The Zoo

FiCtion By danieL Wa LL aCe iLLustR ations By h a R Ry BL a iR

We were listening to Vivaldi the night I died, the bed so sof t, so war m, my wife of nearly half-a- cent ur y perched beside me with a cup of ice chips, there to wet my tong ue, my lips. Even though I die at the end of it, this is not a sad stor y, really: I was ver y old, comfor table, cared for, wear y and loved, loved my whole life long, ready to fade into whatever night was waiting for me. A nd of all the moments I might have conjured to accompany me as I was leaving, it was our ver y first date that I recalled.

Clara and I were g rad st udents in English, just classroom f r iends, week s away f rom defending our disser tations — hers on lute music in Shakespeare’s early plays, mine on Mar y Shelly’s Frankenstein and the bir th of moder n science. I’d always liked Clara, but I think ever ybody did. She was smar t but didn’t seem to care that she was, and made the rest of us — who were battling with each other, always bur nishing the my th of our ow n br illiance — seem dumb. She was also f unny, and the k ind of prett y I was draw n to. Her nose was just a little longer than one thought it might have been, her eyes too big. T hey were emerald g reen, though, and rested on her big cheek s like marbles. Her k nees were oversized for her long thin legs, like t wo snakes that

had just swallowed one rabbit each. T he tr uth was she wasn’t really pict ure-prett y at all, but car r ied herself as if she were, or didn’t care that she wasn’t, and that made her more beautif ul than anyone I’d ever seen. She seemed wild to me, beyond any thing I could ever capt ure. I was 27 and looked like a young man overly acquainted with Mar y Shelley’s Frankenstein, by which I mean book ish in a sunstar ved sor t of way, shy around act ual humans, shiny brow n hair, still waiting for the peach f uzz on my upper lip to t ur n to f ur. Somehow she let me k now that she was f ree — “I’ve been k ind of seeing somebody, but now . . . ” A nd she shr ugged.

A nd there we were.

So we decided to go out for a beer one night. I picked her up in the first car I’d ever ow ned, an old Dodge Dar t I’d bought used five years before, beaten and br uised, 210,027 miles and counting. T here was a hole in the passenger side floorboard a mouse could have slipped through, and the eng ine was ser iously flat ulent.

“Nice car,” she said, hopping in. She was wear ing jeans and a T-shir t, var iations on which seemed to encompass her entire wardrobe. “Is it new?”

“Ver y f unny.”

“K idding,” she said. “But ser iously, it’s a real car, r ight?”

“Ha ha.”

“I’m just having f un with you.” She punched me in the shoulder. “But honestly, want me to g ive it a good push? Happy to.”

She went on like this for a little while and stopped just before it became tedious. Maybe just a beat af ter it became tedious. But I was laughing. “For someone who doesn’t even have a car, you have strong opinions about mine.”

“I k id you,” she said. “But ser iously.”

Of f we went to a place called Brother’s, famous for its jukebox and onion r ings and f rost y beer mugs. We slipped into a booth and talked about what g raduate st udents talk about — disser tation directors, an xiet y, our cohor ts and more an xiet y. T hat was the thing: It was fine and f un and comfor table; we just got along so well. Even af ter a few minutes together it felt like we’d been coming to Brother’s forever and talk ing about nothing and laughing — when this g uy appeared, an appar ition mater ializing f rom the dark of the bar beyond us. Tall, wir y, a small face made ang ular by a well-tr immed goatee, and eyebrows like a mossy overhang. Our age. He was wear ing a black jacket and a black T-shir t beneath it and black pants, and I’m assuming black sock s and under wear as well. He sat dow n next to Clara — they clearly k new each other — and he smiled at me and shook my hand. A strong g r ip. Ver y strong.

Clara covered her face with her hands and moaned. “Jeremy,” she said, she sighed. “Jesus. Jesus Jesus Chr ist.”

Jeremy looked at me and rolled his eyes, like we were having so much f un and now Clara has to come and r uin it for us.

“I saw you and I had to say hello,” Jeremy said to her. T hen to me, conspirator ially: “We were together, not too long ago. Clara and I.”

Clara nodded, but it was a g r udg ing nod. I’m sor r y, she mouthed to me.

Jeremy saw her. “You should be sor r y,” he said.

“Please,” she said. “Jeremy. This is not the time or the place for this.”

Jeremy shook his head and shr ugged. “I don’t k now why. T his used to be our place.”

“Our place?” She mocked him. “We came here t wice.”

Someone put t wo quar ters in the jukebox and “R aindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head ” began to play. Clara looked at me. “We should go, R ichard. T his isn’t going to get any more f un than it already is.”

