Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler

visitors began volunteering their services to sit at the desk or else to help fabricate the new installations. In talking about the museum, David continually defers authorship: he is always talking about “our” goals and what “we” are planning to do next. In part this is one of his typical self-effacing gambits; but it’s also true that the museum has generated a community—or anyway, that it’s no longer so much about what’s going on “inside” David as about what’s going on“between” him and the world. 3
    That it continues to persist at all from month to month is by no means the least of its marvels. “The museum exists against all odds,” David once commented to me. “Nothing supports this venture—it is woven from thin air. We apply for grants, and we’ve gotten a few, but most grants-dispensing agencies frankly don’t know what to make of us. We don’t fit into the traditional categories.” (I’ve seen some of those applications and I’m not sure I’d know what to make of them either: as I say, David never breaks irony, and in these applications he always presents the museum as a straightforward public-educational institution much like any other—only, with some really odd enthusiasms and a penchant, shall we say, as one of its reviewers once parsed the matter with exquisite delicacy, for presenting “phenomena known to science, if known at all, because of their appearance in the museum itself.”) The museum’s annual budget currently hovers around $50,000 (rent is $1,800 a month, and no one receives a salary), and though David originally poured a significant portion of his own outside incomeinto the museum, there’s been less and less of that, in part because as the years passed he spent more and more time on the museum itself, and in part because his exquisitely sophisticated battery of specializations has now largely been superseded by the film industry’s relentless computerization. Have there been moments, I recently asked him, when he and his family have actually been at the poorhouse door? “Oh, yeah,” he laughed. “Moments like now.”
    â€œI have no idea how we got this far or how we can possibly go on,” Diana told me one day. Technically she’s the museum’s treasurer and keeper of accounts, though she admits that in that official capacity she’s often reduced to giggling fits. “I’ve just developed this faery-faith in last-minute providence. At the outset of each month, there’s no way we’re going to make it through, but something always comes up—a small bequest, a grant unexpectedly approved, a slight uptick in admissions. Actually, we’re just about reaching the point where admissions may soon be covering the rent. But David keeps pushing the limit. Last year he took his other company into bankruptcy and doubled the size of the museum
on the same day
—and the crazy thing is,
I wanted him to do it!
He was right to do it. And we got lucky, because almost immediately after that my car got stolen, so we were able to pour the $6,750 settlement from that into the museum.”
    She was silent for a moment. “But it’s strange, because less than a decade ago we were on the cusp of the upper middle class. The other day our daughter DanRae asked me, ‘Mommy, are we poor?’ I told her, ‘Yes, but not without hope.’ ”
    DanRae, incidentally, seems far from anxious. Nine years old, she’s as blithely self-confident and unabashed as her parents are tortuously shy and deferential. She’s also
big.
“Beats me,” David laughs when asked about the disparity. “Sometimes, maybe, it’s just that two negatives make a positive.” (Her given name is Daniela Rae. “The ‘Rae’ is after Diana’s dad, Raymond, who died when she was still a young girl,” David