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Summer 2006 Aimee Potwatka Benson Parker had presided over this lost and found desk for the last thirteen years, since his wife's first failed pregnancy forced him to drop out of his PhD program at Carnegie Mellon University. He'd since dedicated himself to the preservation and cultivation of a collection of found objects that would almost certainly never be claimed. In his first year at the helm of lost and found, Benson learned with surprise of the unscrupulous habits of his predecessor, Judy Henderson. Judy had been a tiny, hunched woman, just over four feet tall. When Benson first arrived, the area behind his desk was cluttered with stepstools and rusty folding ladders. The museum staff told Benson she always kept a stick of salami behind the desk from which she cut and ate small slices throughout the day. The desk still smelled faintly of meat. As Benson began reviewing her records, he discovered an astonishing number of items crossed off without mention of owner verification and reclamation. Among the items that disappeared during Judy's tenure were a lady's wristwatch, a lady's tennis racket, and a diamond and sapphire engagement ring from Tiffany's which, based on Judy's description, was worth at least $250,000. Benson took pride in his improvements to Judy's system, which had consisted of several logs recorded entirely on toilet paper from the museum bathroom. He included a spreadsheet with a pie chart that tracked percentage of owner reclamation and a bar graph that presented the distribution of goods lost in the museum over time. He put up signs in the rest-rooms urging patrons to hold tight to their belongings, and he convinced the management to replace the coatroom with individual lockers, complete with bone-shaped keys. Benson was without a doubt the best lost and found man the museum ever had, but after thirteen years on the job, he imagined himself as a fossil, yellowing around the edges, cracking in middle from a lack of humidification. His coworkers did not respect the seriousness with which he took his job, and he suspected it was a staff joke to bring unwanted household goods from their basements and leave them around the museum for Benson to find. He'd grown tired of always finding things for other people, and just once, he wanted to find something for himself. Benson's greatest secret wish was that he'd walk down the long corridor of Relics of the Catholic Church, and there next to the shroud of St. Elizabeth, he would find that one orange mitten he'd lost in the third grade. He'd know it by a thin, slightly curled strand of green ribbon smashed in the thumb-hole, his only reminder that the mittens were a gift from his father, who'd disappeared a few weeks after Christmas that year. He began thinking frequently about Egypt, about hot sand and scorpions, about whether or not it was realistic for a thirty-eight year old man to reenroll in graduate school and hike across the desert in search of something that was truly lost, in the purest sense of the word. On rainy afternoons, the museum filled with bums and babysitters and college students who were writing up their portions of group projects for Western Civ. Benson liked it when the museum was busy. There was always the echo of someone's voice in the hallway, and the way the voices faded in and out reminded him of the ocean, or a seashell imitating the ocean. That afternoon Benson sat at his desk thinking about the way his wife Edie had looked when he'd left that morning. She'd been having an affair with their neighbor Bill Morrow for the past six years, and it appeared that Bill had either lost again at the greyhound track, or he'd won and celebrated with the meth he got from a cocktail waitress at the topless bar he owned. Benson saw little point in asking. Although Edie hadn't been home when he went to sleep that night, she was there next to him when he woke up, her lip busted, one of her upper incisors chipped. Benson found lip marks on his pillow, as if she'd been kissing at him in her sleep, and he ran his fingers over the shiny brown film of her dried blood, careful not to wake her. Later, a small Hispanic girl walked up to his desk. "I found this," she said. "What is it?" "It's hair," she said. "Doggie? Doggie?" "No," Benson told her. He accepted the hair from her outstretched hand. It was human, reddish-brown, tied together with a blue satin bow. "It's not from a doggie. Where are your parents?" Once they'd located the girl's family, Benson filed the hair under Personal Effects. He wrote up his description in the logbook, then he went into the men's bathroom and cried. June was all about fossils. Gigantic purple banners consumed the museum's exterior, advertising the new, lush exhibits that invited patrons to enter the world of the Pterodactyl, the T. rex. The museum extended its hours, and Benson stayed late, making rounds with the janitors at night, walking silently next to them as they mopped, ready with his clipboard to adopt his next ward. One evening as Benson crept through the hushed halls, he found a woman. She was on her hands and knees in front of the Arctic Wildlife display gathering the contents of her purse from the floor. Benson watched as she swept her hands across the marble, conjuring crumpled tissues, small wrapped candies, and several keys, none of which were on key chains. Her mud-colored hair swung like a pendulum in front of her face, and as her small fingers recovered the remains of a shattered watch face, stuffed penguins looked on from behind the glass. If her