Someone pounded up from behind us, and my captor clutched me more tightly and then relaxed as the fugitive ran by without pausing; it was the girl with bangs.
The twofer’s far head leaned forward, and sought from Blanche to me, and settled on me, and confided, “See, I’m an American myself, and I figure it’s just better not to get embroiled in police matters if you’re not local. They want to know why you’re here and ask a lot of questions which I personally, maybe you don’t, but I—there’s Suze and Joanie. Howdy Suze, Joanie! Is that your car? Do you think you could give us a lift?”
I yanked my arm free, but he had hold of my jacket by the pocket, and for an absurd moment we were playing tug-of-war, and I heard cloth rip. He let go.
“Gosh, sorry,” he said. “Hey, I know a place where we can get that pocket fixed.” He stuck out his hand. “Mr. Disme, rhymes with crime, D-I-S-M-E.”
“I’m late for an appointment, at the National Gallery.”
“The Virgin of the Sands! We’ll drop you off. Allow me to insist.”
“No, really, I’ve got my rental car right down there,” I lied, gesturing down the block toward a couple of parked cars. Too late I saw they were unlikely rentals, a purple Mini and a three-wheeled monster.
“Oh, swell! Hey, do you think you could give—”
I bolted away with a wave back over my shoulder. After a minute a car passed me and I saw him in the back, both heads now grinning and nodding.
I went into the nearest pub and slumped against the bar. There was nothing so strange about an American Togetherist flying to London where the action was, yet I was shaken. He had arrived right on time for my appointment. It didn’t feel like a coincidence, though I couldn’t explain it. And now everything was ruined! If the Togetherists had not already scared away the doctor, the cops surely would have. I ordered a bitter and took a seat by the window. I thought, absurdly, that I might see the doctor walking by, and recognize him by the bright implements in the breast pocket of his suit, the dark stains on his shoes. I took off my watch, laid it carefully on the table before me. I did not want to hear it click against the polished wood. The man behind the bar ran a cloth slowly over the fixtures, staring out the window and giving a loud sniff every twenty-two seconds. It started to rain. A police car passed, slowly, then another. I couldn’t tell if there was anyone in the rear seat.
Fifteen minutes later I ventured back. Everyone was gone, even the cat. The only sign of a scuffle was a soggy piece of a banner in the gutter.
The address corresponded to a boxy, two-story office building. I tried the front door, my damp hand sliding on the handle. It opened onto a dingy foyer that smelled like an old fishbowl. I pushed open a weighted door to the stairs and went up, cringing at each resonant footstep. The hallway was carpeted, though, and I crept noiselessly down it to number 209. The door was not completely closed, and only natural light shone from inside. I brushed the back of my hand against it, and it opened.
The room was nearly empty. A pencil, aghast at my entry, began to roll. It crossed the desk with gathering confidence and a frighteningly loud rattle. Then it fell off the edge. The only thing left on the desk was a tourist’s brochure, the top leaf quivering slightly in the draft from the chinked window, and a phone. Three dust-free patches on the table showed where a computer had been, a keyboard, and a mouse pad. I went outside the room again and looked at the door. Faux wood-grain and an empty brass frame for a plaque.
I went to the desk and looked at the brochure. The Hunterian Museum at the London College of Surgeons. No scribbled phone number, no coded note. Still, I stuck it in my intact pocket.
Then the phone rang.
The sound was terrible as a scream in that closed space. I looked at the phone with an unnameable surmise. Time held its breath.
I let it ring five times. Then I snatched up the receiver. “Hi, it’s Tiffany,” I heard myself say. There was a click. The line went dead. The world paused, and then breathed again.
I waited for the phone to ring again, but it didn’t.
“Did you hear they almost caught that doctor?” said Louche, idly squeezing the rubber bulb of a Speaking Ear.
A strange sensation passed through my head. As of something—a bullet, maybe—emitting a whining, drill-bit hum, rushing intolerably fast toward me from outer space, through me (I flinched), and receding with identical velocity in the other direction.
“What doctor?” I said carefully.
