Hall of Small Mammals

by Thomas Pierce

  “Sorry,” she shouted to no one in particular, then tried to smile at Bert and Delia. She was pretty but pretty like a model: flat-chested and vaguely androgynous. She strapped into a seat across from them. Soon they were in the air and headed for the coast, the city sliding away beneath them.

  Their headphones crackled. “This won’t take too long,” a gravelly voice said. It was the pilot. Bert realized that they could talk to each other, thanks to the headset intercom system. The new passenger stared down at her cell phone and a wad of mascara-stained tissue. Presumably she was out here for the same reason, to say goodbye to someone, to another one of the infected victims. She looked up and caught Bert studying her.

  “Kind of an odd way to meet, isn’t it?” she asked him.

  Bert nodded.

  “You don’t look much like him,” she said. “Just a little bit, around the mouth maybe. Chin, too.”

  Bert didn’t say anything.

  “I’m Cecilia,” she said.

  “Have we met?” Delia asked.

  “No, but I just assumed—” She looked at her hands, then back at Delia. “I guess it makes sense. You weren’t that close, were you?”

  “Did he tell you that?” Bert asked. “That we weren’t close?”

  Cecilia made a face like she might cry. She fidgeted in her seat. “No, sorry,” she said. “It was just my impression. What do I know, you know? I didn’t mean to—”

  The helicopter banked left, and Bert felt his stomach drop. The sky was cloudless. Below he could see whitecaps spitting and foaming.

  “Almost there,” the pilot said.

  A long gray metal ship was coming into view. It was a tremendous boat, the size of a football field and stacked high with containers of all colors: blue, red, purple, orange. As the helicopter descended and spun around the ship, Bert spotted another, smaller boat, tethered to the container ship by bulky cables that dropped beneath the water. The big ship was towing the smaller one.

  “That’s it,” the pilot said. “The little boat. That’s where the bodies are.”

  “Bodies?” Cecilia asked. “As in, plural? As in, more than one?”

  “That’s correct. I think we’re at five now.”

  “Shit,” she said, appealing to Delia and Bert. “Fuck, can you believe any of this? It’s unreal.” She dabbed the corners of her eyes with the tissue. “I’m not sure if this trip was a good idea or not.”

  “I’m sorry,” Delia said, “but I have to ask. Were you . . . with Rob?”

  She nodded. “Off and on. Mostly on. Before he left for his last trip, on.”

  The helicopter circled the smaller boat a few times.

  “I don’t see any people on deck,” Delia said.

  “They’re keeping the bodies isolated,” the pilot said. “No one living is allowed on board.”

  Bert had a clear view down to the boat. He could see a metal ladder leading up to a small, empty captain’s deck. He could see a metal door with a crusty porthole. The sunlight glinted off the metal and the water with the same blinding sparkle that made it difficult to look down for very long without his eyes watering. The pilot advised them to say their goodbyes if they hadn’t already because they were about to head back to the base. In truth, Bert felt no closer to his brother’s death out here than he had back on land. But he needed to let go. His brother’s story would have to end here at sea in the belly of an unmanned boat. The helicopter pulled away from the ship and the water, and Cecilia craned her neck to keep sight of it. “That’s it?” she asked, frustrated. “What happens next?”

  “Nothing,” the pilot said. “Nothing happens next.”

  “I thought we’d get a little closer,” she said. “I don’t understand. It’s not like they can keep him out here forever.”

  The pilot nodded. “This is only a temporary solution. Until they figure out a better one.”

  Cecilia closed her eyes. “It’s almost like I can feel him,” she said. “It’s, like, this terrible feeling that he’s trapped out here.”

  Delia reached for the woman’s hand, but the straps constrained her to the chair. Bert wondered if Cecilia really did feel Rob’s presence, if there was something closed inside of him that prevented him from feeling it too. He twisted for a final view of the two ships, memorizing all the details he could, the rust and corrosion and salt stains, the antennas, the arrangement of the containers. He was constructing a reliable image that he could refer to months from now, when this helicopter ride would no doubt begin to seem more like a dream than a memory.

