True Love and the Giraffe

      God damn these furious beasts.  Nothing stood between Paul and the mother rhinoceros now.  She pawed at the pale yellow grass, narrowed her eyes, and shook her hideous head.  Paul was lean and muscular, but he held no illusion of winning in unarmed gladiatorial combat: Rheena resembled a purple tank, her sides flapping over her legs like jowly sheets of steel, and that spike loomed on her nose like some fearsome medieval polearm.  Why couldn't it be an ossicusp, those furry, gentle protrusions so beloved on giraffes?

      This is why you're always endangered, thought Paul.  You just can't get along with anyone.  Rheena showed every intention of stomping the assistant zookeeper in plain sight.  He had no doubt she would kill him right there in the Tallahassee Zoo.  A crowd of spectators gathered around the fence and held their breath.  Parents, agape, covered their children's tearing eyes.  The mother rhino flicked back her ears and snorted. 

      His mission was to haul her calf to the clinic for an inspection.  When he stepped too close to the baby, Rheena had snapped to attention, jumping up and swiveling, landing on her feet with a thud.  At the sound, he had dropped the eight-foot pole used to keep the giant beasts at bay.  Now it lay out of reach in the grass and his heart raced. 

      Paul knew he'd blown it.  He was a specialist in giraffes, not rhinos.  He'd chosen a career so unusual that no word existed to define it.  He knew less about this rhino, he was sure, than some of the ten-year-olds watching from the fence.  Rhinos are fast, short-tempered, and irrational.  That much he did know.  Without a pole, tranqs are your last line of defense.  There were dart guns in the mammal house just a few paces to his left.  Pole in hand, he'd floated right past them, his mind focused solely on Ginger. 

      “Etorphine hydrochloride,” Paul whispered now.  “Etorphine hydrochloride.”

      You stay away from that baby, spat the mother rhino.  Her eyes were repugnant black balls, scarcely larger than sesame seeds and utterly vacant.  Her decision was made.  She was ready to charge.  There's nothing going on in that head anymore, thought Paul.  Just five hundred pounds of bone.  It's like an anvil with legs.

      Paul sidled to the left, a painstaking step toward the mammal house door.  The mother rhino lurched forward half its body length, then stopped.  Dry dust clouded into the air.  Down the side of his leg, Paul felt a warm stream of urine.  From their safe vantage, a couple of kids laughed, raised on TV nature shows, where humans always escape danger.  Paul was too scared to bother being embarrassed.  He found the warm wetness comforting.  Rheena was going to flatten him.  In the known history of Tallahassee, nobody had ever been killed by a rhinoceros, and that was going to change.  Paul hadn't bargained for this when he applied for the position.  He'd only been working there for a couple of weeks.

      She lowered her head, pawed the dust, reared up a few inches and snorted.  Then she charged, breathtaking in her burst of speed.  She was upon him instantly.  The horn pierced his flesh like a bullet through a paper.  It bored through his intestines and poked out the other side.  He felt himself lifted off his feet and choked on his own scream.  Still she charged forward, with Paul attached.  The air rushed around his hot cheeks.  He couldn't breathe.  Blood flew freely from the wound all down the rhino's face.  The spectators cried out and ran.  He heard their screams and their feet clapping on the asphalt concourse.  The pain was electrical, coursing through his toes and his teeth.  Suspended on the horn, Paul couldn't find the strength to move a muscle: he could feel only pain.  There was no doubt about it, he was going to die.  This is what I get for exaggerating my resumé, he thought.

      As Rheena gave him another vigorous shake, her horn snapped off completely.  Paul flew over the fence in a twenty-foot arc.  He landed on his palms and skidded down the pedestrian walk.  The rhino horn remained, sticking out of his gut. 

      Onlookers gathered around him asking questions to poke him and ask if he was okay.  Honking horns and a siren signaled the arrival of paramedics.  They wiggled the horn but did not pull it out.  Beeping noises in the rushing ambulance, announcements from nurses on a hospital PA system, a fading glimmer of a man in a mask: these were his only recollections.

