I'm With the Bears

by Mark Martin

  “Let’s just go, Ray,” said the wife.

  “I got a squirt gun,” said the kid, and pulled it out: the size of an assault rifle, bright pink.

  “Don’t even think about it,” said T., and looked at the father. His neck tensed, his hands flexed. “Tell him to put that thing away. I’ll punch your face. I mean it.”

  The man was squaring off, his eyes narrowed. He let his camera rest against his chest, the dangling lens cap swinging.

  “Tell me how to handle my kid? He can squirt his water gun at the bear if he wants to.”

  “You disgusting. Piece. Of shit,” said T.

  The wife tugged urgently on her husband’s sleeve.

  “Come on, Ray.”

  After a moment the family man turned, his wife beside him and the kids ranging around them both; as they turned a corner the kid in camouflage pants whipped around and sneered, sticking up the middle fingers of both hands before he disappeared.

  T. felt the adrenaline surge fade but still he burned. He wanted to hunt them down and punish them. But he did not. He did not utter a word of complaint to the zoo’s management. He was flooded with elation.

  He was elated. This was who he was, he thought; he was a person who would defend, who would swear and threaten and feel the heat and the cliff-edge of opinion. He felt good—better than good. He stood there for seconds, or was it forever?—stood there partway in rapture, struck.

  On its flat rock the bear was still turning blearily round, tossing its head as though trapped in a nightmare. Finally it resettled itself and laid its chin on its paws to go back to sleep.

  He went back that night when the zoo was closed, thrilled, as if he was lightly drunk, at the illicitness in himself. It was new. What arrested him in the zoo was the wildness it contained—how far this was from the realm of his competence. He wanted to meet it. He knew the zoo animals lived in cages but nothing more about them except that they were alone, most of them, not only alone in the cages, often, but alone on the earth, vanishing. Their condition was close to what he was trying to grasp, lay somehow at the base of his growing suspicion that the ground was no longer fixed, was shifting beneath him.

  Empire only looked good built against a backdrop of oceans and forests. It needed them. If the oceans were dead and the forests replaced by pavement even empire would be robbed of its consequence. Alone, he thought—a word that came to him more and more, in singsong like a jeer. In the zoo the rare animals might have been orphaned or captured or even born in captivity. He had no idea where they came from, could not know their individual histories. But he knew their position, as he knew his own: they were at the forefront of aloneness, like pioneers. They were the ones sent ahead to see what the new world was like.

  Would they tell what they saw?

  The rarest animal in the zoo was a Mexican gray wolf, the one pictured in the tourist brochure, an animal that was apparently frail and aging. Its fur looked mangy; it had been asleep when he was there earlier. The wolf’s pen, as the sign posted on it told him, was a temporary setup during construction of a new exhibit. It was nothing more substantial than a chain-link fence near the road, with barbed wire curling along the top.

  He looked at his shoes: round toes. He should be able to wedge them into the holes. He shoved his flashlight in his pocket, hooked his fingers through the mesh and pulled himself up, kicking for purchase. His feet flailed against the fencing and his fingers were already bruising, imprinted with purple lines. Speed was the key, he thought, move quickly. He always had reasons for each single action, but he had no good reasons for doing this. Was he irrational? But it lifted him. He would follow the question to its resolution, even if the question was unconscious.

  He was not even all the way up the six-foot fence when he regretted his tactics. He had to get down from here, the pressure on the pads of his fingertips, which he feared were going to be sliced clean through. In a scramble he grabbed the metal frame the wire was stretched on and went up and over it, catching barbs on his chest and thighs. His leg, halfway over, was tangled in the wire, and struggling he lost his foothold. Falling he tried to launch himself forward, away from the barbs.

