by Monica Drake
She tapped her pencil against the metal railing. The rail was decorated with chipped paint, like old metal playground equipment. They should test the paint for lead, she thought, and she’d care about that more if she were still pregnant.
The cows raised their calves together in a happy co-op. The fathers, two bull elephants, were kept in separate enclosures.
Bulls could turn murderous.
In other countries elephants are work animals. Often enough, bulls kill their masters. Mostly they kill when they’re in what’s called “musth,” a state that comes on like really bad PMS, only in the males. It’s a physiological thing, a psychotic shift. It’s a problem. There’d be money in developing a Prozac-type drug to keep male elephants emotionally stable, if a company wanted to take that on.
Some trainers starve the bulls to keep them docile, but musth comes anyway.
In Asia, nobody blames a rampaging elephant. Trainers know the odds: Males go mad; it’s par for the course. In the United States, stomping a trainer’ll get a bull killed. “Put down” is the phrase, as though to kill an animal and a little insult, a put-down, are at all the same. As though bringing an animal to its knees—down, closer to the ground—is the whole of it.
It left a serious dent in breeding programs when zoos became scared of the liability involved in keeping a postadolescent, sexually active bull in the stable. The Oregon Zoo held the international Asian elephant studbook.
Sarah had stood in the same spot weekly for months, watching each baby elephant flop its short trunk and learn to use it. They had to develop those muscles! Supercute.
But after miscarriage number four all this family shit had started to get under her skin. The zoo was a place for endangered animals to fuck in safety. Her job was to watch babies, hoping to see animals make more babies. She was a barren voyeur, a babysitter.
Everywhere she looked, small bodies orbited around larger bodies like Galilean moons.
Sarah was in her own musth.
She’d been robbed. She had been on her way, a baby! And now, nothing.
A studbook recorded who had babies but also highlighted who didn’t.
Around her, the zoo was packed with families, mostly women and children. Dads were rare, but not so rare as to be either exotic or endangered. One woman pushed a six-seater stroller. Six kids? Whose idea was that?
Baby hogs.
Hoarders.
Dulcet was right, they were all addicts.
Children climbed on fences and pressed themselves against the animals’ enclosures in a visual display, a reenactment, of humans encroaching on an already diminished terrain.
As compulsive and indulgent as alcoholics, some people couldn’t have one without going overboard. Even lab rats were kept with set limits on offspring, due to the Animal Care and Use Protocol in research. Too many rats in a cage? That’s a mess. They’ll eat one another alive. Too many humans in a house?
Sarah wanted one single child. She wasn’t greedy.
Down in the Africa exhibit, a sign attributed as a “Masai Elder Blessing” read, “May you be peaceful and prosperous with many cattle and children.”
Sarah passed that sign at least once a day, sometimes more. Now she was not peaceful. She didn’t have cattle. She didn’t have kids.
What was the Masai curse? That’s what she got.
Every baby she saw was an anxiogenic substance: Babies made her anxious.
To see them in plague proportions? That had grown into her personal panicogen, no chemicals needed—flat-out panic.
Her timer peeped. Her charge, a six-month-old male elephant, tapped its trunk against a stick, left and right. He was doing well. “Play behavior,” Sarah marked on her list.
An elephant cow named Rainy Day paced incessantly. It was a coping mechanism. Years before, Rainy had been traded to another zoo, swapped for a male who came to Oregon on a short-term breeding loan.
She was pregnant when they traded her off. Her baby was born at the new zoo, but neither Rainy nor her calf were accepted as part of the elephant social circle there. The other elephants crowded her and pulled rank. Her infant fell off the edge of their artificial lot into a dry moat, hit his head, and died.
Rainy went nuts. They tranquilized her, but that’s when she started pacing, and she never stopped.
Elephant handlers sometimes use what’s called an elephant hook. It’s a long pole. The end is curved like a scythe only with a round ball at the tip, instead of a blade. The ball is supposed to offer a nudge, like a fist, to an elephant’s sensitive temple. After her baby died, when Rainy Day started pacing, when she was high on tranquilizers and frantic with grief, zookeepers at the new zoo tapped Rainy with an elephant hook. But she moved fast, and the ball at the end of the hook knocked her eye out.