“That freak doctor. What happened was that vigilante group, those Togetherationists—”
“Togetherists,” I said.
“You know about them. Well, they tracked down some kind of satellite clinic or dispatch center or something, which I must say is more than Scotland Yard had done, and they were holding a protest—” She turned the Speaking Ear around and squinted at the rubber pinna, then poked a ballpoint pen into its aperture.
“How did they track down the, um, clinic?” I said.
“Somebody tipped them off,” said Louche. “Somebody on the inside, they think. A double agent. Or a patient who changed his or her mind. Anyway, it was a peaceful protest, but because of the bomb scares the police swooped down on them in riot gear, and meanwhile all the evidence went out the back door! Would you think of having Blanche’s head removed?” she added, squeezing the bulb. An ink-smeared bit of paper burped out and caromed off my chest.
The blood had drained from my face. “Louche.” I said it quite calmly. “Who do you think I am?”
It was a good question.
DEAD ANIMAL ZOO
Welcome to the Zoo,” I declaimed. “Right this way, for real live dead animals!”
Dutifully, Blanche sucked in her breath, as if she had not helped to collect each specimen and display it to advantage within a frame of colored stones. She was the only visitor so far. I had made her leave two jojoba beans at the invisible gate between two important-looking barrel cacti, and had issued her a crayoned ticket in return. I accomplished this by passing it from my left to my right hand.
My left hand took it back, and we tore it in half. I started backward down the aisle, gesturing. An odd smell rose around us. It was not unpleasant, just stirringly rich and brown. “On your left you will see a phainopepla, killed by stupidly flying into its own reflection. A phainopepla is a handsome ebony bird with red eyes and a crest.”
“I know that,” Blanche said.
“Don’t interrupt! On your right is a stink beetle, Eleodes. When menaced, stink beetles stand on their heads and emit an offensive-smelling fluid from their butts.”
Our collection was strong in beetles. Besides the Eleodes, it boasted an iridescent green beetle, beautiful as a jewel, and a huge black beetle with spined legs, solid and heavy and soldered together, like a Mattel car. It was a husk when we found it, with ants at work in it, and we had had to poke a stick in its shell and shake it like a maraca until all the ants fell out.
We were not strict about condition. Any dead thing would do. Even parts of dead things—feathers, bones—could be placeholders for the whole animal. In this category, we had two rattlesnake rattles, a bovine jawbone missing a number of teeth, and a rabbit’s tail, a stiff little curved bone inside a soft puff.
“And finally, the centerpiece of our collection: A whole entire jackrabbit, with the hunter’s bullet still in its head.”
“Is that all?” said Blanche.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s not a very big zoo.”
“Look, I’m only one person,” I said, then stopped in confusion. “We’re still building the collection. By the time we’re done, it will be”—I pronounced these words with relish—“a truly distinguished collection. Then we’ll donate it to a museum.” Privately I thought that was unlikely. We didn’t have a dinosaur bone or even a whole rattlesnake. We hardly had a whole anything. Our exhibits kept being torn apart by coyotes or vultures, while the beetles snipped away at them from the inside, more secretly but hardly any slower. Things fresh dead
we weighed down with rocks so they wouldn’t be dragged away by coyotes. We had built a cairn over Dr. Goat’s rabbit. Even so it was looking a little tattered.
“It’s not really a zoo, though, is it?” Blanche said hesitantly.
“What do you mean?”
“Real zoos have live animals.”
“So? Is an animal not an animal any more once it’s dead? In nature, lots of animals are dead right now. Most animals are dead a lot longer than they’re alive. Death is normal. Life is weird.”
She looked dubious. I switched tracks. “Animals are easier to look at when they’re dead. This is a fact about animals: they live to hide. If you can see it, it’s probably dead. Remember that, Blanche.” Dead animals soak up your looks, I explained, and never get enough. Live animals like to stay just out of reach of your look. Maybe you see a bit of a hind leg. Then they pull that in too. Live animals are practically defined as animals you can’t see completely. Like black holes, the way they look is like your failure to see them. I don’t mean they just happen to be out of sight, like a shoe under the bed. The way they look is their out-of-sightness. The good thing about this is it means you can see them all the time, whenever you want. Invisible animals are all around you. Here’s another thing to remember: if you can’t see it, it’s alive. Every time the world seems boring and lonely, that’s exactly when you’re surrounded.
