God Lives in St. Petersburg (17 page)

“It was a mistake,” she’d blurted, so suddenly he knew she had only now determined this. Her voice was small and echoey, easy to misunderstand. Franklin said nothing, not knowing if this moment were the harbinger of new happiness or further pain. She mistook his silence for a calculation of which he was not capable. “I’m
sorry,
” she said, gulping. “Franklin, I’m so sorry.”

He could not discuss it. He hung up hollow, a scare-crow. Four days later he called her back. “I’m on the other side of the world. I don’t know what you want me to do.”

Her tone ossified. “
I
don’t know what I want you to do.”

He would say it, then. If they rebuilt and disaster ensued, he would be the negligent architect. “I could come back. We could start all over again.”

“We could,” she said, her voice cloaked in something gray and wistful. “We could.”

“Everything will be different.”

He heard, somehow, through his primitive receiver, the sound of a forlorn smile.
“All changed, changed utterly.”

He’d been stopped cold. Solitude had made her unrecognizable, florid. Then it came. The words were not hers. This was borrowed sadness—from a poem, of all things: “Easter 1916.” Yeats. Heartbreak’s laureate.
What is it but
nightfall? No, no, not night but death; was it a needless death
after all?
Franklin felt vaguely ashamed. It had never occurred to him to flee into the arms of poetry. Cautiously he asked, “Have you been reading Yeats, Elizabeth?”

“Yeah,” she said, as her tone simulcast,
And why
wouldn’t I be?
But they both knew why. Only one reason. To remember that well-read boy to whom she’d given her heart.

When he finally walks over to the building he sees ANIMALS IN OUR LIVES neoclassically chiseled in concrete above its double-swing doors. What such a promise might entail he is not sure. The lobby is lit with low, teakish light. Elizabeth is across the room, her back to him, standing before a window with the determined head tilt of someone teasing sense from an obscure painting. When he reaches her he sees what dwells behind the window: a pigeon. Its head is a beaked gray thumb. Its wings and tail feathers are splotched with white, as though it had slalomed through the pickets of a freshly painted fence. Its environs, Franklin realizes, are a precisely rendered tarpaper rooftop. Painted on its three walls is skyscraper iconography roughly congruent to that of New York City. The pigeon’s tiny black eyes seem to demand some explanation from him.

“A pigeon,” he says.

She shoots him a dark, simmering glance. “ ‘Animals in Our Lives.’ It’s a motif. Live with it.”

He absorbs this strafe and sidesteps to the next window without comment. Inside is a small rain-forest simulacrum, something called a red jungle fowl standing in insulated silence. Its otherwise dun-colored breast and wings are streaked with a runny palette of green, orange, yellow. A huge tripartite red growth sits atop its head, made of tough plasticky-seeming material that is difficult to accept as skin. Its eyes blink once a second within sockets of pebbled flesh. Franklin reads its lengthy biography and learns that all chickens descend from the red jungle fowl. He is looking at nothing less than poultry’s Eve.

The windows keep coming: the taveta golden weaver, the green plover, the flying squirrel. (One truism of animal nomenclature: Any creature prefixed by “flying” in fact does no such thing.) Elizabeth is unmoved until she genuflects at a bank of smallish thigh-level windows. Encased within are guinea pigs, black gerbils, piebald mice, quivering piles of hairless infant hamsters. Suddenly she is purling, clucking her tongue, shaking her head, a weird analog of motherhood. He tries to join in, snickering as he reads aloud one of the rodents’ identification plates: “ ‘The common hamster.’ As opposed to the extraordinary hamster.”

She doesn’t even look at him. “As opposed to the dwarf hamster right next to it.”

He steps back from her. With sick precision he feels his internal armature give way. Legs first, then arms. His chest is last, collapsing upon itself with a sad, nauseating plash
.
Nothing works. An ache flowers behind his eyes. “Elizabeth—” he begins.

“I know,” she says, nodding, her eyes mashed shut. “I know. I’m sorry.”

Together they wander to the building’s remaining wing. He takes her hand, she squeezing back so tightly the vestigial remnant of webbing between his fingers pulls tight. The spherical room they enter is lit more starkly than the lobby. Astounded children gambol from window to window, leaving their mouths’ hot smears on the glass. Elizabeth stops at a window while Franklin, lost in his first sustained thought in days, keeps going. Her hand opens all too willingly, but he holds on and reels himself back to her. He can’t recall what he was just thinking about. Something about nostalgia: nostalgia being the loss of forward motion. Stupid thoughts. Useless. He stares at her lopsided reflection in the glass. Her face is white and puffy and lovely. Her lips are full and biconvex and devastating. It has been days since they’ve kissed in anything other than ritual.