That’s when they sent her home.
She was a sweet elephant, half-blind, forever walking off that dance to her lost son. Her new baby was the thinnest in the herd; he ran all day at his mother’s feet. It was hard to say if she seemed to be running away from her child or trying to lead him somewhere better. Either way, a nervous mother set the pace for his world.
A happy mother makes a happy family!
Rainy’s dead calf was in the studbook, alongside the success stories. Sarah’s miscarriages? They’d be in a book, too, if anyone were keeping track.
She heard Dale’s voice before she saw him. “You’ve got the easy job,” he said. She turned. He’d come out of the elephant enclosure through a back door, down a fake-clay tunnel, a place used by staff and camouflaged from zoo guests by a thicket of bamboo. He wore waist-high rubber waders, and he was soaked. “Jesus, I hate urine collection.”
Sarah asked, “They’ve got you doing that?”
“Short on handlers,” he said. The air was already ripe with the green scent of elephant poop, and now the acrid component of that stench was intensified and close; Dale reeked of piss. He said, “I’m glad you’re back at work. Sorry you’ve had a rough time of it.” He looked at her as though to say more, but what was there to say?
“It’s not your fault. No need to be sorry.” Sarah was embarrassed. She didn’t want to talk about it. Any fault lay somewhere between Sarah and Ben, in the ways their bodies came together.
Her timer went off. The elephant child ran alongside its mom’s frantic stride. “Locomotion,” she wrote on her chart. She’d heard about urine collection, though never seen it. Handlers tried to keep it behind the scenes. Sarah’s job was out front. “How do you collect urine from an elephant?”
“With a bucket and a prayer.” Dale stomped his feet. A newspaper blew past. It stuck on the wooden rails of the elephant info kiosk. Sarah took it from the rails. A headline read SPEEDERS KILL 1,200 MORE PEOPLE THAN DRUNK DRIVERS.
And what about drunk speeders?
She said, “Let’s raise the speed limit another ten and clear some room for the rest of us.”
Dale offered, “I like a woman with a warm heart. But the crowd’ll thin out once the rain starts.” He was talking about the zoo. Sarah meant the planet. That population would not thin out with the weather, unless global warming kicked in some really severe times.
He said, “Hey, you want to see a show with me?” He leaned on the metal bar that marked the edge of the elephants’ space.
Was he asking her on a date?
That was a new kind of anxiogenic move. She was married.
He ran a hand over his short hair, in the warm light of the fall sun. He said, “It’s a science show, at OMSI.”
The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry was another anthill of offspring. School buses lined the OMSI parking lot to bring kids in by the herd. The “tactile experience center” was a pet store of babies.
Depressogenic, totally.
Dale said, “This show is about reconstructive surgeries, artificial limbs, skin grafts. You’ll love it.” He added, more softly, “The thing is, for me, it’s kind of a big deal. My ex has work in it.”
She’
d heard about Dale’s ex, a scientist in Chicago. The woman had left Dale overnight and broken his heart. He was still her biggest fan.
He said, “I haven’t talked to her in a year.” His cheeks flushed, a shifting of color near his jaw, across his pale skin. Sarah’s heart melted. He looked to the elephants and said, “Seriously, though, she’s a pioneer.”
A pioneer? It was hard not to picture Dale’s ex in a rugged sack dress, crossing the prairie in a wagon, devoted to science.
“She gets huge grants,” he said.
Sarah’s field was observation, her focus behavior and interpretation. Lodged in the soft sciences, she hadn’t practiced dissection since college. Sarah asked, “What does she reconstruct?”
“Anything you want,” Dale answered, with the embarrassed smile of vicarious pride.
Behind him, a woman walked five kids, each one on a furry leash and halter. The woman’s hand was full of monkey tails. She was like a balloon vendor, strings in hand—only her fat balloons scrambled over the zoo grass. She was a dog walker of children, readily making herself genetically redundant and proud of it.
