"The zookeeper, however, is not unwary, so that night he returns to her cage door with a double dose of cat tranks locked and loaded. He draws a bead on her exquisite rump, but finds himself unable to pull the trigger. He shudders to imagine the shock of the needle piercing her hide. He dreads that baleful look on her face as the chemicals creep through her system and shut her down in stages.
"We are lovers now, thinks the zookeeper, we have built a trust. Or at least a tryst. So Zoo-man tosses the gun away and strips off his uniform, enters the cage armed only with his otherworldly tumescence. Do you all know what a tumescence is?"
"A tumessens!" called Old Gold. "That's a boner!"
"Nothing but, young Avram," said Heinrich. "Nothing but. So here we got Mr. Lonely Zoo-man with his parable-derived, parabolic boner looking down on the object of his love, the winsome, ferocity-graced tigress.
"Come to Daddy, zookeeper coos.
"But does Tigress come to Daddy? Does Tigress bend to Daddy's whim? Fuck no! Tigress leaps! Tigress pounces! Bitch munches him up!
"And as the zookeeper lies bleeding to death, he sees it, his tumessens, if you will, now a pale tiny thing pinched in his pawed lover's maw.
" 'Why?' moans the zookeeper. But as he twitches there in the corner of the cage, he remembers another ancient and oft-cited ditty about a frog and a scorpion and a not dissimilar breach of trust, and suddenly he knows perfectly well why."
"It's a fable within a fable!" said Old Gold.
"Avram Cole Younger Gold, we have college boys here who aren't as sharp as you. You're damn right. Fables within fables. Wheels within wheels. Such is the way to wisdom. And to madness. But back to our story. The zookeeper remembers this other little number about a frog and a scorpion, or a tarantula and newt, or a salamander, it doesn't matter. And the zookeeper, now in his pulped puppety death throes, now in what the Teutons might call der Todeskampf, the zookeeper says, 'I understand, my love, I understand, I know why you did this. It's because you're a tiger. That's why, right?'
"Now the big cat leers at him, her flat eyes coins of a darker realm. You like that? Coins of a darker realm? I'm still tweaking that. But anyway, the tigress she looks at him, this dying zookeeper, she levels her leveling gaze at him.
"'Listen, punk,' she says, 'the fact that I'm a tiger's got nothing to do with it. It's just that you got stingy with the good stuff.' "
I laughed. It was hard to tell if it was okay to laugh. I guess it wasn't okay.
"People," said Heinrich, "I want to welcome a newcomer among us. His name is Steve. Get up, Steve."
"I'm Steve," I said, and stood.
I waited for welcome, for hugs, finger gongs.
Nobody said a word.
"I'm Steve," I said. "Provisionally, I'm Steve, and I'm dying of something. Nobody knows what it is, but it's killing me. I don't want to die. That's about it. Thanks."
"Sit, Steve," said Heinrich.
Trubate tugged me to the ground.
"Seen worse," he whispered.
"There you have it," said Heinrich. "Provisionally Steve. A provisional man afraid to confront the truth. Pretty damn pathetic, ask me."
"Hey!" I said.
"Hey, what?"
"Where do you get off with this shit?"
"The question is," said Heinrich, "where do you get on? Or here's another: who are you?"
"I am me," I said, approximating Old Gold's quaver.
"Not yet, you're not. You're not shit."
I barely took in the rest of the meeting, my first First Calling. There was something said about illicit speech acts in the trance pasture, a tentative scheduling of the next cheese run, a note or two about revisions to the chore board. A kid named Lem, the one I'd seen bickering with his mother, was singled out for various community infractions. Heinrich passed a sentence upon him which I did not understand. Others shuddered. I started to wonder if I'd made a major mistake. I'd read about places like this in my father's stroke books, back in the grand old days of investigative porn. Depressed kid joins up with a guru, empties his checking account, splits for parts unknown. Feds find him chunked for canning in a mackerel plant. Friends note he was always kind of a follower. "Fuckeroo'd," says his father, Vice President of the Nibs of Nod.
Heinrich didn't end the meeting so much as abandon it, wander back into the porch shade. The gathering sat for a while, silent, like an audience savvy to the possibility of a trick ending. Then, in staggered waves of bravery, or boredom, they stood.
Lem's mother took my arm.
"I'm Estelle Burke," she said.
"But are you you?" I said.
"Don't take it so hard. When I was a little girl in ballet school the teacher was always toughest on the most promising students."
"Is that where you learned not to take it so hard?"
"I never learned," said Estelle. "I wasn't promising."
"Your boy seems to have gotten himself into some trouble," I said.
"Heinrich is Lem's father. Spiritually speaking, of course. He'd never do anything to harm Lem. Or me. I don't care what he says at First Calling."
"Bark is worse than his bite?"
"This has nothing to do with dogs," said Estelle.
"It's a saying," I said.
"Sayings say nothing," she said.
We crossed the lawn to the dining hall. Sun spilled down on long pine tables. Some morose-looking sorts were busing breakfast trays.
"Can I get some food?" I said.
"You'll have to ask Parish."
"Where's Parish?"
"I was expecting who's Parish."
"I'm on the quite-fucking-hungry side."
"You've been assigned to kitchen duty."
"Kitchen duty? I'm a sick man."
"Take a number."
"I'm not kidding."
"Who's kidding? Chores are sacred."
"What?"
"Read the Tenets."
"Everyone's really recommending that book," I said.
Parish the cook explained patiently that a missed meal was a meal missed. It was a fascinating theory. He was a hard little potato of a man in a tight pink T-shirt that read: There are no shit jobs, just shit people. His rhinestone-studded tool belt bristled with spatulas and slotted spoons. He pointed to a steel box bolted to the countertop.
"That's your new girlfriend," he said. "Keep her hot and wet and we'll all be happy."
The machine was easy, a push-pull job, just the kind of sweaty rote that maybe makes the doer dream of sickles on the Winter Palace steps, or cocoa-buttered asses in Daytona. I finished in about an hour, numbed by the slosh of water and tin. A steam rash ran from my hips to my neck. I worried it, another symptom. I stood there with my shirt open, clawing the spread.
"It'll go away," said Parish.
He handed me a plate with pita bread, some runny cheese.
"Just this once."
Out in the dining hall I took a table near a great stone hearth. Nailed above it was a double-handed saw, rusted, cracked in the grips. Flat on the mantel beneath it was a copy of the Tenets. I took it down and started to skim:
In the beginning was the bird, rotating me back to the late great forty-eight. After that, more service to the state, Uruguay, El Salvador, Pepsi, Bell. But why bore you with corpses, the assassin's litany? Suffice it to say I was one of those who made you safe and warm and free enough to ruminate upon your pain, an activity formerly restricted to aristocrats, and thus helped you along your poison path. .