It might not have been so bad (he might not have woken from nightmares of himself leading packs of children down long hallways built of a stone older than the pyramids, coated in a webbing made by no insect he knew of) if he had to work only one tour. One type of tour. Because the zoo had him running all week (from nine to five every day) and the slaughterhouse had him on the weekends. At night, home again, Dirk was beat. Bushed. It didn’t matter what day it was or, really, how the day even went. Chasing the kids around, constantly counting heads, locking/unlocking doors, locking/unlocking cages, feeding the animals, cleaning the sludge from the gutters, giving directions, taking orders, answering questions, doing what he could to pick up his co-workers’ slack and worrying a lot about his own. He had strong fantasies of an elusive nightlife. He wanted to get off work, shower, and hit the town. He wanted a drink. He wanted two. He wanted company. He certainly wanted to pick up a woman. But no matter how realistic this prospect sounded during the day, once home, it was a different Dirk that entered his apartment and opted to sit down/lie down instead. It was a different Dirk that brushed his teeth at night than the one who did the same in the morning.

Often, before work, he’d take a minute to sit and watch the people pass from a green Goblin bench. And often he’d pick a few out.

Tonight that woman and I will meet and make love…

or

I will cheer that man at the bar tonight…

Dirk was electrified by these little visions of human interaction. He’d certainly had enough of the animal kind. But the fantasies were foggy impressions by the time he flopped down in the chair at the kitchen table at night. There, the whispers came.

Tomorrow, they said, you will be your own boss.

“You’re working too much,” Patrick said over beers one night. “You’ve got nothing to spend the money you make on. That’s not the way to do it, Dirk. You need to blow your pile, buddy. Get so drunk you ruin your life and start over again.”

Dirk, ducking his large head toward the foam of his beer, was flooded with fantasies: asking a woman what she would like to drink; leading her through a crowd on their way to the dance floor; telling her that he was going to own his own business one day, right here in Goblin.

That’s right, Dirk would think. Any kind of business you want.

Or maybe Dirk would melt a woman’s heart with stories about the animals. Trudy…Alice…the elephants and the birds…how, long ago, he returned to the zoo late at night to console Eula on the loss of her baby. How he might have helped her through it.