Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) (5 page)

Miriam’s room was in the back of the hotel over the kitchen and smelled like the inside of a lunch box, but it wasn’t unpleasant. She rearranged the furniture, plugged in the lamp and gazed out the single window at the bar, a long, dark structure that seemed, the longer she stared at it, to be almost heaving with the muffled sound of voices. This was the Horny Toad. She decided to go there.

Miriam had always felt that she was the kind of person who somehow quenched in the least exacting stranger any desire for conversation with her. This, however, was not the case at the Toad. People turned to her immediately and began to speak. They had bright, restless faces, seemed starved for affection and were in full conversational mode. There were a number of children present. Everyone was wildly stimulated.

A young woman with lank, thinning hair touched Miriam with a small dry hand. “I’m Priscilla Dickman and I’m an ex-agoraphobic,” she said. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“Yes,” Miriam said, startled. People were waving, smiling.

“I used to be so afraid of losing control,” Priscilla said. “I
was afraid of going insane, embarrassing myself. I was afraid of getting sick or doing something frightening or dying. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?”

She went off to the bar, saying she would return with gimlets. Miriam was immediately joined by an elderly couple wearing jeans, satin shirts and large, identical concha belts. Their names were Vern and Irene. They had spent all day at the museum and were happy and tired.

“My favorite is the javelina family,” Irene said. “Those babies were adorable.”

“Ugly animals,” Vern said. “Bizarre. But they’ve always been Irene’s favorite.”

“Not last year,” Irene said. “Last year it was the bears, I think. Vern says that Life is just one thing but it takes different forms to amuse itself.”

“That’s what I say, but I don’t believe it,” Vern said, winking broadly at Miriam.

“Vern likes the ground squirrels.”

Vern agreed. “Isn’t much of a display, but I like what I hear about them. That state-of-torpor thing. When the going gets rough, boom, right into a state of torpor. They don’t need anything. A single breath every three minutes.”

Irene didn’t seem as fascinated as her husband by the state of torpor. “Have you gone yet, dear?” she asked Miriam. “Have you asked the taxidermist your question?”

“No, I haven’t,” Miriam said. She accepted a glass from Priscilla, who had returned with a tray of drinks. “I’m Priscilla Dickman,” she said to the old couple, “and I’m an ex-agoraphobic.”

“He doesn’t answer everybody,” Vern said.

“He answers the children sometimes, but they don’t know what they’re saying,” Irene said fretfully. “I think children should be allowed only in the petting zoo.”

A gaunt, grave boy named Alec arrived and identified himself as a tree-hugger. He was with a girl named Argon.

“When I got old enough to know sort of what I wanted?” Argon said, “I decided I wanted either a tree-hugger or a car guy. I’d narrowed it down to that. At my first demonstration, I lay in the road with some other people in a park where they were going to bulldoze two-hundred-year-old trees for a picnic area. We had attracted quite a crowd of onlooking picnickers. When the cops came and carried me off, a little girl said, ‘Why are they taking away the pretty one, Mommy?’ and I was hooked. I just loved demonstrating after that, always hoping to overhear those words again. But I never did.”

“We all get older, dear,” Irene said.

“Car guys are kind of interesting,” Argon said. “They can be really hypnotic, but only when they’re talking about cars, actually.”

Sometime later, Alec was still in the midst of a long story about Indian environmentalists in the Himalayas. The tree-hugging movement started long ago, he’d been telling them, when the maharaja of Jodhpur wanted to cut down trees for yet another palace and a woman named Amrita Devi resisted his axmen by hugging a tree and uttering the now well-known phrase “A chopped head is cheaper than a felled tree” before she was dismembered. Then her three daughters took her place and they, too, were dismembered. Then three hundred and fifty-nine additional villagers were dismembered before the maharaja called it off.

“And it really worked,” Alec said, gnawing on his thumbnail. “That whole area is full of militant conservationists now. They have a fair there every year.” He gnawed furiously at his nail. “And on the supposed spot where the first lady died, no grass grows. Not a single blade. They’ve got it cordoned off.” He struggled for a moment with a piece of separated nail between his teeth, at last freed it, examined it for a moment, then flicked it to the floor.