hair hadn't been shielding her face, Benson would have seen that she was crying. He didn't really care about her emotional status; he just wanted to get her out of the museum, ensuring that she didn't leave anything behind that would subsequently become his problem. When he approached, she didn't look up at him immediately. There was blood smeared under her left eye from where she'd cut her finger on the glass from the watch and then used that finger to swab tears from her cheek. Benson, unused to displays of emotion inside the cool, educational museum, offered her one of her own demolished tissues. "My grandfather gave me this watch," she said. She wiped her nose on the tissue and stuffed it back into her purse. The blood was still on her cheek. "I'm sorry," he said. "Did you know the museum's closed?" "My name is Penny," she said, squinting at him. Penny told Benson that her grandfather had owned a clock and watch repair shop when she was a child. She spent her summers helping him, her fingers stained black from the slippery metal polish they used on old gears. "All that ticking could make a man crazy," Benson said. "No," Penny said, "after a few hours you didn't even hear it, like your own heartbeat." The sound that she really missed, she told Benson, was the sound of chimes that weren't chiming. It was the anticipation of the chiming that she loved, the sense of air vibrating against metal, just not fast enough to create much noise. "It was the same sound as twilight," she said, "just before the crickets start up, or the sound of the sky just before a storm." Benson didn't want to kick Penny out, so he let her walk with him as he made his final check over the museum. "I'm going blind," Penny said. "Retinitis pigmentosa. I come here all the time. I do the parks in the morning, as early as I can, then the movies, then the museums." Penny started greeting Benson when she arrived at the museum each afternoon. She especially liked the Mollusks of the Sea exhibit; she said the streaky lighting and the aquamarine walls helped her perceive things more clearly than usual. Most of the time, when Penny strolled through the museum's long hallways, she bumped into the objects and people in her path. Sometimes, Benson would follow her as she walked, making sure she didn't hurt herself or drop something on her way. "I'm always losing things," she told Benson one Thursday. She leaned over his desk, resting on her stomach. "I lost my dog when I was eleven. I lost my bike when I was in high school. I lost my brother, Eric, when I was in college. And now I'm losing my vision. That's my story." Benson told her he almost never lost things, and that was a problem sometimes too. When he got home that evening, the pink sun was crushing itself to get through the blinds and into the kitchen. Edie sat at the table, her shirt buttoned crookedly, her hands folded in her lap. She closed her eyes. "I'm leaving you, Benny." He nodded, even though she couldn't see it. "For Bill?" he asked. He sat across from her and noticed how dirty they'd let the kitchen get. The table was littered with crumbs, and a ketchup stain splattered the side of the refrigerator. The whole room smelled like cheese. She opened her eyes. "Yes, for Bill." "You're moving in with him?" "Yes and no," she said. "We're leaving together. We're moving to Nashville. Bill just bought a nightclub there, and I'm gonna sing for him. We're gonna have a baby." There was an inordinate amount of hope in her voice, and Benson felt embarrassed for her. "You're pregnant?" "Well, no. Not right now. We're just going to have a baby sometime." "When do you leave?" "Tonight," she said quietly. "Will you help me pack?" The next day moved like a crisis. Benson experienced bouts of nausea, dizziness, and overwhelming anxiety throughout the day and twice escaped to the All About Evolution exhibit, which was closed for renovation, to collect himself. He thought ceaselessly about Edie - the way she glistened when she got out of the shower, the time they mud wrestled in front of that bar in Cleveland, the simple majesty of her voice on the good nights, when she sang him to sleep. He tried to remember their plan, that amazing itinerary they'd created when they were twenty-four, and he found himself kneeling in front of a double helix, his sunken face reflected by the shiny, neon molecule. Penny showed up toward the end of the day. She collided with an enormous metal stand that advertised the planetarium's latest feature, then she sent an entire stack of maps skittering across the floor. As she bent to pick them up, Benson set his hand on her shoulder. "Here, let me help you," he said. He took her out for drinks at a tiny Greek bar a few blocks from the museum. Until recently, the bar had been a Mexican restaurant, and the new owners saved most of the restaurant's decorations, piņatas and such, simply adding a Greek flag to one wall. There were tiny bowls of olives all over the place-fat, wrinkled purple ones and smoky green ones with creamy paste leaking out the centers. The bar smelled vaguely of fennel. "What are we celebrating?" Penny missed the barstool in her first attempt at sitting. "I don't know," he said. "More closet space?" He studied her from across the table, unsure how much of him she could see back. Her eyes were a silvery gray, and the rest of her face was almost translucent white. She never wore lipstick. Benson felt, at least momentarily, that if he looked at her from just the right angle, he could see all the way down to the muscle and the blood supply, all the way down to the