Menagerie

by Bradford Morrow

  With his hands held behind his back, he stood there before us, stock-still, unduly inanimate, rooted in the ground. Despite his poise, there was something fleeting and evasive about him, as if he wavered at the threshold of an unseen door. He appeared older than his years—that look of the youthfully ancient. His build was not small, his stature not short, but he seemed nevertheless dried and shrunken, a mere shaving of his old man. I wondered that all the grandeur of his robber-baron stock should be pruned to that of a mere bookkeeper. A minute or so passed before I was able to discern his voice amid the wind and waters and the din of construction cargo rumbling down the docks. We had been debriefed before departure and knew already what was required of us in our particular capacities, and so he held now to the task at hand, pronouncing not a word on the greater mission (a silence that he would maintain throughout our stay, with, to my knowledge, only two notable exceptions). He led us to our quarters, had us leave our suitcases in our rooms, and then put us to work unloading the boat. He was no more to be seen for the remainder of the day. And so we unpacked the cargo hold and stacked the huge pantries of our new home with crates of canned and dried goods, we piled the freezer with frozen meat and vegetables, we loaded the maintenance closets with tools and spare parts, we charged the infirmary with medicine and first-aid supplies. In short, we equipped the Linnaeum with all the provisions several lifetimes under these churning skies might call for. And as we stocked this ample storehouse, we could only wonder—silently, to ourselves—what was stashed there already in that secret cache we couldn’t touch, what nameless future was held in waiting for us. The last boat, carrying the last construction crew, set off before our work was done.

  It must be understood that the presence of these twelve men and women would hardly touch him: He was as good as alone with his art. For shortly it would come to light that he had, during his absence, answered his mysterious calling. Of course, no one knew where he had gone, where he had trained. Above all, no one knew why he had needed to disappear in the first place. And yet rumors do spread, even among the most circumspect souls. Over the years, I heard half a dozen accounts of his absence and training. They said he was a natural, entirely unschooled, that he’d worked a magnificent collection for an oil magnate in Abu Dhabi without ever trying his hand before. They said he’d trained with a renegade firm in the jungles of India, mounting specimens for throwback shikaris among the world elite. They said he’d passed the first two years as a poacher in Africa, living on the other side of the art, and then had disappeared again—yes, disappeared from his disappearance—to master the skills proper to his vocation. These stories ran their course and fell back into silence. But it was not without effect: The point in time came when we no longer referred to him by name but only and always as the Taxidermist.

  He was a craftsman of a caliber never before seen. And also a purist of unique rigor, such that he devoted himself to a practice limited to the most final of mortal things. He was to be an artist of extinction, to put his hand only to the last instance of any given animal—the last blue-throated macaw, the last Mediterranean monk seal, the last (his ambitions were even so high) Siberian tiger anywhere in the world. It was a career with lucrative promise, to be sure, but time would reveal that he was to be the collector as well and his intention was to own—at ruinous cost, we can only imagine—every piece he was ever to touch. The Linnaeum was his workshop and gallery.

  For a long time, this was all beyond the ken of the outside world and even within the Linnaeum dimly reckoned at best. On both sides, I kept his intentions as concealed as circumstances would allow. That is to say: I was the gatekeeper between the Taxidermist and the world. Shortly after the completion of construction, the supercomputer was booted up. It would be the only continuous link between the Linnaeum and the outside. It consisted of one hundred and twenty thousand processors arranged in thirty-six racks that subdivided the room into a sort of labyrinth, at the center of which was the interface. The computer was designed for one purpose alone: to collect an un-thinkably large set of data from every corner of the information galaxy in order to determine the precise whereabouts of every animal of every species everywhere on the planet every second of the day. It was to be an all-knowing eye over the entire faunal world. The end-game was to pinpoint exactly when and exactly where the last of any given species—from the African elephant to the Old World sparrow—would fall. It was astonishingly effective. I know because I was the information technician at the Linnaeum. If I claim a unique insight into the Taxidermist’s fate and ours, it is not without reason. I presided over the frontier across which he and the world conducted their peculiar commerce.

