A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  “What if I happen to guess them?”

  “Then, especially, I won’t tell you,” he said softly.

  How charming she was. He remembered with a pang the exchange he’d had with his wife the day before. He had just received a long-sought honor, being elected to the Royal Society, and was cooing to himself with pride about it.

  “In your wildest dreams,” he’d said to her, as they were dressing for dinner, “did you ever think your husband would receive such an honor?”

  With a half smile, his wife had said: “Frederik, you do not appear in my wildest dreams.”

  That stung.

  His wife, though proud of their daughter Rachel’s artistry, was put off by his own unique medical studies and trove of rarities, including embryos and fetuses, and acute deformities, all of which she found macabre, repellent, and tedious. Her father had been an eminent architect, and she preferred beauty that was practical and an orderly home (in contrast to Frederik’s domain of a wide, three-story house on Bloemgracht, which held his dusty, crammed curiosity cabinets, workshops, and unnervingly fiendish tableaux). She wanted her life to be calm and amiable, but she only ever seemed angry with him these days. Sometimes he knew why—a clear lapse of judgment on his part, a misspoken word, an unintended slight, too much time at work, a colleague or friend of his she didn’t approve of, an extreme deformity for his collection that made her more uneasy about him than it—but most often there was nothing specific he could identify. Her disappointment with her life was palpable, an invisible aura that weighed on her. They hadn’t been intimate for a long time, and their lives seemed to be curving farther and farther away from each other.

  What would his life have been like married to a woman like Maria, he wondered. But then he wouldn’t have fathered Rachel, the love of his life, who—impossibly, it seemed—had begun the same as the tiny fetuses in his collection, little more than a pale, blind seahorse. How did that sea creature become his beautiful daughter? What had she looked like as a fetus? And, if he had seen her then, as a seahorse fetus, would he have felt the same love? Mindful of his consuming passion for his collection, Rachel had stitched little cuffs and collars for the embalmed, preserved infants in his cabinets—a secret the two of them kept from his wife.

  Reaching a jar down from a shelf, he said, “And here we have the Surinam toad, which you told me at Waltha was one of your favorites.”

  “Ah,” Maria said as she peered through the glass and alcohol at two perfectly preserved female toads, one with the eggs clustered atop her back, the other with its back cut open to reveal where the young had burrowed beneath the flesh and would soon be bursting through the skin.

  “I must say I do shudder when I think of the pain of bearing human offspring in that way,” he said. “So many piercing the skin all at once!”

  “Well, the Bible tells us that Eve was wrenched from Adam’s rib.” Maria eased into a mischievous smile. “Was that any less painful?”

  She has a mind like a lamp, he thought. It gently illuminates whatever it settles on. At fifty-five, he knew he was in the youth of old age, and just when he wanted to think otherwise, to feel as vigorous as the image he saw in the wavering glass of storefront windows, some physical ailment or limitation would sorely remind him. It was that window self he pictured kissing Maria, sharing breath and unsaid words, exploring the hot cavern of her mouth, discovering the flavor of her being. Spiced by the emanations from her skin and the air piped through her lungs. That appealed to him too. His sense of smell wasn’t as keen as it had been in his younger days, when women had undertones and overtones, and different parts of a lover’s body were like uniquely scented rooms. After he’d told his wife that, she’d sometimes scented her zones with different perfumes, just to excite him. Long gone days, he thought sadly. For several years, his wife had suffered from bouts of weak lungs and fatigue, an ailment without a name that he’d seen before, especially among women past childbearing age. It defied prognosis, and could be quite debilitating. When she was bedridden, their servants and children took shifts caregiving, though he tried to spare Rachel too many responsibilities. She needed enough time to pursue her painting, and she was already helping him with his cabinet displays. She intuited, and could stitch, just the right cuff, collar, and lace to soften the impact of the skeletons and embalmed heads and hands of young children on display. The memento mori messages had been her idea, lest moralists or neighbors complain.

