Among the Wonderful (24 page)

He moved a few feet away and sat on the grass. He watched the buck. He thought about his dream.
This
is what happened to Celia, not the other. Her body rotted away. She was absorbed into the earth and gave sustenance to insects. Guillaudeu considered these facts for a long while, and when he did not become angry or afraid, he moved on.

He must have walked more easterly than he thought, because by midafternoon Guillaudeu came to the river and now he walked along the edge of a great salt marsh. He observed the spiral shells of snails moored to blades of cordgrass. The brown mud was pocked with bubbles, and along its sulfurous surface scuttled small armored creatures. Whether they were crabs, sea beetles, lobsters, or scorpions, Guillaudeu had no clue, but he welcomed his ignorance on the matter and enjoyed the sight of two sailboats scudding northward in the distance. He spotted a great egret,
Casmerodius albus
, not twenty feet from him. With one leg poised out of water, the white bird arched its long neck forward and from it the great yellow knife of the bill was aimed and ready. The bird’s head inched minutely closer to the surface of the creek, and Guillaudeu sensed its prey approaching. The air tightened. Guillaudeu held his breath and the world hung in suspension for two long moments. Suddenly the bird had a slim fish in its bill and Guillaudeu shouted, “Hurrah!” With a languid movement, the egret then flapped itself into the sky and away.

When Guillaudeu turned to go, he faced a well-used sandy track angling to the northwest. He’d been in the wilderness most of the day and hesitated to join up with civilization just yet, but the other option would require him to wade through the salt marsh, so he climbed onto the road.

As soon as he saw the hamlet with its small wooden houses clustered around the intersection of two tracks and the sign welcoming him to Pension’s Creek, Guillaudeu’s hunger became very intense. He had gnawed the last of the sausage early that morning and all that remained of the bread were scattered crumbs at the bottom of his satchel. He had drunk from a creek and not thought much more about food until he saw the well-fed villagers going about their day.

Shall I pass as quickly through town as I can, or shall I knock on a door, any door, and beg for food? He was incredulous even to be contemplating it, but this was real hunger, something he hadn’t endured since he was a boy. He passed one house after another, feeling a bit dizzy and unsure how, exactly, to go about asking for help. This was, after all, a voluntary circumstance. He passed a mercantile bustling with activity and a building with boarded-up windows. From the façade of the next building hung a whitewashed sign:
ZETETIC SOCIETY AND MUSEUM
. Museum? He’d landed at a museum.

He walked into the dim interior, brushing crumbs of drying mud and flakes of leaves off his jacket. A pale boy in a coat whose sleeves were much too short stood behind a wooden counter.

“Is the museum open?” Guillaudeu asked uncertainly.

“Well.” The boy cleared his throat. He couldn’t have been older than sixteen. He examined Guillaudeu suspiciously. “Yes, it’s open.” He straightened up to his full height. “We are the largest Zetetic Society in New York.”

Guillaudeu peered beyond the boy into the shadowy room. “I’m not familiar with that particular society.”

“What! Surely you’ve read the Symmes’ Compendium?”

“I have not,” Guillaudeu admitted, looking around the room, which held several glass vitrines, paintings and maps on the walls, and an abominable specimen of
Ursus americanus
. “But whoever stuffed that black bear should be ashamed of himself. I hope it wasn’t you.”

“I am not concerned with those flea-infested specimens,” the boy explained, his hands folded in front of him. “We now
focus exclusively on the more relevant and exciting field of Inverse Cosmogony.”

“Oh?”

The boy extended his hand toward the museum’s small collection. “This exhibit honors the work of the magnificent John Symmes.” He leaned forward in his enthusiasm; his red-rimmed eyes beseeched Guillaudeu with the barely restrained fervor of a zealot. Guillaudeu stepped away.

“Symmes’ theory of a hollow earth inhabited by a more heavenly race of man guides our exhibitions and our fund-raising efforts.” The boy gestured to a tall glass jar with a few coins in it. “We are raising funds for a journey to the North Pole, so we may discover what John Symmes already knew to be true: Great portals await us, leading to new realms of lush geography and civilizations of man!”

Guillaudeu regarded the glass jar. “It appears you have enough to get your expedition partway to New York City.”

The boy bristled. “We’re well on our way, I can assure you.”

