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My job for today is to give two people a tour of our modern art fields. Yes, that's right: fields. We have fields and fields of modern art sculptures and buildings and metal contraptions and walls that go nowhere and things that twirl - curves, obtuse angles, the defiance of gravity, the suspension of belief.
They seem like nice enough people, I suppose, when I first meet them. The woman has red glasses and a pinched expression and a pixie cut. The man has tattoos and his hair is dyed and scant, but his pants are pinstriped: I think he was attempting, that morning, to look artistic so his wife wouldn't be humiliated. Either way, they hold hands and look around then and watch me tentatively.
"Hello," I say to begin. "Here you will see many things that will excite your imagination and make you imagine stories. At any time, if you have a question or an opinion or a theory, feel free to voice it. We are all fans of art here."
I watch the man to see if he winces. He looks straight back at me. I begin to wonder whose idea it was to go for this, his or hers.
*
When I tried out for my job, I had to get through an excruciating interview.
"What makes you feel like you are suitable for this position?" an overweight woman with sharp lines around her mouth asked me, sitting forward in order to better hear my response.
"I've always loved art," I told her. "I like to see the story behind things, I like to theorize about what the artist was feeling, about what he or she was trying to make me, the spectator, feel. It's like media of all sorts - they create it in their minds but the instant it passes through their minds, it becomes its own free form of art. It's like the Creation. God created Adam and Eve, but after that, he was pretty passive. It was up to them to handle what He'd put there. Free will in the viewer. Someone who is depressed can see the dark side in even the happiest of paintings. I like that. I like the openness to interpretation, the purposeful ambiguity of art, especially three dimensional modern art."
*
I am an expert at media. I majored in communications. I can bend words to my will. The steam of my breath makes them contort in others' minds. Either way, I went on for quite a while about how much I loved art, and I suppose it impressed, or at least confused, the obese woman into giving me the job.
*
"Why exactly did you request a tour guide today?"
"Well," the woman replied, "We go to look at art every weekend. I currently work for the school which collaborates with the Center, and was feeling as though this would give me a fuller experience."
"You work for the school? Are you a teacher?" I want funny stories of her being tacked to a chair.
"Yes."
"Do you enjoy your work?"
There is a pause as the husband looks at her in amusement.
Does she enjoy her work?
She purses her lips, making her cheekbones stand out. "Not particularly, no. The children are beautiful - private school children, pale, refined. But they move. I never anticipated such movement in teaching school."
"Movement?" I ask.
"When you are in front of an audience, you can see, even if you are looking at a sheet of paper, out of your peripheral vision, at all time... children move. They fidget. They twitch. They play with their hair, their noses, their skirts, their pencils. They doodle and take notes and write notes. Every second every one of them is moving, even if slightly. It plays with your senses."
I nod. Her husband darts a glance at me. He seems embarrassed.
"One year -" she begins.
He cuts her off. "Don't tell her this story."
She shakes her head at him, angrily pursing her lips. "One year, they all twitched their noses. In synch. It was as though one of their leaders -- probably this one freckled child named Christopher - said, 'all right, everyone, at three oh seven, we will all simultaneously twitch our noses.' "
There is a pause as the ground crunches under our feet. We are heading to the first primary exhibit, a row of pillars.
"Children, they all sway but are attached to their desks. They're like... Jon..."
"Sea anemones," he says for her.
"Have you ever seen those?" she asks me.
*
He works as the person who drives behind the wide-load trucks. I had never before thought of them as people, actual people who farted and drank beer and ordered sundaes at Friendly's. I just saw those little station wagon deals and thought of them as their own entities. Soemtimes I see pickup trucks and think of the people as the guts, not the commanders.
"It's a very demanding job, driving behind ready-to-assemble houses and machinery, and informing the people behind you that yes, this load does cross the dotted line a bit. It's not as elementary as it may indeed appear," he informs me, as if glaring and waiting for me to refute him. I nod, tell him that I understand completely.
*
I like to live among the art, give each piece my own personal name for it. It's kind of like writing free-verse poetry. Different teachers with their own respective hoards of kids all have their own different takes on things - how the line, structure, or color hint towards their own inner meaning. But I don't have anything like that. I try to see how it relates to me. I imagine nesting inside the sculptures. I wonder how long I would last in a sleeping bag in the winter.
