The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  “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.”

  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 from 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 fifteen hundred 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 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 how things work, honey,” his companion said.

  Miriam threaded through 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 him 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 fo
und 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 for 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?”

  Miriam shook her head. It sounded like something the lamp would like. She would try to acquire it.

  “Really? I’m surprised. Well-known broad. She was burned at the stake, but an enormous crowd was converted to her favor after witnessing her attitude toward death.”

  “What was her attitude?” Miriam said.

  “I don’t know exactly. Thirteenth century. The records are muzzy. I guess she went out without a lot of racket about it. Women have been trying to figure out how to be strong for a long while. It’s harder for a woman to find out than it is for a man. Not crying about stuff doesn’t seem to be enough.”

  Miriam said nothing. Back in the room, the lamp was hovering over Moby-Dick. It would be deeply involved in it by now, slamming down Melville like water. The shapeless maw of the undifferentiating sea! God as indifferent, insentient Being, composed of an infinitude of deaths! Nature. Gliding…bewitching…majestic…capable of universal catastrophe! The lamp was eating it up.

  “I’ve been here for ten years,” the taxidermist said. “I built this place up from nothing. The guy before me had nothing but a few ratty displays. Medallions were his specialty. Things have to look dead on a medallion, that’s the whole point. But when I finished with something it looked alive. You could almost hear it breathe. But of course it wasn’t breathing. Ha! It was best when I was working on it, that’s when it really existed, but when I stopped…uhhh,” he said. “I’ve done as much as I can. I’ve reached my oubliette. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “I do,” Miriam said.

  “Oh,” he said, “I’m crazy about the word oubliette. That word says it all.”

  “It’s true,” she said.

  “You’re perfect,” he said. “I want to retire, and I want you to take my place.”

  “I couldn’t possibly,” Miriam said.

  “No stuffing would be required. I’ve done all that, we’re beyond that. You’d just be answering questions.”

  “I don’t know anything about questions,” Miriam said.

  “The only thing you have to know is that you can answer them any way you want. The questions are pretty much the same, so you’ll go nuts if you don’t change the answers.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Miriam said. But actually she was thinking about the lamp. The odd thing was she had never been in love with an animal. She had just skipped that cross-species eroticism and gone right beyond it to altered parts. There was something wrong with that, she thought. It was so hopeless. Well, love was hopeless…

  “I have certain responsibilities,” Miriam said. “I have a lamp.”

  “That’s a wonderful touch!” the taxidermist said. “And when things are slow you’ll have all the animals too. There are over a thousand of them here, you know, and some of them are pretty darn rare. I think you’ll be making up lots of stories about them.”

  It seemed a pretty good arrangement for the lamp. Miriam made up her mind. “All right,” she said.

  “You’ll have a following in no time,” the taxidermist said. “I’ll finish up with these people and you can start in the morning.”

  There was still a long line of people waiting to get into the museum. Miriam passed them on her way out.

  “I’ve been back five times,” a bald woman was saying to her friend. “I think you’ll find it’s almost a quasi-religious experience.”

  “Oh, I think everything should be like that,” her friend said.

  Carl’s big truck was no longer at the garage. Miriam gazed around but the truck did not reappear and probably, as far as she was concerned, never would. For most people, and apparently Carl and Jack were two of them, a breakdown meant that it was just a matter of time before they were back on the road again. She walked over to the hotel and up the stairs to their room. The door was open and the beds were stripped. The big pillows without their pretty covers looked like flayed things. A thin maid in a pink uniform was changing the channel on a television set. Something was being described by the announcer as a plume of effluent surrounded by seagulls…

  The maid noticed her and said, “San Diego, a sewer pipe broke. A single pipe for one point four million people. A million four, what do they expect.”

  Miriam continued down the corridor and opened the door quietly to her own room. She looked at the lamp. The lamp looked back at her as though it had no idea who she was. Miriam knew that look. She’d always felt it was full of promise. Nothing could happen anywhere was the truth of it. And the lamp was burning with this. Burning!

