by Doon Arbus
After a momentary pause, blood began to flow and once started was disinclined to cease. With its lethal treasure still intact, the caretaker gingerly cradled the injured extremity against his body as if it were a trapped bird he had foolishly volunteered to nurse, and got to his feet. A stain was seeping into the fabric of his undershirt, turning it a peculiarly vibrant shade of red and making it look as if he’d been stabbed in the belly. He stared down at himself, mesmerized by the enigma.
His visitors seized the opportunity to take charge. The emergency must have invigorated them. Heedless of the broken stuff beneath their feet, they pressed in around him, full of unwanted offers of assistance, creating a general hubbub of suggestions and advice: ordering one another to call 911, to fetch a towel, to get the victim to a seat, to help him down the stairs. Although the reluctant beneficiary of their attentions kept shaking his head and saying no, insisting he was okay, really, and perfectly capable of managing on his own, they ignored his protests. Someone got hold of him by the elbow and refused to set him free.
As to whatever may have happened after that, he could no longer be certain, having since confused memory with hallucination and fantasy with fact, each — at least in retrospect — as plausible as the other. Had the guilty woman, his eternal nemesis, really offered him her white linen handkerchief to stop the bleeding or was that ironic detail purely his invention? Had he really grabbed her by the shoulder from behind with his one good hand while she was preceding him down the stairs and demanded she submit to an immediate examination of her coat on which he thought he had detected tiny remnants of Dr. Morgan’s artifact about to be smuggled off the premises? — although, in all fairness, he had to admit that whatever he’d seen glittering there also bore a striking resemblance to scattered droplets of melted snow.
He wasn’t sure how he wound up at the hospital, whether one of the departing visitors had forcibly accompanied him or whether he had somehow made it there on his own. He thought he remembered waiting his turn in the company of fellow sufferers in a remorselessly well-lit room with plastic chairs and a green-flecked linoleum floor, where competing injuries and ailments acted as status symbols; where the overdoses, the moaning, the gunshot and stab wounds, the bleeding, the maimed, the semiconscious vied with one another for the best, most urgent claim to attention in the pecking order. He thought he remembered watching someone write deep puncture wound on his emergency admission form, as if it had become his new identity.
What he knew for sure was that his right hand and the precious fragment embedded in it — which by that time he had come to regard as a single inseparable entity — were eventually subjected to some artful form of surgical intervention that succeeded, without too much additional damage, in detaching them from one another. What he knew for sure was that he had received six stitches in his palm and two on the back of his hand. What he knew for sure was that his attempt to reclaim the thing that had caused his injury — “the dangerous piece of broken glass” as they called it — was passed off by hospital personnel as an eccentric whim until his outburst over the matter reached such a pitch that they resolved to indulge him, retrieving it from the trash so as to finally be rid of him.
It must have been later that afternoon, or possibly the next, that he had resumed his salvage activities at the museum, eventually recovering two hundred and forty-seven individual pieces of the shattered artifact — yes, he counted them, every fragment, every shard. The exactness of the tally comforted him, solidifying his grasp on the event. The broken bits, shrouded in a blue sheet, were tucked away where guilty secrets like to hide, at the back of a closet shelf. Keeping them was a way of clinging to the hope of resurrection, the possibility that he just might, in some inconceivable future, manage to put things right again.
His subsequent session before the Board probably went as well as could have been expected. Thanks once more to the widow, his perplexingly loyal advocate, and her subtle powers of persuasion, the members did not vote to fire him. They did not demand he make reparations or renounce a portion of his salary in compensation for the lost object — an amount especially difficult to estimate at this point since the thing had instantly increased in value merely by ceasing to exist. In their collective wisdom, they may have calculated no censure at all was the most effective punishment they could inflict on him. He stood before them, his bandaged hand an emblem of disgrace, and claimed full responsibility for the “incident,” citing a shameful lack of vigilance on his part coupled with a desire to enhance the visitors’ unfettered experience of the place that had undeniably put the safety of its treasures at risk.
