“Me?” For some reason I looked at my hands. “Oh, goodness no.”
“Then your interest in those skulls is nonprofessional?”
“Exactly.”
The taxidermist’s eyes brightened, and he led me to a human skeleton half hidden in the back of the room. “Who do you think this was?” he asked.
Being a layman, all I had to go by was the height—between four and a half and five feet tall. “Is it an adolescent?”
The taxidermist invited me to guess again, but before I could he blurted, “It’s a Pygmy!” He then told me that in the nineteenth century the English went to what is now the Congo and hunted these people, tracked them down and shot them for sport.
Funny how quickly this changed the mood. “But he could have died of a heart attack, right?” I said. “I mean, how are we to know for certain that he was murdered?”
“Oh, we know, all right,” the taxidermist told me. It would have been disturbing to see the skeleton of a slain Pygmy in a museum, but finding him in a shop, for sale, raised certain questions, uncomfortable ones, like How much is he?
“If you like the odd bits and pieces, I think I’ve got something else you might enjoy.” The taxidermist retreated to the area behind his desk and pulled a plastic bag off an overhead shelf. It was, I noticed, from Waitrose, a grocery store described to me upon my move to England as “a cut above.” From the bag he removed what looked like a platter with an oblong glass dome over it. Inside was a man’s forearm, complete with little hairs and a smudged tattoo. The taxidermist said, completely unnecessarily, “Now there’s a story behind this.” For what human limb in a Waitrose bag is not without some sort of story?
He placed the platter on the table, and as the lid was lifted and set to the side, I was told that, a hundred years ago, the taxidermist’s grandfather witnessed a bar fight between two sailors. One was armed with a saber, and the other, apparently, was disarmed with one. After it happened, the crowd went wild. The amputee fell on his back, and as he lay there in shock, bleeding to death, the taxidermist’s grandfather looked down at the floor, at the blood-soaked fingers that may have still been twitching, and likely thought, Well, it’s not like it’s doing him any good.
The story sounds a bit far-fetched, but there was no denying that the arm was real. The cut had been made two inches south of the elbow, and the exposed end, with its cleanly severed radius and ulna, reminded me of osso buco. “It was my grandfather who mummified it,” the taxidermist said. “You can see it’s not the best job in the world, but it’s really rather good for a first attempt.”
I leaned closer.
“Touch it,” he whispered.
As if I were under a spell, I did, shuddering a little at the feel of the hairs. Equally creepy was the arm’s color, which was not Caucasian flesh tone but not brown either, the way most desiccated body parts are. This was the same slightly toasted shade as a spray-on tan.
“I think I’ll just take one of those owls,” I said. “The one on the left, if that’s okay.”
The taxidermist nodded. Then he reached to an even higher shelf and brought down another plastic grocery bag, this one from Tesco, which is decidedly less upscale. “Now, a smell is going to hit you when I open this up, but don’t worry,” he said. “It’s just the smoke they used to preserve the head.”
That’s a phrase you don’t hear too often, so it took a moment for it to sink in. When he opened the bag, I saw that he might more accurately have said “the head of this teenage girl,” for she’d been no older than fourteen at the time of her death. This sounds super grisly but is, I propose, just medium grisly. The head was four hundred years old and came from somewhere in South America—Peru, I think he said. The skin was dry and thin, like leather on an old worn-out purse. Parts of it were eaten away, exposing the skull beneath it, but what really struck me was her hair, which was sleek and black, divvied into delicate, slender braids.
I didn’t ask the price but said a little more emphatically, “I really think the owl will do it for me today. It’s a Valentine’s Day present—perfect for our new place. A house, actually—no basement, and three stories tall.” I wasn’t trying to be boastful. I just wanted him to know that I was loved, and that I lived aboveground.