  My main duties were servicing the hardware and maintaining the server but at first my most urgent responsibility was to erase his tracks. No small part of his online activity contravened whole volumes’ worth of international cyber laws. My task was exacting and I avow that I fulfilled it as well as could be expected. Of course, the operation was enormous and unwieldy, and as it gathered speed, it made noise in a hundred different quarters at a time. It is, however, only in the nature of things that once his part (lawful or not) in the economic system was clarified, legal interest simply and definitively ceased. Even in the media, he was eventually downgraded from a sensational danger to an eccentric billionaire recluse, a crackpot of the familiar Howard Hughes stamp.

  Needless to say, even to the information technician he was not going to willingly disclose this magnificent machine’s purpose. He spoke to me no more than to any of the others—that is to say: almost never. He knew his way around advanced information systems and ran the program itself entirely on his own. My office was appended to the main computer room and my concern limited to technical support and maintenance. And so even for me, it came to full light only after the first hit. Those initial few weeks, the Taxidermist could be found sitting at the interface twenty out of any twenty-four hours, but I stepped inside only at points of scheduled service or when the hardware called for repair. I soon learned that knocking or otherwise announcing my presence was useless and simply entered and tended to whichever rack was in need. He would say nothing. I generally couldn’t tell for sure whether he even knew I was there. I would glance at him from time to time, around the corner of a cabinet, through the vacancies of removed blades. I would study him amid the steady gale of the cooling fans, from aboard the silent train of my own thoughts. He was inscrutable and I read there only my own empty conjectures. From my office, I was aware when he was online and able to observe the passage of incoming and outgoing information, but nothing of greater substance was within my reach. I could only follow an electrical trace that never lit upon any real sense and so I had no notion whatsoever what it all meant. It was from this distance then that I watched him home in on his first target and saw everything converge at a precise longitude and latitude of cyberspace—steadily, in tightening gyres, the Taxidermist, zeroing in. And when he struck, it was at last revealed. The first specimen. A California condor. The final California condor. The California condor.

  It died in a zoo in Beijing (of all places) and touched ground at a private airport in Nunavut eighteen hours later, from where it struck off up the straits stashed away in the hold of a commercial fishing trawler. Thick clouds clenched over the sky as the vessel plied its way into the bay on the island’s northern face. The boat docked and the crew rolled a small freezer down the gangway and onto the jetty. He had me meet them there. It was the middle of the night and all the others were asleep. I’m sure he suspected that I was more or less onto him already and therefore the logical accomplice, but perhaps he also had reasons for counting on my discretion. After all, I was under no illusions about the vetting I’d been put through before being hired. I led them up the path. He waited outside too, at a distance, beside the building, and did not intercept us as we passed up the walkway, but rather timed his approach so as to slip into our wake. It was as if the clouds had snuck in behind us through the open door. It occur
red to me that this was the first outside glimpse into the Linnaeum since its completion and I knew how the crew saw it: enormous and empty, hollow as a bell. They hauled the freezer into the workroom. From the doorway, he spoke then, directing them to set it next to a large table. And then he thanked them. That was all. The door closed behind us and they set off into the choppy seas. The Taxidermist was left alone with his first piece.

