The Museum at the End of the World

by John Metcalf

  The museum was intensely boring. The contents, mainly red Roman-ware, had nearly all been broken, and the missing shards had been reconstituted in white plaster. The two big rooms, at a glance, were a leprosy of red and white. No effort at aesthetics or even selection had been attempted; if it had been uncovered at the site, in it had gone, the rumbled rubble of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium. Shapeless, rusted lumps of iron were identified as “anchors”; the profusion of broken pots was labelled variously as “storage vessels,” “wine vessels,” “conical vessels,” and “vessels with spouts”; a row of pieces of corroded bronze was labelled “mirrors”; scraps and unidentifiable fragments were identified as “decorative elements.”

  Forde stood in front of a glass case that contained a curved piece of metal.

  The card read: “Strigil” [?]

  Here and there the accumulated clutter was adorned by a stele, but the inscriptions were so weathered as to leave legible only a few words, such as est and hic.

  The custodian or curator or whatever he was wore a black suit and, curiously, over it, a long black cotton apron.

  The books were stacked on a table near the front door. The three main periods of the site were recorded in three massive and profusely illustrated hardcover tomes, which gave off a strong whiff of State Publishing. They had been compiled in the 1920s. The authors all wore pince-nez spectacles and wing collars with loosely knotted silk ties. The books cost twenty-five new leys each. This seemed to work out at an impossibly cheap eleven dollars or so.

  He groaned as he waited for Sheila to stop inspecting a broken amphora.

  Outside the museum, a muddy path led to the site itself through a remaining arch in a tumbling brick wall. It had started to drizzle. Feral dogs scoured the parking lot for crumbs. The path ended. The baulk of turf Forde was negotiating crumbled and his right foot slipped deep into the cold mire. A mosquito zizzizzed in his ear.

  “I hate this place.”

  “Oh, stop being childish.”

  “My foot’s wet.”

  “Oh, look, these must have been houses.”

  He looked at the jumble of low walls, footprints of buildings. Nothing was recognizably anything. Some of the walls were stone, some brick. Some bits of wall contained pantile so were probably Byzantine.

  He slapped at mosquitoes.

  Stared down what might have been a street.

  Inside the stone squares grew sedge and wind-stunted bushes.

  In one such square and behind one such bush, stood the Bishop of Bodmin and Exeter. He was standing completely still and staring out over the swamp. Forde regarded his silly hat with its cockade of nylon feathers.

  “What is he doing?”

  “Having a pee,” said Sheila.

  Although he was perfectly aware that the salutation was reserved solely for archbishops, Forde called out “Good afternoon, Your Grace,” which caused a gratifying galvanization of the Bishop culminating in his raised Tilley.

  The drizzle turned to a steadier rain.

  “And what was this big place over here?” called Sheila.

  “Fuck!” said Forde.

  “What?”

  “Blood!”

  “Oh!” she called. “Here’s a plaque!”

  “I’m going back to the bus!”

  “But we haven’t seen everything.”

  “I don’t wish to discommode you,” said Forde, “but I am swelling rapidly.”

  “So this,” she said, pointing to an expanse of ruin and sodden debris, “was the apse but the dome fell in. So,” she said, glancing down at the diagram, “over here, this must be…”

  “I don’t care,” called Forde, “if it’s the collapsed apse of a fucking Byzantine whorehouse! It is raining. My foot is wet. I am getting bitten to death. My body is covered in infected Romanian lumps.”

  He glared at her back as she bent again over the plaque and diagram.

  “Goodbye!”

  He negotiated the slippery baulks of mud and turf and regained the pathway to the museum beyond the arch.

  Alan and Martin were standing on the top step of the entrance to the museum, a step which extended into a terrace. Behind them the yellow-lit expanse of the museum’s first room. They were singing. They were wearing their officers’ dress caps of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and holding hands. They were singing to the parking lot as to an audience in a night club. With their free hands they were making corny gestures of desire and longing. They were utterly absorbed.

  You are the promised kiss of springtime

  That makes the lonely winter seem long.

  You are the breathless hush of evening

  That trembles on the brink of a lovely song.

  You are the angel glow that lights a star,

  The dearest things I know are what you are.

  The custodian in his long black apron appeared at the front door and stooped over a deformed puppy, which kept trying to get inside. Its belly was swollen huge and one eye was much larger than the other and bulged out from its face, reminding Forde of those grotesquely overbred goldfish, goggle-eyed and trailing white fungus-like growths roundthe sockets. The custodian kept making scooping-water gestures with his cupped hands and shouting what sounded like “Marsh! Marsh! and every time he shouted the puppy whiddled on the step.

