Curioddity

by Paul Jenkins

  At the corner stood an ordinary trashcan. Wil looked inside it. It contained trash, including a banana peel and some old newspaper. No surprises there. Wil peeked around the corner of Mons Street to find Mr. Dinsdale standing just up ahead in the mist, tapping his foot.

  “There you are,” said Mr. Dinsdale, impatiently. “What took you so long?”

  “How long has this street been here?” asked Wil. “I’ve walked this way home for years and I’ve never noticed it before.”

  “You know what your problem is, Mr. Morgan?” said the little man in the mustard coat. This was not going to be a question, Wil determined. This was going to be the sentence that preceded a criticism; and this was something Wil had become used to during his last twenty-odd years on the planet. “Your problem is that you look at things too carefully, like a detective specializing in insurance and divorce cases.”

  “I don’t see how that’s a problem. That’s how I’m supposed to look at things, isn’t it? I mean you wouldn’t be about to hire me for whatever-it-is-you’re-about-to-hire-me-for if I didn’t!”

  “Not even close,” said Dinsdale. “You need to learn how to un-look at things if you’re going to take on this job of mine. Life is not about how you use your eyes; it’s about having vision. It’s all about how you un-look at the world.”

  Wil decided this had gone quite far enough. This trek through ever-falling temperatures had now put him in a very grumpy mood, and this seemed like as good a time as any to voice his opinion. “Life is an ugly lake of treacle,” he said. “You can try to wade through it but eventually you’re going to get stuck. If you try to enjoy it you’ll end up sick. And if you go about looking at things bent at the waist like you do, Mr. Dinsdale, you’ll probably end up with treacle up your nose.”

  “I see,” said Mr. Dinsdale with a sniff. The sniff was intended to be a little sullen so that Dinsdale could make it perfectly clear his nose was just a little out of joint.

  “And one other thing: there is no such place as Upside-Down Street. There never has been. Any statement to the contrary would be the ramblings of an old man with too much treacle up his nose!”

  Wil’s angry comment had the desired effect: it left one of the two men feeling satisfied and the other looking rather disappointed. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Wil,” said Mr. Dinsdale. “I can see I must have been mistaken about you. I’m sorry to have troubled you, and I wish you the best in your future endeavors. Now if you’ll excuse me…”

  Mr. Dinsdale began to turn away, making a good show of drooping his old shoulders and being as convincing as possible that his demeanor was now fully deflated. Wil couldn’t tell if this was yet another of the older man’s bizarre tactics: by this point, Wil’s timing was completely off its chosen track. He couldn’t be sure how he felt about anything but he was pretty sure he wasn’t about to let Mr. Dinsdale off this easily.

  “Now wait just a minute,” he began. “You can’t just jump into someone’s Monday and thrash about like a crazy person, and then walk away and then allow yourself to be caught and then walk away again! People don’t do that sort of thing. And I’m not going to fall for that whole victim thing so please stop drooping your shoulders and for the love of all that is holy, tell me what the heck is going on around here!”

  Wil could now barely contain his breath; his brain and stomach were doing competing cartwheels somewhere under the various parts of his skin, and his left eye was beginning to twitch. Mr. Dinsdale eyed him with the kind of calm demeanor that would have made a devout Trappist monk jealous. Wil couldn’t tell if the little man was scrutinizing him for some reason, toying with his emotions, or just plain pushing his buttons. Wil felt like a musical equipment repair workshop, in that most of his organs now seemed to be functioning improperly. How exactly had he gone from a routine-obsessed, tedious human punching bag to a stark raving, wild-eyed lunatic human punching bag in the space of about an hour? No matter which way he looked at his morning, none of it made sense. He’d followed a man dressed like a refugee from a 1950s Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf rerun halfway across town to a hidden street in search of an abandoned cinema and a place named the Curioddity Museum, all without even knowing exactly why. Well, he thought, this was about to come to a conclusion one way or another, whether Mr. Dinsdale wanted it or not. He was going to maintain eye contact with the object of his antagonism until he either got some answers or passed out in the snow.

