The phone started ringing again. Why did telemarketers insist on calling her during the last hour of sleep? Angie removed the cord from the wall but was unable to relax, her self-imposed three-week break was coming to an end. She barely remembered writing the date on the calendar, but now there were less than six hours until her return to the museum.

When she first started working in maintenance, there was considerably less scrutiny as things would break or be broken without fuss. It all changed when the museum added an unfulfilled insurance adjuster named Alcides to the Board. His natural fear of the artwork triggered the defense mechanisms that made him good at his job. He immediately started insisting the museum “Do things the right way.”

Yellow forms with carbon layers between pink and blue copies were attached to clipboards that required weekly evaluations of each wing. Not long after, Hendry was hired to organize the staff into a more systemic unit and begin the process of tackling the back-log of new paperwork. Everyone on the night shift warily started paying more attention to the newly insured step-up areas and the slick spots near the bathrooms. After a few months, Hendry adjusted his schedule to arrive an hour earlier than everyone else. He claimed this helped prepare him for the night shift, but everyone suspected it had something to do with a substance problem that forced him into overnight work. The hour’s difference increased everyone’s anxiety about being late and forced them to speed up their pace to complete the tasks before he left. Angie found that often there was nothing to do at the end of her day and she was usually too tired to care. Angie was always able to sleep through the morning sunlight, and the afternoons allowed her to spend time with her son Mick when he came home from school. She and Len had been married for sixteen years, and if she was being honest, it wasn’t so bad not sharing a bed with him every night. They had the weekend and scheduled times for sex, which made him happy, or at least appear content. She had always been able to compartmentalize people, moments, and situations, allowing the time and space to enjoy the separations between them. Nothing had ever forced her imagination or enticed her to choose between two paths. She appreciated what she had and didn’t feel the need to search for something else. She enjoyed her job at the museum, not the actual work, but the environment and the comforting repetition. Others might view it as cleaning, but it was more than that to her. She was helping to keep an artist’s work alive in a proper place, much the way a nursing home attendant cares for the elderly; instilling dignity and a sense of who they once were. The paintings and sculptures were her wards and she took good care of them, to a fault some might say.

Angie had only been involved in one incident during her first twelve years of employment. It was a rare instance where she had not been paying attention and left a brush poking out of her pocket near the four-foot square bale of “hay” made entirely out of steel sewing pins. The staff called it the “metallic-disaster,” as the entire structure was very fragile and could collapse at any moment. Thankfully, only one of the pins consciously disjoined itself and clamped on to her brush. She hadn’t noticed this until lunch, when the light in the breakroom flashed across the bristle and revealed the interloper. Protocol recommended that she report this to her direct supervisor, but Hendry had left for a fast-food drive-thru, as he always did, returning three minutes before everyone else’s lunch break. She followed him into the Greek and Roman Art gallery and tried to talk louder than the headphones he wore during the second half of the night. She finally got near enough to touch his left elbow, which caused him to spin around suddenly. “For crying out loud Angie, what the hell? You know this hallway creeps me out. Did you take lunch?” Angie was known to sometimes skip or move her break to the end of her shift so that she could be alone for a solid two hours.

“Hendry, one of the pins in the metallic-disaster got lodged in my brush.” She held the duster up and turned her headlamp on so that he could see it.

“What were you doing brushing the cube, you know that thing could go at any moment? I know they say that it’s magnetized, but I don’t see how. I was there when they put it together, and it collapsed at least three times. Stupidest waste of time I’ve ever seen, trying to make a hay bail out of metal needles, just stupid.” It was one of Angie’s favorite pieces in the gallery.

“I didn’t dust it, my brush must’ve been hanging out of my pocket wrong. I screwed up. I’m so sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.” Hendry took the brush and turned it in the light, trying to decide if he should remove the metal from the brush’s soft camel’s hair. “Does anyone else know about this?” he demanded.

“No, you’re the only one I told, but I thought you might want to call Jim and see what he says. He may want to try and put it back.” Angie started to reach for her phone.

