Installation 2: Diet Coke & Cheese Nips previous

The next day, Phoebe woke up feeling like Mary Tyler Moore. She put on what she thought was a very smart pair of trousers and tied a scarf around her neck. She ate a piece of toast while standing in the kitchen and then she set off to catch the bus. She sat by herself, next to a window, and read a book about a housewife in the 1960s who thinks she is going crazy. Sometimes she would look up and out the window at the houses or shops going by and wonder if she would ever find a way to write something.

At one of the stops, an older woman and a younger woman got on and sat together to continue their conversation.

“So I said, ‘I’m not making you dinner and cleaning up and sewing a button on your coat,’” the younger woman said. “That’s my whole night. There’s no time for me in there at all. Then I’ve gotta give Gigi her bath and put her to bed? I don’t think so.”

“That’s true,” the older woman said. “It wasn’t fair, especially if he was just reading a book the entire time.”

“It’s so hard,” the younger woman said. “I wouldn’t want to be alone but sometimes I wonder if I’ve made a mistake.”

“No,” the older woman said. “You wouldn’t want to be alone. I’m alone. I work all day, filing and answering phones, and then I come home to leftover chicken from Sunday. It’s been like this for fifteen years.”

Suddenly, Phoebe couldn’t wait to get off the bus. When it pulled up on the corner in front of The Museum, she rushed to the door and hopped off. There it was, all odd angles, white walls and shining glass. She felt better just looking at it. Inside, she strode to the front desk and asked for her ID badge.

“Who are you?” the guard asked.

“Phoebe Persons,” Phoebe said, scanning the badges waiting for their owners to claim them for the day.

“No Phoebe Persons,” the guard said.

“But I left it here last night,” Phoebe said.

“I don’t know,” the guard said. “Why don’t you go back to Receiving and talk to Hank?”

There was a line of museum employees behind her. Phoebe had no choice but to move off in the vague direction of Receiving. She wandered the halls, passing the few familiar spots – the copy closet, the staff room, the mail room – and then was lost in a labyrinth of hallways. Finally, a blond woman wearing what looked to be a cashmere wraparound dress clicked down the hallway in leather boots. Leather boots!

“Excuse me,” Phoebe said. “Where’s Receiving?”

The woman was eating a miniature croissant. She lifted the croissant to her lips and took a bite while tossing back her hair, which was shiny even in the fluorescents of the back hallways of the museum. And then she shrugged, turned and clicked away. Phoebe watched her go. She was fantastically thin and beautiful and wearing the fabulous aforementioned boots. She knew where she was going and as she went she ate a delicious, buttery croissant. Life was not fair.

It took another twenty minutes to locate Receiving and an additional five to wait for Hank to be done shooting the shit with a guy making a delivery.

“What do you want?” Hank asked, fixing her with bloodshot eyes.

“I’m looking for my badge,” Phoebe said.

“Badges are up front,” Hank said and wiped his nose on a dirty handkerchief.

“They sent me back here,” Phoebe said, looking around at the vast garage, loading dock and freight elevator that comprised Receiving. Off to the side was Hank’s tiny office, the door open just enough to reveal a poster of Carmen Electra tacked to the wall.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” Hank said. “No badges back here.”

Phoebe went back up to her office. Or rather, she tried to go back up to her office but got lost on the way and ended up back at the mail room. From there she took a wrong turn and found herself in the lobby, caught up in a swirl of first-graders arriving for a tour, all of them holding hands as they walked back to the African art galleries; a human chain that prevented her from crossing over to the administrative offices. When she finally got to her desk, she was sweaty. Carlotta came out and squinted at her, then at the clock.

“Come into my office,” Carlotta said. “We need to talk.”

“I’m sorry,” Phoebe said as she sat down in front of Carlotta’s desk. “I was actually fifteen minutes early but now I’m somehow forty minutes late because my badge is missing and I got lost…”

“Do you know what’s important in this job?” Carlotta asked. “Being punctual. When the phones start ringing, someone needs to be here to answer them. If The Director walks by, someone needs to be at that front desk, smiling out at him. Do you know how many people applied for your job?”

“No,” Phoebe said. “How many?”

Carlotta’s eye started twitching.

“When I come into work,” Carlotta said. “And someone tells me that one of my employees is wandering around the hallways, I get concerned. Especially when I hear the phone ringing.”

As if on cue, the phone at the front desk squawked to life. Phoebe jumped.

“But my badge…” Phoebe said.

“Badges are part of working here,” Carlotta said. “You’ll get used to our high level of security. Now please go do your job.”