  When he recovered, on the ground with an aching neck and shoulders, he had a sharp pain in his leg. Sitting up he saw he had grazed his calf on a cactus as he fell. Through the thin cotton of his pants it was bleeding, and in the dark he could see white spines sticking through the fabric. He stood unsteadily, bracing himself against the fence; he could make out almost nothing. He walked around the cactus, lifting his flashlight. In the dark he could imagine not only wolves but almost anything, a secret menagerie. He was filled with the rush of this, with the idea of myriad creatures materializing from the blackness. Their coats glowed, their faces were both benign and predatory. The faces of animals were amazing in that, tongues of velvet and claws of ice. What were they?

  There was a gate, padlocked; a metal box built into the base of the fence; a dry log, a thin tree. Doves rose suddenly from the tree, a flurry of hysterical wingbeats. He jumped.

  His leg was aching.

  He began to point his beam at bushes and the bases of trees, where holes might be tucked. Finally he flicked off the light and squatted down. Without the glare his eyes adjusted and finally he apprehended a shape that was not a bush or tree, hunkered down against the fence, low and dim.

  He got up silently and picked his way closer, still without the flashlight on, his eyes on the ground while he threaded his way between bushes. Closer and closer till he pointed the flashlight toward the ground in front of the wolf’s hunched shape and touched the switch with his thumb. A quick yellow flicker of eyes and then the wolf moved fluidly, fleeing along the fence. It went away from him, into a corner where it remained.

  He would not get closer. The wolf would not allow it.

  The next morning he removed the small spines from his leg. The wound was throbbing, but he did not mind; there was something he savored in it, pinching the hair-thin fibers hard between the tweezer edges. The sensation was fine and sharp as a grass blade. It satisfied him.

  He took two aspirins and showered. In his socks and his shirt, standing in front of the in-room coffeemaker, he thought of the old wolf again. Animals were self-contained and people seemed to hold this against them—possibly because most of them had come to believe that animals should be like servants or children. Either they should work for men, suffer under a burden, or they should entertain them. He had strained against the wolf’s aloofness himself, resenting the wolf for its insistence on distance. He had felt it almost as an insult, and inwardly he retaliated.

  But then he was self-contained too: he had a private purpose, a trajectory, and no one had license to block it. It might be obscure even to him, but that obscurity was his own possession. The old wolf’s unwillingness to be near him was fully forgiven by the light of day and in fact the joke was on him. Wariness was simply its way of life, having nothing to do with him. It had not been robbed of this quality, though it was caged and it was solitary: it retained its essence. It did not attempt to ingratiate itself. It did not have diplomacy.

  He thought he recalled feeling, in the flash of its eyeshine, a similar flash in himself—a fleeting awareness that in the wolf’s gaze there was a directness unlike the directness of men.

  Wolves were gone, the educational sign on the cage had read, from most of the country. They were the villains of fairy tales, and there had been vast campaigns to exterminate them all across the continent. A slaughter of the wolves, along with the buffalo. Long before that in the late Pleistocene, according to the sign, the Clovis people had caused the extinction of the cave bear, the giant beaver, the saber-tooth tiger, the horse and the mastodon.

  He buttoned his shirt without looking at his fingers, eyes on a weather map on the television, a smiling weatherman pointing and gesturing. He had wanted the old wolf to come close to him, head down, softening. As though all wild animals could one day be tamed—as though this was an as
pect of all of them, this one-day-tamable quality, and their wildness was nothing more than coyness or a mannerism. As though other animals should not only submit to people but behave like them, comport themselves with civility.

  Privately, he thought, at the heart of it, you wanted animals to turn to you in welcome. It was a habit gained from expecting each other to do this, from expecting this of other people and only knowing people, not knowing anything beyond them. That was another kind of solitude, the kind where there was nothing all around but reflections.

  And what about the endless differences of the animals, their strange bodies? Many legs, stripes, a fiery orangeness; curved teeth or tentacles, wings or scales or sky-blue eggs . . . instead of looking at the wolf as an animal he never knew and never could, as with the sacred and the divine, he had fallen into the trap. He had wanted it to lick his hand and lope along beside him.

