by Seth Fried
After entering the exhibit as museum guards, we found a nice location in one of the many blind spots of the museum’s surveillance cameras. Across from us was also a surprisingly graphic display of a moose giving birth, which was driving enough patrons away from our general area that we were able to get settled without anyone noticing. OWEN was inspired by the impressive appearance of some of the megafauna, and so disguised us as a fake species of giant skunk that he named Mephitis giganteus. He brought up a low platform around us along with what he determined to be that skunk’s ideal, leaf-shrouded habitat, allowing us to scrutinize the flow of patrons into the museum.
Hours passed and we still hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. Dozens of children were led through the hall by nervous schoolteachers busy making sure their students were paying attention to the docents. Since Sarah Laury’s disappearance was still popularly regarded as a kidnapping, many of the children were made to wear plastic whistles that hung from their necks with string. Every so often a child would blow experimentally into his or her whistle and consequently receive a sharp, whispered reprimand. There was also the expected throng of tourists as well as young couples out on lunch dates, using the more peculiar dioramas as an excuse to tap one another gently on the arm and point. There were the art students who sat on the low mahogany benches making sketches, and finally the dozens of elderly patrons who had only come to the museum for the exercise, pairs of them walking in slow, aimless circles.
OWEN’s capacity for detective work had been quite impressive earlier that morning, but, perhaps because his social intelligence was still developing, his ability to draw helpful conclusions from his direct observations of the museum patrons seemed limited. He was intensely suspicious of the elderly patrons, a fact that became apparent when two women in their seventies power walked by our habitat. They were looking straight ahead, focusing on their low-impact cardio. OWEN perceived this lack of interest in the museum’s displays along with their expressions of grim resolve as indications that they were up to something diabolical. He was also wary of two young boys who had broken off from their class and stopped in front of the moose birth. They were leaning on the velvet ropes surrounding the scene and howling with laughter.
“Two o’clock,” OWEN said, waving his snout toward the boys. “I’ve got some patrons acting strangely.”
“They’re just kids, OWEN.”
“So? Terrorists use kids all the time. They give them heroin and turn them into killing machines. Don’t you read the news?”
“Is there anything to suggest they’re working for terrorists besides the fact that they’re children?”
“Well, somebody must have given them drugs at least,” OWEN said. “They’re laughing at that moose’s vagina, but there’s nothing funny about it. The artist rendered it perfectly.”
“That’s normal, OWEN. Kids think bodies are funny.”
There was a prolonged silence in which I could feel OWEN looking at the moose’s vagina and straining to see the humor in it. He was eventually distracted by the return of the septuagenarians as they completed their circuit around the hall and slowly approached our position. They stopped twenty feet away and began bickering while one rifled through the other’s bright purple fanny pack. OWEN was no longer bothering to maintain the integrity of his disguise and was now watching the two with his eyes wide and his skunk nostrils flared. He seemed certain that one of them was about to reach into the pack and produce a hand grenade.
“Get ready to tackle those two,” he said.
I whispered for him to get ahold of himself, but he was already counting down from three.
Fortunately that was when a tall man in a black agency suit entered the hall. He took a steno pad from his jacket and started to look up unabashedly at the museum’s security cameras, taking notes.
The septuagenarians had resolved their argument and now appeared to be dividing an assortment of vitamin supplements between the two of them.
“OWEN,” I said. “Over there.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the women. “I see them.”
“No, over there.”
The man in the dark suit was now tucking his notepad back into his jacket and walking toward the exhibit on the Dutch fur trade.
“Oh, him?” OWEN said.
He seemed reluctant to give up his suspicion of the women, so there was no little disappointment in his voice when he recognized that the man I’d spotted was clearly suspect. Once we were certain no eyes were on our display, OWEN turned us back into guards and we headed over to the fur trade exhibit, where the man in the black suit was already taking the stairs up to the next floor. We half ran through the crowds gathered around reproductions of beaver felt hats and rusted muskets, then crept up the single flight of broad cast-stone steps after him. Heavy black drapes hung over the next exhibit’s entryway and after I pushed my way through, we found ourselves surrounded by photographs of 1970s Metropolis: vandalized subway cars strewn with garbage, burned-out buildings, a group of children playing on the roof of an abandoned car.
We slowed down and pretended to browse when we saw that the man had stopped in the middle of the room to take more notes. A sign near the exhibit’s entrance labeled it THE FORGOTTEN CITY. The room was documenting those days when all US cities were seen as little more than accumulations of blight. It was a time when the country as a whole was still convinced that low-density homeowners were somehow the solution to every societal ill and struggling urban areas were left to rot. A photo near the entrance showed an elderly woman crying on a fire escape. In the reflection of the frame’s glass, I saw that OWEN had changed my disguise yet again. I was now wearing baggy carpenter jeans with holes in the knees and a stained undershirt.
“We’re tourists,” he said. “Newlyweds.”
