by Ram Sundaram
A lonely orang-utan caught my eye, like evidence to his statement.
I remembered an orang-utan I had restored several years ago. It had been laborious work, because like all primates, the orang-utan has a unique face that is more difficult to capture in a mould than other animals. I had struggled with the plaster for weeks, and it had been Menon who had finally solved the problem. He had had the foresight of making a “death mask” of the orang-utan when its body had first arrived in our class, and using that as a reference, he designed the clay mould and practically finished the piece all by himself. I had been proud of him then. I wondered why that pride had evaporated with time, to be replaced by jealousy.
“In the years after I left your class,” he continued, “I travelled whenever I could afford it, collecting artefacts along the way. I learned to hunt, to earn the trophy and not merely build it. Perhaps that was what my earlier pieces were lacking. It’s one thing to have an animal sent to you to be mounted, but to actually kill it yourself… nothing comes close to that experience.”
I listened enviously, imagining what a kill would feel like. I had been raised with the belief that murder was a sin, a crime so heinous that it damaged your soul. But there was something tempting about the idea of taking a life, before “immortalising” it.
I stood near a beautiful zebra that had wise, thoughtful eyes and a near-smile on its peaceful face. Though the notion of “stuffed” animals following an observer with its eyes was somewhat of a cliché, it had always humbled me to realise just how much feeling lurked within those glass eyes. The zebra seemed to regard me with empathy—no, with something more than that… with recognition. He looked at me as though I were a friend—a long lost friend, perhaps, but a friend nonetheless. I gazed into those empty eyes and found a Universe within.
“You see yourself in it, don’t you?” Menon said, shrewdly.
I smiled and nodded. “It is glass, after all,” I joked, though I sensed he knew I was merely trying to avoid discussing what I’d seen within the zebra’s eyes.
“My latest kill,” Menon said, leading me to a table. It was old and worn, its wooden grain stained with blood. I passed my hand along the surface, wishing I could soak up all that blood, and harvest the power it held within. Menon watched me closely.
On the table lay an eagle, its belly split open. I approached it with academic interest, never having preserved a bird before. “Is restoring a bird much different?”
He shrugged. “Cut the skin; clean it; tan it; and then reattach it to a mould, just like with anything else. Although for birds we use the original skull with the beak.”
“Instead of a mould,” I said, nodding. Most animals’ heads were moulded out of clay or plaster, and then the skin was sewn onto the mould. But in birds, the original skulls with the attached beaks were used, because a mould was a poor substitute for the actual beak. I was surprised that I knew so much of the process. Strangely, I even had vague memories of having restored birds myself, though I was almost certain that I had never done so.
Menon offered the blade he had been using. “Go ahead,” he said.
“I wouldn’t know how to proceed,” I told him, honestly.
“Some things you never forget,” he said.
Perhaps it was the look in his eyes that convinced me, or maybe it was simply having a blade in my hand again that did it, but I pressed the sharp edge onto the bird’s skin. The knife pierced the flesh easily—it was a sensation I had missed. He studied my expressions more than my work, and I wondered if perhaps he too sensed my symbolic homecoming.
“You’ve missed it,” he said.
I nodded. “You have no idea how much…”
“You could return to it.”
“It’s a little too late to start from scratch.”
“My store could use you,” he said, taking the knife out of my hands. “Consider what it would mean to return to this… it’s where you belong.” As he said these words, I had a sudden, terrible vision of every animal in this store coming to life, their murderous eyes bent upon me as they obeyed his orders and lunged with the intent to kill. But then I blinked and the vision faded; Menon stood alone, knife in hand, requesting my partnership.
I took a moment to consider what I’d seen, and then decided that there was something unnatural about this store, something that I couldn’t quite fathom… The lighting, the animals, the smells… everything about this place was overwhelming. It was as if the store had character, as if it were a thinking, feeling being. I sensed its spirit, its very soul… and I sensed the level of control it had over me. What surprised me though was that I didn’t fear it. Instead I was excited, for I recognised that unnatural though it seemed, it was still my world.
I considered the animals again, but with a different sentiment this time. They seemed now not terrible and frightening; in fact, they felt familiar. I studied the beaver, standing on a log; I watched the hyena, bent over the carcass of a deer; a black bear stood on its hind legs, and I almost expected it to roar at me in recognition. Yes, in recognition, for I could remember him, and I knew he remembered me. I knew how each of these animals had lived, and knew how they had died. Menon had killed them, and he had then restored him, but I felt as though I had shared in the process. He was my prodigy after all, so perhaps we had formed a connection deeper than I had anticipated. In the six years that I had abstained from this world, he had thrived in it, and now I was reliving his experiences through this store.
A low growl caught my attention. I looked around in surprise and caught sight of a freshly restored lion at the end of the store. I approached it cautiously, wondering if I was now imagining sounds as well as sights. It was then that I noticed a giant cage beside the restored model of the lion. Within the cage stood a similar sized lion; only, this one was alive.
