She turns away without answer, or maybe Heinz does, the order of events doesn’t matter as he shoves through the room, scans the crowd, leaning forward on his sneaker toes to maximum teetering height. It’s not much help for finding a guy who comes up to his knee.

Laughter barks in his ears and Kylie Minogue sings lucky lucky lucky and he’s nowhere to be found amid the crush of all these sunburnt legs, he must be on the circumference, or over by the tables or the bar, or outside with that girl. And he looks over and sees an animal standing by the exit but it’s the wrong one, brown, too tall.

Heinz hurries over to the door and steps over its tail but it nabs him, long fingers hooked in his sleeve, and Heinz spins around with a snarled “What gives?” when he notices Perry, down there with the other one, the wombat. He sinks to his knees, he grabs Perry’s arm. Perry tips a questioning smile at him.

“I heard you were.”

Perry’s over here chatting with his coworkers, that’s it, he looks utterly unmussed, save for his chalk-fluffed hair, tinged seaweed by the stubborn yellow pigment. That ice cream girl must’ve been confused. “Heard you hit it off with that girl,” Heinz says, making a smile out of his dumb gaping mouth, jiggling him by the sleeve.

The wombat elbows Perry. He gestures something in that Australian sign language. Perry snorts, smiles down at his feet and shakes Heinz’s hand off his arm. He lets it drop.

The gestures become a three-way conversation and Heinz sinks back on his heels, puts an extra foot between him and this impenetrable scene. Perry’s placing his paw on the wombat’s back and ushering him toward the exit, and the kangaroo goes too, and they bat marsupial hisses back and forth with big swings of their paws. And Heinz can’t remember who’s the girl and who’s the boy, as the pair of them wave goodbye and Perry waves back from the doorway. Do they live at the same zoo? Is that where they go home to?

Perry's standing in front of him all of a sudden, out of focus. His chirr is a sweet and balanced sound like middle C. Heinz blinks him clear. He’s still got most of the blue paint on his bill that he wears for his mascot job, rich phthalocyanin, like Heinz used to buy for art class back at university. But facepaint doesn’t look funny on Perry. He looks somehow parental, older, giving Heinz a patient look as he waits for him to settle.

“Or maybe it didn’t work out,” he pronounces. “That’s too bad. But I hope you had a fun time here, tonight. Hope you’re alright.”

Perry surveys the room, grabs Heinz’s arm and has him knee-shuffle closer to the wall, out of traffic. He’s such a sheepdog. No wonder he’s got that animal troupe so tight on their beats. That dumb stage show for babies is gonna pull some Tonys, with the way Perry’s choreographing it. Or whatever shiny trophy they give you in Australia.

Perry scribbles something in the notepad from his jacket and pushes it into Heinz’s chest. He takes it.

Yeah, that girl kissed me. The whole crowd went “Ooh.” Very soap opera. I think I bowed, like a pre-Victorian dandy, and walked over here. What can you say? Besides “no thanks.”

When he looks up Perry’s smiling, shrugging.

“Well,” says Heinz. That’s crazy. They gotta ban that girl from the premises. Heinz suddenly believes very earnestly in the indispensability of an HR department, in a way he never has before. “What can you say?”

Perry bumps the notepad into him again. Heinz didn’t even notice that it left his hands. It’s flipped to a mostly blank page.

Let’s take a walk.

Heinz follows him out in the doorway’s rectangle of light. Gold flakes spark in his hair. Perry builds to a gallop and flaps out the arms of his coat, spins in the breeze like a drunk little pinwheel. Heinz gulps the air into his lungs, as the door shuts in a black curtain sweep. It’s chilly and he needs it. Perry does too. He had his own share of Foster’s.

“Full of the piss?” he asks.

Perry makes an amazing noise when he laughs, it burbles out of his throat in high gasps. Heinz knows for sure he’s sloshed because there’s a snort here and there. He shuts his eyes to make the dark darker: sensory deprivation, just him and the auditory treat of Perry laughing because of him.

“I know that’s what you guys say over here, when you drink. You’re just making fun of me ‘cause I’m foreign.”

Perry chirps. Heinz knows a yes when he hears one.

He saunters in his direction, hopes he doesn’t trip on him. “You okay getting home like this?” he asks, because he’s drunk and forgets that Perry’s lodging here at the park, in that crummy utility room with the cots and the janitor’s sink. He remembers this fact by the time he reaches Perry, bumps him with the toe of his sneaker, which is good, because Perry can’t correct him in the dark. His paw finds Heinz’s sock, then the rolled cuff of his jean which he tugs like a pullcord, and the two-foot tall shape of him leads Heinz away from the club.

