An Arrangement of Skin

by Anna Journey

  I stood a long time in front of the pair of taxidermied peacocks at Deyrolle. I liked the way someone had positioned the white peacock next to the bird with saturated hues, as if the anemic one were dreaming sideways and in a cascade of color. Or vice versa: the blue-and-green peacock looked back on the distant winter of his own mind to find that—yes—he’d survived. The pairing reminded me I now stood on the other side of that November in Houston, safe on a whole other coast and in a new quality of light.

  Since 1831, the principle of Deyrolle has been “to bring to human nature the sense of observation and description”; that “if one wants to protect nature, one has to know it.” Instead of an Eiffel Tower postcard, I chose a baby scorpion as a souvenir of my first trip to Paris. I thought the larger arachnids, with their curled fat tails, might break during my flight back to California. The bespectacled man behind the counter in the entomology room, who’d gently scolded me a few minutes earlier for photographing the stone crab, pinned my scorpion inside a small cardboard box and padded its body in cotton. His pupils looked unusually dilated, as if his daily peering into the minute details of shining beetles and rare butterflies had forever magnified his gaze. I wondered, as I descended the stairs to the street, if the airport security guards at US Customs would linger over the X-ray of my bags; if they’d ever seen a woman carrying a baby scorpion in her purse; if, as their scanners turned objects transparent, they’d glance at me; if they’d ask me how many times in this life I’d been stung, and with what difficulty, perhaps, I had managed to survive.

  In “Some Reflections on Dolls,” Rilke addresses the deceitful doll-soul, as if he held the shell of it—that silent object—in his hands:

  O soul, that has never been really worn, that has only been kept always stored up (like furs in summer), protected by all kinds of old-fashioned odors: look, now the moths have got into you. You have been left untouched too long, now a hand both careful and mischievous is shaking you—look, look, all the little woebegone moths are fluttering out of you, indescribably mortal, beginning, even at the moment when they find themselves, to bid themselves farewell.

  As I wandered the wonder-rooms of Deyrolle, I imagined the inverse of Rilke’s disillusionment in which moths flutter—terribly mortal—from the body of the shaken doll. I imagined each creature held a history inside it, the intricacies of a lived life, with its shifting landscapes and loves. I imagined the spiny anteater licking garnet clusters of ants, flicking its lavender tongue, and the yellowed ivory of a nineteenth-century fox skeleton in a bell jar beginning to shiver and plink out its story of longing for a red barn and a farmer’s chicken coop. I imagined the white peacock perfectly camouflaged on a blizzard-encrusted stump, as if the snow had grown a miraculous bird of powder-white plumes, who now rises—resurrected—from the shining, winter ice.

  There, almost two years on the living side of that divide I had faced in Houston, I could also imagine how my act of looking—the care with which I engaged the world, that alertness and openness and sensitivity—was a way to beat back the seductiveness of death. When I stepped into Deyrolle, the magic and energy of lives pulsed around me: countless species and shells and wings and the most complexly beautiful—and fragile—skeletons. I felt wonderstruck. These specimens of stopped time were, I realized, transparent, undying. Deyrolle was like an ark that carried me—carries all of us, our stories. I felt that world I had once tried to pry apart within the egg timer finally open up and let me—still breathing—step inside.

  BIRDS 101

  The skin of a dead starling is hardier than you’d think. It’s tissue-fine yet lizard-like—wheat-colored chain mail for an airborne knight. During my first class at Prey Taxidermy, in downtown Los Angeles, I could see in the slit breast of my specimen a mix of delicacy and toughness, the bird’s firm insides cool from the freezer and as flush as a plum.

  Allis Markham, the owner of Prey, is a wisecracking thirty-two-year-old with fair skin and dyed-black hair. Around the studio, she wears a ponytail and simple button-up with rolled sleeves, but in a glamorous portrait on Prey’s website, Allis poses between two taxidermied housecats like a deadpan 1940s pinup star: carmine lipstick and a dark rockabilly pompadour. In 2008, Allis (pronounced “Alice”) quit her marketing job at Disney, where she earned a six-figure salary, to attend the Advanced Taxidermy Training Center in Montana. In her studio on the fourth floor of an arts building on Spring Street, Allis offers a range of weekend workshops for an array of misfits, hipster craftspeople, Hollywood types—and the plain old morbidly curious, like me. I decided to take Allis’s recommended course for beginners, Birds 101.