  The animals were very busy with dying, not only one at a time but in sweeps and categories. This he found increasingly distressing. He began to comb newspapers for the latest word about animals vanishing; he began subscribing to magazines. In magazine pictures he saw animals far away, in the places where they had been born and either continued to live or began to die off. Some were in backgrounds of green, others yellow, others a bright turquoise. White now and then, Siberia or the Antarctic. These were the places of the animals’ origin, warm green, dry yellow, the wet deep blue.

  Then there was the gray of human habitation. The blue places were turning to brown, the yellow places to dust, the green places to smoke and ashes. Each time one of the animals disappeared—they went by species or sometimes by organizations of species, interconnected—it was as though all mountains were gone, or all lakes. A certain form of the world. But in the gray that metastasized over continents and hemispheres few appeared to be deterred by this extinguishing or even to speak of it, no one outside fringe elements and elite groups, professors and hippies, small populations of little general importance. The quiet mass disappearance, the inversion of the Ark, was passing unnoticed; on this hot globe, a third of all species would soon be gone. The flocks of passenger pigeons that had once darkened the sky, Teddy Roosevelt on safari shooting hundreds of animals from a train . . . he saw a list from one of Roosevelt’s trips to Africa in 1909. Five hundred and twelve animals shot, including seventeen lions, eleven elephants, twenty rhinos, nine giraffes, forty-seven gazelles, eight hippos, and twenty-nine zebras. George V of England had killed a thousand birds in one day for sport; in a year the Roman emperor Titus had nine thousand captured animals killed in popular displays.

  He soon learned to recognize the signs of an animal’s imminent disappearance. Some were tagged or collared or photographed, some monitored by bureaucrats. Sometimes a group or individual took up the cause of an animal or a plant and could muster the rationale for a lawsuit, and often the courts favored the victim; but the victim remained a victim and for each victim whose passing was noted thousands more slid away in the dark. From where he stood they succumbed with great ease; from where he stood they had always been invisible anyway.

  Animals in the outside were far from his life, but zoos were close at hand. Zoos would be his study.

  His practical lessons took place at nighttime, which left his days free for commerce. At first he read mail-order manuals but soon they left him at loose ends and he hired a locksmith to teach him. The locksmith, a Brazilian, came to his apartment twice a week and brought his full toolkit: hooks, rakes, diamonds, balls, tension wrenches. They practiced on T.’s doors and cabinets, on a variety of locks the locksmith installed for the purpose.

  After the lesson the locksmith would often stay for a nightcap; T. had assured him that he would not use his hard-won knowledge to commit crimes against persons or property, and though he had the impression the locksmith could not care less whether he used his powers for good or for ill the friendly assurances served as a bridge between them. Criminal trespass would be the limit, he said jokily. The Brazilian stayed to drink with him on Fridays and sometimes played a few hands of cards.

  His nights were not always free, however. He was still not delivered of Fulton, his investor, despite the fact that he had professed bursitis to get out of playing racquetball; Fulton’s wife had taken him under her wing. As a young man with no clear defects or blemishes, with his health and his wealth and a full head of hair, he was apparently eligible and became an object of desire for many women newly introduced to him.

  It was Janet’s calling to bring him and these wanting women together. Janet did not believe it was feasible to be single; to Janet a bachelor eked out his living on the margins of society, orbiting the married couples wild-eyed and feral as a homeless man at a polo party. A single man, to Janet, was superior in the social hierarchy only to a single woman—this last a life form that was repellent but fortunately short-lived, naked and glistening as it gobbled its way out of its larval cocoon.

  Because Fulton was an investor T. could not refuse his hospitality on every occasion, and so at least once a week he found himself a dinner guest at Fulton’s house in Brentwood. It was an article of faith with Janet that when men brought wealth to the table women must bring good looks; and since this was Los Angeles there was always someone sitting across from him—not too much older than he, for Janet had imposed a limit of thirty to allow time for courtship, engagement, and a brief honeymoon followed by reproduction—whose hair had been bleached, breasts lifted, or nose pinched into narrowness above delicately flared nostrils.