Beside me OWEN had taken on the shape of a beautiful young woman wearing cutoff jean shorts and an oversized Mickey Mouse sweatshirt. My reflection in a glass case revealed that I was also sporting a Toledo Mud Hens cap and had thick blond sideburns that looked like they’d recently been used to mop a floor.
“You know, I’m from Ohio,” I whispered. “This depiction is a little ungenerous.”
“I hate to break it to you, pal, but it’s an averaged composite of all the obvious out-of-towner data I just collected downstairs. If you want a more realistic tourist disguise, you’ll have to go back down there and skin one. Now follow my lead.”
We sidled up to a series of screen-printed posters and pretended to admire a handbill for some band called the KickMurders. It was an edgy collection by the MetMoH’s standards, tucked away in one of the smaller exhibit halls. The place was empty except for our man. He had been studying one of the room’s support columns and writing in his notebook, but now seemed distracted by a photograph of an underweight homeless man, shirtless under his army jacket and scowling at the camera. The man lowered his notebook and turned to face the picture, regarding it with what looked like concern.
“Excuse me,” OWEN said, suddenly standing directly behind him. “Can you help me?”
The man turned and frowned.
“Help you?”
OWEN waved me over.
“Honey,” he called out. “He says he can help us.”
Before the man could object, OWEN launched into a long explanation about us being on our honeymoon all the way from Toledo.
“We got turned around,” OWEN said. “And now we don’t know the way back to where we’re staying.”
The man looked around the room as if remembering how much work he had to do, but, perhaps deciding it would be easier to send us on our way than risk any unpleasantness, asked OWEN for the name of our hotel.
“We forgot it,” he said, the delicate face of the projection taking on an exaggeratedly pitiful expression with eyes that now seemed almost comically large.
“Well, if
you don’t—how am I supposed to—”
“It’s nearby.”
The man pinched the bridge of his nose and, to my incredible surprise, began guessing the names of hotels. When he mentioned the Tennison, OWEN squealed and clapped his hands.
“Oh! That’s the one!” He pointed down to the man’s notepad. “Do you think you could draw us a map?”
The man shook his head in disbelief and proceeded to draw the intersection of West 48th Street and Seventh Avenue. OWEN gave me a matter-of-fact look and pointed discreetly over the man’s shoulder, where he was projecting the same punching animation as before.
When OWEN saw I didn’t want to do it, he raised his eyebrows and began running the animation at twice its previous speed. The man was almost finished with his map when OWEN projected “DO IT” against the far wall in letters a full story tall. The words moved closer, began to flash.
The man looked up from his notebook and I hit him in the face as hard as I could. When I made contact with the bridge of his nose I felt the cartilage give way and I inadvertently shouted out an apology as he fell to the floor with his face in his hands, blood streaming through his fingers.
OWEN shouted at him, telling him to stay out of the history museum, then ordered me to grab his notebook. I tucked it into my suit coat and we ran toward the heavy tarp at the far end of the hall that was blocking off the adjoining exhibit, closed for renovations. I lifted the tarp and crawled underneath a few moments before the museum guards showed up, drawn by the commotion.
I stood by the covered doorway and listened to the guards ask the man if he was all right. They encouraged him to stay still, but as soon as they radioed down for assistance, I heard him pull himself up and flee the room.
OWEN and I snuck out unnoticed into an exhibit on jazz, where patrons gathered around various 2-D projections of famous musicians and listened to them perform through rented headphones. OWEN had already transformed us into another pair of patrons. He had taken my criticism of his tourist disguises to heart, but only in the sense that he was now deliberately attempting to get a rise out of me. I looked down to see that I was now the attractive young woman, though her Mickey Mouse sweatshirt had been replaced with a baggier one bearing in hot pink letters the enigmatic slogan JUST PLOPPIN’. OWEN was a tall, gangly man with buck teeth and freckles. He wore cargo shorts that came down nearly to his ankles and a black, tight-fitting sleeveless T-shirt. Despite the signs everywhere prohibiting flash photography, he stopped every so often to raise a gigantic camera and snap pictures with a flash that made a powerful walloping sound.
He approached a projection of Nathaniel Tate in the middle of a ferocious drum solo and called over to me in a nasal exaggeration of a Midwestern accent.
“Hey, Tammy, look at ’im go!”
None of the museum employees seemed to take any special notice of him. He even paused to snap a picture of two nervous-looking guards as they patrolled the room.
“It’s a good thing we’re keeping an eye on this place,” he said to me. “The security stinks.”
He kept snapping pictures until we reached the cafeteria, a sunlit room on the fourth floor with café tables and large tropical plants. We found a table out of sight and I pulled out the notepad. The first few pages were stained with the man’s blood, but as I continued to flip through I saw that it contained a list of physical observations about the museum. He had almost every room mapped out by hand and had dutifully identified which were load-bearing walls and which were only dividers. Several rooms contained central pillars and for these he had labeled the position of each with a check mark.
