Chapter 3: Museum of Unseen Things

The drive to the Phoenix Art Museum took twenty-three minutes.

I know because I counted. Not on purpose, it was just something to do with my brain while my body did something else entirely. The car seat was warm against my bare skin, upholstered in that particular shade of gray that said this vehicle was purchased for practicality, not pleasure. My mother’s Honda Civic had the faint smell of coffee and sunscreen and the fast-food breakfasts we’d eaten on mornings when no one had the energy to cook.

I’d put on sandals. And a hat, a wide-brimmed straw thing that had belonged to my father, actually, from a trip to Sedona he’d taken before I was born. It smelled like dust and old memories and the faint ghost of his shampoo.

I’d also grabbed a beach towel from the hall closet. Not for modesty for the seats. For the barrier between my body and the surfaces that other bodies had touched. For the illusion of hygiene, even though I knew that clothes didn’t actually protect you from germs, just from the idea of germs.

The towel was blue. It had a cartoon whale on it, left over from a family vacation to San Diego when I was seven. The whale was smiling. It seemed obscenely cheerful, given the circumstances.

Traffic on the 51 was light; it was still early, still before the rush of people who had places to be and things to do and clothes to wear while they did them. I kept the windows down. The wind tangled my hair and pressed against my skin and reminded me that air was a thing, a real thing, a thing you could feel if you stopped trying not to.

I thought about my father.

He loved the art museum. Not because he was particularly artistic, he couldn’t draw a straight line with a ruler, but because he loved the idea of art. The way it asked questions without demanding answers. The way it held space for contradiction. The way a painting could be ugly and beautiful at the same time could make you angry, sad, and hopeful all at once.

“Art is the place where the rules don’t apply,” he’d said once, standing in front of a Rothko that was just a canvas of red and black. “And that’s terrifying to some people. Because if the rules don’t apply to art, maybe they don’t apply to anything.”

I wondered what he would have thought about me. About the tan line fading. About the towel with the cartoon whale. About the sixteen-year-old girl driving to an art museum in nothing but sandals and a dead man’s hat.

He would have laughed, I decided. Not at me. With me. He would have seen the absurdity of it, the girl who stopped wearing clothes because her father died, as if nudity were a form of grief, as if fabric were the only thing standing between her and the truth.

The truth.

What was the truth?

The truth was that I didn’t know. The truth was that I was driving to an art museum naked because I didn’t know what else to do. The truth was that my father was dead, and the world had kept spinning, and that felt like the biggest betrayal of all.

I pulled into the museum parking lot at 9:47 AM.

The building was white, blindingly white, the way buildings in Phoenix are white, because white reflects heat and heat is the enemy, and the only way to survive a desert summer is to become something that doesn’t absorb. The entrance faced north, toward the mountains, toward the part of the city where the air still smelled like creosote instead of exhaust.

I sat in the car for a minute. Two minutes. Three.

The parking lot was mostly empty, a few cars near the employee entrance, a minivan with Colorado plates that had probably been driven by someone who didn’t understand that Phoenix in August was a form of punishment. The sun was high enough now that the shadows were short, the light was harsh, and everything looked like it had been bleached of color.

You don’t have to do this, I told myself.

Yes, I do.

Why?

Because if I don’t, I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering what would have happened if I had.

I grabbed the towel and wrapped it around my shoulders. Not covering anything, exactly just holding it there, like a cape, like something that could be discarded at a moment’s notice. The sandals made a soft sound against the asphalt as I got out of the car. The hat shaded my eyes.

The air was already hot, not the punishing heat of noon, but the warning heat of late morning, the heat that said you have a few hours before this becomes unbearable, so you’d better do whatever you came to do.

I walked toward the entrance.

The sidewalk was warm through my sandals. The glass doors reflected my body at me, distorted, fragmented, broken into pieces by the way the light hit the surface. I looked like a painting. I looked like something that wasn’t quite real.

The automatic doors slid open.

Cool air rushed out of the aggressive air conditioning that every public building in Phoenix uses to remind you that humans were not meant to live here, that we survive through technology and stubbornness and the refusal to admit defeat.

I stepped inside.

The lobby was mostly empty.

A security guard sat at a desk near the entrance, an older man with a gray mustache and the particular stillness of someone who has been paid to watch people for too long. He looked up when the doors opened. He looked at me. He looked at the towel around my shoulders, the hat on my head, the sandals on my feet.

And then he looked at everything else.

“Ma’am,” he said slowly, “are you ... Are you wearing clothes?”

“No,” I said.

The word hung in the air between us, small and sharp and completely inadequate.

The guard’s name tag said R. HERNANDEZ blinked. Then blinked again. Then reached for something under his desk, probably a radio or a panic button or a phone number for someone who got paid more than he did to deal with situations like this.

“I’m going to need you to “ He stopped. Started again. “Do you have clothes? Like, in a bag? What could you put on?”

“I have a towel.”

“A towel isn’t clothes.”

“It’s not supposed to be.”

R. Hernandez looked at me for a long moment. His face was doing something complicated, trying to process information that didn’t fit into any of the categories his training had prepared for. I’d seen that face before. On my mother, when I’d walked out of the bathroom. On my sister, when she’d come home from work. On David, during the phone call.

The face of someone who has just realized that the world is stranger than they thought.

“I’m going to call my supervisor,” he said finally.

“Okay.”

“Please don’t,” He gestured vaguely at the lobby, at the museum, at the world beyond the glass doors. “Please don’t go anywhere.”

“I want to see the desert photography exhibit. It’s on the second floor, I think.”

“You can’t,” he stopped. Rubbed his face with both hands. “Just ... wait here. Please.”

He picked up the radio and pressed a button. The static crackled that particular sound that always reminds me of old movies and emergency broadcasts and things that are about to go wrong.

“Carol, we’ve got a situation at the main entrance.”

A woman’s voice came back, tinny and distorted. “What kind of situation?”

R. Hernandez looked at me. I smiled. It wasn’t a mean smile, it wasn’t a challenging smile, it was just a smile, the way you smile at someone when you’re both in a situation you didn’t expect, and you don’t know what else to do.

“Clothing situation,” he said.

There was a pause. Then: “Clothing situation?”

“You’re going to want to see this.”

Another pause. Then a sigh, the kind of sigh that said I’ve been here for fifteen years and I thought I’d seen everything, but apparently I was wrong.