Honored Guest

CONGRESS

MIRIAM WAS LIVING with a man named Jack Dewayne who taught a course in forensic anthropology at the state’s university. It was the only program in the country that offered a certificate in forensic anthropology, as far as anyone knew, and his students adored him. They called themselves Deweenies and wore skull-and-crossbones T-shirts to class. People were mad for Jack in this town. Once, in a grocery store, when Miriam stood gazing into a bin of little limes, a woman came up to her and said, “Your Jack is a wonderful, wonderful man.”

“Oh, thanks,” Miriam said.

“My son Ricky disappeared four years ago and some skeletal remains were found at the beginning of this year. Scattered, broken, lots of bones missing, not much to go on, a real jumble. The officials told me they probably weren’t Ricky’s but your Jack told me they were, and with compassion he showed me how he reached that conclusion.” The woman waited. In her cart was a big bag of birdseed and a bottle of vodka. “If it weren’t for Jack, my Ricky’s body would probably be unnamed still,” she said.

“Well, thank you very much,” Miriam said.

She never knew what to say to Jack’s fans. As for them, they didn’t understand Miriam at all. Why her of all people? With his hunger for life, Jack could have chosen better, they felt. Miriam lacked charm, they felt. She was gloomy. Even Jack found her gloomy occasionally.

Mornings, out in the garden, she would, at times, read aloud from one of her many overdue library books. Dew as radiant as angel spit glittered on the petals of Jack’s roses. Jack was quite the gardener. Miriam thought she knew why he particularly favored roses. The inside of a rose does not at all correspond to its exterior beauty. If one tears off all the petals of the corolla, all that remains is a sordid-looking tuft. Roses would be right up Jack’s alley, all right.

“Here’s something for you, Jack,” Miriam said. “You’ll appreciate this. Beckett described tears as ‘liquefied brain.’”

“God, Miriam,” Jack said. “Why are you sharing that with me? Look at this day, it’s a beautiful day! Stop pumping out the cesspit! Leave the cesspit alone!”

Then the phone would ring and Jack would begin his daily business of reconstructing the previous lives of hair and teeth when they had been possessed by someone. A detective a thousand miles away would send him a box of pitted bones and within days Jack would be saying, “This is a white male between the ages of twenty-five and thirty who didn’t do drugs and who was tall, healthy and trusting. Too trusting, clearly.”

Or a hand would be found in the stomach of a shark hauled up by a party boat off the Gulf coast of Florida and Jack would be flown off to examine it. He would return deeply tanned and refreshed, with a crisp new haircut, saying, “The shark was most certainly attracted to the rings on this hand. This is a teen’s hand. She was small, perhaps even a legal midget, and well nourished. She was a loner, adventurous, not well educated and probably unemployed. Odds are the rings were stolen. She would certainly have done herself a favor by passing up the temptation of those rings.”

Miriam hated it when Jack was judgmental and Jack was judgmental a great deal. She herself stole on occasion, mostly sheets. For some reason, it was easy to steal sheets. As a girl she had wanted to become a witty, lively and irresistible woman, skilled in repartee and in arguments on controversial subjects, but it hadn’t turned out that way. She had become a woman who was still waiting for her calling.

Jack had no idea that Miriam stole sheets and more. He liked Miriam. He liked her bones. She had fine bones and he loved tracing them at night beneath her warm, smooth skin, her jawbone, collarbone, pelvic bone. It wasn’t anything that consumed him, but he just liked her was all, usually. And he liked his work. He liked wrapping things up and dealing with those whom the missing had left behind. He was neither doctor nor priest; he was the forensic anthropologist, and he alone could give these people peace. They wanted to know, they had to know. Was that tibia in the swamp Denny’s? Denny, we long to claim you … Were those little bits and pieces they got when they dragged the lake Lucile’s even though she was supposed to be in Manhattan? She had told us she was going to be in Manhattan, there was never any talk about a lake … Bill had gone on a day hike years ago with his little white dog and now something had been found, found in a ravine at last… Pookie had toddled away from the Airstream on the Fourth of July just as we were setting up the grill, she would be so much older now, a little girl instead of a baby, and it would be so good just to know, if we could only know …

And Jack would give them his gift. He could give them the incontrovertible and almost unspeakable news. That’s her, that’s them. No need to worry anymore, it is finished, you are free. No one could help these people who were weary of waiting and sick of hope like Jack could.

