I work security at the Museum of Joy, on Floor 21. It is a job I inherited from my father.

  He worked at the Museum since before I was born. Unlike me, he was moved from floor to floor every few years. The first time I ever visited him at his job, he was on Floor 39. Every few years brought a new post, a new floor, and new exhibits; he retired on Floor 21.

  Family members could visit the Museum for free. The first time I visited, the lady at the front desk told me to make myself at home. I spent my visits on my father’s floors, on break we could visit others. This made me an immigrant of sorts in the museum, every few years a new floor would be my home-- if the lady at the front desk was to be believed. I didn’t, to my father’s displeasure.

  Even when I donned the uniform and was posted to Floor 21, I felt like a refugee in temporary asylum, ready to move at a moments notice. I’ve been on this floor for decades now, but wouldn’t be surprised if my lanyard changes tomorrow.

  This does mean that I’ve become intimately familiar with the exhibits of Floor 21: Projections. The Floor has three dark rooms, each showing a singular film from opening to close. The films are all made by foreigners with hard to pronounce names.

  The rooms themselves are black, with hard wooden benches spaced evenly between an appropriate number of walls and ceilings.

  Theatre 1 is titled MEAT. In some far-flung warehouse out in the Mojave Desert, the artist has placed a giant white tarp the length of a football field, and upon that tarp men wear skin colored loincloths, and women wear skin colored shifts. These men and women dance and play stiffly; I cannot tell if it is choreographed or improvisational. Periodically, there will be meat.

  Art can be that simple, I suppose.

  Uncooked chicken, beef, tripe, lamb, snake, ostrich, fish, turkey, alligator, octopus, escargot, kangaroo, various crustaceans, goat, rabbit, but never pork. These were thrown at the subjects as they writhed and played and the animal product became a natural part of the movement.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  It was the type of exhibit that I dismissed as obvious on my first viewing. Not that I knew the intent, but I could certainly guess why I’d put a person through all that.

  The second exhibit has changed since my starting days, and I much preferred the original. Theatre 2 is/was titled SILENCE. Originally it featured a 20-minute slow pan across Arlington Cemetery. The footage was quite sharp, allowing the audience to make out the names of the tombstones, if they bore them. The new footage of the same name is raucous. It is a whopping 90 minutes of patients in hospitals beds. There is frantic clatter from the staff, beeping of machines, the occasional chest compressions followed by electricity. A hundred vignettes end the same way as the haggard patient downs a paper cupful of pills and falls asleep.

  Working in security, it is probably a bit gauche to critique the art, but I preferred the original and brought it up to management. I was told that the new work is a much more engaging exhibit, much more profitable.

  Theatre 3 is titled RAPE. It’s certainly the most active of the films as spastic scenes quickly cut to show the bombing of small villages, men in caged octagons beating the shit out of each other with their bare fists, slaughter houses, body cam footage, the list goes on and on. I’ve never managed to sit through much of it, but as far as I’ve seen, the footage never repeats.

  Sex doesn’t seem to be a factor. It’d be more watchable if it was.

  What confuses me the most are the people who come to see the films. Some will sit through very little, some the entirety or as close to that as is reasonable for a museum outing. But every time I inquire into their experience, the answer is always the same.

  That was horrible.

  I can’t believe someone would make that.

  This goes against everything I believe.

  But the popularity has never lessened. So, I once suggested to a particularly irate mother-- whose children had just watched two half naked men use tripe to play jump rope for a similarly ashamed woman-- that she could tell others not to come. If not to the Museum, then at least to Projections.

  Darling, she says to me, all the brochures say this is a must. My children have seen the commercials, they’d hang me if I didn’t bring them. And clearly you haven’t seen the news, this fellow running for office spoke out on the Rape Film and now everyone knows he’s both a communist and antisemite.

  I nodded in agreement, not wanting to be either of those things.

  I suppose I could request to change floors. My father was transferred this way and that without a request, so it must be easy to do, but I can’t help feel that it would be more of the same. The objects in the films are the objects in glass cases on floors below me; the acts in the dark rooms are captured in immaculate oil paint above me.

  Maybe someday I’ll get art. I suspect my father did.