Snowing in Pandaland

It was snowing in Pandaland. That's when we've got to close the exhibit down and throw tarps over the pandas. The pandas don't like the snow, I've been told. They don't like the tarps either, but at least they're warm and dry under there, presumably. They always spend the duration of the snowfall trying to escape, so the whole time it's snowing you just hear the crinkling sound of the pandas trying to push the tarps off of them. The tarps aren't weighted down or anything, but pandas aren't very smart, I guess.

The trend in animal containment facilities is to recreate the animal's natural habitat as closely as possible, so it's like an African subsaharan grassland or whatever only in a big pit with thick concrete walls. This makes visitors happy, it is believed, because the visitors believe the animals are happy. The Pandaland bosses saw another way. Pandaland is like a peaceful panda suburb. There are ranch houses, built to about a 1:3 scale with driveways and front yards, and inside they have living rooms and kitchens and master bedrooms. There's a school and a park and a town hall, where once every four years we round them up and make them vote. If you're imagining pandas living like us--driving around, sitting at desks all day then coming home and parking themselves in front of the TV and falling asleep on the couch--then you're way off. The pandas just walk around all this, mostly. These things are obstacles to them. One panda last fall got up onto a roof and knocked off its neighbor's satellite dish, which was a bitch to reinstall. And we had to reinstall to, because the white noise of the dead signal really spooked them. Like snakes hissing--they must've thought there were snakes someplace.

The trick to throwing the tarps over the pandas is you don't have to sneak up on them or anything, because they never see it coming. You just stroll right up, they look at you, and you throw the tarp. The trick is you've got to be accurate about it. Very accurate. Or else there's trouble. Because if you throw it over them, and they get the idea but there's no tarp over their faces, then they get pissed. And pandas are all cute and cuddly and everything when you're behind some glass panels watching them scratch their backs on a lawnmower, but bears are bears, and you try to stay on their good side.

We had thrown the tarps over the pandas--Nick was who knows where, so it was just Juvy and me. We call Juvy Juvy because he spent some time in Juvenile Hall when he was 22. Six months there before the state caught on. He was a short, skinny guy who couldn't grow a beard so a judge thought he was 16 and he spent a while relearning trig and rereading Pride and Prejudice in the juvenile hall's little school facility and he was enjoying it before they realized their mistake and pulled him out. They were going to send him to real prison, but his papers got lost en route or something because he never made it--they dropped him off at home and never came back for him. I asked him once what he did to get sentenced and he said he'd "nearly killed some guy who deserved it," and he's a pretty decent guy, so I believed him.

So right after we got the tarps over the pandas, Nick comes strolling into the control booth, which is where we work--up in the bell tower of the church in the center of Pandaland, overlooking the whole operation. Nick, by the way, is this fat guy who has this funny smell. Not a bad smell, exactly, but it's just something you don't want to smell if you don't have to. Like lettuce, maybe. Like he's got iceberg lettuce in his pockets and it's turning purple.

"Where the hell have you been?" I asked. Ostensibly, I'm the supervisor, but mainly this means I just have to sign my name to shit, like timecards and whatnot to verify whatever. I sign no matter what, basically.

"Around," he said. "I can't find my girlfriend."

"Have you looked in your imagination?" Juvy said.

Nick took this in stride. He sat down in a chair and reclined, with his feet on the control panel. We have a control panel that controls things like sprinklers, clocks, music, temperature, etc. He kicked a button and the traffic lights started going berserk.

"I have a girlfriend now. Did I not tell you guys?"

"No you did not," I said.

"And she's real too," he said, rubbing his hands together. "She's a REAL KNOCKOUT, THAT'S what she is!" said Nick. This shouting made him winded.

"Uh huh," I said. And that was it for a while, until Nick piped up again.

"I'm dating a girl named Francis," he said. "She's got soft hands and flawless skin and her breath smells like cinnamon."

"Does she have a brain disease?" Juvy asked. "A face like she got clonked with a shovel?"

"Francis is a pretty stupid name for a girl," I pointed out.

"Well it's a pretty stupid name for a boy too!" Nick shot back. I agreed.

