Kitabı oku: «Zoology», sayfa 2

New York

The sidewalk outside David’s building isn’t like most sidewalks. The squares are bigger, smoother, more like slabs. He’s on the corner of Fifty-third and Fifth Avenue, and you go in through a golden revolving door pushed by a doorman who stands there frowning at the street, dressed to drive a carriage. No matter how hot it gets outside, if there are Italian ice stands on every corner and the horses in the park are sweating through their saddles, inside the lobby it’s cold enough for you to see your breath. The lobby even sounds cold. (The building’s depressing too, though, the way an empty hotel ballroom is depressing. Every hallway on every floor has the same purple carpet and 7-Eleven lights and yellow walls. Through the living room windows—and the walls there are really nothing but windows—the whole city sometimes seems as dead as a diorama in a glass case.)

A Greek guy named Georgi sits behind a marble desk during the day, running his hand over his silver hair, waiting for you to ask him where you can get good Thai food or a roll of stamps. Each of the elevators (polished as bright as mirrors) has a guy outside it who holds out his hand to guide you in. At first I always tried making conversation with the elevator men, to show that I didn’t think I was better than them. I’d say it was a good day to be indoors, or if it wasn’t, I’d say it sure was a long shift, huh? But most of the time they just stared straight ahead and kept their hands folded behind their backs and nodded at the rows of buttons. People who survive that kind of boredom, I think, ought to be celebrated like soldiers or astronauts.

But Sameer, from the first time I saw him, seemed not to be suffering at all. He turned around while we were riding in the elevator on one of my first days and said, “If you don’t mind, what sort of opportunities bring you to the city?” He’s even smaller than I am, and he has a mustache as dark and perfect as the one you put on a Mr. Potato Head. I told him about the zoo, and from then on every time I rode with him he gave me a tiny bit of his own zoo story. “In Karachi, I studied for over one year in the largest zoo in Pakistan, particularly I studied the behavior and mannerisms of a species of bat that is quite rare anywhere outside of Asia.” For that first couple of weeks, whenever I didn’t want to be in the apartment anymore, I’d go down to the lobby and ride with him up to forty-two and back down to the lobby.

Something was the matter between Lucy and David—they always seemed to be having some important, angry talk that they were careful to keep to themselves. This was for my sake, I guess, but Lucy would sometimes seem to forget that I was around. At dinner one of my first nights there, sitting around their glass table with plates of flank steak that could have been in a magazine, David said, “We should make this for the party Sunday, huh?” Lucy sipped her wine and stared straight ahead. The skin by her ears turned redder and redder. “All right,” David said. “Henry, how’d you do today?” She threw back the last bit of her wine, stood up, and went into her room and closed the door behind her. David chewed a bite of steak longer than he had to, then said, “Look. She’s … you know—this is something we’re dealing with.” And then, while we did the dishes later, he said, only half to me, “Well, this is just fucking great.” She didn’t come out until the next morning.

David’s gone so much that it’s hard to think how they build up enough stuff to fight about. Six days a week he’s out of the apartment by six in the morning, and most nights he isn’t back for dinner until at least eight thirty. He’s been like that since he was at Somerset, finishing projects weeks before they were due, typing up ten-page study guides for quizzes that hardly counted, working in bed at night until Dad would come in and unplug his lamp. Especially compared to the hour or two Lucy spends up in her studio painting, it’s a lot.

I shouldn’t be so hard on Lucy, though—she’s been through a terrible thing. Her first serious boyfriend, who she dated all through college, died just after they got engaged. This was in Brooklyn, about five years ago, three years before she met David. Her boyfriend, Alex, fell asleep reading one afternoon with a candle lit next to a curtain, and when Lucy came home from work her street was so busy with fire trucks and ambulances that she couldn’t see, at first, which building had had the fire. Alex died from the smoke before the fire even touched him, David told me, and that word touched—the idea of fire tickling, then covering, then swallowing—left my heart pounding.

