Among the Wonderful (53 page)

Was that the wind or shouting? Was it the last of the revelers? Slowly, I spiraled up from sleep, considering these sounds from a great distance. Were they fighting? Bidding each other farewell? The sounds became urgent; they seemed to be pulling me toward a foreign country that existed outside these museum walls. Surfacing now, emerging into my room and the waking life, I was delivered into the knowledge that something terrible was happening. Someone ran down the corridor outside my door in heavy shoes. Opening my eyes I could tell by the quality of the darkness that dawn was coming.

“Bring buckets!” It was a voice I did not recognize. Who was that? I sat up. Close by, I smelled smoke.

Black clouds seethed from the windows below mine and drifted up, fragrant and sinister. I peered down but the ground wasn’t visible. I heard more shouting, the sounds of a crowd, of horses snorting, people hurrying and moving things. I turned from the window and saw the distant, appalling reflection of my disheveled self across the room in the mirror. A pale face above a tapestry of dragons.
I’m so tired of this, Mother. I will need a new booth, a new Life History. A new body. This one is finished. Nothing lasts
. Only ten more years, and I die.
I see death in every shadow, behind every door
. What had Tai Shan said?
It’s the same with the sages. That’s what gives them a sense of humor
. Who needs a sense of humor, though, when your life is the joke?

“If we don’t get down there, we can’t get out!” It was Maud. She was running. My body followed her voice, dumbly, like an animal. In the corridor I saw the ruffled hem of her dress disappear around the corner into the gallery.

I hadn’t run in years and it rattled every bone as if the whole blasted thing would come flying apart, a pile of sticks. Fuel. The gallery was filling with stinging smoke. People emerged from the haze, changed directions uncertainly, and disappeared. I passed the beluga tank where people were crowded on the platform, dipping ceramic pitchers while the whale trilled and splashed. There were voices all around me but I recognized no one.

“Get to the third floor!” someone shouted. “The whole museum’s going up!” I heard a dozen sets of feet change direction.

“Maud?” I shouted. I wanted to say good-bye before this scattering. But it was the tribesman who emerged from the haze. He wore a wool jacket buttoned all the way up to his neck and a strange knapsack of bundled rags and rope. He walked swiftly past me, looking straight ahead, his eye on some distant, invisible target. He was singing and maybe smiling. He disappeared. I reached the stairwell and descended into the heat.

On the fourth floor, people were running in all directions, some screaming, some silent, some dragging others by the hand. Most were making their way toward the stairway and I descended among them.

Along the Broadway side of the third floor, people were climbing out the windows into the arms of men standing on the ends of ladders. The heat was intense, and the sounds of roiling fire menaced us from below, and yet the crowd was orderly around these windows. The people knew they would get out. I moved away from them.

I heard a woman wailing. Unlike the others, she had gone to the east side of the building. Maybe she had not seen the windows, the easier escape. I followed her voice and found a black-haired girl, one of the Esquimaux, perhaps. She was howling and jumping up toward a very high window, where
I could see the outstretched arms of a fireman. He could not reach her.

“Here.” I offered her my arms and lifted her to the man.

“Do not try to go to the lower floors,” the fireman shouted as he enfolded the girl. “It’s too hot.”

Below me, another child appeared, his arms reaching up. When the fireman reappeared I lifted this one, too. “Here. Come.”

More appeared. Another child, then the Haitian sisters, each a delicate crane in my arms. Others arrived, more and more. My body creaked and heaved, doing the kind of work it was made for. I took in their different hefts and scents, all the world’s people made into children in my arms. Then Maud was standing below me.

I smiled. “Here,” I told her. “Come on.”

She shook her head.

“Don’t be ridiculous, come on.” I bent my knees and lifted her by the waist.

She clung to my neck for a moment. “You are magnificent,” she whispered. “How will you get out?”

I shook my head as I lifted her higher. “I don’t need to.”

I handed her to the fireman and watched the trailing hem of her Spanish dress slip over the threshold.

There was no one else in the room with me. The fireman shouted something after me but I would not hear.

