"once i wasn't anywhere
i arrived there when i tried
walking through an open door
that had no other side"
- a nursery rhyme told to me by a skeleton on the banks of the Thames River
They're everywhere, the skeletons, walking up and down the banks, inviting people to follow them.
They are tour guides...employees of the museum.
I say "yes" to one. It nods...places one of it's hands on the back of my head. With it's other hand, it places a small stone on my tongue and begins to lower me into the river.
The skeleton holds me there, beneath the water. I close my eyes, breathe in, sink deeper into the Thames. When I die, the skeleton says, "Welcome".
The tour guide then pulls my body down...further down...towards the mouth of a cave far below. The word "entrance" is carved into the stone above the cave.
The tour guide asks for my ticket. I remove the stone from my mouth, now redolent of death, and hand it over. He gestures towards the underwater cave. I enter the British Museum.
I. The Lobby
The entrance hall has a steep incline, the water recedes. I walk into the lobby proper and look around.
Tens of thousands of dead tourists mill about, trying to orient themselves to the museum. They read guides, question staff, stare at signs. I approach one of the staff, another skeleton, and request a multi-media guide. It nods, provides me with a gadget. The handheld device displays navigation charts and info about the various rooms (names, dates, descriptions). And, through earphones, it provides audio-commentary about the museum's more prominent displays.
I place the earphones on my head, press play. A soft voice says, "The museum: a vast network of rooms, corridors, lost tunnels and unexplored chambers. Each artifact, each object, each display: one piece in the puzzle of human culture. Unfortunately, many pieces are irretrievably lost. And the puzzle itself has no shape, size or form. It is unknowable."
The voice pauses, then says, "Face the entrance please. Head right. There is a door in front of you. Please enter."
I walk into the first room.
II. Ancient Egypt
A riot scene. The room, packed with tourists: they squirm and shove, shoulder to shoulder...yelling, bleeding, violent. They attack the displays. Swarming mobs kick down the glass cases and remove the ancient artifacts.
I see a sarcophagus dragged from it's base. It topples to the floor, breaks open. The mummified remains are pulled apart...it's wrappings unwound, the body inside disassembled. Children kick the head about until it crumbles to dust. A femur is pulled from the corpse, used to break the glass of another display. A teenager pulls a second mummy onto the ground, lies on top of it, pantomimes humping it. His friends laugh, take pictures.
The multi-media guide, unaware of the chaos, describes...in a quiet hush...notable mummies, statues of interest, interpretations of funereal rites. It leads me to the center of the room and, after a dramatic pause, says, "The Rosetta Stone".
The pedestal where it once sat is now empty. I look around and find bits of the Rosetta Stone scattered about the floor, broken into a dozen or so pieces. Initials, curse words and crude drawings of sexual organs have been gouged into the stone, obscuring the hieroglyphs and ancient Greek.
The guide says, "The Rosetta Stone has been housed in the British Museum for more than two-hundred years. It is our finest...and most visited...piece. Photographs are allowed."
I pick up one of the fractured pieces, peer closely at it. The word "shit" has been carved onto it several times.
The guide says, "Next room. To your left please."
III. The Hall of Reluctant Cannibals
Hundreds of thrones line the walls of a long and narrow hall. Despite the low ceiling, chandeliers hang the entire length of the room. They touch the floor, leaving the crowds very little space to navigate between the chandeliers and the thrones.
Rulers from different periods of history sit upon each throne. They are sweating, breathing heavily, grotesquely corpulent. Billowing flesh slides from ornate clothing and overlaps each seat. The rulers fan themselves and converse with tourists. I hear one mumbling, "It was for the good of my people, you understand. The good of my people." Another says, "I had no choice, you see. To survive, my people needed space. I did what was asked of me." Another ruler wipes tears with one hand, holds a large piece of meat with the other. He weeps theatrically, eats, says, "Strength is existence. Anything else is extinction. As the father of my people, I owed them nothing less than the full expression of my strength." He pushes more meat into his face, sheds more tears.
The guide says, "Great men, all. Here they are allowed to tell their stories, to explain the impetus behind their noble decisions. These are gentle souls who rose up, met the challenges of their time."
A group of children slap at the exposed belly fat of one ruler. They rub butter onto his stomach, poke their fingers into his belly button. He cries, shoves bread into his mouth, bovinely works his jaw. The children kick at his shins, steal ruby buttons from his jacket. He suffers the indignity in silence. He works his jaw, swallows.
At the end of the hall, a young monarch weeps, says, "It was for the good of my people. I had no choice. It was a matter of survival."
All of the rulers moan and eat and say the same things.
IV. The Mosaics of Ancient Rome
I walk into a spacious chamber. The guide says, "This room once housed one of the largest collections of Ancient Roman mosaics in the world. Unfortunately, tourists have destroyed many of the pieces."
