There are certain places that I don’t like going to anymore. It’s not the creepy places like abandoned alleys or junkyards or anything. There’s nothing sad about those places, they’re empty, but they’ve always been like that. You can’t ruin them; they look positively cheerful compared to some of the spots I used to like before civilization made a quick exit. I minored in art history in college so I used to do all of my projects at the art museum downtown. I spent a lot of time there. They had a simple but really pretty Chagall and Khalo’s “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale”. Really nice pieces. I tried to copy Frida Kahlo’s piece once without much success. I had a morbid fascination with it. The way she painted death was honest and plain, and I thought maybe the painting could help me understand it better if I tried to recreate it, but I could never get a good grasp of it. I bet I could paint it without any trouble now. Frida wouldn’t have questioned taking up a few guns if Zombies had attacked in her time. She thought the mystery in life was stripped away from her after her body got mangled in her bus accident. Everything had lost its romanticism and the world was horrifyingly clear to her perception. I didn’t really know what that meant before.
I went back to the museum with Rok a couple of weeks in. It’s a mistake I repeated a few times: going back to places that used to be important to me. Needless to say the museum is mostly destroyed from the inside out, someone had used it to hole up in and take out as many zombies as they could, probably a few different people. Maybe they liked the bright lights and open spaces, or maybe they got stuck by a hoard or some other circumstance beyond their control. Most everything had substantial damage. The paintings had bullet holes if they were lucky, but others were completely unrecognizable, blown to bits or covered in dried up gore. A lot of stuff was probably stolen. Though I don’t see why someone would take anything so fragile through the apocalypse. Maybe to protect something. A few glass cases were left unbroken, but the glass was cracked to the point of shattering, so I let them be. The museum was always a little cold, but now it’s a big empty building. There aren’t any paintings, just big pieces of cloth or board with some paint, whatever that’s been spared bullets and intestines and blood. I spent a long time trying to find pieces that hadn’t been damaged at all. I found two. Most of the statues had chips or bullet holes, many were in pieces. A few of the modern art statues looked somewhat improved. It made me think of the Venus de Milo with her missing arms. Would anyone ever find a statue from our time, with bullet holes through the stomach or missing body parts from a misfired automatic weapon? I did get to do one thing I always wanted to do. When I was walking around the museum during college, I always had a temptation in the back of my mind to touch some of the really beautiful, historically significant paintings. I wanted to feel like I touched a piece of history, of something that had been important and would become more important as society continued forward. Now, there really isn’t any reason not to. I found a Monet landscape, a garden with one of the floral arches and a pond. It had a red hand print on the corner, over a particularly pretty waterlily floating on the pond. I don’t know if it was a zombie, unintentionally touching, and destroying, an object of singular beauty, or maybe it was someone dying and touching the painting as a last connection with something not completely fucked up. I let myself touch the floral arch and feel the texture on the pond. Just a little. The blood will do more damage than the oil of my still human hands will. Besides, it’s not going to be a part of the future anymore, probably no other living person will come visit it. I couldn’t find the Frida, the case was smashed and empty. I hope that someone stole it, a morbid reminder of the unabashed destruction chasing behind them, trying to swallow up any and every living thing. The Chagall wasn’t so lucky. I found some of the pieces, blue background, a horse’s ear. I put all of them in a ziploc bag. I don’t have any place safe to put it, so I just keep it as secure as I can, but it will decay like everything else. It’s living some weird other life now, all broken and abstract. Nothing is safe from the virus, you don’t even need to be a living creature to be undead anymore.