The sky is spangled and glows a little brighter toward the river, where the city lights pollute. Most of the park is off by midnight, save a few orb lights warmly luring the way to the exit. Park management doesn’t want drunk clubbers getting wandersome. That or they’re cheap.

Palm leaves make jagged shadow shapes, the ones they plant in islands for the daytime guests to sit around. To the left the tracks of the Centrifuge cut black ribbons out of the sky. Heinz stares as they walk past and the stars blink in and out of view.

He wants to ask if Perry’s taking them anywhere in particular. The dorm where some of the animal performers sleep is by the entrance, at the other end of the park. But it feels stupid to ask. This is just a walk, right? Just Heinz alone with Perry and the shuff-shuff of his jacket, walking slow with nowhere to go and nothing open. No donuts and lemonade to buy for him, like he does all workday long so he can earn some chitchat as they while away the hours. It’s a change. The park is changed, with all the lights flipped off. Feels ominous.

The great shadowed awning of the kiddy area looms up on their right, dark and menacing as a bear cave, though as they pass it Heinz thinks he hears giggles, low-voiced murmurings that peak into feminine shrieks. His cheeks heat and he catches up with Perry.

“Can you see better than me?” he asks, to cover the ambient sounds. Perry grumbles an “I dunno.”

“Hm,” says Heinz. “I don’t think your eyes glow in the dark, like other animals. You see them in the woods at night, the eyes. If you’re dumb enough to be out there. They’re attached to a cat if you’re lucky. A pack of Spitzenwölfe if you’re not.”

Heinz takes long stretching strides past Perry, to survey his face, check for spots of luminance. He’s all shadow, looking steadily up at Heinz, easier to see now that his own eyes are adjusting.

“Maybe your eyes are boring too. Like mine and other humans’. Not that I think your eyes look boring, they’re actually quite striking, I wanted to tell you. But. I was always jealous, of animal eyes. Seeing in the dark, all the things that are seeing you.

“But I guess it could be a curse too, in its own way, glowing eyes. If you’re trying to hide.”

A few times each minute the Expo’s Skyneedle sweeps an eerie beam through the air, which starkens the rollercoaster shadows. It keeps spinning all night, as the parties die down. Ostentatious, and oddly reassuring, the steady pulse of this six-month festival, this Frankensteined-together ecosystem in which Heinz and Perry have linked up, from a half a world apart.

“Actually,” says Heinz. “I hope you can see better than me. They don’t clean up the park till morning, right? There’s probably globs of ice cream lying around. Both pre and post digestion. Watch your step.”

Up until now Perry’s feet have made a rhythmic pitter-patter for Heinz to follow. It stops. He emits an adorable yecckhh. Heinz cracks up.

“Aw come on,” he laughs, reaching down to grab Perry’s shoulder, give him another shake, sincere this time. “I’m sure it isn’t that bad out here. I trust your navigation. That said, I can give you a piggyback.”

Maybe it’s the beer, or the dark, that gets Perry to take him up on this. Heinz feels like a million bucks with Perry’s arms around his neck, the soft skin of his bill brushing the shell of his ear. He could skip from one end of the park to the other. But he keeps his steps steady, to provide a luxury transport experience.

More rowdy stragglers, probably their coworkers, are coming their direction from the darkened Star Terrace. So Heinz veers off path, between the rides. He feels a secondhand indignance, for Perry’s voiceless sake, at the sea of loudmouths that wade around them all day every day. There’s not much opportunity for Perry to get a word in, except when he writes it down and Heinz takes the time to read it. He wants to be the one loudmouth on Perry’s side, his chatty witch’s familiar, like a parrot or something. He’s only known this little guy a week but he swears he’d duke it out for him, if the opportunity arose. He kinda wants it to. The beer makes him heroic.

But tonight he steers them away from any big drunken brawls and takes them to the lawn under the coaster. It’s fresh turf dotted by tropical trees, and in the middle a decorative lake. A white lip of cement defines its shape, curving Calder-esque in long meanders, high and wide enough to sit on. Wide enough to stand on, too, if Heinz trusted his balance. Instead he walks them in a path around the pond, its surface still, a copy of the starry sky.

“You could probably make good money,” he says to the platypus on his back. “Diving in there for wallets. Luxury hats, too, handbags, Ray-Bans. We tell them to take ‘em off before the ride but, you know. You could quit your day job.” Heinz treads carefully through the grass. Perry’s bill is notched under his chin, at that pulse point under where the bone sticks out. “But I hope you don’t. Not yet. I think we’ve got a good thing here.”