      He was not going to die.  He was going to live. 

      He was going to die. 

      It's not that Paul was a bad person, but that all the major zoos, with specialists for every breed, weren't hiring in this recession.  The gift shops couldn't move plush stuffed animals and T-shirts, and states were withholding funds from anything that sounded like it might be fun or educational.  So, zoos relied on admissions fees and donations-- but little money came in with purses pinched tight.  The smaller zoos couldn't take keepers like Paul who could only handle one breed.  So, instead of being specific on his resume, he had deleted 'giraffes' and typed 'ungulates,' a far broader category, under 'skills'.  He would have put 'Snuffalupagus' on there, too, if it would have helped him get a job-- recession or not, student loans had to be settled.  Tallahassee interviewed him, watched his work, and seemed to like him.  They managed to miss him studying the placards in front of the cages and hurriedly memorizing all the “Did you know?” fun facts that he did not know.  So, they hired him, and now he was in the hospital.

      The horn had pierced his intestines and torn a hole in a lung, which had collapsed, causing air to enter the cavity between his ribs.  In back, it had scraped a kidney and dislodged his bottom rib.  The doctors installed a catheter.  A tube ran from his crotch to a bottle under the bed.  They'd cut off the horn's sharp end-- the horn was chemically more like a giant toenail than like a nose.  Now he could lay flat, and they'd sanded down the keratin on both sides of the horn, but the bulk of it remained lodged in his gut, like a cork.  The exposed ends would be vulnerable to fungus spores, but its placement-- and the huge dose of antibiotics in his IV-- might protect him from internal bacterial infections.  Most importantly it would stop the bleeding. 

      When he'd first come to, some young doctor had pulled up his gown to show him the exposed purple-yellow disc, some three inches in diameter.  It was fascinating, momentarily, before he recognized his own body.  He'd broken his left leg in the fall, too, and he had burns on his face, arms, and hands.  Doctors had covered him with cream and bandages and a cast for his leg, plus an hourly shot of local anesthetics that made him drool and hallucinate.  Were he to heal, the body might expel the horn/cork, over a span of years.  But he'd be in pain all his life, and would surely never eat solid food again.  In any case he was not expected to survive. 

      The surgeons-- carpenters, really, working with clamps, saws and belt sanders-- had left the tip of Rheena's horn on the windowsill in his room for visitors to admire.  It was nearly a foot long, and that wasn't even the whole thing.  It sat there on the windowsill like a trophy hunter's prize.

      Some visitor had taped newspaper headlines to the walls.  Assistant Zookeeper Gored In Rhino Rebellion.  Piqued Pachyderm Punctures Careless Caretaker.  Rhinos 1, Zookeepers 0.  These were supposed to provide some cheer, apparently, but just made him feel stupid.  What about all the things he'd done in his life that weren't stupid?  Research, theses, a couple of publications.  The public would never know about those.  He'd always be that dumb zookeeper who made a mistake and got himself killed.  He'd let his focus slip....

      Ginger...  It was her eyes that had caught him off guard...

      The male giraffes had all the appeal of oil derricks, painted yellow, or some contraption built from #2 pencils and rubber bands.  Ginger was different.  There was a particular distinction to her pale-yellow face, that of a frustrated princess.  Her long eyelashes and brown eyes betrayed a fierce, opinionated intellect.  She was slinky, a little underweight, but never seemed weak like the other giraffes; her buttocks loomed high, proud and firm behind her swishing tail.  Not that Paul felt this sexually-- it was both sexual and non-sexual at once, in some transcendental gray area-- but Ginger was certainly giraffa camelopardis, not something he wanted to stick his dick into. 

