little biosphere—didn’t babies suffocate under plastic? It certainly wasn’t teaching good habits. But at the same time the plastic dome made the baby seem precious and revered, like a diamond in a case, or a doll tightened down inside its plastic box.
If Sarah’s second baby had survived, it’d be twenty-three months old by now, spitting out the names of animals from around the world.
Toward the zoo entrance, on the horizon, a white van edged its way over the top of a distant hill, KZTV NEWS written on the side.
The timer beeped. Lucy rested snug against her mother, mouth on a teat. The mother wrapped a protective hand around her child. Sarah marked “Nursing.”
The news van stopped where the paths grew narrow. Its sliding door opened, and a crew tumbled out. First came the reporter, a correspondent out in the field, identifiable by her markings: a helmet of blond hair, a large head, a tweed skirt-suit. Why was there a news van on zoo grounds?
One of the teen girls stood up from the picnic table, stretched, and showed a lump under her coat like a beer gut, another baby on the way, or maybe both.
Another baby?
Sarah bit the end of her pencil. The news crew approached on foot. The reporter, in heels, skittered along the curving path like Dorothy on her way to see the wizard, flanked by her loose-legged cameraman and a bearded guy in a headset. The cameraman balanced a shoulder cam over his puffy winter coat. A woman so young she was practically a girl carried a clipboard and led the way, their own little Toto.
They traveled toward Sarah. Her guess? They were hunting for a feel-good story on baby Lucy. She saw it coming: They’d want her expertise. She’d have to hold back. She didn’t work in PR, wasn’t authorized to answer press questions. Zoo publicity was a tricky business of walking a line between PETA protesters and wealthy donors. Portland is a city of vocalized opinions and insta-activism. Sarah’s job was strictly to compile data. The reporter would ask about the mandrills. She’d have to decline. She felt a conflict of interest creep closer with each step of the news crew on the rain-darkened asphalt trail.
She was proud to work for the zoo, in an amazing community of caring people. The air that greeted her daily inside the zoo walls was a particularly habitable atmosphere. Her role was small, but it was hers.
Breeding was a tightly planned eugenics exercise. Animal curators worked with the algorithms of the International Species Information System to determine who would breed and who, of the genetically redundant, was given birth control.
Every zoo manages a budget. They know how many animals they can support and have data to prove who brings in the income—Pandas! Elephants! Monkeys!—while the lazy sun bear and the Visayan warty pigs serve as chorus girls.
Each mandrill birth was recorded in an international studbook, an official intergenerational record of who has sex, who’s born, who lives fast and dies young. The studbook is like Mormon genealogy listings, all those famous begats in the Bible, or People magazine for caged animals singing the song of celebrity births. It’d be gossip if it weren’t seriously about bolstering the genetic makeup of dwindling animal populations.
Sarah collected one thin current of data that fed into behavioral documentation, noting which captive infant animals thrived and which failed.
The young woman with the news crew traipsed in white Keds that miraculously stayed white even in the rain. She seemed to grow younger as she came closer, and smiled, baring friendly teeth. Sarah hated to turn her down, sensing a kindred spirit—they both had clipboards!—but it was zoo policy.
The girl, the woman, reached out a hand as though to shake, to touch skin in a behavioral display of goodwill, and Sarah put her hand out, too, only then, instead of shaking, the girl tucked her clipboard under her arm and rolled her hand, calling the reporter in like reeling in a fish. The correspondent stepped in close, then closer, bringing along a cloud of hair spray.
This is how elephant cows assert dominance: They sway closer and closer, until one cow gives up ground.
Sarah was that cow. She gave up ground. The reporter stepped a sharp heel on the mother-father hermaphrodite worm where it inched along the asphalt, right on the bellyband. Her foot skidded. Babies! She caught herself as if it’d never happened.
The reporter’s hair blocked Sarah’s view of the mandrills. When the timer beeped, Sarah said,