“Hey,” he says, stopping in place once they’re halfway around.

The moon’s hanging over the park entrance, so low, yellow like a peeled apple. Or maybe like one of those apples that are already yellow, the skin. Half-eaten. Its bruises are upside down from what Heinz remembers growing up, in the mountains way up north. It spooked him the first time he saw it, to learn that not even his night sky is sacred, it can change. But it’s the only moon Perry’s ever known. That endears it to Heinz.

“You wanna sit?”

He slings his legs over the white cement wall by the lake. Perry hops off of him, paws in his shirt to keep him upright, leaning into his shoulder. Heinz gets a swoony sensation. Good thing he’s sitting down.

“Kinda spooky out here,” he says. “All these giant structures at night. I wish I could turn on the lawn lights.” The utility key’s in his locker, not worth the hike. “I haven’t figured out all the switches yet.”

Out of the black lake grow steel blue cylinders, holding up the ride. They’re barely lit up by the World Expo, a block behind their backs. Like tall winter trees. “You could almost convince yourself you’re in nature,” he says, and grows quiet. There are insect noises around them, in fact, crickets, warm enough in June here that they can live year-round. The mosquitoes in the summer will be hell. But odder is the low, percussive rattle, that starts up slow and shakes old memories through Heinz. “Is that a woodpecker?”

Perry’s shadow shakes its head. He moves his paws to his bill, makes a noise that sounds impressively like a ribbit. “That’s a cane toad?” Heinz asks, amazed. “How’d he get in here? You know we’re not supposed to talk about those. There’s no cane toads at Expo. I thought you got the memo, Perry.”

They’re everywhere in the country and nowhere in Expo’s glistening view of the future. Loud, annoying, not supposed to be here. Heinz relates.

“But I guess that guy’s making it work. I could find him if I had my flashlight, like the cat eyes. I kinda miss the flashlight now, whenever I don’t have it.” It’s work issue, back in the locker with his keys. “It spoils you. You never know when you need a light. Oh, come to think of it.”

He pulls the pack and the lighter from his jeans and taps out a cig. “Ein Glimmstängel,” he tells Perry with it in his teeth, educational.

The lighter fire singes his vision before he can reveal any toads with it, but he gets his fill of Perry as he lights up, all his colors, the fur tufting out of his unclosed coat, the humorless expression that he wears so well. He reaches out his paw. Heinz considers it, as he sucks in his first drag in too many hours, lets it tingle through. He hands it over.

“So you do smoke,” Heinz admires as the ember glows red on Perry’s face, beads in his low-lidded eyes. It’s funny seeing the stick in his bill, between his tiny fingers. Perry breathes out a jet of smoke and flicks his hand, sends the cigarette out into the water.

Heinz takes a moment. “Hey,” he says, offended. “Littering!”

He’s only got two left, but he accepts Perry’s divine punishment and wedges his butt in closer, as the moon gets eaten up by buildings in between the beams.

“I saw glowing eyes a lot,” he says. “Growing up. My parents liked me out of the house. But the woods can feel like safety, once you get used to them.” He shuffles on his ankles, legs folded underneath him. “The trees block out the wind, when it’s cold, and most of the rain. You can’t hear the crying babies and dogs back in town, if you go in deep enough.

“And I knew for sure it was safe, since my father wasn’t out there hunting.”

Perry’s paw on his knee brings him back and shuts him up. He’s told Perry a little but not a lot, about Drusselstein and his 22 years there. He can’t say too much.

“And that’s the story of why I moved out. You know it’s really not fair like this, in the dark, since you can’t interrupt. You can’t chip in with your pen. Just give me a karate chop to stop me rambling.”

Perry rubs a circle into the denim of his thigh. That’s not a chop. His palm is so small but its warmth carries through, and Heinz resists a drunken urge to cover it with his.

“It was mostly cats out there, at least,” he says. “Strays from the town, I think they mixed with the mountain cats. They’re supposed to be solitary, but I’d sneak out scraps to feed them. There was one I remember who got closer and closer, always hanging out by the same tree. One night she walked all the way up to me and ate out of my hand. I touched the top of her head.”

Again Heinz has to hold himself back, not put his hand on Perry now of all times. As though he’s a feral stray he lured with food. Instead of his new coworker, drinking buddy, dance floor competition. He thinks of that girl with the tee.

