by Daniel Kraus
“One simply cannot summer in style these days,” sighed an actress. “I had my heart set on Prague before that terrible man in Germany had to go invade it.”
“You’re quite right,” said another. “I cannot imagine crossing the Charles Bridge with those vulgar red flags ruining my castle view. What do they call that thing—the swastika? It sounds like an item from a Polish bakery, something sweet with poppy seeds.”
“Poppy seeds!” laughed Mercy. “Hedda, you’re a card!”
“Adolf Hitler,” boomed a producer, “will be the death of us. People do not realize how many pictures are financed with Reichsmarks. Not to mention our reliance on the German talent pool. America could stand to steal away a few more Fritz Langs, I say.”
“Funny Fritzy and his monocle,” pouted Mercy. “I should have invited him.”
“Excuse me for saying so, but I, for one, am glad you didn’t.”
All heads turned toward Dr. Biff, deliverer of this churlish rebuke. Upon being illuminated under such light, he pulled a grin so symmetrical it had to have been fashioned upon an operating table.
“I know Lang made that fine robot picture and that’s all well and good,” said he. “But now is a time for us peaceful nations to circle our wagons and be cautious with whom we consort.”
“Fritzy is a fine Jewish boy,” said Mercy. “We’ve nothing to fear from him.”
“Don’t we?” Dr. Biff, sudden sommelier, swirled his glass beneath his nose. “Who’s to say why he left the Fatherland? That Goebbels fellow, Hitler’s propaganda man, they say he adored Fritz Lang. Shouldn’t that give us pause?”
“Shall we cast aside our every German friend?” challenged the producer. “And what of our Italian friends, now that Hitler and Mussolini have their Pact of Steel?”
“Well,” said Dr. Biff, slurping his cabernet, “as long as we’re cutting wienerschnitzel from our diets, why not spaghetti carbonara as well?”
Maximilian Chernoff set down his steak knife with a loud thock. Everyone bottled up, the same behavior, I imagined, as was common on his sets. Chernoff had said fewer than ten words since his identification of the meats and was clearly not keen to add to that total. But he stood, wiped at his lips with a napkin, and gave his audience a curt bow.
“Please excuse. I have a carcass to dress. Very good to visit you all.”
With that, he charged from the room, kitchen apron bunched in a fist. The only sound was the shift of ice cubes in a glass. Bridey looked crestfallen at Chernoff’s exit but she recovered, for she was, at the end of the day, a professional.
“If there is a war,” declared she, “I do hope we stay out of it. What sort of leading men would be left to kiss? Just grandfathers, invalids, and cowards as far as the eye can see.” She smirked. “Then again, I’m hardly choosy.”
The remark was naughty enough to punch a hole in the pressurized bubble; a heave of laughter tore from each torso and Mercy St. Johns capitalized on it, grabbing the discussion by the nose-ring and pulling it into safer pasture. Only Dr. Biff looked remiss. He turned to the closest diner—me—and put a hand to his mouth to deliver an aside.
“Reality,” sighed he. “Picture people can have such difficulties accepting it.”
The fact that I’d been forced to snuggle next to this squabbler infuriated me. I took up a handful of untouched elk meat and hurled it at the surgeon’s face. Chernoff, like me, preferred his game rare, and Dr. Biff’s face was blotched with blood and spattered with savory spices. Mercy shrieked, the producer laughed, and everyone else gasped as two servants rushed handkerchiefs-first to the doctor’s side. So frantic was the bedlam that the candles flickered, turning the antlers above into devil horns, ideal to graft upon my evil skull.
I was up and out of my chair.
“Beg pardon,” said I to no one in particular. “My elk slipped.”
Then I was through a door and down one annex, then another, wondering if I might ever get through a single civilized dinner party without doing something reprehensible. Presently the light sources lessened and with surreal abruptness I became flanked by a stampede of nature’s creatures enough to make Noah jealous. It was only after tensing for concurrent gorings that I identified my assailants as taxidermied.
