by Tom Bissell
Elizabeth leads him past several tanks of fish and stops at the room’s final window. For two minutes they stare without speaking into a branch-crowded space the size of a computer screen, the rumored home of a New Guinea walking stick. A dent forms between Elizabeth’s tweezed eyebrows. “Well . . . where the hell is it?”
He shrugs. “Maybe this is a part of the Animals Not in Our Lives exhibit.”
They give up. Outside, the sun hits their constricted pupils like a penlight. Their hands fly up to their foreheads in protective salute. She juts her chin across the plaza. “How about some monkeys?”
Sounds of glass-blunted simian distress greet them as they push open the doors. He allows Elizabeth to forge ahead as he stops to survey humanity’s evolutionary growth chart, a bit of self-congratulation customary to every monkey house. He tracks Homo sapiens’ loss of prognathous jaw and humped back and squat cabriole legs. He notes that with each exultant step into a new taxonomy, mankind’s shave grows progressively cleaner. Some wit has Magic Markered a briefcase in the hand of the family Hominidae’s only extant species.
Elizabeth summons him with a giggle. “Look at these guys,” she says, as Franklin rests his chin atop her shoulder and wraps his arms around her waist. Behind the glass a dozen cotton-topped tamarins whip through their jungle gym with impossible precision. In acrobatic lulls, small intelligent faces peer at them from beneath Warholian mops. As she watches the tamarins, he feels the furtive murk of desire. He presses himself against her rump, tastes the salt from her neck, her breasts filling the scales of his hands. She sighs, wearily indulgent, then frees herself from his grasp. “Okay there, tiger,” she says, smiling.
They bypass several other spidery little hominids in favor of the hamadryas baboons. Theirs is the biggest cage they’ve seen yet—not a cage at all, but a barren outdoor mountainside tunneled with caverns. The net above cuts the sky into tiny blue boxes. Franklin half-reads the plaque.
“One of the most fearsome baboons . . . found primarily in Northern Africa and the Arabian peninsula.”
Hamadryas, he thinks, rummaging through a recondite vocabulary amassed during four semesters of ancient Greek. The word breaks pleasingly in half: Wood spirit.
The baboons emerge from their caves with dawn-of-man portent. Their faces are terrifying, their tiny eyes set too close together and fixed above wolfish snouts. They wear their huge filthy-gray coats with the sort of careless arrogance he associates with aging female movie stars. And their asses ! Franklin tries not to look. They are hideously disproportionate, the largest posteriors he’s ever seen: red, distended, inflamed, vaguely metastasized, caked with straw and fossilized shit.
Elizabeth’s face crinkles. “Ick.”
The last baboon to appear has silvery tufts shooting from his wizened face. That this is the alpha male there seems little doubt. Every member of his retinue turns a respectful back on him. He bares his teeth and moves with tumbling knuckle-first locomotion from one cowering female to the next, a long thin pink hard-on wagging beneath him. Franklin turns away without a word. Elizabeth follows. One can watch primates only so long before reconsidering what really makes up the celebrated 1 percent variance in man-ape DNA. Nucleotides, the opposable thumb, or something far fainter? A genealogy of manners, perhaps. Wearing napkins. Asking if this seat is taken.
Elizabeth consults their map. They decide to skip the snake house and camel ride in favor of Discovery Trail. The umbilical breezeway leading to it is filled with games whose primary purpose appears to be the humiliation of the contestant. Hash marks dare them to attempt a standing jump farther than the wallaby’s. Measurements ask them to compare their wingspan to the bald eagle’s. A twenty-yard-dash track, complete with a digital stopwatch, invites them to race an imaginary emu. They walk slowly, wanting to belly up to each challenge as though, in failing, they will once again appreciate humanity’s cerebral consolation prize.
Discovery Trail begins its winding path in an ingeniously landscaped grove, an oasis of stillness and pollen-soaked quiet. The ground is mulched with huge sodden wood chips. Everywhere they turn they are met with explosions of elephant grass and artfully sheared shrubbery and tropical flowers, botanical exotica, once separated by continents, drinking from the same root system. Several fingershaped ponds hem them in, make shunting the trail an impossibility. Elizabeth shrieks as a butterfly, the largest, hairiest, most malevolent butterfly he’s ever seen, flutters near her face. Franklin bats it away, its weight slapping against his palm with an unsettling, velvety density. She embraces him, laughing, and, for that moment, he knows his darkly wrought love for her is irreversible, embered and glowing, hot as the day it was hammered.
