The grubs were a centimeter long. Even as small as they were, Bell could see the mouth parts working. Each grub identical. As far as he could see, the differences which had been so apparent from cage to cage in the adult form were now absent from the next generation. The grubs were all the same, as if a reset button had been pushed. It was only the adult form that seemed vulnerable to change. Bell opened his sack lunch. He took out his apple and sliced it into a dozen pieces. He dropped a slice into the first cage. The grubs responded immediately, moving toward the fruit. They swarmed it.
Bell fed the grubs first thing in the morning.
He decided to turn it into an experiment. He stole a sheet of sticky-labels from the staff room and stuck a label to the side of six different terrariums. On each label, he wrote a different word.
The grubs labeled fruit were fed fruit; the grubs labeled meat were fed sliced-meat. The grubs labeled control were fed a mixture of foods.
The grubs with the cool sticker on the side of their terrarium were fed the control diet—but were also placed in a refrigerator for an hour a day while Bell did his chores. An hour wasn’t long enough to kill them, but it was long enough to impact their physiology. They grew slower than the grubs in the other cages.
If these insects could really adapt to their environments, Bell was going to see how far he could push it.
He’d see if diet was the only pressure they responded to.
The grubs labeled heat were in a small glass aquarium placed on the floor near a space heater. Bell put his hands against the glass. It was hot to the touch. These grubs, too, seemed stressed by the temperature. But they still grew, doubling in size every week.
The grubs labeled carrion were fed the occasional discarded rat from the golden eagle enclosure. These were the grubs Bell found most interesting. They borrowed into the dead rat and ate it from the inside out.
Charles Darwin had believed in God until he studied the parasitic wasp Ibalia.
Darwin wrote in a journal: “There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” Darwin found particularly gruesome that the Ibalia grub only gradually consumed the living tissues of its host—taking a full three years to complete its meal, saving the vital organs until last as if to extend the host’s suffering. Darwin couldn’t imagine a God who would create something like that.
Bell could imagine it.
He thought of the reset mechanism. He imagined a single insect species with multiple phenotypes already encoded in its genome—a catalog of different possible adult forms. And all it took was a trigger to set the creature down its path.
“Maybe it’s like blind cave fish,” he told Seana one evening.
He watched Seana’s face as she peered through the glass.
“Cave fish have most of the genes for eyes still carried in their DNA,” he said. “All the genes required for lenses, and retinas and eyelids, all the genes except for the one crucial ingredient that starts eye development in the first place. If you cross-breed two different populations of blind fish, sometimes you get fish with eyes.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Seana said.
“It does if the blindness is recessive, and the two populations are blind for different reasons.”
“But you said these things aren’t breeding.”
Bell ignored her, lost in thought. “Or they’re like stem cells,” he continued, “each carrying the genes for multiple tissue types, multiple potentials, but they specialize as they mature, choosing a path.”
He leaned forward, tapping his finger on the glass.
“Where do you think they come from?” Seana asked.
“The fruit maybe. The bananas. Central America. I’m not sure.”
“Why can’t you find it in books?”
“There are millions of insect species still un-described by science. Besides, maybe it has been described. Some version of it. I mean, how would you really know?”
Later, searching for reasons to avoid going home, Bell ran down his closing checklist twice.
On his second round, he found the outer door to the lemur tunnel wide open.
He had locked it himself. Checked it himself.
His inner alarm went off.
Zookeepers developed inner alarms, or they developed scars.
He stepped through the door, and let his eyes adjust to the dark, to the long, mildewy tunnel which ran under the moat, to the lemur island.
At the end of the tunnel, bright light, because the door at the island end was open, too.
In the middle, a silhouette. Who . . . ?
“Hey!” Bell shouted.
Several silhouettes. Sharp, jabbering shadows. Five or six lemurs hopped and shrieked.
The shadow in the middle wound up like a pitcher and threw something.
A yelp. The lemurs howled and ran.
“Cole?” called Bell, starting down the tunnel.
One lemur didn’t run. It whirled in confusion, chattering.
Bell’s eyes had adjusted. The shadow grew details. Cole.
Cole, with a handful of smooth, white landscaping stones, eyes wide with rage.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Bell shouted.
“They threw shit at me. They threw their fucking shit.”
“Jesus Christ—!” Bell yelled, lurching forward.