The skin of the black bear’s head had not been sufficiently attached to the manikin; it drooped obscenely, revealing the edge of the glass eye at one socket, and a blackened portion of the lower jawbone beneath the peeling gums. The beast had been intended to maintain a threatening posture, but now it seemed to recoil in horror, as if it had just seen itself in the mirror.

“Even though your museum clearly has … higher pursuits, it is these more common examples of fauna that will lure newcomers into your establishment.” Guillaudeu gestured to the bear and spoke as gently as he could. He’d formed a strategy. “It takes something familiar to bring them in. But once they are inside, they will encounter Symmes’ theory and undoubtedly lend their support to your worthy expedition. Still, this bear will not attract anyone in its current state. Just look at it.”

The boy obliged, tilting his head and frowning. “It is rather tattered.”

“How will anyone take you seriously with this atrocity on your premises?” He paused for dramatic effect. “I can fix the bear’s major failings in one hour.” Guillaudeu finished with a flourish worthy of Barnum: “For I am a taxidermist.”

The boy considered this for a moment, and then contemplated the glass jar on the counter.

“I couldn’t pay you.”

“A meal would be quite satisfactory.”

The boy took him out to a barn behind the museum to look for tools. It was his uncle’s museum, he finally revealed. Until that soul had died, just three months earlier, the collection illustrated the diversity and color of the New York Island flora and fauna. But the boy had moved most of that small collection into the barn to make way for Symmes.

The former proprietor had been an amateur taxidermist, at best. His tools were meager and of poor quality. But Guillaudeu still managed to find some decent glue that hadn’t solidified, and a few sharp tools. He even found thread and a pot of black resin to repair the loose skin and darken the gums.

The work took nearly two hours and by the time he finished, the sun was setting. The bear was repaired and the boy was ready with a plate.

Guillaudeu had never had such a feast: brined beef and pickled cabbage, a small fillet of smoked trout, a hunk of fresh bread, peeled carrots, and a mug of beer. He sank onto the front steps of the museum, dizzy with hunger and delighted with himself. He was a barterer, a man of action, a sly negotiator! He could not see the boy standing behind him in the doorway, but the boy stared at Guillaudeu as if the taxidermist were a dangerous or deranged man. Guillaudeu relished the meal like no other and, later, also felt some relief that
Ursus americanus
was restored.

Once every month for the past eighteen years Guillaudeu stayed all night at his museum to fumigate. Armed with canisters of sulfur powder and camphor, he walked slowly among the galleries, puffing and squirting, thoroughly checking
each specimen for signs of decay. The restoration of the bear, and the meal that was his reward, had temporarily banished the thought that this task was now overdue, and in his absence his own life’s work was falling to ruin.

He opened his eyes into predawn twilight. A bright orange fox,
Vulpes vulpes
, was near, stepping meticulously between blades of grass, its body taut, eyes targeting something in front of it. Even the bushy tail with its black-and-white tip was angled in an attentive curve. The small lean creature moved silently, its pointed muzzle leading it toward its breakfast. In a practiced assault, the fox arched back on its hind legs, leapt straight up in the air, and pounced into the grass. Guillaudeu sucked in his breath. The fox lifted its head, the spread wings of a sparrow caught in its jaw. The fox trotted off. Guillaudeu closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

He returned to consciousness thinking of an aviary. A hundred birds lived in what used to be Gallery Nine, on the east side of the fourth floor of the museum. Some of the cages were too crowded. There were complaints from museum visitors that it was dirty, smelly, crowded. What happens when birds don’t have the materials to make nests? He envisioned the floors of the cages lined with soiled and broken eggs, birds crashing against the glass windows, starving and panicked. Any hatchlings would be pecked to death. Eaten. Had someone fed them since he’d been gone? How long had he been gone? How many birds had died? What about the snakes? The octopus? The whale?

Exactly in the position in which he’d slept, Guillaudeu stared up through the branches at the layers of wavering green shadow. A hive. A Chinese puzzle. A steam engine.
The rogue echo of Barnum’s words returned. The place shifted and transformed under the myriad gaze of the public. A steam engine. A puzzle. The deeper you go, the less you know. The words formed an incantation that Guillaudeu also applied to his journey on foot across New York Island. Barnum’s was an endeavor that invited chaos into its design. Guillaudeu watched the fluttering leaves for a moment and then closed his eyes. Just like nature herself, he thought. No system exists that does not contain the element of the unknown, the egret’s razor beak hovering above the water, or that moment you realize your purse has been stolen and you are far from home.