“You can see animals in normal zoos, though,” Blanche said doubtfully.
“No, you can’t.”
“Well…”
“You think those are animals?” I said. She looked confused. “You think you’re looking at a tiger. But how do you know? Have you ever seen a real tiger?”
“Aren’t those real?”
“No! A real tiger is in the jungle. A tiger in a room isn’t a tiger. You can’t see tigers! That’s the point of tigers! Except dead ones. Dead tigers, you can see. That’s why our zoo is better. Zoos are for looking, and dead things are for looking at.”
Dying, I had worked out, was a vigorous form of appearing. Living animals draw back or move at a strategic angle to your line of sight, thereby keeping some of their appearance to themselves. Dead animals don’t just meet your look squarely, they spring up the line of sight and pile into your eyes. You can see more of them, faster, than you can see anything else. The dead actually improve your vision. But we rarely get to observe dead people long enough for it to have lasting effect. We cover them with a sheet. A special vehicle rushes them away. Then we tuck them underground. Images of the dead in film, art, and literature are scarce, too, though images of the dying are plentiful, as if dying were not simply a way of getting to dead. It is almost as though death were an end or a departure. In fact, the dead have finally arrived. Yet how many films and novels end with a death, how few begin with one! Who are death’s heroes?
Answer: animals.
“But dead animals don’t do anything.”
“Yes, they do.” We watched. There wasn’t a lot of action. The dead happened to be lying low right then. “Dead animals just move a lot slower,” I said forcefully.
We became obsessive collectors of corpses. We scooped fly carcasses from windowsills and pored over them to select the most perfect. A zoo is like an ark, we decided, so we never took more than two of anything, though sometimes when we found a better specimen we would replace the inferior one. We pried off the highway a flattened rattlesnake that had dried in a complicated shape like an ampersand. We slipped through the barbed wire fence around the Restricted Area to look for specimens—fearfully at first, but later it became routine. There, we found a real treasure, better than Dr. Goat’s rabbit: a dead coyote. We once walked two miles dragging a dead deer from the side of the highway. That night at dinner, Mama said, “Something smells peculiar. Maybe we’d better not eat those leftovers after all.” After that, we always scrubbed ourselves thoroughly when we got home.
The deer was our biggest animal until we found the cow. The cow was not full grown, but she was impressive. She was complete except for the soft parts; the eyes were gone, and the belly was a cavity with a bit of hide hung over it like an awning. The chewed edge of the skin made a fringe that flapped a little in the wind. When it blew up you could see right up inside the cow, into the cave under the ribs; she was almost hollow. This meant she was not very heavy. We pried her partway up with an old fence post. Bugs pattered to the ground and swarmed everywhere, and a rank smell rose. She was flat on the underside, like a tent. There the brown and white hair that still held its color and clung to the top of the cow had fallen or been chewed by bugs off the hide, and this was a shocking yellow white and no longer held any part of the shape of a cow.
We dragged her what seemed like some distance, but was probably no more than fifty feet, and then we came to an arroyo choked with thornbushes. The zoo was on the other side. Alone, we could get through, but not in the company of the cow. So we brought the zoo to the cow. Over the course of one day, we went back and forth across the arroyo with a cardboard box, moving the exhibits. Then we set them up all over again around the cow in a new and even better order.
Like memory, the zoo was a gallery of corpses, arranged in meaningful tableaux. But like memory, they could be rearranged. Exhibits could be brought out of storage, others put away forever; the zoo could be arranged to prove a point, or to spite a rival curator. (In this respect too, like memory.)
