"What?" The man said.

"What what?" The young voice on the other end said.

"What do you mean the interview is cancelled?"

"I mean that it would be inaccurate for me to say that your interview has not been cancelled."

"Why? Has the position been filled?"

"I cant say for certain. I don't know anything because I was just hired. But possibly, since I was just hired. Basically they just told me to call to tell you the interview has been canceled."

"I spent a lot of effort preparing for this interview. Can I talk to someone who knows something? Is the department head available?"

"You want to whine to the boss you didn't get? Will that bring you closer to being the employee?" The voice on the other end was sounding younger.

"I could tell them how rude you are." The man said to the young person holding his job.

"Would you keep it down? We don't need to hear about your miserable life." Someone else said.

"What?"

"What what?" The young voice on the phone said.

"Not you," the man said. "Someone on the bus just yelled at me."

"Are you going to shut up or what?" Said the bus voice.

"You're on a bus? Can't you afford a car?"

"Not now I guess."

"Can't you keep it down?"

"Hold on. Hold on. I am getting off the bus."

"What?" The voice on the phone said.

"I am getting off here. Wait. I just got off the bus. Hello. Hello?"

The man watched the bus roll away, heading towards an interview that wouldn't happen, towards the new employee that had just hung up on him.

He stood at the bus stop while cars and people moved past him. He decided to believe in a theory: that human life only exists while it is in motion. The theory comforted him as he was standing still and wished not to exist, but eventually his nonexistence was no longer solitary. A little girl had walked up beside him.

"The zoo is that way," she said.

"Excuse me?"

"The zoo is that way." She was pointing towards a path that lead away from the road. "It's faster to go in through the bushes."

"Thanks. But I'm not going to the zoo."

"Why not?"

"Why not? Because I don't need to go to the zoo."

"No one needs to go to the zoo, unless they work there, but even those people only think they need to go to the zoo."

"Well, sure. But I don't want to go to the zoo."

"Why don't you want to go to the zoo? Don't you like animals?"

"No, I don't mean that. Animals are nice. I mean pleasant. I mean I like animals enough."

"You should go to the zoo."

The path led into a grove of tropical landscaping, and after only a few steps the man found himself as engulfed in green as he would have been in a real jungle. The path was improvised, apparently only used by children or other animals, and the man frequently had to squat or crawl to make it through the cycads and ferns. While the way wound around he gradually lost his sense of direction, forcing him to trust the will of the path.

In time he came upon the back of a low building, and when he walked around the side of it he encountered a metal fence that prevented him from going further. Beyond the fence was pavement upon which stood a line of people. The people were waiting for something from the building beside him. As he watched, the person at the front of the line stepped forward and pulled out a wallet, so he man understood that the building must be the ticket booth for the zoo. He passed back around the rear of the building to the other side, searching for an opening in the fence. What he found was a gate, through which a steady stream of people were passing, crossing over to his side of the fence. Their way continued along a paved path that ran through the landscaping, perpendicular to the route by which the man had just approached.

"Where does this lead to?" He asked a man.

The man looked at him but kept walking. He wanted to ask someone else, so he joined the flow of people to try to engage someone's attention, but before he could ask his question again it was answered when he came upon a large cage occupied by brightly colored birds.

"How long have we been inside the zoo?" He said to the person closest to him, but the woman, thinking it was a joke she didn't understand, didn't acknowledge the man's words

"How long have I been in the zoo?" He said to a hornbill resting on a branch inside the cage. The bird did not seem to understand either, but nonetheless the man felt some solidarity with the bird, certainly more so than with the human.

The man set out to explore the zoo. He saw bears, parrots, leopards, giraffes, and a two headed snake. After an hour of walking among the cages he reached an enclosure that contained a koala, nestled in the crook of a tree. The man had hardly glanced at the other animals, but now, confronted with the koala, he felt compelled to stop. Maybe the meditative marsupial has a slowness that needed to be matched. The man watched, and with a minute of visual effort he was able to discern that one of the koala's legs had moved. The eucalyptus leaves swayed in the wind like seaweed in a tidal surge, until the man's vision came back up from the murky water and saw the face of the koala. The animal was looking at him. The man was being paranoid, but beside this the koala was actually looking back at him. While he had observed the koala, the koala had also observed. The man tried to think back: had any of the other animals been watching him? The animals were all in cages, so there was no way for them to have organized a meeting to discuss his movements, yet he had the suspicion that they had all been observing him with a common purpose and plan. "Like scientists, biological biologists is what they are." The man said.

The koala ignored this accusation.

"Right?" He called out to the koala. The koala didn't flinch. "Is this what you think a zoo is, an institution built with the purpose of displaying humanity to the other species? Do you get entertainment from our ridiculous behavioral traits? Do you think I parade by your cage for your benefit? 'Oh look its another human.' I bet you can't even tell us apart. Did you notice I am wearing a business suit? No one else here has on a suit, but you can't even tell the difference."

"Why are you yelling at that koala?" A little boy was standing beside the man.

"Well, since koalas are not from this part of the world I thought this one might be having trouble understanding my accent, do I had to speak louder."

"Can they understand humans?"

"They may think they can, but we are more complex than they presume."

"You're weird." The boy said and walked away.

The animals grew bored, or boring. The man was tired of seeing so much fur. But then he came to a more exciting exhibit: while most enclosures were labeled with signs bearing words like hippopotamus or harpy eagle, this one had a sign labeled "Unidentified Organism". He looked over the railing and saw, in a far corner of the enclosure, a large ball of fur.

"What is it?" He asked a man who was also viewing the exhibit.

