On Stillness

Many years before, the man had a job as an art conservator at a famous museum. Night after night, he was tasked with painting and repainting the bodies of various sea creatures in the Hall of Ocean Life, which was a wide corridor of room-sized dioramas populated by full-scale tuna, cetaceans, corals, rays, and other aquatic animals. And so he lived for years crawling and kneeling under low roofs of textured plastic pressed to look like the troubled surface of the sea.

He could feel, now, the way his neck would become stiff from sitting on the turquoise floor and craning his head up to paint a fish’s golden scales with a delicate brush. At times, his hand holding the brush would cramp sharply, and he would have to put his implement down and stretch his fingers open like a starfish.

He worked at night when the crowds had gone and the only other souls left in the museum were a few patrolling security guards scattered through the building’s many wings, walking their solitary paths. And in the Hall, only the slight stick of the man’s bare feet on the ocean floor, the silent brush on the belly of a fish that needed retouching due to light exposure, the pleasure of life organized and frozen in its compartments.