Imaginary Museums

by Nicolette Polek

  Annie felt as though she should be turning over a new leaf, rock, or page. Perhaps there she would find a newt, jewel, or her second chance. Instead she had a new cell phone, and her only contact was Sister, who pickled vegetables, read the Bible, and always had bad phone reception. Annie’s therapist also contacted her. He sent automated text messages every evening at 8 p.m. reminding Annie to breathe.

  Annie told her sister she was going to the city. “For research,” she said into the phone, observing her face mask dry in the mirror. Annie had large pores and spent a lot of money covering them up. Annie also had unspeakable grief and a master’s in history.

  “It’s not for me, it’s for my paintings,” Annie said, finding a profound ring in the phrase.

  After the call ended, Annie stayed on the line, listening to the static as though it were the distant ocean in a seashell. She felt so stuck that she believed she might pee herself. But Annie also believed in miracles, and that angels occasionally came down to earth in human form and erased humans’ memories of them after they left.

  Annie started to mention her plan to visit the Air-Conditioning Museum. At the fruit stand, in the elevator, to her landlord. She felt feverish from talking about a trip that had not yet happened, about how the Amtrak would go along the Hudson River where the water gets frothy and nice; about how Penn Station would have those light-up keychains with names on them like Ben, John, and Sarah; about how she had always felt this push to paint. She fantasized about meeting an attractive man with long dark hair. She imagined they could have fleeting, gleaming kisses in an empty room of the New York Public Library.

  To Annie, this museum and the city was “the perfect fix” that could help her move on. She also knew that she briefly thrived on illusory successes. She enjoyed that feeling of being propelled forward, whether or not it was real. She’d always loved even the shimmer of an out, a trapdoor from her heart.

  Annie’s sister emailed her a video of Edna the Elephant painting a bouquet of yellow flowers. Edna made slow, determined strokes with her trunk, and changed paintbrushes when she went to work on the leaves. Annie clicked on a website where people could donate money to rehabilitated elephants by buying Edna’s prints.

  Later she learned that Edna and other elephants are trained to strategically move the paintbrush around and to paint the same picture repeatedly, which detracts from their quality of life. Annie related to the elephant, not only because they were both amateurs, but because they painted their own demise.

  Most of her things fit into her small yellow backpack. She packed her ex-husband’s old camera that she never understood—much like everything else about him, in retrospect.

  But then Annie looked up the museum and found that it didn’t exist. Not in New York or Washington, D.C., not in the Midwest or in some Berlin basement. Instead, there were exhibitions like Disco Prints, Dogs of the Soviet Space Program, and Famous Robbery Weapons. Nothing about air-conditioning, or refrigeration.

  At the library, the small woman behind the reference desk opened the encyclopedia to “Cooling Systems.” Annie stared at the page that made everything seem simple, feeling that it is difficult to understand what another person wants.

  Annie was embarrassed, and for a while avoided the people with whom she had shared her travel plans. She thought vindictively of her senile painting instructor, and stopped attending class.

  She went to throw away her ex-husband’s camera. She walked to the red trash can on the street corner. She disposed of it, then pulled it back out. Sitting on a bench, she fingered the various knobs and buttons and ding-dongs. She threw it away again, passionately. She observed it, the dumb camera. Her only thing left from her first love, now touching what appeared to be a sandwich. She stared without blinking, until it all turned into a blurred mass of trash.

  It was still summer, and Annie retreated to her apartment. She paced in her yellow kitchen; she plugged in rotating fans and her window units. She pulled out some ice trays and positioned them around the room, under lamps, like in a gallery.

  Annie went online and collected videos—snowstorm footage, tours of walk-in industrial freezers, windmills, and waterfalls. She turned on all the cold-water faucets. Sitting still in a leather chair, with her feet in a dish of ice water, she closed her eyes, admiring the cold.

  Your Shining Trapdoor

  Feebee visits her parents in Pennsylvania. They go on hikes each day. Father goes slowly because of his sciatica and Mother brings binoculars. She doesn’t have any friends in America, so she gets to know birds instead.