  As a child, I kept a number of pets: a strawberry-blond hamster, a pair of parakeets, a fire-bellied newt, a short-lived guppy, several generations of sweet-tempered mice, a frisky rat, and three beloved indoor cats. A collector of rocks and fossils, I’d ride the metro into DC to visit the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History as often as my parents would take me. If I could’ve purchased taxidermy from the museum’s gift shop in addition to geodes, arrowheads, and dime-sized trilobites, I would’ve transformed my bedroom into a wondrous forest populated with a hawk on my bookcase, a lemur on my lamp, a lynx in a corner, and a fox on the edge of my bedframe, one paw lifted midair, like a tightrope walker. Instead, I settled for a lucky rabbit’s-foot keychain from the pet store at Twinbrook Shopping Center. Marveling at the paw’s dry ivory fur, four lead-colored nails, and stiff dewclaw split to the quick, I considered the foot too precious to dangle from my backpack’s zipper. I chose to display it on my bookshelf near my collection of miniature china animals with lapis paisleys painted in intricate wisps across their backs. My dad bought me a new blue-and-white figurine from the airport each time he flew on business trips to Thailand, Singapore, or Nairobi. My favorite one was a hippo with the tip of its pale snout dipped in a rich navy glaze. I handled the animal so often that I chipped off both of its ears. I clipped photographs of birds, mammals, and reptiles from my father’s stacks of National Geographic magazines, taping the creatures over every inch of my walls—and the swaths of ceiling I could reach—to weave a patchwork menagerie.

  Visiting the famous Parisian shop of curiosities, Deyrolle, on a trip to Europe with my husband several summers ago, I reawakened my interest in taxidermy. And as I neared the end of my first year of teaching full time, sitting quietly through departmental meetings and writing scrupulous comments on my students’ essays and poems, I longed to rebel—to do something rougher, more insubordinate or wild. I became fascinated by taxidermy’s paradoxical intents: to use dead matter to defy the natural outcome of mortality (vanishing) and to celebrate through the gestures of a corpse the wonders, textures, and varieties of life.

  Finally, my husband searched on the Internet for local taxidermists, found Allis’s studio, and turned the screen of his laptop toward me. I’d assumed most practitioners of taxidermy were gun-loving middle-aged men dressed in camouflage looking to make shoulder mounts of their shot whitetails. I knew, as I peered at Allis’s website, that my perceptions had been skewed. Almost all of the students in her photographs—grinning next to their skunks, coyotes, and raccoons—were young women.

  In The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing, writer and curator Rachel Poliquin argues that any of seven “narratives of longing” can move a person to create taxidermy: “wonder, beauty, spectacle, order, narrative, allegory, and remembrance.” It’s the manner in which we make meaning from these objects—the tales they allow us to tell about ourselves—that turns the taxidermist into a storyteller. That formerly blood-filled, hungry beast, now arrested in time and posed to emulate everlasting life, grows into a locus of ambiguity—it’s both here and not here. Body without sentience. Is this once-breathing entity still an animal? Glass-eyed and lung-less, is it now an object? Can it straddle both categories, slipping back and forth, or has it broken down, irrevocably, and become neither? “What’s my narrative of longing?” I wondered several weeks afte
r I’d stuffed my starling, mounted the bird on a gnarled ghostwood branch, created a habitat using blue stones and pieces of driftwood, and placed all of it beneath a glass doll dome—the bird’s low sky transparent and impervious, an eternal weather.

