“Say hi to the polar bear,” a man said to his child.
“Hi!” the child said.
“She’s protecting her newborn cubs, that’s why she’s snarling like that,” the man said.
“It’s dead,” Miriam remarked. “The whole little family.”
“Hi, polar bear,” the child crooned. “Hi, hi, hi.”
“What’s the matter with you?” the father demanded of Miriam. “People like you make me sick.”
Miriam threw out her hand and slapped his jaw. He dropped the child’s hand and she slapped him again even harder, then hurried from the room.
She wandered among the crowds. The museum was lit dimly and flute music played. The effect was that of a funeral parlor or a dignified cocktail lounge. All the animals were arranged in a state of extreme and hopeless awareness. Wings raised, jaws open, hindquarters bunched. All recaptured from death to appear at the brink of departure.
“They’re glorious, aren’t they?” a woman exclaimed.
“Tasteful,” someone said.
“None of these animals died a natural death, though,” a pale young man said. “That’s what troubles me a little.”
“These are trophy animals,” his companion said. “It would be unnatural for them to die a natural death. It would be disgusting. It would be like Marilyn Monroe or something. James Dean, for example.”
“It troubled me just a little. I’m all right now.”
“That’s not the way things work, honey,” his companion said.
Miriam threaded her way past a line of people waiting to see the taxidermist. He was seated in a glass room. Beside him was a small locked room filled with skins and false bodies. There were all kinds of shapes, white and smooth.
The taxidermist sat behind a desk on which there were various tools — scissors and forceps, calipers and stuffing rods. A tiny, brilliantly colored bird lay on a blotter. Behind the taxidermist was a large nonhuman shape on which progress appeared to have slowed. It looked as though it had been in this stage of the process for a long time. The taxidermist was listening to a question that was being asked.
“I’m a poet,” a man with a shovel-shaped face said, “and I recently accompanied two ornithologists into the jungles of Peru to discover heretofore unknown birds. I found the process of finding, collecting, identifying, examining and skinning hundreds of specimens for use in taxonomic studies tedious. I became disappointed. In other words, I found the labor of turning rare birds into specimens mundane. Isn’t your work a bit mundane as well?”
“You’re mundane,” the taxidermist said. His voice was loud and seemed to possess a lot of chilled space around it. It was like an astronaut’s voice.
He fixed his eyes on Miriam, then waved and gestured to her. The gesture indicated that he wanted her to come around to the side of the glass room. He pulled down a long black shade on which were the words The Taxidermist Will Be Right Back.
“I saw and heard everything back there,” he said to Miriam. “There are monitors and microphones all over this place. I like a woman with spirit. I find that beliefs about reality affect people’s actions to an enormous degree, don’t you? Have you read Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls?”
Miriam shook her head. It sounded like something the lamp would like. She would try to acquire it.
“Really? I’m surprised. Well-known broad. She was burned at the stake, but an enormous crowd was converted to her favor after witnessing her attitude toward death.”
“What was her attitude?” Miriam said.
“I don’t know exactly. Thirteenth century. The records are muzzy. I guess she went out without a lot of racket about it. Women have been trying to figure out how to be strong for a long while. It’s harder for a woman to find a way than it is for a man. Not crying about stuff doesn’t seem to be enough.”
Miriam said nothing. Back in the room, the lamp was hovered over Moby-Dick. It would be deeply involved in it by now. It would be slamming down Melville like water. The shapeless maw of the undifferentiating sea! God as indifferent, insentient Being, composed of an infinitude of deaths! Nature. Gliding … bewitching … majestic … capable of universal catastrophe! The lamp was eating it up.
“I’ve been here for ten years,” the taxidermist said. “I built this place up from nothing. The guy before me had nothing but a few ratty displays. Medallions were his specialty. Things have to look dead on a medallion, that’s the whole point. But when I finished with something it looked alive. You could almost hear it breathe. But of course it wasn’t breathing. Ha! It was best when I was working on it, that’s when it really existed, but when I stopped … uhhh,” he said. “I’ve done as much as I can. I’ve reached my oubliette. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“I do,” Miriam said.
“Oh,” he said, “I’m crazy about that word oubliette. That word says it all.”
“It’s true,” she said.
“You’re perfect,” he said. “I want to retire, and I want you to take my place.”
“I couldn’t possibly,” Miriam said.
“No stuffing would be required. I’ve done all that, we’re beyond that. You’d just be answering questions.”
“I don’t know anything about questions,” Miriam said.
“The only thing you have to know is that you can answer them anyway you want. The questions are pretty much the same, so you’ll go nuts if you don’t change the answers.”
“I’ll think about it,” Miriam said. But actually she was thinking about the lamp. The odd thing was she had never been in love with an animal. She had just skipped that cross-species eroticism and gone right beyond it to altered parts. There was something wrong with that, she thought. It was so hopeless. Well, love was hopeless …
“I have certain responsibilities,” Miriam said. “I have a lamp.”
“That’s a wonderful touch!” the taxidermist said. “And when things are slow you’ll have all the animals too. There are over a thousand of them here, you know, and some of them are pretty darn rare. I think you’ll be making up lots of stories about them.”
It seemed a pretty good arrangement for the lamp. Miriam made up her mind. “All right,” she said.
“You’ll have a following in no time,” the taxidermist said. “I’ll finish up with these people and you can start in the morning.”
There was still a long line of people waiting to get into the museum. Miriam passed them on her way out.
“I’ve been back five times,” a bald woman was saying to her friend. “I think you’ll find it’s almost a quasi-religious experience.”
“Oh, I think everything should be like that,” her friend said.
Carl’s big truck was no longer at the garage. Miriam gazed around but the truck did not resume its appearance and probably, as far as she was concerned, never would. For most people, and apparently Carl and Jack were two of them, a breakdown meant that it was just a matter of time before they were back on the road again. She walked over to the hotel and up the stairs to their room. The door was open and the beds were stripped. The big pillows without their pretty covers looked like flayed things. A thin maid in a pink uniform was changing the channel on a television set. Something was being described by the announcer as a plume of effluent surrounded by seagulls…
The maid noticed her and said, “San Diego, a sewer pipe broke. A single pipe for one-point-four-million people. A million-four, what do they expect.”
Miriam continued down the corridor and opened the door quietly to her own room. She looked at the lamp. The lamp looked back, looked at her as though it had no idea who she was. Miriam knew that look. She’d always felt it was full of promise. Nothing could happen anywhere was the truth of it. And the lamp was burning with this. Burning!