      On his first visit to the giraffe pen, Ginger gave Paul a look he would never forget, a long, lingering stare that he returned in kind.  The zoo staff saw this as a good sign.  But all thought of rational giraffe-handling had flown out of Paul's mind: he was a man smitten.  He'd nearly faked his way into a marriage, once, trying to force a love that wasn't there.  This felt like passion was supposed to feel, an exuberant and all-consuming need for togetherness.  With the other animals-- the elephants, for example-- he sometimes grumbled sarcastically at their neediness, but every moment with Ginger felt like domestic peace, like they were frolicking among dandelions.  Between cleanup activities he'd linger in her section of the pen, pressing against her to feel her warmth.  She would respond by tilting her neck, lowering her head to his level and smiling.  He'd gently scratch her forehead, ears, and ossicusps.

      Previously, in his research studies and his yearly safaris, he'd loved giraffes.  Now he loved a giraffe.  There was a difference.

      Should he have sought psychiatric help?  So what if he loved Ginger?  Male giraffes aren't concerned about sexual identities.  Males will rub their necks together happily and then fuck each other.  Jimmy and Jerry, at the Tallahassee Zoo, troubled many visiting parents who noticed the dangling gonads on both provider and recipient.  At the zoo, it was impossible to protect children from the raw displays of animal copulation, but this was still a bit much.  Homosexual sex didn't bother giraffes, and teaching them religion, modesty, or any other form of shame, on account of their onlookers, was simply not realistic.  Unfortunately, Ginger and her cousin Jenny were, to date, barren.  This was not only a problem for their species but a sales problem for the zoo.  The public loves high-profile animal births.  The pressure was so severe that the previous assistant zookeeper had resigned.  The chemistry just wasn't there and nobody could force it.  There was only a one-week overlap while the outgoing assistant gave cursory instructions to Paul.

      Jenny, the other female, was supposed to breed with Jimmy, but for unknowable reasons there was no romance.  She spent her days staring out at the zoo visitors with an expression that seemed to say “I know my marriage is a sham.” At times the visitors tossed peanuts at her and she'd flinch.  Giraffes, Paul would patiently explain, do not eat honey-roasted peanuts, and they especially do not catch them in flight.  He'd tap a sign: Please Do Not Feed The Animals.  Paul did not sense any self-pity, like Jenny's, in Ginger.  In their moments together, Ginger and Paul were satisfied, and their moments apart gave him a purpose. 

      Now, in the hospital, his mind drifted to other things.  His first girlfriend, who seemed to be allergic to everything and impossible to please.  His first time drinking beer with his friends in high school.  His first and only automobile accident, in which he'd broken a leg, same one as this time, and spent a day in the emergency room.  The day in junior high when he'd found a dog bleeding from its neck and carried to the vet, cradling it with one arm while riding on his bicycle.  When he called the vet later, the vet told him the dog had passed away, and he'd hung up right then and cried. 

      The hospital room was white and dull and antiseptically dead.  The only colors were up on the television screen.  The nurses turned it on every morning and left the remote somewhere unreachable.  Right now it showed a soap opera: lots of names, affairs, blackmail, shadowy figures returning from earlier seasons.  None of the dramatic revelations meant much to Paul.  One of the characters, a woman, was supposed to be wandering the streets of Calcutta-- a wild array of greens and pinks and orange walls-- but it looked stagy like it was filmed indoors in Los Angeles.  He tried to imagine the character falling in love with a giraffe, or any sort of large mammal.  What would the viewing public make of that?  What would the real public make of him, if they knew?  In the show, the character was gawking at the Taj Mahal, but it was clearly a still photo superimposed on a greenscreen.  Paul's mental faculties were intact enough to see that, anyway-- he congratulated himself. 

      He requested to see her.  They led her in on an embarrassing leash, towing her like some mere circus animal.  She hunched through the doorway into the hospital room.  Her handlers left them alone, quietly closing the door on their way out.  She was bowed over, under the low ceilings, and took up most of the room, her fragrant body shielded by a screen.

