Shuffling his feet along the graveled city zoo trail, Nikolai pauses at the diverging fork and looks down at his prompt, typed neatly on a roughly cut strip of copier stock.
‘Find your spirit animal, identify one core value you share.’
This was an obvious and shallow team building exercise given to managers at an overconfident tech company. Adults taking a field trip, congratulating themselves for another high earnings quarter. Fiscally successful, but morally bankrupt. HR started to invent little outings like these after the abysmal ‘manager wellness’ surveys came back. Slapping infantilizing band-aids on the big issues by encouraging staff to ‘press pause’ and bond with peers they despise. Last quarter it was finger painting over prosecco. This quarter – spirit animals at the Dublin Zoo. This would no doubt be followed up with some huddled-up group presentations, reflexively competing over who reflected the deepest.
Nikolai knew the zoo mostly by its wafting stench, cycling daily through Phoenix Park on his morning commute. Now inside its high walls, the vapors collected thicker, marking the territories of the wild and domineering. Sequestered to four corners, these proud and aggressive titans are kept far apart by design, allowing them all a false sense of a marked kingdom. Penned into unnaturally tight quarters, they are agitated by each other’s wafts and howls. And the tension is as unnerving as the low drone humming of the electric fence.
Wolf dens to the south, elephant pens to the north, and monkey cages to the west. Off to the east, something fierce is calling from a jungle, meant to repel but drawing him in. Without glancing at the marked sign posts, Nikolai decides to follow the foreboding path east.
Hot foggy breath seems to congeal into a warning sign that reads ‘only the brave may proceed.’ He picks his heels up higher, a ‘fight or flight’ circuitboard going haywire. His pace quickens fervently as he approaches this fiend’s den. A revived purpose wraps Nikolai in a magnetic field of curiosity. It’s this curious feeling that tempts so many tomcats like him to poke and prod into danger spaces.
‘Find your spirit animal.’
Thoughts stray to his toxic coworkers, embarking on the same task, no doubt plotting how to frame their findings back to the group with subtle postures and humble brags. He shakes the cynically rattling marbles from his head, and returns to his assignment. An assignment that is, at the very least, offering time alone to walk and ponder his course.
‘Identify one core value.’
A few days past, Nikolai’s division had closed out performance reviews for their managed teams. It was a bloodthirsty company practice running every six months. A large draconian boardroom of managers sitting in a windowless fluorescent room, all there to defend the individual achievements of their people and ‘calibrate’ their ratings to everyone else’s. There were unspoken taboos and rules of engagement that everyone learned over time. Don’t be too generous or your whole team will be marked down. Don’t fight back too hard, or you will be marked down too.
Managers came in hostile with prepared statements, everyone with arms folded tight like a poker hand, not wanting to speak too much or too little. HR insists it’s the most efficient way to ensure fairness in cross-company ratings. Most managers describe it as being locked in a room with a few sharp shivs at the center, being asked to fight for survival. Each combatant chained to the table grabs ranks and promotion slots for their own. Playing out small telepathic alliances, winks are exchanged across the room with anyone willing to back your horse, assuming you’ll cast a vote for theirs in return.
And then there were the pythons in the room, never willing to form alliances. Those hungry fast trackers were only looking for opportunities to bait someone into talking too much. They smell weakness in someone’s logic and they consume them whole. And never shall you be seen to protest too loudly, too stubbornly, when things aren’t going your way. Afterall, your poise at this table would be noted for the next ratings session one room over.
So much crossed arm frustration, so many two-stepped ‘attack and defends.’ Nikolai feels the compulsion to replay all his stammering mistakes. The times he should’ve spoken up, the times he wished he hadn’t. He flinches it from his winced forehead and returns to the moment.
‘…your spirit animal… one core value.’
