Emerging from Shamu Stadium, Pending Vegan felt he could withstand his wife’s judgment, as he could withstand SeaWorld, as SeaWorld could withstand itself. Neither the veterans nor the orcas nor he had wigged out and chomped or bayoneted anyone. If the orca show was the climax, the test, oughtn’t they depart? He yearned for the petty solaces of the motel, his family sorted onto twin doubles, with room-service club sandwiches, more pay-per-view Disney.
“So,” he said, clapping his hands together. “Find the parking lot?”
“These are all-day tickets,” his wife said. “Rebecca’s mom told us not to miss out on the pet show.”
“I’m hungry,” he said.
“The pet show, the pet show!” the girls chanted.
“There’s food here,” his wife said crisply. “And we drove here and paid for all-day entry. The girls have waited months.” This time Pending Vegan’s wife found his eyes before he could avert, and he was enveloped in the Cloud of Unknowing.
*
The next pet show began at one, so they parked their stroller in a shady spot and Pending Vegan went looking for something edible. He found a pizzeria, but the wait for a table was impossible, and he couldn’t imagine pushing into its dark interior even to order something to take away. Outside the restaurant, however, a man grilled turkey legs at a stand. The drumsticks looked oddly primal — this wasn’t Medieval Times, after all! — but the odor of the seared meat set Pending Vegan to slavering.
See food, eat food.
Sea World, Eat World.
The instant he made the purchase he regretted it. The drumsticks were meat waste, discarded by some factory farm in preference for the breast product. SeaWorld might as well be selling horse hooves or pickled cow eyeballs. Still, he walked it back to the stroller, feeling like Fred Flintstone. Under his wife’s incredulous gaze he tore shreds off the huge cartilaginous drumstick to feed to the girls, like a mother bird to nested fledglings. The crackling greasy skin came off whole and, once removed, was too revolting to do anything with other than discard. The girls washed the meat down with orange juice. Paper napkins stuck and tore on their faces and fingers.
With fifteen minutes still to spare, they diverted to the bat-ray petting tank. As with the flamingos, Pending Vegan had to jostle the twins to the front for their chance to immerse their hands in the shallow, waist-high tank and let the blunt, rubbery rays slip beneath them. The girls gasped at the sensation. This might be what it would feel like to touch a killer whale. Here might be the true connection at last, the thing they’d really come for, and for a moment again the barriers all vanished for Pending Vegan, the turkey eyeballs forgotten, the piped-in music turned to something transporting, as if from the distant spheres.
For some reason the tank full of eloquent rays also housed a horny, knuckle-faced sturgeon. A sign warned those petting the rays not to try to touch the sturgeon. Pending Vegan, in his rapture, tried to touch it. The fish’s furrowed brow seemed to want his consolation. The sturgeon in response snapped its jaws up at him where he stood amid so many merry children, his own and others. Pending Vegan jerked backward in fear. The sturgeon continued on its course, grub within the meat of the ray tank.
“Did you see that?” he asked his daughters and anyone else who might bear witness.
“See what?” Chloe said.
“The sturgeon! It practically barked at me!”
“Daddy,” Chloe said affectionately.
*
The pet show had a stadium of its own, a smaller arena, basically a set of bleachers mounted before a stage featuring ladders, windows, obstacle courses, and giant plastic sculptures of a milk bottle and a bright-red sneaker. Unlike the seats in Shamu Stadium, those here were sparsely filled, and Pending Vegan and his wife and children found places in the third row. After only a moment the show began. In a sort of pre-credit sequence, a stream of dogs and house cats coursed out of various trapdoors over the Astroturf stage, followed by a pig, an ostrich, and a string of ducklings, to the tune of “Who Let the Dogs Out?” The dogs jumped on a seesaw and flipped miniature plastic burgers at a fake stove. The cats climbed a rope. The twins were enthralled. One of the dogs pulled a lever to release a rolled-up banner that read, in nails-on-chalkboard font, the show’s title: PETS RULE!
“That’s a classic example of Hitler’s Big Lie technique right there, wouldn’t you say?” Pending Vegan said.
“What is?” his wife said.
“ ‘Pets Rule!’ They don’t. They just … don’t. I hate it here.”
“Sh-h-h.”
“We’re complicit with a well-recognized nightmare.”
“I’ve never seen any criticism of the pet show.”
That’s because everyone’s too busy scrubbing their brains of aesthetic and moral calamity, he wished to say. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Instead he said, “That sturgeon back there almost took my finger off.”
“Too late, I think.”
“What, for the fish to eat my finger?”
“No, I mean too late for you and the fish to get on 60 Minutes, since this place already had its media moment.”
An emcee in a baseball costume and a headset microphone emerged and began introducing the pet show. Some failed actor, Pending Vegan supposed. His head shot having landed on SeaWorld’s human-resources desk, the kid was fated to deliver this obnoxious script five times daily. He described the Pet Olympics, in which the trained dogs would compete, then gave the star performers’ names as each appeared, beckoning to the children in the crowd to clap and squeal at each shameless antic. “All our dogs are rescue animals,” he explained. “They train for up to three years before making their debut in ‘Pets Rule!’ and you’re very lucky, because we have a ‘Pets Rule!’ rookie debuting today, a great little guy named Bingo. When I bring him on I want you to appreciate that he’s going in front of a crowd for the first time, so I hope you’ll give Bingo your love, give him your warmest reception—”
Bingo was a Jack Russell terrier. He seemed, at first, ready for prime time, flipping over twice, then operating with his jaw a bright-red wrench on an outsized fire hydrant, resulting in a burst of water that sprayed over a bystander piglet and into the faces of the first-row spectators, who screamed in pleasure. He stood on his hind legs, grinning widely, to gobble a discreet reward from the palm of the emcee. Then the new dog bounded from the stage, scrambled over the first two rows of seats, and into Pending Vegan’s arms. There Bingo begin frantically licking and nibbling Pending Vegan’s chin and lips, with tiny sharp nips mixed in behind the swirling tongue.
“Bingo!” the emcee called from the stage. The wet piglet wandered off erratically, but chortling music continued to pour from the speakers, lending an atmosphere of hilarity. The dog now applied itself furiously to Pending Vegan’s nostrils. Whether this was part of the show or not Pending Vegan was undecided. Chloe and Deirdre responded with delight, reaching to fondle the dog that pressed their father back in his seat. His wife touched the dog, too, and Pending Vegan felt her arm graze his stomach, the first time in months. Others in their row shrank slightly away.
It was their former animal, rescued once and abandoned, rescued a second time and trained, now restored to them. Bingo was Maurice, Pending Vegan understood. Like him, the dog had two names. It had recognized Pending Vegan immediately and leaped from the stage to apologize for having abandoned their family, the man and the woman and the twin girls who were now on the outside of the wife’s body instead of the inside, where Maurice had last known them. The dog had come to honor the alpha in his former pack. With his animal cunning Maurice perceived that Pending Vegan was off the drug now. Unless that was insane. It was insane. The ostrich had ducked from behind a curtain and goose-stepped to the lip of the stage, obviously off cue. The pet show was in tatters. An ostrich was not a pet. Pending Vegan’s crimes had a life of their own, yet the dog would, in its automatic way, offer absolution, especially given hands smeared with turkey juice. Pending Vegan’s crimes screamed to the infinite horizon. Quit globalizing, said the Irving Renker in Pending Vegan’s head, as the terrier’s frantic tongue drilled into the webbing between his fingers.