      For a while, she was silent, serene.  He could see that his condition made her uncomfortable.  She looked out the window at the cars in the parking lot.  This room stood on the second floor.  In the distance stood a black metal gate, a thin rectangular outline, existing for no obvious purpose as the hospital was open 24 hours per day.  On the crossbar were the words: MAX HEIGHT 9'6”. 

      Finally Ginger spoke, shaking her head: You shouldn't have gone in there.

      Ginger, I'm going to die.

      She batted her brown eyes.  We're all going to die, Paul.  It's natural.  It's not something we get to control.

      He said nothing.  Her mosaic of mud-brown spots, set like stonework against yellow grout, was particularly striking in this pale void of a room.  One of Ginger's spots was a near-perfect hexagon, set just below her long jawline on her left side.  One afternoon in the pen, he'd spent an hour tracing it with his fingertip.

      This place is a cage, said Ginger.

      I guess you would know.

      That isn't nice.

      He tried to make a contrite face but winced instead, from the burns on his cheeks.

      Rheena's really sorry about this.  She says she really flipped out.  She told me to tell you and send her apology.

      That apology and eighty cents'll get me a cup of coffee.  Which I can't drink anymore.

      Look, what do you want me to do?  Go back in time and make it all better?  There's some talk about putting her down, you know.

      Oh, they shouldn't do that...  That's just wrong. 

      Ginger sniffed and said nothing.

      After a time, Paul said, We're not going to be able to see each other anymore.

      Don't you think I know that?

      Quit being so short-tempered with me.  How do you think I feel?  I'm stuck here. 

      I know the feeling.

      At least you've got your health.  You're young and fertile.

      She sighed.  Why are we arguing, Paul?

      What the hell is wrong with me?  You're a giraffe for god's sake.  I'm a human.  What is this, Walt Fucking Disney World?

      Paul...

      What.

      Some things are better...

      I don't know what I'd do if it was you here and not me.

      There would be others.  You would get over me.

      No I wouldn't.  I'd leave my job and I'd be here every day and you know it.  As soon as he said this, he regretted making her feel guilty. 

      If...  Then she stopped and looked down at the white tile floor.

      I'm going to die, Ginger. 

      She turned again to the window and watched two elderly men haul a wheelchair out of the trunk of a blue sedan. 

      I wish there was something I could do, said Ginger, quietly.

      If you think of anything...  Ginger, I...

      She placed her head against his good leg and nuzzled it with the side of her face.  The handlers rapped on the door and entered.  She slowly turned around, struggling for space to move.  They stroked the mohawk running down her neck.  Paul grimaced, involuntarily, then winced again.  Ginger slouched through the doorway without saying goodbye.   

      Once he had read a scholarly article linking American zoos, and specifically their importation of African animals, to the black slave trade.  “After the Civil War and the demise of slavery as an institution, the instinct to plunder and destroy Africa transmuted, through the safari rite, into the modern network of public zoos.” The intellectual who had made this argument was prominent and well-regarded but, to Paul's mind the argument was historically inaccurate.  Nevertheless, from then on, Paul had been careful to never patronize the animals as incapable of human-like emotions and sensations, as slavers had once treated their captives.  But, just as it was a mistake to think of slaves as animals, it was a mistake to think of animals as people.  Animals were limited in ways humans were not: instinct versus reason.  Paul had forgotten.  On that one day in the rhino pen, he'd misjudged the permissible boundaries.  He'd expected his enlightened view would protect him, that he could reason his way out of it.  The laws of nature did not change for him just because he wore cargo shorts and a khaki-colored hat. 

