Weak in comparison to dr.., p.3
Weak in Comparison to Dreams, page 3
— Cows, in a zoo? I asked.
— Not cows, Doctor Emmer, gaur.
I looked again. The animals were hulking monsters, bulging with muscles. They had curving horns like parentheses. Two stood near an empty feed trough. Their pelts glistened purple. One licked the metal flange of the trough. A second lurched forward, sniffed inside the trough, then curled its lips and gingerly bit a rusty bar. They were like weightlifter cows with metastasized heads.
— Persistent licking and biting, Suhruda said. That is behavior you need to monitor, Abigail. It is neuroaffectively negative.
He went on, lecturing us about chemical pathways in the brain, and the many ways they could go wrong. Abigail listened, but I could see she was tired. The cold air smelled of manure.
We had attracted the herd’s attention, and they lumbered down to see what was happening. I found myself the object of a dozen stares, each bulging pair of eyes bracketed by a parenthesis of horns. A third gaur came up behind the one licking the metal rim. Abigail and Suhruda were talking about something, hopefully not me.
A gaur in a snowy field, tentatively licking the rim of a metal feeding trough with its bloated pasty tongue.
A second gaur in a snowy field, curling and uncurling its lips, baring its clunky teeth and biting a bar.
A third gaur, standing right behind the one that’s biting, in fact standing so close that the flesh hanging down from its throat, whatever that’s called, rests on the rear of the gaur that’s licking.
A herd of gaurs, staring.
A worried woman, pondering ways to keep the zoo running, patiently listening to a man hypnotized by his own science.
A cold Canadian man watching uncomfortably, wishing he could help and wondering how bad a gaffe it was to think gaurs are cows.
One for sorrow
Two for sorrow
Three for sorrow…
When we got to the bears and the big cats, I thought it would be easier, but I realized there are different kinds of bears and lots of medium-sized cats. I tried to steal glances at the labels.
Abigail pointed out their panther. It stopped pacing and turned to face me. It looked directly into my bleary primate eyes. Its eyes were enormous, incandescent, and frighteningly empty. Charred by some emotion I couldn’t name.
At the exit gate Abigail thanked me for coming.
— We look forward to visiting your zoo, Suhruda said. It’ll be in the AZA, right?
— What?
— The AZA.
— Sure.
— Well, see you next October.
— For what?
— The annual meeting. Are you a member?
— Of course. We all are.
Except for that blip and my mistake about the gaurs, things seemed to have gone fairly well. At the time I thought maybe I can make it through these six zoos by keeping quiet, and just saying things to encourage the staff. But I was in a delicate frame of mind.
When it came to Adela and Fina, I thought way too much, even though my thinking never seemed to do me much good. When it came to this new job, I couldn’t think, because I didn’t know the subject I was supposed to think about. It didn’t help to have a fake job. A job isn’t supposed to be something you like, but it is supposed to be something you can do. At least I still had my ordinary work, my microscope, my amoebas, my little bacteria. They did what I expected, which was scooting around minding their own business, unless of course they were busy infecting someone and sending them on to a spectacular hemorrhaging death.
Lying on the duvet, thinking how wandering might actually be the thing I did best, wondering when I’d decide whether to show up for my appointment, or if I’d just drive away instead, pondering how I seemed to be reaching a state of perfect indecision, I saw that my imagination was not working properly: and that’s when I noticed, noticing myself note the fact, falling into the old familiar thoughts about thoughts, helplessly watching as my drowsiness shut down the wobbly machinery of my mind, like the last worker in a factory going around switching off the machines, with the darkness growing behind him, that’s when I realized I was thinking again of something other than my life.
First Dream
That night I slept a strange, illuminated sleep. I watched, enchanted, as my mind showed me images. Pictures shone on my closed eyes, gleamed in my imagination. Clearly, I thought, as my bemused sleeping mind contemplated the images that kept arriving, this is from my childhood. Somewhere near Watkins Glen, New York, nearly forty years ago.
I was standing in a reedy place next to an overgrown field, looking back toward drier ground. A chalky summer haze powdered the air. A weak wind tousled swamp grasses. It would have been stifling hot.
