He got back into bed. He wished he could write or paint, that he possessed some small talent. To race through the night with a pen! But writing makes everything clearer and worse at once, that is, when it wasn’t making everything appear worse without clarifying it. That was the problem with writing.
All was quiet. There was no Ginger, not even a pneumatic one. Isn’t that the way Paul suggests the dead are resurrected? Pneumatically? The thought of Ginger being pumped up by the whispering breath of a caring supreme being discouraged him. What a carnival everything was, one big lurid carnival. He sighed and turned on the television. “I’m going to kill you,” one half-naked person was saying to another, “but I’ll refrain from eating you because of your rank.” They seemed to be Druids, meeting in some sacred grove. But did Druids talk like that? He was certain Ginger was doing something to his television. The magnetism of inharmony. He turned everything off and gazed fretfully into the dark.
34
The Wildlife Museum had been built around the same time as Green Palms by a man named Stumpp, who had shot more than a thousand big game animals and now wanted to share some of the more magnificent specimens with the general public in exchange for an enormous tax write-off. They were all Stumpp’s animals, brought down by his own plump hand in Africa and Alaska back when those places were truly their selves. Africa at this point in time particularly broke Stumpp’s heart, crawling with people as it was. All those scrawny humans crouching in the dust. He wouldn’t go to Africa anymore. Let them have what was left; he’d partaken of it when it had been glorious. Stumpp wasn’t one of those trophy hunters who went on and on anecdotally about the beasts he’d shot. He couldn’t recall each and every incident, not even most of them, but he felt warmly toward all his animals. None of them had given him any problems, not like some of the humans in the cities over there, who would just as soon cut your throat if you didn’t give them coins for whatever nonsense they were offering you — nails or screws or Chiclets or the like.
The Wildlife Museum was built to resemble Harlech Castle in Wales. Its original design had included a moat in which Stumpp had planned to place several sharks, but this idea had been scuttled by a candy-assed county commission. But Stumpp was glad he hadn’t sued on the sharks’ behalf. They would have been alive, for one thing, which would have compromised the integrity of his establishment, and they undoubtedly would’ve been harassed by the schoolchildren on whom the museum depended for much of its revenue. The kids would have been chucking everything down at those sharks: last year’s laptops, trumpets, baseballs. The sharks would’ve been sitting ducks for those kids. So there was no moat. Instead, in front of the castle, were the typical parking designations, the stenciled collection of circles and lines that in developed countries announced that the place was sacred to the halt and the lame, that while they might be wobbly on their pins and had to cart themselves around in rolling chairs like packages, they still had rights of access and could be interested in things, in this case the dead of other species looking beautiful. The rear of the museum butted up against thirty thousand acres of National Monument land and was all glass and splashily lit, so it was quite conceivable that animals wandering down their trails at night could look in and witness perfection, not that they’d know it, of course.
In fact, Stumpp was a little bored with his museum. The Hwyl! was gone. It was stuffing the project down everyone’s throat that had been fun. And he was tired of dealing with taxidermists, a vain and surly lot insulted when it was suggested that they were little more than upholsterers. Not one of them had any balls, in his opinion — real balls. They all thought they were artists, yet you couldn’t really tell one’s work from another’s. There was a limit to what was possible in making an animal look alive that wasn’t. He was down to one in-house taxidermist now, a mop-up man.
Stumpp was a West Virginia boy, who as far as he was concerned had been born at the age of fourteen, when he got interested in buying and selling gold coins. As he liked to say, and did say to guides and gofers from Mozambique to the Brooks Range, you could spend your life like a damn goat staring out a crooked door through the rain at the mud, or you could spend it some other way. Life was what you made of it or, rather, what you made of your perception of it. Stumpp had dumped gold early and been equally prescient in the timing of his other interests and acquisitions. Most recently, with minor effort, he was doing extremely well in the arenas of gene research and embryo cryopreservation. Shooting megafauna had always been just for relaxation.
But he hadn’t been able to relax lately, and it was beginning to trouble him, as was the smell of shit he was detecting everywhere — not strong, but faintly pervasive. Ignoring it took effort, exhaustive effort of an intense mental sort. Did he have to become a goddamn yogi to escape the smell of shit? Nobody else smelled it, and he’d stopped asking. Not that it was a conversation stopper. Stumpp found that in good bars, hotel bars, say, where a martini cost ten dollars and arrived in a glass with the surface diameter of a goldfish bowl, people would accept this observation convivially, women in particular. Stumpp had a lot of respect for women and judged them to be more perspicacious than men.
“I can’t believe a man like you is having this … ahh, problem,” his last redhead said. “You seem radioactive with belief in yourself, which I find very attractive.”
But it had been a while since his last redhead, since he’d been flattered by any beautiful woman. These days were different days. There was something technical about them, undistinctive. You couldn’t tell the scientists from the vandals. You could order viruses through the mail — pathogens, toxins, what have you. A clever schoolchild could wipe out all the bees in a meadow during recess. They were breeding rhinos with no horns to make them less desirable. Couldn’t even get your goddamn rhino anymore. One of the companies he’d invested in was churning out genetically identical sheep. He stood to make millions, but what sort of real pleasure could be wrested from making money off genetically identical sheep? Where were bravery and singularity and radioactive charisma? Ever since the completion of the museum, Stumpp had felt himself in decline. It was as though he were descending some kind of goddamned terraced path with the smell of shit on a rising wind at his back. For it was at his back, giving lie to the sentimental saw that a wind at one’s back was to one’s advantage. The way Stumpp felt it, the wind was serving the interests of those yet unborn. Sometimes he even imagined it speaking, in the manner of an obnoxious junior high school coach: “Let’s give everyone a chance here, let’s allow everyone a crack at it.” … He should probably pull his money out of all that human egg research. But his money was making so much money. A tough call, money or mental health. Investing in the future had its psychological drawbacks. His money had even spread into oocyte banking. Eggs were being harvested from aborted fetuses. It was getting a little out of hand, those crazy scientists horsing around and having more fun than they had at Alamogordo, supercooling this and flash-freezing that. The lights go out these days, some power grid fails, and it’s not just your digital clock that gets scrambled and your freezer food that needs to be tossed, you could lose whole families, potential waiting families, nonexistent, sure, in theory, but with every right to exist. Everything that didn’t exist had the right to, was the new thinking — made an end run around the ethicists with that one — and although such notions would make money, particularly if you got in on the ground floor, Stumpp was ego sophisticated enough to see trouble ahead. Stumpp’s own parents (gone now) had been unexceptional in the extreme, but at least they’d had the grace to get him in the proper way. “It was in a rowboat, Stumppie,” his mother said. “I knew it at the time. It was like BINGO … my body knew.” At least they’d had the happiness of the old thrust and heave, the unexpected yaw. But these days it was all assisted fertilization, micromanipulation, people in different rooms. The joys of sex were irrelevant in the present climate, or so it seemed to Stumpp. His own old bean hadn’t seen much action lately.