Rigged upon cedarwood panels, articulated inside cabinets, and posed amid naturalistic simulacra was a vast menagerie. Three identical monkey heads stared at one another in incredulity at their absurd situation. A pile of hairless piglets fought for a sow’s nipples. From a tree branch bolted into the wall dangled an immense sloth, so that he might enjoy an upside-down view of the kaleidoscope of hummingbirds caught behind glass. There was, of course, a bear—not a rug but the whole damn thing—a hulking Kodiak reared on its back legs and locked in combat with a cougar. Both animals were trimmed with gelatin blood and foam spittle.
“Straight, left, right, straight.”
His centrality had concealed him. In the middle of the room sat Maximilian Chernoff in a massive leather armchair, cleaning an elephant gun. At his feel lay an old Brittany Spaniel with a name tag reading “OKSANA”; she rested, indifferent to the fifty antlered and horned heads branching from the wall behind her, each of mythological dimension: the Pan-like ibex, the Bacchus-like bison, the Atlas-like moose.
“The way back,” said Chernoff. “Straight, left, right, straight.”
He kept his attention upon the gun, which he polished with a gusto I recalled from wartime foxholes. I spurned my marching orders and dallied, anything to delay my return to the Dining Room of Disgrace. I cleared my throat and toed the plank.
“Handsomely furbished creatures, if I may say so. The hippopotamus is quite plump, eh?”
Chernoff slammed shut the bolt carrier.
“You appreciate? This is so?”
Zounds, no. Taxidermy was for ghouls.
“You bet I do!” enthused I.
Chernoff harrumphed, laid his weapon across his thighs, and considered me for the first time that night. His eye, trained through a camera lens, was scrupulous. I puffed my chest and thought imposing thoughts—me, bare-chested, wrestling a gator, that sort of thing. Chernoff reclined into the soft leather and dropped a hand to scratch Oksana’s scruff.
“Fewer and fewer agree. Victorian décor—not so popular. Is fusty, is gloomy. I myself do the taxidermy—do you know this?”
“You don’t say! How charming.”
“Is my true passion. But Mercy, she does not like. She behave like babushka, tell me, ‘Maximilian, you keep your stuffed animals in back.’ Is how she calls them—stuffed animals. Eh, is all right. I like it here. Here is my cave.”
The mention of his wife shriveled me. It would not be long before Mercy St. Johns told her husband of my tableside antics. Chernoff’s paternal sternness inspired me to come clean before my misbehaviors were otherwise outed. Thus I introduced myself and with a fair bit of hawing recounted Dr. Biff’s harangue and the heaping helping of elk steak I’d fed his face.
Chernoff boomed laughter and clapped.
“You bring me humor! Very good!”
“You are not cross with me?”
“Nyet! Mercy is beautiful sable, but she bring to our home donkey asses. It is they who are the animals. It is they who wait until you are down to feast upon your broken leg.” He gestured at the taxidermia. “But these? These are my noble friends. We meet as equals in the Yukon mountains, the African savanna. No malice, no hypocrisy. Is what we all hope for, da? A dignified end?”
The director’s English was middling but his instinctive grasp of the drama of life dispirited me. Consider, Reader, my own implausible backstory, hinged as it was upon the overused plot device of a bullet through the back, as well as my character arc, which had heedlessly helixed without a conventional three-act structure to guide it. Chernoff was right: I would do anything for a distinguished finale.
So
shined upon me a ray of insight.
I needed no surgeon, no purveyor of living tissue.
What I needed was a man who understood the preservation of dead flesh.
Oksana did not bare her teeth when I approached her master, nor did she growl, for the dog was stuffed the same as all the animals around us, her good work on safaris of legend having ceded to a blissful sleep the likes of which I could only imagine.
“Forgive me, Mr. Chernoff,” said I. “But I have for you a proposition.”
XI.
WHERE THE HALL OF ANIMALS had been a dustless basilica surveilled by unsanctified saints, Chernoff’s workshop was a small and windowless rectory. It smelled gamy and alcoholic. Only a fetishistic neatness kept the space from being overwhelmed by its alarming contents. Dangling from the walls were aprons, gloves, and tanning tools; stretched across looms were hides awaiting pickling; crucified upon teensy crosses were skinless carcasses yet to be deboned; and panting from the corner were two large freezers from which curled a white fog.
