A Strangeness Comes To Town

The metro tossed me out into a muggy summer evening. Corporate towers crouched around me, while banks prowled up from the noxious gloom. I shivered, abruptly feverish in this city that now seemed so strange. Of course it had all been just the same this morning, but getting fired from a job you love adds ten degrees to every gulp of air, and another hundred faces to the faceless, frothing crowds.

I gritted my teeth, and made my way to the museum. Passing the overflowing trashcan at its entrance, I tossed my useless shop key into a bucket of spoiled chicken.

“Heron!” called a familiar guard. He was a big guy with a generous white belly: the color of his undershirt, where it strained through his navy uniform. I waved, though every time he greeted me I couldn’t quite recall his name.

To say I was a regular at the museum understated things. I haunted the place proudly. I loved the way the cool pink marble pressed back the frantic city streets. I loved the pent-up, thoughtful atmosphere. I loved the wrought iron railings that embellished every stairway landing, and I loved the fact that I had made them, alongside the mullions in the stained glass windows, the ornate gateways in the courtyard garden, and the mounts for the most fragile maquettes.

Stepping out onto the second floor, I greeted a wall of Coles and Bierstadts. A slow circuit of the Hudson River School romantics blended into the softer palettes of American Impressionism as I dragged my callused fingertips along the cold comfort of their placards’ dates and names.

Fired, I thought, turning the word over inside my head. I fired metal all the time. I pressed bar stock into white-hot furnaces and then conformed it to my desires. That was what we did in the foundry, manipulating metals into more attractive shapes for our society.

Now I’d have to remake myself the same way. The city was changing. Between competition from overseas, the rising value of the property that the aging foundry I had worked at occupied, and a thousand other factors no one this side of god controlled, lives like mine had become untenable. Across the dying industrial district, cranes still scoped and boomed, but it was all demolitions now. The old theories still applied, but the scale on which we built our crucibles had changed.

It felt different to see those principles applied to a city, to a man.

Maybe that was why I’d come to the museum that evening, I thought. At thirty-two, I’d seen my friends go through this same dilemma years before. To a man, they chose to leave. They went around to all their favorite bars, said goodbye to classmates and ex-girlfriends, then disappeared into a wider world to forget the city that had made them.

It hit me beneath a blizzarding Hassam: I was doing the same thing. I was here to say goodbye to a city that no longer wanted me, starting with an institution dedicated to dead craftsmen, and their dreams.

Impressionists gave way to Ashcans. I walked past Sloans and Everett Shinns, then encountered the first fusillade of postwar abstract expressionism.

I skipped it, heading up. The third floor opened onto a series of unsettling, dog-like sculptures. Their broken silhouettes chased each other down the hallway toward a grand gallery devoted to a driftwood shrine, made to hold a marker and a box of post-its.

Fired, I thought again, imagining other meanings now. Imagining fire licking up the crown molding, illuminating the hidden niches of the driftwood shrine, then insinuating itself between the louvered windows and cyclopean stones until it spread across the city’s streets and uncoiled in skeins of all-consuming flame.

By that point, my hands were shaking. I reached for the sketchpad that I kept in my back pocket only to realize it was gone; I must have left it at the foundry, alongside two missing teeth, a broken bone, and the best part of the last ten years.

Eventually, I washed up beside a newly opened gallery. Peering in, I found a whitewashed room textured with foam sound paneling. White pads cushioned everything except a narrow path along the floor. In the center of the room, raised on a modest dais, there was a table and a chair.

The Museum of Disappearing Things, read a sign above the door.

I paused. Aside from its name, there was nothing to recommend the room to me. The snowy silence that had settled over everything did not entice me; I wanted art that flaunted its own craftsmanship, or at least raged against all our decay.

Instead, The Museum of Disappearing Things appeared a cheap example of asylum chic. That might have fit the changing city, but I refused to let it fit me.

And yet, I found myself approaching. Muffled footsteps padded down the narrow pathway, and then I was on the dais, crouching to examine the furniture there. I’d hoped to find some builder’s mark, but expected nothing more than box store tags.

There were neither. There was, however, a silent figure standing in one corner of the room.

I stood, heart pounding in my throat. “Are you the artist?” I asked, thinking this must be some performance piece.

The figure turned glacially. The man was thin skinned, almost colorless. The common features drawn over the sharp planes of his skull reminded me of a canvas stretched to breaking.

“Please,” he said. “Sit.”

I swallowed, running a hand through my swarf-flecked hair. After a moment, I obeyed.

“Thank you,” said the figure quietly. He approached with stork-like steps, each foot planted carefully. When he stood beside me on the dais I felt only a lukewarm antipathy; his eyes, a passionless gray, stared past me.

His hand brushed over the table and left a small pill in its wake.

I stared at the pill for a long time before I touched it. Letters carved into its sugary surface read The Museum of Disappearing Things. I thought it must be some placebo, a fitting exclamation point to a day that felt like so much quicksand.

