9. National Zoo
Now that my small personality had come to twist back around itself like a potbound tree that girdles and gradually starves itself with its own roots, you can imagine the exhilaration that I felt on being taken to the zoo. I came to crave it like a drug.
When you arrive at the National Zoo the sensations come over you by degrees, slowly at first and then in a rush, the way an illicit drug blossoms in your veins. First, the rank humid smell of Rock Creek Park overlaid with diesel exhaust from the school buses; then the salt smell of popcorn twined about with the burnt-sugar bouquet of cotton candy; now the murmuring of leaves and the trickling of water, pierced by strange shrieks and the occasional heart-stopping roar. Finally, as you enter the river of souls flowing through the gate into the lavish gardens of captivity –– lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’entrate!–– the dark reek and musk of urine-blackened concrete and wild animals. The Great Cats. The Great Apes. The Elephant House. The Reptile House. Massive stone buildings, like Grecian temples or mausoleums or government agencies, filled with caged animals.
Città dolente, the grief wracked city. The tightly coiled agony of confinement. The penetrating funk of Ammonia laced with pheromones of Anguish and Despair. I inhaled it deep into my lungs, electrified with recognition.
In those days, of course, the brutality of zoos was unadorned. Jaguars paced in concrete cells with black iron bars. Chimpanzees hugged themselves and rocked back and forth like traumatized children. Bears loped compulsively across their pens, turning on their heels in great swinging pivots, back and forth, back and forth, endlessly, endlessly. We stood behind the iron railings and laughed to see them do this, then fell silent.
We had no words for what stirred and shifted in our brains.
Did we feel the great valleys and mountains the bear roamed in her heart? Did we feel the rushing rivers teeming with fish, the wriggling grubs in moist soil under rocks; the fragrance of wild blueberries carried for miles on the wind?
Dark traces of dried blood clouded the concrete where the bear’s paws endlessly passed.
I dreamed of being a zookeeper when I grew up. Of being the woman in khaki holding the baby monkey and the plastic bottle of warm formula. The woman bestowing red slabs of dripping meat on grateful tigers, holding stethoscopes to the fragile hearts of orphaned antelopes. I would be the one to love and to cherish, to have and to hold. I saw myself with adoring furry arms clasped around my neck, a ring of keys jingling in my pocket.
In the basement we started our zoo.
In those years the great joy of our lives was to go into the woods and capture things and put them in cages. We had a five-gallon fishtank, a hamster cage, a two-gallon goldfish bowl, an assortment of boxes and jars. I would go with my brother Johnny and Michael Cosentino down to the creek in the woods behind Norcrest Estates, the three of us slipping like little burglars between two wood-panelled split-level houses, hopping over an old stretch of barbed wire fence, sidestepping poison ivy and cutting through a patch of honeysuckle, then finding the path that ran along the drainage down to Cooper’s Creek.
We stalked crayfish, frogs, salamanders, newts. We netted fat bullfrog tadpoles and scooped up glowing gelatinous eggs that hatched into tiny black ones. We brought our small prisoners fresh creekwater and waterweeds and lettuce leaves, and as they nibbled we watched their black tails wriggling like the tails of sperm as they struggle to enter the egg. We thrilled to see the little legs appear, first the back, then the front, and when the tails shrunk and disappeared we thrilled to see exquisite tiny black frogs.
Our lives were supercharged with meaning and joy.
We rode our bikes to the library and got out books on reptiles, amphibians, insects; my personal favorite, a book called Weird Pets, told you how to care for hermit crabs, snails, frogs, salamanders, reptiles of all kinds, how to create an aquarium, a terrarium, from pickle jars if necessary. Michael read an entire book about snakes, studying the color plates, lips moving restlessly, forefinger tracing the words below the pictures, then shyly showed up a few days later with a five-page handwritten report on snakes, fully illustrated, for our zoo library, he said.
We outfitted the five-gallon tank as a terrarium, carefully following the instructions, gravel on the bottom topped by dirt from the backyard, small ferns, a runner from a strawberry plant, uprooted sourgrass with tiny yellow flowers, a little pool of water made by embedding a jar lid in bright green moss. A slanted rock for hiding, a bare branch for climbing, bits of quartz for shining, a beautiful miniature world waiting to be peopled with our tiny captives.
One day after school, I began to pester my mother to take me to the woods to find a turtle. In those days, of course, parents did not just do things with their kids after school: we had our lives; they had theirs. Her life, at the moment, involved standing in the basement, in Bermuda shorts and worn Keds, listening to the news on a small transistor radio while she ironed my father’s shirts.
