St. Abelard’s Zoo for Endangered Species

They buried three goldfish that month. The first suffered from an unidentified illness. The second committed suicide and the last one drowned. Nobody attempted to explain the phenomena to the children who insisted on formalities and buried each goldfish beneath the eucalyptus tree in a separate ceremony. They wore bright clothing despite their gloomy faces. When she tucked the children into bed on the night after the last funeral, the mother told them there would be no more pets.

She had always been hesitant with animals and the goldfish situation troubled her. Her husband, Mr. K., dismissed this as nerves. Dying was natural. She did not need to be reminded of this detail. After all, she had grown up on a farm where her father raised sheep. When they said grace at the dinner table her father gave thanks for the animal by name as its remains simmered on a plate. She never forgot that and it made her fear for the animals in their care.

“My father was a gentle man,” she said, getting undressed and climbing into bed next to her husband, “with a firm hand for killing.”

After the debacle with the goldfish, Mr. K. was surprised the next morning when his wife suggested they have a family outing to the zoo.

The children ran from one exhibit to the next. Thomas, their oldest, had a checklist. He observed each animal carefully, found its position on the list, then waited to determine which of the fourteen most common behaviors manifested. He had organized the list himself using an encyclopedia checked out from the library. The girl, younger by two years, looked at the animals briefly, thoroughly unimpressed.

The mother took photographs. She was very precise. She made requests sharply and without malice, insisting on when the children should flatten their shirts, or move a little this way and that, or wipe that smile away in a pinch. She took pleasure in their obedience. When they ignored her she scolded them and moved on to the next exhibit in frustration.

Almost as disappointing for her as the children were the animals. The giraffes kept their backs turned, the hippos never came out of the water, and the bears refused to wake up. The mother tried tossing a few pebbles near the cave where they slept, hoping for an excellent photograph, but the bears did not even flinch. She had hoped for more. Especially the elephant. After all, it was a privilege to be seen. She had read that zoo animals were therapeutic. Something about being caged made them more empathetic, even helped those with degenerative diseases recover from their illnesses. Her doctor had shared with her this information after their last visit. The zoo was his recommendation.

“Which animals?” Mr. K. asked when she told him.

“Tortoises are best,” said the wife. “But also wolves, penguins, and gibbons.” She wiped away a small spot of dirt from her blouse. It left a stain and was now a total loss.

“They’re all monogamous.”

Mrs. K. blinked repeatedly, her mouth crinkled. Her husband was a repository of useless factoids. “I suppose that’s true.”

“That can’t be coincidence.”

Mrs. K. ignored him and positioned the children for the photograph with the zebras.

“Zombies!” the girl smiled.

“No, zee-bras,” the mother corrected.

The girl’s face soured. “Zombies,” she said defiantly.

Mrs. K. licked her fingers and tried to properly comb Thomas’s hair. The boy twisted away from her grip, but could not escape his mother whapping the back of his head when the hair stood up. Mrs. K. gave a disappointed glare before resuming her position a few feet away, staring at them through the camera lens. She muttered to her husband that the boy had inherited his stubborn cowlicks.

“If the shellfish is spoiled, then it doesn’t matter how talented the chef,” she said.

The children forced smiles. They trotted ahead to the next exhibit. The mother sighed. She turned to her husband:

“They’re going to remember this all wrong.”

The tortoise and wolf exhibits were closed for repairs. It was a virus for the gibbons and the penguins were secluded for mating. One of the zoo attendants suggested the rare feline exhibit. They marched ahead. They saw bobcats and Bengal tigers. Thomas jotted down more notes.

To amuse the crowd, one of the zookeepers lowered into the lion enclosure a large slab of raw meat. It was almost purple in the center and dripped dark blood. Thomas pointed out they had forgotten to remove the zebra skin on one side, but the mother corrected him and said the zoo was not so barbaric and he must be seeing things. The lion sniffed at the meat, then yawned and stretched before heading back into the shade. It let its heavy tongue hang from its mouth as it stared at the family.

