Among the Wonderful (2 page)

Guillaudeu descended the marble stairway against an incoming tide of people. Shoulders bumped him. The feather of a woman’s hat brushed across his neck and he swatted it away. The crowd’s excited murmur gave him a bitter sense of constriction. At the bottom of the stairs he turned left, out of the throng, and passed through a door marked
NO ADMITTANCE
into a corridor with one closed door at the end. Guillaudeu would take up the matter of the sloth with the new proprietor.

Phineas T. Barnum had inherited Guillaudeu, along with the museum’s collection of mounted specimens, from John
Scudder, the museum’s original owner. Scudder had been Guillaudeu’s benefactor, professional mentor, and closest friend. He still could not bear to think of his old companion signing over both of their lives’ work to a man like Barnum. He had made a point of avoiding Scudder ever since the older man had relinquished the title to the collection.

Guillaudeu had spoken with Barnum only twice. In the first conversation Barnum praised the museum’s taxidermy displays and assured Guillaudeu that his services were invaluable to any natural history enterprise. But he then proceeded to reinvent the museum.
To add interest
, he had said during their second conversation, while men hoisted the first of the transparencies outside.
Anything outdated must be expunged!
Guillaudeu half expected to be thrown out himself.

He was increasingly upset as strangers delivered more and more live animals to the museum. The creatures arrived in a racket of squeals; there was even a man who arrived at the door to Guillaudeu’s office with a one-eyed eagle tethered to his wrist. As he made his daily rounds among the specimens, he now looked closely to make sure no new creature was pacing or swimming in a cage that had sprung up unbeknownst to him. As he dusted and fumigated, he looked twice at specimens he had mounted himself: Was that a twitch of the head? Did the crane shift its weight from one leg to the other? He came to dread his peripheral vision.

He considered looking for employment elsewhere, but he could not bear the thought of leaving behind his menagerie of specimens, which now numbered close to one thousand creatures, despite the loss of the lynx, the egret, the ibis, and others.

He banged on the door to Barnum’s office. No answer. He leaned his head briefly against the door frame and thought he heard something rustle on the other side. “Where are you?” he whispered. He knocked again, but no one came.

Guillaudeu made his way back to the entry hall with an uneasy feeling. The incoming crowd was almost impenetrable and he pushed himself against it to reach the door of his office, which was across from the ticket booth just inside the
main doors. Once he was safely inside he moved to the opposite end of his cluttered workroom, past the piles of crates that had been arriving steadily and delivered, unfortunately, to his door.

He paused before the skin of the owl,
Asio flammeus
, which hung, splay-winged, from hooks in the wall. The skull-less hood of its head remained erect above the pinned wings. He ran a finger along the banded brown primary feathers. It had taken him several days to identify the bird. He’d bought it at an auction and knew it came from arctic Norway, but its tags contained nothing legible except the words
BOG OWL
. It had taken careful study and verification from three different sources to characterize it as a short-eared owl. Now the specimen embodied this taxonomic victory and was thus endeared to the taxidermist. The poisoned varnish on the bill and feet was completely dry, and he examined the owl’s soles to ensure that the incisions that had drawn out the tendons had not damaged the appearance of the specimen. They had not. Poised at the threshold of his work, about to dive into its infinite solace, he turned away.

“It’s not my job to take care of live animals!” he irritably told no one. “That’s not why I’m here! I’m not responsible for observing a godforsaken
sloth
. How should I know what it eats? You’ll have to find someone else to be your stable hand, Mr. Barnum.” He slouched into his chair. In an attempt to banish the sloth’s dolorous visage from his mind, he picked up the current issue of the University of Edinburgh’s
Scientific Journal
.

Guillaudeu’s hero, the French anatomist Baron Georges Cuvier, had published a discourse titled
On the Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of the Globe
, which the journal had excerpted. Cuvier described long periods of equilibrium on earth, during which whole kingdoms of plants and animals flourished. These epochs, though, ended in cataclysms of fire or flood. Out of the rubble of the old age would arise entirely new creatures to crawl and fly across the globe until the next apocalypse consumed them. As he read these words, Guillaudeu’s mind filled with the image of a massive cyclone of
wind and lightning ripping up forests and carving great wounds in the earth. He had the uncomfortable sensation that Cuvier’s theory explained more than just an ancient scenario: A dark whirlwind, he realized, had struck the museum in the form of Phineas T. Barnum.