"It's unidentified." The man replied. "It's amazing, isn't it?"

Just then two teenage boys came up and climbed onto the railing to sit. "Do you know what it is?" The man asked them.

The boys laughed. "That's a dumb question isn't it?" One of the boys said. "The sign says it's unidentified. So how can we identify it?"

"Well then what does it look like?"

"If we knew what it looked like, then we could identify it!" the other boy joked. Then the boys ran off laughing.

The enclosure was separated from the adjacent one by a wall that was roughly eight feet tall and two feet thick. To get a better look at the unidentified animal the man climbed up onto this wall and crawled towards the back. He reached the point where he was directly above the animal, but even from there he was only able to see the back of its head, so he called out softly.

"Hey animal."

The animal looked up, revealing a face unlike anything that can be seen, which so surprised the man that he fell backwards into the adjacent enclosure. When he landed he hit his head on the concrete and lost consciousness.

...

v When the man regained his senses, he wondered what type of building he was in. It was a very large space with rough concrete walls but no ceiling. In one corner of the room there was a door made out of welded steel bars. The door was locked. "It is such a strange house, and yet it seems familiar, as though I have been here before." Whose house could this be? The most familiar aspect was the smell. It was not a pleasant smell, and yet it referenced pleasant memories. It smelled of farms or fairs, or - for now his head was clearing - a zoo. Of course! he could see now that he was in a zoo enclosure, he had merely been thrown off by the strangeness of seeing it from an insider's perspective. He was in a pen at the zoo. But he could not remember how he came to be there. Indeed, he could not even recall who he was. He considered, and thought that perhaps he was a zoo animal. "I have always wondered what it felt like to be of another species. Maybe this is what it is like to be a bat!" But then he noticed that he was wearing clothes, and could not reconcile this with his knowledge that humans are the only species self-conscious enough to wear clothing. In the end he decided that he was part of an exhibit displaying humans. He questioned what would have led him to make such a career choice.

The man did not remember that he had a theory that human life only existed when in motion, so he spent the afternoon lounging in the enclosure, trying to act the roll of a human. Other humans would occasionally walk up to the railing at the front of the exhibit and look in at him. Sometimes he waved to them and at other times he did his best not to break character, though he was not sure which of these two behaviors was expected of him. Eventually it grew dark and people stopped coming by the rail, leaving him to a peaceful evening under the stars, culminated by sleep on a pile of hay near the back of the enclosure.

In the morning he was stirred by the sounds of the zoo animals, then later by a group of schoolchildren that gathered at the railing.

"Hey!"

"Hey!" They were shouting. The man rose his head slowly and gave them a dignified look.

"Hey. What are you doing in there?"

He wondered if he was allowed to talk to the visitors. Since he couldn't recall being told not to, he decided it was ok. "I am on exhibit, of course. Tell your teacher you have been to see the human."

"Why does there need to be an exhibit of humans?"

"Yeah, we can see humans anywhere." Another child said.

"But I am special."

"How? You just look like a person."

Like all humans the man was sure he was special but could not think of how.

"You don't seem special. They should get a more interesting human. Like one who is really tall."

"Or one with two heads like that snake that ate too much pesticide."

The man spoke up proudly. "I am special in that I am an example of a human untainted by society."

"Wouldn't you be happier in the wild?"

"No. Here I am protected, plus I don't have to work for food and shelter."

"But what do you do with your time if you don't work?"

"Yeah, I always feel sorry for you zoo animals," another child said. "You don't have to struggle to survive like your relatives in the wild, but aren't animals happiest doing what what they are designed to do? Don't you want the struggle?"

"I don't know. Its not so bad having someone bring you your food," but he felt he had lost the argument, and as the kids walked off it occurred to him that in fact no one had brought him any food, at least not as far as he could remember

Later in the morning, a boy of about 12 years appeared at the railing.

He shouted up to the boy. "Hey. Are those peanuts? Can you throw me a few?"

The boy put his hand in the bag to count his peanuts to see if they added up to an answer. "The sign says don't feed the animals."

"I'm not an animal."

"Humans are animals. How did you make it into a zoo without knowing that?"

The man tried a different line of reasoning. "Then you're saying you can't feed humans, but what do you think you're doing right now when you feed yourself peanuts? You're human, therefore you are feeding an animal."

"When I eat, I am not feeding someone, I am being fed. So I'm not breaking the rules."

"But if you are being fed, then someone must be doing the feeding. Presumably that is you."

"No, its the guy at the food cart. He fed me."

"Well, maybe he can feed me too."

"Don't the zoo keepers feed you?"

"No. They seem to have forgotten about me. I think there might be a new zookeeper and his boss failed to tell him about this exhibit."

"Well, your sign says 'vacant'. Maybe the vacant animals don't get to eat."

"Can't you get me some food?"

"Sorry, I have to go. My mom is calling me. Maybe you should return to the wild so you can hunt for your own food."

The boy disappeared, and the man crawled to the back of the enclosure. "The wild, what is the wild?" he wondered to himself. "Are humans in the wild? Maybe that boy thinks he is, but he does not see the cage slowly being built around him, with bars that grow longer with each birthday."

"Hey!" The boy was back. "I found you a new sign. I stole it from the bathroom door. Maybe now they will feed you." There were two bent screws poking out the back of the sign, and the boy used them to hook it over the front of the vacant sign.

"Thanks."

"Sure." The boy turned to leave, and as he did he pointed to the sign and called out to a group of people passing by, "Hey, did you see the MEN exhibit? Its pretty wild."

The group came to the rail and pointed. "Look at that, its a real person!" One of them shouted.

The man stood up and tried to look dignified.