It paced restlessly within the cage, its head bent in thought, while its muscles flexed in idle frustration, demanding to be unleashed. I was struck by its might, which though concealed, radiated through its very presence. I could distinctly notice the difference between its obvious strength and the impotent might of its twin, frozen upon the shelf. Had the living specimen not been in a cage right beside it, I would have considered the resurrected lion to be a masterpiece. But it paled in comparison to its living, breathing counterpart.
“It’s beautiful,” I remarked, dropping to my knees to study it closely. It paused in its pacing to return my gaze, though with less curiosity and great hostility.
“Do you want to do the honours?” Menon suddenly asked, holding out a rifle.
I leapt to my feet. “You intend to kill it?”
“But of course,” he said, surprised. “This is a taxidermy shop, not a zoo. He is like a bag of ingredients, which must be cooked and prepared before becoming edible. Killing him is the first step in immortalising him. I intended to do it later, but since you’re the guest—”
“But I’ve never killed before,” I told Menon, hastily. “The bodies were always sent to me. I don’t think I could have killed either. I always imagined the animals living fulfilling lives, roaming freely, proudly, like knights in a medieval castle, or gods in an ancient Greece.” I turned to look at the lion—I regarded his frustrated, troubled demeanour with more pity now than reverence. “I never imagined them like this.”
“But this is their reality.”
I shook my head. “Not in my world.”
“Most of the animals sent to taxidermists aren’t trophies hunted bravely in dense jungles,” Menon reasoned. “Those times have long since passed. These days the animals that reach us are pets, performers, or properties. They belong to people who want them remade into a more convenient form. They aren’t mighty, romantic heroes of the savannah that we glorify through art. They’re ordinary creatures, weak, flawed, and mortal.”
The lion dropped its head as if it understood.
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“I can’t kill it, Menon,” I said, throwing my hands up. “I just can’t.”
“I know.”
There was so much venom in his tone that I turned around. I found him glaring at me with his teeth clenched. “You’re gutless,” he hissed. “You always have been. That’s what made you a lousy teacher. You could only teach me half of what I needed to know.”
“I taught you everything you needed to know,” I replied. “It wasn’t cowardice that limited me, but lack of resources. I admit that. I didn’t know how to restore insects and—”
“You’re not a coward because you didn’t read a book on insects,” he said, derisively. “You were and are gutless, because you never understood what a restoration entailed.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning,” he said, stepping forward. “You never knew how to kill.”
I edged away from him. “The kill isn’t important.”
“It is the most important thing,” he said, in a low voice. “It was the kill you never taught me.” I noticed that the lantern glowed in his lifeless eyes the same way it did in the eyes of the animals. “Preservation is one half of the skill; the other I taught myself.”
“Is that what ruined you? Killing?”
“Ruined?” he said, and the beautiful skin on his face stretched into a cruel grin. “If I’m ruined, then why do you envy me? Why do you resent what I’ve achieved?”
I didn’t have an answer.
“You and I are the same,” he told me, “Two halves of the same person. But we complete each other; without you, I’m nothing.”
“You’ve done all this,” I argued. “You don’t need me.”
“You did this,” he said, with sudden ferocity. “This is what I did.”
As he said the words, the store changed.
I looked at the animals; their beautiful, impeccable forms disintegrated before my eyes. The restored lion had a gunshot wound, but was alive, while the lion pacing in the cage now lay dead. The leopard was bleeding; the bison was beheaded; the beaver had been strangled; the beetle had been crushed, and every other specimen in the store carried the injuries that had killed it. They were dead, yet alive; their wounds exposed, their blood splattered and their guts spilled, they made a hideous, gruesome sight. They moved behind him restlessly, carrying the wounds that had killed them. Their bodies were in agony and their souls were trapped.
“When you entered this store, you healed everything,” Menon said, holding the knife before him. “You restored what I killed. Without you, the skill is incomplete.”
I noticed now that Menon himself wasn’t beautiful and unblemished; he had an old wound in the chest, where a knife had stabbed him, and his shirt and apron were stained with dried blood. He looked older now, older than he actually was: lines had appeared on his face and his skin looked stretched somehow, as it hung lifelessly from his bones.
He approached me like a hunter stalking his prey. His every move seemed measured, calculated, and I was too inept to guess it. I stumbled against a large display case, covered beneath a black cloth. “The last exhibit,” he said, nodding towards it.
I eyed it cautiously, and then edged away.
“We mustn’t forget the original purpose behind taxidermy,” Menon said, smiling that hollow smile again. “The purpose isn’t merely to capture life, but to capture trophies.”
Saying so, he unveiled the last exhibit.
Inside was a portion of a taxidermy store: a few restored animals stood on shelves, and between them was a table with a carcass lying upon it. Bent over the carcass, with a cutting knife in hand, was a life-sized model of me. I turned to Menon in outrage, but he wasn’t there.
Instead, I found that I was wearing his blue apron and had his knife in my hand. I looked around the store and found that all the animals had returned to their respective dioramas, and had frozen in their respective poses. All was as it should have been.
Menon’s words echoed in my memory:
“The killer and his prey… they’re one and the same.”