bone. "Did you need more closet space?" she asked. She squeezed an olive and rubbed the off-white paste between her thumb and index finger. "My wife left me," he said. "I'm almost blind," she said. "Okay," he said. "Let's drink to that." The martinis were terrible, and it turned out that all the drinks were laced with the residual flavors of cumin and cilantro. They walked back to Benson's house in the dark, Penny trying to kick at stones on the sidewalk, missing every time. Benson listened to the sound of her shoes scuffing against the asphalt, and he could still hear it long after they went inside, their footsteps muffled by the carpet. "It started when I was eleven," she told him. "I was playing hide and seek with my brother, and I got lost trying to walk back to the house from the tool shed. Night vision always goes first." Benson rolled on his back on the blue shag. Edie'd given up vacuuming months ago, and bits of lint and hair from the floor accumulated on his shirt. "What causes it?" "It's inherited. I got it from my mother. Hers actually started slower than mine, so she wasn't legally blind until she was almost fifty." "Do you ever wish you could see the way other people see?" "I do all right," she said. She squinted across the room and focused on a lamp, one Benson particularly disliked, that was shaped like a swan. Penny turned her body so she was square with the shiny, ceramic bird, and she took exactly two steps closer. She held her head extremely still. Benson took in the patch of freckles high on her left cheekbone and the way her neck looked smooth and wiry and alive. He could have sworn he saw her sniff a little, quietly into the air in front of her, like a dog would, trying to understand the world with a different sense. She laughed, and the sound of it made the room seem cleaner. "What is it, some kind of bird?" "I want to see what you see," Benson said. Then he felt her hands warm on his face. Penny's fingers fluttered over his eyelids, blacking out the dusty light. Her fingertips rested on the bridge of his nose. Benson tried hard to remember the last time a woman had touched his face, but he couldn't. "It starts with loss of night vision," she said. "Imagine yourself in the woods just past dusk. You had no problem finding your way in, and you remember every tree along the way. They've been stripped of their bark in the middle of the trunks, and you told your brother and his friend you thought it was cruel to strip the bark because the trees are living. You just can't see them anymore, is the trouble. It's darker outside than it should be. You have to touch every single tree to find your way home, and by the time you get back, your fingers are bleeding." Benson put his hands over Penny's, and he kept his eyes closed. "Your vision starts to close off," she continued. "You can't see the people sitting next to you in class. When they try to pass you notes, you ignore them, so they spread rumors about you. You miss out on all the secret glances and rolled eyes. You turn your head noticeably more than anyone you know. Things get blurrier from there." As she talked, Benson relaxed his eyes, so he could see just a sliver from underneath his eyelashes. Everything looked fringed that way, with his eyelashes a soft brown filter to the world. Penny was playing with a loose green thread on her cardigan, but she couldn't see that she was unraveling a button, and Benson wanted desperately for her to stop, to stop on her own. "When you're in dim lighting, you can hardly see at all." She pulled the thread farther and farther out of the matrix of the sweater. "But the worst is when you walk outside into bright sunshine. You avoid going to the movies or the museum or the bank because of it." "What happens in sunlight?" "Whiteout," she said. "Everything goes blank. It's like the world disappears right in front of you." "But you still come to the museum all the time." "I think I'm starting to like it." She brushed her fingers over Benson's eyes again, and he opened them, wincing at the influx of light. The button was just barely hanging from her sweater. Benson pulled it off for her, put it in his pocket so she wouldn't lose it. The next day there were items missing from the lost and found. Benson reviewed his log each morning, checking the inventory, filing anything that'd been left out for more than three days into the permanent collection. His research showed that if an item wasn't claimed within three days of being found, there was a ninety-six percent chance it would never be claimed. Not counting perishable items, which Benson threw away at the first sign of deterioration or fungal growth, the number of discrete objects in the lost and found had climbed to 976, with an average of two items added per week. On days when Benson was feeling hopeful about his life, as he was that morning, he reflected on that number, trying to figure out how so many people could be so careless. The problem wasn't in Jewelry or Clothing, which were two categories he watched closely, knowing the museum staff's propensity to adopt these items. As he scanned the shelves of Personal Effects, he noticed several vacancies. The tiny gray notebook he'd found in the second floor women's bathroom was gone, as was a sealed letter addressed to Paul Vendoza in North Dakota and a wallet that contained no money, license, or credit cards, but stuffed with photos of three red-headed children who were all missing teeth. Benson clutched his logbook and went to investigate. He talked to Mary Marvin first, the head of the help desk, because her desk was just