  Maria looked intently at the toad. “When I first saw this toad,” she said, vividly picturing the moment in her mind’s eye, “really studied it, I had an epiphany about the stages in its life. …”

  Prancing violin music began abruptly in a parlor above them, and though it was fluent and melodic, the violinist played the same phrases repeatedly.

  “What’s this? Others above us?” she said. “Angels?”

  “One of my daughters, Ann,” he replied proudly.

  “Is she practicing?”

  “No, not really, she’s educating the violin.”

  “Educating it?” Maria asked. “It sounds like a fully educated instrument to me!”

  “Ah, but the violin remembers,” he said. If you train it to make certain vibrations over and over, the wood absorbs and changes and begins to make those vibrations more fully and more easily.”

  “You mean it learns to sound beautiful.”

  “Yes.”

  “I hadn’t thought of violins growing into their mellow sounds, or of objects being transformed by the people they know, just as for people some relationships are mutually consequential. But it’s a strange and exciting thought. Obvious in a way—I mean, I’ve certainly observed things gradually growing worn—but it’s pleasing to think that the opposite may also be true, that a musical instrument may be improved for having known you. Maybe a favorite paintbrush too, in a way that encourages, or more easily allows, beauty.”

  “This chair,” Frederik said, pulling a leather-upholstered desk chair toward him. “Well, look at it, see how the seat isn’t even but leans back. It wasn’t made that way. The others I have aren’t tilted. It’s become my favorite chair, though, and has been learning my weight and balance and the angle of my slouch for years now!”

  Frederik thought about what she’d been saying before the music began, her epiphany about amphibians. He looked at her intensely with haunting gray-blue eyes, and said softly, “An epiphany, you realize, is a lonely thing.”

  His eyes held hers a moment longer than they really needed to. There was something polymorphously sexual about him, she realized, a fluid sexuality that somehow included all he collected, all the arcana of his world, and she found that strangely appealing. Could she add anything more to her busy life? An unexpected thought flitted through her mind: should I love again? Where had that come from? she wondered. It had been such a long while since she’d felt love’s lamp warming her spine. Was she ready to have another child? Because one could easily follow. That was another matter entirely. At her age, she knew the risks of childbirth—about half of all women died during their reproductive years. Frederik’s wife had nearly died trying to give birth to an eighth child. Also, having raised two children, Maria knew how much energy for her work she’d be giving up. Birth control methods were unreliable, aborticants dangerous. On the other hand, Frederik had said that his wife had been ill off and on for the past year. If he and Maria married after his wife’s death, she’d end up adding his brood to her own anyway. She didn’t want to think about all that, or think at all. Her physical hunger was too great to ignore. Hunger. She missed the feast of touch, and the sensation of fullness that follows, as if lovers somehow consume each other, drink from each other’s well, which they in turn replenish. It was no less a violent, physical need for connection than wild animals felt. Almost wolflike, eating into the other with kisses. Why was she even thinking about kisses?

  So it begins, she thought, inasmuch as it has not already begun. It was time. And a bit frightening, because it
was bound to be life changing. One thing about metamorphosis—in order for something new to appear, you have to shed parts of your old self. Sometimes comfortable parts.

  It felt a little creepy being surrounded and watched by the eyes of so many fetuses. Frederik’s own blue eyes had flecks of gold and brown, she noticed, and she suddenly felt a powerful urge to lick his pale eyelashes. It took willpower to resist. How funny. Her widening smile emboldened him to lean down and kiss her, tentatively at first, then lingering on the soft pillows of her lips, then more passionately. Soon he was not simply a person to her anymore but a kiss, then he was not just a kiss to her anymore but a part of herself she needed to feel alive again.

  Later, returning home, she felt light as fish bone. She was raining and she was going to rain, she was mist and traveling light, she was the sun gone down and shadows clinging to the earth. The sky had cleared and the moon was a bright circle surrounded by darkness. It gets pregnant, she thought, gives light, triggers lunacy. Darkness isn’t really an absence of light. God didn’t banish the darkness, he separated the darkness from light, that was all. Noon was just another form of midnight. Everything is made up of opposing forces, light and dark, growth and decay, male and female—not as opposites, but unfolding together continuously, and must be so for the world to keep its balance. She thought of Frederik’s touch, and of how the violin remembers, how both people and objects are changed by all those they know well. Even the river, she mused, as she turned off of Prisengracht and crossed the first of four footbridges. It tastes so many strange things in its travels, some lovely, others foul. Is it also changed by them? Soon her house on Warmoesstraat rose into view with candles flickering in the two downstairs windows, as was the law, but not upstairs, and that was a relief. She needed to be alone to replay the events of the evening and let them sink in, without having to explain what she didn’t fully understand to anyone, not even herself.

