what I’m really after, and, knowing this, he offers no help whatsoever. Or, rather, he used to offer no help. It wasn’t until this year that he finally dropped a hint, and even then it was fairly cryptic. “Go out the front door and turn right,” he said. “Then take a left and keep walking.”
He did not say “Stop before you reach the boulevard” or “When you come to the Czech border you’ll know you’ve gone too far,” but he didn’t need to. I knew what he was talking about the moment I saw it. It was a human skeleton, the genuine article, hanging in the window of a medical bookstore. Hugh’s old drawing teacher used to have one, and though it had been ten years since he’d taken the woman’s class, I could suddenly recall him talking about it. “If I had a skeleton like Minerva’s . . . ,” he used to say. I don’t remember the rest of the sentence, as I’d always been sidetracked by the teacher’s name, Minerva. Sounds like a witch.
There are things that one enjoys buying and things that one doesn’t. Electronic equipment, for example. I hate shopping for stuff like that, no matter how happy it will make the recipient. I feel the same about gift certificates, and books about golf or investment strategies or how to lose twelve pounds by being yourself. I thought I would enjoy buying a human skeleton, but looking through the shop window I felt a familiar tug of disappointment. This had nothing to do with any moral considerations. I was fine with buying someone who’d been dead for a while; I just didn’t want to wrap him. Finding a box would be a pain, and then there’d be the paper, which would have to be attached in strips because no one sells rolls that wide. Between one thing and another, I was almost relieved when told that the skeleton was not for sale. “He’s our mascot,” the store manager said. “We couldn’t possibly get rid of him.”
In America this translates to “Make me an offer,” but in France they really mean it. There are shops in Paris where nothing is for sale, no matter how hard you beg. I think people get lonely. Their apartments become full, and, rather than rent a storage space, they take over a boutique. Then they sit there in the middle of it, gloating over their fine taste.
Being told that I couldn’t buy a skeleton was just what I needed to make me really want one. Maybe that was the problem all along. It was too easy: “Take a right, take a left, and keep walking.” It took the hunt out of it.
“Do you know anyone who will sell me a skeleton?” I asked, and the manager thought for a while. “Well,” she said, “I guess you could try looking on bulletin boards.”
I don’t know what circles this woman runs in, but I have never in my life seen a skeleton advertised on a bulletin board. Used bicycles, yes, but no human bones, or even cartilage for that matter.
“Thank you for your help,” I said.
Because I have nothing better to do with my time than shop, I tend to get excited when someone wants something obscure: an out-of-print novel, a replacement for a shattered teacup. I thought that finding another skeleton would prove difficult, but I came across two more that very afternoon — one a full-grown male and the other a newborn baby. Both were at the flea market, offered by a man who specializes in what he calls “the sorts of things that are not for everyone.”
The baby was tempting because of its size — I could have wrapped it in a shoe box — but ultimately I went for the adult, which is three hundred years old and held together by a network of fine wires. There’s a latch in the center of the forehead, and removing the linchpin allows you to open the skull and either root around or hide things — drugs, say, or small pieces of jewelry. It’s not what one hopes for when thinking about an afterlife (“I’d like for my head to be used as a stash box”), but I didn’t let that bother me. I bought the skeleton the same way I buy most everything. It was just an arrangement of parts to me, no different from a lamp or a chest of drawers.
I didn’t think of it as a former person