(“How’d they know he fell asleep?” I asked, quietly enough to let David not answer me if he didn’t want to, and he didn’t.)

I stared at Lucy sometimes, when I first moved in, imagining her face when she walked onto her block, when she heard the roar, the second when she understood that the disaster everyone was watching was hers. But you could stare at her all day and not get any closer to understanding how that felt. This Lucy, the one who collects ceramic elephants and who talks on the phone to her mom twice a night, was someone who seemed never to have been through anything harder than a crowded subway ride. I froze, once, when she walked into the living room while I was watching Backdraft, but she just glanced at the TV, picked up her magazine, and walked out.

I got to spend less time sitting around the apartment once David gave me the number of Herbert Talliani, his patient who was on the board of the Central Park Zoo. “Just say some stuff about loving animals and everything. He says they’re always looking for keepers. He’s really a hell of a guy. Used to be an editor at Newsweek.”

When he picked up, Mr. Talliani had a coughing fit and then said, “So you’re the guy with the fever to pick up monkey shit, huh? Send my secretary your name and résumé and everything and I’ll pass it on to Paul. Tell David my skin looks like hell, by the way.” And then he laughed, which made him cough so hard that I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

My interview was at one o’clock, but I walked up to the zoo early to look around. I’d been there once, on a trip to New York with Dad when I was seven, but I didn’t remember anything about the zoo except that it was raining then and that outside the gate a guy in a bright green suit kept wanting to wrap his python around my neck. I also remember Uncle Jacob, who we stayed with that week, telling me that the animals all looked “wretched.” But today it was the sort of day when people talk about the weather without seeming like they have nothing to say, sunny with a few popcorn clouds, and even homeless people looking healthy, almost. The path into the park smelled like something sweet that could have been either pollen or pee.

In a tunnel past the ice-cream vendors, a bald Asian man sat with his legs crossed on a stool, playing a bendy-sounding instrument that only had one string. I stood listening for a minute, and there wasn’t anything you’d walk away humming, but if you listened long enough, it started to sound like a lonely old woman singing. I put all the change I had in his case, and right away he stood up smiling and held out his instrument to me. Did he think I wanted to buy it? Borrow it? I was wearing one of my new shirts and David’s gray pants, so he might have thought I was a banker looking for a hobby. He kept shaking the bow at me, grinning bigger and bigger each time, but he wouldn’t say a word. “No, thanks,” I said. “You sound really good, I’m going to go.” And so I just walked away—feeling not much better than if I’d robbed him—while he stood there shaking his instrument at me and smiling.

A sleepy black guard let me into the zoo for free when I told him I was here for an interview, and just past the entrance was a tank and a sign that said, WATCH OUR SEA LIONS HAVE LUNCH! Kids were clustered around the glass, throwing popcorn in the water or struggling while their parents smeared suntan lotion on their faces. The sea lions—I coultank and a sign that said,d see four of them—had huge bright eyes, long whiskers, and skin like a wet suit. The tank smelled like fish and chemicals, and was as big as a swimming pool, shaped like a stop sign. In the middle was a tall island of brown rocks, and a couple of the sea lions lay there in the sun. There was just a short glass wall between me and the ones who were swimming. I could have dipped my hand in the water—with a little work I could have dipped my body in the water. Another sea lion was up there on a rock now, his skin still wet and dark, but if you stood watching for a minute you could see the light spread over his fur. A red-haired girl in a stroller next to me pointed at the water and said to her bored nanny, “Look! Look! Look!” Swimming sideways, a sea lion would shoot around the edges of the tank, one little flick of its flippers every time the tank’s wall changed direction, its belly out to the crowd, the smoothest swimming I’d ever seen. It hardly even made a ripple. It would spin slowly while it swam, and a lip of water just above it would spill out onto the ground. Every now and then it would have to come up for a breath, but really it didn’t look like it was any harder for the sea lion to swim than it was for me to stand there watching it.

