“No,” she said. “Are you serious?” He nodded, thinking she would laugh, but she looked startled and sad. He said, “It’s all right. One thing Avicenna’s got, it’s got restaurants.”

“Don’t,” Julie said. Pain in her voice was as new a sound to Farrell, as if she had begun to crow or whinny—he hardly recognized it. “Poor topcoat,” she said. She took his hands between her own and brought them to her lips, looking at him over them with mocking, marveling eyes.

“Just don’t imagine me, that’s all,” she said. “Seven o’clock at Fouad’s.” She bit his fingers gently and left him there, watching her calm legs carry her away down a gravel walk and through a door. A momentary intuition that he would never see her again pinched his breath, as it had done the day before. You can only watch someone go away so many times. That was why—in spite of himself, in spite of what he had told Ben in the gym—he still mourned, grudgingly and foolishly, for so many doomed creatures and landscapes and ways of being that he had never seen. To feel the loss, to know what was lost. To remember. That might be what I do best, after all. I hope not. He got back into the bus and drove up to Barton Park in the hills, to see about the zoo.

Chapter 6

There was one job open, driving an electric train in the shape of an alligator around and around the zoo six afternoons a week, lecturing to his passengers about the animals they were glimpsing. Farrell had hoped for something to do with gorillas; but it was outdoor work, at least, and decently mindless. He agreed to start on the following Monday and left with a copy of the route and the recitation to memorize. There were five and a half jokes in it, underlined in red.

When he went home to change his clothes, he found the driveway occupied by a middle-aged yellow Pontiac, with the left front fender mashed into a rusty fist.