Imaginary Museums

by Nicolette Polek

  He uses his wristband to electronically open locker 444.

  He yawns and paws the air within.

  What is this? he thinks. His locker, like his mouth, is ajar and soundless. Inside are his wallet, glasses, and keys. But who would take his clothes? He sits on the bench feeling prickly and hot, like a burned-out lightbulb. He couldn’t tell the receptionist; what if she thought he was an easy victim for bullying? That he had committed some sort of abstract crime that asked for this abstract punishment? An establishment like this wouldn’t take to a childlike scandal like this, he thinks.

  Laszlo stuffs his things into the pockets of his robe. It is bright blue and smells like salt. He walks to the bus stop and the raining starts. A large black hound confronts Laszlo around the corner. It snarls at his sleeves, alarmed by the color.

  At the stop, Laszlo hides behind a street sign, where he steps in something warm and orange like mashed sweet potato. His eyes go to the sky as he wishes for any other warm thing, like his bed, or his cheeks after a mug of beer.

  The bus arrives and Laszlo slinks to the corner. He hunches over. The driver mistakes him for a pile of towels when he glances back.

  The next Thursday, Laszlo softly folds his clothes. Earlier, before he left home, his wife threw a scalding pan at him, but missed.

  He wades into the thermal water and looks up at the painted angels, taking slow breaths. Before long, his ears start to wander in the direction of the locker rooms, trying to pick out suspicious footsteps.

  He hears the lighting of a cigar, the sounds of money being counted.

  Laszlo imagines a deep voice repeating his name, a collective laugh.

  Laszlo goes under.

  There all he hears is heavy water and pulse.

  When the evening comes to a close, he peers into his locker, finding yet again that his outfit seemed to have walked out to take a bath of its own.

  On the bus, he sees a man from his office, wearing ratty loafers and a grim sweater. The man waves. “Laszlo!” he yells, with a big grin, but Laszlo is too embarrassed by how shabby his colleague looks, so he pretends not to see him.

  Laszlo continues going to the Waterhouse, though at the end of each evening his locker is empty. How could he not? These visits are his only escapes. Not only from work, but from the ugliness of his apartment complex, and the wilted cat that waits for him outside the door.

  The Waterhouse is where he feels mistakeless, upper crust, strong. At the Waterhouse he shares the water with shipping tycoons and the prime minister. They nod as they float by. At the Waterhouse, Laszlo feels as though the most powerful men in the country notice him.

  That morning, Laszlo’s wife totaled their bicycle when she passed out from what she described as “demonic menstrual pains.” Laszlo remarked at how very nineteenth century of her that was, to faint about like that, and then escaped her, too.

  Now, in April, Laszlo is down to a few shirts and some corduroys with a patch on the knee.

  Thursdays grow tense. He lingers in the bathwater like an alligator, surveying the others with a slitted predatory gaze.

  Was it Erik? He was always talking about his timeshare, though it sounded like it was in the middle of some undesirable part of Yugoslavia.

  Or Boris, whose wife had a large cigar burn on her neck?

  Laszlo moves around underwater, scrutinizing the body sizes of the other men.

  He skips his massage and stands gargoylishly in the balconies of the massage rooms to see what Yuri did with his empty time.

  Everything stays the same. Everyone basks in the pleasure of the Waterhouse, which Laszlo could no longer enjoy. But he is still there. How is this possible? How is it that Laszlo spends his entire Thursday in the locker room, and still at closing time, he finds missing his last pair of everything?

  Laszlo writes my clothes have been stolen on a piece of receipt paper, and passes it over the counter to the bathhouse receptionist. This way no one would overhear. She sits in a dark cavernous booth lit by candles. Her lips are black from eating gooseberry pie and she purses them when she reads his note.

  The receptionist makes a sound. Laszlo nods.

  “Let’s go to where we can discuss this.” She is standing now, suddenly very tall.

  They walk down a long hallway with many doors, and through one that opens into a soft gray room, like a pearl, or a jail. A lock clicks behind them. She offers a chair. The only other thing in the room is a wooden cuckoo clock.

