Standing outside it, you think the Museum the Human Heart looks nothing like you had been led to believe. In the artist’s representation, it had resembled an elegant villa, or perhaps a fairytale cottage. But the building before you—tall, narrow, and dark—looks like it should be condemned. The front steps are crumbling, splattered with dog shit, and glittering with broken glass.
You and your companion hesitate on the threshold. But you’ve both traveled such a distance to get here, to this dangerous building in a disreputable quarter of a dying city on the edge of a lost continent. So, what the hell? You both pick your way up the ruined, ancient steps and push through the revolving doors.
The man at the ticket booth reminds you of an actor you can’t quite place. Maybe from some sad silent movie you once saw, or a David Lynch film. He reminds you, also, of that smarmy waiter at the crap Italian joint where you had your heart broken the summer before you dropped out of university. You got wasted that night on pills and cheap chianti. After that, for years, every time you ate antipasto it tasted a little like vomit and ashes in your mouth. Without asking, the attendant slides two tickets through the aperture. When you fumble for your credit card, he tells you not to worry, you’ll pay later.
Inside the lobby, cramped and dim, there’s music playing through tinny speakers: “Killing Me Softly” and a muzak cover of something you half-remember (by Morrisey maybe?), all breathy vocals and synthesizer strings.
The gallery itself, once you finally get there down the seemingly endless hallway lined with closed doors and ominous portraits, is disorienting in the extreme – labyrinthine, with no clear layout or discernable organization. The floor plan in the pamphlet that came with the tickets seems to have been contrived by a madman or imbecile, or else it’s a depiction of some other building altogether.
Nor are the exhibits at all what you had expected. All the walls are covered in nothing but rows and rows of flyblown mirrors inside cheap looking junk shop frames. As you move about, standing before each looking glass, you’re appalled to see they are mirrors of the distorting funhouse kind. Some of them make you look leering and gargantuan, others make you look tiny and mean. Or sexy, or melancholic, or sinister, or angry, or reckless, or confused. In some of them, your companion – standing right beside you – is reflected upside down, or separated from you by vast stretches of black space, or is semi-transparent, or not there at all. In a few, there are whole other people you don’t recognize looking back at you, with different dreams and different eyes. When you hold your hand up to the glass, one of the strangers does the same. It’s hard to interpret the meaning of this gesture.
This place is seriously beginning to creep you out. Certainly a far cry from the “whimsical and romantic” outing the literature had described. It doesn’t help that there is apparently nobody else around you, even though you can hear the indistinct sounds of many voices drifting in from other rooms, around corners, down hallways, on the other sides of walls.
You exit, of course, through the gift shop. There are displays of glow-the-the-dark plastic saints, lucky cats, evil eyes, novelty handcuffs trimmed with pink faux fur.
The revolving doors spit you out, weighed down with shopping bags, onto the rush hour sidewalk. It’s only when you’re already halfway home, fighting through the anonymous press of humanity all around you, that it even occurs to you to wonder whatever happened to that companion of yours, or (come to think of it) if there had really ever been one at all.