I made my pitch. She looked at me. Blankly.
“You can’t just go and find a turtle,” she quite reasonably said.
“Why not?”
“Well, there aren’t that many turtles in the woods. Your chances of finding one would be very low.”
Unimpressed by statistical arguments, I persisted. I could feel it. I wanted to see reptilian scales on a twisting neck, plastrons patterned in orange and brown, blinking eyes opening on an ancient brain. I could smell it.
Please.
Again, the blank look.
The situation appeared to be hopeless. By any rational measure, there was no way to convince my mother of the merits of my proposal, and my mother was nothing if not a rational person. And yet––
––A rent in the fabric of the universe appeared, for just a moment, and we slipped through it.
She unplugged the iron, put her pocketbook under her arm, and drove us to a slender patch of forest we had never been to before and have never returned to since, on the grounds of the Naval Ordnance Research Center. I didn’t even know you were allowed to go in there; it was behind the gates of the security-fenced compound. But she drove in through a side entrance, on a road I didn’t know existed, that ran behind the shopping center, past the Naval commander’s bungalow, beyond the eighteenth hole of the NORC Employee Association golf course, and that dead-ended at last in a patch of gravel next to a vague and unfocused stand of middle-sized poplars and oaks.
In this unpromising patch of trees we set out, on a smooth flat path carpeted with fallen leaves, light slanting between the smooth bare trunks, the clack clack of golf balls being struck fading into the bright gray air behind us.
Barely three hundred yards from the parking lot, in a pool of dappled light in the center of the path, was a turtle.
It was like a miracle.
Let me be clear: my people don’t believe in miracles. We don’t believe that wild creatures speak to us. We don’t believe the universe speaks to us, we don’t believe that trees and animals are our relatives, we don’t believe that rocks have consciousness, that rivers are alive. We don’t believe in shape-shifters, in tricksters, in omens, in deities that metamorphose into trees and streams and bears and leaping deer. We don’t believe in stars that visit the earth in human form, we don’t believe in maidens escaping lustful gods by leaping into the sky to become stars or by diving into the sea to become dolphins or vanishing into the woods to become flowering laurels.
We don’t believe any of it.
So I am not claiming some kind of mystical kinship with this turtle. I did not look into its ancient eyes and receive some vision or message about my purpose here on earth. What I did was I took it home and I put it in a cardboard box.
But like a small god I lay my offerings before it. I gave it lettuce leaves to eat, and cucumber slices, and strawberries, and fresh water in a peanut butter jar lid. Reverently I touched its smooth armor, carapace and plastron, reading its ridgy braille with my fingertips; I waited patiently for it to extend its scaled head and clawed feet, thrilled by the slow unfurling of soft body from hard shell. I listened to the sounds of its claws scratching across the cardboard. When it spilled its jar lid of water (as a turtle in a box will invariably do) I wiped it up and refilled it.
I brought it flowers.
Of course possibly turtles do not care for flowers.
What I do know is that goosebumps ran up and down my arms at the sight of it. To me the turtle’s small primordial body seemed to concentrate and then radiate all the thrill and mystery of the universe.
Of course the desire to keep mystery in a box is ill-advised, because after a certain number of hours the box begins to smell.
The creekwater in the tadpole bowl began to grow murky and to stink. You better take them back to the creek and let them go, my mother said. But we didn't want to release joy back into the creek; we wanted to keep it. The first few tadpoles began to die and decompose in the water, their perfect forms growing fuzzy and indistinct, a whitish blur of rot, and the live ones began to nibble on the dead.
A half-dozen grasshoppers now peopled our lush terrarium-world. They weren’t as desirable as newts or snakes, but they were beautiful on the moss and ferns, elegant and green, and I watched them in the lamplight as they chewed with their multiple mouthparts, stepping carefully with delicate legs, translucent abdomens pulsing rhythmically, tiny organs glowing through them. Voraciously they devoured the small plants we had so conscientiously arranged. We brought new leafy branches from the yard and watched as they efficiently clipped the leaves, moving around the edges and then back over the chewed edge while the leaf got smaller, and then smaller, and then smaller, and then gone.
Then, fatefully, we added a fat black cricket that we found on the basement floor.
Our carefully created ecosystem was collapsing. The living plants were razed to the ground, the new leaves were half-eaten and half-dying. The moss dried up and crumbled, the little pool leaked and rank water stagnated in the gravel; it began to reek. In the morning we woke up to discover the cricket eating one of the grasshoppers, translucent green legs still twitching faintly although a substantial hole gaped in the abdominal segment, the cricket’s black mouthparts moving greedily, jerking the dying green body as it chewed.