across from his, and she sometimes helped visitors with a claim if Benson wasn't around. She always wore a hat to work, and rumors about the condition of her hair circulated the museum, whether or not she was hiding great bald patches or a tattoo of a swastika on her occipital. Today, she wore a straw hat embroidered with sunflowers. "Did you notice anything unusual at my desk yesterday?" Benson asked. "I'm missing a few things, and no one left a note that they were picked up." "Anything valuable?" Mary poked a finger under her hat and scratched. "No, that's what gets me. The things that are missing don't really have any value. Except to their owners, of course." "Sorry, can't help you. I left early yesterday. I had a date with a body builder. Maybe check with Rick though. He was here late for a meeting about the new rainforest exhibit." Benson canvassed the museum, floor by floor, questioning everyone he could find. He talked to Vera, the intern with the jagged white scar on her cheek, and Jerry, the new janitor who was missing two fingers on his left hand. Lucas Henderson, a tour guide whose groups were always loud and disruptive, told him he'd seen some people milling around the desk after closing. Lynn Trotter, an anthropologist working with the museum on the primate exhibit, claimed that no one was concerned about the lost and found desk, as far as she knew. Benson had been working at the museum longer than anyone else, but most of the employees didn't even know his name. He'd always skipped the after work drinks, the parties, the group lunches. His saw his job as a soap bubble - sacred, fragile - the slightest disturbance could pop it. By lunchtime Benson was back at his desk, sick with the knowledge that the items gone missing had been lost not once, but twice. He ate at his desk with his head down, staring at his logs, thirteen years worth of work, meaningless. He'd failed in protecting those tenuous remains, and if he couldn't save them, no one could. Penny stopped by around three, after spending her morning tracking down a replacement for Mr. Bubble, a rounded glass magnifying device she needed in order to read. She'd lost her old one either in the coffee shop on Grant Street or on the bus. "I wonder who found it," she said. "I mean, what do they think it is? A paperweight, maybe, or some type of distorted crystal ball. I hope a gypsy found it and is using it to read people's fortunes." "Tell me my fortune," Benson said. He slid his fingers over the slick surface of Penny's new magnifier. "Let's see," Penny said, lowering her voice, looking mystic. "I see a lightning storm, very sudden. One that looks like tiny capillaries running through the whites of your eyes. I see evening, and the failure of light. A night filtered by magnolia leaves. I see light coming through a kitchen window." "That's it?" "That's it." Penny shrugged. He led Penny down to the museum's basement, holding her hand through the hallway, which was crammed with old boxes and models of dinosaurs and prehistoric birds. They heard soft tapping sounds coming from the geology lab and drilling from the paleontology lab. The man from National Geographic, Benson thought his name was Stewart, was listening to Metallica while he worked on an article in his office. Benson's keys clinked together like wind chimes as they slipped into a room at the end of the hallway. "Are you sure we're allowed to be here?" Penny asked. "I come down here all the time when I need to think," he said. "This is like the museum's dungeon, where all the scientists work on new stuff for the exhibits. They just lost their funding for the osteology project, so this lab is abandoned for now." It was always quiet in the bone lab, Benson told her. Something about the room made it impossible to make too much noise. Penny tiptoed in, dragging her fingertips across the cardboard boxes that lined the walls from the floor to the ceiling. Thick sheets of paper covered the tables, and all the brown in the room made it feel disposable, like you could crumple the whole thing up and throw it away. "It smells like sawdust in here," Penny said. She spun around, trying to locate the scent. "It's the bone fragments," Benson said. "You can see the little particles in the air against the light." Penny walked to the window and rested her hand on a skull on the sill. "Is this real?" "They're all real," Benson said. "There are almost a thousand bodies in this room." "Where did they come from?" "A burial mound in West Virginia. We only have them for a few years, then we have to return them to the rightful owners, even though they don't really exist anymore. They were studying these bones for signs of disease, mostly syphilis, but now that the funding's gone, we'll probably never know how they died." "Imagine," Penny said, her hands tracing the contours of the long bones on the table, "an entire population in boxes. The whole damn thing. What happens when the museum gives them up?" "The owners can either donate them to a museum permanently, or they can choose to rebury. Most of the time they get reburied." She was navigating around the tables better, and Benson could tell her eyes were adjusting to the dim light of the room. He suspected this made her uncomfortable, that she'd become used to darkness, that she was afraid of her sense of placement in the room, the certainty, the knowing. Penny shivered. Her fingers tangled with the blinds until she released them with an upward snap. Sunlight broke through the room, through its shadows, through its secrets. Benson ran to her, pulling the blinds back