A few minutes later, the owl secured in a good-size cardboard box, I headed back to the Underground. Ordinarily I’d be elated—I’d been determined to find Hugh the perfect present, and, by golly, I had done it—but instead I felt unhinged, not by the things I had seen so much as by the taxidermist. It’s common to be misread by people who don’t know you. “Like to try Belligerent, the new fragrance for men?” I’ll be asked in a department store. And I always think, Really? Do I seem like the kind of guy who would wear cologne? Hotel operators so often address me as “Mrs. Sedaris” that I no longer bother to correct them. I’ve been mistaken for a parent, a pickpocket, and even, God forbid, an SUV owner, and I’ve always been able to brush it off. What’s rare is not to be misread. The taxidermist knew me for less time than it took to wipe my feet on his mat, and, with no effort whatsoever, he looked into my soul and recognized me for the person I really am: the type who’d actually love a Pygmy and could easily get over the fact that he’d been murdered for sport, thinking breezily, Well, it was a long time ago. Worse still I would flaunt it, hoping in the way a Porsche owner does that this would become a part of my identity. “They say he has a Pygmy,” I could imagine my new neighbors whispering as I walked down the street. “Hangs him plain as day in the corner of his living room, next to the musket he was shot with.”
I’d love to be talked about in this way, but how did the taxidermist know? Plenty of people must go into his store, ask for a kitten or a seagull or whatever, and walk out five minutes later knowing nothing about the human parts. Why show me the head in the grocery bag? As for the arm, how had he known I’d been dying to touch it? I hadn’t said anything one way or the other, so what was the giveaway?
At the station I went through the turnstile and stood on the platform until a train arrived. The owl wasn’t heavy—in fact it was surprisingly light—but the box was cumbersome, so I was happy to find a seat. At our first stop, a teenage girl in a school uniform got on and took the spot across from me. Deal with a kid her age today and the thought of her head winding up behind some shop counter in a plastic bag might not be all that troubling. I mean, the mouths on some of them! That said, it shouldn’t be just any kid that age. The one the taxidermist showed me, for instance—what was her story? Fourteen-year-olds existed four hundred years ago, but teenagers, with their angst and rebelliousness, their rage and Ritalin and very own version of Vogue magazine, are a fairly recent construct. In the seventeenth-century jungles of Peru, a girl that age would have babies already. Half her life would probably be over, and that’s if she was lucky. To have your chopped-off head preserved and then wind up in a Tesco bag some six thousand miles away—that was the indignity. Tesco! At least the arm was in a Waitrose bag.
It bothered me that the bag bothered me more than the head did, but what are you going to do? A person doesn’t consciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and, once they do, nothing, it seems, can shake them. Find someone with a similar eye, and Christmas shopping is a breeze. I can always spot something for my sisters Gretchen and Amy. The three of us can walk into a crowded party and all zoom in on the person who’s missing a finger, or who has one regular-size ear and one significantly smaller one, while my sister Lisa will pick up something else entirely.
Hugh and I don’t notice the same things either. That’s how he can be with me. Everything the taxidermist saw is invisible to him: my superficiality, my juvenile fascination with the abnormal, my willingness to accept and sometimes even celebrate evil—point this out, and he’ll say, “David? My David? Oh no. He’s not like that at all.”
A person who’s that out of it deserves both an owl and chocolate, so I got off the train at Piccadilly Circus and picked him up a box. Then I c
aught a bus and hurried toward home, thinking about love, and death, and about that throat, so elegant in its detail, which was, no doubt, awaiting me.
#2 to Go
“I have to go to China,” I told people, this in the way I might say, “I need to insulate my crawl space,” or, “I’ve got to get these moles looked at.” That’s the way it felt, though. Like a chore. What initially put me off was the food. I’ll eat it if the alternative means starving, but I’ve never looked forward to it, not even when it seemed exotic to me. I was in my early twenties when a Chinese restaurant opened in Raleigh. It was in a new building, designed to look vaguely templish, and my mother couldn’t get enough of it. “What do you say we go Oriental!”
I think she liked that the food was beyond her range. Anyone could imitate the twice-baked potatoes at the Peddler, or turn out a veal Parmesan like the Villa Capri’s, but there was no way a non-Chinese person could make moo shu pork, regardless of his or her training. “And the egg rolls,” she’d say. “Can you imagine!”
