Lightning People (7 page)

“I hope those notes are for
our
files,” Abrams would say, creeping up behind her to try to catch a glimpse at her notebook. “Because I'm sure you're aware we have a policy against independent studies. I don't need to tell you that it's not in the interests of the animals here to double as guinea pigs.”

“No, you don't,” she'd respond, snapping her notebook shut.

“We're a team in this department,” he'd lecture, grabbing his raincoat from the communal rack. “It doesn't matter what college
you went to. We all abide by the same rules. They're maintained for the safety of the collection.”

In her years at the zoo, Del had perfected the fine art of the sarcastic smile, which, if executed properly, punctuated every sentence with “asshole” just before the period. “Have a wonderful evening,” she said, smiling.

In the late afternoon, Del returned from fake Antarctica, pressing send on a text message to Madi: “I need the number of that green card specialist ASAP. Losing my mind.” Madi swore she had the contact for the best immigration lawyer in town. As Del barreled through the darkened rooms of the reptile hall, she felt the vibration of a reply: “Sending now,” Madi wrote. “Want me to phone in a bomb threat?”

Del hurried toward the staff door marked DANGER LIVE LAB in the carpeted black shadows of the exhibition hall. She avoided eye contact from visitors who often stopped anyone wearing a canvas jumpsuit to lodge a complaint about stroller accessibility or to demand detailed explanations on the feeding procedure of carnivores. Del used her hip to open the heavy metal door, and the bright fluorescent lights of the lab scrambled her vision. She pinched her eyes, and that was when she heard a scream rising from the inner offices.

Not a soft scream, not a token gesture. A scream that meant what it sounded like.

Del rushed down the hallway, broke through the lab's set of swinging doors, and saw five of her coworkers slowly backing away from something on the other side of the center island. Her eyes then passed to Francine Choi, standing glued to the far wall with her left leg raised almost to her stomach. The scream came from Francine, and her mouth had kept the shape of that cry, with eyes open so wide her black irises were marooned in lakes of white. Something was keeping her frozen there. Del whistled at Kip, the playboy of the junior staff with his vertiginously stiff red pompadour. He turned his head and mouthed, “Get the shovel.”

Del lifted the heavy, steel shovel from its wall hook and held it upright, gripping the handle, as she darted around the island. There Del saw what everyone was staring at, the beautiful four-year-old
western diamondback, curled in a writhing figure eight on the linoleum floor, her head coiled back in the pre-striking rhythm less than a foot from Francine's ankle.

“I can get her with the hook,” Del said, about to drop the shovel, but Francine screamed again—almost angrily now, because she must have guessed that Del would rather save this animal, this particular specimen of any other in the entire collection, than lose her if there was any chance of recovery. The diamondback's neck jutted backwards. That move was unmistakable. It's the backfire just before the bullet leaves the barrel. Del could feel her own heart rip inside of her—
fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, no, no, no
—as the snake's fangs arched out from the lower jaw, and the neck hurtled forward. Del swung, crashing the shovel's weight down on the diamondback's head. She had no choice.

The blow shattered the skull, her mouth oozing puss and broken teeth across the linoleum. The shovel fell away from Del's hands. Francine's left sneaker returned to meet her right one on the floor.

“Oh my god, Del. I'm
so sorry
,” Francine wailed as she tiptoed around the dead snake and fell against the chest of one of the older keepers. “I was just holding her. I wanted to feel the babies in the stomach, and she dropped.”

The fact of the babies came to Del in a flash. Leto was seven months pregnant, not the prize of the department, but Del's favorite and the subject of her many notebooks intended to be used one day to create the backbone of a book on rattlesnake mothers. She stared down at the snake's bloated body on the floor and dropped to her knees in front of it, pushing away the tears that clotted her eyes.

“It started striking. You had to do it.” Francine looked around at the other keepers for support. “That's code. Well, she had to, didn't she?”

Del glared up at her.