She stares past herself at two poison-dart frogs, their world another tiny, slapdash tropical ecosystem. A pitiful waterfall squirts from an aperture hidden in a pack of smooth rocks. He wonders if any of these creatures have the faintest idea of what’s happened to them. If successful captivity is primarily a matter of fooling the captive. These frogs are toylike and beautiful, living gems, glistening in their deadly marinade. One frog—an impossibly fluorescent green with perfect black spots—leaps from rock to rock and back again. The other, the color of an oxidized bronze statue, peers up at them, pulsing intelligently.

Elizabeth sets the tips of her three longest fingers to the window. “They’re beautiful.”

“You’re beautiful,” he says.

She sighs, her forehead meeting the glass with a sad thud. She looks over at him, her longing so raw and naked that he swallows. “Oh, my love—” She stops, eyes bulging. Words that have not vibrated her vocal cords in weeks. They stare at each other as though a beast believed long extinct has poked its head up through fronds and vanished before either of them thought to document it. At that moment two loutish boys old enough to resent muscle them from their marks. They pound on the glass, elbowing each other and laughing, the frogs leaping around in a kind of post-traumatic-stress frenzy, fruitlessly attempting to hide. Instinct suddenly seems to Franklin like a painfully elaborate hoax.

Elizabeth leads him past several tanks of fish and stops at the room’s final window. For two minutes they stare without speaking into a branch-crowded space the size of a computer screen, the rumored home of a New Guinea walking stick. A dent forms between Elizabeth’s tweezed eyebrows. “Well . . . where the hell is it?”

He shrugs. “Maybe this is a part of the Animals
Not
in Our Lives exhibit.”

They give up. Outside, the sun hits their constricted pupils like a penlight. Their hands fly up to their foreheads in protective salute. She juts her chin across the plaza. “How about some monkeys?”

Sounds of glass-blunted simian distress greet them as they push open the doors. He allows Elizabeth to forge ahead as he stops to survey humanity’s evolutionary growth chart, a bit of self-congratulation customary to every monkey house. He tracks
Homo sapiens
’ loss of prognathous jaw and humped back and squat cabriole legs. He notes that with each exultant step into a new taxonomy, mankind’s shave grows progressively cleaner. Some wit has Magic Markered a briefcase in the hand of the family Hominidae’s only extant species.

Elizabeth summons him with a giggle. “
Look
at these guys,” she says, as Franklin rests his chin atop her shoulder and wraps his arms around her waist. Behind the glass a dozen cotton-topped tamarins whip through their jungle gym with impossible precision. In acrobatic lulls, small intelligent faces peer at them from beneath Warholian mops. As she watches the tamarins, he feels the furtive murk of desire. He presses himself against her rump, tastes the salt from her neck, her breasts filling the scales of his hands. She sighs, wearily indulgent, then frees herself from his grasp. “Okay there, tiger,” she says, smiling.

They bypass several other spidery little hominids in favor of the hamadryas baboons. Theirs is the biggest cage they’ve seen yet—not a cage at all, but a barren outdoor mountainside tunneled with caverns. The net above cuts the sky into tiny blue boxes. Franklin half-reads the plaque.

“One of the most fearsome baboons . . .
found primarily in Northern Africa and
the Arabian peninsula.”

Hamadryas,
he thinks, rummaging through a recondite vocabulary amassed during four semesters of ancient Greek. The word breaks pleasingly in half: Wood spirit.

The baboons emerge from their caves with dawn-of-man portent. Their faces are terrifying, their tiny eyes set too close together and fixed above wolfish snouts. They wear their huge filthy-gray coats with the sort of careless arrogance he associates with aging female movie stars. And their
asses
! Franklin tries not to look. They are hideously disproportionate, the largest posteriors he’s ever seen: red, distended, inflamed, vaguely metastasized, caked with straw and fossilized shit.

Elizabeth’s face crinkles. “Ick.”

The last baboon to appear has silvery tufts shooting from his wizened face. That this is the alpha male there seems little doubt. Every member of his retinue turns a respectful back on him. He bares his teeth and moves with tumbling knuckle-first locomotion from one cowering female to the next, a long thin pink hard-on wagging beneath him. Franklin turns away without a word. Elizabeth follows. One can watch primates only so long before reconsidering what really makes up the celebrated 1 percent variance in man-ape DNA. Nucleotides, the opposable thumb, or something far fainter? A genealogy of manners, perhaps. Wearing napkins. Asking if this seat is taken.