  Janet was a homemaker by choice, a Texas debutante whose father had gifted her with a dowry that had made her attractive to a legion of Fultons; what distinguished her own Fulton was chiefly that he had beaten other suitors to the punch. So the women she brought to meet T. were seldom burdened by such useless accessories as an academic record or a sense of social purpose. They tended to be certain of their attractiveness and accustomed to admiration; they were eager to begin a conversation with him but not always sure where to take it. One of them asked him what he did for a living and then, after he told her, smiled, twirled her hair around a finger and gazed at him glassily, as though fully expecting him to run with the discussion from that point onward.

  At first he tried to be polite to show deference to Janet, but as the dinners wore on over the weeks he saw he had to discourage the women, smoothly and cannily, without allowing them to say precisely what it was in his manner that had pushed them away. Janet should see only that the women, despite their initial surge of interest, would never quite warm to him.

  He applied himself thus to the task of quiet repulsion; and as he grew competent at lock-picking the pace of Janet’s dinner invitations began finally to slacken.

  “I don’t know what your problem is, man,” said Fulton as he was leaving one night, following an encounter with an interior decorator named Ligi who had wished to talk only of upholstery. “Why don’t you make a move for once?”

  “Listen, Janet needs to stop setting me up,” said T. gently. “I appreciate her good intentions. But I’m not in the market.”

  “Jesus, you don’t have to marry them,” said Fulton. “But they’re better than K/Y and Carpal Tunnel.”

  “Not to me,” said T.

  “That’s hardcore,” said Fulton.

  In New York for a business meeting he drove to the Bronx at night. The lock was easy. A low metal gate in a grove of thin trees, then a walk across a dark, wide square. Lights reflected on a sea-lion pool.

  On the second lock his fingers slipped nervously, but soon he was in. His neck was wet and his heart rate rapid; he heard the rush of blood in his ears. He slipped the tools back into his pack, stood still and made himself slow his breathing. He had read a zoo press release. “The most endangered mammal in the world, the Sumatran rhinoceros has not bred in captivity since 1889.” Penlight beam focused, he read the card: Dicerorhinus sumatrensis. It was the only one in captivity in the United States and it was a dinosaur; its species had lived for fi
fteen million years and there were only a few hundred left. A female.

  She hauled herself up as he stood there, hauled herself up and walked a few steps away. She was nosing hay or straw, whatever dry grass littered the floor of her room. She gave an impression of oblong brownness. The Sumatran rhinoceros, he had read, liked mud wallows. Here there was nothing but floor.

  He was standing where any zoo patron could stand, and there was no danger or special privilege. Still, no one was around—he was alone with her—and he was content. It was not to claim the animal’s attention that he was here but to let her claim his. She was the only one of her kind for thousands of miles, across the wide seas. What person had ever known such separation?

  The Sumatran rhinoceros reportedly had a song, difficult for the human ear to follow; its song had been mapped and similarities had been found between this song and the song of the humpback whale. It was not singing now.

  Sight was less important to a rhinoceros than to him, he knew that, but she still had to see. He put his hand to his nose, blocking sight between his own two eyes, closing one and then the other. He had read that the vision of many animals was dichromatic; they saw everything in a scheme based on two primary colors, not three. Were they red, he thought, red and blue? He closed his own eyes, heard the rise and fall of his chest and nearby a rustle whose nature he could not discern. Behind the eyelids it was thick and dark but impressions of light passed there, distracting. They passed like clouds he found himself idly drawn to interpret, to fix into the shape of rabbits or swans.

  After a while the rhinoceros sighed. It was a familiar sound despite the fact that they were strangers. He knew the need for the sigh, the feel of its passage; a sigh was not a thought but substituted for one, a sign of grief or affection, of putting down something heavy that was carried too long. In the wake of the sigh he wondered exactly how lonely she was, in this minute that held the two of them. Maybe she saw beyond herself, the future after she had disappeared; maybe she had an instinct for the meaning of boundaries and closed doors, of the conditions of her captivity or the terminus of her line, hers and her ancestors’.