I went to the roof, emerging into the lightening layers of dawn and soft columns of smoke pouring upward. The restaurant chairs were tucked in tight to the clothless tables and I passed silently among them. I heard the squeals of the Happy Family and went to the cage, bending the flimsy bars easily. Whether they would escape the flames was not my burden. As I walked toward the edge of the roof, I examined my arms. Whether I lived to eat a thousand more meals, or whether I had eaten my last did not matter. My legs moved mechanically, but not without pain. Whether I walked a hundred miles before I die, or twenty feet, there is no difference.

I can see you, Mother, even from this great distance. You
come to my bedside when you think I am asleep. You cover my legs, which have outgrown these flimsy beds. You cover me and then you sit by the window and cry. When you muffle your face with your hands I open my eyes and see you mourning for my life. I always thought you were crying because of my body, but you wept for this moment. You knew one day it would come to this, that I would either live obsessed by death, or choose to die. I am not angry, Mother. I can see the brightening lines of dawn. Here are flags whipping in the wind, and rows of daffodils only just starting to scum with smoke.

But at the edge of the roof I looked down onto a sea of upturned faces and the wrongness of it pushed me back. A crowd, no different from standing in my booth or walking in the galleries. Would I give them the biggest spectacle of all? Would I give them this gift? For a moment I felt myself dangling by a filament: Would I falter? Would I leave no trace that I had ever been? It was the vain clinging of the polar explorer that reminded me of the True Life History on my desk, its pages already starting to curl and blacken. I whirled around and ran toward the stairs.

In my room one edge of the curtain had caught fire. Everything else was perfectly intact. A dent in the pillow where I’d lain, the quilt mussed from my rising. Look at my ill-fitting bed, still ridiculously propped on its crates. I gave it a kick. It wobbled. I kicked it again and the whole thing fell to the floor. I pushed it to the center of the room, quilt and all. The headboard snapped away from the frame under my hands and I threw it down. I went to the window and ripped the curtain from its rod and threw it on the pile. The edge of the quilt began to curl and smoke. Not the first bed I’ve burned, Mother. I can still hear you, your words coming out in a rush, crowded by laughing.
Use it for kindling!

At my desk, I turned the pages of the True Life History until I reached the end of the scrawl. From the drawer I lifted my pencil. While the bed burned in the burning building, I made an entry: The fighters’ bright blood. The children’s faces the skulls of the dead. Grizzly Adams’ arms folded
across his chest in the torchlight, standing on the smooth back of his mare. The beluga eyeing me as I reached down its throat. I wrote until the smoke stung my eyes to tears. Then I took up the History in my arms.

I heard a voice in the gallery near the beluga’s tank and I walked there with one arm extended in front of me and my eyes half closed against the smoke.

From the whale’s platform a creature with long red hair blinked down at me. Its slender black hand shielded its nose. It clung to a man who leaned over the edge of the whale tank and appeared to be speaking to the whale. The taxidermist.

“Will you take this?” I ventured.

He coughed. He held the orang-outang like a child on his hip. Under his other arm was a purple, hen-like bird with a strange knobby face. The bird clucked nervously.

“Mr. Guillaudeu.”

“There’s nothing we can do for the whale,” he said, not looking at me.

“True.”

“The octopus is already dead.” His eyes followed the circling whale. “And the seahorses. Most of the birds have escaped, but the ravens don’t seem to mind the flames, somehow. I —”

“I want you to take this.” I held out my True Life History. “Please look at me.” I gently shook his shoulder. He finally turned. “Take it.”

“All right.” He adjusted the bird and the ape so he could hold my History, too. He was looking at the whale again. I heard it whistle uncertainly.

“Mr. Guillaudeu, it’s time to go.”

“And which would be the best way to proceed from here?” He looked up at the high windows. “If one wanted to reach the ground.”

“You need to go to the third floor right away. They’re on the Broadway side of the building. They can reach you if you go there, but you’ve got to go now.”

“I did the best I could,” he said.

“I know you did,” I said. “Please go now.”

“All right.”