“It felt rare, that she let me do that. I don’t think I saw her again.”

Weight sinks into his thigh as Perry’s knee joins his paw. Heinz struggles to interpret the sensation that must be, confusingly, Perry clambering onto his leg. There’s an effortful hitch in his throat at the attempt to keep steady — his paw grips Heinz’s linen shirt, a finger poked through the buttons.

It would take a mythological degree of will to keep his hands off Perry now, this tipsy-topsy little animal. So there they go, unbidden, wrapping around his haunches.

“Hey careful,” he says like an instruction, “don’t take a dive.” And with an obedience Heinz didn’t anticipate Perry winds his tail around his knee, curled firm, anchoring himself.

For the second time tonight Heinz goes loopy from the shock of being held on to, being something anyone would want to anchor to. Like he’s stable. Heinz hasn’t been stable all his life.

But he can try to act like it, for Perry. Who’s intoxicated and probably cold, swaying into him. He has to say whatever’s right. Whatever the right thing is to say.

“Did you like that girl?”

Perry kisses him.

If this is a drunk kiss Heinz wouldn’t know, he fits his mouth so confidently to his, which adds credence to Perry having better eyes than him.

“Oh,” Heinz says against his bill. Perry responds with a louder growl, vibrational, as he surges forward.

His bill presses into Heinz’s lips with such insistence, soft as beaten leather. Heinz should’ve worn chapstick. He trails his tongue along his own lips without thinking, and it finds the line of Perry’s mouth, which parts, welcomes him in with a hum.

So he’s thought about kissing. It’s been on his mind since he heard about Perry with that girl tonight. And the day before that, when some teens of dubious age tried grabbing Perry off the mascot float and security stepped in. And 12 days before that, when he first laid eyes on Perry at the daily “Out of Another World!” show on the park stage, and it clicked in an instant why this guy had so much fanfare. And for the first time in all his 22 years he was sure of his next career move.

But guys don’t really — and Queensland guys especially don’t — and do animals even —

Perry climbs higher up his lap and the fist dug into his shirt tugs, and Heinz is wedged deeper into Perry, his mouth, his spread hind legs, and dizziness whips around his ears.

And his ass isn’t balanced on the wall. He realizes this a millisecond late. He slams down a hand and finds air, empty, then vertical cement. His nails scrabble as he plunges sideways into the water, Perry going with him.

The water surface is black and unknowable above, to Heinz’s staring eyes. He breaks up, gasping, and the first thing he knows is Perry’s laughter. It cuts through Heinz’s panic in high peals.

“No way,” Heinz coughs. He’s shellshocked, maybe cracked on the head from the pool’s cement floor. “There is no way that happened. That. I can’t believe.” He doesn’t know which thing he means. Both of them.

Perry wades over to Heinz from wherever he landed and finds him with outstretched paws. He falls forward, shaking with giggles, his forehead pressed into his shoulder.

“I didn’t know for sure if you were — I mean I hoped you were, but I didn’t. I had no way of knowing, Perry, unless I asked, and you can’t just ask, that’s.” Babbling, babbling. He cups a hand around Perry’s back, grips his wet coat, as hysteria rocks through his tiny frame.

The pool is as filled as a motel tub, nothing more. But it was deep enough to soak them through. Perry leans back with a last trailing sound, a sigh. Heinz gets the sense he’s being looked at. His own eyes are blown open, desperate to see this guy, hungry. Perry’s an oilslick mystery, his fur is drenched wet as the pool and it gleams with smeared stars, and if Heinz can’t see him he wants to be touching him, on top of him.

He slopes, stalks forward on his palms, accordingly. When his nose meets bill Perry splashes underneath him and skims beyond reach, tail tip whipping his chin.

“Oh come on,” Heinz complains, wading forward in his waterlogged jeans. Why’s he always got him on his knees? “Don’t start swimming around in here. The purses, Perry. The aspirin, the condoms.” He tackles, and gets Perry’s leg and tail. One flat foot presses his cheek. “It’s unromantic,” he mutters into his belly.

The foot slides down his face to his neck, hooks around. Fingers sink into his hair, rake back through it to the nape. Heinz shivers. His long badboy hair is grouped in a tie that he hopes looks cool, or cute, whatever combo does the trick. Perry’s claw pops it open. He shifts down, underneath where Heinz has him weakly pinned, rubs their faces together. Heinz’s breath comes out choppily on Perry’s mouth. His eyes close. Perry grabs his shirt.