Elizabeth consults their map. They decide to skip the snake house and camel ride in favor of Discovery Trail. The umbilical breezeway leading to it is filled with games whose primary purpose appears to be the humiliation of the contestant. Hash marks dare them to attempt a standing jump farther than the wallaby’s. Measurements ask them to compare their wingspan to the bald eagle’s. A twenty-yard-dash track, complete with a digital stopwatch, invites them to race an imaginary emu. They walk slowly, wanting to belly up to each challenge as though, in failing, they will once again appreciate humanity’s cerebral consolation prize.

Discovery Trail begins its winding path in an ingeniously landscaped grove, an oasis of stillness and pollen-soaked quiet. The ground is mulched with huge sodden wood chips. Everywhere they turn they are met with explosions of elephant grass and artfully sheared shrubbery and tropical flowers, botanical exotica, once separated by continents, drinking from the same root system. Several fingershaped ponds hem them in, make shunting the trail an impossibility. Elizabeth shrieks as a butterfly, the largest, hairiest, most malevolent butterfly he’s ever seen, flutters near her face. Franklin bats it away, its weight slapping against his palm with an unsettling, velvety density. She embraces him, laughing, and, for that moment, he knows his darkly wrought love for her is irreversible, embered and glowing, hot as the day it was hammered.

She leads him happily to the trail’s proper starting point, a steep tunnel-gouged strip of turf infested with prairie dogs. They are wild-eyed ravenous little monsters, scuttling in and out of their holes’ crumbly passageways, chattering and whistling to one another. Some animals, he thinks, seem not to mind so much. Nothing would ever hurt them here. Captivity’s sole bonus.

He looks over at her. She is smiling, the sun a pale gloss on her face. “Did you love Aaron?” Why he says this now he doesn’t know. It is a question he’s never asked her before, for dread of her answer. Either of them.

She turns to him with a look of pinch-eyed betrayal that is replaced instantly with the recognition that she owes him an answer. She looks away. “I don’t know. I thought I did.” She empties her lungs with a ponderous sigh, her hair aglow in smooth lemony light. “Yeah. I did.”

They step onto the planks of Discovery Trail’s one bridge, a wooden fairy-tale construction, curved and whimsical. He glances over the rail to see a flotilla of dark, snake-headed turtles floating beneath them. When he turns back to her she is chewing dents into her lip.

“Why did you ask me that?”

His mind fills with cue cards. To know. To know why you left me. To know why I came back. To know the capacity of your heart. To know if this is our last day together. To know if it was a needless death after all. His hands find their way into pockets made roomy by a month of steady weight loss. He shrugs, the tacked-up shreds of his insides unfurling like banners.

At the other side of the bridge, Discovery Trail becomes a zoo without cages or pens, the realm of animals whose escape risk is low. An Australian goose, tall, violet, and dapper-looking, waddles alongside Elizabeth with the pride of a freedman. Peacocks made fat by castaway popcorn trail behind them, pecking hopefully at their footprints. They stop at a thin rope fence. Twenty yards away, beyond a ditch he knows must be deeper and wider than it appears, wallabies and emus wander together with the unease of unfamiliar party guests. The wallabies do not walk as much as skulk, wearing faces of sloe-eyed, mischievous kangaroos. The emus are flightless heaps of black feather above sallow, implausibly muscular legs. Their kneecaps are like small stunted heads. He remembers reading, somewhere, that emus are feared for their rib-breaking kicks. Or is it ostriches? He can’t recall. He used to know so much. And he thinks, not for the first time, of the job he’d left behind.

After college he was a model of unemployability, his single skill, his sole grace, an ability to read books well. He’d sent out résumés like doves in search of dry land. None returned. Then he saw a campus poster for English-teaching positions in the former Soviet Union. Qualifications, helpfully, were not needed. Within weeks he was interviewed, and within days of his interview he had accepted their offer of placement. Before leaving he proposed to Elizabeth, her acceptance filling them both with a Quaker’s inner peace in the face of separation. In Kyrgyzstan, his foolhardy resolve reaped unforeseen rewards. Parents from all over Bishkek approached him to teach their children. He learned passable Russian and sparkling Kyrgyz. He hiked the lower reaches of cloud-topped mountains and rafted rivers he convinced himself no American had ever seen. He learned to grow outraged and excited by a tiny nation’s parochial shock waves, rumblings that only occasionally managed to stir the world’s busy oblivious remainder. When he told his school that he had to leave, that he was experiencing personal problems at home, they offered everything they could to keep him there. His own lovely apartment, rather than a small rented room. A salary additional to that which his organization paid him, money that would have made available every possible Bishkek luxury: peanut butter, a motorcycle, even, if it came to that, the women he often saw trolling the city’s better restaurants and hotels. How easy it had been to spurn the empty satisfaction of the known. He knows now that all mistakes are made with such perfect confidence.