For the past week and a half Damien has been trying to impress me. He brings treats, usually stale cookies, into the intern office that we share, beige walls and one tiny window and, in the winter, space heaters that sputter ice. When we’re there early in the morning, before the printing press has started humming and the journalists whose mistakes we’re catching have come in, Damien takes off his earphones and begins to rattle off facts I never wanted to know.
Did I know about the sleeping habits of orangutans? Did I know that crocodiles are endangered? Did I know – this goes on and on, even though we’re supposed to be checking facts, not memorizing them – that geese are born with their eyes open and they mate for life, did I know that earthworms have five hearts?
Our window is approximately two by four inches, smaller than a birthday present, not very good for looking out. Through it is a grey ledge, pigeons balancing and sometimes leaping, and Damien tells me pigeons commit suicide more than other animals because they don’t realize they can’t fly.
“Pigeons can fly,” I tell Damien, because for once he has gotten to me.
“Some of them.” Damien sticks a violet into a glass he didn’t realize I was drinking water from. “But then some of them have only four bones in their wings as opposed to the bluebird for example who has fourteen.”
“She doesn’t care,” Anna says, piercing the air in the doorway and yanking my arm. I’m staring out the window, thinking that from far away you can’t tell the difference between a leap and a free fall.
Anna is two years older than me and works for a company upstairs on the 21st Floor, something PR. She reminds me that this job is a temporary thing and I’ll join the real world soon. She reminds me that people with an endless capacity for useless information are by definition useless when you line it all up. “Haven’t you seen Forrest Gump?” she asks. I nod, not getting it. “Useless is as useless does,” Anna says, spraying me with skim milk foam. “He’ll be working there forever, and you’ll find something else.” She is drinking her boss’ cappuccino. She wears two coats of mascara and sometimes her eyelashes stick together. Real light, from the actual outside, bleeds over the mesh of her cubicle.
Privately I wonder if Damien could be a natural genius, but I don’t say it. I’ve been out of college for a year and I’ve never met a genius, a real one, though I imagine if I did they wouldn’t look like Damien, all wet eyes and bulge. Anna says you can tell he’s going to go bald early, and I remind myself it’s important to think of people how they are now, not how they will be. If you guess at the future you are bound to be wrong.
Once Damien told me that in the year 2030 there would be a drug that would make people stop aging but the population would overdose and it would actually cause more death.
“If you want respect,” Anna says, “Ignore Forrest Fuck. Follow me.”
Here are more things Damien knows:
He knows that donkeys can live 50 years in captivity. He knows sharks are immune to cancer and sheep can survive up to two weeks buried in snow drifts. He knows that Canadian geese are going to become extinct in 2015, that the government thinks they are an unnecessary species and park troupers will round them up and shoot them, send the bodies to a giant outdoor oven that will burn their bones. He tries to stop this, he comes back to the office one day, hands stained brown and red, feathers on his coat, trailed by two men from security. I just stand there squeezing my water bottle as Damien drops a reddened feather on my desk and says, “this is for you.”
Anna is wrong. Damien is not there forever. The next day a woman is in his place, quiet and wrinkled with a straight line of a body and a voice that sounds like an answering machine. She’s got to be at least 40 and Anna says she’s probably pathetic, which is worse than being weird. Anna says, “we’ve got to get you out of there,” and gives my resume to a woman in HR. Two weeks later I’m up in one of those lit cubicles bringing in the cappuccinos Anna drinks. On the 21st floor the window takes up the whole wall and from it I can see the sidewalk, but it’s so far away, just a strip of grey with tiny people dodging tiny cars. I stare out the window hoping people will think I’m looking at something normal like a sunset, but the truth is I’m sure I can see Damien, silent today, because he knows I’m one of them and doesn’t want to tell me about two-headed turtles or pigeons suspended in free fall; he doesn’t even wave hello.
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KF: Jenny, you have a turtle named Herbert. Is this the extent of your encounters with wild animals?
JH: Well, it isn’t the extent of my encounters with wild animals — I really love hiking and a couple of months ago I came across a baby deer in the woods in Western Mass that I named Franklin and wished I could adopt but that probably would have been illegal. I’ve also come across turtles and frogs and snakes but am pretty scared of the latter.
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