Because he doubted they would find it credible, the caretaker did not share with them the real source of his anguish, but he remained haunted by the fact that he had always quietly disapproved of the now demolished artifact. He’d considered it aesthetically pretentious — like something one might discover in a bourgeois china cabinet — and altogether too flawless to be worthy of its place of honor in Dr. Morgan’s singular collection of the strange, the marvelous, and the astoundingly mundane. Although he recognized the somewhat absurd egotism inherent in his guilty conscience, he nonetheless remained convinced that his underlying contempt for the object — his failure, literally, to care for it — had been the actual cause of its destruction.
The incident marked his loss of innocence and the museum’s loss of innocence as well. In spite of his pleas and promises, new rules were promptly enacted. Stricter policies were put in place. Less and less was left to chance or to the appointed guardian’s autonomous supervision. The building Dr. Morgan had envisioned as a sanctuary of exploration and independent discovery for every visitor, professional and amateur alike, was suddenly besieged by cunning security devices signaling distrust. Leashes threaded through the spines held books in place. Shatterproof glass shielded objects from the onlookers. Alarm systems, rigged by unseen wires, waited to emit their hysterical screech the moment anything happened to be jostled out of place. Barriers were erected to keep people at a distance. Posted signs cropped up, issuing warnings (Do Not Touch, No Food or Beverages Allowed, Private No Admittance, Personal Belongings Must Be Checked) that conjured transgressive notions which might otherwise have never come to mind.
This period — which in the end turned out to have been mercifully brief — came to be referred to by the caretaker in his private lexicon as the Reign of Terror. Not that he could really blame the Board for its actions. Its primary responsibilities concerned the material, rather than the spiritual, maintenance of the place: there was valuable property on the premises in need of its protection. He, on the other hand, in trying to be true to Dr. Morgan’s principles, had ironically become implicated in the betrayal of them. Whatever moral authority he might have accrued with the Board as a champion of Morgan’s cause had been tainted by his role in the incident that had precipitated the new restrictive measures, crippling his ability to argue against them.
Nonetheless, in spite of his failure to make his case, within a year or so the original status quo had largely re-established itself, not as a result of his subtle acts of vandalism (although the caretaker had selectively given that a try, unfastening a few leashes, disabling alarms, hiding posted signs by rearranging a display), not as a result of any official decision to relax the rules, but thanks to the healing powers of attrition, neglect, and amnesia. With the passage of time, devices failed, memories faded. The old ways seeped back into the void. And yet, even today, more than two decades later, telltale signs still linger, scars remain.
A persistent numbness still afflicts the core of his right hand where a raised welt of pale flesh, vaguely sickening when touched, has concealed or destroyed — some might say, permanently altered — the pattern of his fate. All the same, that lack of feeling in his palm fails to prevent a heightened sensitivity to cold, or a dull throbbing sensation that comes and goes from time to time with no apparent cause.
Instead of the posted no
tices, most of which have been removed, there is the caretaker’s low voice judiciously reminding people of the rules when necessary — telling them to keep their distance, that touching is forbidden — with an apologetic inflection suggesting his unspoken disapproval of the policy. In the absence of real barriers, there are still symbolic ones. Ghosts of suspicion tarnish the atmosphere. And there is still, of course, half-hidden in its darkened corner, the ominous presence of the empty plinth around which this morning’s group of nine visitors — unlike most of their predecessors — have instinctively gathered, studying what isn’t there as earnestly as the fabled crowd admired the magnificence of their naked emperor’s new clothes, compliantly refusing to accept the evidence of their own eyes.
