The Gallery of Lost Species (13 page)

“Apologies, madame!”

“Nice of you to join us,
Ravine.
Take place and be quiet.” Galina checked her name off the list before continuing with strategies on how to counteract gravity.

Raven disappeared behind some lab coats and reappeared at my workstation. I sensed her assessing me as Galina scribbled diagrams on the board.

She took a square of paper from our stack of supplies, folded it again and again—sticking her tongue out in concentration—and produced a small origami flower that she slid over to me.

At break, she shoved the epoxy putty and mat board aside, pulled herself up onto the steel table, and retied the laces of her yellow high-tops.

“Hi, I'm Raven. Has anyone ever told you that you look like Nevertitty?”

“I think it's Nefertiti.”

“Ya, whatserface.” Her smile revealed eye teeth that stuck out like fangs.

She was from Winnipeg and had that prairie frankness about her. She had spiky ebony hair and a sapphire nose stud that accentuated her brown skin and blueberry-black eyes. “Are those real?” I asked of her eyelashes.

“Injun lashes, real deal.”

Raven's dream was to go to massage school. She disliked museums and all the dead things they contained. She told me she was in the program to please her mom and because it was subsidized by Northern Affairs.

“After this, I'm doing massage therapy. Then I'll open my own place. I'm calling it Body Poets.”

“Thanks for the flower,” I said.

“You married?” she asked.

“No.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Sort of. It's complicated.”

“What's complicated's name?”

I paused, unsure how much to disclose. It was the first time I spoke to anyone about Liam.

“Liam Livingstone.” Liam. Liam Livingstone. Edith Livingstone. Liam and Edith Livingstone. Mrs. Livingstone.

Raven crinkled her nose. “Sounds like a stripper.”

“Are you?”

“Am I what? A stripper?”

“Married?”

“Going on four years.” She pointed to a crescent moon tattoo on her neck above where her spine began, telling me about Zachary. “We met at a yoga retreat in Halfmoon Bay. We got matching tattoos and eloped to Niagara Falls. He's from Ottawa, that's why I'm stuck here.”

“You're young to be married for that long.”

“I'm twenty-two with an old soul.” She twisted her back to the right then to the left, cracking it. She was Viv's age, then.

“My sister has a tattoo,” I offered.

She cocked her head. “Why are you here? Who made you do it?”

“I want to be here.”

“Is this, like, your calling?”

“I guess so.”

“Yikes. Not a passionate one, are you.” She put on a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, sizing me up. “Bet you end up at the National Gallery.” She took off the glasses and handed them over. “Use these to get in. They're a prop.”

*   *   *

A
FTER CLASS
, I
'D
take the river path home, passing a small island covered in black-backed gulls whose high-pitched cries bounced off the rocks, through the wind and waves.

The terrain was similar to Vancouver's stone seawall that I'd walked along with Liam and Viv. Only Place du Portage loomed on the other side of my bank, obscured by smokestacks sticking out here and there like my mother's cigarettes in the sand bucket on the porch. She was smoking furiously again.

Fishermen on the shoreline occasionally nodded at me, but mostly they continued staring into their watery silence.

I thought about my sister, coveting her life. She barely called me. She was too busy playing the rising talent, the hot young west coast artist mingling in elite circles.

Based on her recent success in the art scene, I figured she'd cleaned up her life and wasn't partying hard or popping pills anymore. I pictured her at galas and soirées where handsome, wealthy men fell at her feet. During her current stint of fame, she told us her organic forms were selling so much to galleries and collectors that she hadn't finished her degree and couldn't take time off for a visit home.

Yet when I phoned her, the odd time she picked up, what she said didn't quite make sense. She spoke in broken phrases, all jumbled together, which created nonsensical conversations that reminded me of the griffins with mismatched body parts that I used to clean on coins.

I felt like I was talking to Alice in Wonderland. She'd left me behind and gone off into a brilliant world I couldn't infiltrate.