  She asks Laszlo to explain the event, and Laszlo stutters through his recounting. He mentions his various suspects. He describes Yuri and his rough hands, his empty closet and his wife who guards it at home, the black dog from the bus stop, his loneliness, his frustration.

  After a silence, the receptionist starts in a low voice. “Let’s find a way to move past this problem,” she says.

  She’s unbuttoning her dress now, making a little pile of clothes between them.

  Laszlo feels alarm.

  Laszlo feels ashamed, and focuses on his bare feet.

  The receptionist lifts his chin with a cold finger. “Are those the clothes that went missing?” she asks, pointing at her pile. She smells of leather and something sweet, and feels crushing and unforgiving when she sits on Laszlo’s lap.

  On Friday, Laszlo stumbles into the ministry, red-eyed and sleep deprived.

  He greets the desk clerk, Dagna. She doesn’t look up; Laszlo notes this mildly. She unlocks the department’s doors and Laszlo lets them close behind him.

  She was wearing his yellow polo.

  He is certain of this, though she is now on the other side of the doors.

  She was wearing it, and it fit her in a way that was evil and wrong.

  The carpet seems cheap and itchy. Laszlo’s skin twitches around like a Saint Vitus’ dance. He makes his way through the floor, trying to find help—but the first person he sees is Stanko the law clerk, wearing Laszlo’s slacks, and Erin, wearing his checkered tie as a hair band.

  “He’s been going to the Waterhouse,” he hears someone whisper. Laszlo smiles, backing up, tightening the belt around his blue bathrobe.

  Once in his office, Laszlo looks at his bulging reflection in the doorknob, and locks the door.

  Laszlo surveys his dim office: desk, refuse bin, lamp. The lofted window above his bookcase lets in smells of dog spit and potatoes.

  Laszlo takes off his bright blue robe and starts ripping it into long strips, knotting their ends together into a rope. He needs to leave the office, find some clothes to put on.

  He balances at the top shelf of his bookcase and pries the window open. Outside is a billboard for Mazda convertibles. A young shirtless woman squeezes her large firm breasts, and a Doberman wearing Laszlo’s cardigan winks at him.

  Laszlo climbs onto the side of the building, and starts his descent down his rope.

  The wind slaps the sides of Laszlo’s pink body.

  Like this, up high, the city, and everyone in it, looks beautiful.

  He reaches the sidewalk, and walks quickly.

  The pedestrians pretend not to see him.

  The Seamstress

  On Monday my seamstress decides to give up people.

  I’m going to give up people, she says.

  I nod vaguely, playing mobile sudoku with one hand and passing her my graduation gown to be hemmed with the other, and then leave without asking what she meant because I’m late.

  When I go back to pick up my gown she doesn’t answer the door. Her house is covered in burly ivy. There is a stained-glass window at either side of the door, and when I look through the glass I see her albino wolfhound, Mercy, who seems to tell me to go away.

  That evening I get a drink at the village inn and see my seamstress there, getting escorted to the private room, where her dinner table is set with black peaches and gray liquor and some expensive lamb dish. A celebratory meal for someone who now eats alone.

  The town is filled with people who eat alone, who don’t want to
be eating alone.

  A grandfather eating pureed pears and buttermilk in his wheelchair while he watches chickadees from the kitchen window.

  A dog eating a band-aid stuck in pig fat from under the stairs of a coffee shop.

  A mother signing divorce papers under the broken ceiling fan, soiling the papers as she takes bites of nachos glossed with oil, flicking juice from the jar of pickles that she sticks her fingers into.

  I imagine the seamstress first missing her companions—her husband, her mailman, maybe even me—but then eventually finding solace in Mercy and disconnecting her landline.

  The seamstress leaves the inn to go back home, to put on her thimbles, to sew a robe for a customer she doesn’t have.

