Among the Wonderful

by Stacy Carlson

  “Ten cents.” The woman extended her palm. “Fifty, total.”

  Guillaudeu reached into the inside pocket of his overcoat for the leather purse that had been Scudder’s so long ago. His fingers dipped deep enough that he should have felt it, but he did not. He pressed his flat waistcoat pockets. The woman watched him unbuckle his satchel and rummage through it; it was an act of denial, though, because he already knew the purse was gone. He had put it in his overcoat pocket.

  The woman narrowed her eyes and now had both hands on her hips. “Well?”

  “It’s gone. My money.” Color rose to his cheeks and again he felt the boundaries of the world dissolving around him. Beside him the cousins roared in approval of Thisbe and her lover Pyramus.

  “If that’s so, sir, you can leave my establishment now.” The cook’s voice was firm and loud. All three Ursus americanus swung their attention onto him.

  “We got a downtown confidence man with us tonight, Bernard.” The cook addressed the closest man. “Do you think we ought to call Leo out here?”

  “I must have been robbed!” Guillaudeu blurted, trying to extricate himself from the bench without disrupting anyone else. His panic was intense.

  “At least we caught him before one of you boys bought him something,” the cook went on. “Now you better leave nicely or I’ll have to call my husband out here.”

  “You don’t want that, old man,” one of the cousins said softly.

  “I’m going, of course! I didn’t mean anything —”

  “Sure, you didn’t. We ain’t fools; you can be sure of that.”

  Guillaudeu tumbled over the bench and trotted across the garden and through the gate. As he latched it behind him, another roar erupted, as if he were the joke, not the stage players. He reached the far edge of the tavern yard, now illuminated mostly by the rising moon. On the East River blinked the lights of several boats, and closer to him were the lights of Turtle Bay village, which now seemed forbidding and forbidden because he was penniless. Of course he’d been robbed. He remembered the sharp elbows bumping him as he rushed from the Points and the skinny children following him closely with sharp and hungry eyes. Of course they would snake their little hands into the pockets of a fearful, stupid man.

  All along he’d thought if worse came to worst, or when he’d had enough of walking north, he’d just catch the Harlem Railroad home. Suddenly Fourth Avenue seemed as distant as the Sierra Nevada.

  But now? A chaos of thoughts tangled in his mind until one pulled free and floated above the others: His time in the field, his exploration of his own country, had only just begun. He was not cold, his stomach was not yet completely empty — he still had a little sausage and bread in his satchel. And, he finally realized, he wasn’t scared. This was New York Island, after all, not the North Pole. He pitched his satchel over one shoulder and like a ghost passed silently through Turtle Bay. Once the village lights were behind him he walked more easily into the night. It never had been places that scared him, even unknown places. It always had been people.

  The full vault of heaven presented itself above the orchards, its topography of stars obscured only by an occasional cloud in the foreground. As Guillaudeu walked below it, a great calm unfolded. He stopped frequently to stare upward into the cosmos, and he was comforted by the dispassion he sensed emanating from between the distant stars, from the great humming ether that presided over the city at his back, all people, oceans and continents, and perhaps even harbored the vessel USS Happenstance, Scipio’s ominous figment, somewhere among the planets.

  A barn disentangled itself from a dark thicket on the far side of a field, and it seemed to be unattached to any visible farmhouse. It might be a safe place to sleep. He left the road, angling toward the structure with the tall grasses whispering against his legs.

  The barn was a huge, octagonal husk. Patches of siding were missing and a faint smoky odor made him think it had burned, though probably long ago. He walked inside the massive structure and among the stalls arranged like facets around the center. A tear in the roof broke the symmetry of the barn’s design. Listening to birds mumbling in the rafters, he walked to the center of the hay-strewn earthen floor. The cobalt patch of sky contrasted with the blackened jagged roof, and Guillaudeu peered up through the hole as if it were a telescope. On some unknown cue, the birds took to the air. Crows, he saw, as they silently rose through the jagged portal. They dispersed into the unbounded world, each black dot tearing its own tiny hole in the heavens.

