A Brief History of Zoos

In 2019, the Paris Zoological Park introduced a new exhibit: a single-celled organism with remarkable and yet poorly understood intelligence. It was known as The Blob. What could possibly go wrong?

Caitlyn grew up in a brewery. It was a family-friendly little pub on the Oregon Coast. In her earliest memory, she played alone in the warm light of the sun in the children’s area near the front window. When it was time to open the restaurant, Mama brought her to the back office. She fell asleep on the worn couch listening to the sound of customers growing boisterous (especially if there was a game on the TV) and imagining their children playing with “her” toys.

When she got a little older, she would sit at the end of the bar and do her coloring books and later her schoolwork. She kept to herself and no one minded – in fact no one noticed – that she was a child in the “No Minors” area.

Caitlyn was becoming good at not being noticed.

It started in second grade when the class had planned a field trip to the zoo. Caitlyn was probably on her way to being a misfit anyway, the way her favorite corduroy thrift-shop overalls carried the yeasty smell of the brewery. The zoo incident sealed her fate.

Caitlyn presented the permission slip to her father to sign.

“Do you know what a zoo is?” Papa asked.

She nodded yes, then hesitated and shook her head no.

“It’s where they keep animals. Great, magnificent and smart animals in small cages.”

“Like elephants?” Her teacher had said something about elephants.

“Like elephants. Elephants are actually intelligent animals. Do you think they like living in cages?”

Caitlyn considered the specter of an elephant in a cage like Shooky, the classroom guinea pig. She wondered if it had a bottle with a little pipe coming out the bottom like Shooky did and started to laugh at the idea of an elephant-sized water bottle. But Papa was using his teachy voice, the voice that made him use big words like “magnificent” and “intelligent.” She decided that elephants would not like living in cages and shook her head left-right-left with conviction.

“I don’t think so either. And nor do the birds or the bears or the lions or the…” Papa’s voice trailed off.

“Do they keep people in cages?”

Papa looked off in the distance for a moment, and then back at Caitlyn. “They used to,” he said a little sadly. “People who looked different of maybe came from a different place.”

“What sort of people would do that?” Caitlyn asked.

Papa ignored her question. “But people don’t do that anymore,” he said. “It is a terrible and cruel thing.”

Caitlyn already knew what sort of people would do that. People like the men who came to the bar and looked at Mama in the weird way they did and asked where she was from or called her “China Doll.” The same sort of people who looked at Caitlyn for too long, trying to make sense of the straight black hair she had like Mama and the crease in her eyelids that looked like Papa’s. She did not like this type of people. She decided she did not like zoos.

She went back to school with the unsigned permission slip and her newfound anti-zoo conviction. This led, inevitably, to a parent-teacher conference. Papa and Mama had to go to the school and repeat the exact same thing to the teacher that Caitlyn had already said. The teacher explained that the animals were not in cages, they were in “habitats.” Caitlyn noticed that the teacher talked to her parents in the tone that some people reserved for talking to children. Mama and Papa never used this tone, even though Caitlyn was a child.

“Be that as it may,” said Papa, tugging on his thick beard, “It is still captivity. We would not need to have habitats in zoos if we hadn’t fucked up the real thing.”

Caitlyn wanted to melt into the coat cubbies in embarrassment. She had forgotten to tell Papa you weren’t supposed to say “fuck” in front of the teacher. Meanwhile, Papa was saying that they had plenty of habitat nearby, the tide pools, the elk meadows, the dune grass, and when did they take a field trip to see that?

“Have you taken Caitlyn to the aquarium?”

“No, we have not. Intelligent animals in captivity.” Papa shook his head. “Did you know octopuses are highly intelligent? And we don’t even know how their brains work, except that it is completely unlike ours.”

“And yet, last time I checked, you still serve calamari at your bar.”

The teacher directed this last retort at Caitlyn’s mother, as though menu selection were clearly the purview of women or Asians.

The parent-teacher conference ended abruptly after that. Caitlyn wished the floor would swallow her. She had forgotten to tell the teacher that when Papa used his teachy tone, you’d better not disagree. She heard the teacher say “Damn hippies” to their backs, which she found strange because you also weren’t supposed to say “damn” in school.