  Over time the clothes she makes become stranger, more alien. She makes a pantsuit and it turns out harlequin, crotchless, and unfamiliar with how legs move. She makes gloves for a three-fingered hand and other elaborately misshapen garments.

  On Valentine’s Day she opens a storefront next to a smoking bench and a sculpture garden. In the window is a sweater for a car, top hats affixed to a mannequin’s breasts, a belt that she fitted around a teakettle. My graduation gown is a curtain.

  The door is locked. The seamstress re-dresses her mannequins, moves them around the store as if they are her customers.

  A man presses his cheek to the glass beside me and we watch her hide behind a trash can. He eventually backs away, starts his cigar, and slowly disappears into the sculpture garden.

  I follow, making my way home before the rain.

  The seamstress, who feels a sudden pain, sits down by the window to rest. When she looks out, she sees people walking, but mistakes them for trees.

  How to Eat Well

  I ask my nephew to bring something nice for dinner. “Something substantial this time,” I say, looking down at a dried-out quail wing at breakfast. My nephew catches a ninety-pound rabbit in the pine forest that evening. Every night he goes into the woods with a basket to forage skullcap and mushrooms, valerian root and red currants, but this time he comes home with a black leviathan, this plump dead rabbit slung across his shoulders like a beached whale. He enthusiastically skins it that evening, cuts it into silky flanks and wraps them in butcher paper, filling our entire icebox and our neighbors’ icebox, and taking the leftovers to the meat shop down the road. The next seven days we eat rabbit for breakfast and for snacks and for dessert, until we turn plump and dark in the eyes. I eat crimson leg meat that puts me to sleep at dinner, and my nephew carries me to my study, slung across his shoulders, where I dream that I live in a castle, where a brotherhood lives behind a door that the tallest pine tree has fallen in front of.

  Owls Fall in Nitra

  The falconer comes from a winding lineage of loving, mysterious people. Her mother died in an avalanche; her grandmother monitored forests from a tall tower. Once, the family went on vacation to Belarus and the falconer, then just a girl, got away. Her father tried to find her, but made a fatal step. Next he was falling down an empty elevator shaft. The falconer imagined a funnel that led to heaven or a pile of missing things.

  Now the falconer trains raptors for airports. She flies them on the runways to chase off the birds that aren’t welcome. The falconer lives alone in a trailer with a Eurasian owl on the banks of the Nitra River. The Eurasian owl no longer hunts, after once having been electrocuted. Instead of flying him, the falconer calls him Squash, and presses her face against his feathers.

  One morning, a knock at the door. A short boy delivers a message. Sometimes it is news from town, but today it is a request.

  A disagreement between families from two neighboring villages. Tensions have increased, and the families are enlisting the local falconers’ help. A sort of traditional gesture. She and another will fly their bird on behalf of each family, and whoever’s bird emerges victorious will be the family that wins.

  So the falconer puts on her cape and packs some frozen mice. Squash, who hates being left behind, unties the falconer’s shoes, then retreats to the cupboard under the sink to murmur.

  Everyone meets in a meadow between the villages: the falconer and her best bird, and a handler from the opposite village with his. The families gather around them. People from the villages gather around too.

  The problems between the two families are endless. Affairs, violence, envy, theft. The issue immediately at hand is this: Two brothers, one from each family, had been dear friends. They would hike to castle ruins and collect black trumpet mushrooms together. They would set off sky lanterns, play Bach fugues on their violins, and gamble. One drunken night, they stole a lime Ferrari from a paralyzed man in a bordering town. They intended to return it first thing in the morning, but drowned in the river during their celebratory swim.

  Now everyone wants to know: Which family gets the Ferrari?

  It is parked in the center of the gray meadow like a virus.

  A bell is rung, and the birds are released.

  Somewhere between the meadow and the moon, the owls lock talons. When owls fight, they play chicken. They latch on to each other and fall, the ground quickly approaching.

  One must let go, or they crash.

  Whichever one lets go first is the loser.