Guillaudeu pushed handfuls of excelsior into the varnished rib cage and bound it tightly with strips of linen. He replaced the owl’s spinal column with a stout iron wire and strung on the bird’s bleached vertebrae. Below this manufactured spine, a ball of bound excelsior became the new pelvic girdle, and he cut and sharpened the ends of two wires before slipping them through the incisions in the soles of the feet and upward inside the feathered legs. He used even heavier wire for the wings, since he wanted the specimen’s ultimate pose to reflect the last moments before flight, wings uplifted.

He worked slowly, with precision and confidence. The rushing flood of visitors outside his office no longer bothered him. He recast each curve of musculature into shape and coaxed the emptied skin into what he believed was an essential new form. To Guillaudeu the scraping and stretching of leather, the briny, bloody, and alchemical tasks, each and every resinous and oily step in this metamorphosis was work that came with thrilling repercussions: What other process allowed people to come this close, so intimately close, to nature’s meticulous designs?

His palette of chopped tow, powders, poisonous liquors, knives, brushes, and wires was spread out around him, each restoring ingredient within his reach and endowed, to his mind, with a numinous quality. There was no problem of anatomy, decomposition, or tanning that he could not solve. He worked single-mindedly, with a sense of duty that
approached faith. Although he would never describe his joy as religious (he had never been a believer), his exultation burned like a glowing iron wire running all through him.

As he threaded a sturdy needle with catgut, Guillaudeu was interrupted by a violent knock on his door. The sound made two tiny golden monkeys, who had appeared at his doorstep the day before and who were extremely difficult to catch, leap from the bookshelf, where they’d been sleeping, and run back into their burlap-lined crate.

A large man wearing a dark blue suit, with slicked hair and one eyebrow slightly raised, stood at the door holding an ebony cane. His impatient, slightly theatrical posture made Guillaudeu instantly uncomfortable.

“Good morning?” Guillaudeu ventured, his mind still entirely with the owl and the delicate operation of securing its skin to its new architecture. With his broad face and tiny, close-set black eyes, Guillaudeu observed, the man resembled the American badger,
Taxidea taxus
.

“I’m looking for Mr. Barnum.”

“Oh.”

“Is he here?”

“Certainly not. Barnum has never set foot in my office.”

The man looked past Guillaudeu into the room, as if Barnum were hiding among the crates inside.

“I am Mr. Archer,” the man declared.

“I see.” The name meant nothing to Guillaudeu.

“I am in need of an office. Barnum assured me I would be accommodated.”

“You’re an employee?”

The man seemed perturbed. “I am Mr. Ar-cher,” he repeated, tapping his cane on the ground to match the two syllables of his name. “Formerly of the
Herald
and
The New York Sun?”

“Ah! Mr. Archer. Yes, I’d forgotten you were to arrive today.” Guillaudeu had never heard of Mr. Archer, but it would do no good to say so.

“I had expected to be met at the door. I have my things.”
Mr. Archer pointed with his cane. “They’re unloading it all now.”

“I see. Well, come in.”

Guillaudeu settled Mr. Archer into a chair and hovered near him. “Mr. Barnum is actually not in the building at the moment.”

“Then who is running the museum,
at the moment
?”

“Well.” Guillaudeu leaned against his desk. “I’m not sure how to answer that question.”

“What do you mean, Mr. —”

“Guillaudeu.”

“Mr. Guillaudeu. In what way is that question a challenge to you? Who is running this museum?”

“Well, the theater staff runs the performances; certainly the custodians and ticket-takers manage themselves …”

Mr. Archer stared at Guillaudeu as if the taxidermist had just told him there were pelicans on the moon. Guillaudeu continued: “The managing chef runs the restaurant and sees to the concession stands. And the exhibits themselves need no supervision. With exceptions, of course. But I tend to those. We’re expecting some kind of naturalist, someone other than myself to look after the new … menagerie.”

