* — December 1, 2022
The Time Museum

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Some peopled treated their visit to the Time Museum as a holiday, others, as an obligation. I dressed up. Mascara-ed even my lower lashes and wore flared bellbottoms, because costume brought positivity to uncertainty (the pants were sequined). I admit I was a little nervous. People said it was like attending your own baby shower, but one in which a recording of your last breath played on a loop over the sound system. I could bring no one with me, because tickets to the Time Museum were strictly Admit One and arrived individually, even for couples who’d been together decades, even for twins.

The Time Museum was open 24/7 every day of the year. Everyone got a ticket eventually. Everyone went. I was lucky. My ticket denoted an entrance on Friday at 2pm, so I only had to cancel a handful of patients. I suspected my patients were relieved.

Getting to the Time Museum was different for everyone; some people had to take an air balloon and then hike or board a ferry or ride a bike; no matter where in the world you lived, the Time Museum was accessible. This was one of the things that made it both inevitable and surprising.

For me, reaching the Time Museum required riding a monorail, followed by a cable car and then a short walk. The museum sat on a hill just outside the city limits. Viewed from the city below, it appeared not to be there at all, though it cast a shadow. As I traveled, I looked for signs. An eagle flew by the window of the train, which I took to be auspicious; at the cable car station, a breeze lifted the hair from my shoulders and pulled a thick strand across my mouth, recalling my hair-sucking days of girlhood before my mother cut it so short I had to assert my identity to all the adults around me. “I’m a girl!” I remembered correcting a secretary at the principal’s office who’d thanked the “young man” delivering the attendance sheet. I do not miss those gendered days, though I do have a soft spot for all that forgotten paper—spelling lists, diaries with keys, snowflake chains, paper bag lunches with my name written in looping script.

Warned that the museum staff were sticklers, I sprinted the last quarter mile and arrived on time for my scheduled entrance. The Time Museum was a national landmark, and the guard at the gate was an aged man with a forelock holding in one hand an hourglass, in the other a scythe. The walls of the entrance pavilion behind him were constructed of glass.

It was the only museum entrance in the world from which a visitor could see sunset and moonrise simultaneously, a recorded greeting informed me as I stepped inside.

Once through the transparent reception, I followed the path beneath the arch that brought me into a gallery covered floor to ceiling in grandfather clocks. The ticking filled me with anticipation, as if the operational definition of time in action—that is, hundreds of repetitions of free-swinging pendulums—was deeply hopeful.

The museum featured an ever-changing selection of temporary exhibitions. On the day of my visit, in the first exhibit, sat a chair with an attached arm-desk on which rested a ball of what looked like yellow playdough. I was invited to take a seat and play with the dough. The yellow substance was, I discovered after a dizzying few moments, Time Dough. That is, time made into a pliable physical substance to be manipulated into various shapes. The dislocations produced from my handling of the Time Dough resulted in torsions and curvatures that challenged my body’s ability to strain and twist. After some nauseating molding in which I was flattened against the chair’s back, pressed into the corner and crushed into the seat of the chair-desk, I rolled my portion of Time Dough into a snake and stability was reestablished.

Next, I put the two ends of the snake together and found myself seated in a circle of conjoined chair-desks staring at myself all around me. Every time I moved an arm or shifted my weight or spoke, so did all the other me’s, and like the elongated wooden chair-desk on which we sat, we all seemed attached to one another, or rather to slip out of one another such that the towheaded child slid into the pimply teen who became the permed twenty-something who morphed into me pregnant, me middle-aged, me now, and me elderly in a continuous circle. At first, I felt physically ill. Soon, however, I discovered the trick was to allow the atoms of my body to glide and slip at low enough stress levels (hence the piped-in birdsong) to release the elastic energy needed to meet the curve’s requirements.

The familiarity of the girls and women whose expressions ranged from curious to outraged to amused to knowing, made me feel deeply understood. Hello, we said, nodding and smiling at one another over and over, and I was lost in that circular time-shape for I knew not how long, before a guard tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to roll the Time Dough back into a ball so the next visitor might have a chance with it.