Chernoff pushed aside a table crowded with wax-sealed jars; the stillborn creatures within bobbed in amber liquids like the Barker’s tapeworms. Chernoff freed me of my coat like a gentleman, sat me down, and rolled up my right sleeve. An arachnid light stand was positioned so that I was bathed in yellow light, and he took up my hand, gently, as if to kiss it.
“Here is where we perform test? You are positive?”
Where else, Dearest Reader, but the wound that had started it all in 1896? If Mr. Avery’s fish hook hadn’t snagged that tender triangle of flesh between pointer finger and thumb, I might still be at the bottom of Lake Michigan, ossified into an underwater shelter for all varieties of innocent guppies.
I had expected Chernoff’s disbelief, if not outright horror, but had yet to be shown either. Since I’d shared my portfolio of unhealed wounds in the hall, the sole emotion he suppressed was excitement. Here was a man so built for challenges—obstinate actors, inopportune weather, hundreds of disorderly extras—that he’d accepted me as hungrily as a birthday child does cake. Now he toyed with my fingers, thumb, and wrist, his ear cocked for the murmur of bones.
“Is customary I work with fresh specimens. But is not imperative. Skin is what I need, and yours is intact. More or less.”
“I thank you for making an exception.”
“I told you, it is my passion.”
“Then I thank you for believing me.”
He gestured toward the Hall of Animals.
“You saw my platypus? When first platypus brought from Australia, what do naturalists say? Is hoax, they say. Bill of duck, body of rabbit, tail of beaver—is funny joke. Nyet. I believe what my eyes see. The eyes, always believe the eyes. Is why pictures so popular.”
All the while he was tabulating equipment upon the counter, putty knives and chisels, boxes of salt and bottles of astringent. Next to the these lay a small bird in a middle stage of disembowelment. Its entire outer comportment of skin, feathers, legs, and tail had been turned inside out, leaving behind a moist red head, spindly neck, and tiny blob of organs.
“You’re not planning to do that to me.” Hopefully, I added, “Heh-heh.”
“A finch or a Finch.” Chernoff chuckled. “What is difference?”
I considered the bird-blob, then my hand. The latter was a-tremble. Chernoff snatched it. He pulled up a stool, sat, and set to drawing an ink circle around my quivering wrist.
“Americans were not always so tender. Where do you think you get leather for your shoes, my friend? I believe the movie screen is to blame. Our violence, it is too clean. A polite edit, snip-snip, and there is no blood, no bone, no pain. What is death in the pictures? It is a dream before our actor awakes to applause. This is not the death I knew in war. Or in the Orient, or on the Nile, or in the African bush.”
He exchanged his pen for a small, sharp knife. He rolled back his own sleeves and I saw fat white scars crisscrossing his right forearm.
“Africa,” said I. “Is that where you received those?”
“Da, da. A lion, two-hundred kilogram. She take my shot and is upon me before I shoot again. Was a nice struggle. I suffocated her with my fist down her throat.”
The knife blade was ice against my skin. No icier, though, than my touch must have felt to Bridey. If this alteration would becalm her so that we might again achieve the harmony I could find nowhere else, then it would be worth it.
“You can really do this?” pleaded I.
The tightness of his smile made it difficult to gauge the sarcasm.
“I have yet to receive a complaint.”
The knife gnawed at me like a patient rat. I closed my eyes and did not open them as the blade completed its circle; I kept them shut as Chernoff worked a flat tool beneath the skin to loosen it; and I dared not open them when he began to peel the skin from my wrist and palm the way you would take off a glove.
Chernoff was patient. It took over an hour to remove the skin of my hand in a single intact piece—a dry, papery thing—during which time there were footfalls in the Hall of Animals, perhaps partygoers hoping to have a word with the elusive director, perhaps Bridey coming to corral me. Well, too bad. She’d been the one to hurl me at the feet of the buffoonish Dr. Biff. All I’d done was find a superior alternative.