One of the ones up on a rock, because he was too hot or maybe just because he saw how much fun his friend was having, decided to plop back in. He moved like a handicapped person who’d fallen out of his wheelchair—until he was in the water, where he could have been an Olympic swimmer. I hung around the tank for about forty-five minutes, sitting on a bench watching and trying to read a zoo brochure I’d picked up, but the sun was so bright that the pages kept looking blank.

Once I’d been sitting there for a while, a skinny zookeeper with thick glasses came up to the tank and rested her bucket of fish on the bench right next to me. She looked about forty years old, with straight brown hair and careful makeup—if it weren’t for the fish and the uniform, she would have looked more like a lawyer than a zookeeper. “Hi,” I said. “Do you work here? I’ve got an interview in a little bit to be a keeper. Is it a pretty good place to work?”

For a second she looked so confused, almost panicked, that I thought she might not speak English. But she was just considering her answer. “Oh, it’s very rewarding. You have to really love animals, but if you do, you hardly even notice the other stuff.” She gave a nervous smile, like she might have said too much, and walked off with her bucket toward the crowd.

The sun was just above us now, and I lowered my head to let it reach all over. A job like this might even beat playing music, I kept thinking. I’d put on a bathing suit in the mornings and jump in the tank, race the sea lions around the edge, hang on their flippers, then lie up on the rocks with my eyes shut while I dried off. A group of pretty girls would walk over to me (I imagined them visiting from somewhere like Tennessee, giggly and polite), and they’d ask how long it had taken to get the sea lions to trust me. I’d smile, sitting up, and ask if they wanted to come in. And even if the job was nothing like that at all, at least I’d be earning money that didn’t feel like just another version of allowance. At least I wouldn’t be measuring out my days in forty-four-minute chunks, listening to the same five songs fumbled in exactly the same places while Dad kept time on his leg.

Before I knew it I’d drifted off in the sweaty-faced way I sometimes do in the sun, and when a stroller wheeling against my foot woke me up, it was two minutes before one.

* * *

In a brown, empty office, a man with a fat neck nodded hi without shaking my hand and pointed me to a wobbly table. His name tag said paul. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, but he acted like I was a student and he was a busy, disappointed principal. By the time we’d sat down, I’d already decided—for whatever reasons we rush to this kind of feeling—that Paul was my enemy. He wore an outfit like a Jurassic Park ranger and stared past me with his forehead wrinkled. His clothes had the sour, bready smell of saltines. “So. Tell me why a job at the Central Park Zoo appeals to you.”

I told him about all the pets I’d had growing up, about watching the keepers in the D.C. zoo wash an elephant. Everything I said just seemed to hang there, waiting for me to take it back. He played with his key chain while I told him, struggling to come up with the word hidden, about how I used to give Olive her pills stuck in a ball of cream cheese.

“All right. I’m going to tell you a little about the job, then you’re going to ask me some questions.” He hunched over and lowered his voice. “If we hire you, you’d be working in the Children’s Zoo, and you wouldn’t get moved to Main unless you stayed for probably over a year. We always start people in Children’s so they get some offstage experience. It’s not a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday thing. Your off days are scattered depending on the schedule, and if something needs to get done, you stay until it’s finished. And there’s not much glamour to it. I tell everyone who comes in, if you think it’s going to be like the Discovery Channel, then you should walk out right now.” I made a face like I thought it was funny that some people thought it was going to be like the Discovery Channel. “It’s dirty work, and you’ve got to be out there all day if it’s snowing, raining, a hundred degrees, thirty degrees, whatever. The animals always need to be taken care of. I’ve had too many people here who’re good as long as the weather’s nice, but it starts raining and suddenly I can’t find anybody.”

Together we walked over to the Children’s Zoo, with Paul staying a few steps ahead of me, and when we passed the Asian man (who was sobbing with his instrument again) I kept my eyes down. Once we were through the gates, Paul said, “Children’s is shaped like a doughnut, farm animals on the ring, aviary in the middle.” His walkie-talkie kept buzzing while we walked, and he’d flip it out of its holster and say quick, military things to whoever was on the other end: “Children’s one to base, fifteen thirty at animal Main. Over.”

