I’m waiting for my mother at the airport, holding a strip of cardboard above my head that says “mutter.” An older German lady emerges from the sliding doors and wanders up to me with a dazed look, relieved that she can finally drop her bags to the floor. But I tell her she is not my mother—never was and never will be. I add that I don’t love my mother just because she’s my mother, though being my mother certainly helps, since it means she’s always been around, and so I got to know her, and it was only then that I came to love her.

With a sigh, the German lady picks up her bags and waddles away. At that moment, my mother comes marching out of the doors. In lieu of a greeting, she informs me that she doesn’t have any checked luggage and impatiently waves us away from the airport, from all of this. She’s carrying only a tote bag, but it’s so heavy—taut and bulging, like there could be a bowling ball inside—that it’s making half her body sag.

“I’ve seen that word before,” she says, pointing at my sign.

“You’ve probably seen it in English. But I mean it in the German way.”

I pronounce it slowly in German. My mother imitates me, then converts the word into a pair of Korean syllables that sound most like the German. She tells me that this Korean verb refers to when a splotch of something sticks onto something else, and it shouldn’t have. The offending splotch is frequently moist, leading to the possibility of a stain, but the Korean “mutter” could also turn out to be a surface-level affair.

My mother, who probably would’ve become an eccentric schoolteacher had she never left Korea for America, asks me to imagine a shooting spree at a shopping mall: “Let’s say the gunman plugs you squarely in the chest and blood drenches your shirt—that’s not ‘mutter.’ Now, imagine you’re sitting in the food court, close to the main action. It wouldn’t be ‘mutter’ if a drop of a stranger’s blood flew over into your cup of soda, but it would be ‘mutter’ if that droplet landed on your shirt. Understand?”

“I think so,” I say. “When something ‘mutters,’ there’s a chance it won’t penetrate deeply enough to leave a stain. Such a ‘muttering’ thing shows up where it shouldn’t, but it’s pretty easy to get rid of.”

As we take the bus into the city, I try to think of a word in English that describes the entire concept in reverse, that is, when something shows up where it should and is impossible to get rid of. Interestingly, there are nouns for this something (soul, God, etc.), but there seem to be no verbs capturing what this something does (“to soul,” “to god”?). Meanwhile, I can think of far too many nouns for something that shows up where it should but is pretty easy to get rid of, and they all have verbs. That would make sense, because, if something can disappear, then it’ll need a verb to call itself back into existence. By contrast, something like the soul, God, etc., in being impossible to get rid of, knows no such shift. It can’t be made to happen, since it’s always already there. What’s more, if the soul, God, etc., can’t be made to happen, then it never has happened, actually, which makes me wonder—does it happen by not happening? Might it happen by not showing up where it should? In that case, perhaps everything I hold dear—e.g., my mother, her voice, both rattled by this bus—can be understood as being in an unrelenting state of abandonment by the soul, God, etc. Beauty, then, arises from the pain and struggle of experiencing oneself as a site of divine truancy, and ugly is that which pretends to be directly equivalent to the soul, God, etc. Might this be why I find cockroaches endearing, while kindly know-it-alls make my skin crawl?

The next day, I bring my mother to work with me. When I first started working at the zoo, its inhabitants were organized by taxonomy (birds here, wildcats there). Not long afterward, the animals were organized by continental regions (African birds here, Asian birds there), reflecting the popular celebration of cultural differences, particularly in the anodyne areas of fashion and food, which made animals—plumaged, etc., frequently eaten, etc.—ideal subjects. Now the park’s animals are organized by their degree of endangerment. The idea among management is something like “save the best for last”: instead of viewing the precarity of a species as an allusion to what’s not there, why not treat it as a substantial trait that imbues an animal with pathos, even a soulful intelligence?

“ . . . but I do love you. I just love you more the next day.”

Cartoon by Lonnie Millsap

I encourage my mother to walk the zoo’s entire course, from the species that exist in plenitude to the species that are so much on their own that even if their calls were to be broadcast around the world, not one living creature would know how to respond. I work as a security guard in the latter section. When my mother finally reaches my station, she joins a group of schoolchildren and their teacher standing before the metal enclosure in which the crown jewel of our park lives: Zelzah, the only California condor left in the world.

