Among the Wonderful (31 page)

He stuffed the first handfuls of chopped cotton and preserving powder into the arms of the sloth. Hours had passed. He lit a lamp, his mind now racing ahead to the various people he wanted to contact, the scientific circles he must infiltrate, the new knowledge he must seek out and gather in order to ascend to his new position as true keeper of animals. It did not matter that when he’d returned to the museum after his walk across New York Island, full of explanations and justifications for his absence, he found that no one had even noticed he’d left, not even William the ticket-man. It did not matter that the museum flowed swiftly around him, shape-shifting all the time to accommodate the public’s fickle and shortsighted fancies. He recognized why he was here and he went ahead with his plans.

He did not finish mounting the sloth until well after the museum’s last performance had ended and the trickle of footsteps outside his door had ebbed to nothing. He closed
the incisions with catgut and secured two black glass eyes in place. He painted over the paw pads and nose with gum arabic and arsenical powder. He had arranged the specimen to appear as he had first seen the creature, sitting like a child with its arms around its knees. During this final hour of preparation, Guillaudeu wondered where in the collection the sloth belonged. Certainly not among the rodents or the monkeys. He lifted the specimen into his arms.

Guillaudeu’s footsteps echoed as he walked up the marble stairway. He paused at the top to observe moonlight saturating the air. It had been a long time since he’d walked the empty halls, absorbing the pale friction that seemed to fill the place to bursting. He walked slowly through the portrait gallery. Any confusion about where to put the sloth dissolved as he realized the creature had already established its true place in the collection.

Guillaudeu’s hands were sore and stained, and the bloodied tools in his office attested to the creature’s transformation from corpse to sculpted impersonation of life. Essentially, though, the animal’s role in the museum remained the same. Aware that he was participating in his first act of deception, Guillaudeu returned the specimen to its pergola, under the sign marked
SLOWEST CREATURE ON EARTH
.

Guillaudeu finished clearing off the shelves in his office, and now he was terrified. He had removed a dozen dusty specimens that had lived in the shelves for as long as he could remember. As he did it he felt relief, catharsis, even. He had packed away the books he hadn’t touched in years. He was overcome by the need to get rid of more, more than he’d planned. But now it was done; his volumes lay in crates and boxes, and the old moth-gnawed robin, his very first experiment in taxidermy, lay hidden inside a cotton handkerchief to be taken home. Instead of satisfaction, Guillaudeu felt very old and very scared. It had taken a lifetime to accumulate what he had discarded in an hour. What time did he have left? Suddenly the thought of dying with empty shelves in his office was the most terrible thing he could imagine. He fought the urge to put everything back where it had been. Instead, he turned to the thick-leaved logbook he’d requested. It was filled with entries made by the two boys whose job, up until today, was to feed the animals. Guillaudeu had taken matters into his own hands, reappointing the boys to cleaning cages and giving himself the primary duties of caring for the animals. The specter of the sloth’s light body drifting to the floor in a cascade of brittle hair haunted him and strengthened his resolve that no other animal would come to such an end.

The logbook reeked of fish. Each page held a list of animals, divided by floor, with a description of the type and
quantity of food given, space for a checkmark beside
MORNING
and
AFTERNOON
to indicate the food had been delivered, and a margin for any general observations.

Guillaudeu looked over the entries. The longspurs were building a nest in a potted myrtle. Most of the fish, too, continued to thrive. There was some concern over the seahorses disappearing. Guillaudeu had assumed cannibalism was the cause, and he had increased their daily dried shrimp allotment. No one understood why they kept disappearing until one of the night custodians, sweeping the aquarium galleries, swore he saw the octopus creeping across the floor, leaving a wet trail from the seahorse vitrine. It returned to its tank, squeezing through the inch-wide opening at the top.

But it was the orang-outang that continued to be the most worrisome problem in Barnum’s menagerie. The animal had been given two servings of fruit and vegetables per day, taken straight from the restaurant kitchen. Despite this special treatment, however, the orang-outang remained the only animal in the logbook with a regular commentary scribbled in the margins:
Food untouched. No fruit eaten. Would not eat. Only water gone. Would not eat. Did not move
. It surprised Guillaudeu that the creature was still alive. He had found illustrations in his natural history volumes, but no useful information about the small ape, and it was not without a certain dread that he finally decided to go up to the third floor to see the animal.

He passed Mr. Archer on his way out and made his best effort to avoid eye contact as the ad man raised his head from his newspaper.

“I can’t believe what I’m reading here. It’s —”

Guillaudeu simply raised a hand as he passed, and Mr. Archer offered no further comment.

The mermaid had vanished from the museum when her monthlong reign in the spotlight ended. In her place sat a heavy, gently swaying woman with closed eyes and draped in bejeweled scarves. Dropping a coin in Valkyria’s jar would dramatically awaken her to the task of shuffling a stack of thick cards, from which she would draw out destinies.

A troupe of Swiss bell ringers had taken the place of the Italian acrobats, and the daily matinee had changed to
A Ceremonial Display of a Vanishing Indian Culture
. Guillaudeu took comfort in the immutable marble stairway under his feet, and the familiar stretches of oak floor and plaster walls that he’d always known. These different entertainments were simply changing wind patterns on the surface of the ocean. He continued up to the third floor.

The orang-outang lived in a small gallery where the only other attraction was a full-sized black lacquer carriage that had supposedly belonged to Queen Victoria. Museum visitors could climb a small set of stairs and spend a minute or two sitting inside the carriage, passing their hand along the very same railing and their bottoms along the very same bench as royalty.