“It’s not hungry,” Mr. K. said, somewhat amused. “Imagine, a real lion, and it’s not hungry.”

“Why won’t he eat?” the girl asked.

“It’s a lioness,” Thomas corrected them. He scribbled, then looked at his sister and then back at the lioness. His sister stuck out her tongue at her brother. The mother said a proper lady keeps her body to herself. When the girl walked ahead the boy kicked her heels and made her trip. The girl complained but Mrs. K. was no longer listening. With sunglasses swallowing her face she walked ahead, muttering how the girl’s little bird voice made it difficult to enjoy nature.

The snow leopards were sleeping. The family could see two small cubs. One of the cubs played with the sunlight that came through the trees, enchanted with the shadows. The other cub alternated between licking itself and falling asleep.

“I’m bored,” the girl said.

“Can we see it eat something? What if we let him chase the zebra? Will they let us watch it then?” Thomas asked his father who looked at the boy helplessly.

“There will probably be a lot of blood,” Mr. K. said.

“Don’t be morbid,” the mother said.

She swatted at a fly and took the opportunity to comb her husband’s hair to one side. When he flinched as her hand came toward him he bumped into her purse and it spilled over the railing into the snow leopard exhibit. Before she had a chance to say anything Thomas was running back to see the lions, shouting, There will be blood! Mr. K. mouthed, I’m sorry, before starting a brisk walk after the boy. The girl followed, scuffing her feet on the pavement.

Mrs. K. lamented her poor luck. She found her way down a stairwell and slipped past a door labeled DO NOT ENTER. She hoped to find a way inside the enclosure. Thirty seconds. That’s all she needed to recover the items from her purse: her good lipstick, tissues, and the her day planner. The rest was expendable. They were easy to spot from the circular observatory walkway that looked down into the enclosure. Thirty seconds. Nothing disturbed. Nobody would see her.

She was gathering her things into her purse when one of the doors leading into the enclosure opened and a fat zookeeper wobbled inside. She did not know what to do so she crouched perfectly still where she was by the pond, hoping the shade of the tree would conceal her.

The zookeeper checked a few valves near the door and was about to leave when he saw her. He squinted.

“I dropped my purse,” she said, standing to her feet. She held up the lipstick in her hand and tried smiling.

“Easy, girl,” he kept saying. He puckered his lips and made a god-awful clicking noise with his tongue. She flinched and he made the sound louder while cautiously approaching her, a whip suddenly dangling in his hand. She stepped forward and he cracked the whip like one of those men in a Middle Eastern suspense film.

“I’m a person,” she said in an unsteady voice.

“Sure, honey,” the zookeeper smiled. He made the puckering noise again.

“You can hear me,” she said, not believing what was happening. “You understand me, right?”

“Don’t think twice about it, sweetheart,” he said. “I talk with all the animals.”

“But I only came to get my purse!” she said.

Then the whip cracked down on her and before she knew what was happening she had skittered to the other end of the pond, covered in mud. She watched as the zookeeper slowly backed out the door.

It must have been a few hours later when she awoke and heard voices above her. She hurried out of the mud and into the middle of the enclosure. Sun drowned the vision from her eyes but she could vaguely make out her husband and children beside the observatory deck railing. Fingers pointed in her direction. One of the zookeepers, dressed in a white lab coat and holding a clipboard, spoke very seriously with her husband. Mrs. K. fixed her hair and did her best to brush the mud from her clothes. She called her husband’s name and he glanced quickly at her, then back at the zookeeper. She waved to her children but they stood glumly, the boy writing down in his notebook and the girl swinging back and forth on the rail.

“Why are there only two cubs?” Thomas asked the zookeeper.

“The mother died giving birth,” he said.

“Will the babies die?” the girl wanted to know.

“We can fool them for a while with bottles, but animals are smart. They die without a mother’s touch. You don’t fool nature for long.”

Mrs. K. was admitted to the zoo on October 22^nd according to the medical transcript we retrieved from the city archives. The zoo only wanted her detained overnight as a precaution. Strictly observatory, they insisted. Human to animal diseases are not uncommon, they warned.