A trainer is inside the cage feeding Zelzah. Meanwhile, my job is to stand guard on the other side of the footpath. Unlike the trainer, who holds Zelzah on his arm and does all sorts of things with her so that she becomes stronger, faster, and smarter, I’m on the lookout for anything that could weaken, decelerate, or retard her. I’d like to be up close and personal with Zelzah, too. But I’d never make it long as a trainer, because I’d have no desire to acquaint myself with her “machinery” so as to coördinate aerial or biological feats out of her. I’d be too busy staring at Zelzah and growing increasingly troubled. I’d let her stay on my arm for as long as she liked, even if that meant sleeping standing up inside her cage. All I want, really, is to fall within her line of sight for long enough that a little pile of information about me forms in her brain. It can be a messy pile, unsorted, just sitting there like dirty laundry.

As the trainer explains the complex evolutionary history of Zelzah’s species, she looks around with unspent savagery. She wants to do something, anything, but she doesn’t know what there is to do. She doesn’t even know how to want to leave her cage. If only I could move all my feelings into her! She’d know how to draw my contradictory human impulses into a single irrevocable act, and this despairing but living instant would be magically commensurate with the rambling span of our conjoined life.

“Zel—zah,” I pronounce slowly. “Last not just once, but twice.”

The trainer informs the schoolchildren that Zelzah was born in the zoo but that her “real home” is a stretch of shrubland north of Los Angeles. She’s “supposed” to have been born there, he says. I don’t understand this matter of supposedness. It seems to me that Zelzah isn’t supposed to be anywhere or anything. The trainer thinks he’s confronting a painful idea, namely that there exists a home Zelzah can’t return to, when he’s actually distracting himself with a painful idea that’s false in order to avoid the more painful idea that’s true. Still, I can sympathize with the desire for a firm peg or two on which to drape the amorphous fabric of one’s existence so that it can approximate a picture with meaning. As much as I can’t stand to be told who I’m supposed to be or what I’m supposed to want, I secretly need some guidance at all times. It’s even better when there’s brute force involved, because then I do everything in my power to break free, a task sufficiently preoccupying that I don’t have to decide what I actually want to be free for. I want freedom but not too much of it. For example, while I have no wish to belong to any particular place or group of people, I wish to belong to myself. So I, too, believe in supposedness: I think I’m supposed to be myself. This may be even more mistaken than thinking I’m supposed to be someone else.

The trainer holds out a piece of raw chicken, the sun striking it as though it were the moisturized pink cheek of an obviously beautiful woman. Zelzah snaps it up. Stuffed with chicken from the top, she has no choice but to eject a violent rash of feces from below. In symbolic timing, I’m selected at that moment for a visit by a trainer at the elephant pond who’s infamous for his uncontrolled extroversion. The prevailing interpretation among my co-workers is that he’s arrogant and thinks himself unduly interesting, but my feeling is more that he’s so burdened by his own banality—his “cross to bear”—that he has to cast off bits of it everywhere, like rotten apples out of a sack.

“Mary was such a good girl today,” he announces. The elephant must’ve been asked to endure something. “Ah,” he goes on, catching sight of my mother, “ha ha, it’s your mother,” and then, preëmptively, “hey, take it easy, I’m just poking fun at people who would say such a thing.” I wait for him to finish talking to himself. Then I confirm that the woman is my mother. But he only laughs some more, mirthlessly. “You can always tell there’s something broken about the older folks who come alone. Oh it’s just so sad. You’ll find them talking to the animals, saying things like ‘You wouldn’t fit in my oven.’ It’s obvious they haven’t had any real human contact in a while. That woman’s husband is probably dead, and I bet her children don’t call her.”

From my position on the other side of the footpath, I try to see my mother as he sees her. She’s shaking her head in awe at Zelzah. The children, meanwhile, are turning around to stare at her, having gathered that she isn’t a mother to any of them and that this makes her solitude weird.

“She looks fine to me,” I say uneasily.