Eventually Mercy St. Johns did knock on the door, but Chernoff shouted a Russian word that sent her running. After that we were left undisturbed for the rest of the night. Chernoff was clearly content. While cleaning, tanning, and salting the flesh-glove, he hummed tunes that brought to mind frozen lakes, rabbit-fur ushanka hats, and brimming cups of vitalizing vodka.
Chernoff next began to cleanse my exposed muscle with warm water. Reader, I’ve made no secret of the contempt in which I hold Gød. Yet I felt as if ministered by gentle Jesus himself, so baptismal were Chernoff’s soft ablutions. He patted dry my rinded hand with a clean white towel, used a hobby knife to nick away tendon gristle, filled the fishing-hook wound with a snug wire implant, applied a resin solution, rolled the skin back on, and sewed the outer wounds shut with the help of a tiny needle and a magnifying glass.
The second he was finished, his stomach, obedient as Oksana throughout the night, roared for its breakfast. It had to be morning. He stepped aside to wash his hands in a sink.
“Well? You like or do not like. Speak.”
The hand was supple, pink, and aglow with health, the appendage of a young man not four decades dead but seventeen years alive.
My lubberly stammer was incommensurate to such a triumph.
“How . . . how much? Do I owe you for . . . this miracle?”
“You are guest. Is free. You go home now, you think thoughts. You want more, you come back, we make arrangement. Money—is not so important but is how American gentlemen do business. Da?”
Da, da, da! Shall I sing the word indefinitely? I exited the workroom bowing and blubbering praise, then traipsed through the Hall of Animals with my marvelous new appendage held before me like a glowing scepter. Chernoff, that peerless artiste, had even managed to erase the ring-finger scuffing wrought by Johnny’s long-gone Little Miracle Electric Mexican Stuttering Ring.
It was dawn and felt like it: a brand-new day for Zebulon Finch! Wrangling a ride back to Beverly Hills took some doing, but by the time I arrived at the mansion I was using the Hand for this, that, and the other thing, and nearly squealing with glee. See how the Hand tips the driver! Look how the Hand opens the gate! Have you ever seen anything so wondrous as the Hand unlocking a door?
Bridey, per her established grind, was in her office. She wore a burgundy dress with shoulderpads wide enough to destroy a doorway, and was calculating gross percentages or net worths or some such tedious bunkum. I vibrated with more stimulating news, but waited at the precipice until she took off her glasses and fixed me with her trademark glare.
“Good o
f you to drop by. Too bad I am busy.”
I rushed the desk.
“The evening took a turn I never could have foreseen!”
“I’d say that’s an understatement. You jilted me, Z. Bridey Valentine, left stag at a party. That does not make me look especially good at a time when I am trying to look especially good. Exactly who do you think you are?”
“Your servant, your humble servant!”
“I had to tickle Biff’s chin all night to get him to keep my next appointment. It left me with no time whatsoever to talk to Maximilian about my script. It could be six months before I get another chance.”
“Yes, Maximilian—that’s what I’m trying to tell you!”
“I’m paying you, aren’t I? I believe that makes you obligated to obey when I tell you to get out of my office.”
Words, ever my ardent accomplices, failed me, so I flung the Hand across the desk, stopping a foot short of Bridey’s nose. To her it looked like the gesture for stop and her cheeks reddened. I turned the Hand round and round till she began to focus upon the flesh. Her scythe eyebrows unlocked from their clash and her scowling lips parted with a delicate pop.
“All right,” said she. “Talk.”
She held her sharp tongue throughout. When I concluded with Chernoff’s offer for further treatments, she snapped her fingers and pointed at the armchairs facing her desk. I sat in one and she took the opposite, perching upon the edge so that she might compare my hands side by side. The difference was breathtaking. The left hand looked as if grubbed from a grave, while the right looked as if it should be gripping a baseball, hoisting trophies, and sliding beneath cheerleaders’ skirts.
Bridey’s eyelids lowered.
“Did Maximilian say anything about me? Anything at all?”
It was, you will agree, a moment unfit for candor.
“Only that you were more beautiful than ever.” The compliment, decided I, needed more Russian detail. “More radiant than the Caspian Sea, more magnificent than the Kremlin!”