“She is ill,” Mr. K. said.

“So, you admit it?” a lanky, bald man said.

“Of course I admit it. It’s no secret,” Mr. K. said with less confidence. “She’s very ill. She’s been seeing a specialist.” The men in lab coats scribbled in their notebooks. “When can I see her?”

“I’m afraid that isn’t possible.”

“The other doctor said her problem is with the skin. She has lesions. The zookeeper said something about she has the skin of a snow leopard. What does that mean?”

“It means your wife exhibits the physiology of a snow leopard.”

“Is that your specialty?”

“Heavens no,” the bald zookeeper said. “I’m an expert on whales.”

“Then why are you here?”

“For your wife, of course.”

Mr. K. stood. He had never learned how to be imposing when he needed to and this moment he wished he could be different. He was a carpenter, good with his hands but slow with words. His wife was the wordsmith. It was one of the reasons he loved her. She would have said something clever. She would have saved him from this indignity. The room was air-conditioned and there were goose bumps on his arms. He thought he should make a scene, but then what would be the point? The children slept on a sofa on the other side of the room. He had not been able to explain to them what was happening, and he wasn’t sure he could if he needed to.

“We can address this with the family doctor,” Mr. K. said, running his hands through his hair.

“We’re all doctors,” the whale expert said. “Highly qualified for her condition, I might add.”

Mr. K. sat back down and let out a sigh of frustration. “What condition?”

Nobody other than the veterinarian staff was allowed to see Mrs. K. during the first month of evaluation. The zookeepers assured the husband they were performing necessary diagnostics. Once each week, after the visitors had left for the evening, they let her into the snow leopard exhibit for exercise.

The first few days she was belligerent. Her curses were so foul it made the scientists blush. When she realized her screams were pointless she was overcome with terror and begged them to let her see her husband. She ran from one end of the enclosure to another, trying to open doors and scale the eighteen-foot walls. She cried. She climbed up the tree but only succeeded in annoying the cubs who had taken refuge from her wild display of emotion. When she exhausted herself for the evening she washed her face in the pond, fixed her hair, then brushed the mud from her clothes and asked to be returned to the air-conditioned lab.

She attempted to escape several times. On one occasion, she created a ladder from broken tree branches and almost reached the edge of the wall before the makeshift structure broke and she injured her leg. She limped for weeks. The zookeepers remained in the circular walkway above the enclosure and took notes.

She washed her clothes once each week and put on her makeup each morning. If she was going to be treated like an animal, she would look damn good doing it. She discovered that on especially humid days the water from the pond acted like hairspray and she could give herself cute hairstyles. She talked to herself—about life on the farm as a child, her wasted college years, vacations her husband had failed to take her on, and which animals at the zoo were mistakes of God and which were enchanting. At night, she memorized the pattern of stars. She felt that speaking aloud was her only hope at convincing the zookeepers of their mistake. After two months, she quit trying.

When they lowered meat into the enclosure, she was not as fast as the cubs. The first time she approached it hesitantly, then, once she realized what it was, criticized the staff for not having the decency to leave a bottle of red wine.

She watched the cubs eat for days. When she could no longer endure her hunger, she snatched the morning meal before the cubs were even awake. She stared at the meat for a long time, wondering what to do. She tried to cook it using the mirror from her makeup kit and some leaves but it was a failure. She resigned herself to raw meat. After three days, it spoiled.

When the cubs challenged her prize, cornering her on the shaded end of the pond, she accidentally wet herself. This alarmed the cubs and they sulked away hissing. She later discovered that flecking menstrual blood was more effective at securing her territory.

In the beginning, she was deliberately cruel to the cubs, using rocks and sticks to drive away their curiosity. Within a few weeks, however, when she realized they were her only companions, a natural affinity emerged. She led them to the pond and showed them where to find the coolest water on humid afternoons. When they got ticks, she clawed them out with her nails. When the file from her purse broke, she discovered, much to her surprise, that her teeth were more efficient.