Miriam had a fondness for people who vanished, though she had never known any personally. But if she had a loved one who vanished, she would prefer to believe that they had fallen in love with distance, a great distance. She certainly wouldn’t long to be told they were dead.

One day, one of Jack’s students, an ardent hunter, a gangly blue-eyed boy named Carl who wore camouflage pants and a black shirt winter and summer, presented him with four cured deer feet. “I thought you’d like to make a lamp,” Carl said.

Miriam was in the garden. She had taken to stealing distressed plants from nurseries and people’s yards and planting them in an unused corner of the lot, far from Jack’s roses. They remained distressed, however — in shock, she felt.

“It would make a nice lamp,” Carl said. “You can make all kinds of things. With a big buck’s forelegs you can make an outdoor thermometer. Looks good with snowflakes on it.”

“A lamp,” Jack said. He appeared delighted. Jack got along well with his students. He didn’t sleep with the girls and he treated the boys as equals. He put his hands around the tops of the deer feet and splayed them out some.

“You might want to fiddle around with the height,” Carl said. “You can make great stuff with antlers, too. Chandeliers, candelabras. You can use antlers to frame just about anything.”

“We have lamps,” Miriam said. She was holding a wan perennial she had liberated from a supermarket.

“Gosh, this appeals to me, though, Miriam.”

“I bet you’d be good at this sort of thing, sir,” Carl said. “I did one once and it was very relaxing.” He glanced at Miriam, squeezed his eyes almost shut and smiled.

“It will be a novelty item, all right,” Jack said. “I think it will be fun.”

“Maybe you’d like to go hunting sometime with me, sir,” Carl said. “We could go bowhunting for mulies together.”

“You should resist the urge to do this, Jack, really,” Miriam said. The thought of a lamp made of animal legs in her life and turned on caused a violent feeling of panic within her.

But Jack wanted to make a lamp. He needed another hobby, he argued. Hobbies were healthy, and he might even take Carl up on his bowhunting offer. Why didn’t she get herself a hobby like baking or watching football, he suggested. He finished the lamp in a weekend and set it on an antique jelly cabinet in the sunroom. He’d had a little trouble trimming the legs to the same height. They might not have ended up being exactly the same height. Miriam, expecting to be repulsed by the thing, was enthralled instead. It had a dark blue shade and a gold-colored cord and a sixty-watt bulb. A brighter bulb would be pushing it, Jack said. Miriam could not resist the allure of the little lamp. She often found herself sitting beside it, staring at it, the harsh brown hairs, the dainty pasterns, the polished black hooves, all fastened together with a brass gimp band in a space the size of a dinner plate. It was anarchy, the little lamp, its legs snugly bunched. It was whirl, it was hole, it was the first far drums. She sometimes worried that she would begin talking to it. This happened to some people, she knew, they felt they had to talk. She read that Luther Burbank spoke to cactus reassuringly when he wanted to create a spineless variety and that they stabbed him repeatedly; he had to pull thousands of spines from his hands but didn’t care. He continued to speak calmly and patiently; he never got mad, he persisted.

“Miriam,” Jack said, “that is not meant to be a reading light. It’s an accent light. You’re going to ruin your eyes.”

Miriam had once channeled her considerable imagination into sex, which Jack had long appreciated, but now it spilled everywhere and lay lightly on everything like water on a lake. It alarmed him a little. Perhaps, during semester break, they should take a trip together. To witness something strange with each other might be just the ticket. At the same time, he felt unaccountably nervous about traveling with Miriam.

The days were radiant but it was almost fall and a daytime coolness reached out and touched everything. Miriam’s restlessness was gone. It was Jack who was restless.

“I’m going to take up bowhunting, Miriam,” he said. “Carl seems to think I’d be a natural at it.”

Miriam did not object to this as she might once have. Nevertheless, she could not keep herself from waiting anxiously beside the lamp for Jack’s return from his excursions with Carl. She was in a peculiar sort of readiness, and not for anything in particular, either. For weeks Jack went hunting, and for weeks he did not mind that he did not return with a former animal.

“It’s the expectation and the challenge. That’s what counts,” he said. He and Carl would stand in the kitchen sharing a little whiskey. Carl’s skin was clean as a baby’s and he smelled cleanly if somewhat aberrantly of cold cream and celery. “The season’s young, sir,” he said.

