Open Casket
The museum is closed now. Night, falling all evening, can finally be said to have fully fallen. The guards are heading home on commuter trains, even the mugshots on the lanyards under their coats closing their eyes in exhaustion, while, beneath the train, the wheels spark on the rails like a subconscious inclination towards violence. The alarms have been set like mousetraps. Lasers tauten, waiting for a foot to trip them. The museum isn’t open, but the paintings still are, this one especially. All day people shuffled past it as if past a casket, which is what it is, or what it purports to be. In truth it is nothing but some bold brushstrokes applied with utter confidence, the confidence of the extremely rich or the abjectly poor, the confidence of someone who has nothing to lose. The brushstrokes approximate a pain the painter can’t fathom, which is perhaps why the painter was able to paint it at all. But under all this artifice abides one real thing: a black horsehair tugged from the head of the brush by the artist’s ardor to get their idea down, trapped in the swirled white paint of the dress shirt. Earlier, when, along with the paintings, the museum was open, too, a boy noticed it and reached to point it out to his mother, waking one of the guards out of his standing slumber to say, in a mechanical way: “No touching the art.” Drawing his hand back, the boy knew that nothing about the painting was real but that black horsehair, which is still there tonight, which will be there long after the painting is taken down, an eyelash in the painting’s eye, which, wide open in the closed museum, can’t blink it away.