Christopher Negri
They’ve taken the elephants out of the zoo, which, to me, sounds a lot like that part of the 90s and the 2000s and most of the 2010s, the entirety of my youth, when the Raiders and the Rams abandoned us and we didn’t have a football team for twenty years.
They sent the elephants to Tulsa in May, which is just shameful. I mean, think of it: the second largest city in the United States, “the dream factory,” and we lose our elephants to Tulsa.
Tulsa.
***
Whatever. I never understand why even the banal spaces in this town are full of people at three o’clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday, but there’s a crowd of good-looking young people at the city pool in Glassell Park today, when I cut out early from work to swim some laps. The sun is bright and unforgiving and I’ve forgotten my goggles at home. I freestyle and backstroke while squinting for thirty minutes, until my contacts get so dry from the pool water that they sting whenever my eyes are open.
I sit in the grim concrete men’s changing room and check my phone. “St mel woodland hills has a priest who will do it, im told,” Sister Joan has texted.
Sister Joan is one of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. She lives at the Dominican church down the street. She’s a pleasant-looking woman of about 80, with a little silver bob. Whenever I see her, she is dressed in a little white shirt with what looks like a doily for a collar and a black skirt that goes down to her calves. Below that line, one sees white stockings and black flats with straps, like the ones the girls at St. Angela Merici wore when I was growing up.
I was confirmed two years ago into the Catholic church, via a Zoom class out of St. Thomas Aquinas in which I, at 35, was the oldest. Sister Joan was appointed my sponsor, when it became evident that the only mature Catholic who actually still believed in God in my life was me. At my confirmation mass, we sat alone together, masked the entire time, the oldest sponsor couple in a church full of 15 year olds who were hitting their marks on schedule. Since then, she has diligently kept in touch with me, sending me news of what the church calls its “Ministry with Lesbian and Gay Persons.” And since I mentioned that my husband and I have had a child and since I have asked her to help me find someone to baptize her, she has adopted finding a priest who will do it as a little side project.
“were well overdue on this as u know,” she writes. She never capitalizes anything. She never uses periods. “little girl is past 1?”
“She’s almost two,” I write back.
“oh yes,” she writes. “oh you must go ahead and call st mel ! ! !”
***
My swimming teacher can never remember my name. He looks exactly like you would want the lifeguard at an LA city pool in the middle of the summer to look. He’s maybe 19. I’m 38. It’s an awkward situation for me, but not for him. He wears authority very comfortably. “Your issue is lung capacity,” he tells me, curtly. “So the main thing is just to stretch that until you don’t have to take breaks as frequently as you’re doing right now.”
And so, back and forth and back and forth, trying to remember to breathe every third, fifth, seventh stroke, trying to take in enough air so that, when I hit the other side of the pool, I don’t have to rest there for thirty seconds gasping for air. Three times a week, I am there on my lunch breaks.
***
“I think it’s extremely sad you can even contemplate not being there,” my husband writes, when I forward him the email I’ve composed to a priest at another parish that Sister Joan has suggested. “And for what?”
“I understand, of course, that it is a complex thing to deal with this specific situation,” I write. “And if it makes sense only for her biological parent to be present during the ceremony, then I would be willing to not participate in the ceremony itself, and instead to just observe it.”
***
In September, we play hooky from work for a day and keep Giulia home from daycare so we can go to whatever remains of the Zoo. It feels normal. The crowds are there. And we ascend upward, since the LA Zoo is on an incline. The road winds up past the snakes and the carousel. We watch two wombats in a room that’s permanently darkened. We pass koalas that you only can see every now and then and orangutans that Giulia finds particularly delightful and two giraffes with their fur blackened from the smog that make one feel real regret for the hideous things we have done with this earth. And, at the summit are the sad remnants of the elephant enclosure, now permanently empty.
“At least they’re in a better place,” my husband says.
“They’re in Tulsa,” I say.
***
Even when the elephants were still here, you would often never be able to see them. We had a membership the year that Giulia was born and, when I was on leave, I took her there almost every day for eight weeks. For almost the entirety of the fall of 2023, we would go together, she bundled up in her stroller, me with my sunglasses on. The only animals that seemed to have any effect on her were the flamingos and the orangutans. She found them both hilarious. The rest left her rather cold. There was no reaction to the elephants, when we did see them. And that happened maybe a quarter of the time.
