Half-Off Ragnarok
Page 12
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Sometime after that, I joined her in unconsciousness.
My dreams were full of algebraic equations and the sewers of New York, where alligator men danced with ladies made entirely of numbers, and carnival music played on an unseen hurdy-gurdy. Even asleep, I knew that Sarah’s dreams were leaking into mine, but it didn’t really seem to matter. Together, the two of us slept on.
Four
“The trouble with the word ‘monster’ is that it’s very much in the eye of the beholder. Show me a monster, and I’ll show you a man who just didn’t know how to explain himself to you.”
—Martin Baker
Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, home of many exotic species and way too many geese
I PULLED INTO THE zoo parking lot at ten past eight, trying to yawn around the bagel I had clamped in my teeth. It wasn’t working very well, given my desire not to aspirate chunks of breakfast food. Crow wasn’t helping. He was curled in the passenger seat making throaty churring noises that sounded suspiciously like laughter.
As soon as I had a hand free, I removed the bagel from my mouth and waved it at the uncaring Church Griffin. “You are a terrible pet,” I informed him. “My mother was right. I should have gotten a dog.” Any dog that my parents would have approved of me getting would probably have breathed fire or transformed into a dragon on the full moon or something, but at least it wouldn’t have laughed at me.
Crow croaked.
“Uh-huh. Out, before I change my mind about bringing you to work today.” I opened my door. “Office, Crow.”
Crow launched himself from the seat in a flurry of madly beating wings and flew out the open door, smacking me in the face with his tail as he passed. I spat out a small hairball and got out of the car, tucking my keys into my pocket. Time for one more day in the real world, explaining that the existence of House Slytherin in the Harry Potter books doesn’t make snakes evil and keeping small boys from climbing into the snapping turtle enclosure.
The Canada geese that infested the pond outside the zoo thronged the sidewalk as they saw me approach, snaky necks bent into S-curves and orange beaks working overtime as they honked frantically. I threw the rest of my bagel into the water. The geese followed it, fat gray-and-white bodies hustling as each one tried to beat the others to the prize. I walked on undisturbed, smothering another yawn behind my hand.
Sarah hadn’t been in the bed when my alarm rang. Since she didn’t put off as much body heat as a human, I couldn’t tell how long she’d been gone by feeling the blankets, but my fingers were stiff, like something had been gripping them for hours. I hoped the night had been more restful for her than it was for me. My dreams had been strange enough to keep me from sleeping well, probably because they weren’t my dreams. I wasn’t mad at her or anything. I was still going to talk to Grandma after work, to find out whether that sort of thing was actually helpful to Sarah’s recovery.
(That assumed that she would know. Cuckoo mental health is something of an unexplored territory, since most of them are too dangerous to attempt to psychoanalyze. If anything, Sarah’s actions had proven that she wasn’t your ordinary cuckoo. After all, an ordinary cuckoo would probably have slit my throat while I was unconscious. All Sarah had done was try to steal a pillow.)
It was almost an hour to the zoo’s official opening, and the arrival plaza was empty, the ticket booths standing deserted. By nine o’clock they’d be thronged by excited children, harried parents, and even more harried teachers with their school groups. For now, I could walk through the area without worrying that I was going to step on any runaway toddlers. I paused to stroke the nose of the brass lion statue, murmuring a good morning, and turned toward the gate.
“Morning, Dr. Preston,” said the guard on duty. “ID please?”
“Does it ever occur to you that ‘good morning, person I know by name, please provide proof of who you are’ is a little silly, Lloyd?” I asked, digging my zoo ID card out of my pocket and handing it to him.
“Every day of my life, but you know what happens when you don’t do your job.” Lloyd was an older man, tan and thin as a sun-dried lizard, with a battered slouch hat pulled firmly down over his presumably bald pate. I’d never seen him without the hat, or without the thick-lensed glasses that gave his gaze a fishbowl quality that I knew all too well from my time in my high school science club. I put his age as somewhere between sixty and eighty, in that timeless country occupied by men lucky enough to live that long.
“I suppose that’s fair,” I said.
Lloyd snorted. “Fair doesn’t enter into it. Never has, never will.” He gave my ID a cursory glance, handed it back to me, and unlocked the gate. “I don’t check your ID, you tell the administration, and I wind up another sad old man trying to take your over-fancy coffee order at Starbucks. No, thank you, Dr. Preston. You can come on in now.”
“Thank you, Lloyd,” I said, stepping through the open gate.
“You’re welcome, Dr. Preston.” Lloyd offered me a friendly nod before turning back to face the plaza, standing at the sort of military attention that had absolutely no place in a zoo.
At least he took his job seriously. I shrugged, put my ID away, and started down the path that would eventually take me to the reptile house.
About half the zookeepers were out and checking their respective enclosures; a few were in the enclosures, waking or talking to their charges. I waved and kept on walking. We all had work to do before the zoo would be ready to open, and they wouldn’t appreciate the disruption.
A little girl in a vibrant orange sari was sitting on the bench outside the reptile house, kicking her sneaker-clad feet sullenly against the cobblestones. I hesitated before walking over to her. “Good morning, Chandi. How did you get into the zoo this time?”
“I’m not telling,” she said, in a tone as sullen as her posture. “When can I come in the reptile house?”
“Well, that depends.”
She glanced up, eyes narrowed warily. She was a pretty child, and she was going to be a devastatingly attractive woman someday, if we could convince her to stop sneaking into the zoo through whatever cracks and crevices she could find. She’d snuck in via the alligator enclosure a week before, and only the fact that she didn’t smell like a mammal had prevented her from getting eaten. And she always did it while wearing her nicest dresses. I was starting to wonder if she actually repelled mud.