  “Goodbye, Rob,” Cecilia said, and tossed a piece of paper out the window.

  “What was that?” Bert asked her.

  Cecilia was looking out the window, watching the paper twirl and disappear. “I’ve met someone else.” She turned to them and grimaced. “Is that awful of me?”

  “Well, it’s been half a year,” Delia said but didn’t say whether she thought that a long or short amount of time.

  “This is it for me,” Cecilia said. “This has to be it. It’s not healthy to dwell on this for too long.”

  Bert nodded and Delia said, “For us too. Absolutely. This is goodbye. That’s what I keep telling Bert. We have to move on. Right, Bert?”

  “Right,” he said. “Yes.”

  The helicopter banked left, and they fell forward into their seat belts. For a moment Bert feared the pilot was trying to toss them, but then the craft evened out, and they were on their way home.

  • • •

  His oldest daughter was visiting from out West the day three large cardboard boxes showed up on the doorstep. They contained some of his brother’s belongings, the tapestries and photographs from his apartment, the stone Ganesha. He paraded it into the kitchen, where his wife and daughter were boiling water for tea.

  “No,” Delia said. “Absolutely not. Not in this house.”

  “Oh, he’s not so bad,” his daughter said, holding it under its lowest arms like a toddler. “He’d make a pretty good doorstop, I’ll bet.”

  “I’m taking him to work,” Bert said to Delia. “You won’t have to ever look at him again, I promise.”

  “You’ll scare off all the customers,” Delia said, pouring water into mugs. “People will lose their appetites. The business will go under.”

  It had been almost a year since their helicopter ride, and in that time he’d scrapped plans for a fourth Pop-Yop franchise and sold his third location to its manager, a nice young girl who, he had to admit, deserved most of the credit for its recent success. Bert wasn’t ready for retirement, not yet, but he could feel himself losing steam. He had plenty of savings. He and Delia had even talked about traveling more, possibly on a cruise, in the Caribbean or in the Baltic or, eventually, both. He imagined himself standing on the lido deck with a cigar and seeing, in the gray distance, his brother’s ship. Wouldn’t that be something, brothers on tandem ships.

  Rob was out there, somewhere. Mrs. Oliver, who’d been emailing him less and less frequently, sometimes wrote Bert notes that included only GPS coordinates. To keep track of his brother’s movements, he bought a small world map that he could fold and keep in his wallet. He recorded Rob’s route as a series of dots across the latitudinal and longitudinal lines. His brother traveled south across the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, and then east across the Indian Ocean, where he was transferred to a military plane and flown to an undisclosed location off the Australian coast. He was there for a full six months before details surfaced that he was on the move again, this time north to a research facility off the coast of Japan.

  There, they dipped and froze Rob’s body in a mixture of gelatin and water and then cut the entirety of him into wafer-thin sheets. Each slice, only a millimeter thick, was scanned and digitized. Scanning one layer meant obliterating the previous one, and by the end of the process, Mrs. Oliver explained, ther
e was nothing left of him, as he’d been ground up into a fine and invisible dust, neutralized and vacuumed into nonexistence.

  God forbid Rob should ever rise from the dead: Bert wrote this to Mrs. Oliver with a glint in his eye, as a joke, but after pushing Send, he realized it was no joke at all. Some part of him really did wonder if there was something to it, to the idea of a physical resurrection, of the roaming spirit’s future need for its body.

  Mrs. Oliver never addressed that particular concern, not explicitly, but she did say that she didn’t want Bert to worry. In fact, she saw no reason why Bert shouldn’t get his own copy of the slides. His brother was computerized now and, as a digital entity stored on a number of servers, he would quite possibly outlast them all.