I lifted him and his various cargo down from the platform and pointed them in what I hoped was the direction of the stairwell. The smoke quickly took him. “Hurry,” I murmured.

The gallery, not yet engulfed, was poised on the brink of its own destruction. The air was electrified against my face. The beluga screamed. I covered my ears and started back toward my apartment. The whale whistled hopelessly, splashing in its interminable circles, and I turned back to ease its passage.

It was easier than I thought to undo the carpentry of the tank. The metal bands holding the planks together were hot, but I slammed my body into the tank as hard as I could. I felt the wood tremble, but it held. I slammed again. The hot metal burned me, but what did that matter? On the third try one plank popped loose, then two more. By the fifth hit, water was gushing from the tank and a metal stave had sprung loose from one end. I stepped aside just as the whale leapt free, hurdling the jagged wall I’d broken. It sailed silently across the gallery toward the apartments and hit the wet floor sliding. It broke easily through the partition wall and into hall of the Wonderful, and then it was lost in the smoke. I heard a tremendous crash, then nothing. The creature left a steaming trail and I followed it.

The heat was so intense in my room I could step only a few feet inside. The flames already glowed blue at the center of the blaze that had been my bed. The wood popped and crackled and sparks spilled up in a dazzling firmament until the floor gave way and sucked the burning bed down. Wisps of quilt were flung upward like the surprised arms of a human being before plummeting, and then all that was left was a ragged hole. I leaned toward it and felt a column of heat so intense I jumped back. The remaining floor creaked and I felt a lurch. Flames licked up through the hole, burning with devouring energy. My heart told me to relinquish this shell but I paused. I looked back, but the way was blocked. The fire
had moved in behind me, had eaten up the hallway, the museum, the world.

Sweat fell in rivulets and evaporated. My hair was a hot, wet coil against my neck. Heat climbed each finger of my left hand and covered my right, which was curled into a fist. I saw my wooden booth and heard Thomas playing Separation Waltz on the balcony. I felt fire in the creases of my face and moved quickly to the edge of the hole. It was only a moment before my body’s weight did the rest.

I rode the back of an old elephant for the rest of the way. We swayed through a furnace of skin-splitting heat. We rode through the worst of it, across the cracked earth of a desert, where I could smell my flesh burning. We reached a narrow canyon passageway and entered it. Buzzards circled, closing in. I leaned all the way forward, resting my head against the great dome of the elephant’s skull. It carried me on toward the place where all giants’ bones must lie.

Guillaudeu stood in the wings, perspiring.
You would think I’d get over these ridiculous nerves, considering how many times I’ve done this
, he thought. He mopped his face with a handkerchief and scolded the merciless butterflies in his stomach. To help ease his mind he focused on the clear, familiar voice coming from the other side of the curtain.

He had been surprised by how easy it was to leave New York. His home was already almost bare and it was no trouble to arrange for his remaining things to be sold and the proceeds forwarded. When he left the apartment for the last time he carried just the satchel he’d taken on his walk in the wilds of New York Island. A small trunk of clothes would be delivered later.

He stood in the crowd at the edge of the still-smoking ruins of Barnum’s museum and verified with his own eyes what he’d already heard shouted by the paperboys for the past three days: It had been completely destroyed. Barely visible among the ashes, he saw the blackened outline of the marble staircase and also the jutting remains of the second-floor balcony, which had crashed to the ground at an angle reminiscent of a sinking ship. And his life’s work? Gone, of course. But when he imagined his specimens consumed in flames, from the smallest songbird to the cameleopard, and their orderly taxonomies and dioramas burned away, he did not feel pain or despair, but relief. An echo of Cuvier drifted to mind:
Out of the rubble of the old age will arise entirely new
creatures to crawl and fly across the globe
. He walked swiftly away.

Across Broadway he climbed aboard an omnibus and from that vantage point observed for the last time the clatter of people intersecting, outstripping, meeting, and avoiding one another on the street, seeing it all as if through the glass of a swaying aquarium. He disembarked at the southern terminus and strolled through the Battery, enjoying the brisk air, children playing on the grass, rows of oyster vendors peddling wares, and the simple sensation of being among the living.