Menagerie

by Bradford Morrow

  Due to technical difficulties in adapting the addition to the preexisting structure, construction proceeded with less speed and efficiency than it had so many years ago, but by and by the new showroom was completed. It featured a huge glass dome fabricated with durable nanofiber. The dome loomed over the space, stretching all the way down the southern wall, opening upon leagues of gray waters, the blank sky, and the blanker horizon. From above, the Warmed World Showroom must have looked like a giant snow globe or some exotic crystal seed. He was different after that. It was nothing any of us could point to, of course, but he was different and our lives too had changed. Every incoming specimen was now installed in the new hall and the other showrooms were neglected altogether. Forgoing sleep, he took to passing among the ranks of the last survivors all through the darkening hours. I discovered him there more than once, pacing slowly from piece to piece, lost in unknowable thoughts, staring into eyes that stared back from a moment beyond time. The moon never seemed so cold as it did through that glassy sky at night.

  The dismissals that began shortly thereafter were taken by the staff as a blessing. The majority of us, in fact, were already appraising our options toward a quiet way out when, without warning, he started discharging us, one or two at a time, by means of a note taped to bedroom doors and with severance pay substantial enough to convince those who remained to bide our time rather than quit. In a matter of months, the island’s living population was reduced to seven.

  By now, I had more than an inkling of what was unsettling him, but even I could not foresee what came next. It was over a year after the completion of the new wing. I was in the computer room replacing a dead processor when he came in. I sensed right away that something was amiss, but couldn’t place it. I did not think he saw me there and I was long past the point of trying to address him, and so I gazed on in silence as he went straight to the interface, sat down, and stared up at the screen. On the surface, everything was as usual and yet underneath it all I felt something astir. I realized what only when the siren went off: A faint scent of gasoline had trailed him in and not come to my full awareness until the fire alarm sounded. Confusion, suspicion, panic, and haste—it was all primed to crash down on me, but for several moments, I was enveloped by a perfect calm. The siren wailed and a recorded voice informed us over the loudspeaker that a fire had broken out in the northeastern quadrant. I watched him. I carefully set the processor back in its rack and slowly made my way toward the door and I watched him the whole time. It was all too clear: He wasn’t going to budge. And then, just as I reached the threshold, he spoke.

  “And I too await the hour when I will meet my maker.”

  All I could see was the back of his chair and the top of his head—a dark crest against the background of the glowing monitor. I waited there for a full minute, but he did not speak again. I ran off down the hallway then, overcome at last by the noise and adrenaline.

  The fire struck a gas line and the blast rocked the whole building and blew to pieces a large section of the outer wall. The Riparian Zone Showroom was in rubble by the time I careened around the corner and hit the heat and chaos headfirst. We went at it with hoses and fire extinguishers, we fought side by side, in solidarity, with staunch resolve, but it was an utter inferno and our efforts choked and sputtered in the smoke that drove us back, step by step. My colleagues’ faces seemed strange to me under the searing light, these faces I’d known through the still and icy decades, contorted now, straining, desperate and febrile, glistening in sweat. It scratched at the surface of things in me long buried, longer dead. I was nearly overborne by the urge to let the fire extinguisher clatter to the ground, call on them all to follow suit, and watch the flames consume the place. I came to my senses. By the time the blaze was fully doused, the Savanna Showroom too was nothing but cinders and charred wreckage. We were weary and feverish and covered in soot. More than anything, we were stunned by the sudden violence that had crashed over our island refuge on the far side of time’s tide. And the crisis was not over. A considerable portion of the Linnaeum’s shell was demolished. It was late February and the wind penetrated deep into the building. It took us thirty-six hours to throw together a makeshift wall and it was no permanent fix. Without a professional crew and new materials, the damage could not be repaired, and over the coming days it became clear that the Taxidermist did not intend to take any action. The best we could do was shore up the barrier with what resources remained from the construction. The result was not reassuring. It held off the unruly brunt of the weather, but no one knew how long that would last and there was no telling with what stealth the more subtle chill might infiltrate.

  I never let anyone know what I knew, but they were suspicious of him. They all noticed, of course, that he was the only one not fighting the fire. It would eventually come to light that the sprinkler system had been deactivated. There were few explanations for how the blaze might have ignited and fewer still for its rapid spread in a building constructed largely of fire-resistant materials. His detachment throughout the disaster and the recovery was disconcerting, to say the least. What it all added up to, none of them could be sure, but grave misgiving could have thrived on less.

  Six months after the fire, I found myself part of the next (and penultimate) deportation off the island. There were three of us. We boarded an outgoing yacht that had brought in the brown rat. The Taxidermist was nowhere in sight. We weighed anchor and the waves kicked up a few miles out and I watched the island fall over the horizon—slipping away to its silent destiny, as I to ours. The final three—the chef, a mechanic, and a housekeeper—were kept on for another four and a half years. They were by no means equal to the task of maintaining the entire facility and, one by one, utilities broke down and subsystems hit upon glitches, some to be patched up, some never to work again. The Linnaeum steadily deteriorated. And meanwhile they—the chef, the mechanic, and the housekeeper—passed each other at great distances in the hallways and showrooms, like ships at crossing prospects, until they finally came abreast one morning on the jetty, luggage in hand, all three bound for the same voyage back home.