The first animal he introduced me to was Othello, the black bull. He smelled oily, and he lived alone in a pen that looked too small for him. When he saw us he grunted and walked up to the fence. You could see his muscles move under his skin. His nose was shiny with some clear goo, and his eyes, as big as pool balls, looked hungry and worn-out. To show how good I was with animals, I reached over and scratched him on the flat, bony place between his ears. He butted my hand away, and Paul said, “Othello’s probably the rowdiest animal here—he doesn’t know his own strength, and he gets jumpy with men sometimes. Don’t ever turn your back on him.”

Through a tunnel in a plastic tree came a group of little kids, all black, all wearing green T-shirts that said, summer is for learning. None of the noise—the talking, the squealing, the laughing—seemed to come from any one kid.

“It’ll be like this every day. Three to five camp groups at once.” In front of the sheep pen, a fat zookeeper with bushy eyebrows was saying, “No. No. No,” to a group of Asian kids in pink shirts.

Paul moved like a cowboy-bear. Leading me around the ring, past the alpacas and the sheep, he said, “Here’s Lily. Back there in the shed’s Chili. They’re potbellied pigs.” The sight, at first, is like the kind of fat person you see on the subway who takes up three seats: You stare at them not quite believing they live entire lives in those bodies. Lily and Chili’s stomachs scraped on the ground every time they took a step. Folds of fat covered their eyes and hung down from their cheeks. They looked miserable under all that, trapped. I reached over and petted Lily, and her hair, black against all that tough black skin, felt like the wires in a pot scrubber. “She’s been overeating, so something you’d have to be very careful of is Lily eating Chili’s food. She loves pushing him around.” Lily grunted when I touched her, and it could have meant, “Help!” or it could have meant, “More!”

A purple thundercloud was hurrying toward us, and when it started to rain a minute later, big, slappy drops, I pretended not to notice the water on my glasses so Paul would know that I wasn’t a complainer.

As we came through the screen door into where all the birds lived, it sounded like we were suddenly hundreds of miles from the city. The air felt thick from the mulch, and full of plant smell. “Right up there are the magpies. Those two are getting ready to mate, so we’re trying to make sure they have everything they need.” I couldn’t see anything, but I made nodding noises. “We have three doves sitting on nests right now, so every afternoon you’ll have to go around and count them and make sure everyone’s here and the nests are OK. This is the chukar partridge, Chuck.” A fat, striped bird waddled by, as uninterested in us as we were in the trees we walked past. “He’s had a thing with his balance for the past few weeks, so we’re trying him on a special diet, and he’s spending every other day in the dispensary. You have to keep an eye on him and write down what he’s doing every morning.” On either side of the bridge we stood on was green water, and ducks with wild colors and paddling feet zoomed underneath us.

Finally, in the pen closest to the exit, I met the goats. There were seven. “That little one’s Suzy. She’s the mom. Her kids are Pearl, there, and Onyx, who’s over there with the gray spot. Sparky’s up on the stump, Spanky’s this one—he’s trouble—Scooter’s asleep right there with the long beard, and that,” he said, pointing to the tall white one, the only one without horns, “is Newman. He’s a Nubian. Totally different species. He’s a big goof. One of the security guards calls him Jar Jar, because of the ears.” The goats looked smart and scrappy, a gang of cartoon grouches and goofballs. Their pupils went the wrong way, and they all looked up at me expecting something—they were the Bad News Bears and I was their new coach. Newman came right over, nibbled at my collar, then rested his head on my shoulder and took a loud breath. He had big pink nostrils and little square teeth. He smelled like dust and hay. His ears hung below his chin, and he looked—with his barrel of a body on top of those long, skinny legs—like a little kid’s drawing of a horse. The Summer Learners came around the bend with their hands full of food, and Newman scrambled to get in position, his front hooves in the mesh of the fence, his neck leaning way over, and his head bouncing from hand to hand.