Arthur Becoming, Becoming Arthur

Written for a creative writing class. Started out as a joke, ended as a marginally pretentious idea.

Hidden in a cleft deep within a canyon of steel there is a repository of modern memories. That place has a distinctly human magic. It ensnares the mind with heartstrings and vests the soul in hued entrapments. Somnambulating souls adorn the grey walls, their beams of inspiration illuminating the voyeurs’ names in the Book of Life. In this metal Chauvet I found him that morning"there, beneath that one, the Oh Marys or something. He was tracing his fingers over the letters as if he was ten years older and they were a woman’s curves. With each stroke he breathed a breathless benediction, and as he followed the sensuous droplet trails to the black and yellow shoes I could have sworn I heard him whispering to himself in wonder.

            They usually say “profound” things. I am talking, of course, of wandering wonderers with their oily chins and their unkempt hair, artists of the superficial. Maybe some of them stink of art, but I wouldn’t know"I spend way too much time here anyway. But he seemed…different somehow. I know it’s cliché, but it’s the way he was. Most patrons will bounce from piece to piece, window shopping without a care in the world, but not this wide-eyed child.

            He was entirely unlike the dynamic duo that brought him, though for different reasons. Never a grayer, stodgier couple have I ever seen. They sat in my office with less enthusiasm than a pair of petrified Puritans. “We didn’t know he’d gotten lost,” she said with a sneer that was almost French. “If we had, we would have done something, I’m sure.”

            “But you have to understand, Mrs. ___, this is a very serious matter,” I said, doing my damnedest to keep a civil tone. “Our cameras don’t seem to tell much of what happened to Arthur during his nightlong"“

            “Yes, Mr. Fitch, but was the boy damaged in any way?”

            I chanced a glance at the live feed on my laptop. The boy was as moony as Moses on Mt. Sinai, and all the patrons ogled him like he was a moving Michelangelo. He mumbled to himself silently as he caressed a sculpture of I-beams. “Depends on what you mean,” I responded curtly.

            “What Mrs. ___ means, Mr. Fitch,” said Mr. ___, “is that the last thing we would want is for the value of museum property to depreciate in any way.”

            I sighed, standing up with their inexorable desire to leave. “Of course not, Mr. ___. Nobody wants that, least of all the…artists, if they can be called that.”

            Since I had been the one to discover the boy in his meanderings, it was decided by whatever men in big suits above that I would be the one to investigate his installment. I checked the security footage, which only showed what I expected"much the same as I had already seen. Even when I talked to other people about the boy, I learned nothing new. But when I mentioned her, things changed.

            At one time he called himself Arthur, and so did others. That was when he walked into the museum, bored as a kitsch doll on a dime-store shelf. In the camera footage he trailed behind his parents from one exhibit to another, mouth vacantly open, glazed eyes drifting lazily to and fro. Mrs. ___ held his hand as if it were a shoelace, and Mr. ___ seemed to have already forgotten Arthur was there. Their meandering path took them through the first floor and up to the second, and it was there that the Event took place.

            The Event was a bit underwhelming"he went to the bathroom, and when he came out they were gone. “He wasn’t all that shaken up about it,” said Charlie, the old janitor on that floor. “Not from what I recall, anyway. I mean, not more than what’s normal, being newly thrown into the world all alone.”

            Arthur sat down on a bench and cried for a while, which was all you could really expect him to do in that situation. A few well-meaning people looked pitifully in his direction, and one matriarch-looking woman looked like she wanted to help, but they were one and all distracted by the pretty colors all around. Eventually Arthur’s tears dried and he stood up, disheveled.

            He wandered around for a while with newly opened eyes, blinking blankly from one room to the next. Soft white lighting glanced off simple stuff and he didn’t understand. Soon he meandered his way into the heart of the museum"and that was where he met her.

            There are three artists in my life that I will ever respect, in no particular order: Van Gogh, the beautiful man that he was; my sister Evangeline, who could render a stray dog or a vase of flowers better than anybody; and her. She had the sky resting comfortably on her shoulders; the ocean bore her feet in turbulent calm. When she walked, she walked with grace. When she spoke, it was the truth. When she created, she did so to delight the sun.

            She was the one that Arthur went to in the end, of all people. By the time he got to her, there were few other people left, since it was her last day. He tried to ask her a question when he sat down, but of course she didn’t answer. She just gazed into his eyes in her way, and he stared back.

            They did this for some time. I wish I could say more about how it felt"to say that the air was electric would be too funny, since I watched it all happen on a video feed. All I know is that she looks at him, and he looks at her, and they do so for some time. I wish I could say what went on between them, but her face is unrevealing. That’s not to say she’s expressionless; even through the grainy footage I felt a sense of…well, I don’t know. It must be how Adam must have felt when Eve looked at him, back before love had thorns.

            At around 1900 hours, she gets up. He stays, staring where she was.

            She walks past him, to leave the exhibit. Then she stops. Like a bloodstain on snow she stands in her red dress against the stark white walls of the Museum.

            He lowers his gaze, shakes his head slowly. He turns to look for her, but she hasn’t gone far. She turns back to him, and, warmly looking down at him, speaks.

            “Look at the art until you can see the artist. Then your eyes will be opened.”

            “That’s it? That’s all she said?” I asked him.

            He fiddled with a mint wrapper as he sat across from me. “Yeah, I guess.” Turned out once you got him out of the public eye, he was actually kind of sane.

            I sighed, tapping my pen against the report I had in front of me. “Do you have any idea what that meant?”

            He shrugged noncommittally. “I mean, it pretty much means what it means. Not much to explain.”

            “But why would she tell you that?”

            “I dunno,” he said. “Maybe because she thought I needed to hear it?”

            Shaking my head, I leaned back in my chair and looked out the office window at the bustling city. “So then what happened?”

            “I don’t really remember,” said the boy. “It’s all kind of a blur. I think I was just walking around, looking at different pieces all night.”

            “And do you think,” I said, turning back to him and leaning over my desk, “that you could explain why none of the highly advanced security systems in place at the Museum of Modern Art seemed to bother letting anyone know about you pawing your greasy little mitts all over priceless artwork?”

            Finally he made eye contact with me. I suddenly felt the way you do when you notice a security camera in a room you’ve been in for a long time"watched. “Not a clue,” he said calmly. “You look a little pale"mint?”

            I sat back down, defeated, and took a mint from the tray. We sat there for a time, letting there be silence. Silence, I have since learned, does not whisper, or ring, or hang oppressively"it just is. Absence of sound begets thought, or something. There was something good about sitting there, letting the absurdity of the situation just wash over us. It was artful, in a sense, if you think about art that way. Like that John Cage piece, the one where"

            He got up, startling me out of my reverie. “If you don’t need me anymore, sir, then…?” he indicated the door roughly.

            “Oh, yeah"well, I guess one more question.” I stood up to open the door for him.

            “What’s that?”

            “Do you know how much you’re worth?”

            He smiled in a knowing way that no person knows how to smile like, let alone a little kid. “Oh, I’m sure it’s in the millions by now, at least. One of a kind masterpiece, after all.”

            I sighed and let him through, not knowing what else to do. I watched as he ambled his way through the crowd, sure to touch nobody. There was something beautiful about him; he seemed more put together now, like a night at the museum had done him good. It seemed like the patrons concurred"as Arthur walked past, they eyed him appreciatively, and one starchily dressed lady on the arm of an equally starchy gentleman exclaimed, “Oh, that one’s nice! Wonder who he’s by?”