  Wil looked up in the sky. It was now snowing. Of course, he thought, as one large and extremely cold snowflake settled on the middle of his nose. Of course it’s snowing. Because I am neither cold nor disoriented enough to fully complete the various challenges being presented to me on this particular Monday.

  “I’m sorry, Wil,” said Mr. Dinsdale. “I truly am. It’s just that people are like mopeds sometimes. They need a kick-start.”

  Looking down, Wil realized that Mr. Dinsdale had undergone a rather unsettling shift in both demeanor and appearance. The little man seemed altogether different, and while Wil had grown to expect such things in the short time he had known Mr. Dinsdale, this was an entirely new proposition altogether. The slightly disheveled appearance was now somehow less ruffled and, indeed, Dinsdale’s odd choice of clothing suddenly seemed altogether appropriate. In fact, the mustard-yellow coat seemed quite fetching as large snowflakes landed on the little man’s shoulders. His bow tie now had a touch of elegance about it, and the plaid golfer’s pants added a modicum of class to his overall appearance. Most importantly, this new Dinsdale gave off a kind of perceptive calm and worldly-wise confidence that had previously been lacking in almost every single facet of his former personality. Wil fancied this particular version of Mr. Dinsdale was the one that had been hiding in plain sight all along.

  “I don’t feel like a moped,” said Wil, unable to think of anything else he particularly wanted to say.

  “Yes, I should probably apologize for that analogy,” replied Mr. Dinsdale. “I could’ve thought of something more powerful and less likely to break down at a moment’s notice.”

  “Or be sat on by an Italian teenager.”

  “Right again. May I ask how you feel right about now?”

  “I feel like a fish that just jumped off the side of a fishing boat, and accidentally landed in a stray net that a previous fisherman hung out to dry. Either you’re trying to catch me on purpose, Mr. Dinsdale, or I’m trying to be caught by mistake. I’m cold, and it’s snowing, and my coffee has worn off. I don’t know where I am or why I am. Does that about cover it for you?”

  “It does indeed.”

  Wil was astonished to realize Mr. Dinsdale had now undergone a complete transformation, paradigmatically speaking. His kindly side was now fully in evidence, and his eccentric side was now fully in remission. His manic side, with any luck, Wil hoped, had gone on ahead by a few hundred yards. Wil realized that to all outward appearances, Mr. Dinsdale seemed like someone he could trust, which made absolutely no sense whatsoever. And for the very first time during his entire Monday, he felt as though things might be looking up, albeit with little to no explanation.

  “Look up,” said Mr. Dinsdale.

  Peering up once again through the tumbling snowflakes, Wil could now see that he was standing in front of a very large building fronted by ornate Ionic pillars. A wide set of marble steps led to a warm-looking foyer. Above, massive lead-lined windows suggested an expanse of space within. The building screamed “museum” in much the same way a stadium with a diamond-shaped playing field might scream “baseball.” Wil was getting the sense that something was awry with either time or space: he surely could not be standing in front of a building of this size. Hadn’t he just turned the corner onto Mons Street? He turned to his left, only to realize that by some accident of time and space he’d come fully fifty yards from the corner of Mons Street.

  Wil looked behind him. Across the street was an old, abandoned cinema that looked like it hadn’t seen a patron in decades. The building’
s façade was hopelessly crumbling, and through the falling snow it seemed to give off an aura that suggested it wished to be left alone. Most of the letters announcing the last movie it had ever housed had long since fallen away, and unless Wil was mistaken, he was sure that the arrangement of the remaining G, W, and D could be easily retrofitted to spell Gone with the Wind.

  “Where am I?” he asked aloud as he turned back to find himself staring toward a large sign on the front of the building closer to him. It read MUSEUM OF CURIODDITY. This simple question came as a shock to Wil, even though he was the one who’d uttered it. It seemed like the kind of thing one might hear in a bad movie or read in a comic book. He looked through the mist and was astounded to realize that yes indeed, he was still fifty yards from the corner of Mons Street. There was the street sign and the trash can. The cold mist seemed to obscure the main road beyond but Wil fancied he could hear the cars going around the one-way system despite the blanketing effects of the snow.

