God Lives in St. Petersburg

by Tom Bissell

  “The English,” she echoes blankly.

  The rinse of daylight on the windshield is blinding. He jerks back and forth in his seat. “Not all of them. Churchill. Orwell. Nice dry brains.”

  She simply shakes her head, hands lifting from her smooshed thighs. A mystified entreaty to elaborate.

  “Tolkien,” he says. That she doesn’t know what he’s talking about sticks him through the heart. She would have, he thinks, once. His tone sharpens. “The Hobbit. Frodo’s. Where you just bought us lunch.”

  Elizabeth gazes out her window. “Tolkien was Scottish, I thought.” They are passing the zoned commercial clutter of a small midwestern university town. She is a medical student here, in the closing weeks of her second year, widely held to be the most punishing. Sometimes, late at night, he allows this to console him. She stares at the bagelries, the record and bike stores, the bars so close to one another he suspects they are in hidden, felonious league. On his side of the street is the northern flank of the university, endless greenery plunked with long flat structures terraced with rococo Modernism, gloomy campus-Gothic firetraps, stark administrative fortresses designed from the academic-industrial-complex blueprint popular in the mid-1970s.

  “Tolkien was English,” he points out gently.

  She shrugs. Her haircut is a day old, a perky forgery of a popular television heroine’s. The way her hair sweeps huggingly down her cheeks, its planed tips curling at her clavicle, creates a vague resemblance to the Greek letter omega. Her face is sere with too much studying, stress, him. “I always thought hobbits were Scottish,” she says, with growing conviction. She has never, as far as he knows, surveyed any of the material one would need to support this observation. Her certainty seems to puzzle even her. She gestures. “Like, you know . . . leprechauns.”

  “Leprechauns are—”

  “I know what leprechauns are.”

  His mouth tamps shut, the following silence like fall-out. His fingers find the steering wheel’s reassuring ergonomic grooves. He remembers when she enjoyed listening to him, the look of milky wonder in her eyes as he clarified and elaborated and invented. It does not seem so long ago. Suddenly he thinks of Tolkien, of the flashlit nighttime hours he’d spent reading him as a boy. The only time one really could read Tolkien. Tolkien had built the bridge that had allowed Franklin to travel from Spider-Man to Beowulf to Yeats to Joyce. He’d read The Lord of the Rings five times, which seems impossible to him now, his shelves sagging with worthy books he knows he will never read. He thinks of Tom Bombadil. Quickbeam the Ent. Gandalf Stormcrow. For three Halloweens in a row he’d dressed as Gandalf, until his cotton-ball beard went stringy and ridiculous. That does not seem so long ago either. He is twenty-five years old. Nothing seems so long ago.

  “Tolkien was a don at Oxford,” he says, after a little while. “One day while grading papers he wrote hobbit in the margin of one of them. He didn’t even know why. The word just came to—”

  “What the hell kind of a name is J. R. R. Tolkien, anyway? Three initials? Who uses three initials?” She fixes him with a demanding stare, her mouth dropped open.

  “M. F. K. Fisher,” he says.

  She looks at him, blinking. “I don’t know who that is. Is he Scottish?”

  He reflects, then clears the word for takeoff: “She.” A mistake. No need to point that out. He has no idea why he’s said it. She is a stranger to him now, and consequently he is a stranger to himself. He cannot decide if he is a kind, decent person who sometimes behaves terribly or a terrible person given to outbreaks of decency.

  On her face: You are such an ass. She looks away, pushes hair from her temple, and settles back into the bucket seat.

  They are on the highway now, headed toward Trapper’s Cove Trail, an isolated apartment complex inhabited by what university housing refers to as “older students,” a euphemism he knows is meant to be heartening. Two months ago he’d abandoned his job as an English teacher in Kyrgyzstan to come back here. To “work it out.” He’d pulled up to Trapper’s Cove Trail in a mostly empty U-Haul to find Elizabeth sitting on the curb, eating peanut-butter-and-chocolate-chip sandwiches. Her eyes blurred with tears as he leaped from the truck and embraced her. They’d smiled at each other, each time they’d passed on the stairs to her walk-up, lugging the dead storage of his old college life into her unchanged college life, box by box. That does seem long ago. But he is not a student, and everything in this place reminds him of it.