We settled into a nice easy silence, Juvy monitoring the video feeds, Nick monitoring the dials, me monitoring the two of them. The higher-ups have warned us to be extra vigilant this week because they just installed a new Little League field with a fence and a scoreboard and dugouts and everything, but the pandas haven't been using it as intended. At first they ignored it, which was OK, but then they knocked over one of the equipment bags and tried chewing on the baseballs and we had a couple of emergency choking situations that had to be resolved by our panda health technicians. They're always wandering the park in panda suits (so the pandas and ideally the guests don’t pick them out as humans) with their earpieces in so they can be dispatched to any corner of Pandaland to take care of any medical emergency. You can tell which ones are the panda health technicians because they walk upright and are always standing face-to-face, talking to each other, presumably, but when you're too far off to hear them it just looks like two dumb pandas staring at each other. Anyway, all of us were quiet for a while until Nick started fiddling with his phone. I pretended not to notice, so Nick sighed real loud.

"I wonder what she's doing right now." In my head, I prayed that Juvy wouldn't take the bait. Juvy muttered "fuck you" under his breath, which was fine by me, since it wasn't really a conversation-starter.

Nick, though, would not be deterred. "I'm just going through some of the messages she's sent me," he said. "You know, I didn't even realize the 3 with the sideways V thing was supposed to be a heart until she told me?"

"You fuck her yet?" Juvy asked, simmering and ready to explode, you could tell.

"Let's try not to be coarse, please."

"Sorry, sorry. Where'd you meet her?"

"In the supermarket," Nick said. "We were both buying the same kind of cereal."

"AH HA!" Juvy shouted, jumping out of his chair with his hands and fingers extended. He looked like an overstressed cartoon dad who had finally had enough. "YOU SEE? HE'S MAKING IT UP. HE'S MAKING IT UP!"

"You don't know what you're talking about," Nick said.

"Buying the same kind of cereal? Cereal?" That's the fucking lamest thing I've ever heard. Shit that lame doesn't happen in real life. It has to be made up by fat pimply virgins who work in Pandaland."

"I've got a picture of her!" Nick yelled (he was yelling now too), grabbing for his wallet. "I've got a picture of her. Want to see?" And he slid a tiny photo out of his wallet--though it took him a few seconds, the way his hands were shaking (and he's got fat fingers too)--and he showed it to us triumphantly.

The girl was nothing special. It looked like a school photo, though more likely it was the kind of thing you get done at Sears. She had dull yellow hair, conservative black blouse, chubby round moon-face. Vacant eyes, stupid smile.

"Let me see that," Juvy said, calmer now.

"No," Nick said quietly, but Juvy had already grabbed the picture out of his hands.

"She looks easy," Juvy said, suddenly contemplative. "And on the dumb side. Maybe decent in school--B- or C-student, but hopelessly naïve and lost, like she doesn’t know what she's ever doing." He held the picture up to the light, like he was looking for a watermark under her forehead or something. "She's using you to build her confidence, and when she has the confidence she needs, she will leave you and find the man she will marry."

He handed the picture back to Nick. We were all silent for a while.

Then Nick said, "she's the smartest person I know."

Juvy laughed, in a good-natured way, though. Well not completely good-natured. But at least 60 or 70% good-natured. "Man, you just don't know when to quit," he said. "I was right the first time; you made her up."

"You're just saying that because you don't want to believe that I can find and keep a girl and you can't."

Which was exactly the wrong thing to say.

Juvy'd had a girl, but she'd killed herself a few weeks back. She was trying to get a teaching degree, but she was truly profoundly stupid, and she ran up against one of these teachers who won't change a grade for anything and he swallowed a bunch of pills and that was that. Pretty little thing, she was. I'd only met her once, at a Pandaland Picnic. She walked into a beehive and had got stung in about a hundred different places and her face swelled up like you were pumping it full of water--and she wasn't in pain or anything, just that her face swelled up, and she was kind of panicking, because she didn't know if something worse was going to happen, and Juvy guided her by the arm to underneath a tree and just held her hand and sat there with her and told her everything was going to be OK, and she just smiled to the best of her ability, with her puffy face and the fear in her eyes and all. Juvy didn't miss a day of work after she'd died. I told him I'd doctor some paperwork for him if it was about the money, but he said no. He'd even convinced the girl's family to hold the funeral on a Sunday night so he wouldn't miss his opening shift at Pandaland (time and a half). I went to the service. It was cold and dark and there were tons of moths--probably the last weekend there were moths before they all died off for the winter. The priest kept getting her name wrong until he must have seen the family frowning at him and he just stopped using her name altogether, just referring to her as "this fine young woman."