My dreams were full of algebraic equations and the sewers of New York, where alligator men danced with ladies made entirely of numbers, and carnival music played on an unseen hurdy-gurdy. Even asleep, I knew that Sarah’s dreams were leaking into mine, but it didn’t really seem to matter. Together, the two of us slept on.
Four
“The trouble with the word ‘monster’ is that it’s very much in the eye of the beholder. Show me a monster, and I’ll show you a man who just didn’t know how to explain himself to you.”
—Martin Baker
Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, home of many exotic species and way too many geese
I PULLED INTO THE zoo parking lot at ten past eight, trying to yawn around the bagel I had clamped in my teeth. It wasn’t working very well, given my desire not to aspirate chunks of breakfast food. Crow wasn’t helping. He was curled in the passenger seat making throaty churring noises that sounded suspiciously like laughter.
As soon as I had a hand free, I removed the bagel from my mouth and waved it at the uncaring Church Griffin. “You are a terrible pet,” I informed him. “My mother was right. I should have gotten a dog.” Any dog that my parents would have approved of me getting would probably have breathed fire or transformed into a dragon on the full moon or something, but at least it wouldn’t have laughed at me.
Crow croaked.
“Uh-huh. Out, before I change my mind about bringing you to work today.” I opened my door. “Office, Crow.”
Crow launched himself from the seat in a flurry of madly beating wings and flew out the open door, smacking me in the face with his tail as he passed. I spat out a small hairball and got out of the car, tucking my keys into my pocket. Time for one more day in the real world, explaining that the existence of House Slytherin in the Harry Potter books doesn’t make snakes evil and keeping small boys from climbing into the snapping turtle enclosure.
The Canada geese that infested the pond outside the zoo thronged the sidewalk as they saw me approach, snaky necks bent into S-curves and orange beaks working overtime as they honked frantically. I threw the rest of my bagel into the water. The geese followed it, fat gray-and-white bodies hustling as each one tried to beat the others to the prize. I walked on undisturbed, smothering another yawn behind my hand.
Sarah hadn’t been in the bed when my alarm rang. Since she didn’t put off as much body heat as a human, I couldn’t tell how long she’d been gone by feeling the blankets, but my fingers were stiff, like something had been gripping them for hours. I hoped the night had been more restful for her than it was for me. My dreams had been strange enough to keep me from sleeping well, probably because they weren’t my dreams. I wasn’t mad at her or anything. I was still going to talk to Grandma after work, to find out whether that sort of thing was actually helpful to Sarah’s recovery.
(That assumed that she would know. Cuckoo mental health is something of an unexplored territory, since most of them are too dangerous to attempt to psychoanalyze. If anything, Sarah’s actions had proven that she wasn’t your ordinary cuckoo. After all, an ordinary cuckoo would probably have slit my throat while I was unconscious. All Sarah had done was try to steal a pillow.)
It was almost an hour to the zoo’s official opening, and the arrival plaza was empty, the ticket booths standing deserted. By nine o’clock they’d be thronged by excited children, harried parents, and even more harried teachers with their school groups. For now, I could walk through the area without worrying that I was going to step on any runaway toddlers. I paused to stroke the nose of the brass lion statue, murmuring a good morning, and turned toward the gate.
“Morning, Dr. Preston,” said the guard on duty. “ID please?”
“Does it ever occur to you that ‘good morning, person I know by name, please provide proof of who you are’ is a little silly, Lloyd?” I asked, digging my zoo ID card out of my pocket and handing it to him.
“Every day of my life, but you know what happens when you don’t do your job.” Lloyd was an older man, tan and thin as a sun-dried lizard, with a battered slouch hat pulled firmly down over his presumably bald pate. I’d never seen him without the hat, or without the thick-lensed glasses that gave his gaze a fishbowl quality that I knew all too well from my time in my high school science club. I put his age as somewhere between sixty and eighty, in that timeless country occupied by men lucky enough to live that long.
“I suppose that’s fair,” I said.
Lloyd snorted. “Fair doesn’t enter into it. Never has, never will.” He gave my ID a cursory glance, handed it back to me, and unlocked the gate. “I don’t check your ID, you tell the administration, and I wind up another sad old man trying to take your over-fancy coffee order at Starbucks. No, thank you, Dr. Preston. You can come on in now.”
“Thank you, Lloyd,” I said, stepping through the open gate.
“You’re welcome, Dr. Preston.” Lloyd offered me a friendly nod before turning back to face the plaza, standing at the sort of military attention that had absolutely no place in a zoo.
At least he took his job seriously. I shrugged, put my ID away, and started down the path that would eventually take me to the reptile house.
About half the zookeepers were out and checking their respective enclosures; a few were in the enclosures, waking or talking to their charges. I waved and kept on walking. We all had work to do before the zoo would be ready to open, and they wouldn’t appreciate the disruption.
A little girl in a vibrant orange sari was sitting on the bench outside the reptile house, kicking her sneaker-clad feet sullenly against the cobblestones. I hesitated before walking over to her. “Good morning, Chandi. How did you get into the zoo this time?”
“I’m not telling,” she said, in a tone as sullen as her posture. “When can I come in the reptile house?”
“Well, that depends.”
She glanced up, eyes narrowed warily. She was a pretty child, and she was going to be a devastatingly attractive woman someday, if we could convince her to stop sneaking into the zoo through whatever cracks and crevices she could find. She’d snuck in via the alligator enclosure a week before, and only the fact that she didn’t smell like a mammal had prevented her from getting eaten. And she always did it while wearing her nicest dresses. I was starting to wonder if she actually repelled mud.