  On Saturday morning, students started to trail into Prey Taxidermy in the twenty minutes before class began. A brass moose head with a rusted patina and wide hoop dangling from its septum served as a door knocker. The suite of three rooms recalled the shape of an “L”: the main workspace formed the base of the letter and two small rooms off the hallway made up the stem. The studio’s white walls, tall windows, and minimal shelves recalled the curated space of an art gallery, though instead of paintings or sculptures, these rooms held sleek mounts of African ungulates (a gazelle, a dik-dik, and some type of massive antelope), a male peacock, the bust of a panda, several raccoons, and numerous birds.

  Allis asked the ten students in Birds 101 to sit at either of two rectangular wooden tables in the workspace. In addition to Allis and her three apprentices (Ally, a sixteen-year-old who kept a pet Jacobin pigeon; Becca, a sixteen-year-old with fuchsia hair; and Jenn, a former paleontological field technician in her early thirties), there were nine women in their twenties and thirties and one teenage boy. Allis asked us to introduce ourselves and explain why we were taking the course. Arabella, a TV writer for a Golden Globe–winning series, wanted “to do something that doesn’t involve words” and “to use [her] hands.” Anne said she loved animals and worked in educational outreach at the Los Angeles Zoo. Olivia hoped to integrate taxidermy into her projects as a costume designer. The woman sitting next to Arabella, whose name I didn’t catch, made jewelry from animal bones. At my table, Mitzy had pale blue hair with lavender streaks, and I can’t remember if she gave a reason for taking the class. I introduced myself as a writer and mentioned my trip to Deyrolle. Ashley and Andrea were preppy architects who’d signed up for the class together. Andrea spoke about her interest in “freezing time.” Sam, who sat across from me, had taken a previous course with Allis in which she’d taxidermied a spring duckling. She showed me a cell phone picture of her fluffy, butter-yellow bird, which appeared to waddle from its hillock of lime-green Astroturf as if into a book by Mother Goose. Sam said she liked the idea of “creating emotions beyond its life.” Church, the only male in the class, was a scrawny junior in high school who wore chunky black-rimmed glasses. Without making eye contact with anyone, he hunched over the table and muttered something about taxidermy that I couldn’t make out. Church’s mother, Allis recalled, had taken Birds 101 before him.

  Allis introduced us to our subject, the European starling: a stocky, eight-inch bird with a short tail, long yellow beak, and iridescent black feathers with glints of amethyst and sea green. Or as Steve Mirsky observes of the bird’s dark and mottled patina in Scientific American: “they look like chocolate that’s been left out for a few days.” Although starlings may seem small in stature, they’re gregarious, noisy birds, possessing strong feet for confident landings and an aggressive sense of curiosity. They’re also gifted mimics, with a crackling, versatile song that swerves from a static-like rattle to a muddy gurgle to a piercing whistle-screech. They can imitate car alarms, jackhammers, even patterns of human speech. Deemed a nuisance species in the US, European starlings destroy nests (“Bad for local birds,” said Allis) and ravage vineyards (“Which are very important to me,” she added). Our specimens were “ethically sourced,” she told us, which, in the parlance of taxidermy, means the birds weren’t netted and gassed just to become rustic décor on our shelves. According to Allis, “Randy in Wisconsin” exterminated our starlings under the auspices of Pest Control.

  We have a work of Elizabethan literature to blame for the starling’s migration to the US during the nineteenth century: Shakespeare’s history play, Henry IV, Part 1. According to Mirsky’s article, a group of Shakespeare enthusiasts known as the Acclimatization Society vowed to populate North America with every species of bird the Bard cared to mention in his oeuvre—more than six hundred avian species. The nobleman Hotspur bitterly imagines driving the king crazy by training a starling to repeat the name of Mortimer, whom the king refuses to ransom. “I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak / Nothing but ‘Mortimer,’” Hotspur says, and in response to these lines, the Acclimatization Society loosed a hundred starlings in Central Park in 1890 and 1891, tipping, in the name of literature, the balance of our ecosystem toward a raucous flock of proliferating black wings.