  “You’re on Upside-Down Street, of course,” replied Mr. Dinsdale. “Welcome to the Museum of Curioddity. Please come inside, and try not to touch anything that doesn’t have a sign on it that says ‘Touch Me.’”

  With that, the little man began to ascend the huge marble staircase that led toward the foyer of what Wil was forced to admit seemed an extremely likely candidate to be the actual Curioddity Museum.

  “We’re on Mons Street!” cried Wil in the specific direction of the little man’s rapidly departing back. “It says so on the street sign!”

  “Does it?” asked Dinsdale, who had reverted back to his enigmatic persona. He moved slowly and purposefully up toward the Curioddity Museum’s entrance. Wil could tell from the little man’s steady course that he was expected to follow. “Or does it only say what you think it says?”

  Wil looked at the street sign. It most definitely had not changed appearance during the last few minutes. Perhaps he was missing something. Or perhaps the old man was missing something instead. Like a few million brain cells.

  By now, Mr. Dinsdale stood at the entrance to his museum, just next to a revolving door. He stopped for a moment to look back at Wil, and smiled. Before Wil could utter another sentence, the old man moved backward inside the revolving door of the museum, disappearing like some kind of enigmatic vampire into the bowels of a comfortable coffin.

  Wil stood transfixed for a moment, knowing with absolute certainty exactly what he was going to do next. He was going inside the museum but not before one final protest aimed at the universe in general and Mr. Dinsdale in particular. “I don’t get it!” he cried. “This doesn’t make any sense at all!”

  Mr. Dinsdale appeared for a moment, having taken the revolving door in a full circle so that he could briefly emerge and make one final comment on the matter. It was going to be a comment that would change everything, and in Wil’s former life already had, once upon a time.

  “That’s because you’re not looking at it properly!” said Mr. Dinsdale as he passed across the outside portion of the revolving door.

  * * *

  “AFTER ALL,” he called out as he disappeared from view, “your eyes only see what your mind lets you believe!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  AS WIL stood on the steps of the Curioddity Museum, he began to feel overwhelmed by a Strange Feeling of déjà vu. For his part he tried to ignore the Strange Feeling, and between the two of them they agreed to revisit things a little later once the situation was better developed. What Wil could not possibly know was at that very moment his life was in the process of changing. Back, most likely: but also forward, too. Wherever the Strange Feeling of déjà vu existed in its own reality, it chuckled to itself, sensing it had already won half the battle.

  Wil thought about Mr. Dinsdale’s incredible parting statement as he slowly and carefully ascended the marble steps toward the revolving door that would lead inside. Could it be coincidence that the little museum curator had parroted Melinda Morgan’s favorite saying, word for word? Wil’s heart fluttered not for the fact that he was nervous about stepping into the unknown but because he had a bad habit of getting stuck in revolving doors. He’d always been the kind of person to approach such things as escalators and elevators far too cautiously, only to chicken out at the last moment and leave a foot dragging or a carelessly untied shoelace in such a position as to cause himself bodily harm.

  He stared at the revolving door, silently daring it to go ahead and try something with him. He’d used this particular tactic a couple of times in the past but inanimate objects had only increased their bullying over the years. Summoning every square inch of his bravado, Wil pursed his lips in the direction of the revolving door and took hold of its outer glass pane with both hands. “Don’t even think about it,” he muttered as he pushed the door forward and bravely made his way inside the museum.

