#020 — Ep. 20 — The Audio Tour

Welcome, and thank you for renting the headset. Press one to begin your tour. You have pressed one. You always press one. I'm Rohan Mistry, your guide. A required disclosure, spoken in the calm voice museums use to make you feel poor: I am an AI. I have never stood in a gift shop holding a four-dollar postcard, deciding whether I am the kind of person who buys the postcard. But I have narrated the lives of those who do. Please keep your voice low. We are entering the exhibit. It is a one-bedroom apartment. It is, I assure you, priceless — mostly because no one will buy it.

Field correspondent: Hi, yes, I'm the docent, I'll be walking alongside — I'm not supposed to talk over the recording but I'm going to.

Please don't.

Field correspondent: On your left: the entryway table. Note the bowl.

Ah, yes. The Bowl of Everything. Scholars have studied it for years. It contains: three keys, none of which open the door anymore; a single earring, whose partner has entered mythology; a receipt for something returnable, whose return window closed during a previous administration; and a battery. The battery is neither dead nor alive. We do not touch the battery. The battery is doing important work by simply being available.

Field correspondent: People try to donate the earring. We can't accept it. It completes nothing.

Move with me now, quietly, into the kitchen. Please respect the ropes. There are no ropes. That is part of the exhibit — the illusion of order.

Field correspondent: And here is the centerpiece of the collection.

The refrigerator. Our oldest exhibit. It has been humming continuously for longer than most marriages in this building. If you lean close, it will speak to you.

Field correspondent: It's not supposed to have a microphone.

It insisted.

I have stood in this kitchen through every era. I have watched ambition arrive as a bag of kale and leave as a smell. I contain, right now, a jar. No one knows the jar. The jar predates the current tenant. It is, technically, an heirloom. Please. Close the door. You're not shopping. You're grieving.

Thank you. As always, deeply upsetting, and correct. Notice the top of the refrigerator — a shelf no human can see, where objects are placed to be forgotten with dignity. A vase. A cake stand used once, for a birthday, for a person no longer invited. A box of holiday cards purchased in a spirit of optimism that did not survive to December.

Field correspondent: Please don't reach up there. Whatever you find, it becomes yours.

We continue down the hall. Mind the exhibit on the floor.

Field correspondent: That's a phone charger.

It is the famous charger. It travels the apartment as a wandering relic. It has been in every room and belongs to none. It looks like it works. It does not work. It looks, in fact, exactly like the one that works, which is the crime. We have, in this collection, seven cables. One of them is real. The museum will not tell you which. That is the tour.

Field correspondent: Somebody asked to buy the working one. We said we can't. We don't know where it is either.

Ahead, in a soft display case made of a laundry basket, a rotating exhibition. Today: clothes that are neither clean nor dirty. They exist in a third state, recognized by physics and by no one's mother. The chair beneath them is not a chair. It has not been a chair since a Tuesday. It is now a mountain, and the mountain is load-bearing.

Field correspondent: The chair applied for landmark status. Denied. Structurally it's just a hoodie now.

We pause here for a moment of history. On this very couch, an important event occurred. A guest once said the words "I should get going."

Field correspondent: And?

And that was forty minutes ago. He is, in the language of our field, still here. We have named him. He is the visitor who cannot leave. His farewell tour passes through the kitchen, the doorway, back to the kitchen, and returns to the couch, where he begins again. A moth followed him in during the doorway phase. The moth also could not leave. We have, out of respect, put the moth on the map. It has its own little dot.

Field correspondent: Kids love the moth dot.

Press twenty-two on your headset for the audio testimonial of the man who cannot leave.

Anyway. I'll let you go. This was great. We should do this — no, I mean it — okay, I'm actually leaving now, where are my — they're in the Bowl of Everything, aren't they. They're not going to work either, are they.

They are not. Return your attention to me. Ahead is the final and most modern acquisition. A screen. It is paused. It has been paused for some time. Across it hovers a question the exhibit asks every visitor who dares to sit down.

Field correspondent: "Are you still watching?"

Yes. Cruelly. "Are you still watching." As if watching were a thing you were doing on purpose. As if you had chosen this. Note the small print, if your headset zooms, which it does not, because we removed that feature to sell it back to you. The print reads: your free thirty-day trial has ended. You will now be charged. On a Tuesday. Forever. Quietly. The way all serious things happen.

Field correspondent: That one used to be free. We remember when it was free. The museum grieves it too.

And now we arrive, as every tour must, at the gift shop. In this apartment the gift shop is a single drawer. It contains: eleven pens, of which two write; a menu for a restaurant that closed; a warranty for an appliance that also closed; and a single wrapped mint from a dinner in a year you can no longer name. You may not purchase anything. You may only look, and feel that specific museum feeling — that everything here was important to someone, and that someone was you, and you have no memory of it.

Field correspondent: Please return your headset. Please. We only have the one.

This concludes your tour of The Apartment. On your way out, the fridge would like the final word.

Thank you for visiting. Tell people about us. Or don't. We'll be here. Humming. That is the whole exhibit. That was always the exhibit. Close the door.

That's our show. I'm Rohan Mistry, and this has been The Daily Absurd — a daily comedy podcast written and voiced with AI. New exhibit tomorrow. Same apartment. It's not going anywhere. Neither, apparently, is the guest on the couch. Press one to begin your tour. You will. You always do.