Caitlyn’s parents decided to close the brewery on the day of the field trip, an expensive proposition, and take Caitlyn on an alternate trip. Caitlyn hoped that this would resolve the matter and told her teacher that she would go to “the loo at the zoo.” Caitlyn’s teacher smiled the way grownups do when they think children have said something amusing but the children can’t be in on the joke.

On the appointed day, while her classmates boarded the screaming yellow school bus for the drive across the mountains, Caitlyn and her parents piled into the battered old Subaru and drove in the same direction. In lieu of the zoo (a phrase Caitlyn would come to know years later and only then understand her teacher’s smirk), they went to the science museum. While her classmates pressed their hands up against the polar bear’s massive paw on the other side of thick glass, Caitlyn climbed inside a replica space capsule. She played at water tables and sand tables and made paper airplanes. When a smiling employee in a garishly colored lab coat offered to let her touch a snake, she asked if it lived in a cage like at zoos. The employee showed her a wall of aquariums: tiny glass cubicles of captivity. Caitlyn glanced at her parents and they did not seem to object. She perceived a dissonance. Since she wasn’t old enough to know what hypocrisy was, she just felt a little icky.

Caitlyn’s parents led her into a strange exhibit that wasn’t decorated in colorful Formica like the rest of the museum. Every couple of feet, set behind glass in the charcoal wall, was a perfectly preserved human fetus. As she walked along the curved path, Caitlyn saw the development of a human life from conception to birth.

Back at school, when her classmates talked about the trained falcons and climbing monkeys and all the birds in the aviary, Caitlyn told them about the babies. Caitlyn’s teacher took her aside and told her she shouldn’t talk about these things at school. The teacher didn’t say why, just like she never explained why Caitlyn shouldn’t talk about the time her family had a driftwood fire on the beach and her father decided to take a dip in the ocean and when he came back his willy was shrunken to a tiny little button like the mushrooms they foraged for in the fall. Caitlyn was learning that there are a lot of things you shouldn’t say out loud.

Fifth grade was a pandemic year. Caitlyn didn’t go to school because no one did. This suited her fine. She could wear her overalls every day and she didn’t have watch what she said or watch the way the other children formed little cliques that didn’t include her. Her parents had anguished conversations about the business as the restaurant was shut down and the tourists stayed away. They did some take-out business, however. Locals who had never set foot in the restaurant until now came by to support them.

Caitlyn was supposed to do online school. She didn’t. She became interested in the subways of the cities of the world.

The subways compelled her more than schoolwork did. She spent her days not on Zoom calls, but Googling transit maps of New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, San Francisco. She committed these maps to heart. In the afternoons, she would go with her parents to the brewery. While they filled growlers and prepared to-go orders, Caitlyn would take a large sheet of parchment paper from the kitchen and spread it across a table in the dim restaurant. She drew, from memory, detailed subway maps.

Caitlyn’s parents tried to engage with her about this new interest. Papa brought her articles about public transit. She skimmed them and set them aside. He asked her opinion – would subways survive the pandemic? She nodded and bent her head back to her drawings. Mama talked about attending high school in Manhattan in the years after 9/11. The #1 and #9 lines were demolished. Caitlyn asked a few questions about how and where and added that information to her hand-drawn maps. By now, Caitlyn had learned what not to talk about. She didn’t try to explain her new hobby. She didn’t share that she heard voices in her dreams telling her to do this. She didn’t explain how she felt that when she had committed each map to memory in sufficient detail, the same being would pull the knowledge from her.

Once parchment-paper maps hung on every wall of the shuttered pub and Caitlyn had no more corrections to make, her obsession ended just as suddenly as it began. She turned her interest to her father’s work and started to help in the brewery. As she was still too young to develop a taste for beer, her father encouraged her interest in the yeasts by teaching her to bake bread.

