by Monica Drake
“What about it?” She’d never discerned between dating and intimidating. She liked a forward guy.
He was a tall man, gone gray, but the gray was all right; it spoke of years. He had hazel eyes and a face that wrote his memoir in meat and cocktails.
Definitely more school superintendent than janitor.
He said, “I’d like to see that show again.”
A skate punk edged around them for the pitcher of soy milk. A mom with a jogging stroller pushed her way to the sweeteners, jogging in place as she loaded up. Dulcet moved toward the bin of used newspapers. He followed.
She said, “Invite me back to the school.” A clarifying test.
“I’d like to see it privately.”
Okay. That was a crucial distinction. She said, “I don’t put on the latex suit for free.” She brought her hot coffee to her lips, as though to wash away her own words if they were to find the wrong ears.
“What’s the price of admission?”
She held steady, turned, and pushed the glass door open, stepping into the sun, where Bitchy Bitch waited. He followed her to the sidewalk. It wasn’t the first time she’d been approached. Her luck brought these guys around when the cards were maxed and the rent was due—which was to say, pretty much always.
A second selling point to being alone in the world, unattached, biologically singular, the end of the family line and lineage? The freedom to gamble. She was a free agent. Her body was the currency of her personal country; the trick was to finesse negotiations—establish an exchange.
She said, “You look like a man who understands the concept of billable hours.” This was the meaning of life: bringing together bodies with needs. Some people are painfully lonely. She could help with that. She sized up his suit to estimate what the market would bear. It was contract labor.
Some might say whoring.
It’s not like she was working a corner. They met buying coffee. That was perfectly innocent! Maybe she’d put her own body on the line, but nobody else’s. There could be good money in it. If she screwed up, there’d be jail.
Sarah paced in a cinder block room overlooking the snow leopard enclosure. Her room was a cage, separated from the animals below by bars and a screen but no glass. In the wild, snow leopards use a personalized anal secretion to mark terrain. It means keep out, written in animal scent. At the zoo, that musky animal smell crowded the air, acrid and persistent. It clung to Sarah’s clothes like smoke on a smoker, seeped into her skin and hair, and followed her home. In the evenings Ben put his nose to her hair and whispered, “Here kitty, kitty.”
He hadn’t put his nose to her hair lately, though, not since he’d smashed his face.
Her timer sounded a peep, like a baby bird, and Sarah wrote “Motoring” on a chart for Malthus, the male. Dame Anne sprawled on a fake sculpted ledge, her eyes narrow.
Sarah waited for a caterwaul. Malthus could mount. Why not? He’d sink his teeth so gently into Dame Anne’s neck, force his barbed cock in, make her eyes open, her thighs quiver.
Kapow.
Uncia uncia. Once once. The Latin name for the snow leopard couldn’t be more lonely or singular. Snow leopards are so instinctively antisocial, there’s no official term for a group of them. It probably pained these two to share a cage, trapped in a cheap motel.
Sarah’s job was to be a voyeur.
When the snow leopards screw, the world is on the mend. That was the thinking in trying to heal one tiny corner of the universe. Yes, it was reductive. Maybe it was alarmist. But snow leopards, almost extinct, wouldn’t voluntarily breed in captivity.
In the wild they had bigger problems. Afghanistan was a war zone. That was one problem. And on the black market a snow leopard penis could bring in serious cash. It’s hard to mate when you’re being hunted for your mating tool.
Unlike humans, a snow leopard has a penis bone, a baculum. In Chinese medicine a ground-down leopard cock is all about virility: Bones bring on boners is the concept. Desperate, flaccid, impotent human mammals sought out powdered concoctions of flayed and crushed cat dicks. Some were duped by pig cocks labeled as leopard, and who could they cry to then?
Those same customers bought pills filled with powdered human babies. No joke. They bought anything that could screw or be youthful.
That was one side benefit of Viagra sales: A snow leopard out there might be able to keep his baculum; a dead fetus could have a burial. Pfizer could market the drug as an ethical, compassionate eco-hard-on.
Ha! Sarah thought of Nyla, with her constant environmentalism and intermittent OkCupid Internet booty calls.
