A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  From here to there, the great doctor traced my story, a story he made out of things I remembered, or dreamed, or things I dreamed I remembered. He traced the line from there to here. Camphor! Bone! The seizures and convulsions that left me partially deaf and mute as a child. Apprenticed to a furrier at the age of twelve. In that house, I dropped everything I tried to hold. The furrier’s wife, believing I was doing it on purpose, made me pay for the things I broke. By the end, I was in their debt. Two years later, the furrier attacked me. I ran all the way home to my mother, who allowed me to work with her—she was a laundress—by the Seine. The mariners and dockers mistook us for prostitutes despite the heavy loads of wet clothing we carried. Every day, they followed us home until the day my mother couldn’t get out of bed. Of the first weeks after she died, the only thing I remember is dark rooms. Soon after, my two brothers were placed in foster homes and I went back to the furrier. I’d lost my virginity by then to a boy I liked who worked for a jeweler. He had deliberate hands, specific fingers. Eight months after I started working again for the furrier, I woke up with the shakes and broke every plate in the house. When I ran away, a nun from the convent on the rue du Cherche-Midi took me in. I think I would have made a good nun though I would never have become bosomy Blanche. I’d still be dusty old Marie. Two months later I had a fit in the laundry room and tore all the linens. It was then I came to the Salpêtrière, hired first as a ward girl, a few days later admitted to the noninsane epileptic ward.

  The doctors assumed my father was one of the men down by the Seine who followed my mother home. The curiosity of those men, like that of the intern, often swerved into cruelty. I kept some things to myself. I keep some things from myself.

  Let me begin again.

  There are endless photographs of us in this museum of dead things. Before I worked in the radiology lab, I worked briefly as an assistant in the photography lab. “Catalepsy: Provoked Pose,” the photograph is called. There it is again, my lost hand, not lost at all. There were days I needed the bright light, the incandescent strip, the whistle, the gong; then there were days it came unbidden. I came unbidden. In the photograph, my left arm is raised. There it is again, my long-gone hand not gone at all (camphor! bone!) but double blurred like Paris rain out a painted window. The great doctor said I was a kind of statue and it is true, I could be when the doctors were especially forgetful. A half bottle, I could hold a position for hours. They raised my arms above my head like a ballerina but the way my head is turned, gazing up at my hand, that was my decision. The curve of my hand reminded me of a wax doll the woman who ran the laundry where my mother worked once gave me. A ballerina with beautiful hands tiny and perfect. A fine vein like the stripped branch of a tree in winter reaches up the inside of my wrist. How to describe the feeling of being only body? That ether feeling of nothingness that wasn’t nothing. I always had beautiful hands. My fingers, long and lovely. The cup of my own palm holds my gaze, it holds me there, in its world. The amphitheater, the hospital, the city, the country—there is infinite, glorious space. My mother, my father, my brothers are there, still. There it is, the world, not lost at all. Though maybe it’s true what they said about me. What they say still. I am in pieces.

  When the train arrived at the port on the North Sea in Dunkirk, did we go to the shipyards? Did my brothers and my father strike up a conversation with some of the men working the docks? Did they talk the way certain men talk about things they are encountering for the first time, conjuring solid facts? The size and shape and seaworthiness of those ships—the words they found to tether the things they saw would have fascinated me. I stuck around a while thinking I might learn something, but then the jetty called to me. I walked out onto it. There, way out on the horizon, a boat. For hours, the boat moved across that water, so slowly it seemed not to move at all. The sea surrounding it, a glittering vision of the infinite. When I broke every plate in the house of the furrier, the sound glittered. Plates and plates and plates, the glittering crashed through me. The light on the sea shimmered inside of me where I stood on the jetty, tidal. The tides had something to do with that lying moon, my father or my brothers or one of the men by the docks said. I felt myself a part of the moon and the waves. This body wasn’t a problem.

  “What comforts you?” the new doctor asked. What did he really want to know?

