Magnificence A Novel

10


When they got back she’d had too much wine—Jim had driven them home—and she collapsed on the bed, useless for sex. He kneeled at the end of the bed and took off her shoes for her, slipped off her skirt and lay down beside her as she pulled the sheet over herself, groaning.

“Ice water?” she asked, pathetically. “Please?”

“Sure,” said Jim, and heaved himself off the bed again. “I’ll brave the geriatrics.”

“Aren’t they asleep?”

“Some of them are nocturnally active.”

He didn’t come back immediately and soon she felt too dizzy lying down. To make her head stop spinning she stood up and went to the bathroom sink, where she splashed water on her face. She found some aspirin in the medicine cabinet and swallowed three tablets with tepid water drunk messily from the tap. She thought of the shaft walled in bricks, the shaft that struck right down into the ground, and now it seemed to be imbued with a mysterious and magnetic attraction . . . down into the earth, down below, into the caverns that for years had known no footfalls but her own. She thought of the stainless steel rungs of the ladder, which she had descended with care and with deliberation as though she were an explorer, a miner, a sailor on a submarine. When she descended the rungs of a ladder she had a direct, secret and linear purpose: she would open the doors. She would go down there now and open all the doors.

She expected to run into Jim on the way out of the house, take him with her down into the well. But she cruised through the empty, well-lit kitchen and did not see him, cruised out to the back, clutching her flashlight, stumbling awkwardly over pieces of ground in the dark. Still she often felt she was floating, elevated—no doubt due to the fact that she was so far from sober. Barefoot, she had to pick her way over the flagstones, not wanting to step into the cracks between them, not wanting to feel the hard nubbins of rock on the tender soles of her feet. She had never had the benefit of tough feet, never formed calluses on the balls of her feet or the back edges of the heels or the big toes.

“Never got the tough feet,” she said aloud, sloppy.

At the shaft she told herself to be extra careful, reminded herself she was loaded and this would be a perfect time to break her neck, crumpled and wasted at the bottom of a brick-lined well. She held the flashlight in her teeth—it barely fit, and biting down on it made her jaw ache—and descended with the unevenness of her own heavy breathing filling her ears. She almost lost her footing twice, her bare feet slick on the metal.

Then she was down, through the door, along the hall and into the locker room, where she turned on the light and staggered to the first bank of cabinets.

Open them, she thought, open, open, open.

The first was a gazelle, the second some kind of warthog, then a pygmy hippopotamus. In a bank of smaller boxes there was a bear’s head, a mouse, a bat labeled FLYING FOX. A kind of cat with huge ears—a serval subspecies, according to the sticker—and the head of something cow-like, almost like a longhorn but thinner, labeled HARTEBEEST. Then reptiles: a skink, a tortoise, a big boa. All the stickers had dates on them, all of the species had expired, some as far back as the early nineteenth century. A duck, an owl, a parakeet. Pigeon, starling, dove; coot, petrel, warbler.

Then she was past Africa and into Europe: a Caspian tiger, a Caucasian moose, an elk, an ibex, a lynx, a hare, a dormouse. Two lizards, a raven, a glass tray of insects labeled PERRIN’S CAVE BEETLE and TOBIAS CADDISFLY. Past Europe to Oceania: wallabies from Australia, rats, long-eared bats, one kangaroo. From New Zealand some birds—shorebirds with long, straw-thin legs, a bunch of tiny wrens, a tray of snails, a gecko. Then she was in Asia and the doors opened to a leopard, a pig, a Japanese sea lion, an ostrich. The sea lion she stopped and stared at—its brown hide faded to gold and then back, and its head, much like a seal’s, was graceful with huge black eyes and long black whiskers.

Her head was still spinning and she wished she’d brought more water. Water, water and more water—she needed it—but she couldn’t stand to retreat now. She had to open all the doors. North America next, where there were still a lot of closed cabinets—first the birds, far more of them than she’d known were lost, bright-colored tropicals, macaws and parrots and parakeets. Then reptiles, iguanas and salamanders, frogs and fish—chubs and trout and dace and shiners. The cabinets of small mammals—a shrew, a vole, a fox, a gopher, a pygmy rabbit, a skunk. Then she was throwing open the big doors to a bighorn sheep, a bison, a monk seal, a jaguar . . .