The floor is covered entirely with mosaics, as are the walls. I walk around. Many images appear to be intact, but small piles of colored stone are heaped everywhere. The guide continues, "Tourists routinely break up the original images and reassemble them into crude depictions. Our experts work, without pause, to restore each mosaic to it's original form...but the recreations themselves are often destroyed. What you see in this room is a small number of original mosaics...a larger number of restored mosaics, that are as close to the original as we can make them...and an even larger number of false mosaics, created by vandals."
I walk in circles, pace the floor. Images drift by.
Deer. Man hunting a boar. A Greek god. The word "shit".
An eagle. A Gladiator. An owl with enormous human breasts.
A forest. Three goats. A river. A nude JFK holding a gun to his head.
More animals, more weapons, more curse words.
It is unclear whether the museum or a vandal created, in mosaic, this quote from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.
“The most beautiful world is like a heap of rubble tossed down in confusion."
V. Miscellaneous
The multi-media guide talks me through one room after another. It describes the displays, the artifacts, and offers a series of concise history lessons.
What the guide doesn't know is that, from this point on, every room is vandalized beyond recognition.
A room that once contained two-thousand stained glass doorknobs...created for a mentally ill queen...is now a debris field.
One area housed a prized collection of ancient Greek statues. All I see: faceless heads; shapeless torsos; rubble.
Jade masks, fertility statues, ancient pottery. All broken.
Graffiti has been spray painted onto Michelangelo's Epifania.
The Cyrus Cylinder, from ancient Mesopotamia...considered to be the world's first documented charter of human rights...has been turned into a bong.
I walk. The guide whispers it's knowledge. Around me, skeletons lead groups of tourist-vandals through ancient detritus.
VI. Under-Babel
In one room, the museum gives way all-together. Tourists have lifted up the marble floor tiles and begun to dig a massive tunnel. It drops straight down. The digging has been underway for years.
With no way to move forward, I make my way down. Rope ladders and crudely fashioned stairs are in place so that people can navigate the walls. The tunnel is a black pit; the bottom too far away to see.
The walls of the tunnel have been stabilized with broken bits from thousands of museum displays. Pieces from statues and mosaics and tombs have been pressed into the muddy walls. As I descend, I pass a sarcophagus. An Aztec mask. A piece from the Rosetta Stone.
I remove my earphones and press the multi-media guide into one bit of exposed wall. I won't be needing it anymore.
I look around. Thousands of people are visible along the wall...some descending, some working. I see people shaping the broken artifacts into new sets of stairs, or hanging new ropes, or pressing items into the walls, trying to strengthen the tunnel.
Hours pass. Then days.
I reach the bottom of the tunnel.
VII. The Final Exhibit
Pitch-black, except for the occasional beam of flashlight. I'm surrounded by mud, tourists.
An aperture has been dug into the ground. I step into it, climb a ladder down to a small chamber. One of the exhibits has been brought down into the room, left intact.
Inside of a glass case, I see an ancient human. He fidgets, shifts around in a pit of sand, tries to find a comfortable position. But he's visibly agitated, can't seem to rest. He fidgets some more, sighs, stops moving for a bit. He reclines at an awkward angle.
A tourist whispers to me, "That's Adam. He's still alive."
Adam's skin is paper-thin from age. His lips have decayed away, leaving in their place a fixed grimace. His eye-lids have dried and permanently retracted, meaning that he can't close his eyes to rest. He looks out at the tourists, confused, fatigued. He fidgets again, continues to seek a comfortable position.
One pane of glass has been removed from his case. Tourists reach in to touch him. Some touch his head. Some squeeze his fingers. Some poke his knees, his stomach. One tourist grasps his withered penis and says, "It's dry, like sand."
Adam startles away from every touch, but is too weak to effectively escape. He just sits in his ancient pit of sand and suffers the tourists.
A rumbling, then. The ground shakes. The tunnel collapses.
VIII. The Gift Shop
(past-tense now)
The ground we were in began to churn and undulate.
The museum, we discovered, was actually a giant entity. We hadn't destroyed it or defiled it's exhibits or harmed it in any way. The displays were merely bait. The museum just wanted people in it's belly.
I only saw a glimpse of the beast as it dug deep and began to devour us.
It's feathers were fish, it's throat a lighthouse and it's guts were a civilization.
It's stone mouth closed around us.
In miles dark, we were squeezed through ages of change. We learned secrets and truths and lies and then forgot them as our minds warped and re-formed in the violence of digestion.
The museum's waste was war and, expelled, we cooled and hardened and became nothing else.
Then: temporary incoherence; a modicum of darkness. I looked around. We had been excreted into the gift shop.
I browsed, inspected the trinkets. I bought a Big Ben fridge magnet and a picture book.
the end
(when we left, Sarah asked, "what did you think of the museum," and i said, "it was strange.")