But we do have a selfie, she and I, in front of one of them. In the image, captured just before Christmas 2023, the elephant looks straight on. Its whole face fills the frame. Its black eyes are above my daughter’s head, on the two sides of her. And she’s looking toward the camera, equally stunned. It’s an image of four dazed eyes.
***
“I do, actually, really, genuinely care that she is Catholic.” I am slightly embarrassed at my own obsequiousness, how I feel the need to buttress this statement with so much emphasis, but the priest I am talking to, who is younger than me but severe, seems to need it. After the meeting, my emails and phone calls to him go unanswered. It’s quite complicated for him, I think.
***
I suspect that it is not so much the act of swimming that I like, so much as the fact that I am now capable of kind of doing it. I am not good, certainly. When moving in the water, I am always thirsty for air. As much as I try to inhale deeply when I turn my head to the side, I can never seem to fill my lungs. Always, the water is there, pressing under and around my chest, and I can’t breathe deeply enough. But I am pleased enough to move, and the sun is nice on my skin. I never even owned a swim suit until six months ago. Before I started swim lessons, the last time I was shirtless in public was on my 12th birthday in the year 2000.
***
The Episcopal priest who baptizes my daughter understands, I think, the sense of defeat that’s in me.
“We welcome a lot of people who were raised Catholics,” she says, and I know what she means. I’ve seen them there in the pews at St. Benedict, the exiles who sit together in little clusters and kneel and cross themselves. They pretend it’s the same, and maybe it is for them.
Giulia is baptized on a normal Sunday in August when the church is baking hot. The sound of St. Benedict is the sound of passing cars. They stream past. A quick little service and my daughter is done with it. And the parishioners, who don’t know us, are about twenty people, all of them rather old. They gather around and smile and say how cute she is and she is happy with the little gold cross we’ve bought her that she won’t get to actually wear for another three years or so. In the car, I switch it out for a “Chews Life” rosary. Made out of silicon, it’s designed for babies to bite. I try to keep Giulia from biting the cross, even if there are little ridges on it that mean it’s been designed precisely for that. It just doesn’t feel right.
Sister Joan stops texting along the way and I think it’s because I’ve offended her, but it turns out she was actually just dying. I discover that she has died too late to go to the service, but they tell me where she’s been interred and I go to visit and leave some irises. They’re symbols of the Virgin. I have some tattooed on my forearm.
***
The two elephants’ names are Tina and Billy. Tina is 59, but she only came to LA in 2010, after a lifetime with a private owner. But Billy came here in 1989, at age 4. His life as an Angelino entirely coincides with my own. He was there for Rodney King, OJ, Northridge, stuck in his little six acre enclosure. I must’ve seen him as a boy, or at least come close to him. Unlike me, he will never have a child he feels the need to baptize. And he will never swim laps.
Billy’s own weight in the heat must be oppressive for him. Even under an artificial waterfall or at the edge of an artificial pond, he must always feel the scale of himself in his bones. Against the size of the world that he inhabits, his heft must make him feel squeezed. In LA, he had 6.5 acres. In Tulsa, seventeen. He must not know that he is built for hundreds of miles, for great migrations, for long, lazy floating in rivers and lakes that would, in the wild, bear him down and down through vast stretches of land if he were to allow the tide to hold and carry him.
They are natural swimmers, elephants. They naturally float well and they can swim confidently for 20 miles a day. But he has never, in all his 40 years, been in a body of water that was large enough to permit him to swim properly, or on a piece of land that allowed him to walk with the efficiency and endurance of which he’s capable. Instead, at 40, having spent his life on just 6.5 acres, his joints must creak and pop when he moves, must make it seem futile even to stand up.
***
Giulia takes to the water “like a natural,” the swim teacher says. She’s wearing Frozen floaties given to her by her six year old cousin, who no longer needs them. She’s dressed in a little pink swimsuit with a peplum and a cute little doily collar that makes me think of Sister Joan.
She comes with me for a little intro private class and I’m holding her up in my arms as her little feet kick her forward across the surface of the water. She goes at a rapid pace, and her toes are perfectly pointed as she does.
“Look me, papa,” she cries with delight. “I swim the water.”
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Chris Negri lives in Los Angeles. His short story collection, Care: Stories, was published by Inlandia Institute, a small press in his native Riverside, in 2020, under the name Christopher Records.