She was tired already, she realized. Too many doors. Closed and open. The old man had been far more methodical down here than he had been with the more pedestrian collection in the house above. She stood with her ears ringing, her bare feet cold against the cement floor, her eyes smarting, her thoughts muddled. She was looking back at the door she’d come in through, all the way open against the wall, and saw something protruding from behind it on the wall—a picture frame, it looked like. She crossed the room and closed the door.

It was a framed map of the basement, a floor plan with each bank of cabinets labeled by continent and taxon. South America Mammals or Asia Reptiles, for all of the continents. At the top of the plan were the black words, in old-fashioned type, GLOBAL HOLOCENE EXTINCTIONS. @ 1800–2000. At the bottom, THE LEGACY COLLECTION. A PROJECT OF HUNTERS CLUB INTERNATIONAL. But it wasn’t 2000 yet, she thought ploddingly. He had been looking forward to his completion date, but then had died before he could finish.

Upstairs was also a map somewhat like this; she had tried in vain to impose a neat order on the collection . . . the story of the auks, she thought. Of how the skins were acquired . . . the question of whether they were murdered for the sake of their own history, murdered in order to become mementos of themselves.

Why did he have to be dead? The old man was dead just like his specimens, but not as nicely preserved and she could ask him nothing. Still she wanted to know about all of this. She wanted to know where he had gotten his bestiary. She leaned in and looked at the map again: there was a piece she thought she had missed, a large square on the corner of the footprint. It appeared to be a room she hadn’t noticed, a room that maybe wasn’t here. There was no label on it. The square was blank, with only a notch in one side for a door. She turned around, orienting herself. It should be past the dodo case, she thought, the door to the room, and checked the floor plan again to make sure. If it was here at all.

She walked back, past the glass, past the yellow-brown rib cage of the bird. What if that skeleton was fake, she thought—a movie prop from a back lot somewhere or an ostrich or something—and all of this some kind of hoax? Possible. The old man was so inscrutable. In the semidarkness she could see planks propped up against the wall, two-by-fours. She reached up and moved them aside. And there it was: a thin white door in the sheetrock, unfinished. Not even a knob yet, only a hole cut near the edge, where a future knob was meant to go . . . she hooked two fingers into the hole and pulled, and the door wobbled and came off entirely. It wasn’t on hinges, even, just sitting there. She set it aside.

Black then, in front of her: a whole separate room. She took a step and fumbled inside to the left, then the right for a switch, and finally she found one. More clicking fluorescents, and she was in. She thought it was empty at first, until she noticed the walls were divided into squares—cabinets, all of them. Drawers. Square white drawers from the floors to the ceilings, like a morgue in a crime procedural, except there was no refrigeration. She assumed the drawers in morgues were refrigerated. Weren’t they? Toe tags, people’s lips blue? She’d never been to a morgue.

The drawers in this room, like the metal cabinets in the other, were unmarked on the outside. She approached the first one on her right, at eye level, with hesitation. It took her a minute, and then she pulled it open.

Bones, old-looking—maybe a chimpanzee or gorilla, something large and anthropoid, not all connected and not complete, but neatly arranged where they should be. There was only half of one leg, and the skull was far back in the drawer. She could make out a jawbone.

She didn’t want to look closely at the skull. The skull was excessive. But then—the sockets of her eyes shot with pain suddenly, her headache returning to prominence—despite herself she opened the drawer beneath: another set of similar bones.

But these had scraps of clothing on them. She saw the foot bones and the shins.

And the drawer above. Filthy, stained-looking and ancient brown bandages: the remnants of some kind of mummification process. She’d seen one long ago on exhibit, though mostly she remembered the pharaoh’s gold coffin with his headpiece of blue stripes. But this was no monarch. More reminiscent of those glassed-in scenes of Indians, old-fashioned displays from before the days of political correctness—the colonial superiority, the cruelty of patronage. Women in beaded headbands sitting and grinding corn on concave stones near a campfire, or women weaving with their papooses on their backs, a scene from a made-up history.

