The sign was – used to be – bright yellow, with black print. It read DO NOT FEED THE DINOSAURS, beneath a slashed circle containing an abstract piece of candy and a triceratops skull.
Terry got in trouble again last week because of it. They brought her into my office, oven-hot with the dead air conditioner clotting my window, and they told me “she’s doing it again,” and she hunched her tiny head towards her all-ribs chest and glowered so fiercely that I understood why two big, strong summer workers didn’t want to be in the same room as her, let alone be the ones to do the job of reprimanding her. Leave it to the contract manager: she’s only going to be around long enough to fix things up; we might have to look Terry in the eye next summer.
“Terry,” I told her (again), “the sign refers to the animatronics.”
“That’s stupid,” she told me.
“They’re just pigeons, Terry. It’s okay if people feed the pigeons, as long as it’s nothing bad for them. It’s not like they’re seagulls.”
“The sign says ‘do not feed the dinosaurs.’ They’re feeding the dinosaurs.”
My back was sweating against the worn fabric of my chair, not from exertion, but its anticipation. “Most people don’t think of birds when they think of dinosaurs, Terry.”
“Well they should because they are.”
“Right, but they don’t quite look-”
“Whales don’t quite look like most mammals, does that make them something else?”
“Terry,” I said, trying to bring it out of natural facts and into practical execution, “can you just enforce the sign as it is meant rather than as it is written?”
“Why not change it to ‘do not feed the animatronics?’ Then I could do both.”
“It’s meant to be whimsical. Light-hearted.”
“Feeding robots is whimsical and light-hearted.”
“Yes, but it acknowledges that they aren’t real. People want to pretend, Terry.”
My shirt was stuck to everything, but I saw the sadness in her eyes that meant I was coming towards the closest I’d get to victory. “Fine. I get it. Can I go now?”
“You’ll stop telling people not to feed the pigeons?”
“As long as they don’t feed the pigeons.”
“Please stop telling people not to feed the pigeons.”
“I’ll try,” she said, and the words sounded as hollow as anything but that was the best I was going to get.
“Thank you, Terry. You can return to your duties.”
And she did, and I watched her go and gazed past my air conditioner down at the ridiculous sauropod fountain in front of the office – long-necked, long-tailed, long-suffering – and thought that if there were one other person in the country who cleaned bird poop and gum from the surface of animatronic dinosaurs with one-half her dedication she would’ve been fired ten years ago. Niche protection wasn’t just for ecologists.
Oh no. I’d thought about ecology, which meant I’d thought about food webs, which meant I thought about plants, which meant I’d remembered that the gardener was late this week again, which meant I had to try and find their contact information, which was somewhere inside a hard drive, or a filing cabinet, or someone’s head.
The afternoon turned bleak and thick in my mind, like syrup from a fly. I sighed, and I swore, and I descended once more into the depths.
***
Morty was baking.
He sat in his lifeguard’s chair, limbs dangling, eyes shut, leathery hide hardening in the pitiless sun, and he simmered under the cloudless sky. I’d never seen him use suntan lotion. I’d never seen him put on glasses or use a hat.
“Or at least a visor?” I pled. “So you don’t need to shut your eyes.” The pool was a mirror of the afternoon sky: every patch of water that wasn’t currently being chopped, splashed, or slopped by milling bodies had been turned into a molten lens that left spots on your eyelids just glancing at it. Cartoon fish and ammonites and plesiosaurs speckled the bottom; figures worn thin and choppy by actual time and artificial tide.
“S’fine,” he grunted. “No worries.”
“You’re the lifeguard. How will you tell if someone’s in trouble?”
“Oh, I can always tell that,” he said, and he smiled at that – oh, his teeth, the one thing not suncooked on his body, big and beautiful. “I’ve got lots of practice, y’know.”
“Right,” I said. “Right. Listen, are you SURE that kid’s okay? Look, he’s waving and-”
“He’s faking it,” said Morty placidly. “His friend’s going to try to pull him out of the water and he’ll yank her in and dunk her.”
I watched. The kid’s friend tried to pull him out of the water and he yanked her in and dunked her.
“I told you,” said Morty. “Lots of practice.”
“Great, you’re paying attention, I get it. But if you don’t at least LOOK like you’re paying attention, the parents get nervous. And nobody’s twitchier and more dangerous than a nervous parent.”
He burst out laughing, or as close as he could come without moving – heh heh heh heh heh, bubbling up from the ribs outward. “True! But they’re just like the kids, you know? If you look upset, they think they should be upset. If you look relaxed, they don’t make a fuss. If I don’t worry about this, they don’t worry about this, and that means you don’t worry about this. Trust me. Lots. Of. Practice.”