  Guillaudeu pushed as much hay as he could into one of the stalls until he had a decent pallet. He curled there under his overcoat, using his satchel for a pillow. He tucked his clasped hands between his thighs, and when he closed his eyes he was standing at his beloved worktable. Pots of resin, pots of beeswax. Arsenic. Cochineal, calipers, excelsior, camphor. He relaxed. His world collapsed immediately into sleep.

  Undulating light danced across his office wall even though the room’s one window was blocked, as usual, by a curtain. He examined his tools, arms folded across his canvas butcher’s apron. Scudder’s voice was in his head, saying words he remembered from long ago: The flawless preparation of a large mammal is a taxidermist’s greatest feat and proof that he is a master of his craft. He smiled because, in the present example, every initial measurement had been accurate. The first incision had been a perfect longitudinal line leading him into the work on a straight and righteous path. The skin had graciously parted from the muscle to receive its salt and arsenic. The bones agreed to their excavation, and the ligaments seemed to release their grip with gratitude. Harmony was what he felt as the herringbone stitch entered his mind and he remembered what he’d been looking for: waxed catgut thread and a curved needle. The skin of a human is decidedly thinner than all other animals, with obviously less hair. It would be impossible to hide the seams, and so his tidiest stitch, the herringbone, would do nicely.

  Celia’s manikin was masterfully prepared out of pine, iron, annealed wire, wax, Formula 9 papier-mâché, and her own bones. The manikin now stood apart from the worktable where Celia, as he’d known her, had ceased to be. Her new skeleton awaited the cloak of skin, and Guillaudeu obliged; he could smell the acrid scent of carpenter’s glue and knew he must be quick about it.

  Beginning at the head and working down, he used high-grade Dutch beeswax to perfect her brow ridge and eye sockets and fitted two blue glass eyes before laying the veil of skin over her skull. Arranging a specimen’s eyelids always took longer than he expected, but he did not panic. He would finish before the glue became too sticky to work with. The neck needed a few minutes of attention — a few more layers of papier-mâché created the shape of the esophagus just so. He had sculpted her arms exactly right, as well as her chest and rib cage. He began sewing at her armpit, his stitches catching the shoulders, and then the arms, in place. He then sewed down her sides to the waist to secure her torso. He politely sewed her well-intentioned but now uncloven femininity and continued on his way down her legs. He finished at the ankles, where the cured skin tucked nicely into the tops of the plaster feet. He tied a neat knot and cut the thread. With growing excitement, he made the final arrangement of her features — applying wax, using tiny spatulas and dentist’s tools to get the shape of her lips, and then resin to get the color.

  Guillaudeu unbound her hair and combed it. He dressed her carefully in soft old underthings, her thick woolen stockings, and a muslin shift. He unhooked all the buttons down the back of her dark gray velvet dress and lifted it over her head. As he pulled the sleeves up over her newly arranged arms, the fabric slid gently into place. He buttoned her up and fitted her favorite lace collar about her neck. He coiled her hair into a bun and tied it with a gray silk ribbon. Into her crooked arms he placed The Seraphim and Other Poems, her favorite.

  He took off his bloodied apron and stepped back. A work of art, he recalled from his years as Scudder’s apprentice, is not complete until beheld by its audience. From the sheath of her newl
y donned skin, the specimen regarded him slyly. He circled her. The height, her posture, the expression, and the way she held the volume of poetry. He’d gotten her just right.

  His triumph sent him directly to the waking world, where for a few moments he could not move. His heart raced. Where was he? Gradually he made out some form in the darkness. He smelled the faint charcoal of a fire long past and the hulking shape of the barn surrounding him. His heart rate calmed as he recognized his surroundings, but accelerated again as the shadow of his triumph returned and he recalled the dream to which it belonged.

  Twenty-nine

  Guillaudeu moved through the morning’s unbroken silence slowly and deliberately. He’d decided to forgo the road for the orchards that lay on the other side of the barn and he moved beneath the gray and lichened branches with humility, inhaling the scent of the grass he trampled and accepting the dew as it soaked his trouser legs.

