Looking at Animals

Raymond knew all about invisibility. It was what had made him so successful during his thirty years at National Geographic; in jungles and deserts, beside rivers, in grasslands—he could get closer to the animals than anybody else. He'd photographed Siberian tigers from just a few feet away, blending into the tundra and chanting to himself, I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing.

Four months ago Raymond retired to Morrisville, North Carolina, a stone-still town with one video-rental store, a diner, some bars, and a concrete park with a patch of too-green grass. He chose Morrisville because his sense of the place was that people let one another be. It was small enough that everyone knew his name, but they didn't feel the need to use it too much.

The business with Greg Phillips started like this: sitting on his front porch one night, Raymond spotted a big kid of about sixteen crouched under Bob Henderson's bedroom window. Something about the kid—how comfortable he looked, how calm—told him that Greg was neither a burglar nor a pervert. His curiosity was benign; he was, like Raymond, a watcher.

After that first night it was a simple matter of doing what Raymond had trained himself to do. If he looked thoroughly enough, he was sure to find Greg leaping over one of those idiot wooden fences that didn't keep anything out that wanted to get in, or perched under a window, or listening at a closed door. Greg wasn't particularly careful, didn't slink or crawl, and Raymond could tell he believed himself invisible. Which was funny, because he sure as hell wasn't. The kid made all sorts of mistakes, wouldn't last a minute in the Serengeti without the animals sensing him, but then again he wasn't all that bad either. It wasn't right, probably, to hold Greg to Raymond's own standards. After all, there was such an art to imperceptible observation.

Greg smelled more strongly of curiosity than any animal Raymond had ever come across—a scent like fresh mushrooms, spearmint, clean sweat; and so it was easy to plot the course of his wanderings. In doing so, in crouching behind trees across the street from Greg, or even hiding a few feet away beneath the very next window, Raymond learned more about Morrisville than he ever would have in a lifetime of conventional looking.

For instance it was common knowledge that kangaroo rats could copulate thirty times a day, but it came as a surprise that Mr. Locke—a stout, quiet man—was a male kangaroo rat in training (his wife, as willing a kangaroo rat as Raymond has ever observed). He's seen Dr. Liebson, a dignified doctor-turned-lawyer, spilling tears onto old photographs and saying "Mommy" over and over; Mrs. Hartz winking at her reflection and whispering, "You're one hot ticket. I want to fuck you." He has heard their shouts, the inhuman growls, the confessions, has noticed that the more intimate the secret, the louder it was spoken, as though these people wanted to be heard—wanted someone to tell them their desires were normal, their fears justified, that they were a–ok. It wasn't particularly complicated, Raymond thought; all animals have a call for when they're lost or afraid. You couldn't possibly follow a pack of wolves for long without recognizing the connection between howling and loneliness.

If a lightning bolt flashed during one of these expeditions, Raymond knew what people would see: a stocky teenager hunkered down in the boundary between inside and outside. They would see a weather-beaten man watching the boy from behind a car or up a tree, and they might wonder what sort of a game the two were playing. Raymond wondered this as well. He was fifty-six years old and spent his days watching Greg and his mother, Pearl. The hairs on his body were gray. His skin was gray. His eyes had dulled to gray. Yet . . . yet he was surprised that now, in his retirement when...