The crown of the carousel dazzles with old-world charm thanks to its miniature spires and ornate curlicues in a pastel mix of golds, greens, and blues. As the ride revolves, trembling, creaking, and squeaking rhythmically like a mechanical cricket, the carriages pass one after another: a steampunk-esque submarine, complete with riveted plates, portholes, and a periscope; a hot-air balloon that features an intricate imitation of a wicker basket; a cherry-red car modeled after early 20th-century automobiles, whose varnished surfaces glimmer in the November sunshine; a tram-like carriage reminiscent of traditional streetcars, a green-and-white cabin inside of which stands Nairu, our émigré from the Ice Age, wearing a quilted, burgundy jacket. While clutching the brass railing, she’s goggling around at the other carriages, at the gilded ceiling of the ride, and at us, her adoptive mothers, in mesmerized confusion.
Next to me, Jacqueline chuckles. Then she presses the tips of her fingers against the curve of her smile, trying to contain her outburst. Mommy’s gaze, anchored on Nairu amidst the whimsical carriages from L’Ère des Visionnaires, brims with warmth as if absorbing our daughter’s antediluvian wonder.
“She doesn’t have a clue about what’s going on, the poor thing.”
“To be fair,” I say, “neither do I. But I hope she has realized that she’s supposed to stay inside her carriage.”
The carousel lurches, creaks, and grinds to a halt. Nairu, already beaming at Jacqueline and me, pushes the swing door of her carriage open. She hops off the round platform. As she bounds towards us, her eyes twinkle, and her chestnut-brown hair bounces with each joyful step. I’m tempted to warn her about running in those baggy jeans; she could trip over a loose hem and smash her face on the pavement. But how do you communicate such concerns to a child who grew up among ground sloths?
Nairu flings herself at me like a bear cub. She hugs my waist, pressing her face against my corduroy jacket. I pat the soft hair on the back of her head.
Whenever this child clings to me, a soothing warmth bubbles up from deep within. I want to mirror her smiles and laughs. Above all, I desire to protect her from the ravages of the world. With Nairu in my arms, I am no longer a freakish, masturbating mess, but the guardian of a vulnerable, Paleolithic orphan.
Jacqueline wraps an arm around my shoulders, resting her hand on the strap of my backpack.
“What a lovely day it turned out to be with my two girls by my side. Anyone else’s stomach singing for some grub or is it just me?”
“Oh, you know I’m a bottomless pit.”
She rubs my earlobe between her thumb and index finger.
“Of course I do, ma poulette gourmande. Allons-y.”
We stroll down the expanse of paved flooring. On one side, a row of children’s rides stands silent and still. On the opposite side, a sturdy railing guards against a steep plunge, beyond which the spiky tops of pine trees stretch towards a cerulean sky. The crisp fall breeze rustles the needles, causing them to bristle and sway.
Nairu has hurried ahead, skipping and spinning around to take in the 360-degree spectacle.
The bumper car ride is playing a jaunty tune that features trumpets and an accordion. Under a translucent roof supported by a rusted frame, a father in his thirties and his pre-teen daughter, lacking any opponents, are steering their bubblegum-pink car in a figure eight. From the rear of the vehicle, a metallic rod juts up; as its brush grazes the electrified grid overhead, sporadic sparks burst like tiny fireworks.
A gust of wind sweeps over the amusement park, ruffling Jacqueline’s raven-black tresses. I fasten my woolen scarf, pulling it snug against my skin. The hickey with which mommy branded me has faded from a mottled purple to a faint brownish-yellow, and no longer feels tender.
Jacqueline leads us to a snack booth, its counters cluttered with donuts, waffles, slices of pizza, and serrano ham sandwiches. The smell of fried dough wafts up my nostrils, complemented by the buttery scent of waffles. As we draw closer, the tangy smell of tomato sauce and melted cheese blends with the aroma of cured meats. My taste buds awaken in anticipation of the textures and flavors: the fluffiness of a powdered donut, the crunch of a toasted waffle, and the salty richness of serrano ham. I wish I could decimate the snack landscape, stuffing myself until my stomach expanded into a basketball, or even a beach ball.
We line up behind a redhead who’s holding a toddler. The concessionaire’s face is stubble-crusted, his arms sleeved with tattoos; maybe a former convict turned snack vendor.
To my left, Nairu emits a lilting sound, a cross between a gasp and a hum. With her back to me, she squats to be at eye level with a garbage bin. She tilts her head first to one side, then to the other, as if scrutinizing an unknown creature. I sidestep until I catch sight of her quarry. The garbage bin is molded from sturdy plastic to resemble a deep-brown, plump bear sitting on its haunches, whose oval eyes avoid Nairu’s gaze as if ashamed; its gaping mouth has been reduced to an entryway for trash.
A yellow-and-black insect, a wasp, hovers near the bear-bin’s open maw while another wasp scurries over the lower lip. As Nairu reaches to touch the bear’s ebony-black snout, her motion jolts the wasps. They flit into the air, then zigzag drunkenly.
I bend down to gently pull Nairu away from the bear-bin.
“What are you up to, my little adventurer? You wanna get stung by wasps?” I pantomime a jab on my own hand. “Better leave the bear to its shameful fate.”
Nairu straightens and half-smiles, revealing a glint of teeth. Her eyebrows have arched as if saying, “Bitch, I grew up having tea parties with sabertooth tigers.”
“What can I get you, gorgeous?” the concessionaire says in an Andalusian accent tinged with awe.