Oh. That was something else. “You’re senior staff, yes. Can you help me with something? I’m looking for our gardener; they still haven’t shown up on time this week and the contact information is shot. Nothing in the computers, nothing in the filing cabinets. Gone. Any chance you remember them?”
“Huh,” said Morty. Not words, an expulsion of air; a breath turned thick. “Huh. Which one?”
“The name’s missing too. But they’ve been under contract here for ages. Practically since the park opened.”
“Huh. Hmm. Big one, weren’t they?”
“It wasn’t a firm, it was just one contractor.” Which was itself cause for surprise: this place wasn’t the biggest attraction on the planet, but it had a lot of plants.
“Yeah, one big contractor. Nice kid, I think. Yeah, I think I remember them. Huh. Not the name though, sorry. Nice, but distant. Always busy. And me, I stick to my pool. Nope, sorry, can’t remember anything more.”
“Are you-?”
Morty hoisted himself out of the chair and vanished into the pool like a bullet. “Bloody nose!” he called. “Out of the pool! C’mon, tilt your head up, that’s it-” and so my question went unanswered.
Fine. I still had half a water bottle. I still had a few hours left in the day. I still had one last stop to make. And I still had one avenue of inquiry.
***
It took almost till shutdown to find him. He had no cell phone. His walkie talkie was out of batteries. He was nearly stone deaf.
But in the end I caught up to his trail near the bathrooms, where he’d been cleaning up an overturned garbage can that had spread wrappers and paper bags and empty pop cans all over the base of one of the gingkoes. He was hunched even lower and more crablike than usual; nose only an inch above the trash as he slipped it back into the half-deflated bag it had slid loose from.
“Herman,” I said to him, “we need to talk for a minute.”
“The leaves aren’t ready yet,” he said. “They won’t come down ‘till it’s colder, and then they’ll come down all at once. Gingkoes are like that. Very convenient, you know. I saw some of the other trees, those…maples” – he said it may-pull, sourly – “…they just dribbled them out over weeks. Sloppy, sloppy. No end of a chore.”
“It’s not about the leaves, Herman-”
“I’m nearly done here. Just got to tip this up. I can do that, you know. I’m not an invalid. Watch. See how I hold the broom? See? See?”
“I see, I see.”
“And see how I put it under the can? See? See?”
“I see, I see, but-”
The thin arms bent, the bent back braced, the bin was in place.
“You didn’t see,” said Herman reproachfully.
“I was looking right at-”
“Oh, that’s not at all what I’m talking about! Now, what have you got to ask me?”
“Herman, don’t you think it’s about time you retired?”
“Bite your tongue!”
“It’s mandatory, not a suggestion. You’ve been here since day one, and you’re not a little tired? You’re not a little worried about labour laws?”
“I don’t not know about what you’re telling me,” said Herman with all the warmth and flexibility of a day-old pizza crust.
I threw up my arms. “Double negatives are not cunning misdirection! Come ON Herman, can’t you be reasonable? Can ANYONE here be reasonable? There’s no traffic and there’s no budget and there’s no plan and there’s no records and the employees are either ignoring the guests or picking fights with them and one of them is outright MISSING!”
“Nonsense, nobody’s missing,” said Herman, and maybe it was just me being paranoid but I felt like I’d said a lot more for him to argue with than just that.
“The gardener,” I said. “Don’t you remember them? They haven’t been in this week at all.”
“Oh, them. No, that’s normal. Nothing to be worried about. It’s very normal for that to happen. They’re good, but they’re a little slow. Hard-working young thing like that, bit prone to sleeping in on a nice summer day. But when they’re on the job, woof, things get moved. See? See?” The broom jabbed up at the gingko. “Look at that, see, see? They did that. Planted it and nurtured it from sapling on up, I saw. Not bad at all. Don’t worry about it, they’ll be by soon enough. Now go away. I have to visit the children’s center.” And no matter what I said then he treated me as if I weren’t there and set off, cart clattering with dustpans and brooms askew and ajar at every angle like distended limbs.
***
I went back to my office. I checked the filing cabinets. I checked the computer. I checked the inside of my head. Overstuffed, undercategorized, overcooked. Ugh, ugh, and ugh.
The air conditioner, sensing that the sun was about to go down, turned itself on for one second and died with a short, sharp grunt. I put my head in my hands and stared from the desk to the ceiling and then worked my way back down again, and on the sixth or seventh go-round of this my hindbrain grabbed my attention by the nose and slammed it into the wall.