The restaurant didn’t have a liquor license, but they allowed you to brown-bag. Thus we’d arrive with our jug of hearty burgundy. I always got my mother to order for me, but when the kung pao chicken was brought to the table I never perked up the way I did at the steak house or the Villa Capri. And it wasn’t just Raleigh’s Chinese food. I was equally disinterested in Chicago and, later, New York, cities with actual Chinatowns.
Everyone swore that the food in Beijing and Chengdu would be different from what I’d had in the United States. “It’s more real,” they said, meaning, it turned out, that I could dislike it more authentically.
I think it hurt that before landing in China, Hugh and I spent a week in Tokyo, where the food was, as always, sublime, everything so delicate and carefully presented. With meals I drank tea, which leads me to another great thing about Japan—its bathrooms. When I was younger they wouldn’t have mattered so much. Then I hit fifty and found that I had to pee all the time. In Tokyo every subway station has a free public men’s room. The floors and counters are aggressively clean, and beside each urinal is a hook for hanging your umbrella.
This was what I had grown accustomed to when we flew from Narita to Beijing Capital International, where the first thing you notice is what sounds like a milk steamer, the sort a café uses when making lattes and cappuccinos. That’s odd, you think. There’s a coffee bar on the elevator to the parking deck? What you’re hearing, that incessant guttural hiss, is the sound of one person, and then another, dredging up phlegm, seemingly from the depths of his or her soul. At first you look over, wondering, Where are you going to put that? A better question, you soon realize, is Where aren’t you going to put it?
I saw wads of phlegm glistening like freshly shucked oysters on staircases and escalators. I saw them frozen into slicks on the sidewalk and oozing down the sides of walls. It often seemed that if people weren’t spitting they were coughing without covering their mouths, or shooting wads of snot out of their noses. This was done by plugging one nostril and using the other as a blowhole. “We Chinese think it’s best just to get it out,” a woman told me over dinner one night. She said that, in her opinion, it’s disgusting that a Westerner would use a handkerchief and then put it back into his pocket.
“Well, it’s not for sentimental reasons,” I told her. “We don’t hold on to our snot forever. The handkerchief’s mainly a sanitary consideration.”
Another thing you notice in China are the turds. Oh please, you’re probably thinking. Must you?
To this I answer, “Yes, I must,” for if they didn’t affect the food itself, they affected the way I thought about it. Once, in Tokyo, I saw a dog pee on the sidewalk. Then its owner reached into a bag, pulled out a bottle of water, and rinsed the urine off the pavement. As for dog feces, I never saw any trace of them. In Beijing you see an overwhelming amount of shit. Some of it can be blamed on pets, but a lot of it comes from people. Chinese babies do without diapers, wearing instead these strange little pants with a slit in the rear. When a child has to go, its parents direct it toward the curb or, if they’re indoors, to a spot they think of as “curby.” “Last month I saw a kid shit in the produce aisle of our Chengdu Walmart,” a young woman named Bridget told me.
This was the seventh day of my visit, and so desensitized was I that my first response was “You have a Walmart?”
There are the wild outdoor turds of China, and then there are the ones you see in the public bathrooms, most of which feature those squat-style toilets—holes, basically, level with the floor. And these bathrooms, my God. The sorriest American gas station cannot begin to match one of these things. In the men’s room of a Beijing subway stop, I watched a man walk past the urinal, lift his three-year-old son into the air, and instruct him to pee into the sink—the one we were supposed to wash our hands in.
My trip reminded me that we are all just animals, that stuff comes out of every hole we have, no matter where we live or how much money we’ve got. On some level we all know this and manage, quite pleasantly, to shove it toward the back of our minds. In China it’s brought to the front and nailed there. The supermarket cashier holds out your change and you take it thinking, This woman squats and spits on the floor while shitting and blowing snot out of her nose. You think it of the cab driver, of the ticket taker, and, finally, of the people who are cooking and serving your dinner. Which brings me back to food.