  Sometimes the doctors put me to sleep and subject me to certain influences. I forgot who I was, my age, my sex, my nationality. I forgot where I was and when. I lost the idea of my late existence. Even still, I was not abandoned, only unfortunate. I was not abandoned, only unfortunate. That boat was in no hurry to get anywhere at all. Where was it going? It moves still, across the infinite, and everyone still and always here.

  I appear to be waxing when I am waning, waning when I’m waxing. My father never took us to the sea, only the Seine, that dirty river. Who cares?

  I want to ask my father, who left this earth long ago, why is unfortunate better than abandoned? Sometimes, I stuff my mouth with vinegar-doused bread, onions, artichokes, herring, and try to forget the question; sometimes, I find the bottles, turn my insides to silk, and the question no longer matters. What question?

  It’s funny the details that make up a life. Born to go nowhere? No one can see the shape of a life until it’s over. The great doctor traced a story with the stories I gave him, from here to there, but then he died and my life was not over yet, no there yet. I won’t be here for there. I’ll never know if it was nowhere I was born to go. There is only beginning and beginning. And, so.

  Let me, oh let me, begin again.

  There’s the story of your life and then there are the parts no one can ever know. Not even you.

  The Empyrean Light

  Gregory Norman Bossert

  Something was lying in the street. Ms. Wronski thought she saw it move, but by the time she had juggled her way up the stairs with her keys and the bag with the milk and the crumple of supermarket flyers and her satchel of ungraded homework, she was no longer certain. Curious, she peered down at it through the brittle curtains. Between the steep angle and the dim light of the street lamp, all Ms. Wronski could make out was a featureless black lump of undecided shape or size. As she watched, it moved, slowly up like a hand raised in hesitant recognition, then uncertainly down again. She stepped back from the window with a vague sense of embarrassment, and went to put the kettle on.

  “It’s a bag, one of those green trash bags for the leaves,” she said to the teapot.

  But this explanation didn’t sit well in Ms. Wronski’s stomach; something about the motion she’d seen was too deliberate to be the wind, more like the pouring of the milk than the way it swirled afterward in her cup. An image came to her, so vivid and visceral that she spilled her tea, of an infant escaped from one of the houses that lined the other side of the street, its little hands and knees bruised and filthy from the asphalt.

  She leapt up and out, her stocking feet slipping on the stairs, stopping only to wedge open the building’s outer door with the brass ashtray that stood guard there, as she’d left her keys in her apartment. Even before she reached the curb she could see that the shape was not a child, thank goodness; it was too small, too angular, too sight-confoundingly black. But what it was was not clear until she, walking more slowly now with the pavement under her soles still warm from the faded day, was right upon it.

  It was a crow. It lay on its right side, head facing the far sidewalk and legs straight out as if it had simply toppled over. Seen up close, the black of its feathers shed the twilight in a thin, prismatic wash. No visible damage, no tire tread or cat slash, no mar or twist of disease. Its eye was a hole into the dark.

  As Ms. Wronski stood there, hands on knees, the crow’s left wing slowly rose to point at the sky, and then down. The motion had the steady deliberation of clockwork, or of a bloom unfolding.

  “A nervous reflex,” Ms. Wronski said.

  She was answered by a low, guttural rattle. Standing on the
curb was a second crow. It shuffled its feet on the concrete, looked down at the crow in the road, then up at her. It made the rattling sound again, followed by a “tsk tsk tsk.”

  “Oh dear,” Ms. Wronski said.

  She looked around. The street, which was never busy, was deserted. A few windows flickered with TV light. The elms were black against the glass-green sky. The yellowing leaves of the maple that had toppled a few days ago in front of Mr. Gamitter’s house trembled in the breeze.

  “Tsk tsk tsk,” went the crow on the curb.

  “Oh dear,” Ms. Wronski said again. She’d read that crows mated for life. Or was one crow or the other a fledgling, still dependent despite its full midsummer growth? Ms. Wronski flashed on her early vision of a stranded infant, and shuddered, though the breeze was warm.

  The crow in the road’s wing rose and fell.