Next I found myself walking around a “rug” made of facts concerning time, projected via lasers, into a calligraphic tapestry on the floor. I paced the perimeter reading the slit-woven texts like runes. There I learned that Daylight Savings Time began as a candle-saving joke by Benjamin Franklin; that the length of a day for a dinosaur was 23 hours; that theme parks overestimated wait times for rides, because afterwards people reported overestimation as pleasurable and underestimation as agitating; that the Roman calendar originally included 61 monthless days of winter; that according to the math of three Spanish scientists, time would eventually stop, and “…everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever;” and that, according to Einstein, the closer you were to the center of the earth, the slower time passed.

It was true then, time passed faster for my head than my heart. Perhaps this was why I still felt my children needed me, though I knew they did not.

In the next exhibit, everyone was lying down, and I was glad for the opportunity, if briefly, to equalize the head/heart time gap. The gallery was dimly lit and furnished with rows of velvet upholstered daybeds of various colors. I snuck a caramel into my mouth from the half-finished package I discovered in my pocket as I stretched out on a red bed near the center. Etched into the ceiling was a backlit portrait of a not unjolly man in skullcap and ruff collar. A recording, activated by my head hitting the pillow, informed me in a breathy whisper that I was gazing into the face of James Ussher, 17th century Archbishop of Armagh, who had calculated biblical family histories and concluded that the earth was created on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC at 6pm.

The specificity of James’ finding was interesting, but the featuring of the old miscalculator was puzzling, and I found myself wondering if the archbishop had been a relative of one of the museum’s employees. Dear old uncle Jimmy, I thought with a chuckle, picturing the museum’s aged doorman in knickers learning cribbage from the Late Archbishop of Armagh. Which made me think of the term “late” for deceased and how it was built into the language to hold it against the dead for never being on time. Which reminded me of my late husband who, in the days of his life, had been pathologically prompt. Had his precision, I wondered now, been an unconscious attempt to undo the effects of his impending perpetual lateness? And how many of what we experience as irritations are in fact, unreceived gifts?

I slipped another caramel in my mouth and let the candy rest on my tongue, the sweet saliva stew pooling until another guard tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to move on.

Soon I came upon a large vending machine, next to which was a shelf piled with tokens. I followed the visitor in front of me and did as she did—that is, I took a token from the shelf, inserted it into the vending machine and pressed the gold button. Out dropped a booklet. I was instructed to take my booklet and step into the reading area, which was a circle of leather beanbag chairs. As I maneuvered onto a free beanbag, my knees touched the leg of the man sitting next to me, and for a fraught moment, we seemed to recognize one another, though the recognition quickly turned cold, leaving in its place an awkward shiver of sympathy.

My booklet contained a story about a fisherwoman translated from an unspecified ancient language. In the story, the fisherwoman came upon a group of children torturing a small starfish. She took pity on the starfish and placed it back into the sea. The next day the fisherwoman was visited by a huge starfish who told her the small starfish she’d saved was the Prince of the Sea, and the Queen of the Sea wanted to thank her personally. So, the fisherwoman traveled to the Palace under the sea where she met the Prince and stayed for three days, after which she asked to return to her husband. The Prince gave her a magic box to keep her safe and told her never to open it. When the fisherwoman arrived in her village, 300 years had passed. Nothing was recognizable. Grief-stricken, the fisherwoman opened the box, at which point she fell to the ground a weak, old woman. I found the story deeply disturbing.

The Time Museum was said to be the museum that elicited the widest range of emotions of any of the world’s museums. And indeed, on one end of the bathroom corridor was the Crying Room and on the other end was the Laughing Room. Whether the rooms were meant as shared gathering spaces or containers for the relief of emotional urges, they were both surprisingly contagious, such that a trip to relieve oneself, depending upon which direction one entered and exited the bathroom corridor, risked one’s equanimity to such an extreme that visitors often avoided the toilet entirely and sometimes to their great embarrassment (hence the robust inventory of Time Museum sweatpants on sale at the gift shop and the many visitors I saw walking around in them, the most popular of which was the gray sweatpant with white lettering across the rear that read: What you see is already in the past). I had to pee but decided to hold it.

