Menagerie

by Bradford Morrow

  On a class trip to the carnival, he told Albrecht that he heard a violin playing in a tent on the edge of the grounds. We didn’t believe him, but then, leaving the carnival, I saw him, a man facing the train tracks, tuning his violin.

  I watched for the cardinal with Jeremiah. I didn’t know what he wanted. The more I saw it, the more unlikely its existence seemed. Red! The audacity!

  The cardinal’s black pebble eye held all of us within it. A perfect siren set off in the middle of a white-sun day, like a wild and blessed emergency. Brilliant, imperious, cresting, black masked throat all full. It chirred and shook a fall of powder off its branch.

  Jeremiah, sentinel, marshal, held on with both hands. His body shook with the effort of not flailing and not shouting. I hoped there was a place in him that I could reach. This seemed possible, because imagining him older was easy, longing all built up into something so much more vast and uncontrollable than one ever imagined it could be. You started to see it as a large spinning phantom on the horizon, receding, your longing.

  I saw words—dysfunctional, impulsive, lazy—words he heard at home, at school, every day, entering his ears and sliding on down into his blood, stamped toxic in his cells. Words distilling his future selves. I saw him at fourteen climbing down a fire escape, clambering into a car with other boys in search of better pills. I saw him shuttled from high school to high school, then resisting his way through college in a funk of stimulants and downers. A smart, creative kid, but not a truly ambitious one. Not a closer.

  Albrecht asked the class, “Who do you want to be? What do you want to learn along the way?” Each day she wore a blazer and taught grammar from a lectern. She believed in each child’s passion and talent, in the genius in each tiny creator’s heart. “Your children will learn to look at the world with open hearts, with minds attuned to beauty,” she’d told their parents.

  “Boring!” Jeremiah rolled his head back to gaze out the window upside down. The children tittered. Later that day, I saw his assignment. He’d written, I want to be red.

  Surely, I saw him first slip a pill in his pocket that second week of January. He pretended to swallow it, then showed me the pill in his hand and I smiled and didn’t say a word. I felt true, thrilling fear passing from my neck down through me in a wave. I saw him do it the next day, and I felt less. Then each day, effortless, quick, I let him put his oranges away. He slammed open the boy’s bathroom door to flush them. Accretive, small, splinters lodging deep.

  Snow fell relentless over the bay, the lighthouse, the streets long winding into town. The children had cabin fever and couldn’t focus. They drew birds in quiz borders, on their hands. They took their lead from Jeremiah, who tracked the king’s halting flight in a composition book: the tree it landed on that day, whether it let out its full-body sonar chirp and how many times it did.

  I paged through his book. Page after page of trees with cardinals colored in as ornaments. I’d loved horses that much, once, when I was ten. But I couldn’t remember a time since when my every thought and breath were sunk into another living thing.

  When I saw our cardinal, I felt fear. I felt him catch in me, arrest me, disrupt my hard-won peace. I saw him and thought, Today a mother lost a child, and today, in some far corner of the earth, yesterday’s skirmish broke into a massacre. The king flipped, on to the next oak; a train skipped on its tracks in the middle of the night.

  Come February, Albrecht and I managed to get the children out on to the playground. Jeremiah practiced his cardinal calls at the wire fence.

  And there it came, and we held our breath, let its fist of heartsong strain and beat against our silence. Its song alternated between a searing, warning intensity and a frenetic, small chucking, back into a coppery stream of whistled chirring. Somewhere, salmon-gray wings shuddered in response. A song honed over fifty generations to earn the queen’s ear.

  It turned on its tail and looked at Jeremiah, and then it looked at me. I thought, He’s mad. His black full eye is mad. He comes from dinosaurs. He moves the winter to burn. He careened off and the snow swallowed up his place and we were left alone, listening to his fading call and somehow, there was nothing right in any of it.

  After it took off, Jeremiah crumpled against the fence. I held his hand as he got the look that said he’d throw himself on the ground in a paroxysm of violent, incoherent need. His eyes sealed up as he gulped for air. He writhed in his green ski jacket, kicked my shins, and howled.