down, blotting out the day. "The light," he explained. "It's bad for the bones. It bleaches them, and they're already damaged enough." Penny nodded. "Can you leave with me?" "I don't know," he said. "I've never left early before." Upstairs, Penny kissed Benson's chin and invited him to a grade school play, a production of The Sound of Music. She didn't know anyone in it, she explained, she just liked to hear the children singing, off-key and full of bravado. Benson hesitated, finally claiming he needed to check in with Mary first and ask her to keep an eye on his desk. He left Penny in the Cell wing, where she touched the jelly cytoplasm models that were sticky with fuzz and grape jelly from school children's hands. She smiled and jumped back when she felt the nucleus, a firm, textured disc in the middle. He thought about what it must be like for her, for everything she touched to be a surprise. He thought about finding Penny the same way he'd found hundreds of things over the years. As he walked into the dull beige employee lounge, he felt desperate to hold on to something, just once, to have something that would never be lost, never need to be found, never transform into dark blue letters in a log book documenting the slow erosion of his life over time. The lounge was packed. Lucas and Vera were there, perched over the refreshment table, whispering into their coffees. Mike Fitch from reference was there, craning his neck to get a better look at something in Andy Burch's hand. The tweed-covered man who did event planning was there, and so was the guy who ran the projector in the little theater on the third floor. Six or seven other people, a few who didn't even look familiar to Benson, milled around the room, eating peanuts and choking out big, ugly notes of laughter. Even Mary was there, smoking a thin cigarette in the center of the noise. They didn't notice Benson at first, but when they saw him, all hands flung into the air, as if they were teenagers who'd been caught making out on a school night. "What are you looking at?" Benson asked, skirting the room. "Nothing," Andy said. He slipped something underneath his shirt. Vera flushed and started for the door. "I'm sorry," she said sadly. Mary stood and reached under Andy's shirt, revealing the missing gray notebook and the wallet, now empty. "Benson, you've been bad!" she said. "This stuff is hilarious. I can't believe you've been hiding it so long. Sit down and listen to this." Benson remained standing. Mary passed the notebook to Mike, who cleared his throat and spoke in a deep, resonant reading voice. "February 12th. Melanie says Brandon likes me, but he doesn't ever look at me in the halls. Why are boys like this? I think she told him though, because he was whispering with all his friends in front of his locker, and they stopped when I walked by. I'm so embarrassed!" Andy banged his fist on the table, and a bag of chips popped up and scattered across the floor. Lanie Adams from the ticket desk wiped tears from her eyes. Mike continued. "April 3rd. Brian and I were kissing behind the dumpster this morning, and he tried to stick his hand up my shirt, but I made him stop. He called me a baby and threw my copy of The Grapes of Wrath in the dumpster and I couldn't get it out. But I'm going to see Jordan at college this weekend, and I'm very excited about that." "Read him the part about cheating on her geometry test," a woman Benson didn't know yelled out. She was wearing a red jumper with bumblebees embroidered on the chest. Benson didn't want to know about the geometry test, and he felt fiercely protective of this anonymous girl, her diary, her uneasy attempts to get some boy with a patchy mustache to like her. In her absence, the diary belonged to him, and hearing it read aloud was like having his pockets emptied, like having the contents of his life spread out on the floor, free for the taking. He clenched his jaw so tight he was sure that if someone touched it, it would make a sound like a harp, reverberating throughout the lounge. "Give it to me," he said. He extended his hand, trying his best to look authoritative. Andy grabbed the notebook from Mike, cradled it close against his chest. He was a tall man with a good education, and most everyone at the museum liked him. He and his wife had just had a baby, Jessica, Benson thought they'd named her. "What if we won't?" Andy said. "What if I hold onto this old notebook and keep reading it? Is anyone going to miss it? Are you going to take it away from me?" Benson had a quick and utter feeling of loss, a flash of sadness that filled him completely. Then it was gone. He thought of Penny, waiting for him in the echoes of the museum, pressing her nose against an enormous floating, fluttering neuron, trying to get a better look at its axons and dendrites. He thought of her walking forward, never quite sure what she'd find up ahead. In that moment, he wanted nothing more than to see what she could see, so he took hold of his own kinetic energy, swelling it into his shoulder, swinging across his body and knocking Andy to the floor. He grabbed the little gray notebook and ran. He ran out into the museum, caught Penny by the elbow, jerking her body toward the lobby. They ran together, through the clicking body counters, away from his life's work, an accumulation of objects he knew only he would miss dearly. They ran though the massive revolving doors, spinning themselves out into the brittle daylight, which would make everything flash white for one or both of them. |
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