      He slept, in the hope that Ginger would be there again when he woke.  The doctors and nurses didn't say anything to him except vague pleasantries-- “how are you feeling today”, sotto voce and rhetorical. Every day he felt weaker.  They blurred through his view, adjusting things, marking charts and checklists, turning him in the bed, wiping the sweat from his face, swapping out his IV bag or his urine bottle.  A zoo HR rep, smelling faintly like lawn clippings, came to tell him he'd receive worker's injury compensation.  Good, thought Paul, it can go toward my student loans.  The zoo, the rep went on, was struggling to find a suitable replacement for him.  To the extent that he could focus on the rep's monologue, or care, Paul was not convinced.  If he hadn't been injured in the accident, they'd have fired him immediately for incompetence.  Rheena's broken horn wouldn't hurt her any-- some zoos snapped off rhinoceros horns intentionally-- so there was no issue there.  And the newfound sense of danger surely raised the visitor count.  His grassy odor lingered after he left.

      His mother and father arrived and visited, weeping, every day.  They'd flown down from Minneapolis and his father wore a leather jacket, pungent from the rain.  His two brothers, too, paid their respects.  He couldn't do much but grunt, now, but he was grateful.  They read newspapers and stories to him, or watched television at his side: the Simpsons, a program about sharks, local news, Meet the Press.  When they laughed with a sitcom's canned audience, they cut themselves short and acted guilty.  Just laugh, thought Paul: it's fine-- but he couldn't say it or smile.  An Asian doctor came in and told them powdered rhino horn had uses in traditional Chinese medicine.  He sounded hopeful.  His family eyed the horn, but left it untouched on the windowsill.

      Over time, colors drained from the faces of anyone in the room.  Sweaters he knew to be green or red were now gray.  The television had turned black-and-white.  Outside, the sun, too, glowed without color.  He had difficulty understanding people when they spoke.  There was a daily calendar on the wall, but nobody was turning the pages to update it.  Paul did not know how long he had lay in the bed.  Death came to seem less abstract, a necessary formality like the copyright at the end of movie credits.  It seemed to be taking a long time, though.  Maybe he was going to live after all.  Sometimes nurses transferred him to a stretcher and rolled him down the hallway into circular rooms with glass walls.  Men and women in masks moved their arms, machines beeped.  He was smeared with conductive goo and measured on electrical scopes.  Behind the glass, he could see the faces of students, silently flapping their lips.  He saw scissors and scalpels shining beneath the white fluorescent lights.  The smell of formaldehyde stabbed tartly into his nasal cavities.  He'd wake up in his numbered room.  His mother had bought him a stuffed hippopotamus, probably by mistake, and someone had written “Paul's Paddock” on the wall.  Enough with the zoo jokes, he thought: I am not a zookeeper, merely a mound of flesh, and it's time to feed the worms.

      The room seemed cold.  The hum of the air conditioner unsettled him. He could detect an E.R. arrival as a faint bloody smell from down the hall, and could hear the young man making up a story to explain the bullets in his torso.  A fly buzzed around the room and landed on his white gown, sniffing around his horn.  He twitched and itched in places he could not reach.

      Tell Ginger I love her, he groaned, to the empty room.  Hearing his own voice he could not interpret the words.  Snatches of conversation now and then: “-go into a coma-”, “-dramatic recovery-”.  He did not know if they were talking about him. 

      And then it happened: he was not going to die.  His brother had tuned the television to local news and there on the screen was the headline: ZOO ANIMALS RUN AMOK.  A nervous-looking reporter stood by the mammal house in front of bent iron bars, twisted steel doors, and crumbled masonry.  Paul's brother stood up quickly and raised a hand to change the channel.  As he did so, the colors rushed back into the television.  Helicopter footage showed two hippos pounding down the interstate at top speed.  They were no ordinary purple-grey: the color seemed so intense that it bled from the screen into the air.  More footage: tigers, flaming orange blurs, patrolling the state capitol building.  Jabbering monkeys perched on parking meters and kangaroos hopped across the tops of parked cars.  The headline changed: UNDERSTAFFED ZOO BLAMED.  The president had sent in the National Guard, and they posted themselves in strategic locations with spidery white nets and tranquilizer guns.  The green of their uniforms burned Paul's eyes.  Watching a gorilla smash the window of a pet shop, he felt hopeful.  But where was Ginger?  Paul would pull out of this.  He would revise his resume and get a job leading safari tours in the Serengeti or Kruger.  Maybe do some original research.  He could be to giraffes what Jane Goodall was to chimpanzees.  His brother flipped to a different station-- a woman selling knives at a bargain price, while incomprehensible stock market symbols flashed beneath her-- and said something in a soothing tone. 