The stench and fog is growing frightfully, Nikolai finds himself in a fever dream of an imagined machete chopping through gnarly vines. He pauses at an arched stone gate, connecting heavy woven fencing deep in both directions, wrapping around a raised grassy rampart at its center. The patched forest behind him of birds and frogs seems to go silent at his arrival. Deadly silent and waiting for the stirring grass across the fence to smell him back.
The path had led him here by intuition. He had avoided the zoo’s map but his senses now tell him which of God’s beasts were locking hungry golden eyes on him. Nikolai strays from the path, wading through tall weeds, hypnotically across the dark forest green fence. His betrayal from safety beckons her curiosity from the camouflage tallgrass. Zooming distortedly closer without moving at all, she emerges from the bushy thicket, a spilling river of dizzying stripes. She is a conjured congealment of rusted red clouds, pooling black stripes along a burnt orange sunset. There before him was the Siberian tiger, a lordly ghost from the frosted pine forests of the far east. From Russia to Mongolia, this panthera goddess evokes savagery from a frozen prehistoric land out of time. Her wildness shines in those banded gemstone eyes, looking slightly disappointed that Nikolai is not a challenging wild boar or a contending Kodiak bear. Her panting breath grows hot into steaming plumes, preceding her approach.
The sabred queen glides with rippling matted fur along the comb-teeth fence, whisperingly past Nikolai, beckoning him to follow. He finds himself at the pen’s corner with a sheltered overhang and a thick glass viewing station. Terrifyingly close now, her tiger paces reveal her true size and striped splendor. Nikolai’s hand is pressed against the glass as the tiger pets herself against the feigned touch.
Caged and walled off from nature’s design, Nikolai spots her radio tracker dangling loosely from her broad neck, and immediately thinks of his own company security badge. Once a mark of prestige, now swinging from its lanyard like a leash. The tiger’s catwalk strides immediately feel familiar, those self-soothing steps of unrest Nikolai had taken himself. Biting his tongue, foot shaking, displaying domesticity but longing to break free, to run endlessly into the wild, to hunt without remorse, to feel no borders or collars.
The tiger breaks her spellbinding paces and locks burning orb eyes on Nikolai. She seems to be sizing him up, reaching deep into his soul to ask, ‘are you my captor or my liberator? Or are you dinner?’ This Amur River tigress blinks slowly and decides he was none of these. And so, this fading spirit turns vanishing like breaking clouds into her patched thicket den.
‘One shared value.’
Nikolai shares her sense of lost hope as he turns back along the graveled path. As he shuffles back to the group, he pulls the lanyard badge off his neck and throws it in his pocket. This tiger was his, and he was hers. They shared something that he could feel but not name. If he was playing at the same politics as his adversaries, he would call these values something triumphant, posturing himself as ‘courageous’ or ‘protecting’ or ‘resilient.’
‘One core value, one shared value.’
His coworker is finishing her grandstanding speech to the mixed approval of her pandering bosses. Something about chimpanzees and teamwork. Grooming each other, needing each other, having each other’s backs. Then she abruptly closes, slipping in some comment about every tribe needing a leader, a silverback to command for this order of power to work. Polite eyes roll to soft claps as she curtsies herself out of the spotlight.
Nikolai didn’t wait for them to ask who was next. He jumps up to follow and decides right away to drop a bomb on this terrible charade. He remembers the proud departure of that Siberian beast, when she had decided she had been a spectacle long enough. She would want him to light this bridge ablaze, and walk off into the forest without looking back. He focuses hard, searching for the right word. Something shackled, made hostile. Something to show a longing to be free of minced words and restrained opinions. Something more fierce and wild than a zoo can contain.
And then the word found him. The word his royal companion had given him, with that disinterested look of biding her time. He rejoined the group with a feral smile, ready for all to see his true self. Stepping in the huddle to go first, arms uncrossed, hands steady, he begins.
‘Sometimes when you cage the beast, the beast finds purpose in that cage. But sometimes, just sometimes, that purpose is to grow stronger than any cage can contain.’
Paul Carreo 