Carnivorous Nights Read Free

surrounded a huge DNA model. The thylacine was hard to see and crammed in the very back. A card explained why the thylacine had been moved. Halfway across the world in an Australian lab, scientists were initiating a project to clone the Tasmanian tiger. Their goal was to bring this vanished species back to life. Aspecimen pickled in alcohol more than one hundred years ago was said to have enough intact DNA to make it possible. Seeing our tiger friend in this new light gave us a chill. The thylacine was teetering unsteadily between the categories of “presumed extinct” and “soon-to-be-alive.” We didn't know what to make of it. Apparently, we weren't the only ones obsessed with this animal. We were overcome with a sudden urge to meet the people who believed the tiger was still lurking in its old island haunts, the scientists who planned to resurrect it, and the pundits who cast it into the oblivion of extinction. Maybe they could help us sort it all out.
    We had recently written a book about New York City's wildlife. Coyotes in the Bronx. Bald eagles flying over Central Park. Cockroaches in the kitchen sink. It was time, we decided, to explore something more exotic. Our friend Alexis Rockman, an artist with a similar fixation on nature, certainly thought so. He had been pestering us to go on a trip, some kind of working adventure, for years. We would write. He would paint. “Enough with the rats and pigeons,” he said. “Let's blow this town.”
    Alexis was the one person who knew about our relationship with the thylacine. His mother was an archaeologist who had worked at the natural history museum when he was a kid, and its hallways—filled with fossils, habitat dioramas, and dead animals—had been his childhood playground. He knew every inch of the place. As a result, he shared our fascination with the thylacine, though not to the same obsessive degree.
    We found Alexis at his basement studio in Tribeca. He was adding tiny species of tropical butterflies to a five-foot-by-seven-foot scene of a South American rain forest. We took a seat on his couch and studied the vines and weird, sinister blooms.
    What we would find hanging in Alexis's studio was always a surprise. One week it might be a giant picture of a tree of life gone haywire. Another time it might be a self-portrait of Alexis, his own body lying dead and decomposing in a jungle. Or maybe raccoons having sex with roosters. His paintings were imbued with dark and disturbing images from the natural world—of species, extinction, evolution, and coming disaster. They pictured lurid landscapes filled with real and imaginary creatures.
    The crammed bookshelves in his studio reflected these interests. Beside coffee-table books on artists such as Winslow Homer and Martin Johnson Heade, titles included the
Golden Guide to Spiders and TheirKin, Dangerous Animals
, and
Dearest Pet: On Bestiality.
He had his own small collection of taxidermy—as well as a well-loved (living) pet cat— and on his desk he kept a dried-out bat in a jar.
    “We've just been to the museum,” we told him.
    “Have you been indulging your thylacine fetish again?” He flicked a dot of red onto the wings of the butterfly he was painting. “That taxi-dermy's so fucking beautiful—and incredibly sad.”
    “So you think it's extinct?”
    “Of course.”
    “You probably wouldn't want to go to Tasmania then.”
    He didn't answer right away. Instead, he cleaned off his palette and put his brushes in turpentine. Then he stretched out on the floor of his studio with his shorts hiked up and took a drag on a joint. Though we were eager for him to say yes, we were anxious about what that might mean. Our eyes followed the thin column of smoke emanating from his mouth as we tried to picture what Alexis would be like as a traveling companion. On the one hand, he was superconfident, talented, and successful. Just over six feet tall, he had lanky, model good looks and magazines such