M. Chouniard
When discussions arise of the great collections, as they do at the dinners I must attend, I lose my appetite. Names such as Verrier and Price come up, and the Rose Gallery, the miniatures room at the Musee de X, the catacombs of Moriconi. Famous collections, and in their way flawless, assembled with what the world deems taste. But assembled. That is exactly the word, and precisely the problem. Few people can see this.
I have procured for all these collections. For their owners, I charge my standard rate, which less serious collectors consider dear. I offer none of them my private fee.
And I think of M. Chouniard, whose name will never pass lips sipping blanc de blanc in a baronial dining room. I picture him as he greets me from the doorway of his small apartment off the Rue de Six Vies. The rooms into which he ushers me are painted in the dove-grey wash once common in Castigan farmhouses. Sun slants through skylights. Here and there a wall is streaked with a smear of dark reddish brown, almost black in some places, and above each streak is nailed a fistful of hair.
There are not many of these smears—perhaps seven or eight in the entire apartment. But each bundle of hair is of stunning color and composition. It is impossible, seeing one, to imagine a richer chestnut, a purer white, a finer spiral of curls. No one of real taste would feel a need for the collection to be larger, though from my first visit I had the impression that M. Chouniard had left spaces for new acquisitions, and over the years he has indeed filled two.
I have never procured for M. Chouniard. He has never made an offer. Someday, as all true collectors do, he will want to complete his collection, and at that time I will be honored to present him with my private fee. Until then, he can find what he needs on his own.
I spear an overstuffed prawn, listen to my host regurgitate praise of the Kiste collection—a collection as expensive and lifeless as one of its diamond eggs—and picture M. Chouniard’s walls.
Mrs. Fairie
Her name, on the other hand, you know. You may remember her brief, scandalous career in the opera, or her songs that still play on the pleasure boats every summer. You may read her style column in Douk-Douk—everyone reads her column—to see her eviscerate those who fall short of her standards, and say a prayer of thanks that you weren’t on the list. She’s always right, that’s the terrible part. Or your entertainment runs to less sophisticated fare, and you follow her sexual escapades in the tabloids. Her passion for young men and women is legendary, and her tastes there are as unassailable as her tastes in all matters.
But you don’t know what I am about to tell you now: none of these things is Mrs. Fairie’s passion. Art, music, literature, fashion, flesh—though she has honed her appreciation of all these pursuits, they are less than hobbies compared to her true, overpowering love.
Mrs. Fairie loves food.
She does not intentionally keep this secret. She has no shame, as ordinary gluttons often do. She never speaks of food because she lacks the language. Humanity itself lacks it. She is such a perfect food critic that she can never write a word on the subject.
Mrs. Fairie hired me to procure a toffee pudding as she remembered it from a dinner she had at age nine.
I understood at once why she needed me. She had eaten this pudding decades ago. Even if the recipe still existed, which was doubtful, the ingredients no longer did. The flour would be a different brand, the sugar would come from different sweeteners, the figs would be an altered breed. The cow that produced the cream was long dead, and no cow would ever be exactly like it.
Besides, she didn’t want the pudding she had eaten as a child. She wanted the pudding as she remembered it.
I remember my thrill when, over coffee, she described the problem. It had been a while since anyone had approached me with a challenge. I acquired things of many kinds and was paid handsomely by people who thought these things would make them happy. It was, and is, stimulating work, but Mrs. Fairie was the kind of client who gives that work meaning. She was under no illusion that the childhood pudding would make her happy. She didn’t want it. She needed it. Her eyes blazed. My fingers twitched.
I offered my private fee. She accepted with a curt nod.
The first step, I decided, was to recreate the pudding as it was. I spent the better part of a year in the village where Mrs. Fairie had grown up, befriending farmers, patronizing the library and the hall of records, getting myself invited to family dinners where old folks talked over beer. I had one great stroke of luck, finding what was almost certainly the recipe in a scrapbook in the back of a junk shop. I left when I felt in my bones that I knew exactly what the pudding had been.