  After Allis finished describing the difference between winter and summer plumage (white spots denote cold-weather feathers) and how beak length corresponds to age and hunting ability (bigger beaks mean older, seasoned feeders), we got to choose our starling from a group of eighteen corpses arranged on a counter in the hall. I approached the spread of specimens, which had been kept frozen, wings folded. They made me think of the ingredients to the teeming dessert described in “Sing a Song of Sixpence”: “Four-and-twenty blackbirds / Baked in a pie.” In the English nursery rhyme, when someone slices open the pie set before the king, a wily blackbird escapes from the crust, flies out the castle window, and pecks off the nose of a maid who’d been hanging laundry in the courtyard. I raised an eyebrow at the feathered pile and reached for a bird with dark summer plumage and a long vivid beak. An older one. A good feeder.

  There are eight distinct genres of taxidermy, suggests Rachel Poliquin: “hunting trophies, natural history specimens, wonders of nature (albino, two-headed, etc.), extinct species, preserved pets, fraudulent creatures, anthropomorphic taxidermy (toads on swings), and animal parts used in fashion and household décor.”

  My father, who grew up in Greenwood, Mississippi, once took a hunting trophy. In the rural South of the late 1950s, most men learned to hunt, and, even though my animal-loving father never much enjoyed it, he would grab his rifle and go on shooting trips with his friend Pete as a kind of bonding ritual. His friendship with Pete—and with Pete’s gracious, educated parents—allowed my father passage, however temporarily, into a family far different from his own: one without his aloof, mean-tongued father, who ran a struggling well-digging business; without his older sister, Beulah, who was a violent bully; without his embittered mother, who, according to the town gossips, married late and “beneath her.”

  My father, prompted by my foray into taxidermy, wrote to tell me a story from his adolescence that I’d never heard before. When he and Pete were both fifteen, they came across an unusual fox squirrel in the kudzu-shrouded woods. Instead of red, the animal’s fur was a rich, shiny black, and a stippling of white hairs surrounded its nose in a smoky halo. My father shot the squirrel and, because of its rare color, decided to preserve the pelt. He taught himself the process of tanning a hide by referencing his Encyclopedia Americana—what he called his “favorite resource for getting along with the world.” Since fourth grade, he’d escaped Greenwood’s dirt roads, rednecks, and desolate trailers through entering the alternate worlds created by reading and through hanging out with Pete’s family. According to my father, he regularly shut himself in his room and read every volume in his encyclopedia set from cover to cover, like a novel, resulting in his impressive and enduring ability to recite curious facts, especially those concerned with science, history, and linguistics. (Over the course of a single weekend, for instance, he told me that “tattoo” is a Polynesian word; that kangaroos, unlike humans, are predominantly lefties; and that the decadent Chinese dish called “live monkey brain” requires a special table with a head-shaped hole cut in the middle so the doomed creature can sit beneath it, exposing its sawed-off cranium to diners wealthy enough to afford the appetizer.) To tan the hide, he measured out coarse salt and potassium nitrate and applied it to the cleaned squirrel, scraping off the mixture and reapplying it every few days until the skin was ready for moisturizing with mineral oil. “Tanning hides isn’t taxidermy,” my dad said, “but it’s close.”

  Bird skin doesn’t require the tannin
g process, which is why it’s perfect for beginning taxidermists, who can learn the basics of the craft in a single weekend. There are five steps involved in avian taxidermy: skinning, fleshing, wiring, mounting, and grooming. To prepare our starlings for skinning, we rinsed their bodies in the sink, to soften them and prevent brittleness and tearing. Back at our seats, the tables were set with metal lunch trays upon which rested a small handful of tools: a scalpel for slicing skin and sawing flesh from bone, a tweezer for prying off chunks of meat and tendons, a paintbrush for moisturizing dry patches, a wire brush for scouring yellow fat deposits, several small metal picks, and a large hooked dental tool known around the taxidermy studio as “the brain scoop.” In the center of each table sat a rotating Lazy Susan–style toolbox stocked with replacement blades, extra tools, and spools of wire and cotton thread. I sat my damp bird in the center of my tray, watched Allis demonstrate a blade change, and reached for my scalpel. I unpeeled the protective sheath of my blade halfway, held the sharp end by its wrapped tip, aligned the exposed dull end with a matching groove on the scalpel handle, and slid the blade down until I heard a firm click.