Old, worn paint, and a small placard beneath a modest photograph. Paleo-Park, founding staff May 1984. And a list of names, helpfully left to right for back, middle, and front rows. All of them, lined up in front of that stupid sauropod fountain outside, stretching from its long neck to its long tail.
There was Herman, looking almost as old as he did a few hours ago. There was Morty, still leathery even at the start of a sunny season. There was someone who looked a lot like Terri, if taller and not quite as thin and with a ferociously toothy smile that I’d never once seen her show, to me or anyone or anything else.
And sitting in the center of them all, possibly the largest person I’d ever seen in my life. Height, width, breadth, the picture of grace at a scale unreasonable in all dimensions. She was smiling, a little, and she was named Louise. No last name given.
She had been pasted into the photo.
***
I locked the office behind me. It stuck. I kicked it.
“A little much,” said Herman. I nearly jumped, then remembered I wasn’t the one who had anything to be ashamed of.
“So what? It’s not like it’s going to matter in a week. This place is going under.”
“Going where, when?” demanded Terri. When had she shown up? I should’ve seen that, should’ve seen her sitting there on the bench. Had she been waiting for me, hoping to argue about the signage again? “Why?”
Honesty was one thing. Full disclosure was another. “Because it’s run-down and doesn’t make any money and some of the employees have never existed without anyone ever telling anyone differently.” And apparently my bad mood was quite another.
“Never existed?” said Morty, and oh I DID jump that time, a full on half-hop, half-start to a run. He was leaning on the edge of the half-drizzling little fountain, right in front of me in plain sight; how had I missed him that completely? Maybe it was because he was wearing a shirt. God, he could barely wear a shirt at all; the tank-top hung from him like a scrap of cloth dangling from a tree branch, stretched and thin. His teeth were brilliant. “What makes you say that?”
“I found Louise.”
Oh, they went. All of them, at the same time, wordlessly. A flinch, a squint, a twitch. Oh.
“And then I looked her up. She never worked here. Not in ’84, not after. She’s never been late. She’s never even existed – you stole the name from the damned STATUE! Right there! In the fountain! Apatosaurus louisae! And you know, when I started pulling on threads after that, a lot of other things didn’t add up either – Herman, Morty, did you know your birthdates have changed every year for the last three decades? I don’t know exactly what kind of scam was going on here, but now it’s out of my hands and in someone else’s.” So please don’t look at me like that, because there’s three of you and shutting me up wouldn’t do anything and why am I thinking like that right now?
“Louise was real,” said Morty. “She never worked here, but she was real. Call it a, oh I don’t know, a dedication in her name. Most of the place was, really.” His teeth were still showing: not a grimace, not a smile. He looked tired; maybe shutting his mouth would take too much effort. “Just a place for some old fossils to remember those who went before us. You already made the call?”
“Yes.”
“Huh. I guess that’s it then.” He looked at me – really looked at me, with his eyes wide open in the evening dim. They glowed a little, slit-pupiled in the dark. “You know, I’ll miss this dump. It wasn’t my idea, but it was nice while it lasted.” The grin again, bigger than ever, and far, far sharper. “Well, I’ll see you all later. I’m not going anywhere.”
And with that he slipped into the murk of the fountain, rugged-backed and rippleless, and became indistinguishable from the floating sticks.
I don’t know what I said. I must have said something, because Herman told me “be quiet!” very sternly, and at such force that I had no choice but to actually listen to him.
“There,” he said. “See, see, don’t make such a fuss. You went and pushed it over, you have no right to whine about the mess it made. She was a nice girl, Louise – so young, such a tragedy – and you know, she really did plant gingkoes back in the day. I’ll miss the ones here. But ah, it was only a little while anyways. See, see.” He scuffed at the drainage grate in the path, levered it up with his broom – stiffly, carefully – and slid inside with a short scrape of carapace-on-stone, long sharp dagger-tail the last to sink out of sight. Up from the long rough pipe I briefly heard the echo of his many legs, then it was drowned by the distant surf: sea, sea.
I looked at Terri.
Terri looked at me. She seemed very thin. She did not blink.
“She was a friend of my grandmother,” she told me. Her voice were flat, her eyes were flat, but her hackles were raised – her feathers all on end. “I never knew her. But she told me about her, and so did they. And now you’ve ruined it.” Her head jerked, one sharp bob. “But that’s nothing new. What else have you and yours ever done since we left you everything? Well, you can do it by yourself now.”
She flitted around the fountain three times in as many seconds, a quick, colourful little blur, then flew away into the darkening sky.
And it was just me.
Once again, it was just me.