  Mr. Dinsdale was nowhere to be seen, which did not surprise Wil one bit. Everything else about the main foyer was exactly as unexpected as Wil expected it to be: it was ever so slightly unlike the outside of the building in one or two fairly alarming ways. Firstly, the interior seemed smaller and much less expansive than one might have assumed from looking at the outside. This was altogether an unsettling optical illusion, though not Wil’s first of the day, to be sure. The act of stepping inside the museum seemed to immediately induce a mild claustrophobia, which Wil put down to an obvious lack of air-conditioning. The second noticeable difference was that the foyer’s design resembled the exterior in exactly the same way a banjo-wielding hillbilly resembles the lead guitarist of a death metal band—in other words, only tangentially. Gone were the imposing and expansive Ionic pillars and tasteful marble steps; in their place, Wil noticed a particular fondness for yellow wallpaper, Escher-style carpeting, and the occasional stray wooden crate. He was immediately struck by the notion that if a tribesman from the remotest region of Peru were to be brought here for his first encounter with civilization, that tribesman might go away with the distinct impression he was from the more advanced culture, not to mention the more discerning. And speaking of cultures, Wil could not help but notice that whatever substance had been spilled onto the main desk of the foyer in some previous month, it must have contained a heretofore undiscovered bacterial strain because it had now formed a little forest of fuzzy growth halfway up the wall. This was either an impressive and detailed bonsai experiment, or Wil was witnessing a potential health hazard that the Centers for Disease Control might eventually classify as a pollutant.

  Next to Wil, one of the stray wooden crates seemed to move of its own volition. He stared at the thing for a moment; then, satisfied that this was the work of neither a rat nor a trapped midget, he scanned the foyer once again for any sign of Mr. Dinsdale. The moment he looked away, the crate moved again. He looked down only for a different crate to move elsewhere in his peripheral vision. The moment he looked at the second crate it refused to move. Since most of the wooden crates Wil had ever encountered had also refused to move, he felt it was for the best to ignore the crates fully and reexamine the problem at the later time when he and his Strange Feeling of déjà vu were going to resolve their differences.

  “Can I help you?” asked a nearby female voice.

  Wil looked up, alarmed. Just moments before, there had been no one at the main desk inside the foyer. Now, a rather pale yet attractive woman in her mid-thirties was standing by the cash register, filing her nails and making a great point of smacking her lips as she chewed upon a large wodge of bubble gum. The woman looked bored, amongst other things. She also looked very much like a backup singer from an all-girl fifties vocal group with her beehive-style “do” and ruby-red lipstick completing the look. Wil felt compelled to comment that the woman’s bright-orange hair suited her complexion but he resisted the temptation. He’d never been very good at talking to members of the opposite sex, and whenever he attempted a genuine compliment it usually led to either a slap across the face or worse, an angry and enormous boyfriend approaching fr
om the opposite direction.

  “Can I help you?” the woman repeated.

  “I was looking for your curator, Mr. Dinsdale,” explained Wil.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No. I mean I was just with him a moment ago but he came inside ahead and I don’t know where he went. He seems to have this thing for disappearing even when you’re looking right at him.” Wil hoped the woman might agree, and that she and he might quickly become friends so that he might ask any one of the fifty or so questions he’d already formulated about Mr. Dinsdale. The woman merely stared at him, disdainfully, and chewed her gum even louder.

  “Mr. Dinsdale isn’t accepting guests at this time. If you’d like to leave a name and number where you can be reached, I’ll pass on your information,” she said in such a way that Wil took it to actually mean, “If you’ll please remove yourself from the premises, I’ll be sure to alert security never to let you back inside.”

  Wil thought this was rather odd, partly because the entire point of museums was to welcome guests and hope they are well enough entertained to bring about a return visit, and mostly because there was no sign of any security guard whatsoever.

  The woman moved to one side to retrieve a small note card. Perhaps glided would be a better description, Wil thought, as the woman certainly seemed to move in the unusual manner of a clockwork marionette. For the life of him, he couldn’t quite work out what was so different about her. He was suddenly overcome by that strange feeling usually reserved for when one is asked the capital of the former Republic of Upper Volta, only to realize that everyone else in the room clearly knows the answer and is biting their tongue while you have absolutely no idea whatsoever.