WIth some hidden deep core strength Perry yanks, flips Heinz around in the water. His head spins from drink and the air is knocked out of him, on the pool floor, and before he can sit all the way back up Perry’s pushing his back against the wall. “Oh my god,” he gasps out. “Who taught you all these acrobatics? Please give me a less—“

Perry’s wet hands slide down his neck, where his shirt buttons sag low and open. They venture out to grip the collarbones, and he presses back in for a kiss. Droplets trickle down Heinz’s chest. His short-term memory is wiped. He kisses back.

Heinz was never one to waste much time on lips. He’s too impatient to go inside of someone, test the strength of their tongue with his. But Perry’s anatomy demands more languorous investigation. His bill, broad and soft, pulsing with his warmth, is so different from anything he’s felt. In the daytime shifts crossing paths with Perry he’d wonder at its texture, go all hot and gooey watching him eat ice cream with that secretive pink tongue.

Heinz sucks on the tip of Perry’s bill and he keens. Some crazy sensitivity there. A taste plays waxy on his tongue — the facepaint. He laps it off with the brackish water and licks down to the bare skin of his lip. Perry moans at being sucked clean and accepts the intrusion of Heinz’s tongue, forcing him to share the bitter flavor. Heinz can only imagine how ruined his bill looks. Can only imagine the blue that’s smudged on his own lips, cheeks, neck.

“God you’re a funny little thing,” he breathes against Perry’s mouth.

And when Perry makes a dubious trill Heinz tests him further, draws the blade of his teeth in a line along his bill, then presses, indents the supple flesh. Perry’s voice heightens to a squeal and his hands fist wet in Heinz’s shirt, his body arcs, coarsing the cloth over Heinz’s hard nipples. But he doesn’t pull away, Heinz notices, as he softens his bite and sucks an apology into the skin.

The chilled air attacks wherever he isn’t pressed skintight to Perry so he bundles him tight, tugs him higher so he can reach him with a kiss. Perry’s head tips obligingly, gives him an angle that works. Heinz finds his little tongue. It’s grainy, pulls against his own. He slides against it, hums, learns more noises he can earn from Perry’s throat. His hand rucks through the fur of his head, grainy too from the chalk, all these textures that grip.

Experimentation fades to gentler kissing, wet sounds smacking in the dead park, water lapping into Heinz’s elbows. He can keep this up all night, hasn’t had a makeout session this ravenous since his teenage days. And sure, jealousy burns when he wonders who else has sucked Perry’s tongue, but his ego floats him past it. He’s good at kissing. The proof’s in his lap.

Perry is debauched when Heinz detaches, drooling with a fucked stare he can dimly see as the Skyneedle sweeps overhead. He pecks, chastely, the tip of his bill. It squishes very slightly at the press.

“Man. This is what I came here for.”

Perry sags in his arms, sinks down on his haunches. He’s sitting on a part of Heinz's thigh that doesn't offer him any deniability. Perry just spreads his rump more heavily on top of it and Heinz laughs, hoarse, like he’s sick with a fever. He’s really, really glad this park doesn’t have a functional HR department.

“Not that I thought I’d actually get it. Touching you,” he breathes into the top of Perry’s head. “I didn’t even know if I’d get to talk to you. And it’s only, what. Our sixth date?” A 14-hour date each day, since he transferred here. He pets the drying fur of Perry’s neck.

“I hope I wasn’t too rough.”

It’s Perry’s turn to laugh. The sound grinds slow and deep in his animal throat.

“You’re so small, you know, and an hour ago I didn’t even know if you were into.” Men? Me? Teeth sinking into his skin? “When you took me out of the club, and . . . Wait, was this your plan? To get me lost in the dark and kiss me? Perry,” he says, stunned to be the target of premeditated desire. “That’s why you threw away my cig. You jerk,” he says, mouthing into his fur.

They do their best to dry out on the grass, Perry shaking water off his tail and Heinz wringing it from his hair. It’s viscerally uncomfortable, wet denim hugging around Heinz’s thighs, an unresolved tightness in his crotch, shoes squelching. Their payback for indulging in an interspecies bacchanal. Completely worth it, Heinz thinks.

But they’re eager to flee the scene. It’s lost its magic, the moon long gone from sight. Perry’s wet feet pad after Heinz until they reach the asphalt, and he clings to Heinz’s leg with an entreating chirp.

“Yeah, get on up here,” he says, hoisting and cradling him in his arms as they stroll toward the exit lights. He plants a final kiss on Perry’s head. He’s gonna look like such a wreck, sitting on the uptown train.

“Let’s get you home.”