“Are you insane? There’s no way in hell he’s going to want to do that. Can you imagine if it collapsed again? The artist is a real Becky to begin with. She made us count every single pin to make sure that it matched the number of deaths during some battle that no one has ever heard of in the fourteen hundreds. Believe me, I did a bunch of reading about this crap. I read EVERYTHING in this museum, and I have yet to come across the Byzantine Slaughter, or whatever she called it. It took us fourteen days to count all the pins, and she made us listen to some kind of Alanis Morrissette station that kept playing a song about a friend’s vagina every two hours. It was maddening, I tell you.” He handed back her newly pinned duster and turned to walk away.

“Well don’t you think that it’s important to put the pin back? You spent fourteen days counting them, that should mean something.” She noticed how the pin had just the slightest curve, or was it an optical illusion based on the wave of the brush?

Hendry leaned into his right arm and turned to face her again, his voice very quiet and steady. “Angie, I like you. You’re quiet, and I think you actually like doing this shit, but let me tell you something. I was high for most of the installation, and so was Jerry, and I’m pretty sure that Melissa can’t calculate more than a hundred numbers before losing count, so to be completely frank, I seriously doubt the number we came up with is close to the number of people killed by those Roman assholes. Or maybe it’s exactly the same number, I mean how did anyone count tens of thousands of deaths back then? The sheer absurdity of it all is what boggles my mind. So no, I don’t think it matters, at least not to the people who counted them, and I know that dead people don’t give a crap, and if that bitch artist cared, she should have counted them out herself rather than make us do the work for her. I hate people like that, and I’m kind of glad that it’s missing a needle, because it’s a fake haystack anyway.” Hendry was quite pleased with his summary and hiccupped slightly as he turned away again.

“I’m going to tell Jim it’s my fault, and I won’t mention that I spoke to you, and I’ll just do the right thing.” With that, her part-time boss turned again, this time with the look of a parent whose child had just thrown their hat into the Sea Lion Pond at the Aquarium.

“You wanna tell Jim, go ahead, and I’ll tell him that you did tell me… and that you did it on purpose… because you didn’t think it was magnetized either.” Hendry was high, she had made a mistake.

A meeting was scheduled the next evening with Jim, who had the brush sitting on his desk. It was the end of his day, but he was more alert than usual. “Angie, please sit down. I want to thank you for taking the time to outline what happened. I understand that you and Hendry had a disagreement, and although you didn’t mention this in your report, I can only imagine that his state of mind was challenging. In any case, he will no longer be your supervisor, nor anyone’s supervisor. I don’t want you to think that this encounter had anything to do with my decision. I thought that giving him some space and responsibility would solve several of his issues and well, that has not worked out. Which brings us to this conversation. I wanted to know if you would give any consideration towards running part of the night crew for me. It’s more responsibility, but there would also be more money. I know that you don’t like to be around the others, but I think we could figure out a way for you to work by yourself and still watch over them. You seem to have a good grasp of what goes on and what everyone’s strengths are. I know it’s a lot to throw at you, but I wanted to solve this in a timely fashion.”

“What’s happening with the needle?” Angie asked. The sunset started to flicker through the window and made the camel hair glow ever so slightly upon the desk.

“We’re going to fly the artist down to place it next week. You remember Danna, she’s very talented and offered to pay her own way, but we insisted that we should bring her in. That’s the other reason I wanted you on board, so you could be there when she does the work. It must be at night of course.” He stopped and looked at the brush, and then at her.

“Sure, I’ll do it. I can do it.” Angie had never worked directly with an artist and wondered if she needed to buy new clothes.

Jim started to get up from the desk and handed her the brush. “That’s great, I’m glad that you’re on board, and I’ll have Louise fill you in on the details and get you new key cards. You’ll have the run of the place, at least during the night. It’s good to talk to you and thank you.” With that she took the brush and walked out of the office, wondering what the run of the place would feel like.

The meeting with Danna went better than anticipated. Angie discovered that they both liked working at night and had similar potato chip cravings at around two-thirty in the morning. Once Angie introduced her to Mesquite-Molasses and Lemon-Infused crinkle crisps, a bond was formed. Angie eventually got the courage to ask about the number of steel pins in the metal bale. The artist laughed for several minutes, stuffing her face with chips and almost choking.