“Why were you holding her without a hook?” she yelled. “Why were you holding her at all?” But Del didn't wait for those answers. Her fingers massaged the soft, limp stomach, still wet and glistening with the pattern of sand-blown diamonds, feeling for the pouch of eggs in the oviducts. Even with her fingers shaking, Del knew what she had to do. She would try to save them. She would try to rescue
the embryos trapped in the uterus that, even if alive, would never find their own way out of their mother by themselves. Kip reached over the counter and handed her a scalpel, and she sliced Leto down the side, cut the damp distended belly open, and wedged her fingers inside.

“They're coming,” she said to Kip. “I can get them.”

Ten babies were cut from Leto's side in ten minutes. Ten frail slivers lying like ribbons on the linoleum floor. Nine dead fetuses to be burned in the zoo incinerator along with their mother, according to code. But one, at the breaking of its egg, bright as a yolk, slipped gradually from its sac and started breathing, a mere three inches of black cord. Del lifted the baby with her fingers into a small plexiglass terrarium that Kip held out in front of her. “Be careful,” she warned him. “This one has all the poison he needs already in his cheeks.”

When Del stood up, wiping the snake's amniotic fluid off her hands and staring at the baby coiled at the bottom of the clear container, the tears returned. She didn't know if the tears were for killing Leto or for saving something counted as lost. She looked around for Francine, but the young zookeeper had disappeared, running for fresh air outside in the park. Kip stretched the department phone, tethered to its extra-long cord, over the counter and handed it to her. Suddenly she was speaking to Abrams, who was demanding a full account of the matter and belching in anger over the loss of a specimen.

Abrams didn't congratulate her. Instead he railed on about the canker of his dwindling staff, Francine Choi. Had she not followed regulations? Had she not heeded the signs, learned the drill, used a metal clamp instead of bare fingers to transport a viper? Didn't she know a pregnant mother was particularly susceptible to distemper? Did she know what kind of politics were involved with killing an animal on zoo grounds? “It's an embarrassment,” he moaned. Del considered ratting out the young keeper who had entered the department a month ago and had since failed in pretty much every way possible. But her allegiances were not with Abrams, not even in this moment of silent acknowledgement that passed over the telephone. She knew that Francine was an immigrant too, brought over from Korea on the promise of an American visa. Once they have you, they have you. And if you mess up, there's the airplane home.

“It didn't go down like that,” Del replied, trying to sound impartial, even though Kip was already wrapping Leto in a plastic tarp with her nine dead infants. “It was an accident, and there was no way of saving her. I'll talk to Francine about it.”

He said he'd see her Monday early. He'd want to inspect the baby himself.

When she hung up the phone, Kip grabbed her by the arms while he made the sound of an arena-sized roar.

“You're amazing, you know that?”

“I killed an animal that belongs to the zoo,” she replied tiredly. “I'm not feeling too exhilarated right now.”

“You know what's funny? If this were any other department except maybe insects, we'd be on the news. If you shot a pregnant tiger, the public would care, and there'd be red tape for days.”

“I cared. Leto was mine.”

“You should have let her take Fran out,” Kip joked. “One good bite would have taught her a lesson.”

“Shit, what time is it?” Del searched her pocket for her cell phone. “I have to change. I've got a date.”

“I thought you already had a boyfriend,” Kip said, while fondling her hand. “You trying to make me jealous?”

“It's not that kind of date.”

Before Del left that evening, she took a note card from the cabinet and wrote APOLLO, CROTALUS ATROX in black marker before attaching it with tape to the plastic top of the terrarium. The sticky little body curled against the corner, but she was relieved to see it breathing. No matter how traumatic her day had been, it didn't match his. You can see it in animals better than in human babies: that stunned, determined look of taking up space in the world.
Apollo
, she thought, tapping her nail against the glass.
Welcome to the Bronx.