  Henry’s Room

  Elizabeth Hand

  It was not yet dark when Henry arrived back at the Workingmen’s House, still light-headed from what he’d witnessed: a girl entering the tunnel of a dark ride at the amusement park, and not returning. Not just him, that boy Pinhead had seen it too. Henry knew what went on in the dark, big hands squeezing things. You couldn’t breathe. No one could breathe. They flopped around like toys with the sawdust running out of them.

  He slumped through the rear door of Workingmen’s House, trudged upstairs to the third floor, then down the long corridor to his room. His nostrils burned as he inhaled the scent of the same lye cleanser he used to mop the hospital floors. All the doors were closed. When he first moved here that had frightened him. Save for a few stints at the Cook County Insane Asylum, Henry had spent much of his life at the Asylum for Feebleminded Children in Lincoln. He was accustomed to scores of boys crammed into dormitories, sometimes two to a bed. Closed doors were for punishments and things he couldn’t explain, even to Willhie.

  “Willhie, Willhie, will he, won’t he?” he whispered. Willhie always told him to knock it off, the rhymes made Henry sound nuts. Dir kléngt verréckt!

  Yet he wasn’t feebleminded or insane. When he was four years old, his mother had died while giving birth to his sister. He never knew what happened to the baby. Did she die too? Was she given away? Stolen? No one ever told him. He’d spent the last twenty years imagining her face in that of every pretty child he saw. They were like the dolls lined up as prizes behind the arcade amusements, the cane-rack game and sharpshooting galleries, curious toys he yearned for without understanding why.

  And yet he couldn’t help but long for them, the way he’d longed for the pictures and words in the Sunday funnies, even before his father taught him to read when he was three years old. Or the way he felt when he started fires in the alley behind their tenement building, watching the flames wriggle from little piles of splintered wood and old newspapers until the blaze reached as high as the first-floor windows and someone called the fire engine, a clamor of bells and shouting and hooves and wheels in the smoke-filled streets. He had an aching curiosity about the world, a sensation that had no name. Where did the flames hide before they emerged? What happened to his baby sister? What happened to all those children he’d known in the asylum? Why were they scared of him, when he was smaller than they were?

  As a boy he’d hated small girls, also babies. He attacked his classmates at St. Patrick’s School in Chicago, where he carried a long-bladed knife and a blackjack hidden in the pockets of his dungarees. He started fires in vacant buildings just to watch them burn.

  Other children were afraid of him. In the classroom he twitched and made frog noises and invented rhymes, trying to be funny so the other children would like him. Nobody laughed. He pretended to throw things—snowballs and baseballs that no one could see. Sometimes he forgot he was pretending. He drew crude imitations of characters from the Sunday funnies in the margins of his classwork.

  “Crazy Daisy!” they’d shout when they saw him coming. Then he’d chase them, throwing real rocks or brandishing his knife.

  He’d skip school, and spend his days roaming the streets on his own. Finally, when he was twelve, his father had him committed to the Lincoln Asylum. He ran away repeatedly but was always captured.

  He’d only escaped for good when he was seventeen. He walked 165 miles back to Chicago, where his aunt and uncle took him in for a few weeks. His aunt got him the janitor job at St. Joseph’s Hospital, mopping floors, cleaning sinks and toilets, emptying pails full of blood-soaked bandages and bits of skin.

  Every morning, he’d start in the basement and work his way to the top floor. Strange voices came from storerooms that were supposed to be empty. Sometimes he heard people laughing or screaming in their hospital beds. Here again his curiosity overwhelmed him, as he cracked the door open to peer inside, excited and fearful as when he entered the spook house at Riverview, sometimes accompanied by a stranger, more often alone.