But eventually Jack’s lack of success began to vex him. Miriam and the lamp continued to wait solemnly for his empty-handed return. He grew irritable. Sometimes he would forget to wash off his camouflage paint, and he slept poorly. Then, late one afternoon when Jack was out in the woods, he fell asleep in his stand and toppled out of a tree, critically wounding himself with his own arrow, which passed through his eye and into his head like a knife thrust into a cantaloupe. A large portion of his brain lost its rosy hue and turned gray as a rodent’s coat. A month later, he could walk with difficulty and move one arm. He had some vision out of his remaining eye and he could hear but not speak. He emerged from rehab with a face expressionless as a frosted cake. He was something that had suffered a premature burial, something accounted for but not present. Miriam was certain that he was aware of the morbid irony in this.

The lamp was a great comfort to Miriam in the weeks following the accident. Carl was of less comfort. Whenever she saw him in the hospital’s halls, he was wailing and grinding his teeth. But the crooked, dainty deer-foot lamp was calm. They spent most nights together quietly reading. The lamp had eclectic reading tastes. It would cast its light on anything, actually. It liked the stories of Poe. The night before Jack was to return home, they read a little book in which animals offered their prayers to God — the mouse, the bear, the turtle and so on — and this is perhaps where the lamp and Miriam had their first disagreement. Miriam liked the little verses. But the lamp felt that though the author clearly meant well, the prayers were cloying and confused thought with existence. The lamp had witnessed a smattering of Kierkegaard and felt strongly that thought should never be confused with existence. Being in such a condition of peculiar and altered existence itself, the lamp felt some things unequivocally. Miriam often wanted to think about that other life, when the parts knew the whole, when the legs ran and rested and moved through woods washed by flowers, but the lamp did not want to reflect upon those times.

Jack came back and Carl moved in with them. He had sold everything he owned except his big Chevy truck and wanted only to nurse Jack for the rest of his life. Jack’s good eye often teared, and he indicated both discomfort and agreement with a whistling hiss. Even so, he didn’t seem all that glad to see Miriam. As for herself, she felt that she had driven to a grave and gotten out of the car but left the engine running. Carl slept for a time in Jack’s study, but one night when Miriam couldn’t sleep and was sitting in the living room with the lamp, she saw him go into their room and shut the door. And that became the arrangement. Carl stayed with Jack day and night.

One of the first things Carl wanted to do was to take a trip. He believed that the doleful visits from the other students tired Jack and that the familiar house and grounds didn’t stimulate him properly. Miriam didn’t think highly of Carl’s ideas but this one didn’t seem too bad. She was ready to leave. After all, Jack had already left in his fashion and it seemed pointless to stay in his house. They all three would sit together in the big roomy cab on the wide cherry-red custom seat of Carl’s truck and tour the Southwest. The only thing she didn’t like was that the lamp would have to travel in the back with the luggage.

“Nothing’s going to happen to it,” Carl said. “Look at dogs. Dogs ride around in the backs of trucks all the time. They love it.”

“Thousands of dogs die each year from being pitched out of the backs of pickups,” Miriam said.

Jack remained in the room with them while they debated the statistical probability of this. He was gaunt and his head was scarred, and he tended to resemble, if left to his own devices, a large white appliance. But Carl was always buying him things and making small alterations to his appearance. This day he was wearing pressed khakis, a crisp madras shirt, big black glasses and a black Stetson hat. Carl was young and guilty and crazy in love. He patted Jack’s wrists as he talked, not wanting to upset him.

Finally, continuing to assert that he had never heard of a dog falling out of a pickup truck, Carl agreed to buy a camper shell and enclose the back. He packed two small bags for himself and Jack while Miriam got a cardboard carton and arranged her clothes around the lamp. Her plan was to unplug whatever lamp was in whatever motel room they stayed in and plug in the deer-foot lamp. Clearly, this would be the high point of each day for it.

They took to the road that night and didn’t stop driving until daylight disclosed that the landscape had changed considerably. There was a great deal of broken glass and huge cactus everywhere. Organ-pipe, saguaro, barrel cactus and prickly pear. Strange and stern shapes, far stiller than trees, less friendly and willing to serve. They seemed to be waiting for further transition, another awesome shift of the earth’s plates, an enormous occurrence. The sun bathed each spine, it sharpened the smashed bottles and threw itself through the large delicate ears of car-crushed jackrabbits. They saw few people and no animals except dead ones. The land was vast and still and there seemed to be considerable resentment toward the nonhuman creatures who struggled to inhabit it. Dead coyotes and hawks were nailed to fence posts and the road was hammered with the remains of lizards and snakes. Miriam was glad that the lamp was covered and did not have to suffer these sights.