      Yes, the animals had freed themselves, but to what end?  Where would they go?  Canada?  Could a gibbon read a map...?  He heard helicopters beating over the hospital, distant police sirens and megaphones.  He stretched out his arms.  They felt light, weak, but perhaps salvageable.  His brother took his right hand and held it.  His brother's hand was warm, smooth.  “Paul...” he said, then reached into his pocket to pull out his cell phone.  He let Paul's hand go and walked out into the hallway.

      Paul moved aside his gown and looked at the chunk of horn still lodged within him.  The skin around it was purple and yellow.  He wrapped his fingertips around it and began to pull.  It slid effortlessly but the sensation felt strange-- vaginal, perhaps.  The nerves in his intestines had never been yanked in this direction.  As he drew the black cylinder out, a thick fluid, maybe pus, spread across the sheets, but there was only a little blood.  Nothing to be alarmed about.  I'm healed!  He held the bulky end of the horn up to the light and studied its striated contours.

      The door flew off its hinges with a bone rattling boom.  Rheena had charged through, head first, a smooth, flat disc on her nose where her tremendous horn had broken off. 

      Where's Ginger?

      Outside.  Come, Rheena said, and began charging into the wall beneath the window.  First the glass cracked, and then it shattered, falling into the room.  The once-antiseptic hospital air now filled with delicious smells, humidity, and warmth.  Stepping on the broken glass, her ungulate paws bled a rosy stain across the tile, but she continued throwing herself forward and backing off.  Her horn fell off the windowsill and skittered across the floor.  Rheena did not seem to notice.  She crashed her heavy skull into the wall, again and again.  Chunks of drywall flew through the air, first, and then insulation, and cement.  The noise was deafening.

      In the gaping cavity where the wall had stood, Ginger's smiling head appeared.  She wiggled her ossicusps and ears.  A feeling of love overcame Paul, surging through his chest and warming his body.  He felt his strength returning, the pain abating.  Rheena pushed his bed to the hole and Paul threw his arms around Ginger's long and lovely neck. 

      Now he could see the parking lot.  It was full of animals.  They had trampled the cars and surrounded the hospital: elephants, lions, polar bears, zebras, apes, crocodiles.  Smaller creatures, too: wolverines and otters, a cuscus, a bandicoot, a pack of foxes.  A party of penguins clustered like ushers toward the back of the lot.  An albatross perched on a parking lot light.  A ring-tailed lemur frolicked atop an ambulance.  A pair of hyraxi rummaged through a dumpster.  Paul breathed deep of their collective smell.  Jerry, Jimmy, and Jenny were all there, and Rhett the bull rhino, and Rheena, once she emerged through the sliding doors.  The crowd was thick, brightly colored, stretching to the ends of the lot.  He could hear them breathe.  These animals came not just from Tallahassee, but further afield.  They formed a carpet of faces, glistening noses, furry, wide ears, black eyes watching him as Ginger began loping across the parking lot, stepping around the flattened cars.  She ducked under the black gate and the kingdom of animals swelled behind them.  His gown fell off in the breeze, and the bandages on his burns slipped down around his atrophied form.  He remained up there, mostly naked, clinging to her neck.  He could sense in the animals goodwill and an overall feeling of cheer.

      Thank you, Ginger.  I...  Where will we go?

      I've always wanted to see Costa Rica, replied Ginger.  How far is that?

      I don't know, two or three thousand miles.  Most of it's Mexico.  We can take I-10, then turn south and follow the coast.

      Well I guess we better start walking, then.