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Outside it's quiet, the shelling on temporary hiatus, but people still huddle over their food in case dust starts to fall.
Most of the tables are in the process of a long drink, no live shot for them tonight, the story bagged and tagged, and Zev
goes over to the French correspondents to get a hit of hash. Everyone smokes Turkish hash, sent over by the Muslim brethren.
"Fucking puis-je voir la carte?" says Zev, slapping a few loose hands.

McGraw watches Zev take a long puckered drag from a pipe, watches Zev look over at him and smile, the smoke slowly curling
out of his turnip-sized nostrils. To the bat cave, McGraw says to himself, and he gives Zev the finger and lights up a cigarette.
"Are we in the alley?" he asks Lewis.

"Yeah. Though I'd love to get on the roof somehow, especially if there's some good shelling." Lewis nods. "That'd be a great
shot—Laraby on the fucking roof as the city explodes behind him."

Laraby, of course, agrees. He agrees to everything Lewis suggests. At first it was a problem. A bit apprehensive, he wanted
to keep his distance. Back in the States Laraby covered natural disasters, that was his gig, his first stint being hurricane
Hugo in '89. He impressed people with his compassion, and as he toured Charleston, chunks of roof in his path, trees snapped
over in tragic supplication, he spoke to the camera and said, "What Sherman once spared, Hugo has damned." Fucking poetry.
And the woman showing him around, a blond coed at The College of Charleston, her name an old Southern name that rhymes with
lots-of-dough, she fell in love with him a few minutes before he fell in love with her. Weeks later the San Francisco earthquake
hit. Then the California fires. Hurricane Andrew. When the dust cleared from those crazy three years, Laraby, the new golden
boy, had been married, cheated on, lied to, and divorced—Jesus, you can be fooled!—and he was now ready to visit the site
of a public Armageddon.

"We need something big," Lewis is saying. "People are getting bored with the same old stuff."

"Yeah?"

"It's got to get sexier."

This is true. Same old stuff, that's a huge danger. Fresh angles are important, fresh ways of telling this story. Maybe a
profile on the upcoming production
of Hair.
Or how about something ironic on the Museum of the Revolution. You can't just have mortar shells and rubble and blood, mothers'
breaking down over the day's corpses. There has to be context, no matter how powerful the image. Hell, McGraw has stacks of
unusable videos, each shot more horrific than the next. Postmortems floating down the Sava River. Hanged men and boys festooning
trees. Women beating themselves to kill the product of rape. You can't believe what you see—it seems so unreal—and in the
end you don't want to believe it. No way. Instead, you turn it into fiction with well-done special effects. And the actors
are so good, it's scary. This abstraction gives you distance and control, and sleep acts as a commercial break. "Now back
to our regularly scheduled war, already in progress," is one of Lewis's favorite lines. But this isn't working for Laraby.
Things are slipping into an absurd equation where he's equivalent with Sarajevo. Each atrocity is part of his own evolution,
almost like childhood memories recovered by a spurious quack, and he watches and rewatches the unwatchable videos, sometimes
staying up all night in front of the monitor—Did this really happen? Of course it did—over and over again. There's the zoo,
a lovely old thing, built a hundred years ago, and today its animals are getting butchered for much-needed meat. The monkey
house is a den of almost-human screams. Dead elephants are chainsawed for their flesh. The untender birds, mostly carrion,
are freed to starve on their own or to scavenge off those unclaimed. Jesus. These images flicker through the sleepless night
like a nightmare. It isn't cruelty—you have to tell yourself that—it's awful necessity. The keeper, a haggard man twenty-five
years with this zoo, aims the shotgun at the caged tiger's head. Nothing to be done. Laraby hits rewind, play, rewind again.
A loop to the polar bears. The footage is purposeless. No one wants to see it. Too much grit for back home. Plus the fearful
lack of civility, the giant leap of regression, all that crap is a bummer to a humanist nation. But Zev, through his many
connections, has managed to scramble up some zebra meat for the four of them. It's tough, charbroiled to a pale brown, but
they eat most of it. Except for Laraby.

"You know, I once drank bat's blood in Cambodia," Lewis says, beginning to spill his usual stories of Disgusting Meals Eaten.
"That was the worst."

McGraw disagrees. "But they're bats," he says. "Who gives a shit about a bat?"

"It tasted awful."

