The shop owner asks if we’re together. And I suppose it would seem that way, the way we perched on the Balinese wedding chest with our tape measures, trying to calculate how many visitors times how many hours until all the history is smashed, bleached and torn.
Tin ladies lounge on their sides, offering incense. We run our hands over the inlaid bone in a desk, crane our necks around the bowsprit, ripped like a scalp from someone’s ship hundreds of years ago. The designer’s hair is sheathed in a polar fleece scarf as if to say, I understand the use of turbans but prefer a more modern medium to hold in my skull.
She’s ridiculous. The prices are extraordinary, as if a kid walked around with a crayon and drew big zeroes wherever he could. We’re trying to imagine the Thai water pot being kicked twelve times per hour. You make a joke about the Director’s baseball card collection, the xylophone he locks up at night for safekeeping. I counter with a story from his childhood, the time he touched a Tesla coil and his hair stuck up like new grass. It’s all fiction:
our exhibit, her hair, the When Dynasty masks and their quiet shrieks. I hand you one terra cotta Ganesh after another. We’re partners in teak. I see how she made the mistake. We’re young; it’s old.