The timer peeped. The cats held steady in their separate corners.
One theory was that snow leopards in the wild reproduced only when they had a habitat with enough prey to sustain the population. They were attuned to their habitat’s carrying capacity. As an indicator, now these two said over and over again, with each flick of the tail, “Why bring babies into a worn-out world?”
Humans get it on even if it means they’ll live as a family in a flat-tired Datsun on a dead-end road. She’d seen that happen.
Artificial insemination of big cats involves anesthesia, surgery, and sometimes flat-out death. The snow leopard studbook ran slim.
Sarah rubbed her belly, where a tadpole of an embryo was busy evolving. A dull ache had set in low down like somebody had ground out a cigarette on her gut, the rubble of broken glass. It could be a good sign, the embryo attaching. Or maybe it was the bitter burn of cheap coffee from the zoo’s administrative offices. She allowed herself one cup of coffee a day, in line with the latest studies: one cup, and there was no risk of miscarriage, they said.
Her senses were heightened in pregnancy. She could smell the branches that decorated the cage below, the hay on the concrete floor, and the rabbit blood zookeepers washed away each morning.
Pregnancy is a battle between a host and new life, an opera built on chance and generations. This time, it was her opera.
She pulled a folding chair closer to the window, near the space heater. Her timer sounded. She peered over the edge. “Resting,” she wrote again, for Dame Anne. Malthus paced along the glass in a flattened figure eight and looked off into the concrete bunker hallways of Cat Cavern.
Visitors against the window down below never looked high enough or carefully enough to see Sarah hidden in the trees, behind bars and mesh. Families would come and go, their faces blurry but their hands clear where they pressed against the glass. Now Sarah saw Dale press his white face to that same streaked pane. One marshmallow-pale cheek flattened between his creased palms and outstretched fingers. His mouth was a smear. It was like being mooned by an anonymous butt in a passing car on the highway.
She smiled out of habit, one social animal to the next, a flash of teeth to show goodwill. Dale stepped back and gestured that he was coming up.
“Hey,” he said seconds later, too loudly for the silence-only space. He barged through a narrow metal door. “Soup’s on. Rabbit delivery.” He slid a cage across the floor. There was a scuffle of feet and claws from inside as the plastic kennel shifted.
The zoo fed the snow leopards live rabbits after hours. It was an experiment. Somebody thought it might help the odds—send the right message. The message was “Rabbits! Lots of rabbits.” The illusion of a plentiful world.
The rabbits would wait. When the zoo closed, they would die.
“Maybe we should sacrifice a Nubian ibex,” Sarah whispered. “That’d be bounty.”
Dale locked his fingers, then bent and flexed his arms, a living diagram of blood pumping. “How goes the war?”
“Shhhh.” She put a finger to her lips.
He pawed a second folding chair, knocked it from where it rested near the wall, and shook it open to sit beside Sarah. He traveled in a cloud of industrial-strength tick dip, the chemical scent strong enough to cut through the animal odor of the room. His strawberry blond hair lay damp, flat against his head, combed and parted. He said, “
I’m knocking out a sun bear in about an hour. You should come watch. It’s pretty cool. Dental stuff.”
A knocked-out sun bear’s yellow teeth? Sarah smiled. “Why would I want to see that?”
“I’ll let you touch its fur.” The vein in Dale’s neck flickered to the surface. Those veins! They were intimate and public at the same time, like a lap dance. He said, “It’s like a big teddy bear, but with massive claws.” He clawed at her thigh and she pulled her leg away but he had her knee in one big hand and he squeezed and she laughed and he didn’t let go. He handled her the way he wrestled doped seals.
A notebook fell from behind the official chart on Sarah’s lap. Dale let go of her knee to lean down and pick it up. A sketchbook.
Between the thirty-second peeps of her timer, she’d used the side of a soft pencil to draw the contour of a snow leopard’s leg, the sway of each cat’s back, and the stretch of tendons. She could tell the two cats apart by the set of their bones, the angle of their jaws, and the width of their hips.
“Not bad,” Dale said.
