“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.”

Dirk sat on the bench long after Gordon left him and replayed the way the bears lifted their heads to watch him pass or the spider monkeys hung by one arm, pointing at Dirk with the other. One night at closing time in his second week on the job, a possible explanation popped up, unasked for.

They know I’m not where I’m supposed to be. Up here—he tapped his head—I’m caged, too.

It was something like a-ha, by Dirk’s standards, an epiphany. He walked toward Trudy the tiger’s cage in a foggy daze, realizing for the first time how badly he wanted to free his own mind. He followed the painted footprints on the concrete, first the little bird feet in yellow, then the alligator feet in green, the white bear paws, the brown hippo toes, and Trudy’s faded orange.

Passing through the wood sliding doors to the tiger habitat, he entered the incredible darkness that housed her. He had a vague sense of purpose, that meeting with Trudy just then was a meaningful thing for him to do. But just like the Goblin sky was so often rainy, and fog accumulated as easily as gnats, Dirk didn’t have a clear idea of what that purpose was.

He felt along the wall for the flip switch, and Trudy’s rusty cage came to life under the bright overhead light.