The Stud Book

S
ay you’re a night crawler in warm ground. Your body is a tube within a tube, soft as foreskin. You’re a hermaphroditic sex organ burrowing through dark earth, a reproductive decomposer.

Fully loaded with two sets of testicles, two testes sacs, ovaries, sperm, and eggs—seminal vesicles, seminal receptacles; the parts sound almost spiritual, nearly Catholic, really—and you have what it takes to build an army, a generation.

The heartbreak? You’re not an asexually reproductive creature, like a lonely sea sponge or a budding hydra. You can’t fertilize yourself.

You have needs.

Your job is to find another earthworm, a dew worm, an angler, to swap sperm, fertilize your eggs, and incubate them in a slime tube, a bellyband, a pale pink saddle you’ll wear briefly around your waist until you slip it off over your head like a silky nightgown. Charm your way into a biological destiny.

Blind hermaphrodites find each other in the dark. It happens all the time.

Sarah stepped over one pale banded worm on the damp asphalt
walk of the Oregon Zoo. She saw the bellyband—the slime tube—and thought:
Babies! So dear, even in a lowly worm
. She carried a timer and a clipboard, pulled her coat closed against a fine rain, and leaned on the railing of the mandrill habitat.

Inside the enclosure the kingpin man-ape gave a flying leap. Leaves tumbled in his wake. He moved from his high perch to a low branch, and on the way flashed his penis, where his body was as red as a rash.

If that mandrill were Sarah’s baby, she’d powder his rash. Not with talc—talc is pure cancer. She’d dust sweet cornstarch on the flaming red genital area between that mandrill’s muscular, hairy thighs. Except his wasn’t really a rash and she knew it. Baby fantasy over. She was a professional. Mandrill penises are red; their scrotums are lilac. He’d be a grotesque infant, big and buried in hair.

The sky was blanketed with gray clouds as bright as aluminum, hiding a winter sun. Visitors moved in tight packs in the rain over the tended zoo grounds. Kids lurched ahead of their parents, with room to roam and no streets to cross. A sullen flock of teens clustered at a cement picnic table around a paper basket of French fries. They had a fat pink baby in a fat pink fleece jacket in a stroller nearby. Who was the mother? They were all kids themselves.

Sarah was twice their age and watched their parenting, or lack of parenting, as though the teenagers were her assigned animal behavior study.

If her first baby had survived, the child would be three years old, with sticky ice cream–coated fingers pressing against the glass in front of all the animals.

Her timer beeped. In the mandrill enclosure—and you don’t say “cage” in a modern zoo, but “enclosure”—a newborn named Lucy clung to the rich olive hair of her mother’s chest. The two huddled on a shelf against a back wall. The mother ate nits from Lucy’s coat. Sarah marked “Grooming” on her chart.

Sarah would eat bugs from her own baby’s hair if that was what motherhood required.

That baby mandrill was Sarah’s field study. The patriarch, though, with his strut and flash, was a steady distraction. The more color a mandrill shows in his red, white, and blue behind, the more
testosterone is cruising through his system, and this one advertised his virility like a flag.

His ass was an ornament, in evolutionary terms.

On his branch, this head honcho tugged his golden beard. He clambered and waved his ornament like a second face there to say hello. On sunny days visitors snapped photos to post on the Internet. They took videos. What a crowd-pleaser! With an ornament like that, you’d think survival of the fittest was about drawing hits on YouTube.

The timer beeped again. Baby Lucy banged a stick in loose straw on the shelf where she perched. “Play behavior.”

One of the lone females followed the patriarch, walking close behind, like his flash ass was the ice-cream truck and she had change in her pocketbook. This was mandrill flirting.

Toward the back of the cage, another female sat with her legs tucked against her body. She was pregnant, the previous customer to chase that ice cream. Mandrills generally don’t show pregnancy the way humans do, but this wasn’t her first round. Her body had thickened, the muscles grown slack from carrying earlier offspring, and this time her pregnancy was pronounced.

A woman with a stroller pushed past, her baby under a clear plastic rain liner like a little biosphere—didn’t babies suffocate under plastic? It certainly wasn’t teaching good habits. But at the same time the plastic dome made the baby seem precious and revered, like a diamond in a case, or a doll tightened down inside its plastic box.

If Sarah’s second baby had survived, it’d be twenty-three months old by now, spitting out the names of animals from around the world.

Toward the zoo entrance, on the horizon, a white van edged its way over the top of a distant hill,
KZTV NEWS
written on the side.

The timer beeped. Lucy rested snug against her mother, mouth on a teat. The mother wrapped a protective hand around her child. Sarah marked “Nursing.”

The news van stopped where the paths grew narrow. Its sliding door opened, and a crew tumbled out. First came the reporter, a correspondent out in the field, identifiable by her markings: a helmet of blond hair, a large head, a tweed skirt-suit. Why was there a news van on zoo grounds?

One of the teen girls stood up from the picnic table, stretched, and showed a lump under her coat like a beer gut, another baby on the way, or maybe both.

Another
baby?

Sarah bit the end of her pencil. The news crew approached on foot. The reporter, in heels, skittered along the curving path like Dorothy on her way to see the wizard, flanked by her loose-legged cameraman and a bearded guy in a headset. The cameraman balanced a shoulder cam over his puffy winter coat. A woman so young she was practically a girl carried a clipboard and led the way, their own little Toto.

They traveled toward Sarah. Her guess? They were hunting for a feel-good story on baby Lucy. She saw it coming: They’d want her expertise. She’d have to hold back. She didn’t work in PR, wasn’t authorized to answer press questions. Zoo publicity was a tricky business of walking a line between PETA protesters and wealthy donors. Portland is a city of vocalized opinions and insta-activism. Sarah’s job was strictly to compile data. The reporter would ask about the mandrills. She’d have to decline. She felt a conflict of interest creep closer with each step of the news crew on the rain-darkened asphalt trail.

She was proud to work for the zoo, in an amazing community of caring people. The air that greeted her daily inside the zoo walls was a particularly habitable atmosphere. Her role was small, but it was hers.

Breeding was a tightly planned eugenics exercise. Animal curators worked with the algorithms of the International Species Information System to determine who would breed and who, of the genetically redundant, was given birth control.

Every zoo manages a budget. They know how many animals they can support and have data to prove who brings in the income—Pandas! Elephants! Monkeys!—while the lazy sun bear and the Visayan warty pigs serve as chorus girls.

Each mandrill birth was recorded in an international studbook, an official intergenerational record of who has sex, who’s born, who lives fast and dies young. The studbook is like Mormon genealogy listings, all those famous
begat
s in the Bible, or
People
magazine for caged animals singing the song of celebrity births. It’d be gossip if it
weren’t seriously about bolstering the genetic makeup of dwindling animal populations.

Sarah collected one thin current of data that fed into behavioral documentation, noting which captive infant animals thrived and which failed.