  But most days here at the hospital, no one spoke to him at all. Not one word.

  There was an elevator at the hospital but he was forbidden to use it. So he lugged the heavy metal bucket and wringer and a rope mop taller than he was, up and down eight flights of stairs. He emptied filthy water in the utility sink on each floor, filling the bucket again on the next. The lye soap burned the skin on his hands until his knuckles bled. At night he’d toss and turn on his thin mattress, struggling to sleep because of the pain in his back and shoulders.

  One of the few people who spoke to Henry was his boss, Sister Rose. She was mean as a snake, with cold black eyes and a nearly lipless mouth. When she knew no one was looking, she’d pinch the back of his neck.

  Only Sister Dymphna ever showed him any kindness. An obese woman with a feathery birthmark on one cheek, she was named for St. Dymphna, virgin martyr and patron of the insane. Sister Dymphna had given Henry a scapular of her namesake.

  The holy card showed a dainty red-haired girl with a halo. A bloody line indicated where her head had been cut off then miraculously reattached, as with red thread. Henry wore the scapular beneath his undershirt, even when he was asleep. Sometimes he withdrew it to gaze at while working.

  He reached his door, unlocked it, and went inside. The room was small and hot as a bakery. There were two narrow iron bedsteads pushed against opposite walls. Two identical wooden desks with chairs. Two nightstands, each outfitted with a Bible. A large crucifix on the wall, rushes from Palm Sunday still tucked behind it. The single narrow window overlooked an air shaft.

  His roommate, old Tom Phelan, snored in his bed. Tom had a shaking sickness that everyone said wasn’t the palsy. He’d been at the seminary, studying to be a priest, but got the boot when his shaking interfered with his studies.

  Henry didn’t believe it was the palsy or any other malady. He’d seen his own father and plenty of other drunks get the shakes. He watched Tom for signs of secret drinking but never saw him take anything stronger than hot tea. He still preferred to think h
is roommate was a drunk. It made life more interesting.

  He shut the door, tiptoed to Tom’s bedside, and stared down at his slack white face, his gaping mouth, and scrawny chicken neck. Sometimes Tom’s eyes opened and he gazed up in horror as Henry scurried across the room.

  But he had to make sure the old man was asleep. He held his palm above Phelan’s face, lowered it until it almost covered the man’s mouth. Press press, where’s your dress? He felt Tom’s breath moist against his fingers, smelled it too, tobacco and tea. You’re disgusting has anyone told you how disgusting you are.

  He turned and stepped to his desk, opened the drawer, and removed a handwritten manuscript bound in string. He’d salvaged the yellow paper from trash bins on the third floor, where most of the doctors had their offices. Doctors were profligate with paper. One tossed an entire ream because it had gotten damp and spotted with mold. Henry had brought it back to his room, where he dried it on the radiator. He also had stolen some onionskin, the very thin paper used for writing airmail letters.

  He set the manuscript on his desk. He’d written the title in meticulous block letters, using a thick pencil he’d pilfered from a nurse’s desk.

  THE ADVENTURES OF GENERAL HENRICO DARGERO OF THE GEMINI AND THE BLACK BROTHERS AND OF THE GIRLS ARMY THAT FOUGHT BESIDE THEM IN THEIR BATTLE AGAINST THE CONFEDERACY OF THE CLAN OF THE AGIVECENNIANS

  By Henry Joseph Darger

  The author of this exciting story

  He ran a finger beneath the string but didn’t undo the knot yet. Too soon and you’re a loon. He reached into the back of the drawer, removed a votive candle in a red glass holder and a box of matches. He’d pocketed candle and holder in the hospital chapel, where he attended mass every day. His room had an electric light, but whenever he turned it on after dark, old Tom woke up. Candles were verboten in the Workingmen’s House. The Great Fire had been over forty years ago, but the city remained haunted by the specter of conflagration. If Tom knew he had a candle, he’d report him to Sister Rose. He’d be beaten, maybe even arrested.