“My first major, way back when. Illustration.” She’d made the cats look sexy. In her drawing they were close together, but only to save space on the page, not to save the species.
“Is that a major?” he asked.
She said, “It was where I went to school.”
He lifted a page, then stopped, ready to tear it out. “Can I have it?”
She nodded. He ripped the page along the spine. He handed back the notebook but held the single sheet carefully between thick fingers. He held Sarah’s drawing like it mattered. “I’ll have it framed for the office.”
It was a quick sketch. He was making too big a deal about it. He flattered her!
Her timer sounded. She checked the boxes: “Motoring,” “Grooming.” Flirting, she thought. Dale. Was he?
A kid slapped the glass down below and let out a howl. Rabbits kicked in their kennel. Everybody seemed happy enough. Some people despise zoos, and, of course, they’re not ideal, but what is? In a way, it was paradise: mates and playmates batched into private enclosures, safe from predation.
All the snow leopards had to do was eat, screw, and look cool.
Dale rolled up the picture. He tapped the rolled paper on his leg. He said, “You could make the rounds with me, if you want. Catch a drink after?”
Sarah kept her eye on the cats, ignoring Dale’s thigh where it grazed her pant leg. She ignored his hand as it stroked that white roll of paper, her picture, like an origami cock, his own fertility talisman.
He wasn’t the kind of guy who’d need to eat a ground leopard baculum.
The timer rang. Malthus skulked. Dame Anne dropped her head as though to sleep. Sarah waited for the cats to take action.
Dale waited for an answer.
“I have to get home after this shift. My husband’s under the weather.” She made it sound like he had the flu. She made it clear that she had a husband.
She did have a husband. That was important! And she had his child—their child!—growing in her body. She swung her leg away from Dale’s bouncing thigh.
He said, “It’s been going around.”
She said, “Actually, he broke his nose?” Her voice climbed, but she nodded as she said it, asking a question and answering at the same time. She said, “Smashed his face. Two black eyes.”
Dale brought his eyebrows together, leaned in closer, and said, “No way!” like a grown frat boy crossed with Sarah’s grandmother. He knew how to make her feel at ease.
She said, “Yep. Slipped, at work. I don’t quite get it.”
“At work?” Dale said. “He could sue somebody for that. What does he do?”
She said, “Underwriting.” When Dale’s face registered nothing, she offered, “Paperwork. Mortgage loans.” That ache still bit at her gut, the grind of glass. Her timer sounded: “Motoring,” “Sleeping,” “Gossiping.” Was it gossip to talk about her own husband?
Dale sat back and said, “Fistfight with an unhappy borrower.” He nodded like he’d seen it before.
She said, “They don’t even meet the borrowers.”
Dale threw one hot arm over the back of Sarah’s chair. Then she was between the space heater and Dale. His chest was so close she could’ve rolled into it. She got up, stretched her legs, and moved away from Dale’s furnace: Let me not stand next to your fire.
There was a red spot on the chair she’d left, like paint. Sarah swiped a hand across the back of her cotton pants. Had she sat in something? Then she felt it, and it was on her hand. Blood. There was blood on her chair and on her clothes. It was her blood, and her baby’s. It was the ache in her gut. How many miscarriages can a body have?
Dale’s neck bloomed in splotches as he got up, too. Was he blushing?
She turned her head away. Quietly, through her teeth, she said, “Not again.” Her eyes felt hot.
He said. “I’m a doctor. I’m trained in taking care of the body.”
“You’re a veterinarian.” She felt her lip tremble, making it hard to talk.
He said, “I grew up with a big sister. It’s okay.”
Like his sister had a bloody miscarriage? Not okay. Not okay, not okay.
Dale said, “Miscarriage is sad, but it’s natural. I see it in animals more than you’d think. It happens.”
Nobody wrote those losses up in the cheerful zoo newsletters. Sarah choked on her own spit, on her tears. “It happens to me,” she said, “four times now.” It came out in a wail more plaintive than she meant it to be. She actually had a fleeting fantasy her words might sound brash.