She looked for a label now, found she was looking, inevitably. And it was there, on the inside of the drawer’s front panel, hard to make out at first.

Haush tribeswoman. Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. Extermination, measles, smallpox. @ 1925.

The label in the middle drawer, which held a smaller skeleton, read Chono youth, T del F, Argentina. Early 20th c. The bottom drawer, with a label printed on a dot-matrix printer, as though it was more recent: Yaghan man, “Domingo,” T del F, Argentina. Measles, other diseases, prob. introduced by missionaries. @ 1960.

The headache came in waves—maybe the aspirin would dull it once it was all the way into her system. She sank down to the floor, her back against the closed drawers. Her knees were raised in front of her and she studied them. If she dropped her knees to the cold floor and her legs stuck out straight she would be a parallel set of bones . . . it made no sense, she thought: he had his club, they had their animal trophies; his club hadn’t hunted these dead people, the members of vanished tribes. It was as though the old man had changed his angle at the end of his life, suddenly. Almost—though she would never know, she thought, self-pitying—as though he had veered from his hunting trajectory, from his celebration of killing, into this plain and sad little corner. An unfinished room of people’s bones.

The room had a melancholy spareness, the end of a long fight, a battlefield desolate with the flattened—the now so modest!—remains of the dead. Above the dry winter grasses rose the pennants of friends and enemies alike, shredded and flapping in the wind.

•

Someone was saying her name; she must have nodded off. A ghost of the old man, maybe, or one of the victims in those far-off tribes, killed with measles, killed by the passion of the emissaries of Christ.

But no: it was only Jim. He was calling down from a hole in the roof of the earth. The hole in the world. He called down to her from the sky.

She got up slowly, not without some twinges of joint ache, and went through the animal room again, aware of the spectacle of their dead beauty on both sides of her as she walked, dreamily. She followed his voice toward the brick well, surrounded by the derelict loveliness. Then the half-light of the open door was behind her. She blinked and fumbled with her flashlight.

“Susan,” he was saying, insistently. “Are you down there?”

She found the switch, felt the plastic ridges under her thumb and pushed it, raising the light shakily until it captured his legs—his legs at the edge of the opening. The bottom of his shirt. He wasn’t bending down, rather he was standing. He wore pants.

Of course he wore pants. A man often did.

She liked, come to think of it, the idea of men who didn’t wear pants—Scotland men. Scottishers, Scotch. Was that what they called them? Scots, that was it. Also men in parts of Asia, including monks, possibly. And certain Arabs. They wore djellabas, for instance. Bless them, bless them, bless all those skirt-wearing men. Truthfully, the skirts looked good on them. There was nothing feminine about a skirt. Not necessarily. If more of the men, over the course of history, had worn skirts . . . but she, of course, had never been on the battlefield. She and the others of her kind were always far away—the tragedy elapsed and people like her, for much of history, remained on the sidelines. Men slew each other, they slew the animals, went slaying and slaying. Women were mostly witnesses. They were not innocent—it wasn’t that simple, not by a long shot—more like accessories to the crime, if not the principal offenders. They saw killing ravage all things beneath the sun and were the silent partner in it. You didn’t want to kill, you had no interest in killing—your very genes went against it. Possibly your hormones. Again, the molecules that governed you. But you were also far too weak to stop it. Your weakness was your crime.

Not weaker than the men, per se, just differently weak. The wanting to be liked, avoidance of conflict . . . you were profoundly and eternally guilty of this terrible weakness, this moral as well as physical weakness, the fear of being hurt, of being injured, of being embarrassed. You were crippled by the guilt of being who you were. Guilty of being yourself.

The self-help books urged you to be yourself, and yet, as it turned out, being yourself was the crime to end all crimes.

“Susan! You down there drunk? All by yourself?”

Drunk yes, but not alone.