The three of them are sipping peppermint schnapps, a rarity here. Zev found it on the black market, a whole case. He also
found a jar of Hellmann's mayonnaise and ten rolls of Italian toilet paper, Di Prima Classe, a soft two-ply brand. A sufficiently
stoned Zev walks back to the table, his eyes pink, his grouper mouth sucking in air. He tops off their glasses, greeting them
with, "Ziveli. And how is the zebra tonight?"

"Excellent."

"Dobro, vrlo dobro." He's been their translator for a couple of months—the old translator, a guy named Alija, suffered a nervous
breakdown from his sister's death—and Zev wants to keep this job for as long as possible. It pays well. There are benefits.
And the Hilton has no more need for an assistant concierge.

"Anyway," Lewis continues, "they bring the bat to your table, holding it by the wings so you can see the wingspan. That's
very important for some reason. Then they whack it a good one on the head and bleed it into a glass. It's meant to be a delicacy."

"Why drink it?"

"Keeps your dick hard for a week."

"Cat's the worst thing I ever ate," McGraw says. "The family cat. Snowball."

"Sta?"

"My father kind of flipped out and did some terrible things." McGraw immediately regrets bringing up this memory, of his father
serving dinner, those greasy pieces of kitty meat, to his wife and kids, and forcing the six of them to clean their plates.

"The family cat?" Lewis shakes his head, like a bowling pin uncertain of falling. "That's cold. I've eaten cat and dog—in
fact, I've probably eaten just about every variety of pet there is—but never the family pet, or a family pet. That's . . .
that's bad. Anyone ever see that movie
King Rat?"

No one has. Laraby is still thinking about bat's blood and a daylong boner. Would that be pleasurable? And then his mind settles
on cruel tortures he used to inflict on the neighborhood animals: throwing rocks at dogs; putting two cats in a potato sack;
blowing up seagulls with M-80s. Why do you do those things?

"Was your cock?" Zev asks.

"What?"

"Your fucking cock." Zev gestures to his groin and makes an adaptation of a fascist salute.

"Nada." Lewis refills his glass, hoping nobody sees him drink this candy booze. Disgusting. And the translator pours with
such a maitre d' flourish and clinks glasses every chance he gets. "The family cat. How the hell was it cooked?"

McGraw pretends not to hear. He stares into the zebra meat—Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, had a zebra for wheels, kind of a
pet, though McGraw isn't too fond of the whole noble-savage motif in comics. Except Conan. And he says, "Why didn't they let
the tiger loose in the Serengeti pen? That would've been something."

"A Bengal," Zev answers. "Fucking Indian, not African." "Let him stretch his legs one last time. Let him get a taste of the
old country. Let him hunt and chase and rip apart. That would've been something to see. Instead of the shotgun." McGraw slides
the meat into his mouth: the kill.

The animal would probably just sit there, stuck with a new fear, too scared of those high-to-the-ground creatures. No doubt.
Fifteen years in the zoo, sleeping and eating, cooled off in the summer and kept warm in the winter, you forget the real you
and fall into a different you, a you without need, a you without painful realizations. But who says this isn't the life to
lead? The four of them basically agree.

"But it'd be nice to show your real power."

The tiger didn't move as the keeper took aim. Did he know? A stupid question. It's not like being pursued, adrenaline pumping,
running because genetically you have to run until those claws swipe your hind quarters and you fall and tumble and within
seconds you hear things tear and you feel things spill and you know things are over. No, the tiger didn't flinch. McGraw held
the close-up on the face, a brutal shot, and off-camera you could hear the click of the pump action and the crazy moaning
of the keeper. Boom. That was one heavy-duty gun. And Laraby had the perfect copy: executions, like zoos, are the sole property
of humans. Then the tiger shook as if shocked and backed itself in the corner, blood all over the place. Every great city
has a zoo.

"And you ate the cat." Lewis is still fixated. He can get that way, waltz with a thought through a whole set of topics.

"Yeah."

"Was it off the bone at least?"

"I really can't remember."