Cole turned, arm pistoning in the dark.
The stone whistled past Bell’s ear and struck hard against the outer door. The tunnel echoed.
Bell froze.
Cole stepped toward him. “You watch how you talk to me,” he said, and for a moment they stared at each other, waiting to see what would happen. Then Cole’s eyes changed—the rage blown out of them like a gust of wind. Cole brushed past him and was gone.
The lemur groped its way back into the light, back to the island.
Bell unfroze, closed up, and said nothing. He’d have to say something, wouldn’t he? Something would have to be done. Right?
He made a mental note. In the future, he wouldn’t let crazy people into his life. He meant it.
Metamorphosis is magic. Darwin had known this, too.
Sometimes it is a dark magic.
The metamorphosis of a tadpole into a frog. A grub into a wasp. A friend into an enemy.
Bell watched the grubs feed. By now they’d grown huge. Some approached five inches in length, blood red, large beyond all reason. Soon they would spin their papery cocoons. Turn into whatever they would turn into.
Bell pondered the advantage of such an adaptive mechanism. Perhaps it was a way to guard against overspecialization, a reservoir of adaptive capacity. Evolution is a slow process, and when new challenges arise, populations take time to react. There is a lag in the modifying response; species that don’t change fast enough die out.
Bell knew of several kinds of island lizard that reproduced parthenogenetically. Such species, when found, were always marginal, isolated, at risk of extinction; they were aberrations outside the main thrust of evolution. Most were doomed over the long run, because sexual reproduction is a much better way to create the next generation. In sexual reproduction, genes mix and match, new phenotypes arise, gene frequencies shift like tides. Sexual reproduction drops new cards in the deck from one generation to the next.
Parthenogenetic species, on the other hand, are locked-in, frozen in time, playing the same card over and over.
But not the insects in the back room.
The insects in the back room seemed to have a whole deck from which to deal, parthenogenetic or not. Such insects could adapt quickly, shifting morphotypes in a single generation. And then shift back the next. It was the next logical step—not just evolution, but the evolution of evolution. But how was it possible?
Bell thought of Cole, of what made men like him. That old argument, nature vs. nurture. In another time, in another place, Cole would have fit in. In another time, maybe Cole would have been a different person entirely.
The descendants of Vikings and Mongols today wore suits and ran multinational corporations. Were veterinarians, or plumbers, or holy men. Perhaps tomorrow, or a thousand years from now, they’ll need to be Vikings and Mongols again.
Populations change. Needs change. Optimums change. And it all changes faster than selection can track.
From a biological perspective, it would be easy to produce the same kind of people again and again. Stable people. Good people. Again and again, generation after generation—a one to one correlation between gene-set and expression.
But that’s not what you find when you look at humans.
Instead there is a plasticity in human nature. A carefully calibrated susceptibility to trauma.
What looks like a weak point in our species is in fact design.
Because the truth is that certain childhoods are supposed to fuck you up.
It is an adaptive response. Wired into us.
The ones who couldn’t adapt died out. Those gene sets which always produced the same kind of people—stable people, good people—no matter the environment, no matter the violence, or the aggression they faced—those gene sets which always played the same card, again and again—
—died out.
Leaving behind the ones who could metamorphose.
We were not so different from these bugs.
Bell unloaded all this on Seana one day during lunch. They sat across from each other, sipping soft drinks. “The evolution of evolution?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Why would this happen in insects?” she asked.
“Because they’ve been here longest,” he said. But it was more than that. He thought of the ants and their aphids. The enzyme that clipped their wings. He thought of the different ways that insects solved their problems. “Because insects always choose the biological solution.”
Bell avoided Cole for days.
He told himself he was waiting for a good time to see the director, to tell her what had happened in the lemur tunnel. Told himself he wasn’t afraid that Cole would retaliate by telling about drinking together on zoo time, zoo property. Both were lies, but what he had the toughest time with was pure simple fear of Cole.
“Ridiculous,” he told himself. “You’re a grown man and a professional.”
On the other hand, Cole obviously was dangerous.
Maybe he could get Cole to leave, to resign his service contract without anyone having to tell the director anything.
This seemed, on reflection, to be the best bet for an outcome where he, Bell, kept his job and got rid of the problem.
The reflection took place at home, on the sofa, in front of the TV, in his underwear.