Mrs. K. was washing her clothes in the pond one evening when she saw her husband leaning against the rail on the observatory deck. Beside him were the zookeepers with their clipboards. She waved, hurrying to put back on her damp shirt. She fixed her hair and waved again. She kept calling his name.

Mr. K. turned away with the zookeepers.

Later that night when they delivered her ration of meat, they told her she could leave. There had been a terrible mistake and they were almost certain she was not a snow leopard and no danger to civilization. There was nothing to fear. They apologized for her detainment, but stressed that even though science has its flaws it is the best system available.

Crouched beneath the tree, Mrs. K. stared at the fallen leaves without blinking, gnawing on the meat whose juices dribbled down her chin.

Two months passed before the zoo reopened the rare feline exhibit. The newspaper ran a full article. Mr. K.—the only name ever used in the interviews—had approached the editor with the details of his wife’s situation. The editor showed little interest.

“I’m not printing that. We report facts, not fantasies,” he had said.

“I know it sounds ridiculous,” said Mr. K., “but it’s the truth.”

The editor was a very large man whose presence inside a zoo cage would not have been suspicious. He lit a cigarette and combed fingers through his thinning hair. He shook his head. “I can’t help you. The problem is too many people will believe it.”

Mr. K. brought his children to the reopening. None of the other zoo visitors seemed interested in the exhibit and those who did were not alarmed by the wife’s presence. They took photographs and moved on.

When the zookeepers lowered the slab of meat, the two cubs kept still under the tree while the mother circled. Blouse in tatters, skirt ripped, hair mud-spackled. Like a castaway on Crusoe’s island.

Satisfied with sniffing the meat, she dragged the carcass under the acacia trees and cleaned it before distributing equal portions. One of the cubs tried to steal a scrap and the mother whacked it with an open palm until the cub cowered in the ditch. It whimpered there until the mother made a guttural noise and it rejoined them. The mother stretched the animal on its back and rubbed its belly furiously. While the cubs gnawed on the carcass, the mother licked the dried blood and marrow from her fingers.

“Do they let Mom kill it herself?” Thomas wanted to know.

“Do they think Mom is one of the zombies?” the girl asked.

“That’s not your mother,” Mr. K. said.

At school, Thomas bragged about his mother the snow leopard. His quarterly theme detailed the dietary needs and evolutionary development of the Panthera uncia. He stood in front of the class and described the social behaviors of snow leopards as well as their mating rituals. He presented diagrams. This earned him a trip to the principal’s office where he refuted claims he was lying about his mother. He showed them photographs.

The next day Mr. K. joined the boy at a meeting with the vice principal and guidance counselor. They asked Thomas questions but he refused to answer. When they told Mr. K. the boy had tried to lick one of the girls in his class he shook his head. He looked every bit the disheveled single father. Puffy eyes betraying a lack of sleep. Facial hair more beard than stubble.

“What were you trying to do, son?”

“I didn’t want the other boys around her. I wanted to mark her,” Thomas said in a low voice.

“Women are not sexual possessions, Thomas,” the guidance counselor cautioned.

“I’m in heat,” the boy replied. He gritted his teeth.

“You’re not a snow leopard, Thomas,” the guidance counselor said. She put her hand on the boy’s shoulder and he sprang out of the chair like an acrobat, swiping at her with his hand and knocking the glasses from her face in one fluid motion. He hissed from the corner of the room.

“Hissing doesn’t make you an animal, it only makes you look like an idiot,” the counselor said, putting back on her glasses and giving Mr. K. a petulant stare.

Thomas breathed deeply then let out a loud cry before fleeing the room.

At home, his behavior grew more and more erratic. He roamed the halls at odd hours and spread out on the stairwell to nap. He ignored his homework and chased sunlight. He practiced his pounce. At dinner, he requested raw meat, and when Mr. K. told him to eat his goddamned pasta primavera and like it, the boy growled before shitting on his plate. He quit sleeping on the bed that night and within two days had moved to the trees in the yard.