“You know, Alec,” Argon said, “I’ve never liked that story. It just misses the mark as far as I’m concerned.” She turned to Miriam. “Tree-huggers tend sometimes not to have both feet on the ground. I want to be a spiritual and ecological warrior but I want both feet on the ground too.”

Miriam looked at the white curving nail on the dirty floor. Jack wouldn’t have had much to go on with that. Even Jack. Who were these people? They were all so desperate. You couldn’t attribute their behavior to alcohol alone.

Other people gathered around the table, all talking about their experiences in the museum, all expressing awe at the exhibits, the mountain lions, the wading birds, the herds of elk and the exotics, particularly the exotics. They had come from far away to see this. Many of them returned, year after year.

“It’s impossible to leave the place unmoved,” a woman said.

“My favorite is the wood ibis on a stump in a lonely swamp,” Priscilla said cautiously. “It couldn’t be more properly delineated.”

“That’s a gorgeous specimen, all right. Not too many of those left,” someone said.

“… so much better than a zoo. Zoos are so depressing. I
hear the animals are committing suicide in Detroit. Hurling themselves into moats and drowning.”

“I don’t think other cities have that problem so much. Just Detroit.”

“Even so. Zoos—”

“Oh, absolutely, this is so much nicer.”

“Shoot to kill but not to mangle,” Vern said.

“A lot of hunters just can’t get that part down,” Irene said. “And then they think they can bring those creatures here! To him!”

“I have my questions all prepared for tomorrow,” Argon said. “I’m going to ask him about the eyes. Where do you get the eyes, I’m going to ask.”

“A child got there ahead of you on that one, I’m afraid,” Irene said. “Some little Goldilocks in a baseball hat.”

“Oh, no!” Argon exclaimed. “What did he say?”

“He said he got the eyes from a supply house.”

“I’m sure he would have expressed it differently to me,” Argon said.

Alec, gnawing on his other thumb, looked helplessly at her.

“I just hate that,” somebody said. “Someone else gets to ask your question, and you never get to the bottom of it.”

“Excuse me,” Miriam said quietly to Irene, “but why are you all here?”

“We’re here with those we love because something big is going to happen here, we think,” Irene said. “We want to be here for it. Then we’ll have been here.”

“You never know,” Vern said. “Next year at this time, we might all have ridden over the skyline.”

“But we’re not ready to ride over the skyline yet,” Irene said, patting his hand.

The lights in the Toad flickered, went out, then came back on again more weakly.

“It’s closing time,” several people said at once.

They all filed out into the night. Many were staying in campers and tents pitched around the museum, while others were staying in the hotel.

“I wouldn’t want to pass my days in Detroit either,” a voice said.

“I was using terror as an analgesic,” Priscilla was explaining to no one, as far as Miriam could see. “And now I’m not.”

Argon was yelling at Alec, “But your life’s center is on the periphery.”

Back in the room, Miriam sat with the lamp for some time. The legs were dusty so she wiped them down with a damp towel. She was thinking of getting different shades for it. Shade of the week. Even if she slurred her words when she thought, the lamp was able to follow her. There were tenses that human speech had yet to discover, and the lamp was able to incorporate these in its understanding as well. Miriam was excited about going to the museum in the morning. She planned on being there the moment the doors opened. The lamp had no interest in seeing the taxidermist. It was beyond that. They read a short, sad story about a brown dog whose faith in his master proved to be terribly misplaced, and spent a rather fitful night.

The next morning Miriam joined Jack and Carl in their room for breakfast.

“We’ve just finished brushing our teeth,” Carl said. Jack’s glasses were off and he regarded Miriam skittishly out of his good eye. She poured the coffee while Carl buttered the toast and Jack peeled the backing off Band-Aids and stuck them on
things. He preferred children’s adhesive bandages with spaceships and cartoon characters on them to the flesh-colored ones. He plastered some on Miriam’s hands.

“He likes you!” Carl exclaimed.

They drank their coffee in silence. A fan whined in the room.

“Truck should be ready today,” Carl said.

“Have you ever been in love before?” Miriam asked him.

“No,” Carl said.

“Well, you’re handling it very well, I think.”

“No problem,” Carl said.

Miriam held her cup. She pretended there was one more sip in it when there wasn’t. “Why don’t we all go to the museum,” she said. “That’s what people do when they’re here.”