I took it. Within moments my head grew heavy, and soft hands laid me down to sleep.

***

I awoke in a dim antechamber, somewhere that I could hear the sea. Peering past the rose shaped mullions of a nearby stained glass window, I searched the dim horizon fruitlessly for any sign of breaking waves. I might have been marooned somewhere in the South Atlantic; I might, just as easily, have never left the city.

“Heron!” a voice called to me. I turned but couldn’t place it. Then anxiety swept it away.

The antechamber only had a single exit. Bronze letters pinned above its opening read The Museum of Disappearing Things. Beside me, on a lectern, there was a hastily scrawled letter signed with a blank square for a name.

Visitor,

You have entered The Museum of Disappearing Things. What follows is collaboration: I have laid out my own gallery, set down its niches and vitrines. Your mind will fill them with what it needs.

It is possible this place will scare you. Do not worry for your safety. In time, all things must change.

□

I read the letter twice just to be certain, and then tore a tiny piece off of the page.

“Fucking performance art,” I said, though no one but the sea was listening. Then, laying a neat sliver of paper in the doorway, I squared my shoulders and walked on into this matryoshka doll of a museum.

***

There was a fisherman with bloodshot eyes.

There was a village, sprouting by the sea.

Ships were built, militias armed.

A fortress rose where herons flew.

And as I walked through the cavernous museum, leaving tiny pieces of the letter to map the random turns I called my wake, the only thing that never left me was the insistent sound of water that I was never quite allowed to see.

Two possibilities occurred to me.

Possibility One: I’d finally been abducted by aliens.

Possibility Two: I’d gone utterly insane.

That it was something so simple as a drug seemed, somehow, the least likely solution. The lawsuits that would accompany such a radical exhibit would have bankrupted anyone’s endowment.

But perhaps, I decided, it mattered less how I had come to be here and more that this place could exist at all. Passing the archaic fortress, I found myself confronted with more images of my city’s founding. Poor workers thronged a brackish estuary turning rude shanties into red brick tenements. The dark bruise of a street appeared. I watched as, within the small space of a glass vitrine, a hospital sprouted from the stick-frame skeletons of a thousand old-growth trees.

From the sea, new peoples came. The city’s English founders gave way to Scots and Irish. The broader Britannic diaspora was joined by Germans, Poles, Italians.

As smokestacks swallowed the horizon, the city darkened with its sky. Populations mixed and changed as black tenant farmers came up from the south to meet with refugees of Chinese wars, with populations of hard working Latinos, with the few remaining natives who’d endured, unnoticed and unheralded, but an essential element all the same.

I turned away, and found myself in sylvan glades. Trees and temples, the old worlds my ancestors had known. In the dark shadow of a doric-columned niche, I watched a faceless laborer applying the plaster for an art piece. Nearby, another beaded, blank man waited. Bags of glass tiles spilled around his feet indicated that he was a mosaicist, but before the man could begin working the columns disappeared, and the niche took on the gorgeous, scalloped architecture that the Arabs called muqarnas. Ornate frescoes bloomed across the half-dome in twining, textual bands that looked like vines made poetry. I could have spent a lifetime studying those designs, but in time they too disappeared.

So I went on. I walked alone through sunlit hallways, through corridors fallen into disrepair. Entire galleries lay dark. Others rang with the music of creation: chords composed of hammers, hacksaws, cranes. I turned into a gallery marked Adulthood and saw girders climbing up the skyline, their shapes an endless scaffolding into horizons miraged by heat.

What I did not see was a single placard or nameplate. There were no explicit histories, no artistic justifications. My museum claimed no answers. Adulthood, it seemed to say, was too complex for that.

By now, my letter was expended. I’d given up on the fairytale I’d hoped to emulate and raced on blindly through the labyrinth. It hardly even registered when I stepped back into my own childhood: skinned knees in a graffitied skate park; first dates in theaters long gone; the barn I’d helped to build during the summer that I ran away; the foundry that finally took me in, and which I’d left in tears mere hours before.

“Heron?” I heard someone call.

I stumbled and almost fell. I tried to follow the voice, upending memories in glass displays.

“Heron!” they shouted again. Strong hands grasped my shoulders, jerking my strained soul away.

That time I did fall. Exhausted, I dragged myself across the mosaicked border of another gallery—

And was confronted, finally, by me.

There I was, Heron Ioannou. The Museum had made me a wax sculpture, life-sized, slowly melting beneath a six foot glass vitrine. As my features dripped and ran I had a sudden image of myself cast in molten bronze. In a moment, I’d become whatever I was meant to be.

But was change allowed to be so easy? I thought back to that time-lapse of the city, the years of constant evolution that turned a fishing village into the universe that molded me. What must it have seemed like in the moment? What if all that living felt like leaving, like waking up each morning in a world that, however subtly, was always evolving into something new?

“Heron!”

***

I came to in a pool of my own spit, beneath the shadow of the friendly guard’s fat belly.