“Oh my gosh, I think that Hendry and the other two were high when we started. I could never find them, so I made up some story about needing an exact number of pins to match some massacre in the Byzantine age. I was joking, but they started counting the pins and stopped hiding from me. I still don’t know how many are in here, but I never really cared, I just wanted the overall dimensions to match a real hay bale, and eventually we got there. But what a pain in the ass! One of the galleries I was working with pushed a sketch I made as the “realization of rural industrial symbiosis”. I would have never built the thing, but then someone bought it. Then the gallery told them that I could build two, one out of toothpicks and one out of pins. I even had someone from NASA call me and ask me questions about poles and magnetism. I’m just glad someone hasn’t completely destroyed it. I’m happy the museum has you looking after it now. That other idiot was unbearable. I’m sure he thought I was a total bitch. It’s stressful having thousands of pointy things following your career, the Feng Shui is terrible. Where are those chips?”

Angie handed her the bag and was too afraid to ask what it would be like to make a bale out of potato chips. She always had those types of ideas when she looked at the art and wondered what it would be like to get paid to stay up all night to create it. Danna stayed for one more night and went through the gallery, pointing out different works and how an artist’s intention sometimes gets lost behind the properly printed plaques with their awkward descriptions. “I hate when artwork is titled,” Danna pointed to her own work. “I’ve only named one piece of work, and that’s because my stupid ex-boyfriend claims that it was his idea. It wasn’t, I have the journal entry to prove it, but I used to get drunk a lot and so who the hell knows? I ended up calling it “Bass-Turd,” but at least he didn’t want credit for it anymore.” Danna gave Angie her email and phone number and the two kept in touch, usually making fun of artists and the sycophants who loitered about in their worlds.

During her three-week hiatus, Angie almost called Danna about what the museum lawyers were labeling the “errancy”. Even Alcides had assured her that there was no malice in her actions and that their insurance policy would protect her from any financial responsibility. At one point he alluded that it might have been a scam to begin with, but that brought her no comfort. She worked very hard during the two years after her promotion to figure out how to keep everyone and everything safe. It was the little things she implemented that made the difference. She allowed music throughout the night, and staff breaks were taken together to help reduce the loneliness. Angie insisted that everyone learn about the artwork and the artists in the gallery, so that they felt connected to what the patrons would see the next day. She was actively involved in six different installations, and all of them opened without a hitch. Things were running smoothly, and she wondered if she had taken that for granted.

It was June when the museum hired their newest curator, Jackie, an energetic twenty-six-and-a-half-year-old who liked to remind everyone that it took Dali twenty-seven years to complete his Persistence of Memory. Jackie’s first exhibition was scheduled for September, and she immediately started receiving new work for a modern series that would be placed in the temporary gallery. This would be the museum’s most ambitious undertaking in over a decade, and Angie’s crew spent a great deal of their evenings disassembling the many cardboard and wooden crates in order to clear space inside the gallery. Security increased as did the insurance paperwork, but Angie enjoyed spending more time in her recently renovated office to review the assessments and make sure that nothing happened to the artwork in the evening hours. The exhibition opening dates were scheduled for the third week of September and the night staff was excited to be invited to the member-gala Saturday evening. There was not a speck of dust in the gallery, and the smooth concrete floors sparkled. Angie allowed everyone to go home an hour earlier as she went through the gallery to take final environmental pictures for Jim before she left. These were her favorite times at the museum with no one to rush or interrupt her thoughts. She didn’t particularly like the new artwork and found its young curator to be overly charmed by the obscure. There were lots of blue penises in the room, but nothing that she considered interesting. She finalized the pictures and was about leave when she noticed a piece of crumpled shipping plastic on the floor. Checking her reports to make sure that the plastic wasn’t listed, she carefully retrieved it and turned off the lights, happy that the opening would go without a hitch. Angie went back into the storage area, ran the plastic through the shredder and went to her computer to transfer the pictures before going home.

Len woke her up after the second phone call. It was still only ten in the morning, and Angie had been in a deep sleep, the Bloody Marys not completely out of her consciousness. It was Jackie the young curator, sounding frantic and talking a mile a minute.