We arranged and rearranged the exhibits according to various schemes of classification. These were subject to fads and upheavals. For a while we grouped them by color. I envisioned a rainbow of deadness, a color-wheel of corpses. It wasn’t easy, the dead are mostly brown and beige, but I purloined Mama’s red fox collar (two heads spitefully biting the rhinestone clasp) to fill in a gap in the spectrum. Roy G. Biv: cardinal, fox, oriole, frog, bluebelly lizard, beetle…but there we ran into trouble. A violet corpse was hard to find.
Another day we tried the alphabet, although snakes proved the only really typographical animals. We needed lots of snakes. All day we trudged up and down the highway looking for remains, and never got farther than F.
Sometimes we organized the corpses by how they died: Run Over, Shot, Killed by Coyotes, Don’t Know. Sometimes we organized them by how rotten they were.
Once we organized them by how scary they would be if they came back to life.
Then, because we cracked up at the idea of being haunted by a rabbit tail, just the tail, by how funny they would be if they came back to life.
Once we organized them by how sad they made us.
Sometimes we took the other smaller animals back to the dollhouse. We made paper doll clothes, ball gowns and tuxedos, and hooked them on their shoulders. That was easiest with the roadkill animals, which were flat already. We gave them names of real people and characters from our stories, making no distinctions: Granny, Dr. Goat, Flossie, Max, Donkey-skin. We made them drink cocktails, play cards, dance, fall in love. Their flat faces—epaulets of matted fur, crushed bone, and dried meat—squinted from above crudely drawn collars. Bits of fur and skin, knocked off in collisions with the furnishings, littered the velveteen rugs.
Gradually, the exhibits fell apart. Even the coyote’s head was going. His ears had been lost for a long time, but now the hard skin was pulling open over the bones and the fur was coming off in patches and blowing away. We had found clumps as far away as the big cholla, stuck in tufts on the needles. I took a long hard seedpod from a mesquite tree and poked it through a hole into the inside of the coyote’s head.
“What are you doing?” said Blanche.
“Checking to see if there’s any brain left.”
“Is there?” The mesquite pod scared up some bugs. They came trucking up out of the eye sockets, dropped on the ground, and hurried away.
“No, the bugs ate it.”
“Does a brain still have thoughts in it after it’s dead? Does it have memories?”
“I guess. Thoughts are just molecules,” I said, though I wasn’t sure. I s
tirred around in the head, but there was nothing much in there.
“No memories,” said Blanche.
But a new dead animal always turned up. Maybe sometimes the exact same animal that had been raiding the zoo the day before. The Dead Animal Zoo had no visitors that were not candidates for collection. It was even easy to imagine ourselves there. Sometimes I lay down among the corpses and practiced being dead, lying straight and perfectly still on my back, while big, meaty red and black ants ran over me and tiny flies came to my temples to sip my sweat. When Blanche sighed and tried to move, I hushed her. “Try and learn something for once,” I said.
“It smells funny.”
“True,” I said. “And your point is?” Actually if you didn’t know better, you might think someone was cooking. Laid out at even intervals like biscuits on a baking tray, the corpses buzzed and steamed and sometimes even twitched a little when the bugs crawling over and inside them all heaved together.
“The ground is hot,” she whined.
“No duh,” I said. “It’s the desert.” She was silent for a moment, then opened her mouth again. “Yogis walk on hot coals,” I said firmly. “Mind over matter, Blanche.” From down there, the zoo looked like a desert camp, a scattering of sagging brown tents, the sudden diagonals of ribs or hip bones like support poles, and ants that ran around like dogs when disturbed, but otherwise plodded in line, dutiful as a camel train. Blanche started humming one of her little tunes to herself.
“Do dead people hum?” I asked.
“No,” said Blanche.
“Correct,” I said. The stones were hot; they seared the backs of my arms, my bare calves. Blanche stopped fidgeting. The sun boiled down. It seemed to be right above me, a brighter, hotter spot in the red behind my eyelids. The voices of insects twined around us. To the left there was the clatter of some small animal whisking from bush to bush. Being dead was like listening, I thought. Like having nothing to say, and just listening.
Half Life Page 18