She leads him happily to the trail’s proper starting point, a steep tunnel-gouged strip of turf infested with prairie dogs. They are wild-eyed ravenous little monsters, scuttling in and out of their holes’ crumbly passageways, chattering and whistling to one another. Some animals, he thinks, seem not to mind so much. Nothing would ever hurt them here. Captivity’s sole bonus.
He looks over at her. She is smiling, the sun a pale gloss on her face. “Did you love Aaron?” Why he says this now he doesn’t know. It is a question he’s never asked her before, for dread of her answer. Either of them.
She turns to him with a look of pinch-eyed betrayal that is replaced instantly with the recognition that she owes him an answer. She looks away. “I don’t know. I thought I did.” She empties her lungs with a ponderous sigh, her hair aglow in smooth lemony light. “Yeah. I did.”
They step onto the planks of Discovery Trail’s one bridge, a wooden fairy-tale construction, curved and whimsical. He glances over the rail to see a flotilla of dark, snake-headed turtles floating beneath them. When he turns back to her she is chewing dents into her lip.
“Why did you ask me that?”
His mind fills with cue cards. To know. To know why you left me. To know why I came back. To know the capacity of your heart. To know if this is our last day together. To know if it was a needless death after all. His hands find their way into pockets made roomy by a month of steady weight loss. He shrugs, the tacked-up shreds of his insides unfurling like banners.
At the other side of the bridge, Discovery Trail becomes a zoo without cages or pens, the realm of animals whose escape risk is low. An Australian goose, tall, violet, and dapper-looking, waddles alongside Elizabeth with the pride of a freedman. Peacocks made fat by castaway popcorn trail behind them, pecking hopefully at their footprints. They stop at a thin rope fence. Twenty yards away, beyond a ditch he knows must be deeper and wider than it appears, wallabies and emus wander together with the unease of unfamiliar party guests. The wallabies do not walk as much as skulk, wearing faces of sloe-eyed, mischievous kangaroos. The emus are flightless heaps of black feather above sallow, implausibly muscular legs. Their kneecaps are like small stunted heads. He remembers reading, somewhere, that emus are feared for their rib-breaking kicks. Or is it ostriches? He can’t recall. He used to know so much. And he thinks, not for the first time, of the job he’d left behind.
After college he was a model of unemployability, his single skill, his sole grace, an ability to read books well. He’d sent out résumés like doves in search of dry land. None returned. Then he saw a campus poster for English-teaching positions in the former Soviet Union. Qualifications, helpfully, were not needed. Within weeks he was interviewed, and within days of his interview he had accepted their offer of placement. Before leaving he proposed to Elizabeth, her acceptance filling them both with a Quaker’s inner peace in the face of separation. In Kyrgyzstan, his foolhardy resolve reaped unforeseen rewards. Parents from all over Bishkek approached him to teach their children. He learned passable Russian and sparkling Kyrgyz. He hiked the lower reaches of cloud-topped mountains and rafted rivers he convinced himself no American had ever seen. He learned to grow outraged and excited by a tiny nation’s parochial shock waves, rumblings that only occasionally managed to stir the world’s busy obliviou
s remainder. When he told his school that he had to leave, that he was experiencing personal problems at home, they offered everything they could to keep him there. His own lovely apartment, rather than a small rented room. A salary additional to that which his organization paid him, money that would have made available every possible Bishkek luxury: peanut butter, a motorcycle, even, if it came to that, the women he often saw trolling the city’s better restaurants and hotels. How easy it had been to spurn the empty satisfaction of the known. He knows now that all mistakes are made with such perfect confidence.
He gestures. “That emu could just hop that ditch and go bananas out here, couldn’t it? Kick little kids from now to St. Patrick’s Day.”
She nods sagely. “Ah, yes. The savage emu.” But she thinks about it, her eyes slitting. “Maybe they’re tagged. Electronically.”