Outside the shelling starts again, the hills raining mortars on the entrenched city. This noise makes Laraby nervous, he can't
quite get used to it, and though there's no danger of a possible hit—the Serbs are targeting the southern section—he stops
eating and looks up at the ceiling. Things quiver slightly. The silverware on the plates. The hanging lights. Like the nearing
of a merciless army from Megiddo. Frightening. With natural disasters he had arrived after the fact, the destruction laid
out in front of him. Except the fires. The fires he had witnessed, but it was always from a distance and it was always beautiful.
The fires he had actually enjoyed. Certain colors only exist in fire—he discovered this early on, as a kid, a little pyro
with his father's stolen lighter. Let's burn this. And sometimes he'd cut his fingernails and cut clumps of his hair, and
he'd burn that in a small pile. An awful stench of himself emerged, sweet and thick and oily.

"But wait," Lewis asks. "Did you know it was Snowball?"

"Not really. I don't know. Let's drop it, okay?"

The shells hit in clockwork fashion. And Laraby listens intently. It isn't that he imagines screams—that sensation will come
later—but it's something else, a different noise, as when you hear voices, in the shower, in an airplane's engine, in an electric
shaver, and the voices are calling for you, trying to find you. An eerie feeling. And as Laraby spends more time in this city,
a weird place of diffuse civilizations and bloods held in the sexless crotch of the hills, the voices become louder.

"Did you puke when you found out?"

"No, okay."

Zev pulls out hash from his inside pocket. "Do you guys want to smoke?"

McGraw—"Yes"—quickly answers.

The seals were particularly hard to kill. The tank drained of the long-neglected water, green for months, but the seals were
quick and they hid in the large rock formation that acted as their artificial home. The keeper slipped on the slimy bottom,
his shotgun discharging in the air. A crowd of reporters gathered. The animals barked and pushed themselves deeper into the
crevices. They knew what was coming—dying screams don't need to be translated from species to species. Laraby leaned over
the rail, his feet bobbing up and down. The whole scene was almost comical. A few of them were easy to kill; they were older
and lazier and almost let the gun rest against their sleek heads. But the rest were a bitch: seals from an overcrowded Scottish
zoo, North Sea seals. The keeper had trouble with their upland names—Macgregor, Glasgow—and
it
all sounded absurd, not just his pronunciation, but his trying to coax them out while blood pooled at his feet. But he had
a fish, a rubber fish, one of those novelty gifts. He waved it in the air, as if teasing for a trick. The reward. Laraby glanced
about in shock. Lewis and McGraw were, as usual, side by side, like a drummer and a bass player in a wedding band. Zev was
off with one of the other keepers—they were shooting the pigeons that lingered by the fountains. Just the other day parents
and children were coming to this zoo to try to forget themselves. Now the seals were the only ones left—four of them, to be
exact—each wedged in the hollow of the middle, each hungry for even a fake herring.

A thick smoke joins the air. For a second Laraby thinks he's smelling himself burn, or maybe others. McGraw passes the pipe
to Lewis. "The cat"—he shakes his head—"just blows me away."

"Shut up."

"This the fucking best," says Zev. "Trust me. You can function, no fucking problem. Look, I juggle." He picks up three rolls
of Di Prima Classe.

The remaining seals were eventually killed and skinned, their blubber used for burning oil, their fatty meat fed to children.
The butcher did everything by guesswork, though he was completely baffled by the giraffes. And McGraw captured all of it on
tape.

They taped everything. Even Laraby's death. Still long-haired and thin, and quiet for the last couple of days before he died.
Something was bothering him, that's what the three of them would say later. He was depressed. Or just lonely. Distant. Who
knows? But as he interviewed a woman about her prized collection of porcelain plates—"It's a miracle that none of your things
have broken during the incessant shelling"—Laraby rubbed his head, his temple, his left eye, and within seconds his appendages,
including ears, felt as if they were retracting into his skull in a blinding flash. His last thought: Spontaneous combustion!
Right here! What a way to go! And then he collapsed on the living-room floor. A plate was taken down with him—a commemorative
Royal Wedding plate, 1956, the Prince and Princess of Monaco posed in the center—but he cradled it safely to his chest, like
a lover's picture, Grace peeking over his arm. Cause of death: an aneurysm. Expired in less than a minute. The woman, wearing
her best clothes and a ton of makeup, crouched over him and tried to prod him back to life while McGraw kept shooting and
Zev considered taking a hockey stick to this fragile place and Lewis wished, for an instant, that it could have been a sniper's
bullet that brought down his reporter, or a devastating mortar, or an angry mob pissed off at America's indifference. Something
sexy with legs.