“R ichard,” Jeremy said. “W hat a g reat name. May I call you Dick, Dick ? Great. So, Dick, about how long have you and Clara been an item . . . Dick.”

I didn’t answer. I was in a dif ficult position: Clara and I really weren’t an item, yet; I didn’t feel it was up to me — or in my wheelhouse — to step up and eject the interloper f rom our midst.

But then, slowly, Jeremy’s smile dimmed and died, and he looked at Clara as if she were a hideous thing.

“You’re a coward, you k now,” he said to her. “How could you just . . . disappear? No call back. Nothing. Not cool. Not how you break up with somebody.” He looked at me, back to her. “Just . . . not cool. In case you didn’t k now.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, as if she were about to plunge under water.

Slowly, she exhaled.

“We didn’t ‘break up,’ Jeremy. We were never even really seeing each other, not like that. We were never even — .” She stopped, g iving up the postmor tem. “Listen. I’m sor r y, ok ay? I should have called you or maybe wr itten you back to say thank s and ever y thing, it was g reat while it lasted but a talent-f ree hobo novelist who doesn’t k now the dif ference bet ween a semicolon and an ampersand is just not what I’m look ing for in my life at this time. A ll the best, Clara.”

Jeremy tr ied to rally with a comeback, but he didn’t have one. “I’m not a hobo,” he said. “Just . . . bet ween places.”

“For a year and a half,” Clara said.

Poor Jeremy. He had been defeated. “R aindrops” ended and began again. Jeremy shook his head, stared of f into the faraway-somewhere. He looked like he was standing on the shore of a deser ted island watching the ship that was supposed to save him sail on by.

“Ok ay, well, I feel like it’s time for me to hitch a r ide on the next prevailing wind! But before I go, I have a message for you, R ichard. You’re going to be me one day. You’ll have the time of your life with this one. You’ll be so happy. It’ll be like the world went f rom black and white to color. T hen ever y thing will go to shit and you won’t be happy anymore because Clara will move on, and it will suck for you, just like it’s suck ing for me now.”

By the look in his eyes he was tak ing a moment to relive some of the color f ul times he’d shared with her, and he smiled. “But it will be wor th it,” he said. “Because Clara . . . well, nobody is Clara.”

T hen he stood, and just as quick ly as he had come was gone, a shadow fading away into the dark ness of the bar.

We paid up and lef t and walked to the car in the dusk y quiet. We were a little unsettled.

A breeze r uf fled the trees but fell shor t of the t wo of us, standing on either side of my car now in the g ravel park ing lot. No stars out yet but the moon was r ising, low still and smok y white.

“Well, that sucked,” she said.

“Yeah. Yeah, but — ”

“But what?”

“You have to admire his pluck.”

“I love t hat word,” she sa id. “He’s not pluck y, t houg h. He’s . . . inde c orous.”

“Unseemly.”

“Boor ish.”

L ook ing dow n like there was something on the g round for her to see, her hair fell into her face and it was as if a big CLOSED sig n went up. Even af ter she pushed it back behind her ears it was hard to really see her. “Jeremy,” she said. “Such a mistake. W hat if ever y mistake you ever made followed you around for the rest of your life? Like a parade of mistakes. T he too -small shoes you bought, the undercooked chicken. Jeremy.”

“T hat would suck a lot.”

“I was mean to him.”

“He asked for it.”

“Really?”

I shr ugged my shoulders. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but I was on Clara’s side now. I looked back at Brother’s. I kept think ing Jeremy was going to follow us out here and stab me.

“I think we should make a mistake,” she said.

“Really?”

“We need to do something,” she said. “T hat or go home. A nd I don’t want to go home. L et’s do something st upid that will follow us around forever like undercooked chicken.”

“Sure,” I said, not really sounding like the devil-may- care- cra zy g uy she may have wanted just then. But what to do? I couldn’t think of any thing: I’d always veered to the quiet, safe side of life. But she had an idea.

“You k now what we should do?” she said. “Or what we shouldn’t do, I mean?”

She sat on the hood of the car and waited for me to join her. I did. T his was as close as I’d ever been to her.

“W hat?”

“Go to the zoo.”

T here was a small zoo in Bellingham, somewhere bet ween a real zoo and a place where a bunch of animals had been collected f rom around the world and housed by a larger-than-life intrepid explorer in makeshif t pens and a pit for lions and tigers, a sk inny elephant, a fence for the g iraf fe, a cement island for the monkeys. T he animals didn’t look abused, just disappointed.

“Great idea,” I said. “But it’s closed. It closes at dusk.”

“W ho said any thing about it being open?”

