Among the Wonderful (37 page)

Lilian Kipp covered her mouth with her hand to laugh. She turned and pointed. “Let’s go up,” she mouthed, moving toward the marble stairway, her form striped by shadows. The street sounds ebbed to nothing and as they climbed the broad marble steps, Lilian Kipp’s footsteps clicked satisfyingly across the faintly luminous, veined surface.

None of the usual crowd noise cluttered the air, and so the portrait gallery echoed their whispers. Guillaudeu and Lilian Kipp walked among a chaos of chairs, some toppled, some leaning against one another like drunkards, detritus from the Indian show. Onstage, the Indian’s wrapped tree still stood, and Lilian Kipp climbed onstage to examine it. Far away, on the other side of the gallery, the draperies swung gently on slow breaths of air. No windows were open that Guillaudeu could see; it must be the museum’s own breath.

They passed through the galleries on the second floor, looking mostly upward beyond the displays, both of them tending toward the vacuous reaches of the upper air.

He suddenly wanted to see his sandhill cranes, so they climbed to the third floor and stood among them. He refrained from his usual explanation of the behaviors their poses displayed. The cranes’ deep, spread-winged curtsy and mirrored arching salute had come straight from the lithographs in Geller’s anatomy book, but here, in the blue night, the postures spoke for themselves in gestures as graceful as calligraphy.

“Your work is stunning,” she whispered, and he did not brush away this compliment.

They walked arm in arm, as if they were admiring the blossoms in City Hall Park. They stayed well away from the balcony in case the mayor’s men were standing guard below, but Lilian Kipp climbed into the giantess’ booth and stood upon the stool there.

“Greetings!” she cried from her perch. “How is life in the lower atmosphere?”

In the aquarium gallery they watched sleeping fish drift from one end of their glass worlds to the other. The octopus pulled itself up the side of its tank, tracking them as they moved around the room. The seahorses swayed, only anchored by the curling tips of their tails wrapped around sea grass.

They walked among automatons, mummies, totems, and optical illusions. He showed her the Cosmoramas, the sloth, the Bengal tiger he had mounted what felt like centuries ago.

“Everything looks different in the dark,” he whispered. “I never thought I’d see the museum like this. That it would be like this … again.”

“Amazing,” she said. “How unexpectedly the familiar regains its mystery.”

Guillaudeu felt such relief, then, that his vision blurred and he clenched his fists tightly. He wanted to trap this moment in a specimen jar.

He led her to the roof, where briefly they shivered in the open air. The door to the kitchen swung open on its hinges, so they went inside and used a big kettle to make two cups of strong black tea.

On their way down they heard distant laughter coming from the fifth-floor apartments.

“Let’s go see what they’re doing!” Lilian Kipp whispered.

“Oh, I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”

“Why not? We’re all stranded under extraordinary circumstances. The rules of our everyday life are void here, of all places.” In her excitement Lilian Kipp was already opening the door to the fifth-floor gallery.

Someone had opened all the gallery windows, and several torches smoked near the Indian camp and the whale. Lilian Kipp took a few steps into the gallery and looked around.

“Well? Are you coming or shall I meet you back here?”

A group of people stood along the edge of the beluga tank, their feet propped against the scaffolding for what would someday be a viewing platform. One person, an Indian boy, sat on the edge of the tank with his legs dangling. A murmur
arose from the group, and they saw the boy’s legs lifted up by the curved white back of the whale as it passed. The boy laughed and hung on to the edge. The whale passed, the boy remained sitting on the edge, now just splashing the water with his feet.

“The apartments must be just there, through that door,” Lilian whispered.

“Yes.”

They crossed the threshold into the corridor and almost ran into another Indian, a woman with close-cropped hair and a scarred face who leaned against the wall. She was knitting, of all things, holding her ball of wool under one arm, and when she saw Guillaudeu and Lilian Kipp, she bolted past them back out to the beluga gallery.

“She was the one from the show today,” murmured Lilian Kipp, already looking ahead with eyes full of wonder.

“Was she?”

The apartment corridor was cozily lit and much warmer than the rest of the building. It emanated the sounds of people at home: conversation, teacups clinking into their saucers, footsteps across rugs.