“Orwell!” I said suddenly. It was not the guard’s name, but it was a joke he’d made to me. He’d been reading 1984 the last time that I visited, and said that he was so shocked he’d nearly popped out of his uniform.

“Close enough,” my guard said, flashing his chipped teeth. We were in that whitewashed, padded gallery, alone.

“What time is it?” I asked Orwell.

“About thirteen.”

I snorted, pushed him. Orwell landed on his butt among the padding; he was so surprised he farted, and then we both were laughing.

“Hey man,” Orwell wheezed, “don’t make me arrest you.”

“If you arrest me,” I said, “who’s gonna help you up?”

He stretched a hand out and I heaved him to his feet. He looked surprised, but I was used to wrestling metal.

“Where’s the artist?”

“What artist?”

I frowned. “You know, the performer? Pale guy, slightly freaky. Looked like he could use a sandwich.”

Orwell’s stomach rumbled. “Shit,” he said. “Who couldn’t use a sandwich?”

I decided not to push things further. Together, we walked out into the dark museum. The day had died, and night seeped through the windows. We went down past the Ashcans and Impressionists, tipped our hats to the Hudson River School, and found ourselves outside. I felt shaken, and must have looked it, too.

“You alright, man?” Orwell asked.

“I’m good. It’s just been one of those days. I got fired, earlier.”

Orwell winced in sympathy. “Ouch. What kind of work did you do?”

“I worked in a foundry.” I pointed. “I made those railings, and the garden gates.”

“No shit!” Orwell clapped me on the back. He seemed impressed. I got the sense that he wore his heart on his sleeve; if there’d ever been a less apt nickname than the one I’d given him, I’d have been hard-pressed to find it.

“A guy like you,” Orwell was saying, “he finds a job in no time. You got skills, yeah? It’s not like me, I ride a desk. A kid could do my job. No, a robot! And then who’d drag you out of your drool? When they replace me with a robot, you’ll drown!”

“Oh please,” I said. “It wasn’t that bad.”

Orwell stepped up in my face, eyes flaring wide. “Read my lips, Mr. Fabricator. So. Much. Drool.”

I snorted and would have left if Orwell hadn’t grabbed my arm.

“What will you do now? Are you broke?”

I shrugged. “No more or less than usual. Why?”

“It’s just that…” Orwell’s tongue snaked out to lick his lips. He had the oddest demeanor, not off-putting, just awkward. He reminded me of myself, a few years and a couple breakups ago.

“I didn’t tell you this, OK? But the museum’s hiring. Or at least, they will be soon. We’ve got a new director coming and she’s already making waves. There’s talk of hiring a mountmaker again, someone who could double up in exhibitions. You ever made a mount before? Would something like that interest you?”

“I’ve made a mount or two,” I said, smiling. “But Orwell, should I be concerned? Are you breaking an NDA?”

“Shit, who knows anymore? I just sign the stuff they give me. It’s all starting to feel like thoughtcrime.”

“I suppose that makes us a conspiracy.”

“I’d settle for friends.”

“How about a beer?” I said.

Then Orwell clocked out, and we descended into the city. This city which was always changing, which had never settled once in the centuries since it was born, save for in the snapshots of my childhood, which I’d mistaken for something more.

By the time we reached the metro it felt like I’d lost my job years ago. Live wires stretched out from my body to the world and I felt connected, shattered, whole. I wondered: if I went back to the museum tomorrow, sat down in that uncomfortable chair, and dropped the same ‘placebo,’ would The Museum of Disappearing Things still be there?

If Orwell visited, would we discover that the exhibition was like the fractals in a Pollock painting? Would our secrets be self-similar, truths nesting seamlessly into each other the way we’d all nested into this metro train?

Or would it be more like the images inside a Rothko? Illusory and highly personal, like some musique concrète coincidence that might never bother to repeat? I didn’t know. Maybe even thinking—overthinking—all this qualified me as insane. Maybe I was just supposed to live, one beer at a time. Jobs came and went. Old blocks disappeared. And yet every day we woke inside a city that was still, stubbornly, alive. In its own way, it was a solid as the museum’s stone facade: that pink Etowah marble which would outlast every soul aboard this train.

Disembarking at the next stop we found the night was cool and quiet. Low slung houses tossed long shadows over streets composed of sleeping cars. Two gulls, lost, rested on the eaves where ravens should be.

Orwell took a breath and held it. “Nights like this,” he said with relish, “you can almost smell the sea.”

“The sea,” I echoed. I closed my eyes, stretching my senses to the horizon.

And I decided, before we ever got that beer, that now was not my time to leave. The city changed, grew, and matured. Evolution was an endless process, a mirror to decay. And whichever system we were stuck in, it would open opportunities. Perhaps I’d get this job at the museum. Perhaps, with all the foundries closing, I’d buy a foreclosed forge and start a business of my own.

A strangeness had come to town today. It had entered when I lost my job, and as I walked it left me.

“The sea,” I said, finally smelling it.

I’d stay, and cool my fever in the sea.