A string of days pass. During the nights I've been sleeping intwenty-minute intervals. I feel aimless, things look cloudy, myhomicidal compulsion, which surfaces, disappears, surfaces,leaves again, lies barely dormant during a quiet lunch at AlexGoes to Camp, where I have the lamb sausage salad with lobsterand white beans sprayed with lime and foie gras vinegar. I'mwearing faded jeans, an Armani jacket, and a white, hundredand-forty-dollar Comme des Garçons T-shirt. I make a phone callto check my messages. I return some videotapes. I stop at anautomated teller. Last night, Jeanette asked me, "Patrick, why doyou keep razor blades in your wallet?" The Patty Winters Showthis morning was about a boy who fell in love with a box of soap.Unable to maintain a credible public persona, I ɹnd myselfroaming the zoo in Central Park, restlessly. Drug dealers hang outalong the perimeter by the gates and the smell of horse shit frompassing carriages drifts over them into the zoo, and the tips ofskyscrapers, apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue, the TrumpPlaza, the AT&T building, surround the park which surrounds thezoo and heightens its unnaturalness. A black custodian moppingthe ɻoor in the men's room asks me to ɻush the urinal after I useit. "Do it yourself, nigger," I tell him and when he makes a movetoward me, the ɻash of a knifeblade causes him to back oʃ. Allthe information booths seem closed. A blind man chews, feeds, ona pretzel. Two drunks, faggots, console each other on a bench.Nearby a mother breast-feeds her baby, which awakenssomething awful in me.The zoo seems empty, devoid of life. The polar bears lookstained and drugged. A crocodile ɻoats morosely in an oilymakeshift pond. The puɽns stare sadly from their glass cage.Toucans have beaks as sharp as knives. The seals stupidly dive oʃrocks into swirling black water, barking mindlessly. Thezookeepers feed them dead ɹsh. A crowd gathers around thetank, mostly adults, a few accompanied by children. On the seals'tank a plaque warns: COINS CAN KILL—IF SWALLOWED, COINS CAN LODGE IN ANANIMAL'S STOMACH AND CAUSE ULCERS, INFECTIONS AND DEATH. DO NOT THROWCOINS IN THE POOL. So what do I do? Toss a handful of change intothe tank when none of the zookeepers are watching. It's not theseals I hate—it's the audience's enjoyment of them that bothersme. The snowy owl has eyes that look just like mine, especiallywhen it widens them. And while I stand there, staring at it,lowering my sunglasses, something unspoken passes between meand the bird—there's this weird kind of tension, a bizarrepressure, that fuels the following, which starts, happens, ends,very quickly.In the darkness of the penguin habitat—Edge of the Icepack iswhat the zoo pretentiously calls it—it's cool, in sharp contrast tothe humidity outside. The penguins in the tank glide lazilyunderwater past the glass walls where spectators crowd in tostare. The penguins on the rocks, not swimming, look dazed,stressed out, tired and bored; they mostly yawn, sometimesstretching. Fake penguin noises, cassettes probably, play over asound system and someone has turned up the volume because it'sso crowded in the room. The penguins are cute, I guess. I spotone that looks like Craig McDermott.A child, barely ɹve, ɹnishes eating a candy bar. His mothertells him to throw the wrapper away, then resumes talking toanother woman, who is with a child around the same age, thethree of them staring into the dirty blueness of the penguinhabitat. The ɹrst child moves toward the trash can, located in adim corner in the back of the room, that I am now crouchingbehind. He stands on tiptoes, carefully throwing the wrapper intothe trash. I whisper something. The child spots me and just standsthere, away from the crowd, slightly scared but also dumblyfascinated. I stare back."Would you like ... a cookie?" I ask, reaching into my pocket.He nods his small head, up, then down, slowly, but before hecan answer, my sudden lack of care crests in a massive wave offury and I pull the knife out of my pocket and I stab him, quickly,in the neck.Bewildered, he backs into the trash can, gurgling like an infant,unable to scream or cry out because of the blood that startsspurting out of the wound in his throat. Though I'd like to watchthis child die, I push him down behind the garbage can, thencasually