Free Secret Lives by Jeff VanderMeer

about the duck and about Vawkansun, if either had ever truly existed. He would have liked to have forgotten about both the duck and Vawkansun, but since he dreamed every night of a magical duck and a shadowy man with a V monogrammed on his shirt, this was impossible.
    “You going out with us tonight?” one of his friends would ask and Tidwell would reply, “I’m not feeling too good tonight. I think I’ll just stay in.” And then he would go down to the local library to research “Vawkansun.”
    It didn’t take long to realize that such a duck and such a man, Vaucanson, had existed—in France in the 18th-century. In a moldy old book of facts, water-damaged and coffee-stained, he found the following entry:
    One of the most famous automata was built by a French engineer named Jacques de Vaucanson in the 1730s. His ingenious mechanical duck moved like a duck, ate like a duck, and digested fish like a duck. The duck had a weight inside connected to over a thousand moving parts. Vaucanson, by trial and error, made these parts move together to make the duck move and give it the illusion of life. It even had a rubber tube for its digestive track. The duck and other automata made Vaucanson famous, and he traveled for many years exhibiting his duck and other machines around Europe. Although he collected honors for his work, he also collected scorn from those who believed he had employed infernal means to create his duck. After a time, he fell out of favor and took a position managing silk-mills in the countryside. Most of his creations were destroyed in a fire a year after Vaucanson died, but the miraculous duck was spotted in 1805 by the famed poet Goethe in the collection of an Austrian antiques enthusiast. Shortly thereafter, the Austrian died and the collection auctioned off to pay his debts. The duck has not been seen since. Even in 1805, Goethe had reported that the duck looked mangy and had “digestive problems.” Strange sounds came from inside the automata, and it is likely it ceased to function shortly after 1806, when it was sold to an anonymous buyer. Vaucanson’s relatives have often claimed that the duck was Vaucanson’s most prized possession and that he believed it held the key to solving several scientific mysteries.
    It would be wearisome to relate how Tidwell came to acquire the duck—the money he had to save, the journeys he had to make to various European countries, the bribes given to this curator to look up records from centuries past and that old grandmother who claimed to remember seeing it in her youth, or even to convey the sheer ferocity of desire it took for Tidwell to continue on his course. Suffice it to say that in due course, he did acquire the duck, even though he committed more than one crime to do so. All seemed forgivable if only the duck came into his possession.
    One rainy spring day, Tidwell came back from his final journey, holding a box. He wearily opened the door to his home, threw the box on the couch, and went to fix himself a drink. It had taken over five years to find the duck, and several times he was certain he would fail in his quest, dead end leading to dead end. But, finally, a wizened old man in a beret, sitting in a cafe in the wine country outside of Marseilles, had given him the lead that had led to the clue that had resulted in a box containing Vaucanson’s duck.
    Tidwell wondered idly if his family and friends would ever forgive him for his obsession. Probably not, but the damage was already done. He could not undo it. Nor, he thought as he drank down his whisky, did he think he would have wanted to. He was not the same person he had been before. He had picked up a dozen new skills in his journeys, discovered in dangerous situations that he responded firmly and well. The world had, no matter what came next, opened up for him in a different way than it had opened up for him in his previous life.
    Thus far he had glimpsed the duck only briefly—winced at its