The second part required less research, more artistry. I visited the homes where Mrs. Fairie had lived over her life—homes that grew larger and more impressive, then smaller and more elegant. I retraced the steps of her tours, sat in theaters where she had performed. I sampled everything she criticized in her column. I came to understand her tastes, if not share them. My tastes are my own, and my clients’ are theirs.
I met with several of her lovers and slept with one. I also took a cooking class.
Almost three years to the day after Mrs. Fairie hired me, we had a second meeting. I asked a few questions to clear up some uncertainties. The next day, I made the pudding.
I delivered it at dinnertime. Mrs. Fairie snipped the string of the plain cardboard box. She sniffed the pudding, hungrily and clumsily, like a dog. She stared for a long, long time. Then she picked it up, very carefully, and indicated for me to follow her.
We passed through a hallway hung with a better collection of paintings than most museums could boast. Not all the artists were famous, but each was represented by their best work. I saw no servants, though they had hovered like yellowjackets at the front of the house. Mrs. Fairie stopped before a door and unlocked it with a small key.
Inside, I was aware of a clutter of furniture and a sweet, musty smell. Mrs. Fairie threw open a curtain.
The room was crammed with tables, and on the tables were plates, and on the plates were what had once been food. I saw black lumps and white bones. Here and there patches of mold stood out in startling colors. A smell persisted. It was like the corpse of an aroma that had once been delicious.
A spot had been cleared at one of the tables. With infinite care, Mrs. Fairie set the pudding down. We left.
She locked the door behind her.
Recently you may have read a new rumor about Mrs. Fairie. Do you really want to keep following those tabloids? I collected my fee. She had no complaints.
Mme. L.
At auction houses I began to notice a certain woman among the bidders. She looked so ordinary, like a faded magazine illustration of a schoolteacher or spinster librarian, that she stood out among the adorned socialites and captains of finance. She might appear one night at a silent auction at one of the finest museums on the continent, the next afternoon at a village church jumble. She only attended sales of lots that included religious items.
I found this odd, but of course I was attending the same sales. Perhaps she was as curious about me as I was about her. That would explain why, one afternoon, as we both studied a silver ambry at a charity sale, she suddenly turned to me and said, “The antibacterial properties of silver, coupled with its natural beauty, make it the ideal material for reliquaries.”
That was how I made the acquaintance of Mme. L.
She was a nurse. She collected relics of Saint Marika, a martyr with a small and obscure cult. Such relics seldom became available, but it took her time to save the money for each purchase. She had been doing this, slowly, for most of her life. She was older than she looked.
In time, she invited me to view her collection. It was in a small room off the garage of her apartment building. Ducking through the low door and into the whitewashed, windowless room, I was reminded of my visits to the Severine Crypts, how the monks treat the soap mummies under their care with a certain blend of veneration and fond familiarity. The dead are family to those monks, which is why I never procure from them for less than my private fee.
Mme. L’s little garage storeroom was no storied crypt. But she had built a low glass cabinet braced with silver, and in that cabinet she had arranged her collection of dried and waxed and brined and polished parts into the sketch of a body.
“I only collect Class One relics,” she explained, “from the holy body of the saint herself.”
“Are you trying for the, er, complete collection?” My interest in Mme. L., already high, shot up. Collectors of such extreme focus are rare, and they are always completists. She had, I guessed, managed to assemble roughly half the saint’s remains, including a skull with pickled eyes. The piecemeal corpse was held together with winding cloth and dressed in an embroidered shroud that could only be Mme. L’s own tidy work.
“Yes,” she said. “But I can’t.”
There was a rival collector. An abbot whose name is no longer important, though at the time he wielded influence beyond his rank—was even whispered to have the makings of sainthood himself. He was also a devotee of the cult of Saint Marika, and he used his connections to acquire her relics. If there had been any doubt left in my mind that Mme. L. was one of the true collectors, it vanished then. To have held her own against such a rival, and assembled such a collection… Perhaps it was a miracle.