  When her parents leave the house, Feebee cleans. There is a program about clowns on the radio. The man has a jagged voice, like quartz or a bitten nail.

  There are four types of clowns, the man on the radio explains. Feebee sweeps the dust from under the couch. She thinks of Dumbo and court jesters, how they both feel like members of a divine class.

  A more familiar clown type is the auguste, says the man on the radio. Auguste means “foolish.” The pranksters who pull jokes that fail. These clowns trip and fumble. They wear baggy plaid jumpsuits and bow ties.

  Feebee thinks of a motivational speaker who came to her middle school. The speaker was taller than a door and ran in place to an eighties classic rock song while everyone sat down. The kids sneered at her. To Feebee she was a queen.

  Too, there are the tramp and hobo types of clowns. Tramps look sad, poor, and plain. Hobos dress similarly, but smile.

  Feebee’s parents’ house is small and dark. It is cluttered with hanging pots of ivy, and smells like dust. Wooden statuettes cover many surfaces. Feebee wipes the cobwebs from them.

  There are pieces of once-expensive furniture Father found in the street, mended with duct tape and glue. There are quilts covering moldy chairs.

  There is a giant red porcelain panther with a lightbulb sticking out of its head. It is the biggest thing in the living room. It is too bright for everything around it. Feebee dusts it off to reveal an even brighter shade of red beneath.

  Feebee remembers when Father found it. How he had pulled the bright panther lamp up the front steps, slowly, with a struggle. How he threw open the door with his arms up wide, above his head, laughing.

  Father’s room is filled with strange replacements for things—a golf club for a cane, a desktop computer on a dresser used as a desk, a stethoscope instead of earplugs, and several one-lensed, one-armed eyeglasses that he’s stacked together into one working pair. On the floor are books on how to become rich.

  Father eats steel-cut oats for every meal, hunched over his bowl. He has a special wooden spoon he always uses. It is wooden and big like a ladle, and he keeps it in his room. He used one just like it at the refugee camp in Italy; it was the first thing he owned after crawling through tall grass for miles.

  Feebee straightens up his desk. She throws away an apple core.

  She almost throws away his yogurt container where he keeps his fake teeth. Next to it is a tape recorder. He practices his English into it, saying the th sound in words like therefore, then, and that.

  Feebee sleeps in her childhood room, the attic, where she only has nightmares. There is a postcard of the solar system on the door. Under the postcard is where she had written the phone number of the only boy she ever loved.

  The lightbulbs in the bathroom are unscrewed. Otherwise, Feebee would stand before the mirror and stare, unfocused, unfamiliar.

  Feebee plans to leave the next day after dinner. Her mother sets the table with bright red bowls and plates. She’d found them at a yard sale next to church that morning.

  “To balance out the living room,” she says, and then, “The plates can be friends with the lamp.”

  Father smiles down at his oats in the bright red bowl. He’d bought a VHS player and a bow tie, which he wears at dinner.

  Feebee eats silently and quickly. She chokes on potatoes and water.

  Her mother gives her dried herbs and vitamin B. She wishes Feebee could stay, and Feebee
wishes they could leave, could find a place for themselves where they fit.

  Father smiles widely and pats her on the back. He looks shrunken in his bow tie. From the car, Feebee sees the panther lamp glowing through the window. It looks better that way, when the entire living room is red, like a circus.

  The next time Feebee visits, she brings a pry bar, door joists, and frames. She waits until her parents leave for the forest, then starts with her mother’s room. She lifts the rug and makes a three-foot-by-three-foot cut into the wood. She tidies up the space under the floor and puts all her mother’s bird-watching books on tall shelves. She installs a large viewing platform with a high-powered telescope that looks out upon rolling mountains. When she climbs back up, Feebee screws hinges onto the door and covers it up with a rug.

  In Father’s room, Feebee puts the trapdoor under his rollaway bed. She puts in various corners of his childhood town: the park where he played soccer, the cow field, the Lubovna ruin by the mountains, a trombone. She installs a hot tub with Epsom salts. The door is the brightest red.