  “No! No! No! No!” He wept.

  Albrecht swooped in, windmilling her arms. “Jeremiah!” she boomed.

  He crouched in the dirt and continued to wail quietly. He squinted, as though spotlit.

  “I hate this,” he said. His hands slipped against the fence. He looked into the trees. Leah began to weep too.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  He crawled under a bench and lay on his back on the freezing concrete. I was afraid of the wildness in me, but I wasn’t afraid of that in him. He asked me for a hug and I knelt down and held him. Counted to three, released. He smelled like dry leaves and glue.

  The teaching unit that month was on art history and the South, and the children were supposed to make face vessels. Artisan slaves in the Southern pottery trade made face vessels in their free time, built faces into jugs and pitchers. The faces were their real selves, the hidden, triumphant selves that lived through and despite all destruction.

  Albrecht slid trays of cold, heavy clay from a deep fridge. Her white silk hair was clipped straight across her forehead. The class put on their smocks weakly, early as it was that morning. Albrecht struggled to explain the task.

  “If you were a slave and this was your secret, what would you make? Does everyone understand what I mean?”

  The children cut the slabs with white plastic knives, kneaded the clay. Jeremiah frowned and picked up his chopsticks and poked holes into his slab. He dug in his thumbs deep and pressed with his full weight into the holes.

  The children were always teaching us. Make something where there was nothing. You had to take your pain and work it like the clay, press and stretch it with relentless force. You had to master your love and turn it outward, like the Mars rover, if your love was the Mars rover, smooth and clean in a new direction. Retract the legs and turn steady east and clamber forward. Soar high, wide, south, into the red stone sea.

  They held up their masks when done. A laughing man, an old-timey pilot in goggles. Their little bodies shivered behind their masks. Leah had sculpted her own face but with fuller cheeks. J. P. had made the face of Benjamin Franklin from a poster of the Great Inventors.

  Albrecht held Jeremiah’s mask under its chin and no one could say a thing, it was so real, its cheeks and brows and lips shaped around a grotesque happiness. Albrecht looked delighted and disturbed that Jeremiah had it in him, to make such an awful thing. The ropes of eyebrows and lips had been massaged into the flesh of the face. The eyes were human.

  A shattered mug, the small bookshelf overturned, Julian with a pink slap stripe across the nose and out the window we could see Jeremiah running past the swings. I watched him watching the trees, his eyes separating and scanning each leaf, his small whorl ears combing the whole aviary’s calls, pinpointing, seeing his bird at the moment it made itself known. The first nomad who peeled off the group in search of water and food had the same restless eye gene.

  I was in over my head and I couldn’t tell a soul. On our hall walks, I pleaded with Jeremiah to take all his pills but he said no.

  His mother didn’t arrive one afternoon and I had to walk him home. Their town house had fig trees in a front garden sunk beneath high walls.

  The front red door was open, and Jeremiah pushed his way in before I could speak. The kitchen was decorative and unused. In the narrow, dark living room, a cleaning lady had her back to me as she vacuumed with headphones on. The air was thick with dust.

  I walked after his sound, up the narrow stairs. He knelt before a television in a s
mall room.

  In a large workroom filled with drafting tables and shelves, Carolina looked up at me. She had a phone in one hand. She waggled the other hand by her temple.

  “You brought Jeremiah?”

  “He’s in the next room.” I waited for her to speak. She looked back down at the phone.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I was calling the school. I need to come in to talk about him. I’m taking him to a new doctor tomorrow. We have to try and get this figured out.”

  I wondered if Carolina wasn’t on something. She seemed to be unwilling to get up from the chair. As I left the house, I turned to see Jeremiah leaning in a window, watching me go. These were other people’s lives, their families, their unhappiness, not mine.

  They were jumping because he was jumping and then he began to dance and punch the air, seized by a hundred small demons peeling him in every direction, and as he leapt they leapt in time, the air filling with quivering, precious bodies. Are they possessed, Albrecht asked, the floor shaking, and they laughed, whipped their heads about to see each other’s faces.

