creatures) had supplanted such exhibitions as these. And truth be told, there was something about the cases themselves, with their mahogany trimmings and plate glass, and the sheer age of the mounted and mummified corpses, that bespoke age and dust and decay.
Of course, the Redpath had its own real mummy, a glorious and mysterious object contained in its own room. The brightly decorated coffin stoodopen for inspection with the rag-and-bone princess summarily exposed for any eye to behold, in total disregard for her noble origins and surely her own and her long-gone family’s desires for her dignity. Still, since immortality had been the goal of her funerary preparations, she could be said to have achieved it, even in this debased and insignificant form. Her hair escaped the crumbling wrappings but still clung to her skull. It was thin, bleached grey not by the expanse of time since her death but by the comparatively brief exposure to the blazing overhead lamp. Her hands had been clasped on her breast while they were still clothed with flesh but now had fallen—both of them, her fingers still entwined—to her right side. The remains of her face had shifted to stare at her hands as if she were mourning the loss of their use. If she were not so obviously dead, she might be sleeping.
All these items radiated an exoticism only magnified by the accompanying explanatory cards and crumbling black-and-white photographs illustrating the remote, dark corners of the world where the brave safari-suited scientist-explorers had risked all to procure them.
For Jean-Baptiste, the most alluring of the oddities in this phantasmagoria were two simple items almost hidden from view in a little-used stairwell, which he’d only discovered while hunting for the washroom. In a modest case, surrounded by poisoned arrowheads, bone needles and a leather pouch spilling powerful magic, were two shrunken human heads.
Balls of chocolate-brown leather misshapen from (some kind of: what?) misuse, topped with tufts of silky black hair like tassels hanging from the handlebars of a child’s bicycle, they were mounted at the ends of sticks smooth and free of bark, whose bottom ends were wrapped in leather (leather?) grips.
As a child these curios had been enough to distract him from the washroom he’d been seeking. He’d stare eye to eye with the tiny people, their eyes sewn shut in an almost sleepy expression, their mouths sewn shut with lips (and here’s how he would ever after understand this phrase)
pursed
, and wonder: What had they seen? What had they said?
As he’d grown he’d been forced to crouch lower and lower, in order to look them in the face, until finally he now resorted to sitting back on his knees as the only proper way to get a look. It had always seemed wrong to do other than face them, since they were still, after all, human beings. He couldn’t bring himself to weave his head about and around the glass case in order to glance behind or above or beneath them, the way others did, or the way he could with statues or mineral specimens. Even the mummy princess was mostly hidden by her centuries-old roll of cloth so that one knew she was a corpse, although her desiccated ashes and dust retained only the vaguest of human forms.
But these heads weren’t objects; these heads had real, recognizable faces. These were people.
Which always led Jean-Baptiste to wonder at the status and fate of people who lost their lives, or piecesof them. Where were their bodies now, what had become of them? Were those bodies also people? Had they ceased to be human when they lost their heads? And whatever had happened to Uncle’s missing finger? Was it still in some way human, was it still in some way Uncle, or had it instantly, on the point of separation from the rest of him, become something else? A mere thing?
This he’d wondered time and again over the years as a child; today, he also wondered: and what about Grandfather’s eye?
Aline was
Of course, the Redpath had its own real mummy, a glorious and mysterious object contained in its own room. The brightly decorated coffin stoodopen for inspection with the rag-and-bone princess summarily exposed for any eye to behold, in total disregard for her noble origins and surely her own and her long-gone family’s desires for her dignity. Still, since immortality had been the goal of her funerary preparations, she could be said to have achieved it, even in this debased and insignificant form. Her hair escaped the crumbling wrappings but still clung to her skull. It was thin, bleached grey not by the expanse of time since her death but by the comparatively brief exposure to the blazing overhead lamp. Her hands had been clasped on her breast while they were still clothed with flesh but now had fallen—both of them, her fingers still entwined—to her right side. The remains of her face had shifted to stare at her hands as if she were mourning the loss of their use. If she were not so obviously dead, she might be sleeping.
All these items radiated an exoticism only magnified by the accompanying explanatory cards and crumbling black-and-white photographs illustrating the remote, dark corners of the world where the brave safari-suited scientist-explorers had risked all to procure them.
For Jean-Baptiste, the most alluring of the oddities in this phantasmagoria were two simple items almost hidden from view in a little-used stairwell, which he’d only discovered while hunting for the washroom. In a modest case, surrounded by poisoned arrowheads, bone needles and a leather pouch spilling powerful magic, were two shrunken human heads.
Balls of chocolate-brown leather misshapen from (some kind of: what?) misuse, topped with tufts of silky black hair like tassels hanging from the handlebars of a child’s bicycle, they were mounted at the ends of sticks smooth and free of bark, whose bottom ends were wrapped in leather (leather?) grips.
As a child these curios had been enough to distract him from the washroom he’d been seeking. He’d stare eye to eye with the tiny people, their eyes sewn shut in an almost sleepy expression, their mouths sewn shut with lips (and here’s how he would ever after understand this phrase)
pursed
, and wonder: What had they seen? What had they said?
As he’d grown he’d been forced to crouch lower and lower, in order to look them in the face, until finally he now resorted to sitting back on his knees as the only proper way to get a look. It had always seemed wrong to do other than face them, since they were still, after all, human beings. He couldn’t bring himself to weave his head about and around the glass case in order to glance behind or above or beneath them, the way others did, or the way he could with statues or mineral specimens. Even the mummy princess was mostly hidden by her centuries-old roll of cloth so that one knew she was a corpse, although her desiccated ashes and dust retained only the vaguest of human forms.
But these heads weren’t objects; these heads had real, recognizable faces. These were people.
Which always led Jean-Baptiste to wonder at the status and fate of people who lost their lives, or piecesof them. Where were their bodies now, what had become of them? Were those bodies also people? Had they ceased to be human when they lost their heads? And whatever had happened to Uncle’s missing finger? Was it still in some way human, was it still in some way Uncle, or had it instantly, on the point of separation from the rest of him, become something else? A mere thing?
This he’d wondered time and again over the years as a child; today, he also wondered: and what about Grandfather’s eye?
Aline was
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