Excessive baby making was a quiet war: building up troops, everyone secretly worried about their team. Would the Mexican families take over the small towns? The Catholics or the Mormons? Go forth and multiply. Those were fighting words.
Make war through love.
We’ve seen the family annihilators, though, from the patricide of Oedipus to the parricide of every spoiled suburban kid to turn a gun on his parents. There was no guarantee of team players. Each one of those five babies could be a little ticking bomb.
Sarah ached for one uncertain little future hellion to call her own.
Two men, elephant handlers, burst from the fake-clay tunnel. As they came out of the tunnel, Sarah saw the men themselves as sperm.
Dale whispered, “Watch. They’ll want help with sperm collection now.”
He leaned over the railing to eyeball a cow’s feet. Captive elephant feet always need vet care. Microscopic bacteria could find a way in around cracks and poorly tended nails, and those tiny bacteria could kill an elephant. He said, “She’s due for a pedicure.”
One handler called over, “We need backup with the old bull.”
Dale gave a glance to Sarah. “Duty calls. See you later.” He jogged off to the indoor rooms of the big elephant cages, the private porn motel of elephant ejaculation. Elephants at the Oregon Zoo mostly mated the natural way, but as part of the Species Survival Plan, and as the strongest Asian elephant breeders in the world, their zoo shipped frozen sperm around the globe for artificial insemination.
Now, where Sarah stood, kids twirled and crashed around her like so much litter.
A litter of children.
In the spring when gnats hatched out over Oregon’s damp grasses, they flew in uneven spirals, ran into things, and reminded Sarah of toddlers, with their little twenty-four-hour lives. Everyone resented gnats every moment they were around. Sarah tried to give them their space. But now these children ran like gnats over the zoo lawn, the same loopy circles.
A pack of hellspawn jumped up and down yelling “Chimpanzees!” or maybe they yelled “Chips and cheese!” Each one was a prized little consumer.
Their mother, that mother gnat slave, frantically opened juice boxes and freed one straw after another from its plastic sleeve. How much garbage did it take to make a juice box? The woman turned, looked right at her, and said, “Sarah! Jesus, it’s been, like, what? Ten years?”
The woman morphed from a stranger into an old friend, and from a mom with a surplus swarm of dirty chimp-kids into Sarah’s old neighbor, when they were, like, twenty, back when the woman was thinner, and younger, and was an excellent drinker with a big laugh and a bottle of Bushmills in her freezer.
What was her name?
Georgie would remember it. They’d all lived in small rooms in an Old West–style apartment building in deep northwest Portland. Nights they’d walked home together, drunk women stumbling in high heels, watching one another’s backs.
The woman asked, “Which kids are yours?”
Sarah could see her own babies out there on the green grass as though they’d grown. Now one was walking, another was still more of a toddler, the third able to walk only if it held on to the stroller, its light curls blowing in the cool breeze.
“None.” She looked to the elephants and tapped her pen on her chart. She was there to work.
“You got married, though, right?” the woman asked.
“Yep.” That was the last time they’d seen each other, at Sarah’s wedding. She held up her hand with the ring on it as though that proved something. “Ten years.”
She was married, but no kids. Was that so freaky?
Why did people think zoos were for kids, anyway? Grown-ups could take an interest in animals. It was the real world.
Four kids orbited Sarah’s old friend, and Sarah asked, “Are these yours?”
The woman nodded. “Four in three years. Twins, even.” She waved a hand at a big-eyed boy, then a girl, who looked nothing alike. “Crazy, isn’t it?”
Sarah nodded back. She really did agree—it was crazy. Flat-out crazy. This, she thought, is why we need speeders. A population can’t just triple, every two people turning into six.
In zoo terms, there was plenty of genetic surplus.
She looked at the flock of smiling faces, little hands, cute mall clothes in mini-sizes, and knew she was horrible for even thinking about thinning the population.
Other people, she imagined—like this made it any better. Send the speeders to take out other people. Somebody had to make room.
She was still horrible.
