fit and then said, “So you’re the guy with the fever to pick up monkey shit, huh? Send my secretary your name and résumé and everything and I’ll pass it on to Paul. Tell David my skin looks like hell, by the way.” And then he laughed, which made him cough so hard that I had to hold the phone away from my ear.
My interview was at one o’clock, but I walked up to the zoo early to look around. I’d been there once, on a trip to New York with Dad when I was seven, but I didn’t remember anything about the zoo except that it was raining then and that outside the gate a guy in a bright green suit kept wanting to wrap his python around my neck. I also remember Uncle Jacob, who we stayed with that week, telling me that the animals all looked “wretched.” But today it was the sort of day when people talk about the weather without seeming like they have nothing to say, sunny with a few popcorn clouds, and even homeless people looking healthy, almost. The path into the park smelled like something sweet that could have been either pollen or pee.
In a tunnel past the ice-cream vendors, a bald Asian man sat with his legs crossed on a stool, playing a bendy-sounding instrument that only had one string. I stood listening for a minute, and there wasn’t anything you’d walk away humming, but if you listened long enough, it started to sound like a lonely old woman singing. I put all the change I had in his case, and right away he stood up smiling and held out his instrument to me. Did he think I wanted to buy it? Borrow it? I was wearing one of my new shirts and David’s gray pants, so he might have thought I was a banker looking for a hobby. He kept shaking the bow at me, grinning bigger and bigger each time, but he wouldn’t say a word. “No, thanks,” I said. “You sound really good, I’m going to go.” And so I just walked away—feeling not much better than if I’d robbed him—while he stood there shaking his instrument at me and smiling.
A sleepy black guard let me into the zoo for free when I told him I was here for an interview, and just past the entrance was a tank and a sign that said, WATCH OUR SEA LIONS HAVE LUNCH! Kids were clustered around the glass, throwing popcorn in the water or struggling while their parents smeared suntan lotion on their faces. The sea lions—I coultank and a sign that said,d see four of them—had huge bright eyes, long whiskers, and skin like a wet suit. The tank smelled like fish and chemicals, and was as big as a swimming pool, shaped like a stop sign. In the middle was a tall island of brown rocks, and a couple of the sea lions lay there in the sun. There was just a short glass wall between me and the ones who were swimming. I could have dipped my hand in the water—with a little work I could have dipped my body in the water. Another sea lion was up there on a rock now, his skin still wet and dark, but if you stood watching for a minute you could see the light spread over his fur. A red-haired girl in a stroller next to me pointed at the water and said to her bored nanny, “Look! Look! Look!” Swimming sideways, a sea lion would shoot around the edges of the tank, one little flick of its flippers every time the tank’s wall changed direction, its belly out to the crowd, the smoothest swimming I’d ever seen. It hardly even made a ripple. It would spin slowly while it swam, and a lip of water just above it would spill out onto the ground. Every now and then it would have to come up for a breath, but really it didn’t look like it was any harder for the sea lion to swim than it was for me to stand there watching it.
One of the ones up on a rock, because he was too hot or maybe just because he saw how much fun his friend was having, decided to plop back in. He moved like a handicapped person who’d fallen out of his wheelchair—until he was in the water, where he could have been an Olympic swimmer. I hung around the tank for about forty-five minutes, sitting on a bench watching and trying to read a zoo brochure I’d picked up, but the sun was so bright that the pages kept looking blank.
Once I’d been sitting there for a while, a skinny zookeeper with thick glasses came up to the tank and rested her bucket of fish on the bench right next to me. She looked about forty years old, with straight brown hair and careful makeup—if it weren’t for the fish and the uniform, she would have looked more like a lawyer than a zookeeper. “Hi,” I said. “Do you work here? I’ve got an interview in a little bit to be a keeper. Is it a pretty good place to work?”
For a second she looked so confused, almost panicked, that I thought she might not speak English. But she was just considering her answer. “Oh, it’s very rewarding. You have to really love animals, but if you do, you hardly even notice the other stuff.” She gave a nervous smile, like she might have said too much, and walked off with her bucket toward the crowd.
The sun was just above us now, and I lowered my head to let it reach all over. A job like this might even beat playing music, I kept thinking. I’d put on a bathing suit in the mornings and jump in the tank, race the sea lions around the edge, hang on their flippers, then lie up on the rocks with my eyes shut while I dried off. A group of pretty girls would walk over to me (I imagined them visiting from somewhere like Tennessee, giggly and polite), and they’d ask how long it had taken to get the sea lions to trust me. I’d smile, sitting up, and ask if they wanted to come in. And even if the job was nothing like that at all, at least I’d be earning money that didn’t feel like just another version of allowance. At least I wouldn’t be measuring out my days in forty-four-minute chunks, listening to the same five songs fumbled in exactly the same places while Dad kept time on his leg.
Before I knew it I’d drifted off in the sweaty-faced way I sometimes do in the sun, and when a stroller wheeling against my foot woke me up, it was two minutes before one.
* * *
In a brown, empty office, a man with a fat neck nodded hi without shaking my hand and pointed me to a wobbly table. His name tag said paul. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, but he acted like I was a student and he was a busy, disappointed principal. By the time we’d sat down, I’d already decided—for whatever reasons we rush to this kind of feeling—that Paul was my enemy. He wore an outfit like a Jurassic Park ranger and stared past me with his forehead wrinkled. His clothes had the sour, bready smell of saltines. “So. Tell me why a job at the Central Park Zoo appeals to you.”
I told him about all the pets I’d had growing up, about watching the keepers in the D.C. zoo wash an elephant. Everything I said just seemed to hang there, waiting for me to take it back. He played with his key chain while I told him, struggling to come up with the word hidden, about how I used to give Olive her pills stuck in a ball of cream cheese.
“All right. I’m going to tell you a little about the job, then you’re going to ask me some questions.” He hunched over and lowered his voice. “If we hire you, you’d be working in the Children’s Zoo, and you wouldn’t get moved to Main unless you stayed for probably over a year. We always start people in Children’s so they get some offstage experience. It’s not a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday thing. Your off days are scattered depending on the schedule, and if something needs to get done, you stay until it’s finished. And there’s not much glamour to it. I tell everyone who comes in, if you think it’s going to be like the Discovery Channel, then you should walk out right now.” I made a face like I thought it was funny that some people thought it was going to be like the Discovery Channel. “It’s dirty work, and you’ve got to be out there all day if it’s snowing, raining, a hundred degrees, thirty degrees, whatever. The animals always need to be taken care of. I’ve had too many people here who’re good as long as the weather’s nice, but it starts raining and suddenly I can’t find anybody.”
Together we walked over to the Children’s Zoo, with Paul staying a few steps ahead of me, and when we passed the Asian man (who was sobbing with his instrument again) I kept my eyes down. Once we were through the gates, Paul said, “Children’s is shaped like a doughnut, farm animals on the ring, aviary in the middle.” His walkie-talkie kept buzzing while we walked, and he’d flip it out of its holster and say quick, military things to whoever was on the other end: “Children’s one to base, fifteen thirty at animal Main. Over.”
The first animal he introduced me to was Othello, the black bull. He smelled oily, and he lived alone in
