The Dinosaur Zoo

Fun fact: the Belgians have a secret dinosaur zoo in the Old City, out beyond the gasworks and the slums, hidden by warehouses and junkyards. It is a zoo proper, with a wide colorful sign and a ticket booth, with balloon vendors and a clarinet band, but it is on no map or guide, and one only finds it by accident, when lost or in flight. Despite the excitement—dinosaurs! for real!—there is a strangely soporific quality to the place, as though the air were not quite right and the sunlight strangely filtered. The zooworkers attend to their tasks, twirling cotton candy and guarding the turnstiles, and yet their eyes seem distant and empty, their clothes rumpled and slept in.

You walk past the exhibits and walls, breathless, staring down into the pits at the mighty leaf-eaters with their spiked backs and duck bills, getting not too close to the cage of the towering chartreuse-and-violet monster with the knife teeth, entering the great dome that houses the fliers with their huge shadowy wings. Because of the strange sleepiness of the day it strikes you only dimly that the dinosaurs do not restlessly paw and pace like trapped animals; they do not eat or growl or stir at all, in fact, but instead they simply watch, perhaps watching you in particular, their eyes swiveling soundlessly while you pass beneath. Some of the bipeds hold strange instruments, scratched metal boxes with large rubber knobs and glowing lights, ancient and welded shut. They never touch the buttons, however, or at least not when you are watching.

When you are finally invited inside the gleaming chrome door to the underground educational chamber by the eight-foot doctor in his white lab coat, "for science," your drugged mind realizes only too late that the hands that clutch the clipboard are green and leathery, and that the human face is only a pink rubber mask….