TWENTY-ONE

I
WAS A NATURAL
at collections care. Fast-tracking my diploma, I finished in eight months and then I applied for jobs across the city. No one returned my calls with the exception of one employer. I took a cab to the interview, crossing the interprovincial bridge into the barren concrete landscape along with thousands of civil servants, returning to the federal government towers where my father had spent his life.

Inside the Chaudière complex, the Heritage receptionist accompanied me through a maze of grey cubicles. The odour of instant coffee attached itself to my skin and hair. She led me to a windowless room for a two-hour exam.

She closed the door, but I opened it when I sensed my usual anxiety coming on. I took two puffs off my inhaler. A janitor came by with a bucket on wheels, setting his mop aside to empty out the garbage cans by the window with a vista of the river and the Gallery. Just like Henry would have done, day in and day out.

I couldn't write a word. When the receptionist returned to bring me to the interview panel, I told her I was late for a meeting and I left.

I sent the taxi away and walked to the river's edge. I crossed the long steel truss bridge that my father had driven on twice a day for all those years. The wood boardwalk creaked and vibrated while cyclists and cars flew past. The bridge railings were littered with love locks—padlocks fixed there by couples, who threw the key into the water below to express their undying love. Thousands of these toy keys corroded at the bottom of the river. I hoped the relationships had lasted.

When I reached the art gallery's glass dome, I remained fixed there in the grass, looking up at the structure. Eventually some incorporeal presence propelled me around to the staff entrance. A security guard unlocked the sliding window.

“I'd like to speak with someone in Human Resources.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No.”

“You need to be on the roster.”

“My father died. He wanted me to work here.”

“That's nice.” The guard stood up and adjusted his pants. The radio hooked to his belt emitted voices through the static.

I pulled my resumé from my knapsack and raised it to his window. “I just want to drop this off”—my voice got croaky—“please.”

My poly-blend dress clung to my back. I hadn't taken the time to cool off after crossing the bridge in the scorching sun.

He exhaled until his shoulders slumped forward. “You can't walk in unannounced,” he told me. “But I'll give it to them for you.” He took the papers from my hand and slid his window closed again, turning back to his surveillance screens.

*   *   *

A
MONTH LATER
, I was called in for an interview.

When I arrived, the same security guard was there. This time he treated me like a proper visitor, asking me to sign in before taking a seat in the waiting area.

A woman whose hair was blacker than mine and who wore a denim jumpsuit and fur sandals appeared at the doorway.

“Miss Walker, pleasure. I'm Jeanette.” The hand I shook was decorated with an enormous topaz ring. I followed her through the doors as she went on, “Lucky for you, we happen to be desperate. Three of our juniors defected to the War Museum, where the pay's better. I'm thinking of going there myself. Come in.”

Once we were seated in her office, Jeanette scanned my file. “You've worked with coins?”

“A little.”

“How's your eyesight?”

I removed Raven's glasses. “These are an accessory.”

“You'd be taking measurements and recording numbers. Essentially, it's a data entry job.”

“I can do that.”

“Do you collect?”

“Not anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I have few things to which I'm sentimentally attached.”

“Excellent.” She rearranged her pencil holder and stationery on her spotless desk. “Hoarders tend to have messy offices, and that doesn't reflect well on the institution when funders tour around. Where did you get that necklace?” She pointed with her pencil to the medallion.

“A friend. He was a collector. We lost touch.”

I must have seemed nostalgic because Jeanette opened up then. “It happens,” she said, her almond eyes glazing over. She looked a little heartbroken. “Some people. Nothing we can do about it.”

*   *   *

I
STARTED THAT
same week. When I told Raven about the job, she asked me to find her something there too—anything, she said. She was working at a hosiery store called Fancy Sox and she detested it.