  It must seem out of order that I was not a member of this long-retained party, that I was sent off not early but untimely enough to belie my significance and uniqueness in the scheme of things, and in this, perhaps, is the key to it all. Above and beyond any other distinction I might claim, I was essential to the supercomputer’s performance, which was itself essential to the Taxidermist’s mission, and sometime before the construction of the Warmed World Showroom, I began to suspect that something was awry here in the central nervous system of the enterprise. Now on my end, let it be said, everything was in working order. The hardware was as sound as ever. But there was something strange afoot in the distribution of the computer’s online activity. From the beginning, information had passed largely through the same channels: to and from zoos and preservations, smugglers and underground market dealers, transportation and communication firms, governmental and law-enforcement agencies. The margins of these thoroughfares saw some exchange, but it was always minimal. An uptick in peripheral activity was the first sign that the case had altered. For a long while, I attributed it to mere fleeting anomalies in the extinction pattern. It escalated, however, and I realized that whatever was going on, it couldn’t be accounted for so easily. This was something else altogether and I had no idea what. Despite the influx of specimens, the Taxidermist also began around this time to spend more of his day before the computer. Naturally, as the aberrations multiplied, my gaze began to gravitate toward his monitor while I ran my rounds through the racks, and it was just a matter of time before I found myself going out of my way to get whatever glimpse I could, and so it is likely that he caught on, likely that he knew that I saw him sitting there, before the screen, hour after hour, staring at an unceasing stream of meaningless combinations of letters and numbers and typographic symbols.

  I don’t claim to know what this means. But I do know that it was in the
midst of my first suspicions that reconstruction began and somewhere about when they kicked into high gear that he set the Riparian Zone and Savanna Showrooms on fire and spoke to me those lone enigmatic words. I do know that it was shortly thereafter that I was released.

  However you have it, the Taxidermist was now the Linnaeum’s only living inhabitant. The deliveries persisted for some time. And so he continued to wait outside at a distance and steal in behind the new arrivals, always silent, always composed. The building’s disrepair appeared ever greater before the eyes of the deliverymen, even as the cold, which had long slipped through the chinks and fissures of our deficient barrier, chased them back away. Besides these brief visits, the only other line to the outside world was the computer and the phenomenon that I had observed could not have resolved itself, would instead certainly accelerate and finally disrupt all communication, even as the machine, left unattended by my hands, would without a doubt slowly break down. Concurrently, the deliveries too would taper off, the supply line would discontinue. It would be just a matter of time before the Taxidermist was cut off entirely from what was called the living world.

  It is now a question of how he would interpret this.

  And again I must assert my unique privilege. For he told me himself.

  He would come to two conclusions. First, that the supply line had discontinued because the supply had died away, that no more specimens arrived because the last of the last survivors was gone. That is: Every animal species was now extinct. Second, that the computer returned endless reels of dumb signs void of mind and intent and no more ships docked at the island pier, that he neither saw nor communicated with anyone anymore because the last of the human species too was gone. That is: the last but one.

  What remained to be done stood before him with authority. He had no choice. All known procedures were out of the question, of course, but that did not relieve him of the charge. The broad principles were plain enough. The challenge was to hone a technique on the whetstone of pure theory. And the technique had to be flawless—there was no test subject. Once more, the Taxidermist faced the absolutely unrepeatable.

  For him, it had till now only ever been a question of the skin, never the innards, ever about the preservation of the dead, never the curing of the living, and so his research took him from Egyptian mummification to modern embalming, from experimental chemistry to mystic thanatology. All traditional knowledge mastered, every facet of the problem still demanded groundbreaking insights and methods. He dwelled on it for many quiet months. The program he at last developed involved successive injections of synthetic and natural embalming solutions—highly diluted at first, but as the body grew habituated, ever more concentrated. Alongside this, a gradual weaning off liquids was called for, plus the infusion of Epsom salts and mineral compounds into a restricted diet. The cold that, in the neglect of the heating equipment, was slowly pervading the Linnaeum now revealed itself to be a boon and was factored into his calculations. Everything was coordinated so as not to shock the system but to ease it into demission—to have shutdown coincide with the final touch of preservative.

  Once the plan was devised and the chemicals were concocted, his workday was reduced to a rate of dosages per hour. Nothing else remained but to let time bleed away as he wandered the Warmed World, day in, day out, the last of living beings, withdrawing ever deeper into his flesh, settling slowly into the stasis that had so long surrounded him, slumping toward the zero degree with every dose: the soundest, coldest mineral slumber. He forwent food entirely those several endmost weeks. And as the moment approached, he made the concluding arrangements. He prepared the final several dozen syringes ahead of schedule. Time and energy were increasingly precious. Seated at a table in the back of the showroom, he wrote the tag:

  Species: Homo sapiens

  Place of Extinction: The Linnaeum

  Time of Extinction:

  He did not stir from that table for days, but sat in a quietude disturbed only by the hourly injection. From above, up in the steeled skies over the island, all would have seemed stilled already—the speck of life that had floated so long under the glass globe, so languidly, come at last to rest.

