by Ben Marcus
“Okay, let’s assume that you’re agnostic,” Helen said. “We die and there’s nothing.”
“Sometimes there’s nothing before you die,” Roy cut in. “Don’t forget that. A foreshadowed nothingness.”
“Okay, let’s say that you want to make an experiential piece that invites people to inhabit that sort of emptiness. How do you do it?”
Roy looked up. “How? As in, how do certain midwestern architects make a credible design of the one, true afterlife? Jesus, Helen. Are we really having this conversation?”
He seemed to give it some thought, but there was something unnatural about how theatrically he pondered, as if he already knew what he was going to say but was pausing for effect. This was the Roy who spouted off at arts panels, who was about to spray fine, floral bullshit across the auditorium.
“I like the question,” he said. “It reveals something important, and I see where you’re going with it. If you make a space like that you connect visitors with the dead, which is a pretty big artistic win.”
Helen winced. Big artistic win.
“In the end,” Roy said, “the question falls apart because the answer is just too easy. It’s too obvious. Why not just kill them? Then they’ll get the real and true afterlife. Who needs to simulate anything when you have the real thing? Someone already designed death. We were beaten to the punch.”
He smiled at her and very nearly seemed to be gloating.
Okay. God. “This isn’t a battle of wits, Roy,” she said. But then she wondered if maybe it was, and that was what was wrong. Partly. When one person thinks it’s not a contest.
They stopped and looked out over the lake.
“I was hoping we could produce work without a body count, though. A modest goal.”
“Oh, you mean because too many people have died already?”
“Jesus, Roy.”
“None of this works if I can’t be honest with you,” he whispered.
“There are other reasons that none of this works,” she said.
“Helen, I was joking. I was trying to be funny.”
But why? She didn’t say. To what end? And aren’t we supposed to be doing this together?
“I don’t know, Roy. Can we think about a tranquil space, not heavy on physical material, not oppressive and thick, that isn’t just a New Age wank space with wind chimes and shit? Can we do that?”
Roy admitted that this sounded good, that this was something they could shoot for.
* * *
—
The memorial planning went on for weeks. They mocked up models, strung wire through their studio and tuned it to different tensions, just to explore suspended structures that might allow for a subterranean feeling without actually trapping people underground. Haunt the viewers but don’t stress them out. And almost every day, sometimes in the afternoon and sometimes in the very early morning, they walked the city together, looking at space and light, growing ever more certain of what they didn’t want the memorial to be.
Roy was kind and gracious, suppressing his own ideas while generously fielding every wild and unbuildable notion from Helen, perhaps knowing that her interest in reality, in plausibility and practicality, could be low. She couldn’t help herself; she went on and on about the mourners. They were still here, she was saying, in this world, but they were conflicted. They were pulled elsewhere, to the place where their loved ones were. Wherever that was. Survivors lived in both places. That was what she wanted this monument to say. She wanted it to feel like that, the tension between two worlds.
“That’s some Schrödinger’s cat bullshit,” Roy said. “And I love it. That’s what I want, too. That’s exactly right.”
For a little while they walked arm in arm, and for a little while things seemed different. But what had they really agreed on? Helen wondered. What were they even talking about?
All the while Roy must have known that there was no building design behind this idea, that time was really upon them and something had to take shape on paper. The office was waiting to pounce at their go-ahead, and he needed to ring the bell. Helen realized that he’d been slowly laying the groundwork for his own plan, which maybe he’d had in his head all along. It was simple and obvious and probably inevitable, and he told it to her in pieces, over the course of a few days. It was to be a hollow square glass museum, low on the plaza, with a center that could not be accessed or even seen. A black void where the building and the shops had been. Right. There were details and details and details, and a narrative had to be written, because, well, yeah, but this was a square with a hole in it. To Helen, it resonated just a wee bit of other memorials, built and unbuilt, which was probably shrewd, on Roy’s part. He wanted their work to get the go-ahead, whereas sometimes she suffered the classic ambivalence of an architect. Maybe her designs had a kill switch on purpose.
They went home and had dinner, and that night Roy was already calling it a lock, commissioning renderings, and speccing out site maps and plans and all the work that had to happen even to get this thing ready for the review board.
* * *
—
There was really just one more thing to deal with for now, and they had both been dreading it.
They had to finally sit down and look at bids from the pharmaceuticals, which were fighting their way onto the proposal, vying to be the providers of the chemical component that every memorial these days was more or less expected to have: a gentle mist to assist the emotional response of visitors and drug them into a torpor of sympathy. Not garment-rending sympathy, but something more dignified. A mood was delivered via fog. Discreetly, and mildly, with microdoses misting through carefully arranged spouts, the way an outdoor mall in the summer might be air-conditioned. You didn’t see it and you didn’t smell it. You strolled through a field or a plaza or a series of dark, marble tunnels, whatever, sipping the sorrow-laced air, and, when you finally departed, a kind of low-grade catharsis had been triggered. You were bursting with feeling. Big artistic win.