  There was a twig in the gutter, debris from the toppled maple. Ms. Wronski picked it up and, with an apologetic grimace at the watching crow, poked the fallen one. There was no reaction.

  She looked up at the crow on the curb. “It’s gone, dear,” she said to it. “I’m sorry.” The crow lowered its head with what seemed like patience.

  Ms. Wronski imagined it keeping vigil through the night, through the morning’s cars and bikes and children chasing the rumble of the school bus, through the inevitable crushing and the heat and the flies. She sighed.

  For all its pristine, shimmering feathers, Ms. Wronski could not bring herself to pick up the fallen crow in her bare hands, for fear of disease—do we have West Nile fever here? she wondered—and for the simple strangeness of such intimacy with something wild. Her twig was too thin to lift the body, and the scattered maple leaves too small. “I’ll be just a minute,” Ms. Wronski said, to one or another of the crows. She shuffled across the street and up the walk, stopping in the door to the apartment building to tug loose a bit of leaf that had stuck to the sole of her stockings.

  She didn’t want to part with the rubber gloves she used for cleaning; they’d just reached the perfect softness, and anyway they smelled strongly of bleach, which seemed disrespectful of the crow’s nature. She thought of using the supermarket flyers, but then with sudden inspiration searched the kitchen drawers until she found the oven mitt her fourth graders had given her a few years back. It was shaped like a bear, with a flap for the jaw.

  She brought her shoes, this time, and her keys. The two crows were still there, the one in the road and the other on the curb. Apart from them, and the litter of Mr. Gamitter’s toppled maple, the street was still empty. The crow’s wing rose and fell, as if to welcome her back.

  Ms. Wronski slipped the oven mitt on her hand, and worked the jaw a few times with her thumb.

  “This isn’t a real bear,” she said to the watching crow, and then felt foolish. “Well, I’m sure you know much more about animals than I do.”

  She carefully picked the fallen crow up from the asphalt and set it on the curb by the other.

  “Now then, dear, say your goodbyes.” She stepped back and clasped her hands, startled herself as the bear’s jaws closed over her fingers, surreptitiously wiped those fingers on her skirt as she looked away down the street. Still no sign of car or pedestrian, no attendant birds or cat revisiting the scene of the crime, just the occasional TV flicker and, briefly, a shape that might have been Mr. Gamitter at his window.

  She looked down. The standing crow was looking back up at her. It didn’t seem particularly mournful, Ms. Wronski thought, just patient, or perhaps a better word was expectant.

  “Of course, you crows are familiar with death,” she said. “The circle of life and all. It’s a matter of the proper perspective.”

  The fallen crow’s wing rose and fell, as if in acknowledgment. The watching crow watched Ms. Wronski.

  “Well, then, here we go.” Ms. Wronski picked up the fallen crow and, with a check of the street—still empty—and Mr. Gamitter’s window—likewise empty—she walked, solemnly and with the crow held before her, across the street and up the walk to the door of the apartment building, then left and around the corner to where the bins sat.

  She opened the lid of the trash bin with her free hand. A stench swirled out, so thick it was visible in the light from the street lamp: pizza and Chinese food and coffee grounds and used diapers and stale beer and the unnatural tang of Pine-Sol cleaner. Ms. Wronski winced and turned her head to catch a breath, saw that the other crow had moved to the walkway, still watching.

  Ms. Wronski blew the breath back out, and lowered the lid. She bit her lip, and looked at the other bins. Recycling seemed too far a stretch, circle of life or not, and the rules of what could be recycled were very thorough. But the next bin was labeled “Yard Waste.”

  “You might not be quite what they had in mind,” Ms. Wronski said to the crow in her hand, “but you certainly spend most of your time in the yard, and I am sure you are biodegradable.” She looked over her shoulder, somewhat guiltily. Mr. Gamitter’s house was just across a low fence from the bins. It occurred to her that Mr. Gamitter also spent most of his time in the yard, and was likewise biodegradable. She swallowed the sudden urge to giggle. “We won’t toss him in the bin just yet,” she whispered to the crow. “No matter how distraught he was about the maple tree crushing his roses.”

