Student Show

I lost a day. It happens, first thing you know it's tomorrow and you wake from a dream, or maybe you're not awake and it is a dream. Maybe you got up to pee and went back to bed, fell quickly back to a dream state, continuing an earlier fantasy. I'm late for work, though this is actually a day off. Call D, tell him the dog ate my homework and I'll be running an hour behind. Started hanging the student show, yesterday, working like a man possessed. Easy enough to finish up today, except for one piece, on which I need to lengthen the monofilament, so it hangs at the proper height. Someone's brain flying away, half a beach ball with the top of a skull flying beneath it, suspended over the rest of the head. Did I say I love this job? Latent heat is generated by the condensation of water vapor to a liquid. The phantom smell of dreams. I swear there was a scent there, as though I had been visited in my sleep. Making things up, I tell myself, but still, sniff my fingers. Nothing succeeds like a smell. The day wears on. At some point I have a question for D and I don't ask it, just hand him an object, and he doesn't answer, just shakes his head, all lines of communication open. He's busy, so I hang this show by myself, mumbling a lot and calling numbers out loud. Some time after three, he comes out and lights the show, while I finish hanging. A well oiled machine. I'll do the labels on Tuesday, show opens Thursday, we're good to go. "Docenting After Hours" isn't a bad title. The janitor puts his mop away and points with a cane. He's pointing away, over there, off camera, as if something was happening. It's all fiction, of course, what we really see is paint on canvas, not the thing itself. He goes into that, naturally, in one of those rants we'd rather forget. Embarrassing. The way he over-explains. By the end of this scene you want to shake him, explain that post-modern is so over. He's gone underground by this point, only conducting small tours through the reconstructed ruins; coming out of his cave for tributes of whiskey and tobacco, as if that were owed him, for the hours he had spent composting shit. I due tend toward running sentences on. I always want more information. Right now, I know way too much about newts. It's an occupational hazard, every rock I choose to hide under, there's a goddamn salamander, waiting to start a fire. The less you know, the better. Seriously. Ignorance is bliss. There was a person at Janitor College, Sven Svenson, a great guy, he could accurately predict the weather from the pain in his ankles, he's crashed a few times; downhill, I know next to nothing, I can ski cross-country. He can. Right.You see where things might be going. That eternal apple.