I thought I heard the owl hoot by the front door. His name was Alan… I had restored him six years ago. But how did I know that? I looked at the zebra, at the shrewd, all-knowing look in its eyes—it was still smiling at me. Trapped inside this giant riddle, I wondered if Menon had ever really been there, or if we had both been immortalised within this store.
The bell on the front door tinkled, but no one entered the shop. I was alone.
Epilogue:
Absolution
One
It is time.
Is it? I check the skies. There is no sun to mark the progression of the day. Has the sea swallowed everything, I wonder? For though it is a cloudless sky that I gaze into, there is no sun, no moon, and not even a star. In that case, even time must have been consumed.
The Banyan tree and I are alone on this world. This beach has withstood the cancerous tide thus far, but how long will it be before I too am engulfed by the ocean? If these are my last few moments of life, then I must accumulate as much knowledge as I can and preserve it.
But I have nothing to learn from.
Two
He learns from the world.
There is much about this existence of his that he has yet to understand. It is vast and diverse, yet it is small and monotonous. What he sees is endless sea and an endless sky to mirror it; yet within this tedium there exists the diversity of currents, of infinite ripples of water, each different from the other. The sky for all its abundance is cloudless, yet it serves as a celestial mirror to the sea, echoing the elegant motion of every wave and every current.
The world is poetic. But it does not rhyme.
Three
There are bottles upon the island, hundreds and thousands of them. They lie amassed in a little inlet on the other side of the beach, waiting to be searched. Every bottle carries a piece of paper with a message on it. Excited by the prospect of learning, I hastily uncork the bottles and read the messages within. Since time no longer exists, I cannot measure how long it takes me to read all of them, but when I finish the last message, I find that the world is different.
The tree hasn’t moved.
The beach hasn’t flooded.
The sea and the sky are the same.
Yet the world is undoubtedly different.
Perhaps it is because I myself have changed; or rather the knowledge within the bottles has changed me. There is nothing profound within the messages, nothing written with divine inspiration or matchless talent; but even the idle thoughts, the aimless theories and the random notions, crafted in a crude hand by an ordinary mind, serve to enhance my understanding of life. For the author, whoever he or she was, must have been just like me, and might have even been a part of me. For that is the gist I have gathered from these messages, is that we are all one.
One plus one equals two…
Oh shut up…
Four
He does not understand every message. Some bottles contain papers that are essentially blank, but for a small drawing or even just a number written in the corner. Some papers are covered in writing, back and front, such that not even an inch of the paper lies bare.
The messages are written in a strange, factual language that he cannot comprehend. Since they were preserved in a dry bottle, and kept apart from the sea, the words lack the sensitivity required to affect him. He therefore soaks every message in the sea before reading it.
Funny, he thinks, what was the point of putting the messages in a bottle, then?
Five
Vanity is a funny notion.
A man that spends two hours training at the gym to build an aesthetic physique is considered vain. A woman who spends two hours at a salon having her hair and her nails done is considered vain. But when the same man and woman re
ad books in a library, in an effort to expand and enhance their knowledge, they are considered studious and enlightened.
Is reading not an indulgence in vanity as well? If improving one’s physical appearance is considered vain, then isn’t developing one’s mental prowess also vain? For what motivates us to read and learn? We hope to gain a better understanding of the subject we learn, so that we can earn a living in that field, or so that we can instruct other students in that subject, or merely because it bestows upon us the satisfaction of knowing that our knowledge has been enhanced.
Every gesture, every action, and every breath that we take in life is driven by vanity. We are individuals, equipped through circumstance with a unique set of talents, skills, and ambitions. But one common feature we each share is an ego, an awareness of our apparent individuality, which motivates us to enhance ourselves through every moment of every day. When eating, sleeping, thinking, moving, acting or speaking, we are driven by a necessity to serve ourselves. The impulse is so deeply ingrained within our psyche that it affects our behaviour unconsciously. None of us are immune to the ego, for as long as there is an individual upon this world, there will be ego.
I am reminded of a dream where I’d entered a classroom and found that every student within that class, as well as the teacher, was me. We interacted with one another as though we were different people, yet we were all the same. I was everyone and yet, because it was a mere dream, I was no one. It is that rule that parts reality from fantasy, and the individual from the collective.
Reality features an individual within a collective world; Fantasy features a collective consciousness within an individual. Yet ultimately, there is only one individual in both realms.
All these fantasies… all these dreams and illusions that I have tortured myself with… what do I have to show for them except frustration? As a society we tend to believe that dreaming increases understanding, but what if fantasy actually impedes empathy? What if it inhibits our ability to accept? Why else does life grow increasingly difficult as we grow older? As children we’re naive, and that innocence allows us to find fantasies within reality. But excessive dreaming eventually corrupts our reality and dilutes it. Fantasy dispels all fact, all certainty and therefore all reality. It leaves us intolerably vulnerable to that cruel nemesis, disappointment. And so whenever we stumble upon an answer, we dust it off, measure it, and then finally hold it up to fantasy’s expected standards. And more often than not, the answers appear ordinary. So we discard them and move on. Until eventually, there are no more answers left.