  The night had been infinitely long and the taxidermist was incredulous that it had given way at all, especially to such a delicate dawn. Enveloped in this misty shield Guillaudeu did not feel apprehensive as he continued north; if he was trespassing, which he surely was, he could explain. He groped his satchel until he felt the smooth ridge of Linnaeus’ spine within. He was not sure of the words he would use when faced with the angry landowner, but they certainly pertained to the importance of traveling in one’s own country. What is the difference, really, between an orchard on New York Island and sublime Dalecarlia, when both are approached with the same sense of wonder and exacting eye of the naturalist?

  He walked on, among browsing cattle, past farmhouses fragrant with wood smoke, and across the dreamlike landscape of blossoming apple trees. With his mind finally quiet, he took simple joy in his own meandering path. He walked on a small path through a wild meadow, and as he came over a mellow rise, he saw a brown shape in the grass. A person? He stopped. But his eye, accustomed to certain forms, soon recognized a bedded-down animal. As he came closer, it took shape as an ungulate. A few more steps and he was certain: It was a deer. He moved toward it in an exaggerated creep that would have made an observer laugh, but creeping was entirely unnecessary since this creature was entirely dead, and had been so for some time.

  The carcass was in that peculiar stage of decomposition during which the opposing forces of desiccation and rot waged war and it was not at all clear which side would win or how the two coexisted at all. The skull, already bleached in places, had broken through layers of dried hide, yet from the bowel liquid still seeped, teeming with what manner of animalcules Guillaudeu could not guess. The buck had died with its forelegs outstretched and its hind legs tucked as if he had just leapt, indeed, over the great divide. A small set of antlers now tangled with the meadow grasses.

  He counted three holes in the animal’s side. Guillaudeu knew nothing of guns or hunting, but by the placement of the wounds he deduced that no single shot had killed the deer. In all likelihood the creature had made its way some distance before it succumbed. Had the hunters not pursued their prey? Had they been turned away by the owner of this meadow? Guillaudeu looked around as if that personage were lurking nearby. Why hadn’t the property owner dressed the meat for himself? The spectacle of the deer’s body disturbed him. The disarray, the holes, the way the fur drifted away from the carcass on the cool air, it was ominous and wrong. Creatures should die for a reason, he asserted suddenly, and this one clearly has not. It’s as good as murder! Outraged, he squatted near the carcass, noting the delicate hooves and the sockets where the eyes had been. The grass was dead where the creature lay and soon he saw small worms making their way out of the rotting meat into the ground. Disgusting, he fumed, but he could not turn away.

  He saw more movement within and around the carcass. It was not just a few worms; myriad tiny creatures scavenged upon the buck. Flies preyed on its eyes, bees swarmed its wounds, and now he noticed that what he had interpreted as bullet holes may actually have been pecked by crows or some other bird. The buck may have just died here of natural causes. It may have been lame or diseased. All manner of woodland creature have supped on this feast, he realized.

  He moved a few feet away and sat on the grass. He watched the buck. He thought about his dream. This is what happened to Celia, not the other. Her body rotted away. She was absorbed into the earth and gave sustenance to insects. Guillaudeu considered these facts for a long while, and when he did not become angry or afraid, he moved on.

  Thirty

  He must have walked more easterly than he thought, because by midafternoon Guillaudeu came to the river and now he walked along the edge of a great salt marsh. He observed the spiral shells of snails moored to blades of cordgrass. The brown mud was pocked with bubbles, and along its sulfurous surface scuttled small armored creatures. Whether they were crabs, sea beetles, lobsters, or scorpions, Guillaudeu had no clue, but he welcomed his ignorance on the matter and enjoyed the sight of two sailboats scudding northward in the distance. He spotted a great egret, Casmerodius albus, not twenty feet from him. With one leg poised out of water, the white bird arched its long neck forward and from it the great yellow knife of the bill was aimed and ready. The bird’s head inched minutely closer to the surface of the creek, and Guillaudeu sensed its prey approaching. The air tightened. Guillaudeu held his breath and the world hung in suspension for two long moments. Suddenly the bird had a slim fish in its bill and Guillaudeu shouted, “Hurrah!” With a languid movement, the egret then flapped itself into the sky and away.