The crack of a gun made him jump to his feet. Leaves fell from him. He was cold but not unrested. There had been no nightmares. He looked around, unsure from which direction the shot had been fired. He had made a nest for the night in a copse of sassafras trees. Beyond them to the west was someone’s orchard. Ahead of him northward was woods. Beyond that, he did not know.

From behind came the sounds of several men walking through tall grass, their low voices alternating in conversation. Guillaudeu stood unmoving as the flannel-jacketed trio saw him. From a rope slung over one man’s shoulder hung two foxes, still dripping blood from their mouths, their tails adorning the man’s neck like a woman’s stole. Guillaudeu raised his hand in greeting, or surrender; the men acknowledged him, he thought, and kept on walking.

After his meal with the Symmes fanatic he had stayed on the thoroughfare for a few miles until he came to a walking track veering off westward. He’d followed that between properties and through wild thickets until he found the sassafras copse. Now, as he gathered his things and started off again, his hip ached in its socket and he favored his right foot. The sole of his left shoe had thinned and the ball of his foot was bruised. He picked up a stout branch to use as a staff. He had passed beyond the margins of his known world, and in his aching muscles and stiff back he felt his age: A younger man would have traveled more quickly, observed
more, never would have had his purse stolen in the Points, he thought. But he had done it — slipped into the lifestream beyond the walls of his office. Slipped into a world of chaos, the only real world. And it had not devoured him, at least not yet.

The woods were dim and the branches around him were mostly dead, choked out of the light by the upper reaches of trees. Here was a mixture of pines and maples, sassafras and alder. A group of tiny gray birds flitted above him.

An aviary, he recalled. A real aviary was what the museum needed. All the birds out of cages living together in one big gallery. Trees could be planted. A water feature — a spring and pool of some kind — would be constructed in which they could bathe and preen. Maybe the sloth could live there, too. He wondered if anyone was feeding the beluga whale. Had the orang-outang starved to death? He looked down, watched one foot go ahead of the other. His trouser hem had frayed. The sleeves of his jacket were splattered with mud. He ran a hand across his cheek and felt bristles. An aviary where different birds lived and nested all together and could be observed by the people of New York.

When the woods thinned and then dropped entirely away he found himself standing on the skyward edge of a great escarpment hundreds of feet above a plain of waving grasses. Far below, four horses galloped, riderless, across the savanna. Almost level with him, riding the upward air currents near the rock face, soared several large birds. Hawks, probably. Too small to be vultures.

Granite outcroppings dotted the flats below and the high cliff continued northward. He walked its edge, marveling at the landscape. In the distance he saw the East River curving westward. From the other direction came the Hudson. He was looking across the Harlem plains.

He walked across the tops of granite outcroppings the size of his apartment building, heavily lichened and bearing the petroglyphic markings of water and time. He passed a boulder that had been split by a maple tree growing up through it and now lay in leaf-covered halves. He felt as if he were
walking through the ancient epochs, medieval times or even earlier. He walked until he saw a path winding down to lower ground. Following it with his eyes, it stretched all the way to a village at the edge of the Hudson. “The Spuyten Duyvil ferry,” he breathed, amazed to see something familiar in this wilderness. This ferry docked at the Christopher Street port, near the terminus of Franklin Street. He saw the moored ferry almost every day and had never given it an ounce of thought. He looked southward down the river, where several boats steamed or sailed toward the city. His heart lifted. He started down the path.

A lone woman stood at the end of the dock with a swarm of gulls banking above her.

She focused exclusively on her task, standing sturdily against the wind. She held part of a dinner roll aloft in her outstretched hand. Her olive-green shawl had come half unwrapped and one end of it fluttered behind her. She seemed not to notice. Guillaudeu walked onto the dock. River water lapped the pilings and Guillaudeu felt light, like he barely inhabited this world. Banners of sunlight on the silty water waved like the flags of Barnum’s Aerial Garden. A sailboat tacked across the Hudson and Guillaudeu watched its pilot duck when the boom came across.