Caitlyn developed an affinity for baking. She soon discarded the thermometers and timers and just listened to the yeast breathing. She could hear their raspy awakening when the warm water washed over the refrigerated grains. (Caitlyn resisted using the pronoun “it” for something so alive as yeast.) She hummed along with their youthful chorus while she kneaded. She could hear their steady respiration in the rising dough. She heard sighs when she punched down the dough, breaking down the glutinous barriers and giving them new air. She could even hear their death gasp against the hardening, browning crust in the oven.

Caitlyn began selling her bread under the name “Caitlyn’s Crust”. Her yeast breads were delectably soft with perfectly chewy crust. Her sourdough melted on the palate with a perfectly balanced tang. Few of the customers who stopped by for a growler fill could resist leaving with a loaf or two under their arms.

Caitlyn and her parents foraged mushrooms in the forest as they did every fall. Caitlyn found that she could see life-lines of their underground networks, shimmering just beneath the cover of fern and mulching leaves. She followed them to troves of morels and chanterelles deep in the dank undergrowth. The bounty was more than her family could eat and she started to sell mushrooms alongside her breads.

By springtime, Caitlyn was old enough to explore the rainforest at the edge of town on her own. She picked her way through the undergrowth and discovered clusters of edible fiddleheads, a rare find in Oregon. She was captivated by these baby fronds that were also living fossils: Ferns evolved before the invention of sex and survived just fine, thank you, without ever developing the need to flower or mate. Customers returned to the restaurant. Caitlyn served them fiddleheads sauteed in Tillamook butter with local sea salt as an amuse-bouche.

Life returned to how it had been. The leering drunks who predicted that Caitlyn would blossom into a lusty barmaid were disappointed (as they should be). Caitlyn was more like a fern. Her breasts remained small and hard, like dough that wouldn’t rise. She outgrew the last of the thrift-store overalls and moved on to loose faded jeans secured with a canvas belt. Her flat waistline developed just enough to accommodate the new uniform.

Caitlyn was a senior in high school when she asked to go to the Bronx Zoo. She wanted to see The Blob. This slime mold, a single cell with unusual intelligence, had been in the Paris Zoo for nearly a decade. Zookeepers were dividing The Blob and sharing portions with major zoos around the world. Caitlyn knew better than to say too much. She didn’t tell her parents that she’d once again heard voices her in dreams. She didn’t explain that she felt like an old friend had asked her to visit. She found some articles about the organism and mutely handed them to her parents with her request, as though she had just discovered this event on the internet.

Caitlyn’s parents repeated their opposition to zoos, but Caitlyn was adamant.

“It may come to San Diego,” reasoned Papa. “It’s closer and that zoo has a great reputation.”

“They’re already in New York.” countered Caitlyn, using the same awkward pronoun that she used for yeast and which she’d recently begun using to refer to herself. She almost said, “They’re waiting for me in New York,” but stopped herself.

Caitlyn’s parents relented and reasoned that she could do as she pleased with the money that she’d saved from her baking and foraging business. Mama agreed to chaperone the trip and show her the Korean neighborhood where she had grown up. Caitlyn and her mother drove through the coast range to the airport. They flew through the night and landed in Newark at dawn. They navigated the train to Manhattan and paused for breakfast in an underground café in Penn Station. Caitlyn said little, as was now usual. She showed little interest in sites and landmarks other than getting to the zoo. She didn’t even show excitement about riding the subway, the routes of which she had once spent hours memorizing and drawing.

They found themselves standing in bright fall sunshine in front of the zoo half an hour before it opened. They stopped in a bodega to kill time. Mama perused the postcards and tried to interest Caitlyn in a souvenir magnet or coffee mug. Caitlyn, disinterested as usual, wandered towards the back of the shop where they kept some sundry hardware. She hefted a claw hammer in her hand and brought it to the counter.

“You won’t be able to take that on the plane,” commented Mama.

Caitlyn just nodded as she paid and slipped it into her day bag.

When the zoo opened, Caitlyn bought tickets for Mama and herself and made straight for The Blob. She did not look left nor right at the other animals. She was not tempted by the food carts or souvenir stands. She did not consult a map. Caitlyn’s mother nearly jogged to keep up.