  And so she began transmitting his brother electronically as a tremendous file that contained over two thousand high-resolution images. The software that assembled them did so in real-time, and over the course of an afternoon Bert watched his brother load onto his computer, the layers stacking into a familiar shape—toes, feet, ankles, legs, knees, all of it adding up to . . .

  . . . to what, exactly? Entire parts, he realized, were missing: an arm, a section of shoulder, his mouth, an eye. Though Bert could flip through his brother’s body like the pages of a book, could click down through the pale skin, could rotate each bone and navigate the world of his organs, Rob remained an incomplete specimen, a redacted document. When he let Mrs. Oliver know this, she was embarrassed to admit that she hadn’t yet secured the rights to certain slices, the scans of which were currently on lockdown for reasons she couldn’t disclose.

  To Bert, this latest—and possibly final—hiccup was so absurd he considered breaking off communication with Mrs. Oliver altogether. He printed out his brother’s incomplete naked body on his office printer and called up Mrs. Oliver. “You’ve done all you can,” he told her. “And I’m grateful for that.”

  “We’ll get the clearance,” she said. “Eventually. I promise you that.”

  The stone Ganesha was on the shelf above Bert’s desk, and he stood up from his roller chair so that he was eye-level with it. “And I don’t doubt you,” he said to Mrs. Oliver, cradling the hot phone between his ear and shoulder so that he could fold up the printout of his brother and stick it under the statue. It was off-balance now and seemed to lean forward. Bert stepped back and bounced the floor to make sure the statue wouldn’t come tumbling off the shelf. It seemed sturdy enough.

  Mrs. Oliver was still on the line, reiterating how committed she was to securing the rest of the files and completing the process. She would be there for him, she said, almost pleasantly. She would continue to work on his behalf with the powers-that-be. “More as I have it,” she said, and hung up.

  Hall of Small Mammals

  The zoo, finally, was going to let the public see its baby Pippin Monkeys.

  “I bet we won’t be able to get very close,” Val said. Like always, he had on his blue backpack, the one that contained what I understood to be his novel-in-progress, plus his supply of granola bars, arrowroot cookies, popcorn, and insulin injections. The water bottle clipped to the side of the backpack was metal and shiny in the cloudless afternoon heat. Val was my girlfriend’s twelve-year-old son, and I wanted him to like me.

  We were at the back of a very long line that began near the Panda Plaza and wound all the way around the Elephant House. Nobody was very interested in the elephants or the pandas at the moment. Everyone was at the zoo for the baby Pippins. If just one of the three Pippin Monkeys survived to maturity, it would apparently be a major feat for the zoo, since no other institution had been able to keep its Pippins alive for very long in captivity. The creatures came from somewhere in South America. They were endangered and probably would go extinct soon. But before they did, Val wanted to see one up close: the gray fuzzy hair, the pink face, the giant empty black eyes. Val wanted to take a picture to show his friends.

  “I can turn off the flash,” he said, messing with his camera phone. We had just passed a sign that banned all photography once we were inside the Hall of Small Mammals, where the Pippins were on display for one weekend only. “No one will notice,” he said.

  “Just be covert about it,” I said, though I didn’t really approve. Generally I don’t condone rule-breaking of any kind. I’ve always been this way. At the airport, when there’s a line roped off for the check-in counter, I will walk the entire maze, back and forth, even if I’m the only one there to see me do it. If my car barely protrudes into a nonparking zone, I will drive for miles in search of another spot.

  Val tapped his sneaker on the asphalt, steaming from the earlier spray of the sprinklers. By this point we’d been waiting for almost an hour and had not even passed the Elephant House. I tugged my shirt off my sticky back to let in some air. Directly behind us in line, a man with a comb-over fished around in his neon green fanny pack and produced two Wetnaps, one for himself and one for his wife, a somber-looking woman in a zebra-print dress that I gathered she had picked out specifically for this excursion. I watched them unfold their antibacterial napkins with care and scrub every inch of their hands—palms, fingers, creases, wrinkles, even up past the wrists. Watching them groom was exhausting. All of this was exhausting.