“I see.” Mr. Archer peered again at the office. Bookcases lined one side of the windowless den, and a small reading desk was pushed up against the wall. Chips of petrified wood fallen from the larger museum pieces had found their way to the bookshelves, along with various specimens: a few mice, a robin, a tattered hare. These were duplicates of the specimens in the galleries, too damaged or old for public display. All along the opposite wall, tools hung from hooks in an assortment of sizes, from the tiny silver brain spoon to rib clamps the size and shape of a wolf trap. The worktable was the center of this panorama, displaying its array of tools and the owl spread out, half clothed in its skin. Underneath the table were shelves of jars, metal canisters, and clay pots. There were bottles of alcohol, ether, cornmeal for absorbing a specimen’s natural oils, bags of excelsior, hide-curing
salt, glass eyes in brown, yellow, and even blue (for certain New World nocturnal species). As Mr. Archer swiveled in the chair to take it all in, Guillaudeu saw it as this stranger might: as if a great tide had left surf-blown piles of flotsam.

“Your wife?” Mr. Archer pointed to the framed likeness on the wall. Guillaudeu’s throat filled with an awful bile that he quickly swallowed.

“Celia,” he said weakly, not permitting his eyes to meet his, or hers.

“Well then,” Archer tapped his cane on the floor. “About my office?”

Guillaudeu cleared his throat. “Given the museum’s rate of growth in recent months, organization is sometimes difficult. Regrettably.”

Mr. Archer gave a short nod. “I wouldn’t have guessed organization to be the underlying principle here.”

“I suppose not,” Guillaudeu replied. He did not like the man’s tone, and he still had no idea how Mr. Archer fit into the scheme of the museum.

“Sir,” Mr. Archer said as he brushed a few golden hairs from his trouser leg. “Where is my office? I’d like to get settled.”

“If you will excuse me, sir, I will research that detail.” Guillaudeu ran across the hall to the ticket window. “William. Have you heard of a Mr. Archer?”

“Archer?” William was an elderly Irishman with tufted eyebrows and a wandering eye. He had worked for John Scudder for many years and remained a reliable nexus of information of all kinds. He continued to take coins from the hands of incoming visitors. “Isn’t that the ad man? The fellow from the papers?”

“Is it? What’s he doing here?”

“Barnum hired him.”

“Do you know where his office might be?”

William laughed, half looking at Guillaudeu for the first time. “Who knows? Not much room down here. I haven’t heard anything about it. But since you’re here, I had a complaint
from a patron yesterday that you’ll want to know about.”

William paused to take admission from an elderly woman wearing a coat made from the pelt of
Pagophilus groenlandicus
.

“Apparently some kind of bull on the fourth floor has some worms. In the eye area.”

“What!”

William chuckled.

“The fourth floor? That must be the wildebeest. But that seems highly unlikely, since I’ve fumigated —”

“I’m just the messenger, Emile. If I hear anything about this Archer, I’ll make sure you’re the first to know.”

Guillaudeu reluctantly returned to the office. He’d have to go up there straightaway. Worms! Maggots, surely. Guillaudeu’s embarrassment flared.

Mr. Archer had retreated to a corner and held his cane out as if he were about to engage in swordplay. The burlap sack moved. A monkey peeked out.

“They’re harmless. They’re much like you” — immediately he realized that it was an unsuccessful analogy — “because they’re waiting for their permanent habitat, you see. See?
Leontopithecus rosalia —
”

Mr. Archer was unmoved by the monkeys’ Latin name, but as if in response the tiny creatures darted out of the sheltering bag and disappeared between the crates littering the floor.

“As you can see, Mr. Archer, the museum functions rather on its own terms. Information doesn’t always make it to every corner of the building. Your office” — Guillaudeu could think of no better way to put it — “does not exist. Yet. The museum has undergone so much transformation in recent months that the other offices are still full of ladders, equipment, building apparatuses. Apparati, rather. You get my meaning.”

“This is ridiculous! I left the
Sun
for this?” He waved his cane.

Guillaudeu shrugged weakly.

“What do you propose as to my accommodations?”

Guillaudeu’s instinct was to escort Mr. Archer straight out the door and proceed with his day as if they’d never met. Out of discomfort and an irrational and ill-fated desire to end their conversation at all costs, he offered a second choice.