Tagged. Technology again. Franklin is inexplicably saddened. At least with cages one knows where one stands. He does not know why, really, he hates technology, a hatred Kyrgyzstan had only hardened. Perhaps, like any other bigot, he needs hatred’s reflexive, vulgar reassurance of preservation.
They continue their exploration of Discovery Trail, stopping to gaze up at a pair of red pandas snoozing in the treetops. These creatures are a curious dog-fox blend, the stopgap work of a stagnant evolution. “Cute,” she says, just as one of them yawns to reveal a wicked mouthful of yellowy incisors. Franklin laughs, too hard, and Elizabeth walks ahead, leaving him there. They police opposite sides of the trail, taking in the next few stops alone. Franklin is staring with unseemly fascination at a porcupine snacking upon a twitching grasshopper when he hears Elizabeth say, “Well, this is depressing.”
He turns. She is standing before the bald eagle exhibit, shaking her head and making soft, aghast sounds. Twenty feet ahead of her, ballasted by talons clutched around the thin trunk of a wind-cripple sapling, sits a bald eagle. No. Not sits. Not stands, either. There is no satisfactory verb for its nonflight state. Franklin feels an unaccountable quickening of his pulse. This is just a bird, after all. But bird is wholly unable to communicate the essence of this animal. It is as wide in the torso as he is, invincibly silent, motionless. Its bright yellow beak ends in a sinister down-turned spike. The eagle seems somehow aware of its national-mascot status.
Elizabeth’s distress has only deepened. “God. It’s so sad.”
Gently Franklin turns her five degrees to the left. “Have a look at the plaque.”
This eagle’s foot was caught in a trap set to catch fur bearing animals. In addition to its foot injury, it experienced a wing injury which prevents it from flying. We are caring for this eagle because it cannot live in the wild anymore.
“I don’t care,” she says, throwing up her arms. “They should just kill it, then. Put it out of its misery. You can’t take care of something just because it’s hurt.” By the last word, she is shouting with gallant conviction. A nearby family shies away with telepathic simultaneity.
Franklin wills the anger from his voice. “You didn’t seem too torn up about that pigeon. Or those emus.”
His refusal to allow her this hypocrisy summons wide-eyed hatred. “It’s different,” she says.
He turns back to the crippled eagle. The sky above it seems as open and blue as a taunt. Perhaps all we owe those we love are nods when confronted with vanity, smiles in exchange for blind sanctimony. Never itemizing. Never using weakness as collateral. Why, he wonders, should love need signifiers? True love. An inexplicable qualification, a near tautology. There is, after all, no true hate, no brotherly indifference, no puppy lust. We engrave love with names to preserve it in the hierarchy of our memory, the most absolutist graveyard. We name it so that it might not die. His voice sinks to a pitch of détente. “Maybe it likes it here.”
“What choice does it have?” she says, bitterly rhetorical.
“Come on,” he says, after a moment. “One more stop.” He takes her cold, limp hand, but she doesn’t budge, her sandals rooted to the ground. He simply looks at her and tugs her lifeless arm. Finally she shakes her head, her face speeding from fury to composure in a heartbeat. They are living by that heartbeat, minute by minute. Nothing is promised beyond that.
He remembers, now, reading in the Daily Journal how Potter’s Park had volunteered for the yearlong gig of babysitting an elderly Siberian tiger named Ajax while the Cincinnati Zoo remodeled. A small block of text buried behind AP bulletins from Srebrenica and Tehran. For some reason he knows that the Cincinnati Zoo saw the last passenger pigeon die under its vigil. My God: Why does he know this? A book, he recalls, read months ago. A history of zoos, one of the hundred titles quietly acidizing on the shelves of the American Chamber of Commerce’s tiny Bishkek library.