The two had never met, but they were aware of each other. After years of silent rivalry, Mme. L. possessed half the body of Saint Marika, and the abbot possessed the other half. They were at a stalemate. Mme. L. still frequented sales in search of peripheral items—hair, fingernails—but everything she truly needed belonged to him.
He had a radius; she had an ulna. She had one preserved kidney, he the other. She had the skull and he had the spine. An old playground rhyme about dry bones sprang to mind.
I thanked Mme. L. for the viewing and left. I told myself I had to think things over, but my mind was made up. The next time I saw her, in the nest of curio shops outside Clavo Sagrado Seminary, I offered my private fee to complete her collection. She considered the offer thoughtfully. Clients often ask if another option exists (for these acquisitions, no), but Mme. L. said only that she would pray on it. A week later, she sought me out at an auction to say yes.
I began by writing to the abbot with a direct offer: I would buy his collection of relics at any price. No response came, so I sent a follow-up note, then a final notice. At last I received a brief letter from a church secretary. Father had no such collection, it said, and incidentally how had I found out about it?
Theft it was, then. I cut my hair, changed my clothing, forged identification, and got work washing floors in the abbey. The key to disguise is simplicity. I am not famous outside my field, but when summoned—those tiresome dinner parties!—I make a point of standing out. In disguise, I dull myself. Often, while working undercover, someone I know well has stared into my naked face, only to turn away without recognition. A good eye is so rare.
It did not take long to search the abbot’s chilly apartments. He lived simply. The relics were nowhere to be found. I went back again and again to scrub the stone floors and look for a hidden door, a locked closet. The abbot had so much to hide. The spine. The long bones of the legs. The stomach, the small intestine. Even the heart, embalmed by a believer in myrtle, honey, and lime.
Where could they be?
In my frustration, I grew sloppy. The abbot surprised me one afternoon as I was tapping on his walls. He knew me at once—not my name, but what I had come for. He even guessed I was working for his great secret rival, the unassuming Mme. L.
Then, to my surprise, he laughed. “Go on looking,” he said. “You’ll never find them. As if I’d leave my holy relics for a thief to find.”
In that moment, I knew. It was in his eyes.
He started to turn, probably to call for a guard. My knife was in his windpipe before he could make a sound. The staff was supposed to be checked for weapons, but I had been working there for some time, just another cleaner, and the guards got lazy. They were certainly lazy that afternoon, as I had plenty of time to lock the door and get to work with my knife.
I slit the abbot open with care. The smell of myrrh rose up, and I knew I had been right.
There were the missing relics of Saint Marika. Yellow ribs surgically implanted alongside the abbot’s white ones, a dead spine held up with wiring and braces. One of his kidneys had been removed and replaced with the saint’s. In other cases, the relics were sutured to their living counterparts. Even a set of withered female sex organs hung beside the abbot’s complementary male set.
Had he hoped to achieve sainthood by internalizing the saint? I could appreciate the level of obsession that must have driven the project, but at the same time it confirmed that the abbot was no true collector. A true collector needs to see his collection. It may be locked away for a while, but not hidden from the eye forever.
Once I had retrieved the relics, it was no trouble to make my exit. No one looks twice at a cleaner carrying a garbage bag, wearing a uniform spattered with what could easily be mud.
Mme. L. now gazes with peace upon the complete body of her saint and breathes its jumble of funerary perfumes. I have not yet collected my fee. I can give her a little more time.
General Pan
I never thought the General—as he insists on being called, though no one is under the illusion that he was ever in the military—would be one of my special clients. I procured for him many times at my usual rate. If you’ve visited his lucrative museum, you’ve seen plenty of my work. The mountain gorilla, the narwhal, the white and black peacocks, the hodag, the devil monkey, even the General’s celebrated mermaid: he asked for them, and I found them. Now they stand, or crouch, or dangle from wires, among the hundreds of other taxidermy pieces in General Pan’s Museum of Life.