*
The couple, as it turns out, likes to go out and see art every weekend. Very rarely do they do anything else. Occasionally it's bowling, or visiting their grown-up children, but these are ventures beyond their routine.
"We," the lady tells me, "live above a hippie store. It's called 'Dead Ahead.' I suppose this is a reference to the Grateful Dead but God rest my soul I never listened to things like that. You should see the place beside it though. It houses the most terrible things imaginable."
"It's a piercing place," he informs me. He has no visible piercings.
"They get body parts pierced that I can't even say aloud," she says to me gravely.
I fear that they say these things to all of the people who take them around the art. I think that they only request tour guides on their weekly ventures because it's cheaper than therapy.
"I was thinking that these young ladies - incredibly young - must be going in there, stating these awful body parts in unmentionable areas. Even worse than that, I realized one day, they have to actually bare these areas in order for the specialist to pierce them! Can you imagine removing all of those garments - your regions that should only be exposed in marriage - to a complete stranger?"
"I cannot," I reply. Although I could. Once a lesbian friend of mine had dragged me into an illegal piercing parlor in order to get her clit pierced. It had been an entertaining experience, up until she got infected and had to see a gynecologist for the first time, at the age of fourteen.
*
In the corner of the acres of land lay a broken peach. According to legend, a Japanese god had to put his son inside of a peach, to be hatched. Within the pit of the peach was a young god, Momertanio, who was borne from it and proceeded to greatness.
Every place like this has a person who is a little too obsessed with the work. I am the person here. Every new year, I break into the peach and pretend I am being reborn.
*
"I cannot imagine what it must be like for you, listening to people like us babble all the time," the woman says to me, taking off her glasses and rubbing them with her handkerchief.
"I tolerate it somehow," I tell her chirpily. Feeling harsh, I tell her it's all about the art anyway.
*
If God is anywhere, he is right here. The fields of this place have been gently maneuvered to curve and bump and dwarf any of the art. The art is towers high - dwarfing you. Then you think that there must be something greatly larger than any of this - and you can almost imagine God in the clouds.
The wind makes everything rustle. The trees go straight up in perfect lines like someone painted them or dreamed of them on graphing paper. The art seems to stand on its own like the pyramids - like they were planted. I feel like an undeserving wanderer. Sometimes I talk to God. Sometimes I pray.
*
Sometimes I catch people in their own little words - couples and trios and larger groups - all enjoying themselves.
The statues curve and stick into and out of themselves and each other - lines and movement and beauty. It is enough to make a person incredibly randy if he or she is susceptible to such visual cues.
*
"I think that art is the height of human experience," the man tells me as his wife heads into the bathroom. "Everything we do is passed on by our art. No one will look at our piles of beer cans and think 'my, I understand that person.' Most of us are just passive, listening to CB radios, watching football, sucking in the media. No one puts out anymore."
I tell him I understand what he means. He shakes his head sadly and asks whether or not the children like to graffiti on the art. I tell him that sometimes they take their fingernails and scrape their names into the rusty sculptures.
I tell him that this is art in evolution. People interacting with the art, making it more interesting. Besides, rust is only oxidization, it's a continual process, it gets done over. It's a cycle, like the water cycle from clouds to rain to rivers to oceans to evaporation and back again. He asks how this is related to the water cycle. I tell him that everything refreshes. That the toilet bowl his wife is relieving herself in is full of water that dinosaurs drank.
*
The three of us walk along the carefully paved path. It's amazing how much distance such tiny people can cover. I feel like a player on a chessboard. Would it have made a difference if we had seen the Calder statues before the parallel walls? Would I have had any choice over what I decided to do with our guests today? I will receive my paycheck and come back next week either way. I will wind up at the mall - with its own architectural manipulation of form and motion, persuading me to buy, consume, buy, engulf - and buy that crimson scarf I've had my eye on. I will turn on Enya and watch muted reruns.
*
The couple will go home to their place over the hippie store, like awake yet asleep, and mentally prepare for the day ahead.
And plan for the next art exhibit. Maybe this one will open their eyes to what they've been missing all along.
Unfortunately this requires more than metal and paint chips.
Some weekend they will be able to look each other in the eye, hold hands, and fall asleep.
The deep restless sleep as the wind whistles through the abandoned metal playground, causing it to hum a lullaby to itself.