Phoebe answered the phone. It was for Julia. She transferred the call despite the fact that Julia’s office was dark. A man walked by and she smiled at him because she wasn’t sure if he was The Director. She hoped it was. She hoped he wouldn’t walk by when she was in the bathroom. She looked at The Museum’s website. She accepted the mail when it came up from the mail room, delivered on a little cart by a man who didn’t make eye contact. She tried to parcel it out to the correct people, putting envelopes into the clear acrylic mail holders hung outside office doors.There were other people in the office who worked for Julia and Carlotta. She’d met them all yesterday and had forgotten their names.

At noon she got up from her desk and wrapped her cardigan sweater around her shoulders. She planned to spend her lunch hour sitting in the staff room eating her leftover Chinese and browsing through the latest copy of Harper's Bazaar. There were some small pockets of museum staff seated at tables around the room. She walked to the refrigerator. It was filled with lunches in brown or white bags. Someone had a metal Scooby Doo lunchbox. She didn’t see her little white container with the red pagoda and wire handle, heavy with food. She pushed lunches aside and looked around the room. She looked in the wastebasket. There was no evidence of the box ever existing.

She straightened up and looked around. She had no business being in the staff lunch room with no lunch. She rolled Harpers’ Bazaar into a tube and tucked it under her arm, putting on a face meant to look surprised but in a hurry. “Oh,” she hoped it said. “I was going to eat lunch but I just remembered that my friends are waiting for me at a posh eatery and I must hurry if I want to catch them before they eat all the Asian pot stickers without me.”

Back at her desk, she looked through her wallet for change so she could have a lunch of Diet Coke and Cheese Nips. Before going out to the vending machines, she stopped at Carlotta’s door. Carlotta sat at her desk with her eyes closed, listening to a CD of loon calls.

“Carlotta?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, but I have to tell you something,” Phoebe said. “Someone took my lunch and I’m just wondering if that sort of thing happens a lot around here.”

“Was it leftovers?” Carlotta asked. “From yesterday?”

“Yes, my Chinese,” Phoebe said.

"It's the Phantom," Carlotta said and pointed to the ground. "The guy who monitors the video footage. He gets hungry and comes upstairs and goes through the refrigerator. Won't touch stuff people bring from home but eats anything from a restaurant. One time he ate all the chicken out of my kung pao and put the rest back."

“That’s horrible,” Phoebe said. “We have to speak to him; make him stop.”

“You can’t stop the Phantom,” Carlotta said. “He’s here when we aren’t and he controls the video footage. I guess he used to be a nice guy, handsome, up-and-comer on the guarding scene and then something horrible happened.”

“What?” Phoebe felt the hair on her arms stand up despite the cardigan.

“Some kind of accident in the restoration lab,” Carlotta said. “He wasn’t supposed to be in there but he had aspirations to become a restorer and would sneak in at night. But something went wrong with some acid he used.”

“Did it blind him?” Phoebe said.

“No, his eyes are fine,” Carlotta said. “He’s still a guard after all. He can see.”

“What then?”

“The accident made part of his face look like raw hamburger, is what I heard. He doesn’t let many people see his face,” Carlotta said, then sighed and stood up.

“OK,” Phoebe said. “But I still think it’s too bad we can’t use the refrigerator in that manner just because of him.”

“Life is tough,” Carlotta said. “I’ve gotta go out for a little while.”

Phoebe went to the vending machines and got her Diet Coke and Cheese Nips. Back at her desk, she spread the little crackers out in front of her and nibbled them one at a time while watching the phone. It didn’t ring. A man walked by and she smiled, wondering if he was The Director. Carlotta never came back and Julia’s office remained dark.

At the end of the afternoon, Phoebe stood up and put on her cardigan. She flipped off her desk lamp and picked up her bag and proceeded to join the migration out of the museum. She stood in line to hand in her badge and when it was her turn she stepped up to the counter with a firm resolve.

“My badge is missing,” she said. “So I hope that someone here can locate it before tomorrow morning or I’m not going to be a happy person.”

The guard on duty, a pasty-faced man with hair dyed platinum, didn’t even look up.

“Name?” he asked.

“Phoebe Persons.”

He scanned the rows of badges laid out in front of him, ticking them off with a chubby finger.

“Ah,” he said. “It’s right here. Phoebe Persons. Cute picture.”

“It’s there?” Phoebe said, peering down at the upside-down picture. “But it wasn’t here this morning.”

“Well,” the guard said. “Maybe someone was borrowing it.”

“I don’t think that’s funny,” Phoebe said. “You’re supposed to be guarding this museum and not letting just anyone in to…”

“Next,” the guard said.

Phoebe went outside and caught her bus. She saw the older woman from that morning and went to the back of the bus to avoid her. When she got home she made herself a large and comforting dinner of spinach salad with goat cheese, linguine with clam sauce and coconut gelato for dessert.

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