Michael Cosentino seizes a twig of honeysuckle and thrusts it in her face. His fingers are brown and smooth, dirt under the nails. He holds it under her nose, tickling, the blossoms touching her lips.
––Smell this, he says. He picks a blossom and bites the end off. His teeth are white and shining. He puts the tip of the blossom between his lips and sucks on it.
––You can suck the honey out. It’s sweet. She looks at him. His eyes are the color of creekwater, reflecting the light that falls between the leaves of the trees. She picks a blossom and bites the end off. It tastes soft and papery, like grass. She sucks on it–– nothing.
––Wait, that’s not a good one. I’ll find a better one.
They crouch and search the sprawl of honeysuckle for a more promising blossom. Michael chooses a deep butter-yellow trumpet with long, pollen-laden stamens and a perfect crown of petals; he bites the end off.
––Try this.
––It has your spit on it, she says. She takes it and sucks on it anyway, her tongue stung by the sweetness.
They go further into the woods. Soon the sound of creekwater trickles through the green light. The boys hop deftly from rock to rock down a mossy drainage, crushing tiny ferns and lichens beneath their brown feet. She tries to keep up, feeling a thrill when she leaps lightly and lands well on the next boulder.
Johnny quickly scans the creek bed and starts clambering over rocks to reach a bigger pool upstream. Michael crouches by the shallows below a tiny cascade. Emerald green algae ribbons through the shining water. A water strider steps delicately across the little pool, glimmers of light in its wake. Michael leans intently over the water, his toes slowly sinking into the black muck. The smell is cool and rank. She crouches beside him. Goosebumps ripple across her arms.
The sound of the trickling creek makes her have to pee. And something else; starts down there and spreads through her belly, her throat, her mouth. Michael’s warm skin, its warm smell like brown leaves and woodsmoke.
––If you block the light with your body you can see better, he says. She leans over the creek, seeing both their reflections shimmering back at them, peers at the muddy creekbottom. A flattish rock casts a shadow on the silt. Something darker moves there.
––I see something.
She lifts the rock; a cloud of silt erupts. The thing scoots instantly away.
––Lift the rock straight up, not sideways, he says softly. ––That way it won’t stir the mud all up. His hand moves, stealthy, his fingers grip the edges of a little ledge of stone with a hollow place underneath. He lifts it with surgical precision, pulling it out of the water without a ripple. A tiny swirl of silt spirals up from the exposed creekbottom. And there, as it clears, curved in a perfect slender S, a salamander; poised, motionless. Its back gleams golden brown, like a leaf, or a dapple of light; two narrow black stripes curve from head to delicate tail. Michael’s hand darts. The salamander vanishes, leaving another faint coil of silt.
He hunts on. His body quiet, he lifts the next rock, and the next one, slow, precise. There it is. Michael curves one hand around behind the salamander, the other hand dangling above, approaching, shadowing the bright flecks of light on the water: he drives it into the waiting hand, warm trap. In a flash there is a wriggling of skin on skin, cool on warm.
He has it.
He holds it for a moment, intent, hands cupped around it.
She leans toward him. He places his cupped hands inside her open hands. Warm. The salamander steps into her palm, sinuous, gleaming. Cool.
It is perfectly formed, glistening. Tiny feet with spread toes, tiny shining eyes, two lines of black dots extending from head to tail.
She opens her fingers a little. Too much. A flash. A ripple and a cloud of silt.
Gone.
––I’m sorry! she cries. He shrugs it off, smiling.
They hunt on. She moves to the next pool in the creek. With a hunter’s soft eyes she scans the rippling surface of the water. Something shoots backward into the shadows, under a rock. Gone.
A tiny scimitar shape emerges, moving slightly. Shading the water with her body, she lifts the rock straight up, not sideways, and then she has it: scimitar claws waving in the air, a crayfish, a huge one, almost six inches long, bigger than any the boys have caught. She feels the energy of it between her fingers, legs struggling, life vibrating beneath the hard shell.
She masters the thing, holds on to it. She wants to feel the legs scrabbling on her palm, wants to feel the hard pinch of the claws, she wants to feel.
In time, our zoo was depopulated, then abandoned; our hunting trips replaced with other pursuits. The fishtank was filled with storebought tropical fish; the other cages and jars stood empty, in a box on a shelf in the basement.