She turned and looked back to the rectangle of light, past which the corpses lay in state. If there were ghosts here they were the ghosts of men, not of the animals, men hovering over the artifacts of their prey. They had no interest in her, none at all. Rather it was for her to be interested in them. The ghosts of men, in this case the ghosts of killers, because that was part of the atmosphere of institutions . . . a museum held, in its perfect, orderly, austere glass cases, not only the presence of the artifacts but the invisible presence of those who had hunted them, those who had dug them up or even stolen them. The unknown or the dead people—no, their desire, that was the presence that hovered there, their deep wanting, part of the sacred air.

When she was married and slept around she’d lived in the desire of men, in all that ambient wanting, where once she felt noticed. Now she lived in the aftermath of what they wanted, among the phantoms of men’s desire—not the same men, but men all the same. It was the feeling you had after a feast, the feeling that came after gluttony and was part regret over the fecklessness of the party—the wantonness, the excess. A memory of the white-draped tables, heaped high with many varieties of sugar and of flesh. The madness, the sumptuous feast.

The men gave their tragedy to everyone else—handed it out like a gift. They gave it to the mammals, the birds and the amphibians. They handed it to whole species of trees, to the oceans and the forests, where her daughter had gone; handed it to the far-flung people who had fewer possessions. Beside them, as they handed it out, stood the wives, hostesses at the gathering—arranging the tables, placing the silver and linen, the fruit and the soup tureens. So gracious, nodding and smiling. Smoothing it all.

Her little girl lived with animals now—the ones who were still alive, though the condition, of course, was fleeting. But she herself existed in a kind of permanent sculpture, a kind of monument. When it came to the animals’ bodies, or what remained of them in the mounts, you couldn’t exactly call them the dead—or at least, they were a version of the dead that had, in the end, almost nothing to do with who or what the animals once had been. She would tell Jim, though his interest in taxidermy was limited. To say the least. She would reach out to him. I love you, Jim. And I was a slut back then but I loved my husband too. Now he’s gone—gone into other molecules. The binding is released, the molecules have not held. The molecules let him go. Now I’m with you, but I’m also with him and I always will be. I’m staying with both of you. We are the memory of others, we are the memory of ourselves.

“No, no, not by myself at all,” she called, though her voice was a mumble.

Jim! The dead have sent their bodies down to be with us—the ones with fur, the ones with skin, the ones with scales and hides and feathers. Some of them even have skeletons. They’re more beautiful than we are—golden, orange, an iridescent green, scarlet, the blue of tropical water, the blue of skies, the blue of violets. Lions and peacocks, auks and bears. The deep brown of comfort and hibernation. White like the snow. Their faces are so different, as different from each other as the faces of people are. But they’re not people and they never were; the people tracked them and killed them, then flayed off the skins. I was here the whole time, forgetting everything beyond my field of view. On rare occasions I caught sight of them, but still I never moved.

Jim, listen. I’m so drunk, I’m so drunk. Once God glorified us and made us burst with love—but love of ourselves, in most cases, is all that it turned out to be. And then our human sacrifice. Our sacrifice of everything. But museums are capacious, they can contain both God and molecules, even our passion for ourselves that brought smallpox to baby Indians. I never knew the old man and I never knew his friends; all I knew was keys moving on a piano, a liver-spotted hand and maybe a croquet mallet. We’ll keep the stuffed animals, OK Jim? I know you don’t like them but indulge me. We’ll have them here with us, figures from history, figures that once roamed beyond Pasadena, beyond Palos Verdes, where your rich ex-wife lives whom you will always love. Beyond the inland empire. Both of us love the gone ones, you and I, we live with them still, we always will, but Jim I welcome it. And I don’t care who made all this, Jehovah or Darwin—Jim? I really don’t give a f*ck. My point is, it’ll never come back again.

I’ll look at them every day, I’ll touch them with my hands, I’ll listen as they make no sounds, to the ringing stretch of their silence. I’ll look at their details for as long as I live—the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails. I even like their eyes, made out of colored glass to look like the real ones. I’ll walk through the rooms and you can come with me. Here’s our ticket; now let’s go in. Let’s walk along the velvet rope and never touch the specimens. Stay with me, Jim. There’s still some time. We’ll keep each other company. Stay in these rooms for years and years, live on forever in a glorious museum.