On my first day, Jeanette brought me up to the fourth floor and introduced me to Alejandro, a middle-aged, slender man with a dark goatee who wore a pinstriped suit. Alejandro would train me on Avalon, the database I was to work with as a cataloguer.

Two desks took up the snug room. Once Jeanette left, Alejandro moved a stack of magazines over and motioned. “You can sit there, but the chair's broken.” Then he angled his monitor toward me to demonstrate how to complete tasks in Avalon. “It's a temperamental system that's going to crash and thousands of hours of entries, all the history, will be gone,” he told me. “This is technically not my problem. I've voiced my concerns and no one listens.”

Alejandro went on. “Avalon estimates that we show 4 percent of our collections to the public. Most mornings you'll be in the vaults for at least an hour or two with a laptop, pencil, notepad, and tape measure, cataloguing the other 96 percent. It's riveting work.”

Vault doors stayed closed at all times. He confided that he doubled his lab coats while in storage to keep warm in the strictly climate-controlled environment. He pontificated about handwashing and the ban on lotions and jewellery, and how dust was the enemy, its particles tiny daggers causing irreparable damage to surfaces.

Alejandro also explained the coding for the works on paper, stored in archival black boxes one on top of the other like rectangular coffins on steel shelving units.

“Light and humidity levels are verified daily. It's freezing in there and coffee's not allowed. I slip chocolates and power bars into my pockets, but if you do it, be careful. You don't want to be on your knees collecting crumbs when a curator walks in. There are infestations to think about, insects and mice.”

In the afternoon, Alejandro gave me a tour of the viewing room, which we would alternate supervising, bringing works on paper to researchers arriving with permission letters.

“Make sure they don't have pens or chewing gum, and that they don't spit onto the art while talking. In my opinion, the buggers should wear masks,” Alejandro said. “And ask that they leave their bags at the door. Give them gloves from the desk drawer and check in on them once per shift. Otherwise you're free to do whatever.”

The viewing room had the most windows and light in the entire complex. It was on the top floor. The ceiling was a skylight and the front wall was all glass.

My new refuge steadied me and lifted my spirit.

I stood at the window, gazing down at the river and the iron bridge. The gulls and clouds swept down so low, it was as if they were inside with me.

*   *   *

I
HARDLY NOTICED
the seasons passing. I sent letters to Liam via a general delivery address, but I was uncertain if he had received them. I ploughed through Avalon, correcting typos and inaccuracies, knowing that in the future someone would go in and alter the information I'd entered until every digit was swept away like a sand mandala.

The watercolours, prints, and drawings I catalogued were deteriorating at varying rates and were as translucent as petals. Each one had its own digitized consultation chart like a patient in rehabilitation. I was almost paralyzed by the thought that one false move, one slip or catch of the sleeve, could destroy a work forever.

It was an unglamorous job, but it suited me. If I was in the storage cage a day too many, the skin of my fingers cracked and chapped, sometimes I speculated about what course my life could have taken had I any real talents like Viv.

The female Gallery workers were as striking as my sister. Especially the managers in their silk skirt suits and impressive heels. A flock of forward-thinking, handsome curators had landed on-site like stately monarchs, replacing academics who'd died off and been buried all at once like terracotta warriors, Alejandro told me.

He said affairs went on behind the scenes after hours, when these important individuals laboured into the night, preparing for blockbuster exhibitions—
Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture,
or
Egyptomania,
or
The Great Parade,
showcasing artists as clowns, which caused children to run screaming from the galleries. I regretted having missed that one.

I caught glimpses of these luminous beings flashing past the door to our small office, or wandering through the vaults where I was stationed. They heaved lugubrious sighs and my imagination teleported them into trendy bistros and romantic symphonies, recruiting them into one large-scale orgiastic canvas titled
The Lucky Ones.

Little by little, I let go of the life I'd planned.

Liam had not written back. I felt like a woman seated at a loom unravelling a tapestry or standing on a cliff, skirts and hair blowing wildly—
Woman on Precipice.