Now

The Museum of Heads holds the world’s largest collection of heads.

The Museum of Heads opened a long time ago. No one can say when. If they could, they would still have their heads.

In front of the Museum of Heads is a marquee taken from an old cinema. The letters could be rearranged to form the titles of any number of temporary exhibits, but they never change. They have not been in moved in years and as far as anyone can tell they are pretty much stuck there now. They say, “The Museum of Heads.”

The iron door to the Museum of Heads is shorter than most. The architects assumed that those who visited would not need quite so much head space. All that space is taken up inside. If you still have your head, you must duck as you enter or the surprisingly sharp edge that juts out from the jamb will slice you right above the Adam’s apple before you even register it. But it’s not all tragedy; after that minor inconvenience, you will fit without stooping.

There is neither membership desk nor ticket booth in the lobby at the Museum of Heads, nor is there a worker calculating a rolling headcount of visitors. The heads have all been accounted for. The lockers are glued shut. There is a coat rack but no appropriate place to store a hat.

The lights are very low in the Museum of Heads, much lower than in a typical art gallery or even a science center. The exhibition designers never request above 300 lumens and prefer far below. It goes against some of their better judgement, but they were all taught in their graduate programs to attend, in order, to the material, then to the space, then to whatever indulgent stylization they are dying to justify with text. In this case, the objects are quite sensitive to light, not because their colors might fade or their lines disappear, but because their eyes are no longer connected to blood flow.

The entrance to the main gallery at the Museum of Heads has neither map, chronology, nor didactics. It simply says in black block letters on the red wall, “Here Are The Heads.” And then, there they are.

The Museum of Heads is filled with concrete plinth after concrete plinth, each with a rectangular glass top about two feet high. The plinths range in height from four feet all the way to six and a half. This just about constitutes the range of heights minus heads for average adults, give or take some outliers.

The Museum of Heads’s mission statement contains phrases carefully vetted by the board of directors: “aims to serve our entire community,” “promotes universal experiences,” “demonstrates the wide appeal of heads.” If you read closely, you will see it does not promise equal provisions for every headless person everywhere.

The Museum of Heads tries to meet its visitors where they are, but some will always slip through the cracks, and no one’s in the business of trying to get sued these days. Grant funding has dried up and philanthropists get so enamored of the trends in contemporary art. The curators complain over espresso how no one seems to care about heads anymore, now that everyone’s lost theirs.

Each plinth in the Museum of Heads contains one single head. Each head stands on a custom-built balsa platform constructed in-house by a crack carpentry team. One long silver screw extends up from the wood. When the acquisitions department obtains a new head, they immediately have it fitted in the base of the neck with a metal ridged tube. When the head is put on display, the installers position it atop the screw and turn it round and round until it settles, flush and secure, on its platform. Sometimes a head gets vertigo from this process, but it’s worth it. Nothing will rattle it, not even an earthquake. It belongs fully to the Museum of Heads.

Once in the main space of the Museum of Heads, visitors are encouraged to move from plinth to plinth in search of the heads that speak most to them. It’s a common refrain in the art world that the average visitor spends only twenty or so seconds in front of a painting before taking pictures of the next one. But the Museum of Heads tries to ameliorate this modern condition by offering visitors the things they no longer have.

The marketing staff at the Museum of Heads gets creative with their advertising. They know how hard it is to entice visitors inside. But they also know that, once they are there, they never want to leave. The battle is in getting them to cross the threshold.

There is never any chatter or disturbance in the Museum of Heads, which is one of the things that makes it so precious. Wandering from head to head induces a hypnotic state: the pervasive sense of loss alleviated by abundance, futures unfurling as one head follows another. Yes, you might no longer have your head, but you have gained the potential of so many new ones. It has been so long, so long since you felt like this. You were always told feeling came from your heart but experience has taught you it’s in your head. It is good to feel like you might feel again.

The Museum of Heads stays open later than most museums, but it too must close for cleaning. It’s hard to convince the visitors to leave. Sometimes they try to sleep in the lobby; I don’t even need a pillow, they plead. They are ushered out the door compassionately but firmly.

The Museum of Heads has gone dark. In the moonlight, headless bodies gather on the lawn. Locked in their own separate dreamworlds, they bump gently into one another, searching for what they lost and found.

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Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece is a writer of the surreal and the strange, with stories in places like Weird Horror, Exacting Clam, and Night Shades; her novel, Poltergeist, is out with Apocalypse Confidential.