It was sponsorship and it was gross, but because it was essentially invisible, and because people genuinely seemed to seek it out—attendance had undeniably spiked—Roy and Helen had been looking the other way and letting it happen and now they really didn’t have a choice. It was an inevitable shortcut, or even a stage of evolution, in architecture, assisting the public’s reaction and securing that most prized of currencies: human fucking feeling. How to create it, how to create it? And why not use all the help you could get?
But here was Roy saying that he didn’t want to agree to anything yet, and to hell with these companies for trying to leverage a sacred memorial with their goddamned money. “Maybe we only consent to a zoned dispensary this time,” he said. “There should be an area, cordoned off, where the feelings are more intense.”
“Intense how?”
“Like harder, more honest.”
“Oh, some feelings aren’t honest?”
“None of them are, Helen. It’s fake, right? It’s a drug spout in the ground. Or it’s a gas stream pulsing from the ass of a mechanical bird flying a figure eight around the burial ground. Isn’t that the idea, that we can’t make people feel exactly what we want with our work, with what we make, so we poison them instead?”
“Poison.”
“Sure, it’s poison. In high enough doses.”
“Like water, then. Like oxygen.”
“Exactly like water and oxygen. A perfect comparison. You just read my mind.”
“I couldn’t help it. The door to your face was open and the text was scrolling inside. Impossible to miss.”
Roy shook his head. “On the other hand, why not put people in a more pensive or reflective state? Why not even stoke their anger a bit?”
“Because those are the moods they bring to us. Those are the moods we correct.”
“Okay, do you
hear how that sounds, Helen? We correct their feelings? Really? I guess I’m just saying that right now we are therapists. We are not designers. We try to make people feel better.”
“You make that sound dirty.”
“I guess I’m not sure why we’re even arguing about this,” Roy said. He sounded defeated. “I don’t think the ingredients are within our purview. I don’t think we can edit those parameters.”
“Not with chemicals, we can’t,” Helen said.
“Meaning?”
“Look, I don’t care how happy or blissed out or in touch with the one true good earth you are, if you walk into a certain space, situated on a certain site, and that space has been shaped to the nth fucking degree, your mood, if we want it to, will freaking collapse like a lung.”
“I don’t know. Drugs are stronger than buildings.”
“Maybe we make our buildings more potent, then,” Helen said. “We increase the dosage.”
Roy smiled at her. He raised an empty hand in a toast. Such a small and delicate hand. “Cheers,” he said, and he softly pawed the air.
* * *
—
After they won the bid, with a forty-eighth-iteration proposal that was mildly tolerated by all—a black granite labyrinth, inset with dark transparencies, as if panels of the stone itself were made of glass, which, however badass that would have been, they weren’t—Roy went out to St. Louis. Roy was the face, the body, the organism. Maybe he had sweet young people he fucked; Helen couldn’t be sure. He caught the temperature of the place and tried to decode the deeper desires of the city, which could then be met or thwarted so that the appropriate tension might infuse the final project. He photo-documented and did flyovers and he stuck his finger into the client’s collective rotten body to determine where the hard command center was. These kinds of projects often blew up in your face. You were fired while you slept. So Roy, with his temper and his charm and his fit little body, stayed out there and fought like a mongrel to keep them in the game.
Helen spent that time getting lost at the drafting table, sketching mostly, working from the gut, ignoring what she knew in order to make way for what interested her far more—what she didn’t know. For instance, she knew that she felt tremendous sorrow for the dead and thought about them often, if vaguely. What she didn’t know was why she wasn’t crippled with grief, stupefied at the scale of the atrocity, unable to move or speak. This was a mystery. She wanted to draw a purely empty space, which wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Heavy lines were required, of all things, and not just for framing the so-called void, as people in her profession loved to say, but for actual fucking substance. She had to ready the space for haunting. Purity was called for. This was a tombstone for a city, a funeral for a feeling of safety that was now gone. Leaving a blank page was not the same thing. That was a cop-out, and, anyway, you couldn’t shit on the client that way. Partly because she herself was the client, and Roy was the client, and so was everyone they knew, and everyone they didn’t. Now you had to view the world, the air itself, as something that could be torn away to reveal an eerier sort of place. Maybe that sounded like bullshit, but sometimes, sometimes, this process—if followed strictly and without concern for hovering meddlers—led to a wild, unstable kind of vacuum that you were not always prepared to be sucked into, Helen thought, even if you thought you were curious, even if you thought you couldn’t be shocked.
That was what she tried to draw, and that was sometimes what she and Roy tried to build, even though “build” was a strange word, and you sounded like a punk if you said “erase” or something pretentious like that. Like, in my work, I erase the landscape in order to reveal the true terrain of the world. Yeah, uh, no. Maybe it didn’t make sense, any of it, but it didn’t have to. Sometimes it just had to sort of look pretty and make you sad and thoughtful. That was Memorial Theory 101. In the end, no one cared what you thought, or said, about a memorial you made. That sort of verbal posturing was for students and the simperingly boneless teachers who floated over them, gushing endless praise out of their open necks.