  At the end of the week, Feebee touches the tops of their heads and tells them goodbye. In the mailbox, she leaves individual envelopes, and inside those are keys.

  Slovak

  SCENERIES

  Sabbatical

  Oh good, you made it . . . come under the umbrella. I’ll show you the property first, then you can unpack your things and dry your feet. When it rains, it rains . . . as they say . . .

  This is the front yard . . . the house is there . . . through the fog. There are pear trees and plums . . . black-currant vines . . . in the summer you should trim them, so they don’t grow wild.

  The front path is over here . . . it cuts into the neighbor’s yard. There he is . . . Boris . . . Boris! . . . He doesn’t speak much, but he knows a few English phrases from touring with his metal band . . . and he has a goat, Bucket . . . who’s standing on the enormous pile of firewood over there . . . sometimes he gets up onto the ladders . . . they make him feel tall, as though he owns the land. Once I drove into town without noticing that he’d hopped up onto the roof of the car . . . all the villagers pointed, dropped their bread, as if I were sailing a flamed chariot through the hills . . .

  It gets tricky finding the place at night . . . without lights . . . but you’ll know you’re close when you hear Bucket bleating, which he does . . . all night. It’s like his song for the stars. The dark is also good for eating figs from the tree. Then, you can’t see the bugs . . . inside . . .

  Here’s the river that carries the trash from town . . . you should remove the detritus that drifts onto the bank . . . Across the river is an abandoned auto salvage yard. Lizards live there now . . . but it’s worth a dig, you never know . . . maybe you’ll find some stray euros under the seats . . . a costume . . . or a love letter . . .

  I was wondering . . . if you climb around out there and find a knife with a thin jade handle . . . could you dispose of it, under the oak tree? That is where I bury all the things that need burying . . . you may do the same.

  The Blue Woods are all around us . . . see those tall pines up there? They’re good woods for hikes, tricky sometimes. It’s best to go when the sun rises so you have the whole day . . . to find your way back. The carpenter’s daughter’s shoes were found up there . . . there were footsteps that trailed in circles until they stopped . . . at a pair of white sneakers . . . as though she were plucked straight up into the sky . . .

  You mentioned one of your hobbies is mycology? I left you a picture of the nonpoisonous mushroom you will find in the woods . . . I could have left you charts of the fifty-six poisonous ones, but this way is much simpler . . .

  I’m an ornithologist myself . . . I just received a grant to study blackbirds . . . in Chernobyl . . . I’m happy you’ll be here, watching.

  Here’s the front door. It doesn’t lock.

  I’ve left a slab of plywood, in case you feel threatened.

  Sometimes gleaners wander here from the village. Sometimes they confuse our homes for theirs . . . sometimes they’re a bit pushy . . . sometimes. If you find some fruits and vegetables on the property I would recommend you leave them on the front porch . . . as a truce . . . Perhaps you could also leave a note that says, “He didn’t mean it” . . . I’d appreciate it.

  Here is the kitchen. I left you a bottle of cranberry juice to celebrate your housewarming . . . Being alone in a country like this is a very brave thing to do. I find that when you live somewhere where no one knows you, or your past, you become ultimately free . . .

  I know I didn’t really give you any conditions . . . but I left you a short list of things I was hoping that . . . you could keep an eye on during my absence . . . it’s really nothing.

  At the top of the list is visiting my grandmother . . . She gets a bit . . . lonely . . . since my grandfather died, so I told her about you . . . and how you’ve agreed to have coffee with her . . . on Wednesdays . . . and Fridays . . . You can expect to sit by the window of her apartment and silently look out upon the buildings. Sometimes her neighbor is there too . . . she harvests honey . . . into wine . . . I told them you made a bottle or two yourself . . . so maybe you could read up on that . . .

  Your bedroom is here . . . you . . . cut through the living room and . . . move the couch a little . . . to the left so . . . you can access . . . the staircase. Your room is small and the bed is . . . missing . . . but the space opens up to a balcony that looks over the land . . . like a gift . . .