  A billboard floats past on their starboard side, too bright and cartoonish to disregard. He spies a camel, an elephant, a peacock. The camel and elephant are deeply familiar, defiant cribs from icons made famous by R. J. Reynolds and Dumbo. The peacock, having seized the foreground, shouts in a large white word balloon: COME SEE US AT POTTER’S PARK ZOO! NEXT EXIT! It makes weird sense to him that, of this bestiary, a peacock should serve as spokesanimal.

  “Zoo,” he says quietly. He has no idea if she’s seen the billboard, if she will know what he’s talking about. Read my mind, he thinks. Reconnect. Tell me what I’m asking you, because I no longer know.

  “Oh, Franklin,” she says, rubbing her eyes. “Anything. Anything but this.”

  “Lock the doors,” she says getting out of the car, slipping the knot of sleeves at her midriff and punching her way into a lawn-green sweatshirt. It is emblazoned with her College of Human Medicine’s logo, a quasi-federal seal wreathed high-mindedly with Latin. As her hairdo passes through the sweatshirt’s cinched neck it suffers the devastating physics of static electricity. She looks at him, nervous and pie-eyed, attempting to smile. The sweatshirt hangs dented and formless from her shoulders’ unsettlingly visible knobs. Since he’s moved back they have dropped so much weight they seem in anorexic competition.

  “Locked,” he announces, using the fat remote control tethered to her key chain to fire the bolts into place. Her eyes roll instantly skyward as he double-checks the driver-side door the old-fashioned way, with his hand. He knows that Elizabeth has always believed the remote control to be technology’s most benevolent gratuity. Her air conditioner has a remote control, as does her microwave. Franklin’s faith in the purely tactile is a philosophical divergence they once thought charming, an enduring non-argument stoked only as an excuse to kiss and make up. He tries to ignore her double-nostriled sigh as he moves around the car to check on the passenger-side door.

  They wend through a parking lot of minivans and station wagons, their shoulders docking in small, accidental bumps. Franklin chatters hopelessly, noting blacktop splatterings of mustard and ketchup that indicate likely sites of savage parent-child struggle. She looks at him in an amused, disbelieving way, then chuckles and shakes her head. Heartened, he begins to devise long, inscrutably reasoned police reports based on the sunbaked condiments’ arc and angle. She shushes him suddenly, her eyes rimmed with wet light, then throws her arms around his shoulders and crushes her face against his breastbone, as though this is the Franklin she wants, this one, right here. And please don’t change if I let go.

  They pull apart, shaken, and reach the long willowy esplanade leading to Potter’s Park’s ticket booth. It is a bright, zephyr-bathed day. Pink and lilac flamingos stand motionless in the shoal of an adjacent pond. Peacocks and Canada geese roam freely along the sidewalk’s grass borderland, close enough to startle away with a foot stomp. He has a mindless phobia of Canada geese: the reptilian atavism of their physiology, their mysterious ability to hiss, the tiny razors cunningly hidden within their beaks, their sharp and grotesquely purple tongues. Suddenly, his heart nose-dives: one goose, satanically privy to his fear, is prancing toward him. Suddenly he is awash in sweat, charging down the path with panicked composure. Somehow Elizabeth catches him and takes his hand. He doubles over, temples thrumming with blood, her palm moving in clockwise solace in the drenched small of his back. Her smell is a synthesis of tumble-dried clothes and baby powder, and he has a child’s sudden faith that nothing will ever happen to him as long as she’s here.r />
  At the booth an older man with a lean arrowy face trades Franklin’s money for tickets. The man smiles at them in the poignant, not quite envious way of one who has accepted his aloneness. He proffers a single map, an assumption of their indivisibility. In the aftermath of this gesture, Elizabeth looks on the brink of tears, the air above filled with the faint roar of the nearby airport’s arrivals and departures. They push through the turnstile and find themselves on the gazebo overlooking Potter’s Park Zoo. Across its sun-dappled plaza float small groups of three and four and five, families all. No one here is alone, yet he is unable to link wives with husbands, children with parents. Everyone either knows everyone else or is pretending to, reticence burned off in the sunshine. He knows Elizabeth is looking at him. Put her in any proximity to children and she is helpless but to midwife their own child’s physiognomy in her mind. He cannot bear to look over at her. What was once a reverie is now bloodless skepticism.