All this is just to say, the subject of Juvy's romantic life was still pretty off limits.

So Nick said the thing he said and Juvy blew up. At first he just started screaming syllables that didn't add up to words. Then he overturned a chair, then a second, then he punched the side of a TV screen, which made a weird hollow sound. After that he grabbed the picture back out of Nick's hand and threw it out the window. It was weird, the rage and the force with which Juvy threw the picture out the window, and the pathetic fluttering it did all the way down to the ground. Incongruous.

"My Francis!" Nick screamed. He stuck his head out the window and watched the picture fall. It settled on the cobblestone streets of Pandaland Towne Centre. Snow fell on it and melted.

Nick turned around and jumped for Juvy's throat. Juvy jumped to the side and sent Nick to the ground with a karate chop to the back of the neck. Then he kicked him in the face.

It was at this point that I advised everyone to calm down.

Nick sputtered "you bastard" at Juvy's shoes through a bloody mouth and broken teeth. Juby picked him up by his shirt, opened the hatch and threw Nick down the steep spiral staircase. Nick tumbled all the way down to the bottom, somehow. You'd think even if he didn't have the agility or the presence of mind to grab the railing and hoist himself up, his momentum would have carried him straight into the wall rather than all the way down in tight little circles. He fell all the way down, though.

At this point, I was just trying to calm Juvy down. He was still freaking out, pacing in circles, punching things. I restored a chair to its proper upright position and sat Juvy down and held his face. He bared his teeth like a wild animal. On a security monitor I saw Nick, dazed, combing Pandaland Town Centre for his picture.

"You need to calm down," I told him. "You're displaying some seriously destructive behavior right now and as supervisor I have a duty to warn you that it could impact your employment here." That's when he bit me on the arm.

He drew blood. I jumped back and held the wound. Me and Juvy looked at each other. He was starting to return to normal, but he was still panting and he wasn't quite right yet. He looked like an animal still, but an animal capable of remorse, like a very sympathetic wolverine.

So I did the stupid thing. I said fuck him and fuck his stupid fucking dead girlfriend and found myself somersaulting down the stairs just like Nick had. I ran back up (I only made it halfway down before I stopped), but Juvy had locked the hatch.

I stormed right past Nick, who was still looking for the picture, and headed for the emergency exit. It leads right into the parking lot. I was just going to get the hell out of there. I still had a couple hours left in my shift, but I'd had enough shit for the day. I considered Juvy's bite and wondered if I'd have to get shots.

Walking through the park was pretty eerie. All the pandas were still writhing around under their tarps. There was crinkling from all directions as all the pandas struggled to free themselves from the tarps. They looked like crinkly blue ghosts, trying to push the dead off them. And also Juvy seemed to be mashing all the buttons, because streetlights were flashing, hoses were spitting water, garage doors were opening--it was like the suburbs had come to life and were overthrowing their masters or whatever.

I got to the exit and opened the door and was stepping out when Juvy did a very stupid thing. He turned on the emergency sirens. We'd only had to use them once before--when the art museum had caught fire. The idea behind it, I guess, was to alert the pandas to any danger, but all it did was make them really agitated and angry. So angry that even when we cut the sirens, the pandas were still fucking shit up for a while. We weren't able to leave the control tower for hours after that--the three of us on the crew that night had to sleep on the floor. One of the emergency health personnel in a panda suit got found out as a human and got clawed in the thigh pretty bad. He had to swim out to the jetski harbor in the middle of Lake Panda and just bled out there for a while in his suit with his panda head floating in the water, because all the pandas were standing around the shore, salivating. The standoff went on until we had to release an emergency honey reserve from the top of Great Panda Tree, and that distracted the bears long enough for the guy to paddle back to shore on a raft and limp out of the park.

