Wakefield

by Andrei Codrescu

  Wakefield takes the pill from Susan. It’s just what his throbbing head needs.

  The day is gray, the leaden sky filled with impending snow, but it’s not all that cold, and Wakefield carries his coat over his arm as he strolls through the International Architecture Park with Marianna. Only, they are not really strolling. Marianna is clutching a briefcase that looks incongruous with her long peasant skirt and sheepskin coat with hand-embroidered edges. Whatever happened to couture and $500-an-ounce perfume? She even smells like sheep. They are on their way to meet with the Swedish Culture Minister, who is greeting visitors today at the Swedish pavilion.

  The pavilion is a mall-like minicity, complete with split-level homes, an amusement park, and a sculpture garden. It looks terribly familiar. Marianna beats him to the punch: “It’s like that suburb we lived in when Margot was born.” Indeed, to be complete, all the illusion needs is for a younger Marianna and Wakefield to walk out of one of the houses, holding baby Margot.

  They enter a reception area lit by a huge skylight. Seated behind a glass-topped desk in a Deco chair is a cheerfully blond young man with a diamond stud in his left ear. He is the Swedish Culture Minister. Several respectful students are listening to him speak in accented English. He looks a little bored, so when Marianna and Wakefield approach, he waves them over familiarly, raising his eyebrows as if to say “Finally, some grown-ups!”

  “Well, what do you think?” he asks his visitors. The students turn a bit resentfully toward the newcomers.

  “It looks very familiar,” says Wakefield. “We used to live here.”

  “That’s it, that’s it,” the Minister nods enthusiastically. “Precisely. It looks familiar because it is. This architecture could be anywhere, and that’s the point. But the difference …,” he raises a significant finger, “the difference is in the materials. Everything is constructed from lightweight plastics more durable than brick or steel, which makes this entire city portable. Two men could push a house made of these materials fifty feet in sixty seconds! Let’s see, shall we?”

  The little group follows the energetic Culture Minister outside, where he hurls himself against one of the houses and shoves it a few meters.

  “So you see, these structures are an answer to the most vexing problem of contemporary life: boredom. Here you can move your house, exchange views with your neighbors, or take the whole thing with you for a weekend of fishing in the country. Sweden has beautiful lakes.”

  Marianna catches the Minister’s eye and reaches for her orphan propaganda.

  “There are one hundred thousand orphans in Romania, locked up in terrible institutions, living on the streets or underground in sewers. How can Swedish architecture help improve their lives?”

  The Minister looks with distaste at the crumpled pamphlet and his eyes rest for a second on the grainy babies. He is about to make a gesture of curt dismissal, but the students have gathered around Marianna and are passing her pamphlet around. They are interested, and the Minister changes his mind.

  “Well, these materials are still expensive, but such light houses could be useful to … orphans.” He pronounces the word with reluctance, as if it were completely alien to him.

  “I don’t see how they could be useful,” Wakefield says, playing devil’s advocate, “if they move so much. Orphans suffer from being moved around like leaves by the wind. What they need is stability, but not institutional buildings, of course. Solid brick homes with parents in them, not prisons.”

  “Naturally, naturally.” The Minister turns to the students. “Any ideas? You are all smart MIT architecture students.”

  A young woman with serious eyes says, “I’m an orphan.” Her fellow students look at her, startled. They are not orphans. “Yes,” she says firmly, “I grew up in foster care. I would have loved to live in such a light house in Sweden by a lake. Perhaps we could make a whole city for orphans.”

  A few eyes tear up, and the Swedish Minister is suddenly alert to the potential. “Hmm, a light Swedish city for orphans.…”

  “Romanian orphans,” Marianna corrects him.

  “Well, yes. A Swedish city—”

  “For Romanian orphans!” interjects an enthusiastic student, looking awestruck at the young woman with serious eyes, with whom he has fallen instantly and irremediably in love.

  The rest of them catch on quickly. “TLSCFRO,” a wit spells out, “The Light Swedish City For Romanian Orphans.”

  And so The Light Swedish City for Romanian Orphans (TLSCFRO) is born on the spot. The young blond Minister has no choice but to listen to the plans being made by the bright would-be architects, who have not only formed an ad-hoc committee, “The MIT Team for TLSCFRO,” but have begun drawing in their notepads. E-mail addresses are exchanged and a letter of intention is drafted and signed by everyone.

  The activity attracts a crowd and word spreads rapidly. A photographer and reporter from Architecture Magazine appear and the Culture Minister finds himself explaining TLSCFRO as if it had been a carefully thought-out idea now being unveiled for the first time on the occasion of the Swedish exhibition.

  Wakefield is amused. The Minister must be cursing the day he decided to make a public appearance at the site. He’s doubtless imagining the dismay of his budget people when, in addition to the cost of the exhibit and the expense of his own travel, he presents them with TLSCFRO. Still, the publicity benefits are undeniable. Everyone is smiling, Marianna most of all, while the students high-five one another, excitedly discussing their upcoming internships in Sweden to help build TLSCFRO.