A nd she told me a stor y she’d heard, about an entr y way at the bottom of the 12-foot-high metal fence, one you can slither through with ease, gaining access to the entire place. No alar ms, no cameras. Just you and the animals in the dark.

“I k now the way.”

“Sure,” I said, hoping to impress her with my new found reck lessness. I handed her the keys to the car.

“Really? Ser iously?” she said, like a k id. “You’re up for this?”

Her face was so small I could cup it in one hand, and in the halflight of the park ing lot outside of Brother’s she had the patina of a film f rom the ’40s. I think I was already in love with her. We got in the car and she looked at me, and it was as if she were saying, Are you ready? Because this is happening. If you’re going to wimp out this is your last chance. In just the few minutes we’d been outside night had f ully fallen. A couple of f rat boys came out of Brother’s braying at each other, and the tail end of a song comes out with them — “R aindrops.”

“L et’s do this,” I said.

She st ar te d t he c ar a nd w in ke d at me a s she rev ve d t he eng ine. “Big m ist a ke,” she sa id.

It was a terrifically mugg y night but with the windows down I could feel a cool undercurrent to the air. I remember think ing that one day it would be fall, then winter, then spring and then summer again, and that whatever was about to happen will have happened a long time ago. T he wind made Clara’s hair go wild, half of it flying out the window like streamers on a bicycle, the other half in her mouth and in her eyes, blindfolding her for seconds at a time. “I’ve got this,” she kept saying. “No problem.” T hen she looked at me, mock-scared with a f rightened smile, like the other par t of her was saying, Don’t believe me! T here is a problem! I don’t have this!

She took a sudden t ur n of f of Greene Street, and then the road whipped around to the r ight, up and then dow n, the car beams break ing into what felt like a virg in dark. Just a pine tree forest, a forgotten road, nothing else.

She pulled over to the curb and cut the lights and we were under the cover of night.

“We’re here,” she said.

Gradually the world around me came into focus, and over the trees I could see the throbbing red light at the top of the W R DC radio tower. I positioned myself in the world and I realized we were in fact r ight behind the zoo, near a far m, an overg row n past ure. She put the car in reverse, pulled back, angled it, then t ur ned the lights back on, spotlighting the secret entrance through the fence. She raised her ar ms into the air, fists clenched: victor y.

“You’re prett y impressed with yourself.”

“I am,” she said, nodding. “A s I should be.”

She t ur ned of f the car and threw the keys back to me.

“It’s go time,” she said.

T he hole in the fence was big enough for a mandr ill to crawl through. We got in on all fours. Neither of us said a word but communicated through hand sig nals and raised eyebrows and then suddenly — W hat’s that? Oh. It’s nothing. Continue . . . inching through the ink y dark toward the animal quiet.

T he woods ended, and we were on a path, dir t and g ravel first and then lightly paved uneven asphalt. A yellow light spilled on the elephant cage, that fenced-in patch of hard dir t no bigger than a poor man’s f ront yard. T here was no elephant there now — he or she was sleeping inside. I’d been here a couple of times, throw n a few peanuts over this wall. Clara looked at me. She was so excited she seemed to be vibrating. She leaned in close and stood on her tiptoes to whisperyell in my ear: “We did it!” She held onto my elbow. “But it’s important to stay quiet,” she said. “T hat way they won’t k now we’re not one of them. T hey’ll do things most people never get to see them do.”

It turned out that animals in the zoo at night do what most animals do. T hey sleep. It was absolutely still. T he elephants, the giraf fes, the monkeys, the spiral-horned antelope — they were all asleep. You could hear them; it was the humming sound of a living forest. Blue-black shadows ever y where. An ibis had a bad dream and shrieked, and a striped hyena answered (maybe it was an ibis, maybe a hyena), then it was silence again. W hat lights there were were kept low, and the moon was hidden behind a cloud. It turned out that sneak ing around in a zoo f ull of sleeping animals was not unlike sneak ing around in a zoo

APRIL FICTIONwith not a single animal in it. Clara thought she saw something and gave a little involuntar y gasp and turned and — it was a rabbit. She shr ugged her shoulders, smiled, but I could tell she’d had high hopes for this adventure. It hadn’t lived up to its hype. “We can go now if you want,” she said.

I did want to go. I wanted to be back in the car talk ing about what had just happened, how g reat it was and can you believe that we act ually did that? Clara had no idea how caref ul I nor mally was, how meticulous with my life, had no way of k nowing that I was a man who folded his pants at the crease and ar ranged his shir ts by k ind and, within k ind, color, whose life-plan was to be invisible on command, to follow directions, to go as far as a man with a Ph.D. in Frankenstein could go. So yes, I wanted to leave.