Trees stood around in the landscape, like men on Second Street in summer. I could almost hear their idle talking. Their voices were lost in the scorching breeze.
I turned around, in my mind, and saw I was at the edge of a swampy pond. Like the one I’d played at as a child. Mats of exhausted cattails lay on brackish water. Beyond them rafts of green algae. In my dream they had lost their color. Most people dream in black and white, and in their dreams they know they’re missing something, but they just can’t keep their minds on what it is. The idea of green lingered a moment, then faded.
The water stank of methane and mud, like the pond behind our house in Watkins Glen. The far bank buzzed with flies. A pair of dragonflies zoomed madly up and down, back and forth. Beyond the swamp were pine woods. They’d be a little cooler. There was something in the tall pines I wanted to see, but I couldn’t think what it was.
This was the sort of place I loved as I child. The sun was warm on my shirt. Let me wander in my sleep, I asked, as if I were asking someone else, let me see it through the eyes I had as a child, little Sam’s eyes, as if little Sam was someone else, and of course he was.
Farther into the swamp. I was wading. My shoes were soaked, the mud gummy. My jeans black with it. Reeds cracked and rustled as I walked. There was a drone of uncountable insects, clinging to every leaf, hovering, swarming.
I was heading toward the remains of an ancient tree, shipwrecked in the swamp. Beyond it was a scrim of thin wet woods, roaring with the sirens of cicadas.
A deerfly bit me on the hand, or else a thorn pricked me. In the dream I didn’t look at my hand. Sometimes in dreams it’s impossible to do the simplest things, like look at your own hand.
I sloshed on into the swamp. Insects whirred and fluttered. The flat water reflected the flat sky. Sometimes in dreams impossible things are simple, like walking while standing still.
At the water’s edge I crouched down. Willow saplings were growing in the muck. Their stems trapped leaves in the slow current. On the bank were swamp milkweeds, a plant that grows quickly at the end of summer. They wither at the first frost and shrivel down into the earth.
The viscid soil near the water, the tangled sodden roots and stems, last year’s leaves coated in slime, reminded me of something in my real life, my waking life. The rotted black mud at the edge of the swamp meant something, but I couldn’t quite recall what it was, because the images kept arriving, unexpected, unasked.
I looked up at a bank of milkweeds. Beyond were some trees killed by the swamp. In Watkins Glen the swamps always expanded. Year by year they grew, and the woods around them died. The swamps created wastelands, hollows where dead trees stood knee-deep in water. Those were also places little Sam loved, because no one ever visited them.
The leaves of swamp milkweed have a velvety feel. Soft like small animals warm in the sun. There was something wonderful about weeds. No one attended to them. They were always a mess. When they got tired, they leaned on each other.
I watched the scene carefully, gratefully. There was the sound of a woodpecker back in the swamp, chipping at a soft trunk. The milkweeds moved ever so slightly in the breeze. Just a few millimeters one way or the other. Gentle, minimally alive.
My sleeping mind’s eye watched, bemused, as the landscapes came one after another. I had an idea I was looking for something, maybe a particular tree. I walked through woods soundless as a ghost. The delighted eye of my memory regarded one thing and then another.
I saw a vase of ferns, then a young tree that had died and half-fallen on a cushion of stems and vines. Brilliant daylight poured down. Leaves shone softly. There was darkness underneath.
I had no fear of getting lost, because I was a little boy again, and somehow whatever I looked at was home.
2
Life with Maria-Kristiina Tank
At eight fifteen the next morning I was in the hotel lobby, thumbing through a copy of Life in Estonia, waiting for Dr. Maria-Kristiina Tank.
— Hello? she said loudly, behind my back.
She was in her forties, with a knotted, diffident expression and a blunt nose that might have looked adorable on a little girl’s face.
— Dr. Samuel Emmer, she said, using that odd custom in which people identify themselves by announcing they know the name of the person they are meeting. She stretched out her hand for an American-style handshake. Her fingernails and hair were funeral black.
