It had been an unfortunate moment even then.
The taxidermist scowled at the infant gorilla he’d been working on all morning. He was dissatisfied with its expression, it lacked hunger. He nudged it into his trash can and moved over to his broad wooden desk. He’d never heard of this wood before. Some new wood. Like the fish they were coming up with these days. Monkfish. What the hell was monkfish? Turbot. The same. He’d go home, and the wife would say, “I’ve got this lovely piece of monkfish from the new market,” and he and the family would gather at the table beneath the cathedral ceiling in the house she’d insisted they purchase and eat it. The cathedral ceiling was ridiculous, the whole house was ridiculous, a Taj in the foothills for which they’d unwisely overextended themselves. Still, he was glad she was content. She’d been about to unravel back in Alaska. He’d enjoyed some prestige, having done all the bears in the Kodiak airport, but doing all the bears in the Kodiak airport didn’t provide the kind of income one would expect and she’d had to take a job as a housekeeper in a hot springs resort where the Japanese honeymooners just about drove her crazy. The Japanese had invented the concept of the Alaskan honeymoon and came there in droves to do it. They didn’t tip, they shed pubic hair like crazy, and they beamed, they were always beaming.
They’d gotten out of Alaska just before the short bitter days had come round again, the moose in the cesspit jokes, the grafitti on the snowbanks of the pissed-on frontier. The wife selected to bring nothing along but her old blue Samsonite filled with the tiny dresses of her babyhood. Just in case, she’d say, just in case, not that she was campaigning for another one, but if it happened and it was a girl, or if the boys had little girls when they started their own families — maybe the clothes could be used then. The thought that these rotting, stained, shrunken, incredibly delicate clothes worn by his wife when she was newly born would be imposed on the future, where naturally they would be entirely unwelcome, depressed him. Sometimes he didn’t think his wife was well, that those goddamned cavorting Japanese had broken her spirit, that she’d lost the little something she had when he first met her that made it all seem worthwhile. Of course, she had her baby clothes back then, but they hadn’t seemed so peculiar, so out of proportion to their lives; they hadn’t reminded him, yellowing things, dark where they’d been folded, of the Momias de Guanajuato in Mexico, the Museum of the Mummies, where he’d gone when he was still single, when it was still weird and distasteful, before they’d cleaned it up and made it into a clean, well-lighted museum where you were funneled past the things through a narrow corridor so you couldn’t linger to study them more closely, people pushing up behind you so you had to keep moving and before you knew it you were back outside where some pear-shaped amputee scooting around on a dolly was selling postcards of the momias, the baby momias dressed in their Sunday best, the embroidered smocks and bright blankets remarkably similar to the stuff his wife kept in that sinister blue Samsonite.
The taxidermist shook his head vigorously to free it of unwanted thoughts. He picked up the newspaper, leaned back in his chair, and propped his feet on the desk. He read that those goddamned Japanese had developed a prototype of a robotic cat. Those people needed to be given their own army again, get some realism back into their lives. A robotic cat, aimed at the elderly-widow market. This was what the future was: robots, artificial intelligences. There would be no sincerity, no art of the kind he’d devoted his life to. The future was a place where the dead looking alive would no longer be enough.
Abruptly, his door swung open and Emily Bliss Pickless entered carrying a cardboard box.
“Hey,” the taxidermist said. “You knock first. You knock.” He removed his feet from the desk.
“I need something,” she said.
“Yeah, a brain.” He loathed this kid.
Emily shrugged. People either wanted to worship her or snap her in half. So do the exceptional ones walk through this world. Though she was not vain.
The taxidermist peered into the box. A puddle of fur and blood and bone, impossibly breathing.
“You’re not normal,” he said. “Anybody ever tell you that?”
“I am distinguishing between life and death,” she said, “which is more than anyone else in this place does.”
“Don’t quit your day job for that talent, missy.” She was gazing around his workplace with maddening impunity. He’d smack her little fanny and push her out the door — this was his office, his workplace, his sanctum sanctorum — but he was uneasily aware that she enjoyed some special relationship with his employer. Maybe she was a niece, a grandniece. Unmarried oddballs like Stumpp always had nieces and nephews galore, and it was the taxidermist’s opinion that these terms were code for abnormal or immoral relationships. The taxidermist had always felt this to be so. Say the word niece to him, and the red flag would go up right away.
“Pest,” the taxidermist said.
“Why’d you throw this little gorilla away?”
“Get out of my trash, you!” He felt that he’d been hounded by this kid forever, though she’d showed up only a few weeks ago. Stumpp had given her one of the rooms at the museum for her animal “hospital.” He’d had a carpenter build her some cages, and there was a tabletop full of dog and cat cages customarily used for airline travel. He’d bought her a refrigerator and a few heating pads and some pans and dishes and towels. Even told the chef in his café to provide the little freak with anything she required — salads, ground meats, fruit medleys — though the taxidermist took pleasure in the fact that none of her “patients” had taken any nourishment before they croaked.
“You don’t know how to do this anymore, do you?” she said. “You’re just pretending.”
The taxidermist stalked out of his office in search of Stumpp. He found him in the oasis room, where he seemed to be listening to the air conditioner.
“Hey boss,” the taxidermist said, “that Pickless child? She’s adorable but she’s forever bothering me, wasting my time. You hired me as an artist, and she’s always intruding on me, taking my needles, rummaging through my tooth and eye drawers — those things are organized, I tell her.” He shivered, quite involuntarily, in the chilled air.
Stumpp looked at him irritably. Waves of an elusive melody had been bearing him outward, beyond the confines of this place wherein he had interred himself. This was one hell of an air conditioner. Airy-fairy flaky types, which the desert and these new millennial times seemed to produce in abundance, would likely lose their wits after a session with this baby. You had to be a strong man to fiddle around with the kind of consciousness this unit inspired. This was ethereal business, and he resented being interrupted by this oaf. If he mentioned even once again in passing that he’d done all the bears in the Kodiak airport, Stumpp would punch him in his pink wet mouth — with a mouth that repulsive, hadn’t he ever considered a beard?
“Pickless?” he finally said. “You came in here to complain about Pickless?”
“People are going to be bringing her roadkill next. It’s going to get out of hand. Your reputation will be wrecked. Besides, has she ever saved one of those things?”
“What do you mean, ‘saved’?”
“Repaired it so she could let the damn thing go. No, the answer is no, she has not. Because everything she’s got is missing something which it needs. If she wasn’t eight years old, she’d realize this. Half those birds she’s got in there go around in circles or tip over backwards because their backs are broken. You can’t release a one-eyed hawk. Those poisoned things she gets, she’s just torturing them. Their guts are moldering. Does she know the slightest thing about biology? About science? She should be playing with dolls. Or just getting over playing with dolls, though I’ll admit I don’t know how that works, I have two boys myself. Sons,” he said for added emphasis.