Just then, a gloved museum employee in coat and tails emerged to announce a special panel discussion on the topic, “What time is it really?” about to get underway. We were ushered forward to an auditorium with swivel chairs placed around a rotating stage upon which sat the speakers—a panel of experts in various fields from astronomy to philosophy to religion to physics. Discussion was made of the hyperplane of space and rotations of the time axis, and after God knew how long, I slunk off, stupefied and headached. The lecture, which seemed not to have an end, had made me ravenous.

The way to the cafe was marked by an enormous timeline silkscreened on tall, foldable panels. From the Big Bang, it took me sixty steps to reach the extinction of the dinosaurs, then just one more to reach the appearance of modern humans and a toetip more to the invention of the veggie burger. Which was the only food served in the cafe, though it came with a choice of potato or kale crisps and an orange. Musicians playing thumb harps wove their way around the tables adding a ceremonious twang to the meal.

Once my appetite was sated, I ducked into the bathroom, past the Laughing Room, and my resultant giggling eased the passing of liquid even after the long wait. As I left the stall, I noticed a number of women standing staring into the mirror that hung above the bank of sinks. I slipped between two, put my hands under the faucet, looked up at my reflection, and my eyes met a younger version of myself in a tunic with shoulder pads. It was the outfit I’d worn when I’d first met my husband. My cheeks were rounder than I was used to, and dark blue eyeshadow glittered on my lids. I was quite beautiful. A label underneath the mirror stated: “This is the age you feel.” The woman next to me gasped, and I peeked at her reflection: a stooped and balding crone in a burlap sack. When I looked at her directly, I saw she was, in fact stylishly dressed and not a day over 40. On the way out was another mirror, this one full-length. All distortion and strangeness—there I stood naked with a child’s round belly but saggy, liver spotted knees. My breasts hung low and deflated, while my shoulders and nose peeled with the sunburns of pre-melanoma days. I did not care to linger over the label. Perhaps it said, This is the age your body parts feel. I quickly exited the bathroom, hands over my ears; tears filled my eyes as I passed the Crying Room.

In short order I found myself on the edge of a time pool in which several visitors were treading water, while others breaststroked against the surface which met them like a lap machine such that they paddled madly but made little progress. Still others were on their backs floating slowly backward. I walked the perimeter of the pool, gazing at water which remained impressively clear but shifted in color from turquoise to jade to gold as my vantage changed. The breaststrokers were panting audibly; the floaters kept periodically lifting their heads to orient themselves, the treaders were tense with concentration, reminding me of amateur meditators. Each group regarded the other with a condescension I found unbecoming, and which I thought betrayed a secret envy. Had I fancied getting wet, surely, I would have sidestroked through the treaders, neither battling nor surrendering to the pool’s current.

Next, I found myself amidst a display of wooden lecterns, each housing a screen, a toggle switch and a silver knob. As I stepped forward to one of the free lecterns, its screen began playing scenes of my life. There I was, sitting on my old couch, watching The Sopranos and nursing my newborn son. I turned the silver knob to the left and watched as my son’s cheek dimpled then fattened with each suckling draw, and my early-mother eyes blinked so slowly it seemed I was falling asleep between each of his gulps. I flipped the toggle, and I was lying in a hospital bed with an IV dripping steroids into my arm as my mother knitted by my side. I turned the knob to the right, and the IV emptied into me and the nurse ran in with a benzo which I gulped down with water, and from my mother’s clicking needles flew a scarf, a hat and mittens to match. This was power. To control which moments to slow and which to speed. I accelerated right through middle school, the stomach flu, the periods, the lemon juice hair bleachings, the binging and purging, the sound and light shows, the mosh pit, the bad trip, the first dates, the date rape, the accident, the breakup.