  The workroom, which, with its assortment of odd tools, exotic materials, and extraordinary equipment, had been the knottiest puzzle of all, was now revealed to be a state-of-the-art taxidermic factory. It was endowed to take on any imaginable specimen. This was in line with his singular practice, for at any moment he might find himself in need of any given utensil, chemical, or component, only to use it nevermore. That is: Extinction being a one-shot deal, he would not ever work the same animal twice and therefore every specimen would arrive with new demands. The variety was to be perfect, each individual figure unique. As a rule, taxidermy is a discipline that calls for steadfast patience and variegated skill. It’s at once a craft, an art, and a science. Biology, chemistry, surgery, drafting, designing, modeling, molding, sculpting, welding, even whittling are all within its domain. I don’t claim any expertise in these matters, but I had occasion to know firsthand the work of the world’s greatest. I can say that the secret is in the pose. The word “taxidermy” (like the word “taxonomy”) derives from the Greek “taxis,” which we can translate only inadequately as “arrangement.” More telling is how the term has been adopted by various fields. In architecture, taxis is the due proportion of ordonnance. In rhetoric, it is the systematic organization of language into a figure of speech. In biology, it is a life-form’s response to a directional stimulus. It’s a fecund word, and an elusive one, comprehending ideas of order, of sense, intention, and figuration, and even of the orientation of vital energies—the very shape, meaning, and purpose of life. And so it is in the art of taxidermy that the word fulfills the deepest demands of its etymology. In the taxis of the work—in, that is, the pose—order and meaning are brought to being. The pose is what transforms carrion into art. It’s what brings the dead back to lifeless life.

  Having defrosted the California condor and drained its blood, the Taxidermist selected a blade from his collection of a hundred-odd knives and skinned the bird. He then cleaned the pelt, salted it, and set it to dry on a frame. Done properly, these procedures are less straightforward than they sound. The mask requires particular delicacy in such a species and plumage is a tricky matter in and of itself. But these are questions of technique and it was only after the skin was cured that the art truly came into its own. It was only then that the Taxidermist conceived the pose—he read it, in fact, read it there in the hollowed-out pelt. What we have next comes at secondhand (I had little business in the workroom, after all), imparted by hushed voices over the dinner table: a series of still images, mental photographs taken by the maids, the janitor, snapshots of the Taxidermist under a surgical lamp, hunched over the condor’s skin—the same image with every new memory, picture to picture a remarkable uniformity. For a week straight, each of the half dozen or so glimpses the day brought found him hunched and brooding over it. He must have examined every square centimeter a thousand times over. They caught him running his fingertips lightly across the surface or with his face drawn down until it grazed the plumes. He came at last to know the lay of every single quill. And he read it there—in the contours, in the fold of the feathers—he read the secret traces in the tissue, the life that was, the channels through which it once ran. He read the pose.

  And then he brought it to life in clay and aluminum alloy. The workroom was furnished with a sculpting studio, a carpentry shop, a blacksmith’s blast furnace, and a laboratory where he could cook up all brands of synthetic molds and casts. He called the elements to shape by these many names and dressed them in the skin that nature had shucked forever away. Again, I am no expert, but a masterpiece speaks for itself. It was as if the creature’s every fiber had been restrung and set a-thrum again. It was sculpted out of the stuff of time, a span of evolution packed down into the very earth that had pared it to form over the millennia. Nothing less than death made quick. The upper body lunges forward. The wings curl off the shoulders, digging the gleaming remiges into the air. The neck plunges down at a sharp angle. It seems to want to stab its hooked beak into the ground, to gash and score the dirt and leave its ragged mark. The perfect image of itself. The condor’s ankle was tagged and the Taxidermist wrote there in his own hand:

  Species: Gymnogyps californianus

  Place of Extinction: Beijing Zoo, Xicheng District, China

  Time of Extinction: 5:28 a.m., December 13, 2--7.

  He mounted it on a low riser in one of the largest showrooms, in the exact center of the huge, vacant space. The spotlight above was turned on and beamed down on it: a scavenger alone with its own carcass.