“Angie, thank God, thank God. Look, I’m sorry to call you on a Saturday, but have you seen the Pinwater piece? Jim sent me your pictures, but the Pinwater piece isn’t on them. Do you remember seeing it? Oh my God, it’s my first exhibition, and Jerry is going to kill me. I swear to God, it was the last install of the day, I made sure that everyone knew about it. It’s gone Angie, it’s gone.”

Angie sat up in bed, unphased. So many pieces had gone “missing,” only to be discovered later behind a curtain, or returned to a different gallery. The new curator was probably just overworked and had installed it in the wrong location. Angie sat up in her bed.

“The Pinwater piece. I don’t remember that being on the list. Are you sure it is supposed to be in the temporary gallery? I verified that all of the pieces were clean and listed, I took pictures of everything before I left.”

The voice on the other end stopped breathing, and then gasped. “It was a last-minute addition that I didn’t want anyone to know about. It’s impossible to get a Pinwater, and he’s very secretive about his work. I know it was on the final paperwork that I added last night. You should have gotten my email.” Angie checked her inbox and found the message delivered at two thirty in the morning, her potato chip time.

“This email was delivered to me at two-thirty in the morning. I do our print outs at 10pm for everyone. We didn’t have it.” She put on her glasses to read about the Pinwater piece.

JERRY PINWATER- “Plastic ON FLOOR- an artistic challenge for the artistically inept.” Jerry Pinwater’s take on man’s inability to ignore the clutter and confusion of a world obsessed with daily deliveries and plastic waste. The Plastic ON FLOOR allows us to see what the world would look like in a concrete ocean of our own making. Instead of killing aquatic animals, Mr. Pinwater’s piece sits as a constant nuisance to our sense of order and inability to experience our own waste. A dolphin is not allowed to remove itself from a sea of man-made refuse, why should we?

Angie now despised artwork descriptions as much as Danna.

“Angie, that piece is valued at thirty-four thousand dollars. Do you have any idea what happened to it?” Angie took off her glasses; her head started to throb. “I’ll be there in a half an hour. You’re going to want to call Jim and Alcides. The Pinwater is not going to be in tonight’s opening.” She winced as she heard Len shredding some mail in the other room.

When Angie arrived, the young curator was not there. Luckily, the recycling had been picked up that morning so she would not have to explain why she shredded thousands of dollars’ worth of artwork into two-inch strips. After the meeting with Jim, they decided that her three weeks of vacation should be taken immediately. She spoke to the board over the phone, and to the new curator through email, slowly sinking into a wave of depression that she concluded was of her own making. The three weeks stretched and contracted unpredictably as she prepared for the inevitable return to the museum. At eight fifteen, she got into her car and headed back to work.

Her office was dark, except for the blinking orange light on her phone. The message was from Danna. “Hey Angie, I just heard about the Pinwater piece. What a dickhead. I heard that you’re taking it kind of hard, but you shouldn’t. That asshole is known for his junk. I’m sure he’s absolutely thrilled that you threw his piece away, that’s his whole schtick. Listen, what you did was art, you took something shitty and made it into something less shitty. I bet if you still had those plastic strips, he’d be able to sell them for sixty-thousand dollars, and you wouldn’t have seen a dime. Don’t let this get you down. You were doing your job, and that curator should be fired. I bet she was in on the whole thing, trying to make a name for herself. So, listen, go back to work, head held high, and I’ll come visit soon. We’ll break one of my new toothpick bales and spend a few nights together. Okay, talk to you soon.”

Angie smiled and sent Jim an email, requesting that they have a meeting later that week. She knew that she didn’t want to clean other people’s art any longer. At the end of her shift, she went to breakfast and then parked in front of Brilliant Brushes, where she took a short nap until it opened. The sun reflected brilliantly against the store’s glass windows when she awoke. Angie took her time strolling inside, perusing each aisle, thinking about an image that had been missing from her life. After looking at the blank canvases for a few minutes, she went over to the sales desk and asked to purchase every tube of Acrylic Symphony Monoazo Orange they had.