But she was just too defeated.

If this were even our second date I would hug her, even kiss her until my kisses made her smile. A second date meant options. A first date, you couldn’t — I couldn’t — do more than take her hand. There was an old stone wall surrounding a duck pond, and I stepped up on it. It was only 2 feet high. Clara looked up at me and sort of laughed and said, “W hat are you — ?” but before she could finish the sentence I had my hand out and she took it and I pulled her up to stand beside me. “Listen,” I said. She listened and heard the same thing I did: almost nothing at all, just that humming sound. “Now listen,” and with my hands cupped around my mouth I shouted a quote from the book I had memorized: “L earn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”

T hat did the job: T he night blew up. T he animals rose. Plodding out of his concrete bunker pounded the elephant, the cur ious g iraf fes loped into the moonlight, and the island of monkeys began to wildly chatter. Ever y animal was baying and woofing and screeching. T he animal world had awakened — just for us.

“R ichard,” Clara said, still in whisper-mode. Wings flapped in the dark above us, water roiled somewhere nearby. Clara g rabbed my ar m and pulled me close. Our shoulders bumped. “T his is just . . . so g reat!” Her big eyes were wide, the size of saucers for a miniat ure teacup. T he moon, the stars, the sk y, the animals of the Ear th, this beautif ul woman, all here, before me — and I felt as if I had created a moment that had never been created before, never in the histor y of the world. A nd I was shar ing it with Clara.

But I woke up more than the animals. T he zoo act ually had a keeper. I saw him before I heard him, the beam of his super-power f ul flashlight bouncing of f of ever y thing.

“W ho’s t here ?” he c a l le d out , in a de ep voic e. “You’re t respa ss ing, a ssholes. A nd yes, it’s a felony, a nd yes, I w i l l prose c ute. Do not t h in k I won’t. C ourse I’ l l let you sp end some t ime in t he h ipp o p ond first , go dda mn it.” He sounded tired, and ver y serious. T his had gone too far for me, and for Clara. She was f rozen against my side, had stopped breathing I think, statue-still. I took her hand and we jumped down f rom the wall. I had no idea now where the hole in the fence was, but what choice did we have but to tr y and find it? We ran into the woods. I scratched my face on the lower branches of a pine tree and could feel the stripes of blood across my cheeks. But we didn’t stop r unning. T he zookeeper could hear us, of course, and shined the light into the woods following our path. “Come out come out wherever you are, moron,” he said gleef ully. He followed the sound of us, sweeping his light through the forest, coming closer. I had no idea where we were. But we came to a huge tree, and I pulled Clara behind it, wrapping my arms around her until we were as small as t wo people could be. T he light of his flashlight fell all around us, but not on us. We were that close to being seen — inches away f rom being caught and caged. But we were not.

He gave up. “Damn it,” he said to himself now, think ing we were long gone.

T hen he t ur ned around and headed back the way he came.

Still pressed up against me she looked up at me and smiled.

“You did it,” she whispered. “You saved us.” She k issed me on the cheek, but her eyes did not leave mine. “R ichard,” she said, “that was tr uly mag ical.”

And I thought, I actually remember think ing this as we huddled together behind that tree: in 30, 40, 50 years — whenever she buried me — no matter what may have happened through the decades of our life together, this was what I’d remember, this night, the stor y she’d tell too many times to our children, our grandchildren, our oldest f riends, the stor y of that night we broke into the zoo and woke ever yone up. And not because it was the best thing that ever happened to us, but because it was the first. It set the tone, she’d say, for the rest of our lives. T hat night at the zoo we were in our own cocoon, arms encircled, closer than close. She burrowed into me, and we stayed that way for a while, longer than we needed to, until the night returned to its rhythms, until all the wild animals in the world went back to sleep.

So of course, out of all the moments of my life, this would be the one I chose to see me out.

I felt a chip of ice on my lips, a damp cloth on my forehead. I didn’t k now if my eyes were open or closed, but it was all dark now, and getting darker. I found my wife’s hand and held it.

“Clara,” I said. “Oh, Clara!”

Yes, your name was my ver y last word, so sweet I said it t wice.

“Clara?” Gwendolyn said, and she shuddered, seemed to f reeze and harden as if she’d died herself. “R ichard, who is Clara?”

A nd I might have told her, but it was a long stor y f rom a long time ago, and by then it was much, much too late. OH Daniel Wallace is the author of six novels, including Big Fish and, most recently, Extraordinar y Advent ures. He lives in Ch apel Hill, where he directs the Creative Wr iting Program at the Universit y of Nor th Carolina.