Bob switched off the radio. Took a deep breath. And had an idea: that if he put his foot down now and waited till the speedometer showed a hundred before closing his eyes then he wouldn’t have to face another day. He pushed the thought away, but he was shaken. It wasn’t the first time he had thought about taking his own life, but it was the first time the thought hadn’t immediately frightened him instead of seeming almost tempting. Well, OK, now he was scared by the fact that he hadn’t been scared. He sat up straight in his car. He had to do something. The bar lady had been right. He had to change tack.
Bob reached out and turned on the radio again.
Tried to focus his thoughts. Tomás Gomez. The apartment. Why did he keep returning to the apartment? Was there something he’d seen there, something his subconscious had noticed but which hadn’t managed to make it to the surface? He went over the details one by one. The couch. The cupboards. The syringe. The bathroom. The cat. The neighbours. No, that wasn’t it. Was it the smell? The decor? No, not that either. It was something about... the whole thing. Or the emptiness. It reminded him of something. What was it?
It was past one as Bob slowly cruised the nocturnal silence of the Phillips streets. Passed the tiny, one-storey houses. Some shacks, some with boarded-up windows, but also well-maintained houses behind newly painted white fences and notices with ‘We care’ on them. Realtors trying to tempt buyers from out of town liked to stress how central Phillips was, how many parks it had, how it was one of the most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods in the city, housing immigrants from all over the world. They never wrote about how poor Phillips was, how many criminal gangs there were, and that after sunset the parks turned into no-go areas and that on Bloomington Avenue, with drug dealers standing in front of every second house, the inhabitants had to clear their lawns of hypo needles before they could mow them. Bob cruised past a dealer’s team now, on Bloomington and 29th Street. An ethnic trinity, like a Benetton advert, one black, one white and one brown, those realtors were as good as their word. The three watched him as he cruised by. Two were just teenagers, but the third, a Latino with a porkpie hat, looked nearer thirty. On the house wall above them was some graffiti, the symbol for X-11.
Bob pulled up at the kerb and got out. Breathed in the good, sharp night air. Passed through the gate to a two-storey brick-built house that was squeezed in between all the other single-storey buildings, let himself in to the two-room apartment he rented and tried to ignore the rancid smell that had been there since before he moved in. He hung up his coat and jacket behind the door without turning on the light. He hadn’t been living here long enough to be able to filter out the regular noises, and tonight they came from both the flat above and the one on the adjoining wall. Quarrelling from above, hip hop with a juddering bass from the left. In the bathroom he could hear his neighbours even better, the pipes carrying the sounds. He splashed his face with cold water and studied the bump on his forehead while brushing his teeth. The bruise was already turning blue, and in the course of the night the colour would hopefully become even more pronounced. He opened the mirrored door to the bathroom cabinet. Took down a pink tray of pills. It was unopened and he noticed from the date that he hadn’t taken one since July. He weighed it in his hand. Hesitated. Then put the tray back, went into the bedroom, lay down on the bed in the dark. Took down a plastic ball the size of a baseball from the shelf behind the bed. It was an electric toy, a Radica 20Q. You ask it something specific and then tap in Yes or No answers to the twenty questions that appear in the small display window. Nine times out of ten it would know whether you were lying. In Bob’s case ten times out of ten, because the answer was always ‘ex-girlfriend’. He made up his mind to think of something else and chose ‘suicide’. Radica 20Q gave up after twenty questions. Bob suspected that the word had been omitted at the programming stage.
He listened to the sound of Phillips. Laughter out in the streets, an angry cry, glass breaking, a car engine revving. Neighbours you never heard during the daytime. Behind the quarrelling of the adults he heard a young girl crying. The sound was faint, at the same time so distinct as to drown out all the others. Yes, he wanted out, to get away from this life, from Bob Oz. But would he give them that satisfaction? No, not yet. He would change tack. Change channels. Change focus, name, the date, himself, life. But more than the future he wanted to change the past. Not all of it, just his. Because the past is everything. Didn’t someone once say that?
He unbuttoned his shirt and as he was pulling off his pants felt something in the pocket and took it out. A business card. Mike Lunde — Taxidermist. He thought of that canary. What kind of people have their pets stuffed?
Bob Oz closed his eyes, took a deep breath and steeled himself for another sleepless night. And as he lay there it finally floated up to the surface. What it was that Tomás Gomez’s apartment reminded him of. It was this. His own apartment. The emptiness was the same.
14
Downtown, September 2022
I stand with my face pressed against the display window and peer into Town Taxidermy. In the darkened interior of the store I can just make out a bear standing up on two legs and a deer with a massive set of antlers. The store doesn’t open for another hour, but the arrangement I have with the owner isn’t even for today, I just wanted to have a look since I was driving past.
It strikes me that it’s such an odd profession, to recreate something that once was. Although actually, a few months ago, when I spoke to the taxidermist who runs the place, he insisted that what he did was not recreate but create something. That it isn’t an actual recreation but a fiction. Something that tells a story by putting it in a certain context in which it can be felt, and for that reason can sometimes feel truer than the cold, isolated facts do.
And that was when it struck me that this is precisely what I’m doing in this book I’m writing. I’m a taxidermist.
15
Taxidermy, October 2016
The time was 9 a.m. and Bob was standing in a narrow street in downtown. He looked at the sign above the store doorway.
Town Taxidermy.
In the display window a black bear stood upright on two legs, and around it, like courtiers, a gathering of birds and various rodents, which, Bob assumed, formed part of the local fauna.
As he entered a bell over the door jingled feebly. But once it stopped, and the door had closed behind him, he noticed how quiet it was. Quieter than simply soundless. Quiet as the grave, he thought, as he looked around at the bodies of the silent animals. A hart, a lynx. A wolverine with bared teeth. Several birds. As far as he could tell they were perfect copies of the original living beings they once had been. He stopped before each one in turn. How lifelike they were. As though they all had a story to tell. So unlike the corpses he was used to seeing. Murder victims with expressions of fear, perhaps, or pain, but who otherwise hid more than they revealed, holding on to secrets it was his job to wrest from them. Bob stood contemplating an owl that returned his gaze. And it occurred to him that the silence in here wasn’t oppressive at all, it was... restful. Liberating. Balm for the ears and the soul.
‘Good morning.’ A smiling man with a laurel wreath of hair surrounding a bare dome emerged from a doorway, in the act of removing a pair of latex gloves. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, I was in the middle of something rather complicated in the workshop.’