The Museum of People

Lanay Griessner

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Yes, I know exactly why you called me here today. But before I explain why I threw the surveillance camera out the staff kitchen window on the third floor; I’d like to remind you that I have an exemplary record. I was Tour Guide of the Month this past June. I’m punctual, committed, a team player.

To be clear: I threw the surveillance camera out the window because I needed to make sure the fall would break it. After all, they have a pretty robust aluminum casing. This is obviously why I chose to run up with it to the third-floor window and not drop it on ground.

I didn’t, however, just throw it out of the kitchen window willy-nilly. No. I threw it precisely so that the lens would shatter when it hit the concrete edge of the reflecting pool at the main entrance and then the shards would fall into the water and drown.

Now before you tell me you can’t drown something that isn’t alive, I will tell you that that attitude is exactly why I didn’t come to you with this issue before. You would have asked me if I was feeling ok. I am. I’ve never been better.

The problem is you. Well, it is not only you personally, ok? But as Director you have the honor of barring the blame for anything that happens on the museum’s premise, which is why I principally blame you for this crime and not the janitor, or the cashier, who were at the very least complicit.

My crime, defacing private property (your words), is negligible compared to what you have done, and would probably continue to do, if I hadn’t decided to fix it.

It was, frankly, my responsibility to act as the most senior employee here. Yes, I said most senior. You may not have noticed but I’ve been here for ten years. Ten! You’ve been here for barely one. You’re still a baby in museum years. Don’t give me that face. It’s not a criticism, it’s just a fact.

Back when I was hired the museum was still under construction. We decided to call it a museum because we wanted the whole marketing package to have a Fine Arts vibe, but it was primarily conceived as a staging location. We had special rooms for rent, each with their own look and feel, naturally all customizable for a price.

You must remember that at the time Freezing was still niche. It was mostly millionaires and celebrities that were Freezing themselves for meditation or for long public appearances where they needed to smile for hours or just didn’t want to speak.

Once the patent expired though, it was a whole new ballgame: Thousands of Freezing studios sprung up all over the country offering styling, costumes, and transportation to and from a chosen display destination. Everyone with a middle-class income could pay to have their moment in the spotlight as a living, breathing statue. So, we reorganized, made cheaper packages, and business boomed. By the time Freezing was fashionable, we had waiting lists for Freezing spots and even visitor spots in every one of our rooms.

It still baffles me that Freezing became so popular but the whole process has a very special appeal according to Alice, our current staff psychologist (have you ever said hello to her, even once?). It’s not a photograph of our body, it’s our whole physical body that we are offering to the world or giving up for a short period of time. That means something to you and to your audience no matter if you are staring into the eyes of your newborn child in the privacy of your own home or posing as a lingerie model in the mall. It’s the commitment that matters.

For the first year or so that we were in operation Freezing was all about sexy poses and carnival costumes until some unlucky people started getting stuck: People who didn’t snap out of it after 4 or even 40 hours, studios that gave the wrong Freezing dose (sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose) and turned the people permanently into their own statue. At first even we sent them to the hospitals, but soon they were overwhelmed with Frozen people the doctors had no way to treat. It was then that the government took over and told us to function not only as a real museum but also to take on basic medical care responsibilities for the patients to keep them alive (also known as our In-And-Out Care Model: nutritional fluids in, waste fluids out). Our mission became clear: a house for every Stuck person until the day a cure was discovered, or they died.

Was that a snicker? Please John. May I call you John? Good. I am, in fact, not being dramatic. They do die. All the time. The turnover in our museum would make lemmings blush.

Freezing problems are rare, but they do happen, and we still don’t understand why some people get Stuck and others don’t, or why some die and others don’t. It’s an intensively studied area in our R&D department. You would have known this already if you had bothered to attend even one our Monday seminars.

The lucky Stuck ones (and let’s be honest, the prettiest ones) are now on display for the public in our museum. The rest are in Storage now and haven’t had any visitors (besides Staff and Medical) since their arrival. And it’s not just one or two people, we are talking about 137 people who were effectively trapped in a dim-lit basement.