On his last day of school, he got in a fight with several boys. He tried to impress them with his genitals, believing this would startle them. They beat him until he was bloody and had pissed himself. The school phoned Mr. K.: Thomas had been expelled but could return when he decided he wanted to be a boy again.

“It’s not his fault,” Mr. K. said. “He believes too much.”

Mr. K. rarely saw the boy after the expulsion. When he did, the child was naked and alternated between walking upright and on all fours.

“What’s happening to my spots?” the boy asked one afternoon. It was the first time Mr. K. had heard the boy speak in more than a month.

“You don’t have spots.”

“Mom has spots. I’m like her.”

Thomas showed his father his arms and back. Mr. K. removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“Those are freckles, Thomas.”

The boy stood there looking pensive. He gnawed his lip and scratched his forehead.

“You mean, I’m like you?”

One of the snow leopard cubs at the zoo became sick and died. It was the male. It had quit eating the week before and started retching up frothy pools of green liquid. The zookeepers had been unable to evaluate the cub in the lab because Mrs. K. guarded over him. They shot her with three or four tranquilizers, enough to topple an elephant, but they only succeeded in infuriating her. Whenever they came close she flecked menstrual blood and vomit at the nosy zookeepers. Late at night, she licked the cub’s fur smooth.

The older girl cub mauled her brother in the night. Mrs. K. had fallen asleep and the female cub split open her brother’s neck. When the mother awoke and found the lifeless body, the female cub made a strange purr that Mrs. K. understood was a kind of lullaby. She did her best to imitate the sound.

“What happened?” Mr. K. wanted to know. He was on the observatory deck watching the scene unfold. The zookeeper explained the mysterious illness. Then he sighed.

“These things happen.”

The husband watched as his wife licked the fur of the dead cub.

On the other side of the enclosure was a group of young boys. They were huddled in a circle. They looked the same age as Thomas. One of the boys threw a rock. It bounced off Mrs. K.’s right hind leg. She skittered beneath the tree. Another rock came down. It hit her on the shoulder. Her eyes squinted, but she did not flinch. She shielded the cub’s lifeless body from the barrage of falling rocks.

Mr. K. found a rock of his own. He held it in his trembling hands.

Mr. K’s first attempt to liberate the zoo was a failure. He leaped over the gate sometime past midnight but was discovered before he could even get to the monkey cages. He spent the night in jail. The next morning he promised a judge he would never do such a ridiculous thing again. He tried unsuccessfully to secure a court order to have his wife forcibly removed from the zoo.

“This is the twentieth century, Mr. K.,” the judge said. “The prerogative of wives against the wishes of their husbands is of no concern for this court. Marriage is not an endangered species requiring government intervention.”

The second attempt, one month later, was a success. He managed to free the foxes, gorillas, rhinos, and half the kangaroo population without difficulty. The other animals took some concerted effort. When the first zookeepers arrived the next morning the flamingos were strolling about, the lions preening on the grass, and the hippos ambling about in search of a new pond. Only the giraffes and meerkats were still in their enclosures.

Mr. K. felt he had no choice but to stage an escape. For months he had tried to convince his wife to leave the zoo. She had been unresponsive to his attempts at intimacy which the zookeepers suggested might be the only way to woo her back to civilization. He had waited until late February—the peak of snow leopard mating season, according to the book he borrowed from his son—but she was altogether uninterested in his efforts. She did not seem to recognize the songs they once listened to together on the antique record player, the flowers he brought made her sneeze, and she shat on the picnic dinner he prepared.

He discovered that in fourteen years of marriage he had forgotten how to flirt and the best he could muster were awkward smiles, bad jokes, and uncomfortable silences. He called her Lulu, his favorite pet name for her. He tried to jar her memory with simple remembrances. He reminded her of the time she slipped at the restaurant and broke two fingers. Or when her high-heel was caught in the sewage grate in the middle of the road and he directed traffic for half an hour because she wouldn’t leave behind her favorite shoes. During the long stretches when he would talk, she perched on all fours beneath the tree with the girl cub and listened, almost as if she was trying to forget.