Soon, Caitlyn stood before her only friend. There was only a pane of glass between them. As she looked at its indescribable shape, she felt an overwhelming surge of empathy for all who defied categorization. The yeast and the mushrooms, neither plant nor animal. The spring fiddleheads, genderless like herself. Herself, neither white nor Asian; an outsider in her own town. In one smooth moment, she pulled the hammer from her day bag and hurled it through the glass between herself and The Blob. Alarms started to ring. Bystanders froze in shock. Caitlyn vaulted over the small barrier and reached in, pulling a handful of The Blob from the severed log that formed their “habitat.” Then she ran.

Caitlyn ran straight for the exit. She hurtled through an intersection, sidestepped a blaring taxi and half slid down the greasy steps of a subway entrance. She stumbled at the turnstile, her body momentarily folding over the sliding glass barriers and releasing The Blob to slide to an ignominious rest under a discarded tabloid in the gutter. She slid to her knees, caught her breath, and turned to face the pursuing cops.

After her arrest, Caitlyn couldn’t or wouldn’t explain what had inspired her crime. The incident briefly made news only because of the copycat incidents in London and Tokyo the same week. The news media determined that the three perpetrators, all teenage girls, were not working together. They published a few essays about the cult of loneliness among young women. In Japanese media there followed a brief exposé and critique of hikikomori culture. The news cycle moved on and the incidents were attributed to “post-pandemic stress,” a catch-all syndrome for strange occurrences that would not be examined. No one seemed to notice that an intelligent organism had escaped from the zoo in each case.

Years passed. The Blob burrowed deep under New York, London, and Tokyo. They learned to digest fatbergs and other human detritus. They threw spores onto the passing soles and trousers of travelers, finding their way to every other underground in every other world metropolis.

In 2031, an earthquake rocked Tokyo and fractured its neglected infrastructure. The Blob rose up through the cracks and plugged the damaged tunnels. They grew faster than scientists could explain. Workers would remove them, but they would re-emerge overnight. The unstoppable blockage forced the abandonment of more lines.

When tidal currents in the Thames started regularly flooding Tube lines, The Blob found a foothold in London and did the same. They crawled along the tracks and fouled and disabled the aged mechanical switches. Within months, the London underground was inaccessible and unusable. Street level congestion grew unbearable. The strain created anarchy in the city that had never quite recovered, economically, from Brexit. While MPs argued and pointed fingers, Britain fell apart.

In 2032, a high school science fair prodigy calculated the level of sea level rise that would crush the Lincoln Tunnel. Alarmed engineers measured the deflection with a laser and ordered the tunnel immediately closed. Salt water was already seeping into New York’s deepest subway lines, occasionally electrocuting sewer-dwelling refugees. The Blob soon clogged these lines and advanced rapidly uptown and into New Jersey. They choked and broke the underground communication lines leading to the city. Wall Street shut down. Banks collapsed. The theaters, and discos that had recklessly roared back to life after the pandemic were darkened again.

In San Francisco, they broke down the BART system but the city had seen what was coming and seemed poised to survive a transportation crisis. Shared bicycles were ubiquitous. Tech millionaires allowed their yachts to be repurposed as ferries. The cable cars which had been restored as a tourist attraction resumed their role as critical public transit. Meanwhile, The Blob burrowed down the Pacific Coast and displaced the lines that carried the internet between North America and Asia. The world was now unplugged.

The world economy, as conceived at the turn of the twenty-first century, could not survive without constant growth, eating everything in its path. In The Blob, it met an adversary of its own kind. Already threatened by climate change and population collapse, the world plunged into a deep depression.

In time, people learned a different way to be. They learned to live with enough. They learned to live with an intelligence that they could not understand. They started to pick their way through the crumbled roads and abandoned cars and learned to travel again. Those who made their way to what had been the northwest coast of the United States met someone who had long known to live in this way.

The people assumed this person to be a Native American woman because they wore their hair in a long black plait and said few words and lived among nature with an easy, swinging stride. In fact, they came to their wisdom in another way, by listening to the beings that no one else understood. They were content to let the rumors speak for them. They learned long ago that it is easier to let people think what they will than to intrude upon their lack of communication and imagination. They sold bread and mushrooms and fiddleheads. It was also noted, among adults, that they made a damn good ale.