“I can do this, if you want to go home.” He reached for the clipboard with the chart. She let it go into Dale’s hands. He put it aside and pulled his sweatshirt over his head. The white expanse of his abs flashed in the sickly fluorescents. Sarah blinked eyelashes thick with tears. She kept her gaze on those abs as though they were meditative, a still point in a shaky world.
She’d have to tell Ben about the baby. Round four. She’d been so sure, this time! She wiped her cheek with the back of one hand. The timer sounded. The cats? Motoring. Fucking around. Nothing. Those stupid, selfish cats. They could mate if they chose to.
Sarah wanted to mate. Immediately, even. This had nothing to do with reason and everything to do with loss.
She saw the smile on Dame Anne’s face: Smirking. Mocking. Smug, and no box to check for it. Those withholding, passive-aggressive, aggressive animals with their pseudo-Darwinian line about not breeding, they wouldn’t save the world from anything at all.
What kind of animal doesn’t mate?
Georgie made it look easy! Nyla did this when she was practically a kid. Dulcet taught kids how to fight off pregnancy like it was a raging epidemic.
The whole study of eugenics was founded by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton. What kind of private things happened in that family to make those boys obsessed with baby making and survival?
The rabbits were getting it on in their kennel. She could hear the shuffling. Every rabbit was a premade pregnancy test.
Dale reached behind her and so brought her into his cloud of sweat and chemicals, the tick dip. He wrapped his sweatshirt around her waist. She was shaky. He took the arms of the sweatshirt and laced one through the other, and when he did, his hand grazed her stomach. He gave a tug. That sweatshirt was a bandage. Dale’d fix her up the way he fixed up every other hurt animal.
Down below, kids on a field trip laughed then screamed, ecstatic with the echo of their voices, laughing to spite her: obnoxious kids, the children she’d never have! She wanted to bite somebody, that’s how it felt.
Dale said, “Do you need a ride?”
She didn’t want to be anywhere, not even in her own body.
There were 250,000 people born every day, in the time it took McDonald’s to sell four million burgers, both a disgusting production line.
Dulcet was right: Humanity was a disease, maybe a mental illness with physical manifestations
, but still Sarah was ready to bring it on. A bleakness ran through her bleeding organs. She was a snow leopard, trapped in that space. Was this Ben’s fault, or the chemicals of eastern Oregon?
Dale waited for her answer.
She shook her head. “Go floss that bear’s teeth.”
“I can take your notes to the office.” When he reached for the door to the stairs, his forearm was a diagram of shifting planes.
He smelled like health.
“Where did you grow up?” she asked.
“Right here,” he said, and guided her out.
Those veins along his legs, working the system in concert with his arteries and capillaries, would circulate blood to his penis and his heart. His vascular health could win an award. This man’s sperm would make, for some woman—some other woman, some other family—all the difference in the world.
Vicodin, OxyContin, Tylenol 3. Diazepam and Ambien. Ben let the words tick through his mind in a chain of jagged syllables.
Prescription meds come with three- and four-syllable names; illegal drugs have one: pot, crank, crack, hash, blow, speed, smack, rock, dope, weed, junk.
His own name was one syllable. Ben.
Maybe he was illegal. Contraband. A bad boy. Except he heard his name, in his head, always in his mother’s voice calling him in to dinner. She had a way of dragging his name out until it broke into two pieces—Be-en!—or else she’d use his whole name and make it three. He could still hear her voice, the way it sailed out into the blue sky, the yellow field grass. She was almost forty when he was born. He was almost forty now. She was gone. But for all those years, when she called out over the farmland, he went home to grilled tuna sandwiches, baked fish on Fridays, roast beef on Sunday.
Ben was a good kid, and soft as they came.
He and Sarah had their vials of meds lined up on the coffee table like appetizers. After four miscarriages and a broken nose, they’d amassed a decent collection.
Sarah took Tylenol 3, Ben took oxycodone. They poured whiskey in their coffee and let dishes pile up, making towers of bowls and plates. Georgie’s maternity pillow claimed a corner chair. At night it made a fat shadow, like an intruder. Their good dog sat by their side.
