Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls - By David Sedaris Page 0,54

for it to sink in. When he opened the bag, I saw that he might more accurately have said “the head of this teenage girl,” for she’d been no older than fourteen at the time of her death. This sounds super grisly but is, I propose, just medium grisly. The head was four hundred years old and came from somewhere in South America—Peru, I think he said. The skin was dry and thin, like leather on an old worn-out purse. Parts of it were eaten away, exposing the skull beneath it, but what really struck me was her hair, which was sleek and black, divvied into delicate, slender braids.

I didn’t ask the price but said a little more emphatically, “I really think the owl will do it for me today. It’s a Valentine’s Day present—perfect for our new place. A house, actually—no basement, and three stories tall.” I wasn’t trying to be boastful. I just wanted him to know that I was loved, and that I lived aboveground.

A few minutes later, the owl secured in a good-size cardboard box, I headed back to the Underground. Ordinarily I’d be elated—I’d been determined to find Hugh the perfect present, and, by golly, I had done it—but instead I felt unhinged, not by the things I had seen so much as by the taxidermist. It’s common to be misread by people who don’t know you. “Like to try Belligerent, the new fragrance for men?” I’ll be asked in a department store. And I always think, Really? Do I seem like the kind of guy who would wear cologne? Hotel operators so often address me as “Mrs. Sedaris” that I no longer bother to correct them. I’ve been mistaken for a parent, a pickpocket, and even, God forbid, an SUV owner, and I’ve always been able to brush it off. What’s rare is not to be misread. The taxidermist knew me for less time than it took to wipe my feet on his mat, and, with no effort whatsoever, he looked into my soul and recognized me for the person I really am: the type who’d actually love a Pygmy and could easily get over the fact that he’d been murdered for sport, thinking breezily, Well, it was a long time ago. Worse still I would flaunt it, hoping in the way a Porsche owner does that this would become a part of my identity. “They say he has a Pygmy,” I could imagine my new neighbors whispering as I walked down the street. “Hangs him plain as day in the corner of his living room, next to the musket he was shot with.”

I’d love to be talked about in this way, but how did the taxidermist know? Plenty of people must go into his store, ask for a kitten or a seagull or whatever, and walk out five minutes later knowing nothing about the human parts. Why show me the head in the grocery bag? As for the arm, how had he known I’d been dying to touch it? I hadn’t said anything one way or the other, so what was the giveaway?

At the station I went through the turnstile and stood on the platform until a train arrived. The owl wasn’t heavy—in fact it was surprisingly light—but the box was cumbersome, so I was happy to find a seat. At our first stop, a teenage girl in a school uniform got on and took the spot across from me. Deal with a kid her age today and the thought of her head winding up behind some shop counter in a plastic bag might not be all that troubling. I mean, the mouths on some of them! That said, it shouldn’t be just any kid that age. The one the taxidermist showed me, for instance—what was her story? Fourteen-year-olds existed four hundred years ago, but teenagers, with their angst and rebelliousness, their rage and Ritalin and very own version of Vogue magazine, are a fairly recent construct. In the seventeenth-century jungles of Peru, a girl that age would have babies already. Half her life would probably be over, and that’s if she was lucky. To have your chopped-off head preserved and then wind up in a Tesco bag some six thousand miles away—that was the indignity. Tesco! At least the arm was in a Waitrose bag.

It bothered me that the bag bothered me more than the head did, but what are you going to do? A person doesn’t consciously choose what he focuses