Storage. That was on your watch. Sure, it needed to be approved by the Board and enforced by Staff but it’s your signature that made it happen. Why didn’t you just expand the museum and keep it as a place for everyone? Why did you create this unnecessary hierarchy of Stuckness?

You could argue (if you were an asshole, which, let’s be honest, you are) that they deserved it. They knew the risks of what they were getting into.

But did they really?

Whatever the cause of Stuckness is, we all think we are immune because it is much more convenient that way. Freezing is a risk we allow ourselves to take so we can all pretend to be someone special for a few hours. And sure, we all know deep down there is some risk to what we are doing, but we accept it so we can live the life we want, just like we accept the risk of driving a car, breathing in secondhand smoke, or using dull knives to cut vegetables.

Don’t get me wrong, plenty of the Frozen people in Storage look ridiculous, but they are still people who deserve a basic level of attention and at the very least dusting! The statues don’t represent who these people are; the whole look and feel of that moment they decided to Freeze represents a single choice they once made under who knows what influence. We’ve got plenty of slutty Halloween bunny mistakes in Storage that were mothers and teachers and cleaning ladies who just wanted to have a laugh for a few hours, and it got out of hand.

I know this all now because I was assigned to Storage for the first time at the start of this summer due to compound staffing issues (layoffs, vacations, some stray quitters).

My job was just to turn off the lights and lock up before I went home, but I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. Of course, I knew Storage was there, but I didn’t really know it until I saw it. I was busy with my tours and making quite a bit extra in tips (did I already mention that I was Tour Guide of the Month?). I didn’t see the people arriving, the bodies filling the room. I didn’t see their loneliness. Now I had to see these wasted lives and lock them in a room every night. It was heartbreaking to listen to their collective silence.

I couldn’t just lock the door after I saw their faces. I started lingering, checking my email on my phone, listening to a podcast without headphones. At first, I stayed just a few extra minutes, I didn’t want to look weird. But soon I was staying for hours after my shift ended just to talk with them, all of them, about my boring life: television shows I watched, the jerk that cut me off in traffic, the price of eggs and milk compared to last year.

And you know what? The people in Storage cared a lot. They needed me, much more than the people who got daily visitors and flowers on the first floor.

It felt good to be needed. You can call it selfish but it’s just human if you ask me. When I enter the room, they all grunt hello (the ones who can) now in a way that feels so hopeful. Everyone needs to care for something. Even dictators have plants, or the laziest ones a rock garden. Our families grow up and we fill the void with farming, or cats, or the crazy ones get parrots who will outlive them to torture their next of kin by repeating the same 3 sentences until they die. We need it. 

The people in Storage have become my children. I know their sounds; I am responsible for their fluids. I went from being extremely lonely to having too many children in weeks. I feel all the joy and weight of motherhood. And as their mother I have a certain responsibility to keep them safe but also to try to create an environment conducive for happiness.

For example, I try to move everyone next to people they like, which is hard when they can only grunt but one grunt for yes and two grunts for no can take you a pretty long way if you are creative.

Now on the night in question, we were having a bad movie night in Storage. I brought down the projector and positioned everyone so we could watch Plan 9 From Outer Space together, just for fun. It was a beautiful, normal moment together with lots of collective grunting and it just hit me: this was the best I could reasonably do for them here. It was good, but as their mother I knew I must do better.

So as soon as the movie ended, I removed the surveillance camera, ran it up to the staff kitchen window on the third floor and threw it, as we have already established. I did it so I could give them a more normal life at home. In my home. It took me hours to get them all there since I had to first load them onto pallets and then bring them home in my pick-up truck while they were hidden under a large Picknick blanket. I easily took 30 trips that night to and from the museum but by morning they were all safely in their new home. It’s cramped, sure, but we manage a little more each day. The real funny thing to me is that you called me here to complain about a cheap camera, but you didn’t even notice everyone was gone.

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Lanay Griessner is an American short story writer with a PhD in biology that she doesn’t know what to do with yet. Originally from Springfield, Massachusetts, Lanay moved to Austria in 2008 for graduate school and couldn’t figure out how to leave because the signs were all in German. She now lives in Neunkirchen, Austria with her husband and two children.

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