The next door on their right was open but the room was empty. Barely furnished, what was visible looked slightly off: The bed was half propped on wooden crates and stretched half the length of the room, and the mirror was hung at a level high above their heads.

They passed two closed doors, and then came upon an open one leading to a lavish apartment hung with rugs and silks, with several carpets covering the floor in an ornate, mismatched collage.

As Lilian Kipp stepped up to the doorway, Guillaudeu automatically stepped back as invisible but impermeable barriers rose between him and the carpeted room. He fought sudden panic.

A card game was in progress among the hirsute woman, the giantess, two young men with slicked hair sharing a seat, and a woman of tremendous girth who sat with her back to the door talking animatedly. Amazingly, the Australian
tribesman sat a little apart from the game, straight-backed in an overstuffed chair and looking neither right nor left.

“I’ll wager Barnum set it up himself,” the obese woman said. “Profits are down. They say he’s spending all his money abroad doing — what? What is it?” With great effort she wrenched herself half around. For a moment the room fell completely silent. “What in the hell is this? I thought the museum was closed!”

The card players glanced briefly at one another.

“Who are they?” one of the slick-haired men said.

“Didn’t the deputies get all of them?” said the other.

“Hello!” Lilian Kipp offered valiantly.

“It’s the taxidermist,” said the giantess, who had gone back to studying her cards.

“Makes no difference to me,” retorted the hirsute woman as she rose. She lumbered to the door with the same expression, as if the bread were burning in the oven.

“Good night,” she said curtly and shut the door in their faces.

When she turned to Guillaudeu, Lilian Kipp had lost her going-to-a-picnic demeanor.

“We
are
in their private living quarters,” Guillaudeu remarked.

“I suppose so.”

Down the hall another door opened and two ghost-children scampered into view, chattering in French. Their hair and skin were identical shades of pale, milky yellow. The boy ran past and pulled the edge of Lilian Kipp’s shawl. He let it snap back, then ran to the end of the hallway and out into the beluga gallery. The little girl stopped short, her crimson eyes darting between Guillaudeu and Lilian. She turned daintily on her heel and skipped back from where she came.

“Yes, we should go,” Lilian conceded.

They retraced their steps and were almost back to the beluga when a bird called sharply behind them. When Guillaudeu turned, the tribesman was standing there. He addressed them by hooking his thumbs together and flying his hands upward.

Guillaudeu laughed. “I
know
him!”

The tribesman, who was only as tall as Lilian Kipp’s shoulder, led them back to the apartments and to the end of the corridor. He gestured for them to enter his room and sit on his narrow bed while he settled upon a rough stool across the room by the window.

“He’s a fine fellow. No English, as you might imagine. This is Lilian Kipp,” he told the tribesman by way of introduction. “He sings a most intriguing bit of music.”

The tribesman folded his hands on his lap and looked from one of them to the other.

“He is breaking my heart somehow,” Lilian murmured.

“To my knowledge he has never performed. I have a theory that Barnum has forgotten all about this one.”

“Why doesn’t he leave?”

The tribesman continued to regard them with the bemused patience of a grandmother, occasionally contemplating the rising darkness outside the window or gazing across the room to a small bundle of burlap in the corner.

“He was carrying that when he arrived here.” Guillaudeu pointed to the bundle. “Your belongings? From home?”

They all observed the bundle.

“Isn’t it strange,” Lilian Kipp mused. “We are so accustomed to our social graces. We are so dutiful. We carry out our meaningless, expected parlor conversations, never saying what we truly mean, or what is important to us. How easy it is to exist in the company of others and yet remain completely alone. Without all the talk, as it is with this man, I see how conversation is all too often just a clutter. It makes me sad, all the time we waste. He is looking at you so strangely.”

It appeared that the tribesman had made a decision. He went to the corner and brought the burlap sack. He pulled his stool so close that their three pairs of knees almost touched.

From the wrapping he pulled a hardwood root, thick and serpentine. Along it were etched designs burned into the wood: circles within circles, chevrons, and parallel lines. He
cradled the root in his arms with an expression that wavered between mild alarm and resignation.

