Change is nature's delight.
—Marcus Aurelius
The entire planet wavers in its orbit. Mysterious star-forces bombard it. For a few minutes the sky looks as if it's full of northern lights, even though it's daytime. There's lightning now and then, but no clouds. Everyone on the street is dizzy from looking up. People bump into each other. The light is so particularly strong right over the Academy of Motherhood that everyone is wondering who has been born there this morning. What would they think if they knew it was three piglets and a colt? Probably they would wonder if the colt would one day win the Preakness.
The city seems free of pollution. Con Ed has shut down, perhaps because there's so much electricity in the air already. (One should not worry about the safety of the three important men confined to the Responsive Early-Life Play Pens. The pens have self-contained, fail-safe electrical units, advertised as safe for as long as two months after an atomic blast. Of course they're so expensive that only upper-class children could afford to be saved.) Most of the cars and trucks are stuck at the edges of the city because the wildebeests have been kind enough to turn back from their migration and help their sisters by keeping traffic in a snarl outside the city limits. Anyone who wants to come in must walk or ride on some creature, if they can find one willing to accept them. The air smells fresh, enigmatic, earthy, slightly sour—almost like the very stuff of females—outlandish and uncanny.
George (for the detective has now introduced himself), Pooch, and the baby have reached Lincoln Center. Pooch recognizes it at once, with a little frisson of excitement. She gestures towards the New York City Opera. She whispers. She is still not sure her voice will be there when she wants it and what she is about to say, she hardly dares venture. “Perhaps it is here,” she says, “I might find some decent clothes.” Of course she is thinking of clothes that would be much more than decent. She is thinking of something Carmen would be wearing at Lellas Pastia's tavern.
Since George is a detective with badge, it isn't hard for him to get access to places. “Why not?” the doorman says leading them in. “Half the costumes are gone already. All of La Traviata, gone. And Gilda, Aïda, Susanna, Santuzza, Mimi.... The divas themselves took lots of them. I didn't dare stop them.” He is a chickadeelike man, soft and plump. One does not wonder that he was afraid, considering all those brand-new claws, hooves, incisors, and beaks he probably had to deal with.
The costume room has been well picked over. Pooch looks first for third-act Carmen costumes, but all the gypsy clothes are gone. Then something feathery catches her eye. At the end of a far rack ... a complete bird suit! Papagena! No one would ever recognize her in that. There's a feathered cap of iridescent green and purple, which changes color at every tiny move. It fits low over her ears and forehead. Also a matching bodice and a short, feathered skirt that turns up into a tail behind. All the feathers in it are curled and downy and mostly reds and oranges. Then there are yellow leggings that show off her nice new long legs. Everything fits as though it had been made especially for her. She has never felt so gaily dressed.
She is so elated that a haiku pops into her head practically in finished form:
What if every creature were part bird?
Could fly, glitter, whistle?
Topknot on head! Red!
Of course she doesn't really want to be a bird. She knows that it is the human being who can pretend to be anything, and she will never, now, give up being human. What other creature could have invented opera and haiku? Of course they also invented war and pollution, but perhaps it all goes together, the best and the worst. Maybe it's animalness that will make the world right again: the wisdom of elephants, the enthusiasm of canines, the grace of snakes, the mildness of anteaters. Perhaps being human needs some diluting. At any rate, how nice to be well dressed and among friends and in a state where poems pop out by themselves.
George and the doorman both break into spontaneous applause at the sight of her, but the baby is terrified and will not be comforted, until a satin Cherubino jacket is pinned around it and it is given a large feather to hold along with its kazoo.
All four of them, the doorman included, now head for Fifty-seventh Street.