The shoes are made to go with the heavy serge of the uniform, the now formless trousers that may have been formless when new, the long drop to the dark ankles, black themselves, black on black on black, undifferentiated as the cloths in a stage illusion. Alexander wonders if the guard has back trouble, if he soaks his feet in hot salt water. These oiled and bare wood floors, pale as match sticks, faintly dipping, uneven. Marbles set down on them would tumble erratically, collect in some unpredictable pool of gravity. This same force would suck at the man’s feet, pulling at them painfully through the solid soles as he stood all day in his area. Alexander senses the old man’s crotchets, his distaste for stragglers, his ambiguous desires for female art students whose backs, propelled forward in their chairs, reveal an orbit of the elastic tops of underwear above their blue jeans, sliver of the moon, cantaloupe slice of pantie, square inches of backflesh forgotten behind them in their young concentration like Cinderella’s slipper. Does he even see the exhibits? Has he a favorite? Or is his concern only for the glass cases themselves, for whistling, loud talk and no smoking?
As he often does, Main feels an odd envy of the man, of his circumscribed conditions. It suddenly strikes him that the guard is the only person on his Christmas list who is not a lawyer or judge, cop or custodial officer, clerk of the court or prison official. And though the guard gets nothing that Main has especially picked out for him, only the box of good cigars or bottle of Scotch or top-grade Florentine leather wallets bought in bulk for his least important contacts, this makes him, he supposes, his friend. A friendship that is entirely one way, for to the extent that he considers Main at all, the man almost certainly thinks of him as a crank. There must be others, drawn as he is, to this place, or to some other like it. Though Alexander has never seen them, has seen only the schoolchildren and illicit lovers and the vague flirts and lonely, overanxious men.
He loves the cool, big room, its antiquated radiators and old-fashioned exhibit cases, its antiquated space, the corny visual aids, the large type on the yellowing cards by the exhibits. He loves the teeth.
“Afternoon,” Main tells the guard.
The man nods and Main steps away from him and goes toward the case. “These specimens,” reads the legend, “were obtained from drugstores in the Far East. The apothecaries regarded them as ‘dragon’s teeth,’ no matter what they really were. The teeth shown here probably came from cave deposits in the Karst of South China, for they are like the teeth of the Middle Pleistocene animals found in the region.”
He sees the tooth of the giant panda, large as a small seashell, the impression across its broad grinding surface like a curled fetus. Next to it a pair of molars from an orang-utan, the shape and shade of old dice, three deep holes in each like a goblin’s face, history throwing a six. There’s the dentin of a wild pig, dark as root beer, the pulp chambers in cross section like the white veins in liver. He sees the enormous tooth of a rhinoceros, taking the card’s word for it. It does not even resemble a tooth; it is deep, chambered as a lock. In another case there is a comb of kangaroo jaw, four teeth blooming from the bone like cactus.
He moves along a ledge of the extinct, peers at the camel-like jaw of the Macrauchenia Patachonica: “a member,” says the card, “of the peculiar South American ungulate orders. This genus was camel-like but others were horse-like. Thus the litopterns show parallelism with the more familiar true camels and horses.” The keyboard of teeth float in the petrified gum like tulip bulbs. And the lower jaw of a ground sloth, relative of the Megatherium, the teeth driven like stakes deep into the bone, all shapes, one a figure eight worn down to the ground, another like a tree stump, a third like a pipe, a fourth with a crown the texture of target cork. The teeth are in terrible disrepair. (They died this way, Alexander thinks, biting their pain.) A root thicker than the wire in a coat hanger rises a full inch above the awful terraces of decay which surround it. There are teeth long and thick and curved as tusks — these were inside a mouth, Main thinks — huge as jai alai bats.
As always, Alexander ignores the skeletons, the carefully wrought xylophonic carcasses, immense scaffoldings of spine, he supposes, from a hundred animals, so that what he sees is some ancient committee of beast he finds it difficult to believe in (though he is fascinated by the individual parts: the shield-like pelvis, the separate vertebrae, long as the hilts of swords, a hinged jaw like the underedge of a key). Comically a megathere squats upright pawing a prop tree, its odd squat like some plantigrade, prehistoric crap. No. It is the teeth. The tiny spines in the skull of a young jaguar, curiously white, sharp as toenail. Skin still adheres to the palate, the concentric tracery distinct and fine as what he touches with his tongue at the roof of his own mouth. It is teeth that he comes back again and again to see, as if these were the distillate of the animal’s soul, the cutting, biting edge of its passion and life.
He is thinking in geological time now, in thousands of millions of years — thinking Pre-Cambrian, Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, saddened at the sixty-million-year-old threshold of his own immediate past, Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Quaternary. From seaweeds, younger only than the earth’s crust, through invertebrate animals, fishes, land plants, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, birds and men. He is weeping.
The guard approaches him. “Are you all right, sir?”
“What? Oh. Yeah,” the Phoenician says, “I’m a sentimental old fool.” He starts past the guard, his friend.
“I was wondering something,” the guard says.
“What’s that?”
“Well, it’s just that you spend so much time here.”
“Yeah, well,” he tells the keeper, “I’ll tell you why that is. I’m a dentist.”
He was late for lunch. (As so often on museum days, his sense of time — he is an early riser, beats others to appointments, brisk as a candidate when it is time for the next, goes late to bed, paper work in the toilet, on the bus home, carrying no brief case but all pockets stuffed with correspondence, pens, notepaper, stamps ready in his wallet — turned tragic, pulling long faces, the past slowing his blood, thickening it, stopping his watch.) He did not even have time to go back to the office.
The bus stop he’d chosen, looking back over his shoulder as he walked from one the two blocks to the next, was outside a drugstore. A woman waited with a shopping bag.
“Missus,” Alexander said, “have you been waiting long?”
“About ten minutes.”
“Just miss a bus?”
“It was pulling away when I came out of Kroger’s.”
If he hurried he would have just enough time to call Crainpool.
“Crainpool?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s up?”
“It’s been very quiet.”
“No messages?”
“The man who was in earlier stopped by.”
“What? The mobster?”
“He said Mr. Morgan gave him the slip. He holds you responsible.”
“Does he, now? Has there been an afternoon mail?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well?”
“There was nothing from Chile, nothing from Iran.” Crainpool chuckled.
“East Germany?”
“No word from East Germany.”
The Phoenician cracks down the receiver so hard that the drugstore clerk looks up at him. Loose, he thinks, fugitives at large — the phrase, as always, chilling, raising goosebumps. He thinks of swamps, caves, passes in mountains. Loose. At large. He thinks of settlements so inland in terrains so forbidding that the inhabitants have no language. The chatter of apes, perhaps, the signals of birds. As always, the idea of such remoteness abstracts his face, neutralizes his features, a sort of paralysis of the attention. People watching him wish to help.
“Is there something you wanted, sir?” the clerk asks. At large, loose.
“Hmn?”
“Is there anything I can get you?” Loose.
“What have you got that’s binding?” He sees his bus outside and rushes to board it.