  I was ready to give up and go home, but, ever since seeing the color photo of the Pippins in the magazine insert of the Saturday newspaper, Val had talked about little else. It would make him so happy, his mother had said. Val had studied up on Pippins and knew all there was to know about their tool-making intelligence and diet, about the destruction of their leafy forest home in wherever-it-was, about the mysterious malaise that overcame captive Pippins and made reproduction difficult and rare. Frankly, I didn’t want to hear any more about the godforsaken Pippins.

  “So,” I said, trying not to sound bored, “tell me about your novel.” Val looked up at me like I’d just asked him to squash the family hamster.

  “First of all,” he said, “it’s not a novel. It’s a screenplay.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sorry, I was under the impression it was a novel.” I didn’t tell him that his mother had more than once referred to it as Val’s not-so-secret secret novel. “What’s it about?”

  The boy sighed. “Okay,” he said. “So what do you know about sensory deprivation?”

  I admitted that I knew very little about sensory deprivation.

  “Well, you probably won’t get it, then,” he said, and writhed loose from his backpack straps. He took out a granola bar and his insulin kit and then handed me the pack like I was his personal valet, which in a way I suppose I was. “I need to go do this now,” he said. “Don’t get out of line. I’ll be right back.”

  I watched him waddle off toward the bathrooms taking big bites of the bar. Maybe it was his flat dry hair or his tube socks or his white hairless legs, but Val already had the look of a middle-age government employee. I saw nothing of his mother in him, so he must have resembled his father, a man who lived in the same city but whom I’d never met and never would. I’d been dating Val’s mother for only a few months. She worked in the same building as me but for a separate company. Her department did something that involved cardboard tubes. The tubes were different sizes and lengths and colors. They leaned against all the walls and desks on her floor. She didn’t enjoy discussing her work. “That’s not who I am,” she’d say. By the time we broke up, not long after my visit to the zoo with Val, I still hadn’t figured out if her company shipped the tubes or received them or made them or what.

  The couple behind me in line was getting impatient.

  “This is ridiculous,” I heard the man say. “They have a responsibility to keep the line moving, don’t they? How much time do you need in there? One look and go.”

  The woman examined her zoo map, did some calculations on it with a pen from her purse. “We started here and now we’re here,” she said. “That’s about two hundred feet. Div
ide by the time, and we’re moving at a rate of”—she scribbled—“three feet per minute.”

  “And,” the man said, “so what?”

  “That means we should be there in”—she scribbled some more—“seventy-two minutes. At this current rate, I mean.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” the man asked.

  I had to agree with the man. Seventy-two minutes was a lifetime. I checked my watch as we shuffled forward. The zoo would close its gates in two hours. The sprinklers came back on outside the Elephant House ahead of us and large misty clouds floated over the ferns along the walkway, giant ferns with long, sweeping fronds that knocked against the shoes of the few people on their way to see the elephants. I searched Val’s backpack for some hard candy. He had some peppermints and half a bag of peach lozenges, and I helped myself to a handful of those. I also couldn’t resist looking at his screenplay. I suppose that’s why, really, I’d opened the bag in the first place. Just to have a quick peek. I didn’t have to take out the pages to read them. Somehow that made it feel like less of a violation.

  The title page said Prehistory X by Valentine Creel, and it had his home address at the bottom. The story was about time travel, that much I could see right away. Val’s hero was the son of a famous scientist, who in the first scene turned up dead in her lab. I gathered that by using a sensory deprivation tank the hero’s mother had figured out a way to move through time with her mind. Soon, using his mother’s copious notes, the hero was whipped back to the Bronze Age, a scary place populated by gruesome men with painted faces and women with large “cannonball” breasts. Miraculously everyone spoke English. The villain was some sort of tribal chieftain who was holding the mother captive. Yes, she was still alive. I no longer remember how Val explained it scientifically but I think it involved a disembodied mind, forever lost in time.