Roy phoned from St. Louis, early in the process, and even though a working design had been approved, the understanding—Helen’s understanding, anyway—was that certain, uh, changes could still be made, and these changes could, caveat, significantly alter and enhance and improve the original, shit-sucking plan, which she suddenly thought might better belong, in miniature, on the wall of a Starbucks.
What Helen envisioned, she told Roy, was a series of soft columns swelling out of the plaza, but almost imperceptibly. You almost wouldn’t even know they were there.
“You know how there are some people who think that if they could only sharpen their vision they would see ghosts?” Helen asked.
“I didn’t know that,” Roy said. “Interesting.”
The plaza itself, Helen went on, would be poured from a spongy material, so that visitors might feel as though they were sinking as they walked along. Playground rubber, maybe? The columns would be slab-like, but ephemeral—Helen emphasized this word: “You know, very nearly not there,” she told him—fabricated out of a kind of stable, nearly elastic, she didn’t know how else to put it, smoke.
“You can admire them as sculpture—they will be beautiful, and up close the smoke will reveal a texture, sort of like porcelain, with streaks and veins and imperfections in the surface. But, from farther away, they may just look like clouds. Rogue clouds that have fallen from the sky.”
Roy was quiet for a while. She thought she could hear him typing. “That sounds nice,” he finally said. “Aside from wondering how this remotely relates to the approved plan, am I supposed to be asking how you’ll achieve this?”
“Other than the obvious way?”
Roy was rummaging at the other end of the line. Talking to someone or watching TV. Helen listened into the room and listened and listened, on the verge of hearing something clear. Maybe he was falling from an airplane. She wasn’t even kidding. There was so much wind around him.
“I mean, how serious are you?” he said. “This sounds maybe more speculative? Which is cool. Which is, you know, I know it’s part of your process but I’m living in reality right now. I’m in an actual hotel room, in the actual real world. I’m talking to the board, or, really, they’re talking to me, very sternly—they are literally holding my hand like I’m a child—and I’m talking to the mayor and the city and the state, and in my downtime I am having nonconsensual elevator sex with the donors, who are huge hairy creatures with indeterminate genitalia, because they get to have whatever little thing they want from me.”
“How nice for you.”
“I don’t have a choice, Helen. Seriously, how possible is this, your sticky smoke? Are we really spitballing this idea right now, at this fucking late date? Am I supposed to be telling people that this is what we are doing?”
“Well, whatever you do, please don’t refer to it as sticky smoke. It sounds like a carnival attraction. With a little bit of work, we can find some seductive language. That’s never so hard.”
She wanted to laugh. Never so hard. Finding seductive language was the hardest thing in the world. There wouldn’t be language for this. Not in her lifetime.
“Jesus, Helen. The tech—and you know this very well—doesn’t allow for what you’re talking about. I mean, right? Suddenly I’m the bad guy because of physics?”
Helen sighed. “That’s not why you’re the bad guy, Roy.”
They covered other topics, because they had a stupid business to run, and so many details to haggle over—zoning and permissions and negotiations with contractors, along with political tensions that Helen couldn’t even fathom—and then, just as they were saying good night, Helen said she needed to ask him a question.
Roy was still distracted; he would always be. Some muscle in his face produced the word “yeah,” but otherwise nobody was home. After finding o
ut what he needed to know from Helen, he’d moved on to gather information from other sources. This was Roy spreading himself so thin that you could see through him. At least in person he knew to tilt his face into postures of interest, taming his little mannequin body. So Helen was silent for a while. She heard the same dull murmur in the background. A voice or a bird or the wind, or just some subvocal turbulence on the phone line. It was almost pretty.
“What?” Roy said, suddenly impatient. “What do you want to ask me?”
“I just wanted to know…who’s that with you?”
“What?”
“Next to you, Roy. Just look. In the bed. Touching you while you talk. What a curious creature. Who is that? I’d really like to know.”
As she said this, she pictured someone, something, crawling over her husband’s body. The most gorgeous living thing.
Roy said nothing. Maybe he turned off the television, or maybe something else caused a rapid drop in room tone, because now the sheer silence was staggering. It was shocking to Helen. Like, you’d need a machine to achieve that kind of quiet. The world had been scrubbed of noise, just because she’d said a bunch of words. That was what a spell was, maybe. Had a mere sentence of hers ever had such an effect before? She could hear Roy breathe; she could hear the churn of his body.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Helen.”
It wasn’t like she expected a different answer, or particularly cared. Confessions and denials were equally troubling. Answers in general were so often disappointing. Was there any speech at all that didn’t, in the end, cause a little bit of dejection?
“No, I guess you don’t,” she said.
“I mean, if I could show you, I would.”
“Show me, Roy. Switch over to video. Show me the room and the closets and the hallway. That’d be great. Thanks.”
