Crossing the rest between two lines in an advertisement for rural theater, I found myself in the depths of a fissure. A woman I knew was there as a girl, and at that anti-summit she took a hand and walked away without looking back at me, receding into whatever was behind the bottom. I was drawn out and saw the trench walls, some ten thousand conversations congealed into a rectal texture, and was drawn out further, until I saw myself reading, but not then. The entire fissure had the shape of a decision, one I could have made ten thousand talks ago, or along the way, but not then, when I’d like already to have made it, so that I could be this woman I knew, whom I knew well enough to know I’d never want to be. What I wanted was to choose those things that she had done, I thought, without making a choice.
Berta and I met while watching the ducks in the park. She had already quit her job at the zoo. As though there was a loose detail she might corral through repetition, she told me the story of why she’d left again and again. In some tellings, a monkey had pulled her hair, while in others it had been a coworker, who had blamed it on a monkey, and in others still it hadn’t been her hair but a visitor’s, a child’s, and it hadn’t happened recently at all. The only constants were the hair pulled and an earring with a tiny jewel, which had fallen into a grate in an enclosure. Above all she resented the grate: like her, it shouldn’t have been there.
Now Berta was applying to divinity school, having decided that she should be a chaplain in the air force. Once, she’d asked me if I knew how many zoos this country had bombed. I didn’t and neither did she, but there was a related case that had really marked her. During the Second World War, the governor in Tokyo had ordered that zoo animals be killed preemptively, thinking that the shock would prepare the city for coming hardships. Most of the animals were poisoned, but the elephants understood what was happening; they refused to eat and starved, were starved instead. She said I didn’t want to know what was done with the snakes. I had particular feelings when it came to reptiles, which Berta knew. Even though I didn’t find zoos sad, the closest I’d ever gotten had been while watching a caiman slide down a wet incline in its enclosure. As soon as it got to the bottom, it would climb around to the top again, and it did this over and over. I remember the keeper saying: “We don’t see this sort of play behavior in the wild!” I tried to make eye contact, to let it know I knew something that it knew too, but caimans can only lock eyes one at a time.
Before she left for school, Berta asked me to look after her brother, Sandy, who was serving a 12-year sentence and was quite young. Every other day he’d call and we’d talk about the same six movies that played on tv there, and he’d ask me to download and send pictures of creatures from an online trading card game from as many angles as possible. These he would paste together into three-dimensional paper models. On one call I asked him what kind of animal he’d like as a pet, what real one, and he said a lizard, because they didn’t smell. I brought up the caiman I’d watched, and he explained to me that it wasn’t a lizard. “And that zookeeper was lying,” he said. “They do that in the wild too.”
I didn’t find zoos sad, but I hadn’t been back to one, not even to ask for work. Berta thought I was being too picky, that I’d look good in an exhibit. I said that seemed like it was in bad taste, but she said there were no jobs in good taste. “What about the chaplaincy?” I asked, and she said she hadn’t known there’d be so much reading. The fissure came back to me then, its very depth-tip, and I told her. “You know somebody pulled my hair?” she said after a pause, and I agreed. “The earring never fell in anything,” she admitted. “But the rest was true.”
Serena Keenan Sánchez is living in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared here, before you. She will have a website eventually. For now she has music.
High Horse 