When Mr. K. lowered the ladder into the enclosure during that midnight raid, he thought he would have her out in a few minutes. He called her name in a whisper, then shouted. When she leapt down from the tree he almost did not recognize her. She was remarkably clean and her hair, while longer, was neatly pinned in a bun. She looked taller, even though she remained in a perpetual crouch. It was dark but her eyes were a striking green, aching with confidence.

What attracted her was not his voice but the ladder. She sniffed it, eyeing him as if she sensed the deceit. She licked herself. He called her name again and she yawned.

When Mr. K. started to climb down the ladder she hissed. He tried to take her hand and she flecked menstrual blood at him.

They rounded up most of the escaped animals. Some had been shot by local hunters, others euthanized, the rest sent to live on bio-reserves. Some were never seen again.

The zoo closed down for violation of city ordinances. Mrs. K. was one of the last animals removed. They gave her a fresh change of clothes and sat her on the bench while they retrieved her husband. Mr. K. came along shortly looking every bit a man defeated. For the previous two weeks he had locked himself in the sea turtle exhibit trying to be closer to his wife, but nobody mistook him for anything other than a damn fool.

They walked slowly into the empty parking lot. Pleasant weather ruled the skies. Mr. K. talked about putting new locks on the doors. After showering, they ate. The children were asleep. The house suddenly seemed foreign to them both.

Undressing in the dark, Mrs. K. stumbled over a box of old photographs. Her husband must have retrieved them from the attic. Dimming the light, she studied them, glancing over her shoulder to make sure her husband was still asleep.

They were boring photos. Weddings. Birthdays. Her husband had no eye for capturing the moment. Suddenly, halfway through the stack, she recognized her younger self smiling on an old cobblestone bridge. Somewhere in the Austrian Tyrol, if she wasn’t mistaken. The photograph was taken the day before she jumped off that bridge. It happened decades ago, the first time she was away from home, the first time on her own. She had left everything behind, crossed the vast ocean alone, and hitchhiked from town to town. Ate cheese. Breathed deeply that foreigner’s air buzzing with starlight. She took a job in a bakery. Flour, water, and salt. That was her religion. Before sunrise she kneaded dough, baked it and sold it to people whose words she did not understand. In the evening she strolled by the river, astonished by its current. It seemed so fragile. Nothing daring to disturb its solitude. Without thinking, she wanted it. Perhaps the first time she wanted anything in her young life.

She jumped early in the morning. This was a Tuesday, the best day for a woman to leap from a bridge, according to the library. An old bridge, maybe hundreds of years. Laid stone by stone for men to cross and women to leap. How many jumpers had it known? Was she one of a thousand? Or something more special? She convinced herself only the fall would tell her. Yet the fall was too brief to even startle her, only enough to help her feel what it was like to be close to the edge of elsewhere.

Nobody rescued her. A man letting his dog piss in the river smoked his cigarette as she swam to the muddy bank and collapsed out of breath.

A few hours after leaping off the bridge, she discovered the cut on her thigh. She stared at it, disappointed to the point of betrayal, because already the wound was beginning to scab. For a time she peeled away the crusts to look at the wound. Then it scarred. Not long after she left the town for another and met Mr. K. on a Wednesday, the best day to fall in love, he later convinced her.

Lying in bed, Mrs. K. reached for the rubbery scar. Where was it? Her hands groped awkwardly. Maybe she had remembered this all wrong. Maybe there was no leap. No scar. No, it was there, only faint. So very faint. It had—for a day, maybe less?—been a magnificently discolored thing, but now, surrounded by charcoal shadows creeping over the walls, Mrs. K. felt only its absence. The wonder of this astonished her softly. Like stepping into the lobby of the hotel where dreams are made and finding all the rooms occupied. Without knowing why she longed for that moment after jumping off the bridge, that moment when her face broke through the water’s surface, eyes opened, so relieved by the fatal lack of color.