Then I decelerated one Sunday morning a year and half ago when I’d sat at the kitchen table cupping my mug of coffee as its warmth spread into my palms, and the caffeine draped its blanket of contentment over me, and I turned from the view out the window of the mountain that did not move to the doorway, through which walked my husband, whom I hadn’t seen since I slipped from our bed, and who was heading toward me now, arms open, intoning my full name as if it were a precious stone he’d dropped long ago and just now found and was holding to the light exclaiming how beautifully it glowed.

There was, I noticed, no pause button on the lectern. This struck me as both painful and useful. I could slow my son bending down to kiss me before disappearing into the train that would take him to his home that was no longer our home, but I could not stop him. I could slow the song my daughter sang in the shower and listen as her singing poured through the cracked open door on a plume of steam festooning the house in strawberries and silk, but I could not prevent her from turning off the shower and stepping out. “Can you feel it?” she used to say, I now remembered. “The quickening?” as she’d wave her little hands in the air to indicate time’s gust. I sneezed, and as soon as my hands left the lectern the screen went blank.

At the Sumerian water clock, there was a commotion. The guards were trying to get visitors to move on, but they were refusing to leave. I pushed my way closer and saw the large stone bowl originally filled with water that was slowly draining through the spout at the bottom. Inside the bowl, hours were marked based on the water level, but I quickly ascertained that the water, having reached a certain lower level, was barely trickling out. In contrast to time’s ticking faster as they aged, visitors to the Sumerian water clock witnessed time slowing as the day wore on, and no one wanted to go. People were skipping and dancing, in celebration of time given back.

I continued to the gift shop.

It was hard to decide what to get amid the sundials and the pendulums and the sand sculptures. I wandered the rows of celestial charts, chronometers, chronologies and cosmologies. I fingered a purple Chronos statuette, a leather-bound copy of the Zohar, and flipped through texts by Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Hawking, and Zeno. There was a lovely hologram of Einstein I briefly considered and some light cones that I thought might look nice on a coffee table placed over one of the Big Bang rugs. I passed on the plush arrow of time and the medicine box of stimulants and depressants, though they were each tempting. The pocket-sized DeLorean and glittery weekly planners were overpriced. In the end, I purchased a tight-fitting t-shirt with lettering across the chest that read, All dimensions are subject to change.

As I headed toward the exit, a young girl wearing a museum badge that said, Little Disclaimer stepped in front of me and said, “Nothing you have experienced today proves in any way that there is such a thing, in fact, as time. Thank you for visiting.”

I didn’t quite wish to leave just yet, so I stood by the door, eavesdropping on the other visitors as they left. Those who’d arrived at the Time Museum looking for action found nothing much happened. Those who came for personal development, instead of epiphanies found only echoes and doubles of themselves. Some people felt it was all a sham, others felt it was the best spent time of their lives. “Time has changed everything for me,” I heard one man say.

I made my way out the door, along the path and through the arch of the exit gate, where I paused to look out at the city below. Time’s shadow spilled over me onto the road ahead, and then dark clouds began to gather. I started down the road that wound to the cable car station and soon was drenched. Looking for a straighter route, I ran down the hill over a fuchsia carpet of creeping thyme. In my mind’s eye, my children rolled down the spread of blooms, and my husband held an umbrella over my head. Little raindrop-sized holes opened everywhere.
 

Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 10. View full issue & more.
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Lynn Schmeidler’s fiction has appeared in KR OnlineConjunctionsGeorgia ReviewThe Southern Review and other literary magazines. She is the recipient of a Sewanee Writers Conference Tennessee Williams scholarship in fiction and has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. In addition to fiction, she has published one poetry book, History of Gone (Veliz Books, 2018) and two poetry chapbooks, Wrack Lines (Grayson Books) and Curiouser & Curiouser (Grayson Books 2013 Chapbook Prize Winner). She is currently completing a short story collection.