I'm With the Bears (6 page)

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 fifteen 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'.

Maybe she had no idea.

He put a hand against the cool wall and felt almost leaden. No other animal could have eyes shaped like these, see the ground and the trees from this place with this dinosaur's consciousness. No other hide would feel the warmth of the sun wash over these molecules, and neither he nor anyone would know how it had felt to live there, in both the particulars and the generalities, the sad quiescence of the animal's own end of time.

He never spoke of his incursions and guarded carefully the difference between himself and the self that was available publicly. This was a clear benefit of being alone. A partner would have broken the seal.

With meticulous care he planned his business trips in relation to sanctuaries and captive breeding facilities, finding reasons to fly to these places even when profit was unlikely. Undetected he entered a bird sanctuary in San Diego, a rescue center for manatees scarred by boat propellers, a butterfly habitat in New Hampshire, a laboratory in Rhode Island where American burying beetles were bred and released. He was a regular at the best zoos in California, Arizona and New Mexico and he also flew to others—St. Louis, Seattle, Cincinnati. Each night he reserved for a single enclosure.

And he took a course in basic first aid that stood him in good stead. His thighs stayed lightly scarred from the tree in the Monkey House, whose superficial but stinging cuts had proved slow to heal; his knees scabbed over from multiple abrasions he tended to reopen, and his right calf bore the purple marks of teeth from a young Morelet's crocodile. It had been a fairly fortunate encounter in fact—the baby crocodile had let go almost right away, allowing him to drag himself out of its pen sheepishly, hurting but mostly ashamed of his carelessness. The punctures were not deep and did not require stitches; he slathered them in antibiotic ointment and left it at that.

So that no one would notice the marks he ran his half-marathons in long pants; should anyone ask, he was rock climbing, in the mountains and at the gym. Thence came the battered kneecaps, the scrapes on his elbows and knuckles and cuts on his fingertips.

At the beginning he was afraid of the predators, and though he chose with great care, avoiding animals known to be highly territorial or prone to aggression, he was still wary. They were not pets. But he soon lost this novice fear. It was not his habit to stalk the animals, merely to enter their enclosures and sit in one place to observe them. So he waited for each animal to show itself, and over time he grew tired, then bored; he was amazed at the depth and reach of his boredom, the way minutes and hours wore on uneventfully. For the animals too the greater part of captivity was waiting: when their food was delivered the last animals fed, slept and briefly forgot, he believed, the urgency of hunger. Then they awoke and the waiting started again.

He wished he knew if they got impatient. Expectation struck him as a human impulse, but then he thought of his dog. Her days were entirely given over to expectation, it seemed to him.

Waiting for a feeding the animals paced or swam or leapt from branch to branch, as their natures dictated, with a bat now and then at a so-called enrichment tool or a peck at an errant insect. Their lives were simple monotony. They slept to use up time; this was how their days were spent, the last sons and daughters.

In the wild, he thought, there would be almost no waiting. Waiting was what happened to you when you lost control, when events were out of your hands or your freedom was taken from you; but in the wild there would always be trying. In the wild there must be trying and trying, he thought, and no waiting at all. Waiting was a position of dependency. Not that animals in the wild were not watchful, did not have to freeze in place, alert and unmoving—they must do so often—but it would hardly be waiting then. It would be more like pausing.

Time must run more quickly there, matching heat and cold to the light of day and the dark of night. Familiarity with this pace would spin out through long days, as though it would never change: now and then would come quick fear or a close call, but mostly the ease of doing what had always been done. For a second a prey animal might grow complacent, and then in a rush the end came. As the animal moved where it had always moved, a scent on the wind might stop it. The last surge of adrenaline, the lightheadedness of a bloodletting: sleep again in the fade, in the warm ground of home. And how different could it be when the death was a last death? Say an individual was the very last of its kind. Say it was small—one of the kangaroo rats for instance—and ran from a young fox through a hardscrabble field, towering clouds casting long shadows over the grass. The run lasted a few seconds only; no one was watching, no one at all because there was no one for miles around, no one but insects and worms and a jet passing high overhead. Say neither of them knew either, the fox or the rat, that the rat was the last, that no rat like him would ever be born again. Was it different then? Did the world feel the loss? The field stayed a field, the sky remained blue. Any pause that occurred as the action unfurled, any split-second shifting of the vast tableau would have to be imagined by an onlooker who did not exist. The fox started to run again, looking for his next quarry since the last animal had been barely a mouthful. And yet a particular way of existence was gone, a whole volume in the library of being. Others were sure to fall afterward—a long fly with iridescent wings that lived only in the nest of this single rat, say; a parasite that lived under the wing of the fly; a flowering plant whose roots were nourished by the larval phase of the parasite; a bat that pollinated the plant . . . it was time that would show the loss, only time that would show how the world had been stripped of its mysteries, stripped by the hundreds and thousands and millions. Remaining would be only the pigeons and the raccoons. But it was not the domino effect he considered most often, simply the state of being last. Loss was common, a loss like his own; he couldn't pretend to the animals' isolation, although he flattered himself that he could imagine it. One day, he knew, it would be men that were last. In the silence of the exhibits he thought he could feel time changing him too, atom by atom. He was so bored one night that he lost resistance to falling asleep. It would be good to let himself go, he decided: so he did.