 

WHEN THE SETTING sun gutterballed between the East–West streets of downtown Manhattan, Del had to be careful about keeping her head in check. It wasn't just the speeding front bumpers of taxis she had to watch out for while crossing the street, it was the past that could slam into her and send her spinning violently through the air.
It occurred to her that only the ring on her finger separated her from a phantom version who had walked these same blocks after work every evening through Chelsea almost a year ago. As always, her eyes traveled through the windows of the brownstones between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. The flower boxed frames were surprisingly free of curtains to allow full-on flasher views of oak bookcases, crystal chandeliers, Ed Ruscha single-word paintings, and all the fine possessions that Wall Street executives made it their hobby to collect. She heard the chime of plates being dealt across tables and saw housekeepers plugging white candles into thick, silver sticks. It amazed her that these West Chelsea lives could be so clean, so secure in their own habits, that they didn't find the constant stares from outsiders a threat. At Columbia, she had spent her sophomore year in one insanely small L-shaped dorm room, whose single window opened onto an apartment building of competing rectangles. It had taken her months to remember to keep her shades closed when she dressed. Once she saw a hirsute young man masturbating in a window across from hers, and she stood there watching him, hoping he'd see her but also fascinated by the furious arm pumping his fantasies through an afternoon rainstorm. When he did finally look over, perhaps searching for a glimpse of naked bodies compartmentalized in university housing, teenage torsos glowing in their lit windows like insects trapped in amber, she waved.

She wondered if Joseph masturbated when she wasn't at home. If he chain-locked the front door and walked into their bedroom with his pants cuffed around his ankles. Sex with Joseph. The urgency of his pale body fumbling over her as if constantly trying to find a better position like a nervous mountain climber unsure of the distance to the summit. She had no complaints. Even if a guy was a disaster in bed, she could usually find a meeting point with him, learn to adapt to the geography of his body, discovering the softness of his chest hair or the sensitivity of his neck, because everyone took on extra dimensions when they were naked. Everyone had secret avenues and unwelcoming slums and unexpected detours of scars and muscles hidden when the clothes went on.

But to be honest, she had preferred sex with Raj.

This familiarwalk to the West Side Highway where the brownstones dissolved into car washes and art galleries reminded her of their old routine: entering his studio with the wood floors glowing purple at sunset and Raj sitting shirtless at his desk, staring at photographs with a glass loop in his hand. Del would creep over to him, prizing the silence, the slight weep of the floorboards under her shoes, the clink of her keys on the dresser, the echoing motors speeding along the Hudson River. She'd slide her fingers over his collarbone, sharp as a coat hanger and strangely hot, his skin was always so relentlessly warm, and he'd drop the loop and soon they would be naked on the floor glowing purple themselves. Raj had what she always called
doomed eyes
. They were delicately ice blue, encased in baggy brown lids from his father's Indian ancestry, almost fluorescent but filled with a sadness so disarming that she often wondered, even as he worked his penis into her, if pleasure for him stemmed more from a sudden lack of pain than from the spasms firing down his back. Maybe that's what made sex with Raj so memorable. There was a sense of temporary relief, a sense that she was helping him.

She stepped over a collection of cardboard boxes and blankets on the sidewalk, unable to determine whether someone was sleeping underneath them. She did not use the key Raj had given her when they had been a couple, although it still drifted somewhere at the bottom of her purse. Instead she rang the buzzer—a sure marker that their relationship had turned a corner in the year since their breakup.

“Hello?”

“It's Del,” she said, and the door gave.

Raj was not shirtless. He was dressed in a yellow button-down with a coffee stain smeared on the collar and loose khaki pants worn to holes in the knees. His hair had grown long and curly, fraying over his ears like a man much younger than his age. As he leaned into her at the door, she deflected a kiss that landed on her left ear.

“Well,” he said, recovering from the rejection with a grin. He waved his arm back to welcome her in. “Late as usual. Glad to see some things don't change. You don't come over this way much anymore.”

“There aren't many reasons to.”

“Has it been too long to ask how your day was?”

She considered telling him about the rattlesnake as she paused for a moment just inside the hallway. She didn't know how to begin and felt that Raj was already studying her, probably determining how different she looked from the last time he had seen her almost a year ago. She swept her hand over her forehead, intentionally blocking a direct view of her face. But she was also looking for what had changed as she walked past him into the studio. His place had undergone a few renovations since she last visited. A black couch replaced two broken armchairs by the window. A bulbous metal light shone on a number of photographs tacked to the wall—interior shots in Raj's style: cold uninhabited rooms of chilly modern design. A wire birdcage and two empty leather trunks were stacked in the far corner. Sentimental junk was not his aesthetic, and she wondered if someone else had been around the past few months renovating his room with her own sense of what a home should look like.