  After handshakes all around and an orphan brochure in every hand, Marianna snaps the “letter of intent” into her briefcase, the only nonethnic accessory on her. Wakefield’s hangover is gone thanks to Susan’s pill and a mild euphoria sets in. He regards his ex-wife with genuine admiration, as she takes leave of her allies. Buoyed by triumph, Marianna walks briskly a few steps in front of Wakefield, who wonders where this woman, who was once his wife, came from. Of this Marianna he’d never had a hint.

  A few yards from the Swedish site is the Belgian pavilion. Not much luck here, since there isn’t one human being anywhere in sight. Belgium has contributed a fully automated futuristic prison, where each transparent cell is equipped with a computer built into an extension of a narrow bed. The visitors wander about on their own, listening to electronic voices explaining that the walls of the prison become opaque after dark and transform into projection screens on which educational programs are beamed until lights out. Wakefield depresses a lever below the word Evening in one of the cells. The screen-wall darkens and a language menu appears: Press One for French, Two for Flemish, Three for English. He presses Three and gets more choices. Press One for Literature, Two for Basic Science, Three for Economics, Four for Psychology, Five for Environmental Studies, Six for Food Preparation, Seven for Media. He presses Four for Psychology. A silver-haired teacher appears on the screen. “Turn on your computer to begin taking notes,” he instructs. “Early Childhood.” A brain with highlighted areas revolves slowly beside the teacher.

  “Belgian convicts must be walking encyclopedias,” says Wakefield.

  “Let’s go,” Marianna says glumly. “These people have no compassion.”

  Neither, it appears, does the world’s greatest superpower. American design is represented by an immense store called ShapeShifters, as vast as three Home Depots. On the miles-long shelves objects made of “intelligent plastics” form and reform themselves. Wakefield reaches out to touch what looks like a bolt of fabric; it cascades off the shelf and unrolls itself, a watery puddle on the floor. When he steps into the puddle, it covers his shoes like galoshes.

  A quiet voice track provides visitors the architects’ statement: “Form and function are an extension of content. The content is intelligence. Our minds contain all forms. We can teach the material world to listen.” Morphing, changing, my country ’tis of thee.

  “This is scary.” Marianna is holding a round ball that’s
changing into a square box, its surface changing design from polka dots to stripes, then changing texture from smooth to pumice rough.

  “This reminds me of this one time on acid when I tried to walk through a door because I was sure I could rearrange the molecules to let me through. I knew that it was possible, I just didn’t know how.” Wakefield thinks he had this experience before he met Marianna, but when she rotates the box and it becomes a diamond-shape prism reflecting the light, he’s not so sure.

  “I was there,” she says, but doesn’t sound happy about it. “There is nothing for my orphans in it.”

  “In what? Our shared past or in that box?”

  “Both.”

  A familiar note now creeps into their conversation. It’s not a big leap from here to an all-too-familiar recrimination fest.

  They barely notice as ShapeShifters changes from a megastore into a multiplex cinema. Movies start playing, there is the aroma of popcorn in the air, but their brief neutrality has dissolved. They are combatants again. Wakefield tries to steer the conversation in another direction. “The Company must have something to do with this! It’s a version of the Home of the Future!” The theme of the U.S. pavilion is “Virtuality Takes Command,” and The Company is in fact listed as the main sponsor. He feels a twinge of nostalgia for Typical, as if his visit there had happened ages ago. He thinks about Maggie and feels an urgent need to get away from Marianna. This is some kind of trap, he seethes, and I will not go back to any past.

  Marianna is obviously determined to go on to the future, but the past is not easily eluded. In search of other exhibit organizers, perhaps even another Minister of Culture, they stumble into the Russian pavilion, an acre of ruins: war-ravaged Stalingrad recast in plaster, crumbling Brezhnev-era beehives, piles of maimed statues of famous Bolsheviks. The ruins are punctuated by pillars plastered with leaflets. The text on the leaflets reads: “The process of re-carving, re-education, re-creation, re-consideration, re-casting, becomes organic over time, creating a new nature, an urban wilderness, a necropolis of architecture.” There is not a human being in sight. This is obviously the world that created orphans, and it has no tools to help them.

  A glimmer of hope shines briefly in Luxembourg, where they encounter the designer of a video installation consisting of a huge screen on which corporate logos morph into one another endlessly: the McDonald’s arches become VW, VW becomes CGI, CGI becomes IBM, IBM becomes Microsoft, Microsoft becomes U.S. Steel, U.S. Steel becomes The Company, ad infinitum in rondelles and waltzes of symbols. The artist, glad for visitors, takes Marianna’s pamphlet without reservation, studies it carefully, then proposes: “I will enlarge this photograph and project it behind the morphing logos! The subliminal effect will be phenomenal!”