  The yard-waste bin was larger than the others, a steel box on wheels that was picked up and dumped by a special truck once a week. Ms. Wronski stood on her tiptoes and pushed up the lid. It smelled encouragingly of grass and wood chips. She hooked the arm that held the crow over the edge and levered herself up. Inside, the bin was dark, and as her eyes adjusted she could see that it was entirely empty. She opened the pot holder’s felt-toothed jaw. In the dark of the bin, the crow’s shimmer was lost; it was a black, featureless form, as it had been when she first glimpsed it in the street. It was surprisingly heavy lying in her pot-holdered palm at the end of her extended arm; she always imagined all birds as feather light, but the crow felt like a bag of apples, or a pint of milk. She imagined how it would drop from her hand, not flying but falling, to land with a thud and the low bell thrum of the bin’s steel floor, to lie on that bare steel floor in the dark until the truck came.

  She closed the bear’s jaws again around the crow, slid her feet back down flat, and closed the lid.

  “For goodness’ sake, Eli, get a grip,” she said to herself.

  She walked back around the corner to the front door. The other crow hopped back a few steps and looked up at her. “Tsk tsk tsk,” it said.

  “Indeed. If I’ve taken on the responsibility, I might as well do a proper job,” Ms. Wronski said to it. “I’ll just be a few minutes.”

  She unlocked the building door, a bit awkward with her right hand since the crow was in her left, went up the stairs, and unlocked her own door. She spread the supermarket flyers on the coffee table and set the crow down, set the bear pot holder next to it, fetched her abandoned tea, and sat herself on the love seat.

  The crow looked utterly alien, there among the school papers and knickknacks and stacks of books. The gleam of its feathers; the dark of its eye; the smooth, reversing curve from beak to neck to back; its perfect stillness; all made the apartment look tawdry and transient.

  The crow’s wing rose and fell. If Ms. Wronski hadn’t finished her tea she would have spilled it again. She got up, put the cup into the sink, stood by the fridge with her hands on her hips, and frowned at the crow. It looked no less alien from the vantage of the kitchenette. Then she carried the kitchen stool into the bedroom and stood on it to rummage through the top shelf of her closet until she found the box that held the black patent pumps that she’d just worn the once and had thought to return, but hadn’t. She took out the pumps and set them on the floor with her other shoes. The shoebox no longer had its tissue paper, but the green scarf with the floral pattern that she sometimes used to wrap her hair on blustery spring days was hanging there in the closet.

  As she came back to the f
ront room, Ms. Wronski heard a throaty rattle. She leaned over the crow on the coffee table, but it was still silent. The rattle came again, from the window. She pulled aside the curtains and there, balanced on the narrow ledge outside the window, was the other crow. It peered past her at the table, then tilted its eye toward her.

  Ms. Wronski pondered for a moment, then shrugged. “In for a penny,” she said, and opened the window.

  The crow shuffled forward a bit onto the flat of the window ledge, but did not enter.

  “You’re welcome to come in,” Ms. Wronski said, and then wondered if, vampire-like, it was now free to come and go as it pleased in the future. Though, of course, “the future” might not be long for a crow, as the bird on the table attested.

  The crow on the ledge just blinked, and preened a feather flat.

  “Suit yourself,” Ms. Wronski said. “Though if I had stayed at my window when I first saw your friend in the street, I would never have figured what was going on. As I said, it’s a matter of perspective.”

  The crow in the window tilted its head with a dubious look she would have found a bit cheeky in one her students.

  “Well, then. My name is Ms. Wronksi.” She underscored the “z” in “Ms.” like she did with her students, though they invariably said “Mizzuz,” and that oaf of an assistant principal always insisted on “Miss” with a drawn-out “s” and a disdainful leer. “But then again, he complains about the ‘puh-suede-o intellectuals, so I pay him no mind at all,” she said.