Was it so wrong to want space and water and resources for her own unborn? Save a little something, please. But she and Ben were turning out to be snow leopards, calm and barren, while everybody else got to be gnats, or even better, happy elephants, breeding and grazing and wandering the fields.
Sarah wanted to be an elephant cow, like her old drinking friend!
Population control: The world needed barren women to balance out the numbers. Sarah pushed that anxiogenic, panicogen, depressogenic, loserogenic thought away fast.
Who assigned her the role of barren?
Mrs. Fertility let her kids trample the zoo lawn. She said, “You heard about that girl who used to live upstairs from us?”
Sarah tried to remember.
The woman said, “She got shin cancer, from all those years as a stripper. You know, cowboy boots, bare legs. They treat the leather with chemicals that give you cancer. That’s what I heard.”
The baby elephants ran like clumsy ballerinas. Sarah listened to a string of stories about old neighbors. The mom talked about meth and somebody getting shot while she handed her children slices of apple.
Rainy paced the edge of the elephant enclosure. Her baby kept up a steady trot at her feet, and Dale stumbled from the elephant enclosure’s back rooms.
Sarah said, “That was fast.”
“I’m good at what I do.” He dropped the suspenders on his waders and stepped out. His shoes caught on the pant legs. He held on to a small tree for balance and tugged one foot free. He said, “It’s called animal husbandry, and sometimes that feels a little too accurate, you know? As in—why am I that elephant’s bitch?”
The mom-friend was in the center of her own storm, working her diaper bag, managing a pack of Wet Ones. She helped her kids and littered the ground in a living illustration of perpetual consumption.
Dale let his waders fall in a pile. He pulled off the shirt half of his scrubs. He had another shirt underneath. The two shirts hitched up together, flashing an expanse of a strong back, soft skin, hard muscles. His stomach had only the inevitable folding of skin as he bent, no gut rolls, no spare tire, no muffin tops or love handles.
Sarah started to introduce him, but his face was hidden. The other woman looked, too. She ate one of her own brown apple slices.
Still u
nder his shirt, Dale said, “Next month I’m assisting on an elephant vasectomy in Orlando. That’ll be a first. The thing about elephants is, their testicles are inside, up near their kidneys. And they have a trunk-sized penis, if you can visualize that.” His shirt slid off, and he straightened up, in his Hanes T.
Again Sarah moved to introduce him, but before she could, he cut her off. He said, “So, are you going to that show with me?” He was sweaty from work and too many clothes.
She saw Dale the way her friend would see him: hot.
His flushed skin caught the sun and cast it back in a glow. He said, “Maybe next week?”
There were perks to not having kids. She didn’t have to sort out child care. Ben would be at work. She’d make the most of it, because, why not?
With the audience of a mom who now wiped her oldest boy’s snot with the edge of her sleeve, Sarah said, “That’d be great.”
Dale said, “We could have drinks.”
She said, “Sure.”
Nyla went to the school, found the vice principal’s office, and explained how Crystal Light wasn’t crystal meth and never had been. It was all pretty much a game! Kids’ stuff. The vice principal was a dark-haired woman in the middle of filing papers, bent over a cabinet. She straightened up with a groan. She adjusted her wool skirt at the waist and said, “The report was detailed and specific.”
“But it’s wrong,” Nyla insisted. She felt about twelve years old. The vice principal let her in to see Principal Cherryholmes.
Mrs. Cherryholmes was petite and beautiful, maybe even younger than Nyla. She had frosted hair and frosted fingernails and tipped her head sideways as she sat behind her desk and listened.
Nyla said, “When you saw it, did it look more like baking soda or salt? Did it smell like cat urine or more like lemonade?”
A look of disdain flickered across the principal’s face, then she was back to her polite composure. She said, “Our security personnel worked with the police. I don’t know what it looked like. I certainly didn’t smell it.”
“It wasn’t drugs,” Nyla tried, one more time.
Mrs. Cherryholmes took a deep breath. She reached a hand halfway across her desk—not far enough to touch Nyla, but diplomatically far enough to make a gesture of communing. She said, “Understandably, many parents fall into what we call a truthfulness bias. They need to believe their children tell the truth.”