I accepted work from the General even if I found him vulgar. Not everyone can be blessed with taste. But I had no interest in his famous gallery in the basement, nor did he need me to procure for it. At the height of his popularity, he had families volunteering to donate. I had no moral objection to it, if only because the General seemed to want people to find it shocking, and I refused to give him the satisfaction. The papers asked how he could get away with it, but no one was really mystified. The General had money, and money can buy anything. Except, again, taste.
At the same time, I reluctantly acknowledged that the General was one of the true collectors. Not for his taxidermy animals; he chose specimens that sold tickets. There was none of his inner self in that part of the museum, only his outer persona, his celebrity, his ballyhoo. But the gallery in the basement…there was something there. He needed it. Apparently he wasn’t alone, because it was rumored to be his most popular attraction.
Somehow, the General found out about my special acquisitions. I certainly never told him. For some reason, the idea fascinated him. He wanted in. I tried to explain that I had nothing for him at that fee because he needed nothing. He would scoff and pour me a lemonade—among his other offenses to good taste, the General was a teetotaler—to rope me into staying a little longer.
One day, to my everlasting surprise, he convinced me. “Find my next darling,” he said. “At your private fee. Between you, me, and the wainscoting.”
“You can get it on your own,” I said. I took a sip of lemonade to be polite. I had just delivered a tatzelwurm, freshly stuffed, and its glass eyes gave the animal’s face an ironic expression I didn’t like. All those glass eyes—another reason I didn’t like visiting the General.
“The one I have now is almost ready. A few weeks, a month at the most. Come see him.” The whine that entered his voice irritated me, but drew me as well. I heard the need. “At this age, every moment is so precious.”
We left the collection rooms and made our way through the galleries. The museum was closed for the day, but as we passed the entrance I could see, through the front windows, a line already forming for the next morning. There was also a knot of protestors clutching cardboard signs and pamphlets. They stood with the weary, hopeless posture of true believers.
“Anti-vivisectionists,” shrugged the General. He didn’t seem upset. To his type, any publicity is good publicity.
We descended the famous pastel staircase. Tinkling music beckoned us through a hall lit with artificial sunshine. The specimens stood, or sat, or lay in simulated slumber, on plinths painted in merry circus colors. Each face smiled with cupids-bow lips. Children, the most beautiful boys and girls, every one a parent’s dream. Living children, I know from limited experience, throw food and dribble snot and scrape their knees and scream. These children would never do those things, or at least would never do them again. They were jacks and jump-rope and long summer days and firefly nights and sugar and spice and snips and snails scooped up and sewn into place by anonymous highly skilled needles.
As I said, tasteless. The cloying music, the nursery colors, and above all the little outfits, fifty years out of date and impossible to imagine on any child that ran and played. I thought of M. Chouniard and his modest artistry. And yet the need was real. It was the only real thing about General Pan’s twee mausoleum, but it was so real I could choke on it.
The General kept glancing at me, looking for my reaction, but I don’t think he saw it. He saw only his prizes. In every other room of his museum he was a showman above showmen, but here he was the audience.
We didn’t linger. The General was too eager to get to the room at the end of the corridor. Inside, the Darling Playhouse looked as it does in all the photos and newsreels you’ve seen. Maybe, if you’re younger, you even grew up with picture books about it. The glass over the cutaway was polished to invisibility, and the rooms inside, scaled to a child, were spotless white. The General had declared white the color of joy, and who could question General Pan in his museum? The preserved children in the corridor were altered from time to time, their clothing changed and their poses readjusted, but the Playhouse never changed.
A boy squatted in the living room of the Playhouse, engrossed with a magnificent train set. A sparkling set of marbles waited nearby, and a spotted rocking horse, and, heaven help me, a hoop and stick. Like the clothing in the corridor, the Playhouse belonged to some vague golden past. The General’s childhood, half-remembered, perhaps. Or simply Childhood as an idea.
The boy was beautiful, of course. He was perhaps six. He wore tartan pajamas—very cute and probably very expensive, but real, not a taxidermy costume.