Ajax has been given Potter’s Park’s celebrity suite. Franklin wonders if, somewhere in the zoo’s untrafficked bowels, there is a lightless cell filled with a displaced brown bear. Ajax’s grounds are as rolling and wide open and dandelion splotched as an upper-middle-class lawn. A farrago of long Stonehengish slabs of rock form a shelter beneath a shady stand of trees near the back. The cat makes good use of its space, stalking imperially from one quadrant to another, telegraphing its direction changes with a head-lifting sniff of the air. Ajax’s muscles, all of them, from the long plates of his flank to the tight bunches around his neck, are splendid enough to trigger pinwheels of creationist awe. His stripes are brilliantly diverse, some tapering into spear-heads, others jagged like lightning bolts, others yet arabesque swirls. Age has given over Ajax’s coat to an uncertain gray-edged white. Elizabeth is breathless, drilling her fingers into his hand. This is the only animal they’ve seen that seems to think of its captivity as temporary.
“Wow,” she says simply. “Look at him. It’s like he’s biding his time or something.”
Nothing alive, it occurs to him, can be truly broken. Suddenly, as though testing her, he lets go of Elizabeth’s hand. Without hesitating she stuffs it under her armpit and shivers.
He stares at Ajax. His long, unkempt whiskers are filthy with curds of meat. Who trims them? It seems a question in search of a punch line: Where does a two-ton elephant sit? Ajax, he thinks. From the Greek, of course, its journey into the King’s English leaving it as roughed up and unrecognizable as the name Jesus would be to a first-century Galilean. Aias, from aiai: pain that is selfinflicted. A useful distinction. Aias the solider who did not know when to stop fighting.
Elizabeth looks over at him as though she doesn’t know what’s just happened. As though the casket in her mind has not just been filled. “Seen enough wildlife?”
The day’s heat clogs his throat. He nods.
Her smile trembles. “Let’s go home?” In the final syllable is a terrible cognizance that tears her smile in two. Home. A reflex word, summoned by striking a shared joint now withered and dead. A certainty they can at last share. After an awful half-second hesitation, she squeezes his bicep and walks away.
He wonders, as he follows her, where he will go. What he will do. But he feels a supernal calm, a numbing reconfiguration of his chemistry. He falls behind, until they no longer have even the illusion of walking together. When, much later than love would have allowed, she finally turns to find him, to pick out his face from the sudden orbiting crowd, he feels latitudes away from her, his radar gone black, at an utter loss to name this loss. Her eyes find his. She smiles. There you are. Are you coming? As his hand lifts, he knows nothing but the solace he will take from the sad, lovely girl who comes to him, sometimes, behind his eyes, and tells him how much she loves him. And he will live, for a little while, on that imagined bit of love, until he no longer needs it, or her, or the girl whose face she wears. This girl. You.
Author’s Note
These stories were written in the following order: “Aral” (1997), “The Ambassador’s Son” (1997), “God Lives in St. Petersburg” (1998), “Animals in Our Lives” (1999), “Expensive Trips Nowhere” (2000), and “Death Defier” (2002). Students of Central As
ia will note that many of the stories misrepresent not a few of the region’s factual particulars. The United Nations has never dispatched to the Aral Sea anything like Amanda Reese’s doomed troupe of scientists from “Aral,” for instance. “The Ambassador’s Son” and “God Lives in St. Petersburg” fiddle creatively with the geography of Tashkent and Samarkand, respectively. “Expensive Trips Nowhere” affronts as boring the Almaty of 1997 or so, not the vibrant, interesting city of today. “Death Defier” describes the uncertain situation between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance in mid-November of 2001; while it is, in some ways, reflective of what was happening during that time in northern Afghanistan, no Afghan or Tajik folk remedy I have ever heard about involves medicinal grass. (The folk remedies of which I am aware are, if anything, far weirder.) These and other distortions—while we are at it, the Potter’s Park Zoo of “Animals in Our Lives” will surely disarm anyone who has visited the actual zoo in East Lansing, Michigan—are intentional.
The Russian in this book has been transliterated in accord with written rather than spoken Russian—with two exceptions: “sevodnya” (today) for “segodnya” and “shto” (what) for “chto.” I thank Boris Fishman, Minsk’s loss and our gain, for his help here.
“Expensive Trips Nowhere” draws heavily on (and in two places directly from) Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”; Viktor’s memories were helped by Svetlana Alexievich’s Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War. “God Lives in St. Petersburg” is indebted to the Pauline scholarship of Wayne A. Meeks. “Death Defier” was strengthened by readings of Sherwin B. Nuland’s How We Die and Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva’s The Bang-Bang Club.