— We must go. It is eighteen minutes by tram.
It was a chill dark day, with a buffeting wind. Our shoes clattered and slid on the outsized paving stones.
I told her I was interested in the new mountain goat enclosure. My assistant, Vipesh, had given me a heavy folder of documents for my trip. I hadn’t read them, but I’d noticed a newspaper clipping that said the Tallinn Zoo had the world’s largest collection of mountain goats and mountain sheep.
She made a sound, possibly yes, but possibly also eh or yeh, and probably meaning I didn’t catch that, but I’ll pretend I did.
We walked on in silence. My eye was caught by a shop with the sign WOOLENS, GOLD, SILVER, AMBER, ESTONIAN NUKUKUNST DOLLS. In the display, dolls of anorectic young women with enormous eyes and fairy wings walked on a landscape made of wool blankets, against a backdrop of silver, gold, and amber clouds. One had a wool shawl and held a gold brick. Another had a ruff collar, a miniskirt, and lace-up boots. A third had an enormous wig with an amber egg on top. She was pushing a wheelbarrow full of gold and silver. Rosie would have liked that one, I thought. When I looked up, Dr. Tank was about to disappear around the corner.
The tram was cramped. For some reason the seats at the windows were six inches farther forward than the seats on the aisles, so I sat a bit behind her. I was grateful for that, and for the tram’s dizzying swings and lurid screeches, because they made it impossible to talk. The howling of the tracks was at odds with the complacent faces of the passengers. The tram was like one of those old wooden roller coasters, straining against the clamp that holds each car to its tracks, the clamp that’s probably grimy with machine oil and grit, eroded from decades of grinding, crisscrossed with hairline fractures, fatigued from the crushing pressure and the lurches and the percussive rattling, the clamp that’s somehow kept holding on even though it should have broken years ago, but it’s down there somewhere, unnoticed by anyone, never inspected or even cleaned, but that’s life, everything falls apart, no one’s accountable, the clamp that finally snaps, releasing the car into the air, sending its ecstatically horrified occupants sailing into silent zero-gravity space for just exactly one unmeasurable eternity before they come crashing down onto the amusement park parking lot, smashing brutally, exploding in blood and bones and rusted nails, like in Amusement Park Horror Ride or whatever that movie is called where the last scene is the girl’s hand holding the teddy bear, sticking out from underneath the red-painted rim of the overturned roller coaster cart. At every ill-engineered turn in the street, I absorbed the juddering electric feeling of swelling danger, followed by the sad, draining return to the steel track, safety, and more traveling. The tram and the wheelchair, I thought. Vehicles that take us dependably on into our uninteresting futures.
We got out in a mixed-use neighborhood and walked down a wide street guarded by dirty concrete medium-rise apartment buildings. There was a mist of rain. It was the kind of street where you might find a furniture wholesaler or a specialty shop to fix cracked windshields, the sort of neighborhood a lost tourist would drive right through, never dreaming of asking directions from any of the undoubtedly surly monolingual shopkeepers. Estonia, I decided, is a particularly inhospitable place for tourists hoping for friendly chats with surprisingly North American people who only betray their nationality in their endearingly light accents.
We stopped at a restaurant across the street from the zoo entrance.
— I live there, Dr. Tank said, pointing to a wretched-looking five-story Soviet-era apartment building overlooking the zoo.
She chose an outside table with a blue vinyl parasol that shivered in the breeze. The menu, she said, offered dishes made with local wild mushrooms. She ordered for both of us: soup made from smoked cheese and mushrooms, and a glass of kama, which she said was a national drink.
— Your city has a special interest in mountain sheep?
For the first time I picked up on the U.K. accent in her speech.
— We might.
“No” would have been more honest, but I was on the edge of the runway. It was fascinating to watch myself swerve. The straight path used to be the easy one, I thought. It’s the one that’s marked on the runway, after all. It’s smooth, it doesn’t end in a spectacular burning crash. But straight lines had become difficult.