The first night they stopped at a motel, with a Chinese restaurant and lounge adjoining. Miriam ordered moo goo gai pan for dinner, something she had not had since she was a child, and an orange soda. Carl fed Jack some select tidbits from an appetizer platter with a pair of chopsticks. After they ate Miriam wandered into the lounge, but there was only a cat vigorously cleaning itself who stared at her with its legs splayed over its head. She picked up a couple of worn paperback books from the exchange table in the office and went back to her room. Through the walls she could hear Carl singing to Jack as he ran the bathwater. He would shampoo Jack’s hair, scrub his nails and talk about the future … Miriam turned on the lamp and examined one of the books. It concerned desert plants but many of the pages were missing and someone had spilled wine on the pictures. She did learn, however, that cactus are descended from roses. They were late arrivals, adaptors, part of a new climate. She felt like that, felt very much a late arrival, it was her personality. She had adapted readily to being in love, and then adapted to not being in love anymore. And the new climate was, well, this situation. She put the book about cactus down.

The other book was about hunting zebras in Africa. I shot him right up his big fat fanny, the writer wrote. She had read this before she knew what she was doing and felt terrible about it, but the lamp held steady until she finally turned it off and got into bed.

The next day they drove. They stopped at hot springs and ghost towns. They stopped on an Indian reservation and Carl bought Jack colored sand in a bottle. They stopped at a Dairy Queen and Miriam drove while Carl spooned blueberry blizzard into Jack’s mouth. They admired the desert, the peculiar growths, the odd pale colors. They passed through a canyon of large, solitary boulders. There was a sign threatening fine and imprisonment for defacing the rocks but the boulders were covered with paint, spelling out people’s names, mostly. The shapes of the rocks resembled nothing but the words made them look like toilet doors in a truck stop. On the other side of the canyon was a small town with two museums, a brick hotel, a gas station and a large bar called the Horny Toad. Miriam had the feeling that the truck’s engine had stopped running.

“Truck’s stopped,” Carl said.

They coasted to the side of the road and Carl fiddled with the ignition.

“Alternator’s shot, I bet,” he said. He took Jack’s sunglasses off, wiped them with a handkerchief and carefully hooked them back over Jack’s ears. He was thinking, Miriam thought. Underneath her elbow, the metal of the door was heating up.

“You check into the motel,” Carl directed her. “Jack and I will walk down to the garage. He likes garages.”

Carl helped Miriam get their luggage from the back and carried it into the hotel’s lobby. She arranged for two unadjoining rooms. They were the last rooms left, even though the hotel and town appeared deserted. The museums were closed and everyone was at the bar, the manager told her. One of the museums displayed only a petrified wedding cake, a petrified cat, some rocks and old clothes. It was typical and not worth going into, the manager confided. But people came from far and wide to see the other museum and speak to the taxidermist on duty. He was surprised that they had come here without having the museum as their destination. The taxidermist was a genius. He couldn’t make an animal look dead if he wanted to.

“He can even do reptiles and combine them in artistic and instructive groups,” the manager said.

“This museum is full of dead animals?” Miriam said.

“Sure,” the manager said. “It’s a wildlife museum.”

Miriam’s room was in the back of the hotel over the kitchen and smelled like the inside of a lunch box, but it wasn’t unpleasant. She rearranged the furniture, plugged in the lamp and gazed out the single window at the bar, a long, dark structure that seemed, the longer she stared at it, to be almost heaving with the muffled sound of voices. This was the Horny Toad. She decided to go there.

Miriam had always felt that she was the kind of person who somehow quenched in the least exacting stranger any desire for conversation with her. This, however, was not the case at the Toad. People turned to her immediately and began to speak. They had bright, restless faces, seemed starved for affection and were in full conversational mode. There were a number of children present. Everyone was wildly stimulated.

A young woman with lank, thinning hair touched Miriam with a small dry hand. “I’m Priscilla Dickman and I’m an ex-agoraphobic,” she said. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“Yes,” Miriam said, startled. People were waving, smiling.

“I used to be so afraid of losing control,” Priscilla said. “I was afraid of going insane, embarrassing myself. I was afraid of getting sick or doing something frightening or dying. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?”

