Hummingbird Salamander(26)

As she became someone else, my mother wrote herself another history. Maybe she wanted her altered state to roam as far from us as possible. To stray and linger, in unequal proportions, to her illness.

Maybe it just happened because it was always going to happen. But that didn’t make it any less catastrophic. I lost my brother, then I lost my mother, more or less, even as my father turned bitter and my grandfather, before the end, was no better than a thin, flailing beast. Sometimes my father summoned the nerve to lock him in a shed during his rages. Calmed into “thin milk,” as Father put it. Calmed so he could be let out, but muttering and sharp and surly and nothing like a person. Not what I wanted a person to be. Sure to make Father suffer for what he’d done. So Father shut him up less frequently.

Sometimes I felt his flailing, his rage, was Mother’s made manifest, in the body, in the world.

Mother’s rants were worse for being written down, for being quiet until read, because, when read, they seemed intent on burning up the world, on tearing it down with inchoate rage. The sharp marks, ripping the paper, so violent. That her vacant gaze made it seem as if something had been summoned into her. I never knew what she was going to hand me. “Con-flagration,” Dad would say, when they argued, and list the words around that, defining her—or that he would cast a spell, bind her, understand her.

Most of what she wrote was about my dead brother. But also about me, as if I had died, too.

I missed my brother, and here, in the letters, our mother had created this further life for him. Had written to him as if he were in college. As if he had gone on to get a job with his degree, begun to raise a family. As if he had been corresponding with her, telling her all the details of his days. Time became a miracle in these letters, so he might age a year in a month or not age a day in eighteen months.

While I, in these letters, these accounts of some parallel world, remained single. I remained single and always had a new boyfriend. I would appear at family reunions and be disruptive. I drank too much. I did unforgivable things. The Devil himself could not have come up with some of the accounts my mother did; at the end, she had more imagination than during the whole rest of her life.

It hurt, but it always hurt more that my brother was gone, so I read whatever she sent me. The delicate, curving handwriting in meticulous blue ballpoint pen on onionskin paper. Tucked crisp into sturdy envelopes. Sometimes trinkets fell out with the letters. Pressed flowers. Charms to add to bracelets I didn’t wear. Once or twice, money. I received it all, all that damage, just so I could hear about my brother, alive, in some other place and time.

I kept reading them until my mother died. And then I felt the lack, but still felt the hurt. Maybe that was my cue to live another life than the one I’d chosen. I don’t know. Except I had the example: you could be whoever you wanted to be.

When we moved from an apartment to the house, I didn’t give my dad the address. Made it clear we were done.

But I kept my mother’s letters.





[33]


I blew off the conference the next day. I luxuriated and wallowed in a huge room service breakfast of scrambled eggs, waffles, bacon, toast, hash browns. After a workout in a gym so small my ferocious intensity to wreck every machine drove out the one flabby, middle-aged man using the rower. The hunger and the fear in his eyes as he drank me in repulsed me and yet perversely made me push myself harder.

Then I went to find Carlton Fusk.

The way I’d always planned to.

Brooklyn was flooded from recent rain, but, oddly, not near the water. I had decided to check out a few other taxi dermy stores before pouncing on Fusk. Maybe out of caution, but also to get a sense of what the average taxidermy store was like. Establish a kind of baseline to judge Fusk against, I guess.

But most of the stores had converted to selling other things. People didn’t buy dead animals as much anymore. At least, not in Brooklyn. One place had become a kind of sad “man store,” devoted to hair-care products and aggressive-looking outdoor gear for the faux tough who never went camping. They had a dead ostrich chick taxidermied, along with a lion cub. Every animal in there was a dead baby of some kind, even the owner behind the counter. The door near the back drenched in cologne. I crossed two other stores off after that, without visiting. Knew what they’d be and why.

“Roadkill is fine,” proclaimed one storefront. “Roadkill is just fine.” Another advertised “intricate detail,” including “smaller birds,” and I went in because a goldfinch or similar on a pedestal got my attention. But it meant nothing in the end. Why should it? Typical taxidermy store wasn’t a thing, I concluded. It was more like used-book stores: the spaces and what they contained gave insight into the owner’s mind more than some “industry standard.”

I could only take so much of this kind of exploration before I was ready for Fusk.



* * *



As soon as I walked into Fusk’s (let’s call it) “The Low-Budget Bordering on Shithole Taxidermy & Antiques Shoppe”—the low-grade stench of mold hit me. That and some kind of furniture varnish. But also, I realize now, the smell of death, which meant Fusk must perform his “art” on-premises. Maybe in a basement, so a hint of reek rose from the floorboards.

The clutter was of the hoarder level only respectable in an antiques store. Someone I assumed was Carlton Fusk coalesced as a smudge of shadow in the back, seen behind the far counter through stacks of boxes, overflowing shelves, and floating dust motes.