  And yet you would have seen him from up high as he stood at the appointed hour and looked toward the riser where the final syringe awaited him.

  And you can imagine him then:

  Once and only once more he passes through the ranks of the last survivors, to the front of the Warmed World, the crown of the kingdom—passes the mummichog, the giant tube worm, the Northland tusked weta, the carrion crow, the black-backed jackal, the beatic dwarf olive. He plows forward over the frigid ground with ever-flagging speed, recedes into the stillness underfoot at every step. He inches toward the head of the pack and is soon outstripped by time’s slow creep, vies in speed with their enlivened shadows, and is taken up by that silent herd marching west to east, driving back the dawn. Finally, he arrives. And he lifts his leg then, slow as night, levers himself onto the riser and into place, grinding, muscle by muscle, to a stop. He takes the last syringe off the platform. He draws it aloft. He coaxes it into his left cephalic vein and depresses the plunger and the serum drips a drop at a time into his coagulated bloodstream. He draws the needle out, cell by cell. He drops the syringe and the thin glass shatters the silence. And he cringes over at the waist then into a gesture that takes shape over days. The accumulated solution oozes through the congealed slough that clogs his veins, fixing his every atom into place—the art he’d only ever known from without brought within, coiling him into expression: the final mudra of himself and his kind. And he urges his right arm down, tick by tick, across his legs, edging his hand forward, eroding his way through space, toward the tag wrapped around his left ankle, toward the stop that every second seems to push two seconds away, until he reaches the penultimate moment, the pause before the definitive stab, the breath before the last gasp.—And you will imagine him there for a small eternity: Waiting. Pen in hand. Waiting. Pen poised. Waiting for the time when it will have been. Waiting to write the moment of his own death.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

  EMILY ANDERSON’s fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including McSweeney’s, Caketrain, and the Kenyon Review.

  RUSSELL BANKS is the author of many novels, most recently Lost Memory of Skin, and six short-story collections, including the forthcoming A Permanent Member of the Family (both Ecco), which contains the titular story that appears here. “A Permanent Member of the Family” is © 2013 Russell Banks.

  MARTINE BELLEN’s most recent collection of poetry is Wabac Machine (Furniture Press Books). Her other books include GHOSTS! (Spuyten Duyvil Press) and The Vulnerability of Order (Copper Canyon Press).

  REBECCA BRIDGE is a poet, essayist, and screenwriter who lives in Seattle. Her work has previously been published in Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Sixth Finch, notnostrums, and elsewhere. Her collection of writing essays and exercises, Clear Out the Static from the Attic, is forthcoming from Write Bloody Publishing.

  Novelist, cut-up artist, and Beat postmodernist WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS (1914–1997) is the author of such canonical works as Junky and Naked Lunch (both Grove Press). The recipient of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, he published nearly thirty books in his lifetime, as well as collaborating with artists such as Laurie Anderson, Jim Morrison, Gus Van Sant, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits.

  EDWARD CAREY is a writer and illustrator. His novels Observatory Mansions (Crown) and Alva and Irva (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) have been published in fourteen countries. Hot Key published Heap House, the first volume of his young-adult Iremonger trilogy, in September.

  H. G. CARRILLO is the author of the novel Loosing My Espanish (Anchor Books). His short stories have appeared in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, Glimmer Train, Ninth Letter, Slice, and elsewhere. He teaches at George Washington University.

  GILLIAN CONOLEY’s seventh book, Peace, will be published by Omnidawn in the spring of 201
4. City Lights will publish her translations of three books by Henri Michaux, Thousand Times Broken, in the fall of 2014.

  SUSAN DAITCH is the author of three novels, L.C. (Dalkey Archive Press), The Colorist (Virago), and Paper Conspiracies (City Lights), as well as a collection of short fiction, Storytown (Dalkey). “Fall Out,” a novella, was published this year by Madras Press in support of Women for Afghan Women.

  MONICA DATTA’s work appeared earlier this year in Web Conjunctions. She is currently writing an opera libretto and a novel, from which this piece is excerpted. This is her first appearance in print.

  “The Taxidermist” is CRAIG EKLUND’s first published story.

  TEMPLE GRANDIN is a designer of livestock-handling facilities for the United States and many countries around the world, as well as a noted author and speaker on the subject of autism. Named one of the one hundred most influential people by Time Magazine in 2010, she is the author of numerous books including New York Times bestsellers Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (Scribner) and Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). The HBO movie about her life story, Temple Grandin, won seven Emmy awards and a Golden Globe.