“His name is Rene,” said General Pan. “Don’t you just want to tousle his hair?”
I remembered the General mentioning that his latest darling‘s time was almost up and started to make some comment about it, but it seemed gauche with the boy right in front of me. “He can’t see us?” I said, just to be sure.
“Can’t see us or hear us. It’d be damn intolerable for him during operating hours, with the crowds we get down here. My first darling, Cynthia, how she used to cry until we soundproofed the Playhouse.” The General clutched his breast, the showman reasserting itself. “Poor sweet girl. Would have spoiled her looks, too, in the long run.”
“But this one is unspoiled.”
The General looked sharply at me, perhaps sensing an undertone he didn’t like. “I don’t allow my darlings to pass their peak by so much as a day.” He turned back to the soundproofed two-way glass, and his face softened again. “Soon Rene will be at his prettiest, his most charming. Isn’t he wonderful?”
“Your selection is impeccable,” I said diplomatically. “You know what you like.”
“I like what everyone likes. That’s the secret to my success, not that I make a secret of it. Who hasn’t dreamed of freezing time for a loved one, keeping them forever at their most lovable? That’s why the public adores my darlings.”
“As much as you do?”
“Impossible.” He was right. Perhaps his need was one shared by many people, but in him it was like a gravitational pull. Other people had passing moments of nostalgia, fleeting fears of change and death. General Pan had a museum.
“You will get me my next darling, won’t you?” the General said. “At your private fee.”
Did the man never stop pitching and selling? “Why do you want to hire me for this?”
For once, the General wasn’t ready with an answer. He watched Rene play with his trains. At last he turned, and for the first time I saw honesty in his gaze. “I need you to find the last one. He’ll hold your fee in his hand.”
That stopped me short. Procuring yet another pretty child for the General to raise like a Christmas goose held no attraction for me. But to find the last piece for his collection, a child worthy of holding the General’s payment in its soft hand… There would be artistry in that. There would be meaning.
In the end, I couldn’t resist the General’s eyes.
“If we agree,” I said, “you can’t rescind the offer. I will collect.”
“I’m a man of my word,” said the General.
In the Playhouse, Rene got up and ran for the rocking horse.
At home, I considered the assignment. The last specimen could not be just any child. The General’s own child, perhaps? He had two daughters, both grown. They were married but childless, and from my cursory research I suspected this was a deliberate choice. The General had no close child relations and no special fondness for the children of friends. Any paternal instincts, it seemed, were satisfied by his collection. I decided I was on the wrong track.
The General himself? No. Amusing as it would be to see him stuffed and mounted, he wasn’t an appropriate specimen. His collection captured youth, beauty, innocence. Innocence above all.
I went to playgrounds. I watched children fight, scream, bully, lie, establish sandbox fiefdoms where all the cruelties of adult society were rebuilt in miniature. Innocence was an illusion, I thought. Should I procure for the General an infant, a newborn, a fetus? The idea was almost crude enough to appeal to him, but not to me. I had to provide not what the General might think he wanted, but what he needed.
I visited the museum. The crowd in the basement was suffocating that day. The Playhouse had been emptied. In front of it, on a temporary plinth, stood Rene. He wore a baby-blue playsuit and held the ridiculous hoop and stick. His smile, as I caught it in glimpses through the crowd, was ice cream on a sunny afternoon.
In a few weeks, when the first wave of visitors had died down, Rene would be moved to the corridor with the others. Soon I could expect a call from the General asking for his last darling. I wondered how long I could put him off. Then, as I made my way down the corridor, past all the stiff, lonely smiles, I realized I didn’t need to. I knew what he needed.
I pushed harder against the crowd. I wouldn’t find my specimen here. These people were, like the General, needy. They took too much to be able to give.
Outside the museum stood the anti-vivisectionists. I approached them casually, hiding my excitement, my own need. I took their pamphlets and listened to their pitches. I got each of them alone in turn and asked each the same question.