When Lin crossed the room, he saw himself through her eyes. He looked like a bum.
She was thinking, he knew, what an asshole he was for buying beer.
He didn’t care.
Neither did she, it seemed.
She sat down on the couch beside him.
What was he? When had he turned into a person who said nothing, did nothing? What had he let himself turn into?
The next day, Bell followed Cole down to the supply shed and said “We’re going to have a talk.”
Cole took a set of eight-foot pruning shears down from the wall rack, and turned to face Bell.
“Yeah,” he said.
Bell fumbled for a beginning, forgetting what he’d rehearsed.
Cole leaned on the pruning shears as if they were a wizard’s staff.
“I have to turn you in,” Bell said.
“For what?”
“Throwing rocks at the animals.”
Cole stared at him. His grip on the shears tightened. “I lose my temper sometimes. I have a temper, I admit.”
“That’s why you can’t be here.”
“Listen, I’ll work on it. I’ll be better.”
Cole shook his head. “I’m just letting you know as a courtesy. I have to report it.”
“You don’t have to do anything.”
“The other choice is that you leave today and don’t come back.”
“That’s not any choice at all.”
“There are other places you can do your service.”
“I like it here.”
“Here doesn’t like you anymore.”
“You know what I don’t like? I don’t think I like you trying to push me around.”
“Today is your last day here, one way or the other,” Bell said. “You can leave on your own, or you can be ushered out.”
“You really don’t want to do that.”
“You’re right, I don’t,” Bell said.
Cole’s face changed. “I’m warning you.”
Bell raised his walky-talky, never taking his eyes off Cole. “Garland,” he spoke into the handset. There was a squelch, then a voice, “Yeah.”
“You better come to the supply shed.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Now, Garland.”
Cole shoved Bell into the wall. Shoved him hard, so his teeth clacked.
And the rage was there again in the cutting torch eyes. Rage like nothing else mattered. Scarred hands curled into Bell’s shirt.
“This is your last chance,” Cole said.
Bell only smiled, feeling something shift inside him. He found suddenly that he was through being scared. “Fuck you,” he said.
Bell ducked the first blow, but the second caught him upside the head, splitting his brow open. Bell spun away, throwing an elbow that missed, and then they were both off balance, taking wild swings, and Cole grabbed at him, and they were falling. They hit the ground and rolled, wrestling for on the filthy floor. Cole came up on top, sitting on Bell’s legs. “I fucking warned you,” he hissed, and then he rained down punches until Garland tackled him.
After th
at, it was two on one, and Bell didn’t feel the least bit guilty about that.
The zoo super interviewed Bell for her report. They sat in her office. Behind her, against the wall, her fish swam their little circles. The superintendent leaned forward and laced her hands together on her desk.
She didn’t dig very deep. Seemed to think Cole’s behavior was its own explanation. “I think you need stitches,” she said.
Bell nodded. He touched his brow. His first zoo scar.
“He’ll be barred from the zoo, of course,” she said. “And I’ll insist that his community service hours be revoked.”
“What’s going to happen to him now?”
“Charges probably.”
“I don’t want to press charges.”
“Animal cruelty. The lemurs. He’s going back to jail.” She paused, then added, “When they find him.”
Bell looked at the fish, swimming in the aquarium. “He said he’s never going back.”
That evening, as he was closing up, Bell found Cole’s parting gift. Found it revealed, at first, in the presence of a door ajar.
The back room of the castle.
Bell stared at what had been done.
After the fight, Cole had climbed to his feet, wiped the blood from his face—and then walked off. Heading toward the gates. Even two on one, the fight had been about even, and when Cole had finally stepped back and walked away, Bell and Gavin let him go. A draw. They’d assumed Cole left zoo property. But he hadn’t left.
He’d circled back around to the castle.
And he’d poured lye into each and every terrarium.
Several grubs were on the cement floor, ground into pulp with a boot.
Others were desiccated husks. Only a few still moved, writhing in the white powder. Bell stepped further into the room, surveying the carnage. He should have known. He should have known this was coming.
Bell’s inner alarm started bothering him on his way home that night.
Once a zookeeper developed an inner alarm, it worked everywhere.
In this case, it was less an alarm than a sense of something out of place. It got stronger as he closed in on the trailer park. At first he thought the alarm had something to do with Cole, but when he got home, he understood. The universe had an interesting sense of timing.