She went off to the bar, saying she would return with gimlets. Miriam was immediately joined by an elderly couple wearing jeans, satin shirts and large, identical concha belts. Their names were Vern and Irene. They had spent all day at the museum and were happy and tired.

“My favorite is the javelina family,” Irene said. “Those babies were adorable.”

“Ugly animals,” Vern said. “Bizarre. But they’ve always been Irene’s favorite.”

“Not last year,” Irene said. “Last year it was the bears, I think. Vern says that Life is just one thing but it takes different forms to amuse itself.”

“That’s what I say, but I don’t believe it,” Vern said, winking broadly at Miriam.

“Vern likes the ground squirrels.”

Vern agreed. “Isn’t much of a display, but I like what I hear about them. That state-of-torpor thing. When the going gets rough, boom, right into a state of torpor. They don’t need anything. A single breath every three minutes.”

Irene didn’t seem as fascinated as her husband by the state of torpor. “Have you gone yet, dear?” she asked Miriam. “Have you asked the taxidermist your question?”

“No, I haven’t,” Miriam said. She accepted a glass from Priscilla, who had returned with a tray of drinks. “I’m Priscilla Dickman,” she said to the old couple, “and I’m an ex-agoraphobic.”

“He doesn’t answer everybody,” Vern said.

“He answers the children sometimes, but they don’t know what they’re saying,” Irene said fretfully. “I think children should be allowed only in the petting zoo.”

A gaunt, grave boy named Alec arrived and identified himself as a tree-hugger. He was with a girl named Argon.

“When I got old enough to know sort of what I wanted?” Argon said, “I decided I wanted either a tree-hugger or a car guy. I’d narrowed it down to that. At my first demonstration, I lay in the road with some other people in a park where they were going to bulldoze two-hundred-year-old trees for a picnic area. We had attracted quite a crowd of onlooking picnickers. When the cops came and carried me off, a little girl said, ‘Why are they taking away the pretty one, Mommy?’ and I was hooked. I just loved demonstrating after that, always hoping to overhear those words again. But I never did.”

“We all get older, dear,” Irene said.

“Car guys are kind of interesting,” Argon said. “They can be really hypnotic, but only when they’re talking about cars, actually.”

Sometime later, Alec was still in the midst of a long story about Indian environmentalists in the Himalayas. The tree-hugging movement started long ago, he’d been telling them, when the maharaja of Jodhpur wanted to cut down trees for yet another palace and a woman named Amrita Devi resisted his axmen by hugging a tree and uttering the now well-known phrase “A chopped head is cheaper than a felled tree” before she was dismembered. Then her three daughters took her place and they, too, were dismembered. Then three hundred and fifty-nine additional villagers were dismembered before the maharaja called it off.

“And it really worked,” Alec said, gnawing on his thumbnail. “That whole area is full of militant conservationists now. They have a fair there every year.” He gnawed furiously at his nail. “And on the supposed spot where the first lady died, no grass grows. Not a single blade. They’ve got it cordoned off.” He struggled for a moment with a piece of separated nail between his teeth, at last freed it, examined it for a moment, then flicked it to the floor.

“You know, Alec,” Argon said, “I’ve never liked that story. It just misses the mark as far as I’m concerned.” She turned to Miriam. “Tree-huggers tend sometimes not to have both feet on the ground. I want to be a spiritual and ecological warrior but I want both feet on the ground too.”

Miriam looked at the white curving nail on the dirty floor. Jack wouldn’t have had much to go on with that. Even Jack. Who were these people? They were all so desperate. You couldn’t attribute their behavior to alcohol alone.

Other people gathered around the table, all talking about their experiences in the museum, all expressing awe at the exhibits, the mountain lions, the wading birds, the herds of elk and the exotics, particularly the exotics. They had come from far away to see this. Many of them returned, year after year.

“It’s impossible to leave the place unmoved,” a woman said.

“My favorite is the wood ibis on a stump in a lonely swamp,” Priscilla said cautiously. “It couldn’t be more properly delineated.”

“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.”

Argon was yelling at Alec, “But your life’s center is on the periphery.”

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 of 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 1,500 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 were 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 the way things work, honey,” his companion said.

Miriam threaded her way past 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 the taxidermist 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 found 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 to her. The gesture indicated that he wanted 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 a way 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 hovered over Moby-Dick. It would be deeply involved in it by now. It would be 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 that 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 anyway 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 resume its appearance 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, looked 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!