The former convict turned snack vendor has pulled his shoulders back. He’s making a show of wiping his hands on a paper towel, trying to present a more respectable version of his tattooed, stubble-crusted self, but his eyes, locked on Jacqueline, remain widened as if his brain needed a reboot. This stallman must have been working on autopilot, fantasizing about his next score or prison sentence, when the hottest bombshell alive materialized before his counter, and now he’s considering if he should abandon his snack booth empire to shrink to the size of an ant and crawl inside her pussy.
“Ten churros,” Jacqueline says, “s’il vous plaît.”
My nostrils have flared. In my mind, this guy flashes a lecherous smile and utters, “It’s a privilege to serve you, goddess on Earth.” I’m about to shoot a warning squint at the ex-con when a child’s hand tugs at the sleeve of my corduroy jacket, jolting me out of my murderous haze.
Nairu is gazing up at me with her pair of monolid, almond-shaped eyes, that brim with the wonder of a naturalist who has discovered a new species.
“Eide, Eide.”
“Close enough.”
She scribbles in the air with an invisible pencil, then jabs a finger at the bear-bin.
“Crayon!”
A surge of warmth floods my chest.
“When you look at me, of all people, with kindness in your eyes, you know I must oblige. Want to transform that garbage bear into art? Be my guest, child of the Ice Age.”
I kneel to rummage through my backpack. I pull out Nairu’s sketchbook and hand it over. I take out the pack of Crayola crayons and fold up the cardboard flap, revealing a rainbow of waxy peaks. Nairu’s fingers hesitate above the red, green, and blue, before snatching the black crayon.
As she grasps the sketchbook and crayon, her arms go slack. She turns her head to fixate on the bear-bin. Her flawless, peach-orange skin reflects the November sunbeams, but her eyebrows are furrowed as if her thoughts have drifted millennia away. Windswept and wild, her chestnut-brown locks dance and shimmer.
The ambient sounds of children’s laughter and mechanized rides fade into a muted hum as the universe holds its breath.
“I was wondering, Leire,” Nairu says, “what could be the meaning of that creature.”
“It’s called a garbage bin. We use them to dispose of the detritus of modern civilization. In summer, when the weather’s hot, flies and gnats swarm around to lay eggs in the trash.”
“It doesn’t look like any garbage bin that I’ve encountered in all my wanderings through this bewildering age. Is it a type of animal punished for some sinful transgression? Is it perhaps a deity who presides over the discarded remnants of humanity, collecting them until the day of reckoning?”
“No, it’s a human-made object, designed to save us from drowning in our own filth and disease.”
“But why does it have a funny shape and face?”
“Because humans like to turn mundane objects into something amusing or unusual.”
“What a strange people you are, to take an inanimate object and make it into a creature, thus defacing the very fabric of nature.”
“We are strange, indeed.”
“You create a million diversions and amusements to distract yourselves from the void.”
“We don’t always give our creations a fair shake. But we do our best to make sense of the world and our place in it.”
“Well then, I will document this garbage bear’s existence before it vanishes like a footprint in sand. However… should we draw anything at all? Don’t our efforts only add to the muck of human creation?”
As the bear-bin stands in the periphery of our minds like a dark monolith, Nairu’s gaze drifts to the pavement, and her lips curl downward as if a sudden pain had stabbed her through.
I swallow the lump in my throat. Nairu, my adopted Paleolithic child, who roamed a glacier-encrusted world of ground sloths and woolly rhinoceri until her family vanished in the flood of time.
“Do you miss the Ice Age and your dad?” I ask.
“Every day. Sometimes I imagine I hear the crunching of their footprints in the snow. I imagine I hear my father calling me through the trees, and I want to run towards him.”
“I wish you didn’t have to leave everything you knew behind. I wish the ice and the animals returned.”
“What if the universe ends before I get to experience good things?”
“I promise, I won’t let the universe end.”
“But you can’t, can you? It’s all so massive, and you are a speck of dust.”
“Even so.”
“Still, I don’t belong anywhere. No one wants me, no one needs me. I am alone.”
My chest clenches as if my ribs were caving in. I lay my hands on Nairu’s shoulders, sinking my fingers into the padding of her jacket.
“I understand you. Even though having to travel five days a week to that soulless office, where I program websites for a piggish boss, made me want to hang myself, I used to work overtime into the evening because I dreaded returning to my empty apartment in Irún, where no one had ever said my name or hugged me. Did I matter? Was I real? For all my masturbation and my angst and my demons, I have never grown up, and my struggles to paint a pretty picture in this ugly world were doomed from the start. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, because the emptiness in my chest feels like a bottomless hole sucking me down, down, down. Why don’t you let me help you? Why don’t you let anyone help you? Maybe because you’re not used to asking for help, because nobody ever offered you any. Maybe you’re scared of what happens when you open yourself up to another human being. You’re on your own, fending off the world and its terrors, and the pain in your heart just builds and builds. It’s hard to let go of control, to let someone else in. You wish you could float away into the vacuum of space, where you would die silently, and be forgotten forever. But I have found that life isn’t as scary as I imagined. Neither are people. There’s beauty in this world that we can’t grasp with words, and we need to embrace it and let it guide us. Do you believe me? I’m here, Nairu. We’re here. You will never lack for a home. We’ll protect you with our lives. I will give you the world and everything that shines in the universe.”
Author’s note: today’s songs are “Now It’s On” by Grandaddy, “Summertime Clothes” by Animal Collective, and “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” by Iron & Wine.
I keep a playlist with all the songs I’ve mentioned throughout the novel so far. A total of a hundred and ninety songs. Check them out.
Do you want to hear Nairu’s tomboyish voice saying Nairu things? Check out the audiochapter.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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