[29] Does the soul have a fate?

 

Since than night at the Marzipan, I’ve wanted to take Johnny to the zoo behind the Pleasure Palace at the base of the Imperial Folly. There’s an excursion for us. I want to take him there while he’s still an animal himself. So I order a fiaker one morning. Johnny wrapped in two soft blankets and another for his head, under my black cloak. He gets in free. The west is winning the weather battle today: the sky is low and dark, a sheet of satin steel over our heads. But down here on earth the air still bites and the snow squeaks under wheels and sticks to boots like ice cream. Avenues of cypresses pull us towards the entrance, where I pay my ticket. We’re the only visitors for a long time, rootless cosmopolitans in a world that won’t acknowledge us, a universe of two.

The world was meant to be a single organism; it wasn’t supposed to be possible or necessary for people to separate themselves from it. But what has history done to us? What have we done to ourselves with history? It demands that we shave off pieces of ourselves, feed them to the powers and authorities. Yet somehow we must maintain our barriers. In this world now, which has travelled beyond our understanding, you have to know who you are and what the world is and stay clear in your head which is which, where the border is, and how to stay integral while you walk it. Good luck. Two days ago, at grandfather’s, while he was holding Johnny at his kitchen table, he told me: ‘He’s raising himself, Emma. He’s the microcosm of a single being. We all come into the world that way. You’ve planted him on this earth. Now you’ll feed him and water him. This year is the easy part, you know – the hard part is going to be when you have to teach him that the world isn’t self-organizing the way he is right now. That it’s a machine we don’t have in us to control, coming from one place not who we are and going to the next place that isn’t who we are. That journey is what he’ll need to survive one day.’

I’ve been out this way often enough, walked the path along the edge of the zoo, which is on the way to Gus’s studio, and to the Imperial Folly and the Cyclops Fountain, and heard the ghost lions roaring and the spectral jackals laughing out their hysteria. I’ve always feared the animal world, yet here I am, slogging through fear with careful little steps. The outdoor cages first, and I hold Johnny in front of me to see. Bison like peasant cottages, big and solid but tattered everywhere. Their breath steam rising until it vanishes against the low clouds. The giraffe – why? I must be too much of a city person, because they look ridiculous to me, though their eyes are entrancing from down here, huge, brown, and a little bulbous, with lashes you can tie knots in. Gentle creatures who mean no harm. Where are the dangerous ones I’ve always imagined?

I’m getting too cold to be patient, but Johnny is in his element. I hadn’t expected that. His eyes open five weeks now, wide open at the sky from his blanket roll but still learning to connect. He hasn’t learned to sort things out, so I doubt if he’ll remember this. Everything is still always new to him, and what a blessing that must be. The blessing of babyhood – everything new every day. Every sight a new path and the paths not treaded so deep you can’t see over. He sees from the top of Baby Mountain. He recognizes me, and looks me in the eye, and I make a monkey sound to make him sneer and his hands shoot out. Then the lions roar, and my heart skips a beat.

Tigers, actually. I’ve seen pictures of those. One of them is fighting himself over a bone, batting it between his claws, pouncing from above. Johnny starts to cry, smart lad. There’s anger in Mister Tiger’s eyes, but it’s a woman’s anger – the caged kind. He’s not happy to be angry, let me tell you. Women’s anger explodes at the world. Men have the luxury of siting their targets, which sounds like more fun.

Now the monkeys. I’ve been avoiding them all my life, but I don’t want him to fear them just because I do. You have a son, I tell myself, for his sake you must learn not to fear monkeys. We step into the monkey house and I feel the wind stop as the door blows shut behind us, and for a moment I feel trapped, but once I battle that off, and pry my eyes open again, I’m proud of us both. I step in front of the first cage and make myself look, and Johnny seems to understand them right away. Monkeys are professional babies with pinched little faces. They chatter and simper along their branches and swing from their tails. They don’t grow up. They do nothing all day but talk monkey talk, and they don’t seem to miss much with their eyes. They stare right into mine and Johnny’s, and Johnny stares back with his mouth open and bubbling. Johnny want his rattle? I slip it from my pocket and place it against his chest, just to be sure, and he grabs it with his right hand and shakes it at them. The next cage, the next. Each time they follow us along the bars, wondering if we’re one of them. But soon they turn away, no, no stimulation here, no promise of food or a warm place to comb their fur. As they turn their backs, we walk to the next cage. I watch them pace their branches, watch them eat. That guy, he picks up an orange slice and bites down with his baby teeth so the juice sprays. My how fun.

‘Come to momma.’ Johnny gives me an eye contact moment while he sucks his rattle. I put my finger in his mouth to see how he grabs it. He used both hands, but then drops the left one, and I breathe again.

Lions, hyenas, bears. Hyenas are crazy, you can tell by their laugh, and I watch them long, waiting if I’ll start laughing with them … nothing. I just can’t share the hyena joke. Bears aren’t much – when they’re in cages, they’re hard not to laugh at, but I leave them their pride.

But the wolf … oh my, I didn’t expect this. He’s curled up in his brick den in the back of his cage in a dip he’s clawed from the earth, and suddenly I no longer see the cage, I no longer hear the city, and I’m holding Johnny closer than he needs. You look at a picture of a wolf, or a drawing, or you close your eyes and think of a wolf, and that doesn’t do it. You don’t see its life, you don’t feel its pulse, you don’t see the wolfness of this existence. There’s all of a world’s wild intelligence in a wolf’s eyes when they look back. Wordless, nameless, soundless. The wolf is not me or anything else, it has always been its own separate nature. The inhuman wisdom that cruelty allows, the hunger for other lives with all of its shifting calculations. This wolf has travelled right to the end of time, and he’s looking back from it, looking at us. When you’ve seen the end of the world, when you’ve been where time runs out, can anything matter to you afterwards? And having seen that look today, I’ll go home knowing where I’ve seen it before this, and that I’m going to want Johnny to be ready for it the first time he sees it. Ready the way I was not.