  Then he was running down the hall and out of the double doors of the school. He stepped up on a bench, caught a foot in the fence, and lifted himself over into the woods. Once his foot hit the ground, he shifted gears into a run.

  Out in the drifts, the white burning my eyes. My body twisted as I ran through the knee-high snow. I scanned the dark above for the legionary’s crest. And there, a riot exploding through the cold, across the path that Jeremiah had cleared. He lit low, filled with force, swept back across. No rest, no cover, weaving higher up toward his inversion, his natural law, his sandy wife. I’d never seen her before. Her tail and wings had been dipped in his color then dried to orange rust.

  We were alone in the woods, running, Jeremiah’s green jacket and hysterical laughter just out of reach. I had to tell them what I’d let happen, and I’d probably be fired. Maybe they already knew. I felt Carolina, Albrecht, and the principal watching us, receding, from behind the glass.

  Jeremiah whooped and bounded. The school was out of sight. He followed after a spatter, a sound, a burst. I felt a violent, sudden, and pure joy slice my heart in half, a joy that said, Marry the siren, marry my life to emergency. I saw him fall in the snow and I heard him laughing.

  The Taxidermist

  Craig Eklund

  THERE ONCE WAS A YOUNG MAN who, not one week past his twenty-second birthday, inherited a tremendous fortune and the control of a vast business empire, only to liquidate, before the market’s closing bell the day of his father’s death, every last asset and relinquish executive rights and responsibilities, all in order to pursue what he referred to only as his true calling, by which he meant, so it was to turn out, taxidermy. Years passed, however, before anyone came to know that, for even as he cashed out and handed over the reins, he said nothing more about the nature of his plans, and when the process was complete and all ties were definitively cut, he vanished without warning. Later, it was alleged that this disappearance was the first charge of his calling: to enter into the secret of leave-taking.

  An extensive and thoroughgoing investigation was set in motion at the word that he’d gone missing—he was, after all, the scion of an old, powerful family. The only apparent trace was an empty boat dock in the Cayman Islands. After several months, the investigators had discovered no further leads and so, amid uncertainty and indecision, they pronounced him dead at sea. The word “suicide” was not used, but he had been, everyone confessed, a peculiar and withdrawn young man, nothing like his father, and who could account for the motives and actions of such an anomalous character? Four years later, he came back to life. The Associated Press reported that an island had been bought in his name with funds the official inquiry had been unable to account for. It was a frozen hunk of rock and lichens on the northern fringe of Canada’s Northwest Passages. Needless to say, the news was received as a fantastic surprise and on its heels came headlines announcing the launch of a fleet of bulk freighters. Heaped with cranes and trucks, massive quantities of concrete and steel, and a wealth of cutting-edge synthetic materials, they forged up the frozen straits and closed in on this crest of earth breaking the sea’s frosty surface. Construction was under way.

  The enterprise was prodigious, an undertaking of regal ambition by any standard, but what the blueprint drew up was more bunker than pleasure dome. The greater part of the island was given over to the main building, an enormous hermetic structure with a concrete shell designed to endure the fiercest cold and the most extreme storm conditions (weather patterns having become, by this point in time, dangerously unpredictable). A desalination facility and a small hydroelectric plant were constructed on the island’s eastern face. A dock was fashioned along the bay that inscribed the northern coast and the seafloor was drilled, blasted, and dredged to prevent glaciers from coming aground (the Northwest Passages being, at this point in time, known for a great deal of such traffic). The interior of the main building meanwhile was divided into a dozen showrooms, a large workroom, and a small wing of living quarters. The showrooms were immense and featured rows of different-sized risers illuminated by spotlights arranged in tracts across the ceiling. The workroom was too manifold in character to bespeak any coherent function. The living quarters were spartan. Finally, in a large back room of the domestic wing, a military-grade massively parallel supercomputer was installed—no one knew yet to what end, of course. In fact, at this point, no one knew what he was up to with any of this, for the strangest thing was that mid this commotion, which had all the makings of myth and legend, the young man himself was nowhere to be seen.