mingle in with the rest of the crowd and touch theshoulder of a pretty girl, and smiling I point to a penguinpreparing to make a dive. Behind me, if one were to look closely,one could see the child's feet kicking in back of the trash can. Ikeep an eye on the child's mother, who after a while notices herson's absence and starts scanning the crowd. I touch the girl'sshoulder again, and she smiles at me and shrugs apologetically,but I can't ɹgure out why.When the mother ɹnally notices him she doesn't screambecause she can see only his feet and assumes that he's playfullyhiding from her. At ɹrst she seems relieved that she's spottedhim, and moving toward the trash can she coos, "Are you playinghide-and-seek, honey?" But from where I stand, behind the prettygirl, who I've already found out is foreign, a tourist, I can see theexact moment when the expression on the mother's face changesinto fear, and slinging her purse over her shoulder she pulls thetrash can away, revealing a face completely covered in red bloodand the child's having trouble blinking its eyes because of this,grabbing at his throat, now kicking weakly. The mother makes asound that I cannot describe—something high-pitched that turnsinto screaming.After she falls to the ɻoor beside the body, a few peopleturning around, I ɹnd myself shouting out, my voice heavy withemotion, "I'm a doctor, move back, I'm a doctor," and I kneelbeside the mother before an interested crowd gathers around usand I pry her arms oʃ the child, who is now on his backstruggling vainly for breath, the blood coming evenly but indying arcs out of his neck and onto his Polo shirt, which isdrenched with it. And I have a vague awareness during theminutes I hold the child's head, reverently, careful not to bloodymyself, that if someone makes a phone call or if a real doctor is athand, there's a good chance the child can be saved. But thisdoesn't happen. Instead I hold it, mindlessly, while the mother—homely, Jewish-looking, overweight, pitifully trying to appearstylish in designer jeans and an unsightly leaf-patterned blackwool sweater—shrieks do something, do something, do something,the two of us ignoring the chaos, the people who start screamingaround us, concentrating only on the dying child.Though I am satisɹed at ɹrst by my actions, I'm suddenly joltedwith a mournful despair at how useless, how extraordinarilypainless, it is to take a child's life. This thing before me, small andtwisted and bloody, has no real history, no worthwhile past,nothing is really lost. It's so much worse (and more pleasurable)taking the life of someone who has hit his or her prime, who hasthe beginnings of a full history, a spouse, a network of friends, acareer, whose death will upset far more people whose capacityfor grief is limitless than a child's would, perhaps ruin many morelives than just the meaningless, puny death of this boy. I'mautomatically seized with an almost overwhelming desire to knifethe boy's mother too, who is in hysterics, but all I can do is slapher face harshly and shout for her to calm down. For this I'mgiven no disapproving looks. I'm dimly aware of light cominginto the room, of a door being opened somewhere, of thepresence of zoo oɽcials, a security guard, someone—one of thetourists?—taking ɻash pictures, the penguins freaking out in thetank behind us, slamming themselves against the glass in a panic.A cop pushes me away, even though I tell him I'm a physician.Someone drags the boy outside, lays him on the ground andremoves his shirt. The boy gasps, dies. The mother has to berestrained.I feel empty, hardly here at all, but even the arrival of thepolice seems an insuɽcient reason to move and I stand with thecrowd outside the penguin habitat, with dozens of others, takinga long time to slowly blend in and then back away, until ɹnallyI'm walking down Fifth Avenue, surprised by how little blood hasstained my jacket, and I stop in a bookstore and buy a book andthen at a Dove Bar stand on the corner of Fifty-sixth Street, whereI buy a Dove Bar—a coconut one—and I imagine a hole,widening in the sun, and for some reason this breaks the tension Istarted feeling when I ɹrst noticed the snowy owl's eyes and thenwhen it recurred after the boy was dragged out of the penguinhabitat and I walked away, my hands soaked with blood,uncaught.