But just when it seemed we had outgrown it all, a momentous thing happened at the National Zoo. In an unnatural mating of two gargantuan creatures, the United States of America was artificially inseminated by the People’s Republic of China with the precious anima, the spunk, the elusive animal spirit of that great land mass: Ailuropoda melanoleuca, the Giant Panda. Like a king’s favorite daughter rendered up to the Emperor, the famously adorable Ling Ling and Hsing Hsing were plucked from their bamboo forests by Chairman Mao and crated and shipped halfway around the world as a gift to Richard Nixon’s National Zoo.
The Giant Panda, it turns out, is a creature that quietly, insistently declines to thrive in captivity. It is so evolutionarily fastidious that, without the precise environment in which its ancestors painstakingly evolved, without the precise shade of light filtering through softly rustling bamboo leaves, without the precise temperature of mist rising slowly off the mountains at dawn, it cannot –– or will not –– successfully mate and reproduce. In Washington D.C.’s sweltering heat alternating with raw gray penetrating chill, circled round with chain link fencing and scrutinized by impudent and promiscuous pigeons and squirrels, the National Pandas were able to somersault and tumble and entertain First Lady Pat Nixon but unable to keep a baby alive.
Five times the people of Washington D.C. exulted at the escalation of Ling-Ling’s urine hormone levels which indicated pregnancy; five times a newborn bear the size of a butter stick brought joy to the hearts of the Nation; five times a small cold stethoscope registered only silence. What was missing? What was wrong? The finest veterinary minds of the United States and China could not fathom it.
It seemed a shame for the baby pandas to keep dying. Much preferable, in my youthful imagination, was the situation where the captive mother merely rejected her infant, so that the silky little butter-stick bear would have to be hand-reared by aforementioned khaki-clad young zookeeper. Heating pads and cute flannel blankets and tiny doll-sized baby bottles would be produced. Photos would be taken of the smiling young zookeeper cuddling the swaddled baby panda, or, later, teaching it to frolic and caper adorably with brightly colored plastic rejected-baby-panda toys. This scenario was deliciously full of pathos and yet oh-so-desirable –– apparently to zookeepers across the nation as well, judging by the alacrity with which they pounced on every Zoo infant at the least sign of trouble and began measuring it, weighing it, drawing its blood, artificially feeding it, taking its rectal temperature, stimulating it, isolating it, staging photo-shoots with it, and in the end creating just enough bewilderment and disruption that the poor traumatized hormonally-violated mother would finally say fuck it, you want it so bad, you take it.
Maternal rejection had the added benefit of creating tremendous opportunities for Modern Science to conduct important research. Babies could be reared scientifically; experiments of various kinds could be performed on them. There was so much to learn about their growth and development, about the nutritional characteristics of their optimal diets, about their cognitive capacities and limitations! Many fine experiments were conducted, articles and books were written, documentary films were produced. There was just one little problem. It transpired that that these hand-reared infants did not develop normally: they screamed in fear of their own kind, they went into terrible depressions, they regurgitated their food, they ate their feces or hurled them at their keepers, they plucked out their own feathers and pulled out their own fur or paced till their paws bled. If they were able to mate and reproduce, they would shrink in horror from their own infant, treating it like a foreign object or perhaps a large frightening insect, ignoring it, attacking it, or emitting little hysterical screams at the sight of it.
A detailed slideshow on the National Zoo’s Flickr page shows how the process continues to unfold. Dr. Copper Aitken-Palmer thaws six tubes of frozen panda semen in a pan of water. Dr. Li Desheng peers intently through a microscope to appraise the defrosted sperm’s motility. Now Dr. Li Desheng and Dr. Pierre Comizzoli perform an artificial insemination on the unconscious female panda Mei Xiang. Artfully shot so as to show both veterinarians but neither the face nor the intimate nether regions of Mei Xiang herself, the photo almost seems a fulfillment of the obstetrician’s dream of creating life without the mother’s actual presence.
After the procedure, in an image Caravaggesque in its chiaroscuro drama, Mei Xiang lies supine on a table, her massive arm thrown back unnaturally, her belly and armpit hair slackly exposed, a blue plastic blood pressure cuff above her limp paw, plastic bags of fluid connected to her by rubber tubes and needles. Circled round her are three laughing women in rubber gloves, while off to the right a man lunges intently toward her IV stand. Beyond him a lone woman stares solemnly at the camera as though in a state of shock.
ABC News, Monday September 24, 2012:
Giant Panda Cub Dies; Cause of Death Unknown.
The cub's 14-year-old mother, Mei Xiang, is slowly returning to her normal routine. She has come out of her den and started eating again and interacting with her keepers. Watchers noticed her cradling a plastic toy Sunday night.
"We believe this is an expression of her natural mothering instinct," the National Zoo's statement read.
I never became a zookeeper, as it turned out. I became Mei Xiang herself.