  They said that he was insane. That he was a megalomaniac, a would-be dictator, a cult leader without a cult. A one-man conspiracy. One of history’s great madmen taking shape. They attributed to him psychological disorders and sexual deviancies of every stripe. They accused him of crimes of every color. They said that the compound was fortified, that he was declaring war on the civilized world. They said that his plan was to let the place sink (sea levels having risen, around this point in time, beyond the mark of mere threat), that he intended to found a new Atlantis and bide the times below the current. They said that it was a giant nuclear fallout shelter, that he knew of some unknown catastrophe to come. They said it all, even that he was still dead. But in the end, the only thing they were right about was what he called it: the Linnaeum.

  Family and friends had no contact with him. As it happened, they would never hear from him again. In light of his family’s history, authorities of several sorts, not to mention many an influential private faction, were more than a little suspicious of his designs, but all their means came to no avail: He was nowhere to be found and his aims were just as concealed. What’s more, there were in the works measures to secure this inaccessibility once and for all. Given the status of the surrounding waters as an international shipping passageway, plus the fact that the island was now a territorially independent entity with a net wealth that commanded no small respect, the possibility arose that the Linnaeum might be granted a technical form of de jure statehood with corresponding rights of sovereignty. His lawyers had begun pushing the case through international bureaucracies even as the foundations were being laid.

  All of which is to say that he was in every way out of reach. The details and schematics of the project came trickling back with the construction workers, but nothing of its meaning and purpose, and only bare rumor about the author himself. Some believed that they’d espied him—a questionable presence on the outskirts of the work site, a figure for whom no one could account wandering about the half-finished halls—but none could be sure of it. The person in question certainly had none of the magnetism that (if it was him) had distinguished his father in his worldly heyday. Details were spare and vague and widely inconsistent, but what was relatively constant story to story was a sort of gradual awareness, as if he’d come to appearance without noise, without entrance, as if he’d always been diff
used throughout it all but only now condensed and materialized (these are more or less their actual words). The world at large wanted to bleed him of a thousand outrageous confessions and what it got instead was a glance at a blurry snapshot of a shadow.

  While these accounts teased the inflamed public, the construction entered its final stages. The pace was astonishing. With each passing week, walls were sealed off and systems powered on, and as each phase drew to a close, another band of workers shipped off. Day by day, the hallways emptied and hushed. It was only when the last crew had begun loading and battening down their equipment for departure that a ship charged with supplies arrived, bearing also the permanent staff. The Linnaeum was to be maintained by these dozen men and women: maintenance people and technicians of diverse specialties, a janitor, two housekeepers, a physician, and a chef. They came forged under every known climate, hammered out by every conceivable history. They were drawn by lavish salaries and undeterred by the clause in the contract that forbade any contact with the outside world for the entire term of employment. Naturally, they would all turn out to be cagey and reticent loners, but, whatever their motives, they were amenable to the conditions and fit for the task. Theirs are the first definitive eyewitness accounts. He stood on the pier as the ship berthed.

  I was one among them that day, one who had willingly severed all connection to the world (for reasons I would no sooner divulge than any of them), one who had yoked himself to this strange and secret undertaking (for a considerable fee), and I saw him there, standing on the pier, blank and impassive, his gray suit vexed by the wind, and I was distinctly unimpressed. By all the noise that had run the daily round through every channel, journal, and website, by all the gravity and diligence and secrecy that had governed my hiring, I’d been led to believe in something more. Neither I nor any of my shipmates knew the purpose of this monumental endeavor, but there was an epic promise in it all that seemed to say that the spirit of our age had taken body out of the fog and haze and scattered passing hours and come to shape right here in this remote latitude. Unknown perhaps even to myself, I’d imagined I would now look it in the eye and call it to account. But the hope slipped through my fingers when I disembarked and finally came upon the figure on the shore.