The caretaker waits on the landing behind them. The Dürer portrait, filched from its original place in the Overture, hangs on an isolated bit of wall adjacent to the plinth, watchful as always. In a gesture of overt familiarity that helps bolster his courage, the caretaker hooks a thumb onto the watch pocket of his unfamiliar vest and leans back against the newel post as they attempt to satisfy their frustrated curiosities on their own. “As you have no doubt observed,” he begins in a leisurely congenial drawl, “something is missing.” The sentence captures his audience’s attention and relieves them of the need to probe further. They give themselves over gratefully to what he has to tell. Like a verbal magician, he conjures the missing object for them out of words, not as it actually was, but as he believed it ought to have been: something rough, irregular and ominous, embodying the violent clash of elements out of which it was created. He sees his vision mirrored in their rapt expressions and concludes he has done well.
“It used to be the introductory note of Dr. Morgan’s symphonic installation on the nature of glass,” he continues, spurred on by the success of his opening gambit, “but thanks to a wanton act of carelessness, the exhibit has been closed for some time now. It soon became apparent that without its pièce de résistance the display of glass specimens had lost its meaning and ceased to add up to a coherent study. And herein lies the Achilles heel of Dr. Morgan’s curatorial genius. The very subtlety and brilliance of his meticulously orchestrated ongoing conversation among objects often makes the loss of any single element enough to destroy the eloquence of the whole.”
In answer to the inevitable question from a visitor as to the fate of the missing artifact, he offers a version of the incident leading to its demise that deviates in so many particulars from what actually occurred as to be labeled, at least by some humorless straight talkers, a lie — although in the caretaker’s mind he may merely be embroidering on the truth for the pleasure and edification of those he is in the process of deceiving. “Well, the world is a fragile place. Full of fragile things,” he muses in conclusion, as though providing a fable its required moral. “It needs looking after.”
In light of this knowledge, the visitors might have been inclined to linger, but the caretaker doesn’t give them the opportunity. “We’d best be getting on. There’s lots to see,” he says, gesturing toward a half-open door and, following his lead, they begin to negotiate the cramped labyrinthine displays of the second floor. They weave their way from room to room, filing past glass cases, peering into the dim recesses of cabinets, opening shallow drawers by invitation, and under their guide’s watchful eye, poring over the minutiae on display inside. His low soothing voice — offering them hints, pointing out obscure connections — casts its spell.
In accordance with Dr. Morgan’s object lesson in typology, topics introduced in the Overture by means of a single isolated example are revisited in these rooms in depth by myriad kindred ones: given the infinite variety of leaves, what is the fundamental nature of the thing we know as leaf? This vexing question, which goes to the heart of Morgan’s thesis, turns out to hinge as much on issues of language as on biology, science, or philosophy. Definitions expand and contract in response to shifting needs for inclusion or exclusion. After some time spent dazzling, deluding and enlightening themselves, the visitors emerge from the last of the contiguous series of rooms, their minds reeling with questions of likeness and difference, to find themselves at the opposite end of the landing in front of a staircase leading to the next floor, access to which is thwarted by a braided rope bearing a homemade sign that spells out in block letters: PRIVATE.
The caretaker ceremoniously undoes one end of the rope and lets it fall, savoring the effect of this unexpected tacit invitation on his little group. Hesitantly, one by one, the nine of them, propelled on by their host’s ambiguous evaporating smile, head up the stairs toward their next destination, forming a tight cluster of indecision on the landing. They make for a timid bunch. Their excitement at the prospect of a spectacle implicitly denied to others is tempered by uncertainty: the privilege they have been granted may be one they would prefer to have renounced, but there is no turning back. The triumph of Morgan’s complex installations lies behind them. His widow’s triumph lies ahead.
Here on the top floor lie the residential quarters of the house. This is where the private Dr. Morgan, driven to retreat before the growing demands for space and time of his perpetually expanding collection — “the insatiable beast,” his wife had called it, to which the more he gave, the more it seemed to need of him — had taken refuge. These are the rooms in which, for most of his last decade while in pursuit of the demands of his great passion, he had lived and worked and slept and sometimes entertained, pretending to the best of his ability to go about the rituals of daily life in the manner of an ordinary man. This is where, since his death, in fulfillment of a promise made only to herself, his widow had staked out the territory for an installation of her own, preserving as sacred even the most mundane artifacts of her late husband’s existence. Some of his devoted admirers regarded her project as a deliberate parody of Dr. Morgan’s stunning achievement, the revenge of a jealous spouse on the rival that had stolen from her the affection she deserved. Others saw it as a bereaved woman’s tragic, ill-conceived expression of idolatry.