“I’ve heard about that,” Carl said. “And I would say that a museum like that, and the people who run it—well, it’s deeply into denial on every level. That’s what I’d say. And Jack here, all his life he was the great verifier—weren’t you, Jack? And still are, by golly.” Jack cleared his throat and Carl gazed at him happily. “We don’t want to go into a place like that,” Carl said.

Miriam felt ashamed and determined. “I’ll go over there for just an hour or two,” she said.

There were many people in line ahead of her, although she didn’t see any of her acquaintances of the night before. The museum was massive with wide cement columns and curving walls of tinted glass. She could dimly make out static, shaggy arrangements within. The first room she entered was a replica of a famous basketball player’s den in California. There were 1,500 wolf muzzles on the wall. A small bronze tablet said that Wilt Chamberlain had bought a whole year’s worth of wolves
from an Alaskan bounty hunter. It said he wanted the room to have an unequivocally masculine look. Miriam heard one man say hoarsely to another, “He got that, by god.” The next few rooms were reproductions of big-game hunters’ studies and were full of heads and horns and antlers. In the restaurant, a group of giraffes were arranged behind the tables as though in the act of chewing grass, the large lashed eyes in their angular Victorian faces content. In the petting area, children toddled among the animals, pulling their tails and shaking their paws. Miriam stepped quickly past flocks and herds and prides of creatures to stand in a glaring space before a polar bear and two cubs.

“Say hi to the polar bear,” a man said to his child.

“Hi!” the child said.

“She’s protecting her newborn cubs, that’s why she’s snarling like that,” the man said.

“It’s dead,” Miriam remarked. “The whole little family.”

“Hi, polar bear,” the child crooned. “Hi, hi, hi.”

“What’s the matter with you?” the father demanded of Miriam. “People like you make me sick.”

Miriam threw out her hand and slapped his jaw. He dropped the child’s hand and she slapped him again even harder, then hurried from the room.

She wandered among the crowds. The museum was lit dimly and flute music played. The effect was that of a funeral parlor or a dignified cocktail lounge. All the animals were arranged in a state of extreme and hopeless awareness. Wings raised, jaws open, hindquarters bunched. All recaptured from death to appear at the brink of departure.

“They’re glorious, aren’t they?” a woman exclaimed.

“Tasteful,” someone said.

“None of these animals died a natural death, though,” a pale young man said. “That’s what troubles me a little.”

“These are trophy animals,” his companion said. “It would be unnatural for them to die a natural death. It would be disgusting. It would be like Marilyn Monroe or something. James Dean, for example.”

“It troubled me just a little. I’m all right now.”

“That’s not the way things work, honey,” his companion said.

Miriam threaded her way past a line of people waiting to see the taxidermist. He was seated in a glass room. Beside him was a small locked room filled with skins and false bodies. There were all kinds of shapes, white and smooth.

The taxidermist sat behind a desk on which there were various tools—scissors and forceps, calipers and stuffing rods. A tiny, brilliantly colored bird lay on a blotter. Behind the taxidermist was a large nonhuman shape on which progress appeared to have slowed. It looked as though it had been in this stage of the process for a long time. The taxidermist was listening to a question that was being asked.

“I’m a poet,” a man with a shovel-shaped face said, “and I recently accompanied two ornithologists into the jungles of Peru to discover heretofore unknown birds. I found the process of finding, collecting, identifying, examining and skinning hundreds of specimens for use in taxonomic studies tedious. I became disappointed. In other words, I found the labor of turning rare birds into specimens mundane. Isn’t your work a bit mundane as well?”

“You’re mundane,” the taxidermist said. His voice was loud
and seemed to possess a lot of chilled space around it. It was like an astronaut’s voice.

He fixed his eyes on Miriam, then waved and gestured to her. The gesture indicated that he wanted her to come around to the side of the glass room. He pulled down a long black shade on which were the words
The Taxidermist Will Be Right Back
.

“I saw and heard everything back there,” he said to Miriam. “There are monitors and microphones all over this place. I like a woman with spirit. I find that beliefs about reality affect people’s actions to an enormous degree, don’t you? Have you read Marguerite Porete’s
Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls?”