After the demonstration, the children move on, but my mother remains standing before the cage. As I cross the footpath in her direction, I feel like we really could be strangers, and, in that suspension of our lifelong history, she strikes me for the first time as lost and confused. Zelzah spreads her wings wide. My mother anxiously turns her head left and right, scanning the wingspan as if a message awaits her there, but the bird, with an air of displeasure, promptly folds her wings back up, and what I used to see as a posture of relaxation now strikes me as the tense withholding of a secret. When I lay a hand on my mother’s shoulder, she looks up at me in alarm, eyes void of recognition—but then they soften, become mild and indifferent. Flooded with relief, more because I want to be than because I am, I hug her.

“I’m so tired,” she says. “I hate your time zone.”

I take her home as soon as I can. After I finish showering, we sit on the floor in the middle of my apartment so that we can have dinner while she combs my hair. I’m surprised she doesn’t ask if I’ll ever come back home, or make her usual solicitous observations about my apartment’s chairless austerity. Now she sits cross-legged behind me on the parquet beside our dinner of discounted baked cheese and seems perfectly resigned to the way I live.

“You used to have so much more hair,” she observes from behind. “Now when I gather your hair into my hand, it has the dimensions of a chewed-up plastic straw.”

“Whenever you get older, I get older, too.”

I tell her it’s never made any sense to me that more and more hair falls out with age. Shouldn’t my hair, dead as its cells are, actually multiply over time, while the juicy living parts of my body fall out, with my death being the exact moment when nothing that’s alive about me is left? Rolling around inside my coffin would be a gigantic ball of hair trussed by a Möbius strip of fingernail.

“The older I get, the more I love you,” I say. “Does that mean my love is more dead than alive?”

“I know you’re frustrated, but eventually you’ll be completely numb to humiliating losses just like your old man.”

Cartoon by Ivan Ehlers

I tell my mother that sometimes it feels like an emergency: she must know that no one else can ever be what she is for me. I don’t care who other people are and what they think they can do for me, I wouldn’t care even if my mother were dead—in fact, they better leave my sight so that I can focus on the gaping hole she’s left behind.

My mother says nothing and keeps the comb trundling across my scalp.

“Hello?” I say. “Are you there?”

She stops combing. I turn around to look at her.

“I came here to tell you something,” she says. “I’m starting to forget things, and it’ll only get worse. Thankfully, at a certain point I won’t know it’s happening. As a matter of fact, I’ll probably be the happiest and freest I’ve ever been. But you won’t be happy and free. My greatest fear is that I’ll do something in my brand-new life as an idiot that’ll make you laugh and cry at the same time. I don’t want to confuse you like that; I don’t want to make your joy and sadness hard to tell apart. I know this wicked mixture is the truth, but still, I don’t want it for you. So treat me as if I were no different from that impressive bird you watch over at work. I know it’ll be hard to see me as an animal. I was your human mother for so long, after all. But understand that I’ve transformed. Understand that your human mother has gone away. Don’t try to find her in what I become. Only then is there a chance you might love me still. You might even be tempted to cuddle me, post pictures of me, spend hundreds of dollars to buy me so that you can keep me at home and play with me.”

I touch my hair. It’s silky until I reach the ends, which are so viciously knotted that I’ll have to cut them off with scissors later.

“But who will take care of you?” I whine. “Live with me. Stay with me.”

“I would never do that to you. Things would get so bad that you’d be relieved when I die. No, it’s healthier to catapult you into grief.”

I weep as she resumes combing my hair. Ignoring my breakdown, she tells me a story I’ve already heard before, about how, when she was a girl, she had thick beautiful hair all the way down to her butt and wore it in a flamboyant braid as long and heavy as a rope. She lost her balance whenever it swung, and, in that sense, it functioned nothing like an animal’s tail. But her mother, who found it unseemly for a little girl to be swinging such a thing about, chopped it off one night while my mother was asleep. The next day, what made my mother even sadder than the braid’s disappearance was how amazingly light she felt as she walked down the street, like she might float right up into the sky. ♦

This is drawn from “To God.”