  Entirely oblivious, Alan and Martin sang on

  Some day my happy arms will hold you,

  And some day I’ll know that moment divine,

  When all the things you are, are mine!

  Back on the bus and in the seat they’d sat in before, Forde dried his glasses on a paper napkin he’d saved from lunch. Some of the stragglers appearing through the gloom had umbrellas, others wore transparent plastic hoods. Mosquitoes whined on the windows. The crinkle of cellophane, somebody opening a packet. The smell of damp clothes.

  Forde watched the feral dogs lying on the asphalt and crusted rubble chawing, chawing at the dulled fur of their flea-bitten flanks and haunches. One showed patches of raw skin the size of saucers and the colour of ham. A female was lying on her side with what could have been the right hind leg broken. There was blood on it and its angle odd. Whenever she tried to get up her two half-grown pups pounced in, biting the dragging leg and toppling her. When she snarled at them, one in particular chop-chopped her mask, his lips drawn back in a way that seemed to Forde not at all like play.

  The bus swayed again as Father Keogh and The Minder climbed aboard. They made their way down the aisle and sat in the seats in front of him.

  “And your hat, now. Have you lost your hat? Left it somewhere. Did you have it in the museum? Or did you lose it in that horrible old bog? Fall, did you? Slipped and fell. Wandering off like that while I was in the water closet. And these stains on your good jacket. Mud from that bog. That’s what it’ll be. On your lapel, look. And your shoulder. Tweed’s a lovely cloth, so it is. A lovely cloth.”

  Father Keogh sat in remote silence, staring straight ahead.

  The Minder stood and took a plastic bottle of water from his little backpack in the overhead rack. He wet his handkerchief and sat again to dab at the stains.

  “Is it mud? Mud, is it?”

  Through the gap between the seats, Forde saw The Minder looking at the stains on his handkerchief.

  Saw The Minder looking at his fingertips.

  Smelling them.

  Heard his half-whisper …

  … Holy Mother…

  A breathy exhalation.

  Heard the little gluggings as he dribbled more water onto his handkerchief.

  “It is mud, Father.”

  Coming into view again as he leaned across the gap to dab.

  “On the lovely tweed.”

  The bus swayed again as Sheila climbed up. She plumped down beside Forde and said, “How are your bites?”


  He gave her a cold glance.

  “You smell,” he said, “like a cloakroom.”

  “Air conditioning ON!” shouted Baden Powell.

  …eighteen, nineteen, twenty…

  “Not another museum,” said the man in the seat behind.

  “It’s mosaics,” said his wife.

  “I’d rather an early dinner.”

  “They’re Roman,” said his wife.

  “Oh!” he said. “Why didn’t you say? Roman! Well, if I’d known they were Roman…”

  “Now Harold!” she said.

  … nine, ten, eleven… re-counted the guide.

  The custodian had retreated into the museum and closed the door. The pack had materialized behind the puppy and sat watching the lighted windows.

  In the middle of the bus, the guide was saying, “One is missing. We are missing a passenger. Does anyone recognize who it is?”

  People craned about. Some stood.

  “Where’s Bronwyn?” a woman said. “Is it Bronwyn?”

  “Which one is Bronwyn?”

  “… with the make-up…”

  “… from Borneo.”

  “… the lady in question,” Baden Powell was saying to the guide,“will doubtless have got on one of the other buses—silly old trout.”

  The guide, now standing beside the driver, spread his hands in a gesture of resignation and helplessness.

  “Jaldi!” roared Baden Powell. “Jaldi jao!”

  The bus bumped across the parking lot and ground up onto the approach road. As it began to pick up speed and the museum receded, the custodian shrank smaller and smaller, a black speck within the lighted cube.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks and gratitude to Dan Wells—luftmensch—who imagined Biblioasis into being and who labours in our mundane world building the New Jerusalem.

  Thanks also to my copy editor, Emily Donaldson, for ruthlessly enforcing uniformity on my vagaries.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo: Myrna Metcalf

  John Metcalf was Senior Editor at the Porcupine’s Quill until 2005, and is now Fiction Editor at Biblioasis. A scintillating writer, a magisterial editor, and a noted anthologist, he is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction and non-fiction, including Standing Stones: Selected Stories, Adult Entertainment, Going Down Slow and Kicking Against the Pricks. He lives in Ottawa with his wife, Myrna.