Goblin Sanitation had no reservations about the switch, either, and so Patrick traded the odor of Goblin’s animals for the smell of Goblin’s trash. But right as it felt, there was one thing he was very wrong about. Not only would Dirk be handling the animals after all, he would very soon become the face that every Gobliner thought of when he or she recalled the Goblin Zoo. Dirk would become a celebrity there. He’d own the place. But not like he was the boss. Not that kind of owning. And that semantic would haunt him as darkly as the dreams of leading children down long stone hallways, walls cloaked in webs. Stone slabs so old that Dirk would wake shaking, desperate to know what sort of animals howled and laughed, boomed and bellowed, beyond them.

3

It couldn’t really be stopped. Dirk working the zoo was akin to Hercules getting his shield. A mythic match. His bulking thirty-eight-year-old frame was as eye-popping for the children as the polar bears. His big mitt hands could make an entire unfolded map vanish in a single swipe. He could carry six bags of shit at once (Patrick could barely manage two) and for reasons not wholly understood by any of his co-workers or himself, Dirk had an immediate calming effect on the animals. Was it simply his size? His vibe? What exactly emanated from Dirk that soothed Eula just as she began beating her chest in despair? What unseen element brought the lions to cease roaring as he approached?

Dirk noticed the changes in behavior.

“Oh, that sort of thing happens here,” Gordon McCall, one of the animal feeders, told him over lunch one day. “There’s the animals that the civilians see, the animals on their best behavior, the constant flow of people passing their windows, Gobliners there to watch them eat, watch them mate. I don’t care how sentient you are…a living thing must act differently when it knows it’s being watched. How could it not? But there’s this other side, the side that we get to see. When the zoo closes. When it gets dark around here and the animals crouch back into that isolation, the first minute all day they get to themselves, the first chance they get to think and maybe, in a way, to be the closest they can to what they were before they went and got caged. And that thing, Dirk, that state an animal can get into, is a scary thing. You don’t want to approach an animal when he’s there, when he’s returned to that original state, where something like a man and man’s authority suddenly stops meaning anything.”

But none of this was what Dirk was really talking about.

“They just seem different around me,” he said.

“Yeah, well, sounds like you’re just catching lions being lions. Don’t start thinking you have some magic power over them or you’re gonna go nuts when they misbehave.”