  Marabou

  The funeral of Anne’s son, Harry, had not gone smoothly. Other burials were taking place at the same hour, including that of a popular singer several hundred yards away whose mourner fans carried on loudly under a lurid striped tent. Still more fans pressed against the cemetery’s wrought-iron gates, screaming and eating potato chips. Anne had been distracted. She gazed at the other service in disbelief, thinking of the singer’s songs that she had heard now and then on the radio.

  Her own group, Harry’s friends, was subdued. They were pale, young, and all wore sunglasses. Most of them were classmates from the prep school he had graduated from two years before, and all were addicts, or former addicts of some sort. Anne couldn’t tell the difference between those who were recovering and those who were still hard at it. She was sure there was a difference, of course, and it only appeared there wasn’t. They all had a manner. There were about twenty of them, boys and girls, strikingly alike in black. Later she took them all out to a restaurant. “Death…by none art thou understood,” one boy kept saying. “Henry Vaughan.”

  They were all bright enough, Anne supposed. After a while he stopped saying it. They had calamari, duck, champagne, everything. They were on the second floor of the restaurant and had the place to themselves. They stayed for hours. By the time they left, one girl was saying earnestly, “You know a word I like is interplanetary.”

  Then she brought them back to the house, although she locked Harry’s rooms. Young people were sentimentalists, consumers. She didn’t want them carrying off Harry’s things, his ties and tapes, anything at all. They sat in the kitchen. They were beginning to act a little peculiar, Anne thought. They didn’t talk about Harry much, though one of them remembered a time when Harry was driving and he stopped at all the green lights and proceeded on the red. They all acted as though they’d been there. This seemed a fine thing to remember about Harry. Then someone, a floppy-haired boy who looked frightened, remembered something else, but it turned out this was associated with a boy named Pete who wasn’t even present.

  At about one o’clock in the morning, Anne said that when she and Harry were in Africa, during the very first evening at the hotel in Victoria Falls, he claimed he’d seen a pangolin, a peculiar anteater-like animal. He described it, and that’s clearly what it was, but a very rare thing, an impossible thing for him to have seen, really, and no one in the group they would be traveling with believed him. He had been wandering around the hotel grounds by himself, so there were no other witnesses. The group went on to discuss the falls. Everyone could verify the impression the falls made. So many hundreds of millions of gallons of water went over each minute or something, and there was a drop of more than 350 feet. Even so, every
one was quite aware it wasn’t like that, no one was satisfied with that. The sound of the falls was like silence, total amplified silence, the sight of it exclusionary. And all that could be done was to look at it, this astonishing thing, Victoria Falls, then eventually stop looking and go on to something else.

  The next day Harry had distinguished himself further by exclaiming over a marabou stork, and someone in the group told him that marabous were gruesome things, scavengers, “morbidity distilled,” in the words of this fussy little person, and certainly nothing to get excited about when there were hundreds of beautiful and strange creatures in Africa that one could enjoy and identify and point out to the others. Imagine, Anne said, going to an immense new continent and being corrected as to one’s feelings, one’s perceptions, in such a strange place. And it was not as though everything was known. Take the wild dogs, for example. Attitudes had changed utterly about the worth of wild dogs…

  Abruptly, she stopped. She had been silent much of the evening and felt that this outburst had not gone over particularly well. Harry’s friends were making margaritas. One of them had gone out and just returned with more tequila. They were watching her uncomfortably, as though they felt she should fluff up her stories on Harry a bit.

  Finally one of them said, “I didn’t know Harry had been to Africa.”

  This surprised her. The trip to Africa hadn’t been a triumph, exactly, but it hadn’t been a disaster either and could very well have been worse. They had been gone a month, and this was very recently. But it didn’t matter. She would probably never see these children again.

  They sat around the large kitchen. They were becoming more and more strange to her. She wondered what they were all waiting for. One of them was trying to find salt. Was there no salt? He opened a cupboard and peered inside, bringing out a novelty set, a plastic couple, Amish or something; she supposed the man was pepper, the woman salt. They were all watching him as he turned the things over and shook them against his cupped hand. Anne never cooked, never used anything in this kitchen, she and Harry ate out, so these things were barely familiar to her. Then, with what was really quite a normal gesture, the boy unscrewed the head off the little woman and poured the salt inside onto a saucer.