  Potter’s Park’s designers have single-mindedly eschewed cages, bars, grates, anything that suggests an overt mandate to detain rather than preserve. Four identical brick buildings with tinted glass doors angle around the zoo’s centerpiece, an exposed moated rock pile draped with half a dozen California sea lions. Elizabeth is drawn toward them, down the gazebo’s bleached concrete stairs, cooing. Franklin follows, transfixed by how the sunlight ignites the sea lions’ fur to a bright rust, how the water slickens their coats with a petroleum sheen. They are absurdly pleasing animals, their flippers as huge as tennis rackets, their leglessness somehow mistaken, whiskers spraying from their smooth, tiny skulls.

  As he joins her at the tank’s polished silver rail she reads aloud from a nearby plaque.

  “A male’s harem may have as many as ten females. They bark to discourage other males from intruding on their territory.”

  She turns to him, delighted with the fresh imprint of information she can, for once in her med-student hell, treasure as completely useless.

  “Barking,” he says. “Maybe I should have thought of that.”

  She takes a moment to process before her eyes cloud over and her face screws up in disbelief. “Jesus Christ,” she spits, executing a turn of military precision and marching off.

  As he lets her go he fills with mechanical calm. What can he tell her, this late in the game? His bouquets have been tendered, tossed back in his face, reassembled and tossed back again . . . he has nothing left with which to console her. Her beeline terminates at the nearest building, whose glass door she yanks open. She hesitates before vanishing behind its tint, frustrated that the door’s slow journey shut confounds her desire to slam it. He turns back to the sea lions’ tank, water slopping dreamily over its raised edge. A small, sleek black shape swims ecstatic laps, in the thrall of discovering that a circle’s joy is never having to turn a corner.

  She had broken up with him by letter—what his fellow aid workers had called a “long-distance rupture.” He had wandered the hilly green streets of Bishkek with the letter stuffed in his back pocket, hoping its contents might change if he read it in a different light, beneath trees, next to a statue, at night, across town. She had offered no explanation other than “this” being “too hard.” He could not write back. He did not know how. He did not know what “this” referred to. He knew only her, and him. A few weeks later his letters to her were returned, ribboned together, with a short, graceful note. He wrote back this time. For months he heard nothing. Then, one night, across twelve time zones, she called. Her testimony came forth all at once, any of its bitter serrates smoothened by rehearsal. Aaron, the man she now explained she had left him for, was gone, though it was no fresh wound; it had happened weeks ago. It seemed Aaron was something of a big-game hunter, and after he’d stared long enough into the eyes of his latest mounted trophy, the itch of the stalk sent him reaching for his pith helmet. She spared Aaron any villainy. He was a vain, childish man whose pathogens she had freely allowed to infect her.

  “It was a mistake,” she’d blurted, so suddenly he knew she had only now determined this. Her voice was small and echoey, easy to misunderstand. Franklin said nothing, not knowing if this moment were the harbinger of new happiness or further pain. She mistook his silence for a calculation of which he was not capable. “I’m sorry,” she said, gulping. “Franklin, I’m so sorry.”

  He could not discuss it. He hung up hollow, a scare-crow. Four days later he called her back. “I’m on the other side of the world. I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  Her tone ossified. “I don’t know what I want you to do.”

  He would say it, then. If they rebuilt and disaster ensued, he would be the negligent architect. “I could come back. We could start all over again.”

  “We could,” she said, her voice cloaked in something gray and wistful. “We could.”

  “Everything will be different.”

  He heard, somehow, through his primitive receiver, the sound of a forlorn smile. “All changed, changed utterly.”

  He’d been stopped cold. Solitude had made her unrecognizable, florid. Then it came. The words were not hers. This was borrowed sadness—from a poem, of all things: “Easter 1916.” Yeats. Heartbreak’s laureate. What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night but death; was it a needless death after all? Franklin felt vaguely ashamed. It had never occurred to him to flee into the arms of poetry. Cautiously he asked, “Have you been reading Yeats, Elizabeth?”

  “Yeah,” she said, as her tone simulcast, And why wouldn’t I be? But they both knew why. Only one reason. To remember that well-read boy to whom she’d given her heart.