If someone added a pinch of human feces to my scrambled eggs, I might not be able to detect it, but I would most likely realize that these particular eggs tasted different from the ones I had yesterday. That’s with something familiar, though. And there wasn’t a lot of familiar in China. No pork lo mein or kung pao chicken, and definitely no egg rolls. On our first night in Chengdu, we joined a group of four for dinner—one Chinese woman and three Westerners. The restaurant was not fancy, but it was obviously popular. Built into our table was a simmering cauldron of broth, into which we were to add side dishes and cook them until they were done. “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering us some tofu, some mushrooms, and some duck tongues,” said the Western woman sitting across from me. “Do you trust me to keep ordering, or is there anything in particular you might like?”
I looked at her, thinking, You whore! Catherine was English and had lived in China for close to twenty years. I figured the duck tongues were a sort of test, so I made it a point to look unfazed. Excited even.
When I was eventually forced to eat one, I found that it actually wasn’t so bad. The only disconcerting part was the shape, particularly the base, from which dangled tentacle-like roots. This reminded you that the tongues had not been cut off but, rather, yanked out, possibly with pliers. Of course, the duck was probably dead by then, wasn’t it? It’s not like they’d jerk out the tongue and then let it go, traumatized and quackless but otherwise whole.
It was while eating my second duck tongue that the man at the next table hacked up a loud wad of phlegm and spat it onto the floor.
“I think I’m done,” I said.
The following morning, and with a different group, Hugh and I took a drive to the mountain where tea originally came from. It was late January, and the two-hour trip took us by countless factories. Mustard-colored smoke drifted into the sky, and the rivers we passed ran thick with waste and rubbish. Eventually we hit snow, which improved things visually but made it harder to move about. By the time we headed back down the mountain, it was almost three. Most restaurants had quit serving lunch, so we stopped at what’s called a Farming Family Happiness. This is a farmhouse where, if they’re in the mood, the people who live there will cook and serve you a meal.
One of the members of our party was a native of Chengdu, and of the five Americans, everyone but Hugh and I spoke Mandarin. Thus we hung back as they negotiated with the farm wife, who was square-faced and pretty and wore her hair cut into bangs. We ate in what was normally the mah-jongg parlor, a large room overlooking the family’s tea field. Against one wall were two t
elevisions, each tuned to a different channel and loudly playing to no one. On the other wall was a sanitation grade—C—and the service grade, which was a smiley face with the smile turned upside down.
As far as I know there wasn’t a menu. Rather, the family worked at their convenience, with whatever was handy or in season. There was a rooster parading around the backyard, and then there just wasn’t. After the cook had slit its throat, he used it as the base for five separate dishes, one of which was a dreary soup with two feet, like inverted salad tongs, sticking out of it. Nothing else was nearly as recognizable.
I’m used to standard butchering: here’s the leg, the breast, etc. At the Farming Family Happiness, rather than being carved, the rooster was senselessly hacked, as if by a blind person, a really angry one with a thing against birds. Portions were reduced to shards, mostly bone, with maybe a scrap of meat attached. These were then combined with cabbage and some kind of hot sauce.
Another dish was made entirely of organs, which again had been hacked beyond recognition. The heart was there, the lungs, probably the comb and intestines as well. I don’t know why this so disgusted me. If I was a vegetarian, okay, but if you’re a meat eater, why draw these arbitrary lines? “I’ll eat the thing that filters out toxins but not the thing that sits on top of the head, doing nothing.” And why agree to eat this animal and not that one?
I remember reading a few years ago about a restaurant in the Guangdong Province that was picketed and shut down because it served cat. The place was called the Fangji Cat Meatball Restaurant, which isn’t exactly hiding anything. Go to Fangji and you pretty much know what you’re getting. My objection to cat meatballs is not that I have owned several cats and loved them, but that I try not to eat things that eat meat. Like most Westerners I tend toward herbivores and things that like grain: cows, chickens, sheep, etc. Pigs eat meat—a pig would happily eat a human—but most of the pork we’re privy to was raised on corn or horrible chemicals rather than on other pigs and dead people.
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