The first time I saw Montgomery Ivanhoe he was kneeling in front of a group of mortuary ceramics, wearing black Timbs and a black pinstriped Penny Hardaway jersey. He asked me what I thought the Maya would say if they knew where the pale figures protecting their graves had ended up. "Me, I'd be losing some sleep about it," he said, rubbing his graying beard.

He glanced down at my two-year-old son.

"First time at the museum, young man?"

My son buried his face into my leg.

"First time for both of us," I said.

"Wonderful. Check this shit out."

Ivanhoe strode past Noh masks and Scythian weaponry, greeting each of the militiamen patrolling the quiet halls with AR-15's across their backs. He led us into a cavernous rotunda and stopped in front of a sickle-shaped phoenix carved in pinkish jade.

"Emperor Huizong lived one thousand years ago and collected treasures from two thousand years ago," said Ivanhoe. "Paid anyone who brought him relics, so you know the tomb raiders went off. Less than one percent of his collection survives today. We'll never know what we lost. We got one of his own paintings in the basement, shit is John Blaze."

We followed Ivanhoe through a gallery flowing with mosaics of glittering naiads. A young woman walked past, flanked by two silver-haired couples. The young woman mused aloud whether the reception would be more impressively staged here or in the Assyrian pavilion. Her elders nodded. As they disappeared around the corner, a flustered young man entered the hall and rushed to keep up with the others.

My son ran into a shadowy room full of glowing paintings and pointed at one of a giant crane disgorging a blue god. On the opposite wall hung a carpet the size of a pickleball court.

"The militia brings in new shit from all around the world," said Ivanhoe. "They got money like that. Paid London's Government-in-Exile two billion coin for the Ardabil carpet over there. They got money but no sense. These paintings are Rajasthani and that carpet's from the Safavid dynasty. Not for nothing though, look at the carpet. It looks like the Hubble Deep Field. You know what I'm talking about? They knew about that galactic shit without having to see it with their own eyes."

Ivanhoe took us to a hexagonal room whose sole object was a domed crown of gold, constructed in tiers like a three-layered cake. I lifted my son and he pressed his face against the glass casing to see the ghostly apostles embossed in the crown's surface.

"People think I make this shit up. They don't know I worked as a guard here for fourteen years, ten of those before it all went to shit. I know about these treasures. Once, a representative of the Ethiopian church paid us a visit. He explained to me how the British plundered this crown from Emperor Tewodros in 1868. They also took the emperor's son. Seven-year-old orphan prince trapped on an island of white people. Queen Victoria kept him around until he died at eighteen. The churchman said they've been asking for the boy's bones to return home ever since, but the Brits always found a way to say no."

"Now you have the crown," I said.

"That we do," said Ivanhoe. "Like I said, the militia has no sense. But better here than in some oligarch's kitchen, right?"

Needing a rest, I took my son to the museum's atrium and gave him some stale jerky. I watched him run laps around the fountain in the atrium's center, in which workmen in rubber leggings scrubbed colossal bronze dolphins. I thought I recognized one of the workmen, someone who used to work with me at the EPA. Before I could confirm my suspicion, I realized my son was no longer in sight. I sprang up and darted around the atrium. I locked eyes with a woman sitting under a cypress tree. She pointed behind me. I followed her finger and saw my son in a forest of Roman marbles, talking to a bronze boy with mother-of-pearl eyes. As I walked towards my son, he reached out cautiously and touched the sculpture's outstretched hand. He snapped back as if the bronze was electric and doubled over in stunned laughter. I stopped and forgot all my life's torments.

Upstairs, we crossed paths with Ivanhoe again. He made a beeline towards us and said, "Come see one more with me."

An iridescent canvas relieved of its tension draped the walls of a room without a ceiling. Fingers of sunlight touched blue wrinkles and red undulations pliant as spacetime. My son floated around the room, lost in the work.

"You can almost see his brain rewiring in real time," said Ivanhoe. "I could hardly get my son MJ to visit here. The past never interested him. Future neither. He was always just wherever he was.

"MJ spent most of the downfall in the clubs. He met a girl named Salome one night. She loved him from the start. He came around on her eventually. He didn't mind her other dudes. He knew it was part of her job. He even looked out for the lonelier ones. He always felt too much.

"He was... I don't know. I hope you think of him next time you come here."

My son, no longer wary of Ivanhoe, craned his large eyes up at him. A militiaman peeked his head into the room and then disappeared with a squeak of his sneakers.

On our way out, Ivanhoe showed us a small ivory statue of a man with a lion's head made forty thousand years ago. We gazed at it in silence.

Leaving the museum, I picked up my son and clambered down the hill of rubble, chasing a faint memory of what it was like when the roads were clear.


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