Chase Burke
Museum
The first thing the museum told me is that Julius Caesar drank out of this cup this blue cup this very blue cup. So said the square white sign in tiny sans serif. There I am in the lobby looking at the cup the blue cup the very blue cup on the pedestal next to the bust of Steve Jobs smiling solemnly and the severed finger of a French painter whose name I cannot pronounce, having never consorted with the French. This cup this blue cup this very blue cup isn’t even blue; it’s closer to gray, the long march of time at work. Or perhaps gray is the cup’s nature: it has always been gray and never was a very blue cup or even a blue cup. But blue is a better color for the cup to once have been, in the eyes of the museum—it’s a color removed from black and white. Shouting It’s just a cup! into the museum makes no difference, because everyone continues obliviously their perusal of what we could call artifacts, though I don’t know if this van Gogh knockoff is the right artist to represent the artifice of art: cutting off a finger (the pinkie!) is a coward’s way compared to van Gogh’s severing of the side of his head. I can pronounce the latter’s name but not that of the digitless other. Strange: though we study cowards in school, we never studied him. We study the cowardice complex of the very white West, but we call it the history of the world. As I’m standing in the museum’s foyer—French—I’m struck by the thought that museums are of, by, and for the cowardly. But then I walk down the hall from the cup and the finger and Jobs and I enter a large room (rather like this office we’re in right now) containing a to-scale model of the Twin Towers falling, real flames licking, real smoke billowing, the attack forever replaying in real time. Of course, 9/11—the attack itself as well as the ongoing response to it—was cowardly, but a museum is for commemoration of life lived, not life taken, which is just to say that the focus of a museum, when it comes to violent events like the Holocaust or 9/11 or any American crime committed at home or abroad, isn’t the fact of violence done (though there is always an element of violence to commemoration), but that people were once living and no longer are. I’m not being very clear. Looking at the buildings burning, I thought that this place can’t be a museum of cowardice because not everything fits. What was the organizing principle? What else was here? Etc. I left the Twin Towers behind as I wandered along the preset path past a family with their kids oohing and aahing at everything they passed—the parents, not the kids; the kids looked simultaneously bored and terrified—which led me here, to this exhibit, to this not-quite-round office, where I’m talking, inexplicably, to you. We both know this building is a maze, this whole city a puzzle, this entire country a safe without a key, and what’s the point of having a safe if you can’t get inside of it? What is worth protecting if it’s inaccessible? An idea? A way of life? A memory? I don’t know, but then I’m not paid to know things. I’m not paid to be here in this place full of people observing cowardice they don’t believe they own. They are wrong, of course. History as we have written it is cowardice, but no one admits it. There are whole buildings in here, there are citizens, there are homes, and what kind of tourist am I if I don’t know what I’m touring, and why are either of us here? Which of us is the exhibit? I’m running out of breath because, Mr. President, listen to me, because I need you to hear me and understand this: I worry that everything around us is a falsehood, and we are never leaving this place, and nothing outside matters to anyone at all. And the truth is I have never ever felt so lonely as I did looking at that cup that blue cup that very blue cup in this museum of America where everyone, you and I and all the others, eventually comes to die.
Icebox
Later I’m retrieving a cube of ice from the freezer to make a certain kind of blue drink I read about online. The freezer smells like ice which smells like water which smells like nothing. The smell of nothing is an old smell, like the air. Water contains minerals—iron, calcium, magnesium, lead. Old-earth leftovers. The earth smells like the cool expanse of nothing in my freezer. The freezer is in my garage, which is dark except for a single yellow light hanging from the ceiling, and warm because everything is warm now, and ripe with the smell of dirt and concrete and gasoline. Mine is one of those tall single-door standing freezers, all white if dirty, and I don’t have a dead body in it. One day I would like to put my own body into storage, to freeze my cells as they are now before they atrophy, age, abscond. Porkchops rest, wrapped, next to the tray of ice. I don’t eat meat. I am more than fertilizer for another earth’s populace. Heat leads to a chemical change at the molecular level, but freezing is physical. If Vonnegut’s ice-nine will Midas the world into stasis, is that not preferable to the slow death of heat exhaustion? You can come back from being frozen because you can be thawed. Your DNA, slowed to stopping, is still there, still the same, still you, whether you were a coward or a child. Ash is just another word for dirt. I want my body frozen so commemoration is inevitable. I don’t want to be coaled over and raked into a garden. I want to be ready to display until I’m woken, like Ötzi, found in the Alps. We know how old he was. We know how he died. We know what he’d eaten that day from the shit in his gut. We know everything about him, except, maybe, how he felt being encased in ice. What am I making? I pledged a long time ago to lay off the liquor, yet here I am, outside but inside, in the garage, holding open the door to a cold place I want to crawl inside, if only momentarily. Everything about the past—my impressions of it, my experiences with it, my expectations for it—is encased in the ice of brittle memory, and though I don’t know how to access this I’m trying hard to remember what it is like to feel my mind slow, to sleep, to spread out over so much time the firing of synapses keeping me alive. I don’t want to change chemically, climatically, cleansingly. I want everything as it always was, paused, waiting. Ice, after all, is unlike entropy, which is the gradual fall into disorder. Ice, this freezer, sentiment—all of that is crystal clear.
Correspondence
I lost my hard drive last week, and along with it all the letters I ever wrote my brother. Computer crashed, poof—blinking cursor on a black screen, then nothing. I, my mistake, had never sent my brother what I’d written. Yesterday I bought a new computer at Best Buy: solid-state technology, hexadeca cores, more memory than Methuselah. Fanless, too. Quiet as a warm mouse. I get a kind of militant feeling when I use it, like I’m operating from the open fuselage of a battlesuit, my desk the controls, my worn-out office chair a peeling-leather cockpit. This new computer runs games like life, i.e. in messy high definition. I’m happy with my purchase, which is to say, I hardly think about it at all. But I know the computer will one day crash, because they all do. Planned obsolescence: companies priming for a future payday. An absence of progress. Moore’s Law incorrectly predicted that processing power would double every eighteen months for the foreseeable future, but what happens when the future is too far around the bend to be seen? What then when the computer doesn’t die? When the disk drive isn’t driven, when nothing moves, when it’s just data saved on singular wavelengths? What happens when this [sweeping gesture] sweet setup is no longer ahead of its time or behind the times but simply of time? What happens when the computer at my fingertips is not only at but of? One day my brother and I might share a mind. There would be no point in sending letters, digital or not, in the face of constant communion. One day, maybe, a company will gather consciousness and distribute it to anyone connected. All of us as all of us all the time. This future in the future will look like collective human memory: everything always, progress at a plateau. We will write each other’s stories. My memory of my brother will be a kind of reality, as will be his of me. Thinking will be making. Thinking will be being. And isn’t this what we want? To communicate without exchange? To know others the way we know ourselves? The thought of writing again terrifies me because I can’t recall what I have lost. I would not know anyone. Would my brother know me? It’s not hard to form connections, no, but no one ever talks about remembering them.