Guillaudeu navigated the mass of early-afternoon visitors. Halfway to the gallery, he almost turned back. The museum was at its most crowded, after all. It would surely be more comfortable, and probably more enlightening, to observe the orang-outang this evening. But he was already approaching the gallery. It would be even sillier to return to the office. Guillaudeu suddenly had the sense that someone, maybe God, was watching him, taking note of his actions, certainly, and quite possibly his thoughts. He had the sense of a moral obligation. I am in charge here, he thought; I
will
proceed.

The ape’s cage was a square of delicate metal latticework over a straw-strewn floor eight feet in diameter. Visitors swarmed the cage but were held away from it by a length of velvet rope. The people were quieter here than Guillaudeu expected, except for the inevitable collective squeal emitted by the children who formed the layer innermost to the cage. From the doorway, Guillaudeu couldn’t spot the orang-outang at all. Strange, because the cage contained only straw and what looked like a few strips of fabric. As he reached the far edge of the crowd, though, a reddish lump became visible in one corner. The ape
had
died. Its leathery black feet were positioned sole-to-sole and everything above the creature’s knees was covered by a piece of burlap. Guillaudeu looked at
the faces of the people around him. A mother to his left watched her boy with a bemused smile. A gentleman holding the arm of his daughter or niece stared at the lump with a decidedly expectant expression. He considered emptying the gallery of people. He could say the orang-outang was scheduled to have a medical examination. Then he could find someone to dispose of the creature’s body. The children squealed, though, and the lump made a small move. A hand emerged from under the burlap and very slowly an ovoid face peeked out. The orang-outang looked at the children before withdrawing again behind its makeshift curtain.

That evening Guillaudeu returned to the orang-outang’s cage with a bucket of fruit. Empty of visitors, and lit by six wall sconces, the gallery contained an almost firelit glow. The animal sat in the middle of the cage. It did not have the wide cheek flaps shown in the illustrations. Barnum’s monkey was female, Guillaudeu decided.

He unlocked the small door on the side of the cage and set the bucket down. The orang-outang sat with her hands in her lap and did not acknowledge his presence. Perhaps she ate only when she was alone. He strolled casually back to the entryway and watched her from a mostly hidden vantage point. He held still for five minutes, listening to the sounds of the custodial staff somewhere behind him and the sounds of the street somewhere in front. She finally pushed up to her feet and went to the bucket. She looked into it, picked up a triangular piece of melon, and dropped it. She stalked to the other side of the cage and resumed her cross-legged seat.

Guillaudeu decided to try an experiment.

“Now, what is this all about?” He spoke softly as he retraced his steps to the cage. “You can’t be so picky about your food that you would starve yourself to death, would you?”

He opened the door and retrieved the bucket, pulling it out of the cage and setting it on the gallery floor. He picked up the melon. “This looks delicious to me, you know.” He made appreciative sniffing noises. The orang-outang pretended not to notice. He picked through the fruit. It was ripe and clean. When he looked up, the orang-outang was standing
at the edge of the open cage door, only two feet from him. She had long, tufted red hair, with brown-black skin showing through on her chest and lower legs. She swung down from the cage and walked, with quiet propriety, past him toward the window.

If she escaped, Guillaudeu would appear a fool. He imagined her in a cloud of feathers as she tore apart the tundra swan specimens. She hurled vases from the glassblowing display. He did not know how fast the orang-outang could run, but he imagined it was very fast indeed. Because the gallery had no door to seal it from the rest of the museum, Guillaudeu blocked the entry with his body. The orang-outang watched traffic on the street below. She moved her head slowly from side to side. Twice, she observed pigeons flying. She walked to the second window and looked out from there. She moved, Guillaudeu noted, with surprising grace. I should write that down somewhere, he thought.
Movements like that of a particularly agile child. Exceedingly long forelimbs and the hands of an old woman
.

The orang-outang turned from the window and Guillaudeu immediately spread out his arms to make himself look bigger so she might think he could stop her if she tried to escape. The ape did not look at him but walked directly to Queen Victoria’s carriage and climbed aboard. She was still for a few minutes. Guillaudeu could just see the top of her head through the carriage window. She slid out the other side and proceeded directly to the food bucket. Guillaudeu imagined her hurling it against the window. Instead, she picked it up, carried it to the carriage, and, using her two hind legs and one free forelimb, climbed expertly to the carriage roof and ate her dinner, beginning with half an apple.

Guillaudeu returned to his office smiling despite himself. He opened up the logbook. The ape had eaten every scrap of food, groomed for ten minutes, and returned to her cage for a nap. He opened the heavy logbook and pulled out a pencil.
This young lady prefers her meals on the carriage roof
.

“He’s in London, you know. Then he’s going to Paris.”

For once Guillaudeu welcomed the interruption. He was staring at the empty bookshelves again. He could not think of where to begin, or how to find the books that would help him proceed: animal behavior, accounts of the wilderness, whales, and orang-outangs in particular. On a slip of paper he had written
Lamarck?

“Who told you?”

“Who told me?
Who
told me?” Mr. Archer had burst into the office with startling vigor. The ad man waved a newspaper. Guillaudeu recoiled.

“The
Atlas
told me, that’s who. Barnum has set up a regular column with them. A
Public Correspondence
, as they call it.” He looked away, as if the newspaper were an unfaithful lover. “He didn’t even tell me. And I’m supposed to
know
these things.”

Guillaudeu took the paper. Archer walked stiffly to his side of the office and sat down.

“It’s brilliant, of course,” Archer muttered. “Even when he’s gone, he’s here.”

“London. May the eighteenth. A missive from the Royal Exhibition.”
Guillaudeu looked up. “Or would you prefer I didn’t read aloud?”

“Go ahead. I didn’t get through the whole thing anyway.”