  Here’s a framed picture of my family . . . you can move it.

  Here is my art collection . . . you don’t have to look . . .

  I know I also mentioned that you’d be the only tenant this summer, but I had agreed that my friend’s fiancée could stay here in July . . . Her sister recently died in a fire . . . she’s having a hard time, so I hope you don’t mind . . . finding another place . . . toward the end of your stay . . .

  I was also wondering if you could give her a tour . . . just tell her everything I’m telling you now . . . I’d really appreciate it. Maybe tell her to take notes . . . in case she’ll need to give a tour of her own . . .

  Flowers for Angelika

  My grandfather was twenty-six and poor, staring at his crossword puzzle in line at the fish market. He was staring at the empty squares for 32 Across when Angelika entered through the wooden doors. The locals knew her as the conscientious drunk driver, the widow who drove around the village with her hazards on.

  Angelika was rodent-like. Her mouth twitched when she smiled, which she did behind my grandfather in line. It was like a slippery electric shock that passed from one corner of her lips to the other. She held a potted plant, and my grandfather asked her what kind it was. She told him its Latin name, and how it would lean toward someone who spoke quietly to it.

  My grandfather bought a smoked trout, and she bought two herrings, and in the weeks that followed he fell in love with her.

  Angelika brought up flowers in all their conversations. She talked about opening a flower shop. She talked about using Queen Anne’s lace for birth control, and how she could tell if a sunflower was a girl or a boy by the number of petals it had. My grandfather had little money to spare, but he took her to the botanical gardens in Košice. Her big mouth twitched uncontrollably at the birds-of-paradise, and her eyes became tearful in the cactus room. He worked in a lumberyard and on some days used his lunch and coffee money to have a single daisy delivered to her.

  Then she left for an afternoon trip to get some mountain air for her asthma. My grandfather took the bus to her house, and crawled through a basement window, holding a rare orchid. He climbed up the basement steps feeling warm and perverse, having never been in her home, and being there without her knowing.

  In the kitchen were clusters of potted plants. They sat on top of the fridge, all along the counter, on the seats of chairs, in the cupboard, inside the shoes. The palms, the succulents, the violets, and the carnivorous plants were gray shadows o
f their previous forms. His daisies strung down the sides of a vase. When he felt them with his fingers, they buckled into brown dust.

  The house was still as my grandfather filled bowls with water. He filled pitchers and mugs and said a prayer. He cupped water in his hands. He poured it onto the dried dirt. He poured it over the leaves and the exposed roots. He splashed it on the begrimed carpet, and onto the couch. He went into her bedroom, which was terribly messed, and dumped water onto an heirloom quilt. A mouse froze under the sink, and watched him spill water on her telephone. He went outside into the rain and watered each garden flower with the hose, but he knew it wouldn’t be enough.

  Thursdays at Waterhouse

  The Waterhouse is all blue marble and fine echoes. Large expensive men bob in the water like corks. The website calls it “exclusive.” A reviewer calls it “neo renaissance.”

  On Thursdays, Laszlo takes the bus to the Waterhouse. He changes into a blue robe, and disappears into the cool, silent chambers.

  On other days, he works at the Ministry of Defense.

  On other days, he is a lowly clerk with migraines and low-grade depression.

  But on Thursdays, he is not.

  In March, the end for Laszlo begins.

  But first he floats around droney and angelic.

  He thinks about biting his wife’s ankles, and the satisfying imprint of a pearl revolver on a velvet cushion. Sometimes he thinks of a big donkey drinking from a street puddle. When the donkey speaks, it sounds a like a slowed-down recording of his father.

  In the massage room Yuri the masseuse presses his rough hands onto Laszlo’s back, while he tells stories of his many girlfriends with Stockholm syndrome. Afterward, Laszlo is given a shot of bourbon and a bleeding steak. He screams when they dunk a bucket of ice water over his head.

  Then it is time for Laszlo to go back to the locker rooms.