We only had to glance at the notes briefly to know what they were. The various calculations and focus on internal supports suggested that these were the plans for a demolition using explosives planted inside the building. One page bore the museum’s address and the date of the parade under the phrase “Laŭ ordono de T.K.” OWEN translated it, “By order of T.K.” I recognized the initials right away.
There it was, plain but befuddling. One of the most brilliant civic planners in the country was organizing a plot to destroy a beloved institution in his own city.
OWEN leaned back in his chair, looking lost in thought.
“What are we supposed to do?” I said. “We know what these drawings are, but the police won’t.”
He took a moment to send a few warnings to the MPD, though he knew I was right. We had no proof. No real details.
OWEN went quiet, concentrating, before eventually breaking into his toothy, tourist grin.
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Tammers,” he said. “We’ll stop ’em ourselves.”
He raised his camera and the flash went off, blinding me for a moment.
* * *
OWEN’s plan to protect the museum was surprisingly simple. If Kirklin’s people were going to plant explosives in the building, what better way to stop them than if we were already inside? We checked out of the Eldrit and when no one was looking we stashed my bag in a model tenement on the museum’s seventh floor. I planned to sleep there for the two nights leading up to the parade on Sunday. During the museum’s hours of operation we wandered around the exhibits, keeping our eye on the place using OWEN’s never-ending supply of disguises.
At night we investigated key points in the building’s infrastructure to make sure no explosives had already been planted. OWEN had hacked into the museum’s security system, a complicated exertion on his part, during which his only instructions to me had been to “shut up for a minute.” But ultimately he was able to turn off the museum’s alarms as needed and loop feeds from all the security cameras so the museum appeared to be empty in all the footage. This allowed me to climb into air ducts, pry open maintenance closets, and comb through some of the museum’s more complex exhibits.
When I needed a break, OWEN and I tried to pass the time by playing cards with a deck I borrowed from the gift shop. But he was too good at counting them for there to be any real chance or fun involved. We even came up with a special set of rules to address what OWEN kept referring to as my “human handicap.” I still lost. We toured the gift shop looking for other distractions and the closest we came was a chessboard, which we both lingered over if only to contemplate the staggering degree to which OWEN would have walloped me at a game of chess.
We ended up talking for the most part. About movies at first, but when we came to Gorcey Hallop’s performance in The Orphan Gang the conversation turned to my upbringing. He and I stood in a room that was dark except for the low orange security lights. One could just make out the interiors of old textile factories and ironworks. As I began to describe the circumstances of my youth, I realized I had never said any of it out loud before.
It certainly hadn’t all been bad. While the succession of foster parents to whom I was assigned often seemed ill equipped to deal with children, I ended up falling deeply in love with the foster care system as an abstract entity. No matter how often I was transferred from one house to the next, the rules that governed my care always stayed the same. The complex set of regulations regarding doctor visits, clothing allowances, religious freedom, nutrition, and closet space was a source of relentless consistency throughout my otherwise itinerant childhood. My foster parents were required to install locks on their medicine cabinets and conduct quarterly fire drills. I can still remember one of my foster families standing outside at eight in the morning in their pajamas, the parents swearing under their breath and consulting a stopwatch, their biological children glaring at me as the morning dew on the lawn dampened all of our socks. To me the scene was heartwarming. Because while my caretakers themselves were often ambivalent about such precautions, complaining about all the hoops that had to be jumped through in order to do a good deed, the rules always stayed rigidly devoted to my well-being.
When I was thirteen years old, I was moved to a home in Akron, Ohio, where on the living roo
m coffee table I found a small packet of papers explaining my rights as a foster child. The first few items caught my eye:
The foster parent will adhere to the following:
Permit the child to eat meals with the family, and to eat the same food as the family unless the child has any dietary restrictions.
Allow the child to participate in family activities.
Treat the child with dignity.
The list went on, but I was affected so deeply by item 1(c) that I had to put the packet down. After the death of my parents, I had become a serious and inward child, so the mention of the word “dignity,” as I stood in another strange living room, filled me with an intense welling up of gratitude toward the benevolent, rule-generating body that my foster parents often referred to bitterly as “the goddamned government.”
“So now you’re the goddamned government,” OWEN said.
He might have meant it as a joke, but I told him I was proud of it. He had referenced my personnel file on the plane and long before that I’d known I wasn’t exactly well thought of among the other agents. I explained to OWEN that it was difficult to work with people who didn’t truly understand the consequences of rules. If my foster parents had picked and chosen what rules they followed, what sort of life would I have had?
“Sure,” OWEN said. “I get it.”
He put his hands in his pockets as we strolled, looking up as if he were trying to recall something.
“There’s only one thing I don’t understand,” he said. “I still have access to all the data from my old interface.”
“When you were on our phones?”
“Right. Did you know that when the interface was at peak usage, over 90 percent of your colleagues regularly engaged with me in what could be described as small talk?”
“No,” I said, not sure where the question had come from.