Menagerie

Draft chapter — posted as a work in progress

Time is the longest distance between two places. No time seems longer, and no distance feels greater, than the interval between two lovers.

To while away that time, and to shorten that distance, I have found no more satisfying pursuit than leading a willing woman to the zoo.

But for the humiliating inability to answer the obvious question, "If you're so good at this, . . . " I would have gone long ago into the business of dispensing advice to lonely men. The standard, all-American first date — dinner and a show — holds nothing on a zoo date. Why waste two hours in the dark, unable either to talk or to gauge anything of value? Far better to stroll amid sculpted nature, surrounded by hints of incipient animal mating and hardcore evidence of successful human coupling.

On the arc between first contact and initial intimacy, the zoo trip stands at the apex. Fate promises nothing regarding the future trajectory of any relationship, but four hours in a garden of captive animals will almost surely represent a local maximum.

* * * * *

Zookeepers, I imagine, are museum curators, merely to an extreme. Men on the make, I know, are specimen collectors, likewise to an extreme.



* * * * *

attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.


For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles — and so goodbye

The window is filled with pieces of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of a shattered rainbow.