  The families yell and throw rocks into the sky. They curse and shove and pull at each other’s hair. The men of the families auction their sisters for kisses. The falconer watches them all with a strong sadness.

  In the final seconds, an owl lets go and rises, then returns to the falconer.

  Now that family must let go of the lime Ferrari too.

  At home, the falconer sits by the fire with Squash, telling him about the crooked fir trees from the meadow, and how Squash would have liked to sit in them.

  The falconer tells him about the way the birds fell, clutching each other. She can’t help but think of her father, who once tried to find her. Squash moves closer and murmurs. Sometimes falling is a kind of freedom. The falconer tries to hide a tear, but Squash is quick and wipes it with his head. He gives the falconer a wrapped caramel, and brings her to the window. A gentle snow begins to fall.

  Library of

  LOST THINGS

  Girls I No Longer Know

  The girl who lost twenty pounds from falling in love and could no longer hear her footsteps. The girl who clapped at the sunset. The girl who tucked a pearl under her tongue while she slept. The girl who never slept and became a spiral. The girl who emptied flower food packets into someone’s lotion as revenge. The girl who was a child acrobat, a star, who was struck by a fallen gymnasium light and became a paralyzed millionaire from lawsuits. The twin girls who got into a knife fight in the driveway next door. The girl who tripped me in ballet, which I enjoyed. The girl who watched an agave plant bloom and immediately die. The girl in my mother who disappeared over time, and the girl who tried to find her.

  Guest Books

  On June 13, 1998, a woman named Penny, who was about to lose her eyesight, wanted to see “all that God created one last time.” There was an entry written by reunited siblings after a boating incident, a man “at the end of himself,” and a heart surgeon on her vacation. Now, in July of 2019, the woods still look magnificent.

  The new couple sits in the cabin away from the large oval window, eating sausages and arguing about the word gourmet.

  Field Notes

  Erica will walk for a maximum of thirty-five minutes, so that she has time to get coffee and return emails before lunch. Then the other things—reducing leisure time on the phone or computer, saying what she means, maintaining good posture and hydration at her desk, and reducing despair—will become more manageable.

  Erica exits her car and walks into a blue sign. NATURE STUDY AREA. It lists wildlife information. Butterflies. Groundhogs. Trail map, jackets advised: daytime temperatures average fifty to sixty degrees.

  Erica swings her arms and moves along, finds another sign a few steps farther.

  This land was first home to the Ottawa tribe,
who left shortly after they arrived; then Moravian missionaries, who wrote to their congregation that there was “darkness on the land”; then the New England settlers, who drowned and hanged themselves. It is now a place to observe songbirds, pick blackberries, and sit beside various ponds.

  She tries to clear her mind but her brain feels itchy. She wants to find an empty clearing to become one with, or a patch of quicksand in which to briefly suspend.

  Erica takes deep breaths but still feels the her in her.

  The air smells dim and shapeless, like burlap or fear.

  The words of Christopher Brosius: “Perfume is too often an ethereal corset trapping everyone in the same unnatural shape.” Erica looks at everything in front of her at once and detects a million little movements.

  Her mother lives in the flatlands now. “You always know when people are coming,” she once whispered over the phone. It’s quiet there. Erica stood in a crowded room last night; a hush fell over everyone at twenty minutes past the hour. According to a website about divine synchronicity, this means an angel passed by.

  Erica feels for the shape of her phone in her pants and remembers that she intentionally left it in the car.

  This wetland patch is populated solely by decades-old skunk cabbages. Maroon in color, skunk cabbages wake in early winter, when other plants are still sleeping. The smell, similar to rot, both attracts flies to pollinate and deters other wildlife from eating them.

  Erica looks past the sign and sees pieces of trash stuck in the mud.

  There are old oak trees around a pond that make opening-door sounds—like visitors—when the wind blows. Erica tries to listen to the river sounds but gets distracted by the rhythm of her breath.

  Do you see beavers building their dams nearby? It is a little-known fact that beavers dislike the sound of rushing water. It drives them to do anything to block it out, to make dams.