  Of course it was only the first of innumerable pieces. The system strengthened with use and, in due course, a steady stream of specimens began to flow into the Linnaeum (for the times, to be sure, were to amply provide). His days and nights were given over more and more to the workroom—with each new arrival, new techniques, new tools, new chemicals, and new materials. Invariably, the animals died in zoos, drew their final breaths in foreign air. It turned out that he had dozens of cryogenic freezers just like the one the condor had been delivered in stashed away all across the globe. When the moment came, a freezer would be shipped in from the nearest depot to be packed with the corpse and then hustled out of cities and towns, through airports and down loading docks, across oceans and continents. Once arrived in the Linnaeum, the animals were grouped, showroom by showroom, in their rightful ecosystems, where each species assumed its position in line and stood in its place on its own respective square riser. The enormous, empty spaces filled with these empty presences. At any given moment, the Taxidermist had dozens of projects in development at once, all in different stages. I’d step outside to take in some fresh air and find myself watching a crane hoist off the deck of a freighter a truck-sized freezer containing the Asiatic buffalo. I’d glance into the workroom and see the island fox being sponged down in carbolic acid, the woodland caribou pickled in a tank, the Mona ground iguana tanned in a tub of alum. I gazed on once as he toiled several long hours pasting the Apache trout onto its manikin. I caught him in a moment of acute concentration adding the final touches of enamel paint to the Himalayan wolf’s eyes. I observed the very curious spectacle of the meticulous installation, on a tall, thin riser in the Saline Wetlands Showroom, of the Salt Creek tiger beetle. Without ever setting foot off the island, I stood before creatures rarer and more outlandish than I’d ever dreamed. All of the earth’s homelands, in time’s wholesale clearing, emptied out here where every last creeping beast after its kind was transfigured into its own likeness.

  Daily life inside this mute zoo settled into a surreal normality. Among the staff, an unvoiced accord maintained a certain distance between us all. We spoke together, of course. We played cards on Friday nights in the Alpine Ecosystem Showroom. We were cordial and familiar. Friendly even—but never friends, or so it was for most of us anyway. We kept to ourselves and did our jobs. And so time passed with a monkish uniformity. The selfsame day stretched into weeks, months, and then years. And all the time, at the edges of our willful enclosure, we were watched by the glassy eyes of yesteryear, and while we could hold them at bay, the Taxidermist lived squarely among them. I could hardly imagine such an existence: the gruesome dreariness, the stillness and silence that sucked at your vital reserves. It was an art of grisly magnificence and it could be borne for only so long, face-to-face.

  Afterward, I surmised that this unrelieved strain was what brought it about (something I wouldn’t understand until later would have me reconsider), but the first shake-up came as a complete shock. Early one July morning, a fleet of ships broke the iron horizon. He was nowhere to be found and we could only con
clude we were finally being invaded, so, after some debate, a white flag was drawn up in front of the compound. It turned out that the ships were loaded with construction equipment. Straightaway they began knocking down walls on the southern face of the building.

  He did not show himself until the third day. He called the entire staff before him. We gathered outside by the dock, in the same place where upon our arrival he’d first addressed us all as a group—which was the only time, until now, he had ever addressed us all as a group. A thin veil of cirrus clouds was cast over the sky and the sun seemed impossibly far away. He stood there once more, stock-still, hands behind his back. We had aged, all of us, but it was only then that I realized how completely the Taxidermist had shed his youth, how fully he had assumed the biding ancientness that had so long hung about him. He began to speak. He told us that a new wing was being added to the Linnaeum in order to reflect what he referred to as the new world. He explained that climatic conditions across all of the planet’s ecosystems had come to fluctuate so drastically that all distinctions had been rendered untenable. Nowhere did there remain the environmental stability necessary to characterize and differentiate regions. And as chaos metastasized and installed its homogeneity of absolute instability, the global climate and the population dependent on it came now to constitute a single enormous new ecosystem. He called it the Warmed World. He anticipated skepticism and rejoined that the island was set within an anomalous pocket of relatively constant cold, an atmospheric concentration of low temperature created by the very heat that was tightening around it like a vise. He was totally calm. It would have been far less disquieting had he been raving and foaming at the mouth. He said that the earth had been reduced to one one-hundredth of its former species. He said that those that remained, the last survivors, would all end up here, in this immense new hall. Absolute zero, he said, was within sight. All in all, it was more than he’d said these many years combined and the first time he had ever uttered a word touching his true concerns. His voice grew hoarse as he spoke and finally slipped into a rasp so soft I doubt any of us heard his closing words.