  When he finally walks over to the building he sees ANIMALS IN OUR LIVES neoclassically chiseled in concrete above its double-swing doors. What such a promise might entail he is not sure. The lobby is lit with low, teakish light. Elizabeth is across the room, her back to him, standing before a window with the determined head tilt of someone teasing sense from an obscure painting. When he reaches her he sees what dwells behind the window: a pigeon. Its head is a beaked gray thumb. Its wings and tail feathers are splotched with white, as though it had slalomed through the pickets of a freshly painted fence. Its environs, Franklin realizes, are a precisely rendered tarpaper rooftop. Painted on its three walls is skyscraper iconography roughly congruent to that of New York City. The pigeon’s tiny black eyes seem to demand some explanation from him.

  “A pigeon,” he says.

  She shoots him a dark, simmering glance. “ ‘Animals in Our Lives.’ It’s a motif. Live with it.”

  He absorbs this strafe and sidesteps to the next window without comment. Inside is a small rain-forest simulacrum, something called a red jungle fowl standing in insulated silence. Its otherwise dun-colored breast and wings are streaked with a runny palette of green, orange, yellow. A huge tripartite red growth sits atop its head, made of tough plasticky-seeming material that is difficult to accept as skin. Its eyes blink once a second within sockets of pebbled flesh. Franklin reads its lengthy biography and learns that all chickens descend from the red jungle fowl. He is looking at nothing less than poultry’s Eve.

  The windows keep coming: the taveta golden weaver, the green plover, the flying squirrel. (One truism of animal nomenclature: Any creature prefixed by “flying” in fact does no such thing.) Elizabeth is unmoved until she genuflects at a bank of smallish thigh-level windows. Encased within are guinea pigs, black gerbils, piebald mice, quivering piles of hairless infant hamsters. Suddenly she is purling, clucking her tongue, shaking her head, a weird analog of motherhood. He tries to join in, snickering as he reads aloud one of the rodents’ identification plates: “ ‘The common hamster.’ As opposed to the extraordinary hamster.”

  She doesn’t even look at him. “As opposed to the dwarf hamster right next to it.”

  He steps back from her. With sick precision he feels his internal armature give way. Legs first, then arms. His chest is last, collapsing upon itself with a sad, nauseating plash. Nothing works. An ache flowers beh
ind his eyes. “Elizabeth—” he begins.

  “I know,” she says, nodding, her eyes mashed shut. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  Together they wander to the building’s remaining wing. He takes her hand, she squeezing back so tightly the vestigial remnant of webbing between his fingers pulls tight. The spherical room they enter is lit more starkly than the lobby. Astounded children gambol from window to window, leaving their mouths’ hot smears on the glass. Elizabeth stops at a window while Franklin, lost in his first sustained thought in days, keeps going. Her hand opens all too willingly, but he holds on and reels himself back to her. He can’t recall what he was just thinking about. Something about nostalgia: nostalgia being the loss of forward motion. Stupid thoughts. Useless. He stares at her lopsided reflection in the glass. Her face is white and puffy and lovely. Her lips are full and biconvex and devastating. It has been days since they’ve kissed in anything other than ritual.

  She stares past herself at two poison-dart frogs, their world another tiny, slapdash tropical ecosystem. A pitiful waterfall squirts from an aperture hidden in a pack of smooth rocks. He wonders if any of these creatures have the faintest idea of what’s happened to them. If successful captivity is primarily a matter of fooling the captive. These frogs are toylike and beautiful, living gems, glistening in their deadly marinade. One frog—an impossibly fluorescent green with perfect black spots—leaps from rock to rock and back again. The other, the color of an oxidized bronze statue, peers up at them, pulsing intelligently.

  Elizabeth sets the tips of her three longest fingers to the window. “They’re beautiful.”

  “You’re beautiful,” he says.

  She sighs, her forehead meeting the glass with a sad thud. She looks over at him, her longing so raw and naked that he swallows. “Oh, my love—” She stops, eyes bulging. Words that have not vibrated her vocal cords in weeks. They stare at each other as though a beast believed long extinct has poked its head up through fronds and vanished before either of them thought to document it. At that moment two loutish boys old enough to resent muscle them from their marks. They pound on the glass, elbowing each other and laughing, the frogs leaping around in a kind of post-traumatic-stress frenzy, fruitlessly attempting to hide. Instinct suddenly seems to Franklin like a painfully elaborate hoax.