Donny Can’t Stop Touching the Caravaggio
by Jihoon Park
Donny keeps touching the Caravaggio. No touching the Caravaggio!, we say to Donny. See that red line on the floor? Stay behind the line Donny. But he keeps touching the painting, getting oil from his hands onto the centuries-old masterpiece.
Just look at it Donny!, we say. Look at it with your eyes. Take in Caravaggio’s masterful use of color and the wonderful details. But as soon as nobody is watching him, Donny is right back to touching the painting.
There are only three of us museum guards for the whole gallery, and we can’t afford to be watching Donny at all times. We need to make sure the other museum patrons aren’t crossing the red line and touching the other artworks. Our museum archivist says touching an old painting can immediately turn it into a pile of ash.
The painting is Judith Beheading Holofernes, one of Caravaggio’s masterpieces. In it, the beautiful widow has already seduced the Assyrian general with many bottles of wine and is halfway into cutting through his neck. Judith is freeing the Israelites from the Assyrians. Afterwards, Judith will hold up Holofernes’s head by the hair in triumph. Donny keeps touching the blade running through Holofernes’s neck, tracing the squirting blood with his fingers.
We establish a rule. Every time Donny is caught touching the painting, he will be locked in the museum security room for an hour. This works at first, but as soon as each hour is over, Donny runs right back to touch the painting again. He touches the painting many times before we can pull him away, and sometimes gets three or four hours in one go. Pretty soon Donny racks up close to a month’s worth of time in the security room, so we order him a sleeping bag and some instant ramen noodles. We think this is a bit excessive, but we stick by our words. Rules are rules after all.
But then the police chief comes and tells us we can’t keep Donny against his will in the security room. We tell the police chief that Donny is, in fact, there by his own accord, since he willingly touched the Caravaggio knowing the consequences of his actions. Oh I see, that’s okay then, says the police chief. He tells us to keep up the good work. With Donny locked away, we can do our jobs properly and make sure the other patrons aren’t touching the paintings.
That’s close enough sir! Back away from the paintings, behind the red line!, we yell at the patrons. We push them back with our batons and beat them if they resist.
About three weeks into Donny’s sentence, the museum curator finally notices what we are doing. He says we are being immoral, keeping a Caravaggio enthusiast locked up for simply loving a painting too much. We hold a summit in our secret underground museum bunker and think about solutions. There is a scale model of the museum with three chess pawns as us, the museum guards; a miniature version of Judith Beheading Holofernes drawn on a post-it note; and a red thumbtack, which represents Donny.
After a grueling three-hour tactical session, we find a solution. We free Donny from the security room and tie him to a crucifix right in front of the painting. The police chief and the museum curator, as well as some museum patrons, applaud at our brilliant solution. Now Donny can appreciate Judith Beheading Holofernes without temptations to touch it. When he gets hungry, we feed him honey with a very long wooden spoon. We send pictures to Donny’s wife and children and they weep tears of joy.
One day Donny tells us he is in pain. The ropes holding his wrists and ankles to the crucifix are slipping and giving him awful rope burns. We hold another session in our bunker. In our scale model, Donny the red thumbtack is superglued to a toothpick crucifix. Eventually, we settle on another great solution.
We nail Donny’s hands and feet directly into the crucifix, and then shoot him up with morphine so he can ignore the pain and keep enjoying the painting.
Soon after, we run into another problem. Our museum patrons are becoming very disturbed by our actions. Donny is so hopped up on morphine and drooling all over the floor, and the patrons are doubting the quality and fulfillment he is receiving from looking at the painting. Many doubt that he can even see the painting anymore. Our museum patrons begin protesting, picketing signs and threatening to destroy our precious masterpieces with Molotov Cocktails. Our museum curator is put under tremendous pressure from the local newspapers. The police chief is torn between protecting the paintings and protecting the citizens from themselves. He gives us riot gear and makes us feel powerful. We push and shove the protesters to the ground.
This state of chaos continues for many months, until our museum curator chokes on a salmon bone and dies. A new museum curator is hired, who is very hip and much younger. He listens to Kidz Bop and enjoys local craft beers. The new curator declares that it is okay, once in a while, for people who are genuinely compelled to do so, to gently touch some of our paintings, given that they properly wash their hands first.
We free Donny from the crucifix. We smash it into tiny bits with sledgehammers. The museum patrons throw their picketing signs into a big bonfire. We throw a big party and hold hands and dance.
Now, we often accompany Donny through the galleries and touch the paintings, feeling the rich textures on the canvases. We press our noses up to the paintings and smell the history. Sometimes, just for kicks, we all get drunk with Donny in his minivan and drive around town, smashing mailboxes with aluminum bats and burning down prisons.
Jihoon Park is currently an MFA student at George Mason University. His fiction is forthcoming or published in Spry Literary Journal, The Fiction Pool, MARY: A Journal of New Writing, and elsewhere. He is from San Jose, California.