In either case, regardless of her motives, the widow turned out to have been right. “The public craves the personal touch,” she had said years before, addressing the Board in its early days in defense of her proposal. “Much as we all appreciate the ambition and complexity of the Doctor’s great undertaking, we must admit it’s all a little arcane for the ordinary person. What most people really want is some access to the private man. They want to find out how he lived and see the commonplace things he chose to surround himself with. They want to be able to poke about among his personal belongings for the reassurance that, no matter how brilliant or famous or rich or aloof he may have been, he was basically just another human being, not unlike themselves. True or not, why deny them what they want?”
The effect of these upper rooms on their new selectively chosen audience confirm the widow’s point. As the morning’s nine visitors move about Dr. Morgan’s study (painstakingly, though perhaps a bit too creatively, restored in accordance with the widow’s mandate to the condition in which her husband had left it the day he departed on his final fatal journey), the look of strained puzzlement begins to seep from their faces. Unlike their recent experience on the floors below, where every marvel they encountered represented one more challenge in a vast imponderable mystery begging to be deciphered, the scene before them now is full of familiar stuff, evocative as a stage set, and requires no interpretation. Here in this comfortable, well-appointed, unremarkable room, where the sobriety of dark wood and heavy woven fabrics is punctuated by the occasional paragon of modern furniture design, by plastic souvenirs, diplomas and awards, and a cacophony of idiosyncratic mementoes, the imposing figment of the absent Dr. Morgan, stripped of the armor of his curatorial intent, loses much of its impermeable luster, leaving the great man’s artifacts exposed to the hazards of prying eyes and the casual inspection of paying customers.
The tall casement windows, facing south and blinded for the mo
ment by the refracted glare of the noonday sun, throw a pattern like prison bars across the disorderly array of papers on the desk and superimpose it upon the ornate flourishes of the faded Oriental rug. The stereo is on and the muted voice of an aging tenor issues from the speakers, risking everything in traversing octaves and challenging rapid-fire lyrics with the abandon of an aerialist. Books line the walls — three thousand four hundred and twenty-two in all, the caretaker announces, giving his audience the benefit of his fetishistic absorption with numbers. The impressive total, as he goes on to point out, includes not only the volumes in plain view crowding the open shelves from floor to ceiling, not only those resting facedown on the arm of a chair or lying open on a book stand or a hassock waiting for their pages to be thumbed, but the forty-two leather bound ledgers segregated behind leaded glass doors in a locked cabinet all their own, each with a year emblazoned on its spine, which account for all the known volumes of Dr. Morgan’s journals. Only the last one, dated 1988, the year of the author’s death — which would have contained no more than eleven entries at the most and may in fact never have existed at all — remains missing. To this day, the well-advertised standing offer of a substantial cash reward, supplemented by a diligent professional investigation conducted both at home and abroad, has evidently failed to unearth the coveted item.
The visitors let loose in the room have been exploring its contents on their own with the tentative, suppressed excitement of liberated sheep, but their investigations begin to embolden them. A few brave souls succumb to the temptation to touch things, surreptitiously stroking the back of a chair or running a finger along the spines of books as if it helped to make the titles legible, astonished that, unlike what they had been led to expect downstairs, the transgression when observed provokes no rebuke. The tenor’s solo, still barely audible beneath the murmured commentaries circulating through the room, devolves into a duet — a lovers’ quarrel actually — in which the two singers, locked in a barbed exchange, continually contradict, outdo, and eclipse one another in an impassioned battle for the last and longest-lasting note.