Most said no, indignantly or regretfully or laughing in disbelief. A few said yes. One meant it.
I sent her to the General with a brief note of introduction. I didn’t explain further. If I was correct in my choice, he would understand. If I was wrong, I would have to go back to the drawing board. But I knew I was right. I knew I’d completed General Pan’s collection when I saw how seriously she considered my question.
Would you join the General’s gallery if it meant you would be the last?
I don’t need to tell you what she looks like. She stands at the head of the gallery beneath General Pan’s Museum of Life. She’s always dressed in syrupy bad taste. No label identifies her, but visitors have already started to call her Mother.
Is she as beautiful as the children? I think so, but not in the same way. Her beauty is in the expression on her face, marvelously preserved by the General’s taxidermists, even with the distracting artificiality of those awful glass eyes. She was taken not at the moment of physical perfection, but at her moment of greatest virtue.
I visited the General shortly after Mother took her place in the gallery. He stood watching her by night. “Are you satisfied?” I asked.
His face twitched with fear, then spread into a salesman’s smile. “If not, can I get a refund?”
I waited. His smile faded.
“It’s right, of course it’s right. But surely you’ll give me more time.”
“You made the deal,” I said. “You insisted on it.”
“Well, yes. But…now?”
“Now,” I said, and stuffed an ether-soaked cloth into his mouth. He was a great persuader. He’d convinced me, against my instincts, to take this job. It was best to silence him before he could talk me into letting him go.
Maybe he’d made the deal believing he could wiggle out of it. Maybe he was always planning to manipulate me, or pay me off, or have me imprisoned or killed—he was rich enough. That was one reason I collected my fee so quickly. But also, I wanted to. The collection wasn’t complete as long as General Pan could run his hungry gaze over it. Mother and the children weren’t safe from him yet, and the collection promised safety.
The General must have understood that. Afterwards, I’m sure, he felt that completeness.
Eyeballs can be removed with the fingers, but I find it cleaner to go in with a knife. The General had beautiful eyes; I hate to think this was why I agreed to procure Mother for him, but I do have moments of weakness. My hand trembled a little in excitement as I snapped through one optic nerve, but by the time I severed the second my hand was steady.
I left the General lying on the floor at Mother’s feet. I never have time to tend to a patron after collecting my private fee. Enucleation is rarely fatal. General Pan, like most, recovered. He has not been out in public, but clients often choose privacy after completion.
My concern was for my own collection. I had to hurry home. One doesn’t choose one’s passion, and the great drawback of mine is that new acquisitions need to be processed quickly. In my workroom, I’d already set up the preservation equipment and the rubber mats. I injected the General’s eyes with formalin, then dropped each into a small jar filled with a distillation of Marsh’s Fixative. In my early days as a collector I damaged a few specimens, but now my skills are honed.
I returned one jar to the General. You can see it now cradled in Mother’s left hand. In her right she holds a silver teaspoon. To visitors, she looks ready to pour a spoonful of medicine for her eternal children. I wonder if the curators will change the presentation from time to time—disguise it as a jar of sweets or a bottle of lemonade. I hope they enjoy the challenge.
There’s a similar jar, shaped like a small amphora, at the centerpiece of Mrs. Fairie’s dead feast. Soon I’ll place a jar between the wired-together hands of Mme. L’s relic. I hope someday to provide M. Chouniard’s bare apartment with a small conversation piece. They will all understand, or come to understand. Once a true collector has seen their collection completed, what more do they need to see?
Meanwhile, my home fills with the matching jars. I watch them watch me. I love them. I need them. But they make me ache. Because I feel my collection nearing completion. Soon I will have almost enough. And when that time comes, who will complete it for me?
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Shaenon K. Garrity is a cartoonist and writer best known for the webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse and for the Willowweep Manor graphic novels, drawn by Christopher Baldwin. Her next graphic novel, Steam, drawn by Emily Holden, will be out from Simon and Schuster in February. She lives in Berkeley with a cat, a man, a boy, and some chickens. |