  When Guillaudeu turned to go, he faced a well-used sandy track angling to the northwest. He’d been in the wilderness most of the day and hesitated to join up with civilization just yet, but the other option would require him to wade through the salt marsh, so he climbed onto the road.

  As soon as he saw the hamlet with its small wooden houses clustered around the intersection of two tracks and the sign welcoming him to Pension’s Creek, Guillaudeu’s hunger became very intense. He had gnawed the last of the sausage early that morning and all that remained of the bread were scattered crumbs at the bottom of his satchel. He had drunk from a creek and not thought much more about food until he saw the well-fed villagers going about their day.

  Shall I pass as quickly through town as I can, or shall I knock on a door, any door, and beg for food? He was incredulous even to be contemplating it, but this was real hunger, something he hadn’t endured since he was a boy. He passed one house after another, feeling a bit dizzy and unsure how, exactly, to go about asking for help. This was, after all, a voluntary circumstance. He passed a mercantile bustling with activity and a building with boarded-up windows. From the façade of the next building hung a whitewashed sign: ZETETIC SOCIETY AND MUSEUM. Museum? He’d landed at a museum.

  He walked into the dim interior, brushing crumbs of drying mud and flakes of leaves off his jacket. A pale boy in a coat whose sleeves were much too short stood behind a wooden counter.

  “Is the museum open?” Guillaudeu asked uncertainly.

  “Well.” The boy cleared his throat. He couldn’t have been older than sixteen. He examined Guillaudeu suspiciously. “Yes, it’s open.” He straightened up to his full height. “We are the largest Zetetic Society in New York.”

  Guillaudeu peered beyond the boy into the shadowy room. “I’m not familiar with that particular society.”

  “What! Surely you’ve read the Symmes’ Compendium?”

  “I have not,” Guillaudeu admitted, looking around the room, which held several glass vitrines, paintings and maps on the walls, and an abominable specimen of Ursus americanus. “But whoever stuffed that black bear should be ashamed of himself. I hope it wasn’t you.”

  “I am not concerned with those flea-infested specimens,” the boy explained, his hands folded in front of him. “We now focus exclusively on the more relevant and exciting field of Inverse Cosmogony.”

  “Oh?”

  The boy extended his hand toward the museum’s small collection. “This exhibit hono
rs the work of the magnificent John Symmes.” He leaned forward in his enthusiasm; his red-rimmed eyes beseeched Guillaudeu with the barely restrained fervor of a zealot. Guillaudeu stepped away.

  “Symmes’ theory of a hollow earth inhabited by a more heavenly race of man guides our exhibitions and our fund-raising efforts.” The boy gestured to a tall glass jar with a few coins in it. “We are raising funds for a journey to the North Pole, so we may discover what John Symmes already knew to be true: Great portals await us, leading to new realms of lush geography and civilizations of man!”

  Guillaudeu regarded the glass jar. “It appears you have enough to get your expedition partway to New York City.”

  The boy bristled. “We’re well on our way, I can assure you.”

  The skin of the black bear’s head had not been sufficiently attached to the manikin; it drooped obscenely, revealing the edge of the glass eye at one socket, and a blackened portion of the lower jawbone beneath the peeling gums. The beast had been intended to maintain a threatening posture, but now it seemed to recoil in horror, as if it had just seen itself in the mirror.

  “Even though your museum clearly has … higher pursuits, it is these more common examples of fauna that will lure newcomers into your establishment.” Guillaudeu gestured to the bear and spoke as gently as he could. He’d formed a strategy. “It takes something familiar to bring them in. But once they are inside, they will encounter Symmes’ theory and undoubtedly lend their support to your worthy expedition. Still, this bear will not attract anyone in its current state. Just look at it.”

  The boy obliged, tilting his head and frowning. “It is rather tattered.”

  “How will anyone take you seriously with this atrocity on your premises?” He paused for dramatic effect. “I can fix the bear’s major failings in one hour.” Guillaudeu finished with a flourish worthy of Barnum: “For I am a taxidermist.”