Zoo
and Crowbar:
A Fable
GUERNICA ESSENTIAL PROSE SERIES 109
TORONTO – BUFFALO – LANCASTER (U.K.) 2015
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Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2015, David Zieroth and Guernica Editions Inc.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.
Michael Mirolla, editor
Guernica Editions Inc.
1569 Heritage Way, Oakville, (ON), Canada L6M 2Z7
2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, N.Y. 14150-6000 U.S.A.
Distributors:
University of Toronto Press Distribution,
5201 Dufferin Street, Toronto (ON), Canada M3H 5T8
Gazelle Book Services, White Cross Mills, High Town, Lancaster LA1 4XS U.K.
Legal Deposit – First Quarter
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2014950181
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Zieroth, David, author
Zoo and crowbar [electronic resource] / David Zieroth. -- 1st edition.
(Essential prose series ; 109)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55071-936-9 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-55071-937-6 (epub).--
ISBN 978-1-55071-938-3 (mobi)
I. Title. II. Series: Essential prose series ; 109
PS8599.I47Z65 2015 C813’.54 C2014-906220-6
C2014-906221-4
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.
After so much disbelief,
will something be beyond us to receive us?
– C.K. Williams, Le Petit Salvié
Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different – unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.
– Karen Thompson Walker,
The Age of Miracles
DRIVING ON THIRD, HIS CAR FILLED WITH THE smell of orange peels he chucked on the empty passenger seat, the radio on, Zoo was half- listening. And when the reporter in Africa stopped talking and fell with a thud to his studio floor, this was the beginning of Zoo’s separating from himself, which soon started to feel like a cut, like wretchedness coming after actual hurt, but instead of building immediately into pain, the leave-taking turned into soft dulling. He slowed the car to stop, suddenly faint, thinking he might be sick to his stomach, confused by his own reaction, sweat now on his forehead and hands. He decided to drive on; he was nearly home after all, asking himself what could happen here? He kept up the question. It helped him drive. His arms felt prickly, as if touched by thin needles, and then came a passivity he was grateful for. He switched off the radio and thought, I’m having an allergic reaction.
What could happen here? The answer came at home when he pulled out an old portable TV from where it sat in the corner of the second bedroom, plunked it down on the coffee table in his living room, plugged it in and began surfing through the half dozen channels he could still pick up without Netplug. The French network had sent in an air device to record what was happening to people in Africa. Blown off course, it had missed the major population centres and drifted over the countryside where the commentators were shocked to see dead animals, the elephants that didn’t make it back to their famous burial ground the most obvious from that height.
One pundit from Disease Control speculated that a new phenomenon, a fatal wind-blown virus like a malaria that mutates rapidly, was sweeping the continent. His idea was picked up and, before midnight, the announcers were speaking of ’The Wind.’ Banners ran across the bottom of the screen: Toxic Wind out of Africa Blows toward Israel. As it turned out, the banner was right: a rabbinical student in Haifa fell over, dead, and then within minutes, if the reports were right, a busload of Palestinians also died, most of them leaning, apparently, against one another, none of them panicked, although there were no pictures to confirm this. Zoo could no longer tell if these events were really happening or if he was witnessing an elaborate deception by the media, intended perhaps to produce mass hysteria – for reasons he couldn’t imagine.
For a moment he thought he was watching an updated version of The War of the Worlds, and then he turned back to the screen, waiting for the event that would bring something home here in the West. He flipped channels, saw one announcer begin to stutter, the camera cutting away from her awkwardly. The webcam in Cairo showed a strangely calm city before the continent went dark once again. Seven hours had passed since he’d first heard of the Wind, and his phone hadn’t rung once. Neither had he thought of calling anyone.
One plan he almost believed: the British government was prepared to bomb the first place affected in coastal Europe or anywhere close across the Channel. They argued that, if they blasted the Wind with nuclear force, it would be annihilated. When asked, a think-tank of European physicists said that the Wind was a force of non-dimensional anti-matter, emerging from behind the 90% of the universe we hadn’t yet been able to grasp, and that possibly a nuclear explosion could alter its makeup and send it back into a realm we knew nothing about.
The spokesman said we were dealing with phenomena beyond our understanding, of an entirely unimagined nature. But perhaps a bomb would still work. Zoo sat on his couch and watched these men talking as if they were discussing the gravitational pull of the moon or some force that had been safely assigned its place. Their composure was broken at least once when the man with the large white moustache, his eyes wide with excitement and disbelief, wiped his brow with a crumpled blue handkerchief. One scene showed travellers in Heathrow shouting, and what looked like dancing, and then slumped along the walls. Shortly afterwards, Zoo fell into an abeyance of sensation almost like sleep.
Later, he reached out and turned off the TV, not wanting new information about new death places, wanting instead to turn toward that non-dimensional anti-matter force that was now the only necessity. From the kitchen table he looked out on sunshine, and the city across the harbour was dreamy in its wintry light. He could see tiny corporate flags flapping at the tops of towers, and he wondered about the others who might be feeling this new way, for surely there were others ...
He remembered scenes of panic, everyone wanting to be home, but finally any place sufficed because what mattered in the end was the state of being, not the body but consciousness, now that almost everyone could leave the body easily, apparently, without any kind of strangulation.
The mindfulness with which he ate toast and drank tea was a greeting. He had to purify his mind in preparation for the arrival of his own death, whatever death was coming – the situation was that primal, he could see, and it was irrevocably coming. In that short void before waking he had capitulated to his fate. He didn’t have to be afraid, he just had to be ready, and his thoughts were calm: I’ve been a doubter, but now, if I become a believer (in what? in the efficacy of the Wind and its power to take me elsewhere?), I will be among the chosen-and-taken, too, although who else might still be alive, on a beach in Australia, for example, of which I’ve heard nothing, who can know? Or on some Asian plateau, someone missed by the Wind, a camel herder on a trek that took him from his family’s tiny village across the last remaining wilderness, experiences a moment of clear light, becomes touched by what he calls God, but does not die, yet when he returns to his home base, no one is alive to gather him in. Out on the space station, the eleven men and three women, untouched, are bewildered at first by the silence, then as the shock sets in, begin to register anger, denial, wildness, and their own decisions about what to do. Someone stuck in an elevator, child in a playground. And was everyone else on earth getting the same quiet, decent death even if undeserved, some killer in the city passing on just as serenely as a saint in the mountains?