I thought of telling her the whole zoo project was just the City Council’s idea to attract regional tourists, that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I didn’t care about her mountain sheep. That would be interesting. But then she’d probably write to Catherine or Agathe and I’d be in trouble.
— You are from the University of Emory?
I guessed that the name of the university I had once attended meant as much to her as the name of her university, which her email signature identified as Tartu Ülikool, meant to me.
— No.
— Okay.
She was wearing a black-and-white striped blouse and black velvet pants, which together with her black hair and nails gave her the appearance of a pantomime actor portraying a zebra. Her glasses had oversized plastic tortoise-shell frames. I wondered if zoo directors often dress like animals. I guessed she was fifteen years out of university, earning something like 30,000 Euros a year, probably supporting a child or two.
She was looking at me like I was an idiot.
— So, she said, unfurling a brochure, this zoo is the largest in Estonia and we cannot see everything.
She pointed to several features, but the brochure was in Estonian, and it was upside down. Her accent meant either she’d had a teacher from the U.K., or she’d lived there. If I were Estonian, I would definitely want to get out, maybe just to see trees that aren’t blue.
She was saying something about mountain goats.
I wanted to ask about another thing I’d seen in Vipesh’s folder, concerning a man who lost his right hand to one of the zoo’s polar bears. He had been drinking and fell asleep behind some bushes. After the zoo closed, he woke up and wandered around in a stupor. At some point he offered a cookie to a polar bear. The bear took his hand along with the cookie. The hand was never recovered.
When Dr. Tank finished her explanation my mouth was filled with kama, which turned out to be a curious blend of powdered dried peas and berry-flavored kefir yogurt. The polar bear’s snack would have been creamy and crunchy like that, but with a different flavor profile. Perhaps the bear got the man’s watch, too. That would have been especially crunchy.
— This is not really a local soup, she announced. We do not really have a cuisine here. The country is too small. This is just a Russian soup.
Was I meant to console her for the continuing hegemony of Russian culture, or to praise her for her honesty in acknowledging her country’s lack of cuisine? There were enormous distances between Guelph and Tallinn: culinary, linguistic, climatological, economic. In Canada, we have an actual sun, I thought. Tallinn has a pale thing that lingers somewhere off in the sky. Around Guelph there are reasonably prosperous farms with late-model cars parked in paved driveways, and the farmhouses are nestled in the shade of mature trees whose leaves are generally a good healthy green. Tallinn is surrounded by an endless forest of toilet brushes. In Guelph people speak that slight Canadian drawl that Americans have such fun making fun of. The Estonian language is related only to Finnish, which is said to be one of the world’s most difficult languages. Silly to think some Russian soup could possibly bridge those gulfs.
Suddenly she brightened.
— Do you have children? she asked.
— A daughter.
— How old?
— Eighteen, she’s gone to college now.
— And your wife, she is also a scientist?
— My wife lives in Bratislava.
I sighed to indicate I was sad, even though I wasn’t. Or not exactly, anyway. Whatever had once been sadness was overwhelmed by anxiety that the sadness might come back, and since it hadn’t, the result was more like relief.
— Unfortunate. I believe Bratislava is very beautiful. I have no time to travel. My position at the university is part time, and my position at the zoo is also part time. This is how things are.
— So sorry. But you’re not missing anything. For me, it’s kind of depressing to come all this way to study animals trapped in cages.
— Please, Dr. Emmer, our animals are very good. Our welfare compliance rating is exceptional plus. Eighty-three percent of our animals are born in captivity. They are used to it.
I hadn’t always been so thoughtless to blameless people. I felt for the interns in the lab when they were hardly able to learn what they needed for their certificate, and I knew a number of waiters, waitresses, and coffee shop employees who would have said I was perfectly cheery. But when my apartment emptied out, I lost interest in what other people felt, not because I had more problems or worse ones, but because I’d lost that natural connection with my own feelings that we all take for granted. My feelings weren’t working right. Either they arrived a minute or a day too late, as if they had their own schedule and no longer cared about mine, or they didn’t appear at all, leaving me in a vacuum, where all the oxygen had gone out of the air and yet I was able to keep breathing.