A lone ant, larger than any Guillaudeu had ever seen, emerged from one end of the root. As soon as he saw it the tribesman began to hum. The ant moved directly to the highest point on the root without any of the mindless zigzagging typical of its kind. The tribesman pulled a tiny piece of food from his pocket and set it on the root next to the ant. The creature lifted it high, retraced its steps, and disappeared.

A whole procession of ants now emerged, some like the first one, others with taut, distended midsections bloated to the size of amber marbles.

“Yerrampe,”
said the tribesman. The ants marched to the highest point and the tribesman put crumbs out for each one. He began to speak, slowly at first, navigating the buoyant, rolling words and rapid repetitions of his native tongue. He spoke softly, but soon his recitation took on some urgency. Occasionally he looked over his shoulder, gesturing toward the window.

When the last ant disappeared into the branch, he rewrapped the bundle very carefully and placed it back in the corner, still talking. He returned to the stool and continued his story.

There was no one in New York who could translate these words. It was a chasm of centuries, of millennia, that separated their worlds. It was the least he could do to listen carefully despite this obstacle.

After a while the speech turned to the humming song with its unfolding layers. The shadows shifted on the walls, the night poured in. The man hummed and sang. Lilian Kipp nodded to sleep with her cheek on Guillaudeu’s shoulder, and Guillaudeu kept very still so as to enjoy every moment and every square inch of her side snugged warmly against his.

In the song he heard subtle harmonies and strange tilting narratives. No system of categories contains this, he observed. He felt Lilian’s breathing deepen and he wondered if she dreamed of cocoons swaying under canopies of sunlit
leaves. What purpose is there in looking for order when new species are discovered all the time and when all premises shift and bend and crumble with time? Why look for order when the deeper you go and the more closely you look, the greater the mystery?

The song continued for a length of time that Guillaudeu could not measure.

And then at a certain point it was time to leave.

“What is your name?” Guillaudeu asked the tribesman before he roused Lilian Kipp.

The tribesman frowned and nodded and did not say.

All the apartment doors were shut and the corridor was silent. The only sounds on their way out were the snores coming from the Indian camp and the swish and ripple of the whale swimming in slow circles. Sadly, Guillaudeu realized this night would end. The steady march of daybreak had started somewhere beyond the distant horizon; the clockwork of the universe proceeded.

“Come with me,” Guillaudeu whispered. “I want to show you one more place.”

“Yes.” Lilian Kipp was still waking up. “What do you think he was telling us?”

“He was telling us about a place we’ll never see. A place where we would know nothing and recognize nothing.”

“My father once traveled to India. A man there blessed him. Spoke a prayer over him before his sea journey home. He asked the man to translate the words but the man wouldn’t. He said the prayer had already entered his soul and would do its work despite my father’s ignorance. Who knows.” Lilian Kipp yawned. “Maybe the man was really cursing my father and simply made up a pretty explanation for it.”

Guillaudeu led her into a green and leafy world. Hemp netting billowed down the pea-green walls and formed a canopy above them. He lifted the netting’s hem and they ducked inside. Potted myrtles and shrubs of varying heights had become the major thoroughfares for a bustling ornithopolis. A small fleet of juncos beelined among the dark trees,
their white tail feathers flashing. A bluebird glided between low-hanging branches, streaking cobalt. The purple gallinule stalked delicately behind them on the sawdust path. Higher up, shapes silhouetted by the dim upper air glided by. Higher still hung the chandelier, where two ravens presided from a half-built nest made from bird bones and strands of netting, and decorated with buttons lost from Guillaudeu’s waistcoat.

They sat, leaning against one of the great ceramic tree pots. Lilian Kipp dozed again, and Guillaudeu listened to the movement of birds. Gradually, light gathered strength, rising across the windows in slender bars. A wren flitted across the path at knee level to light on the topknot of a bush. It bowed and cocked its tail and emitted a much grander song than its appearance implied. The morning must have achieved some critical brightness, because following this diminutive herald, the birds let loose and sound drenched them from above. Lilian Kipp raised her head, smiling.