When he left, Hannah leaned over and confessed, “I can’t remember a single thing we just ordered!”
“Me either,” said Tim, although he could.
They said what they did. Hannah taught astronomy at a secondary-level nursery school for goats and sheep. “They couldn’t care less, of course,” she said, “or else they hate it with a passion, but then again, they’re all really good at it. Teenagers!”
“Hey, that’s really interesting,” said Tim. “Astronomy, huh? You must never be bored with that stuff in your head. That’s great. I’m a stock boy at Wal-Mart.”
“Sure, yeah,” said Hannah. “It says in your profile that the benefits are great and you have a close bond with your coworkers?”
“That’s true,” Tim confirmed. He supposed she now realized that he hadn’t bothered to read her profile before making the date. Maybe she thought that was because he was so into her photo.
“Yeah,” he said. “I love my job. And I have a nice home, and a human. It’s funny how your life just comes together without even trying. Well, you’re trying, but you’re not planning. You work hard in the moment, but you don’t know what lies ahead, and then one day you realize that what lies ahead is exactly what’s happening now. You’ve become this animal who is what he is. It’s so easy. Such a relief. We’re really lucky, I think. You can just trust evolution, these days. No more dead ends.”
“That’s a really great attitude,” said Hannah, slightly despondent.
The food arrived, six tiny trays of cunning this and clever that. Tim felt exhausted just looking at them. His appetite had vanished. Hannah leaned forward and immediately began pecking at the bananas cayenne with anguished intensity. Tim placed the end of one of his bulges in a plate of bloodfruit-infused ayahuasca foam and let the fierce little bubbles soak in through his tissue as he waited for the buzz to hit.
Eventually, Hannah said, “Yup, I really admire how positive you are, Tim. I’d like to learn to feel that way. Sometimes it just seems to me that modern life is too solitary for me. I guess I’m a throwback! I know that the bonds I have with friends, colleagues, and students are really more reliable and straightforward than the copulatory alliances that animals forged back in the day, but… I don’t know.” She crushed a candied macadamia in one pensive claw. “I guess I should tell you that this is my first date in a long time since my previous relationship ended.”
Tim looked up, startled. “You had a chaste partnership before?”
“Uh huh,” said Hannah. “It was a really good experience for… well, for me, anyway, and, you know, it really felt right being protected and also protective. Because people can say all they want that, of course, no one has any natural predators anymore, but the world—the world’s a natural predator, isn’t it? A big natural predator! I mean, time is, and gravity is, and radiation, and ourselves. It’s… for me, it was good to have someone to count on, and to know that I could trust him because I knew that he trusted me, too, that if he were in trouble I’d be the person he’d turn to. But—sorry!” she added suddenly, laughing. Some macadamia sprayed out from her beak over her breast and she preened for a moment, futilely. “Is this probably all a bit much for a first date, or a— Is this a bit much for you?”
“No, no,” said Tim. Hannah depressed him unutterably, but he did want to know more. He had met so few animals who had domestic alliances at all, and he’d never known anyone whose alliance had failed. It had not even occurred to him that that might happen. “Did you two have adoptees?”
Hannah shook her head. “I wanted to, but we never got that far. We had a human, but he took her when he went.”
“What happened?” asked Tim. He was vaguely aware that his questioning was more ruthless than sympathetic, but he couldn’t help it, or, he acknowledged, he didn’t much care.
She sighed, and the ruff of down around her neck fleeced out as her head sunk slightly into her chest. “I don’t really know,” she said, gesturing weakly. “I don’t think he liked the idea of my depending on him, and I honestly don’t think that if anything bad had ever happened to him that it would have even crossed his mind to come to me for help. He was a pig, and very cerebral and self-reliant and self-contained. And, well… you know, I think he was just bored, living with me. Living alone, you know, every day after work could be different for him. One day he could be a film buff, and the next day he could go for a long run around the lake, or he could cook up one of the experimental chilis he used to make when we were first dating, or he could hunker down with a book and a whisky, or he could be this rambunctious guy out hitting all the bars: anything. With me, if he didn’t come home as usual, I’d worry, and if he wanted to cook he might find I was already busy in the kitchen, or I might not like the movies he queued up, and we only had the one compy, so we couldn’t watch different things—but, I guess, more than anything, it was just that I was always there. And that was boring. So he left. And he took our little human girl, which I didn’t understand, if he didn’t want to be tied down… And so. It was hard for me. I pulled out all my feathers and I wasn’t eating, and then I had a hysterical pregnancy and became egg-bound. It’s been a rough couple of years. But. I just wanted to be honest about that. And I don’t want to freak you out! Because I wouldn’t be dating again if I didn’t believe that I was ready for it. But I also think, I guess, that I owe it to you to let you know what I’m looking for. I don’t just want someone to take me bee-dancing or whatever. I want someone to make a life with.”
Tim realized he still had his bulge in the sticky ayahuasca tray. He took it out. His whole top-right nodule was numb. “I didn’t mean to eat all the ayahuasca,” he apologized. Then he added, “I already have a life. I’m sorry.”
He could hear the scratch of Hannah’s nails as she curled her claws around the edge of her seat. For a moment, he knew exactly the little rush of misery that was dizzying her. “You have a nothing life, Tim,” she said. “I’m not trying to be revengeful or anything, I just want to say. You’re looking for someone to just walk in and fill the empty space you’re troubled by? That’s not how it works, you know. You have to start all over again from scratch with your soul-animal, and build together from the bottom up.”
“With respect,” said Tim, “you don’t actually know me.”
Hannah shrugged and got up. “What’s awful is how bad I feel about this,” she told him. “I could see the minute you walked in here that you weren’t right, you weren’t ready, that if things did go any further with you they’d end terribly. And I still tried to make you like me! I was ready to deceive myself, and set myself up for all kinds of heartbreak all over again. Because even that would be better than being alone. I don’t believe for a minute that you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Tim stared down at this lap and began melting two of his nodules into each other. “I’m sorry you didn’t have a good time, Hannah,” he said. “But let’s face it, nobody ever knows what anybody’s talking about.”
“See?” she said, putting her bag over her shoulder. “You’re lonely, too.”
Tim tried to pay, but the maître d’ told him the lady had taken care of it already. On the bus, the coco colada and psychotropic foam hit him at last, and he leaned his head against the window, so woozy that his cheek began to drip down the glass, leaving an ugly grayish smear. When they reached his stop, everyone on the other side of the bus began to laugh and point, and when he got off, he found Mimi copulating on the hood of the neighbors’ car, not with Yoyo this time (instead, Tim observed him behind the windscreen, masturbating in the navigator’s seat), but with a naked, scabby, tangle-haired, filth-encrusted human who must have been living in the nearby park. The wild male had Mimi facedown, his penis fully inserted, and a finger jerking in her anus; and she, gasping and writhing, appeared to be pissing herself. That must have accounted for the passengers’ hilarity, thought Tim. Without a word, he grabbed her by the hair and yanked her out from under the stray, dragging her into the house, her ankles and calves scraping painfully along the concrete driveway as she struggled for footing.