The alarm seemed to be having a similar effect on these pandas that evening. They got real mad and started growling under their tarps. The clawing got more frantic and everyone started getting angrier and I saw a panda free itself. It was the first time a panda had ever gotten out from underneath a tarp before and it reacted kind of like I imagine the first human reacted to burning itself with the first fire. Just stood there, pretty confused, and then the clouds started lifting and he just got really fucking pissed off.

The panda put the tarp in its mouth and shook back and forth. In the process, it pulled the tarp off another confused and angry panda. The wheels were really turning in those two pandas' heads and they started pulling tarps off other pandas, with their mouths. I was just standing there by the exit in awe of these things. And then when there were six or seven of them free, they saw Nick, oblivious to the whole thing, still pawing around for his picture. The pandas started off towards him.

The siren was still going off, and there were angry pandas everywhere. I let the emergency exit close behind me. Nick was going to get it if I didn't do something. I was right next to Panda Hunting Lodge, so I broke in and grabbed the shotgun hanging over the fireplace. Behind the bar, there was a poacher's head on a plaque. It was a mechanical thing that, if you growled at it, it sprung to life and said something goofy, like, "whoa, how did I get here?" and "help!" This, I considered, might be sending pandas the wrong lesson. I jumped out of the hunting lodge through an open window and headed towards Pandaland Towne Centre.

By the time I got there, Nick and the bears were gone. I stepped on his picture of Francis--it had been right here and the idiot had somehow missed it. The siren was still going and I called up to Juvy to turn the damn thing off already. He was in no condition to respond. I couldn't hear him through the windows, but I could see him laughing and screaming like a madman and shaking his fists at the heavens in victory. I heard Nick scream "help!" from the post office. Nick was in a bad way.

I burst into the post office. There were three pandas milling around in the lobby. I aimed and fired--they collapsed onto the counter, dripping blood onto a pile of fake panda letters. Every once in a while, we deliver a package of salmon, and the pandas all crowd around the post office, tearing into everything, looking for the food. That's fun.

I jumped into the counter and headed into the mail sorting room. There was a panda guarding the door. I was about to blast it point blank, but it knocked the gun out of my hands. I dove for it, but the panda shoved me out of the way. This is it, I thought, until I realized that it was one of the panda suit guys. "Don't shoot me, you idiot!" he hissed, as loudly as he could afford to without losing his cover. "He's in there," pointing at the little back office. "I did everything I could."

I snuck around and peeked into the office. A panda was batting at Nick in the corner--having his way with him. Nick was sobbing, pretty much ready to die, I think. I jumped in and fired three times, bam bam bam. I hit the panda in the back, then the leg, then the chest as it turned towards me. It twisted and fell on top of the desk, knocking a computer to the ground.

"Thanks," Nick said, weakly. I jumped over the desk to check up on him. A big bloody red hole screamed up at me. Some of the shot had gone straight through the panda and into Nick's thigh. He was losing blood fast.

I tucked the gun under my right arm and dragged Nick out of the post office by his armpits. He was giggling--giggling! I would have been angry, but I knew he was just losing it, and I was too scared. Outside, I heard growling and crinkling and a thud.

In the lobby, the panda suit guy was beating back the real thing with his fake panda head. The panda just swatted it away absent-mindedly and kept clawing at the guy's stomach. I fired and missed, but it scared the panda off. The panda suit put his head back on and curled up into a ball, sobbing underneath the PO boxes along the wall.

We made it outside. Pretty much all of the pandas were free now and they didn't know what to do with themselves. I don’t know if it was the sirens or the snow or if they were still disoriented from the tarps, but they were going nuts. A couple of them were fighting each other; two more were humping right in front of the Panda's Mosque. And there was a whole crowd of them standing in a circle in Pandaland Towne Centre. I fired into the air and they scattered. Juvy was lying face down, limbs extended, body flattened, blood everywhere. He had jumped.

A bear growled behind my left ear and I whirled around and plugged a bullet into its gut. It flew backwards and toppled over a trash bin filled with birdseed. Other pandas saw this and started lumbering towards me. Nick moaned; I had to get him to a hospital. I did the best I could--I lifted him up and rolled him onto the roof of the post office, where hopefully he would be out of the animals' reach. I hoped he would hold out for a little longer, because I knew I was going to be there for a while, dodging teeth and deflecting claws and wasting pandas.