The Traveler: An Encounter with Taxidermists and their Antlers, on the Landing of the Stairs

The Traveler, or, Meditations of a Company Man, illuminates the inner life of an assassin trained as a child in the art of murder and employed by a shadowy company whose national allegiances are forever cloaked in mystery. The short pieces that make up The Traveler weave in and out of time in an organic pattern more akin to music than to narrative fiction. Its pleasures lie in the joy of words heard and felt for their own particular, undefinable magic.

Transcript

Right before we left I had to stop on the stairs to tie my shoe, and I had a spell of dizziness, and couldn’t remember how to tie my shoe, and I felt panic wash over me, the kind of panic that I used to feel as a young recruit, those first few months, barely out of the blanket, barely out of that big black limousine that had carried me away from my home, down that snowy road in winter so long ago. My comrades noisily passed me going down the stairs, where I could see in the lobby the crowd of taxidermists with their prize animal heads and antlers, gathering, chatting amiably in the warm smoky air from the fireplace that had begun to choke a little in the gathering storm.

I couldn’t tie my shoe. It was as if an old song had vanished from my mind, as if something like the Star Spangled Banner or the Pledge of Allegiance had vanished, and I was beginning to freeze up, as I had early on, as a recruit, when they nearly sent me back home.
Below me in the landing of the stairs the small lobby of the inn grew more crowded with the taxidermists and their antlers, so that it began to resemble some kind of herd, seen from above, as from a helicopter, and my eyes fell upon, in the middle of this gaggle of portly Austrians and Germans and Welsh, a petite blonde woman holding, incredibly, a stuffed great Dane.
And then as I later learned I passed out and had to be taken to the hospital. I’d had some kind of transient ischemic event; I was there a few days. I missed the mission. I slept a lot. Every time I fell asleep I dreamed of the taxidermists in the lobby, men holding antlers above their heads, and that petite blonde woman holding the stuffed great Dane in her arms … like a child.
Like a child! On my last night in the hospital I had the dream that made it clear. I dreamed that my mother was carrying me through the lobby of a church, and we were surrounded in the lobby by grazing deer, and elk, their enormous antlers poking me in the head, and catching my mother’s blonde hair as we tried to make it through the lobby of the church into the pews. My mother was trapped; the animals barred our way. But I felt safe bundled up, watching; in the dream, I was both safe in my mother’s arms and also watching from a distance; I was also one of the deer and my antlers were eyes, which could be poked right at me, so that I saw myself, as a baby, and then as a baby I was going up into one of the antlers, and I was inside the deer, I was a deer then, conversing with the other deer, and someone said something about my mother, about the baby, about how she’d better hurry up, the men were waiting, they needed the baby. They needed me, I understood. They were waiting for us outside the church. Then I woke up. My hospital room was filled with my comrades, they were celebrating, they had noisemakers and champagne and those things you blow in and they unfurl and make a Bronx cheer, and they were wearing funny conical party hats, and I thought to myself well, that must be the antlers I dreamed about.
This was not a good sign. My friend in the academy, Joshua Stern, not his real name of course, he arranged for the medical incident to be scrubbed from the record, or my retirement would have been hastened considerably, and I wasn’t quite done yet. After I was home I could not stop thinking about my dreams, and I thought about that scene near the end of the movie Mystic River, where Sean Penn is about to kill his friend, believing his friend had committed a monstrous crime, and his friend is pleading, saying, “I’m not ready, I’m not ready,” and it struck me that I was not ready either, I was not ready to go.
But neither did I want to stay so long that I would be eventually pushed out. I wanted to exit under my own power.
You can’t imagine how upsetting it was for me to find I could not tie my shoes, and then to end up in the hospital, and to have those recurring dreams of the deer in the lobby, the taxidermists, the petite blonde woman holding the stuffed great dane—she obviously was one of very few prominent women taxidermists in Europe—and then that dream in the hospital, in which I was a baby in my mother’s arms, surrounded by grazing deer in the lobby of the church, trying to get to the pews, and then I remembered faintly the scene of my baptism, how my mother objected but my father, the religious one, he had insisted as I understand, and it gave me a lifelong fear of water which even our years of wilderness training and survival skills did not erase. I still cannot cross a bridge without trembling and simultaneously thinking of throwing myself off.
And sometimes I wonder, if we are such a elite squad, if we are genuinely among the most fit and competent men on earth, chosen out of an elite number to commit the most harrowing and necessary acts of sabotage and assassination, are we not also, to a man, more than a little unhinged, a little mad, not just a bit unbalanced but actually tethered to reality by the merest, slimmest, and frayed of threads? And, in that sense, were we not therefore also among the most dangerous men on earth?
This thought troubled me, but then there was another mission coming up and I had to get ready.