Zoology. Ben Dolnick

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СКАЧАТЬ animals, I reached over and scratched him on the flat, bony place between his ears. He butted my hand away, and Paul said, “Othello’s probably the rowdiest animal here—he doesn’t know his own strength, and he gets jumpy with men sometimes. Don’t ever turn your back on him.”

      Through a tunnel in a plastic tree came a group of little kids, all black, all wearing green T-shirts that said, summer is for learning. None of the noise—the talking, the squealing, the laughing—seemed to come from any one kid.

      “It’ll be like this every day. Three to five camp groups at once.” In front of the sheep pen, a fat zookeeper with bushy eyebrows was saying, “No. No. No,” to a group of Asian kids in pink shirts.

      Paul moved like a cowboy-bear. Leading me around the ring, past the alpacas and the sheep, he said, “Here’s Lily. Back there in the shed’s Chili. They’re potbellied pigs.” The sight, at first, is like the kind of fat person you see on the subway who takes up three seats: You stare at them not quite believing they live entire lives in those bodies. Lily and Chili’s stomachs scraped on the ground every time they took a step. Folds of fat covered their eyes and hung down from their cheeks. They looked miserable under all that, trapped. I reached over and petted Lily, and her hair, black against all that tough black skin, felt like the wires in a pot scrubber. “She’s been overeating, so something you’d have to be very careful of is Lily eating Chili’s food. She loves pushing him around.” Lily grunted when I touched her, and it could have meant, “Help!” or it could have meant, “More!”

      A purple thundercloud was hurrying toward us, and when it started to rain a minute later, big, slappy drops, I pretended not to notice the water on my glasses so Paul would know that I wasn’t a complainer.

      As we came through the screen door into where all the birds lived, it sounded like we were suddenly hundreds of miles from the city. The air felt thick from the mulch, and full of plant smell. “Right up there are the magpies. Those two are getting ready to mate, so we’re trying to make sure they have everything they need.” I couldn’t see anything, but I made nodding noises. “We have three doves sitting on nests right now, so every afternoon you’ll have to go around and count them and make sure everyone’s here and the nests are OK. This is the chukar partridge, Chuck.” A fat, striped bird waddled by, as uninterested in us as we were in the trees we walked past. “He’s had a thing with his balance for the past few weeks, so we’re trying him on a special diet, and he’s spending every other day in the dispensary. You have to keep an eye on him and write down what he’s doing every morning.” On either side of the bridge we stood on was green water, and ducks with wild colors and paddling feet zoomed underneath us.

      Finally, in the pen closest to the exit, I met the goats. There were seven. “That little one’s Suzy. She’s the mom. Her kids are Pearl, there, and Onyx, who’s over there with the gray spot. Sparky’s up on the stump, Spanky’s this one—he’s trouble—Scooter’s asleep right there with the long beard, and that,” he said, pointing to the tall white one, the only one without horns, “is Newman. He’s a Nubian. Totally different species. He’s a big goof. One of the security guards calls him Jar Jar, because of the ears.” The goats looked smart and scrappy, a gang of cartoon grouches and goofballs. Their pupils went the wrong way, and they all looked up at me expecting something—they were the Bad News Bears and I was their new coach. Newman came right over, nibbled at my collar, then rested his head on my shoulder and took a loud breath. He had big pink nostrils and little square teeth. He smelled like dust and hay. His ears hung below his chin, and he looked—with his barrel of a body on top of those long, skinny legs—like a little kid’s drawing of a horse. The Summer Learners came around the bend with their hands full of food, and Newman scrambled to get in position, his front hooves in the mesh of the fence, his neck leaning way over, and his head bouncing from hand to hand.

      “He’s just a big kid, always hungry,” Paul said, and that’s when, with a quick bob, Newman lifted the glasses off my face. Paul jumped the fence and grabbed a handful of Newman’s neck hair, then wiped my glasses on his shorts before he handed them back. “He’s terrible sometimes. I’ll make a note for him not to get Enrichment this afternoon. Usually, something like that happens, you’ve got to fill out a report. Last month he broke some woman’s camera, we had to pay two hundred bucks.”

      I still haven’t fixed the scratch on my glasses’ left lens. He snuffled the food from a row of girls’ hands, snuffled them again to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, then lifted his head before bobbing off down the line.

      * * *

      When Paul called Monday afternoon to offer me the job, I decided to go for a celebration walk, and while I was looking for a place to get an egg-and-cheese sandwich, I realized I was right by David’s hospital on Fifty-first. Long escalators led up to a busy lobby with a gift shop full of flowers and silvery balloons. A week before I would have felt uneasy in a place like that, suspicious that everyone who walked past was wondering why I wasn’t at work. But I felt now like a businessman paying a visit to a friend, full of easy braggy charm.

      In the elevator I only noticed that I was humming because of how the nurse was staring at me.

      David’s face—like mine but wider and flatter, like a cow’s—can’t hide anything, and he wasn’t glad to see me. For some reason he shook my hand. “Good to see you. Just stopping by? What’s up?”

      “I can come back later.”

      “No, I’m sorry, it’s just hectic here. I’m an hour behind on my afternoons and I’ve gotta get somebody’s lecture notes for this morning. I’m about to see a nice kid now, though. You wanna come sit in? I’ll tell her you’re a first-year.”

      She walked into the office wearing shorts and carrying a folder, and she did seem nice, but to tell the truth I could hardly look at her. There wasn’t a spot on her face that wasn’t covered in acne, a Halloween mask she could never take off. David shook her hand without wincing, and she hopped up on the table, swinging her legs and crinkling the paper.

      “Your chin’s looking better,” he said, “and it’s a lot less angry up here around the temples and the hairline. How many milligrams do we have you taking now?”

      “A hundred.” It was strange to hear a little girl’s voice come out of that face, like expecting milk and getting orange juice.

      “I think we’re going to step it up to one-twenty for the next two weeks. This is Henry; Henry, this is Joan. Henry here’s at NYU, hoping to be a dermatologist himself.” He stuffed his tongue in his top lip to keep from smiling.

      “I want to be a doctor,” she said, looking at me now. “Either an open-heart surgeon or the person who helps with babies.”

      “She designed the entire Web site for her school. One of the most talented people I’ve seen,” David said. “And within six months we’re going to get her all cleared up and she’s going to be one of the most beautiful people I’ve seen too.”

      She smiled and seemed so brave, so patient and gentle about living with her face, that I hated myself for being disgusted by her.

      David has never had more than ten pimples in his life, but he’s always been a fanatic about his skin. When we were growing up he was full of weird ideas: olive oil and sugar, Aqua Velva, ice water—his routine before he’d go to bed used to take half an hour, but I don’t think he would have had any pimples if he’d wiped once with a wet rag and eaten nothing but chocolate cake. I wasn’t so lucky. From the time I was in eighth grade until a couple of years ago, I didn’t have a single day where I woke up and my face looked the way I wanted it to. Every night I’d smear on the creams and swallow the pills that СКАЧАТЬ