  Wakefield imagines the grainy babies flashing through the sinister morphing logos, and cringes. Marianna isn’t too impressed either, so they exit rather abruptly, leaving the poor artist feeling even lonelier.

  Each country’s pavilion is surrounded by bare chestnut and maple trees with snow frosting their branches, and it’s becoming clearer to Wakefield as they walk that nothing is going to diminish the distance between Marianna and him, not even the sudden salvation of one hundred thousand orphans.

  Happily, his most recent three muses save him. In front of the Hungarian pavilion they “run into” his friends. They are a fairly dazzling crew, Milena in a plaid miniskirt, black sweater, and black tights, her neck bundled in a long red scarf; Susan wearing an ankle-length faux-fur coat and combat boots and her customary frown of concentration; and Tiffany in blue peacoat, blue jeans, and thigh-high leather boots.

  Introductions are made and everyone studies the huge globe in front of Hungary’s exhibit. Conceived by an eccentric architect who’d worked on the design secretly for fifty years, the plans for this object were discovered in an attic in Budapest. The building of the actual globe was subsidized by an anonymous Hungarian billionaire specifically for the site. (Wakefield silently upbraids Farkash: See what a billionaire can do?) This visionary world was intended by the architect to “restore the emotional and spiritual unity of Man and Earth.” Examined closely the model reveals exquisitely detailed pyramidal and circular towers, looping streets, naked people, and saucery vehicles. It’s like an odd combination of Paris and Aztec Mexico. Between the jumbled buildings are ritual areas: wells, stages, and altars, and the poignancy of sheer impracticality shines over the utopian city like a full moon.

  Milena points to a sleeping microdragon curled around a tiny well. “He looks like my imaginary pet, Jaroslav. He still comes when I call him. Did you have an imaginary pet when you were a kid, Tiff?”

  “Susan was my pet.” She strokes her sister’s head.

  “Gee, thanks. It’s not bad enough that I’m the short one, now I’m an animal!”

  “How about you, Marianna?” Milena asks. “Did you have a pet?”

  “I don’t have a pet, I have a cause,” she says acidly.

  For the first time in a long time Wakefield feels the urge to hide.

  “Cerberus was my pet,” he mumbles, embarrassed for his ex and for himself. Nobody laughs.

  The group holds together for one more country. Japan has chosen to cover its site with a beautiful, empty City of Women that ignores architecture altogether. Under the winter-bare trees are large photographic panels of the face of the same woman. The images are scattered sparely over the large area, so they are forced to meander among them. The face is neither beautiful nor terribly expressive. It floats in the zenlike emptiness of the apple-blossomy snow. Transparency reigns in the City of Women, and also a serene sadness, as if roughness and jagged disharmony had been removed, their traces swept clean away. Wakefield is struck by his vivid, three-dimensional companions walking between the photographs of that plain, repeating face. The scene is disturbing, almost painful; the women in his past have the same quality of repetition, he realizes, and it makes him sad that time has erased their color and dimension.

  “The face looks like a blown Easter egg before it’s painted,” says Tiffany. “Very creepy.”

  Susan concurs. “Maybe she represents the people killed at Hiroshima,” she ventures. But the face isn’t tragic, it is pure surface.

  Nonetheless, the City of Women depresses them. The merry little gang falls silent, and this is where Marianna chooses to leave them. Wakefield watches her walk away, her briefcase swinging at her side with pendulum-like precision. Inside of it the orphans wait for better days. Wakefield feels like one of them.

  “Let’s get out of here immediately,” Milena orders. “I need a drink, a joint, a foot massage.… Enough of architecture!”

  The life of real city streets revives them, a vibrant, instant cure.

  “I fear for the future if it’s left up to architects,” Tiffany says, repairing her lipstick, “but they do seem well-meaning.”

  “Boring,” pronounces Milena.

  Wakefield is thinking that architecture seems to struggle with ideas a great deal more than most art forms do, perhaps because of the conflict between corporate visions and individual architects’ beliefs about the way people should live. He vows to try to feel at home wherever he is, to live in a kind of architecture-without-architecture. After all, the body is architecture; so are the clothes a person hangs on it. One can view anything, including emotional life, architecturally. One can make a structure from one’s sorrows, or from one’s joys. He is awfully close to forgetting his deal with the Devil, all the deals he has made in the past or will make in the future. He could live in the eternally repeating present of the City of Women.

  Milena and Tiffany stop to kiss on the sidewalk.

  “Disgusting,” says Susan.

  “Come here,” says Milena, putting out her arms. A group hug ensues. Wakefield feels supremely at home in the house of women, inhaling their perfumes and warmth. It’s cold, starting to snow, and they are hungry.

  “Starved!” Milena calls it.

  They agree tha
t a Ukrainian restaurant is the warmest place to be, because of the steam of cabbage soup and piroshki, and they pile into the first one they find. The waitress who takes their orders is middle-aged, plump, and friendly. Wakefield has a view of the street through the steamy window. It’s snowing now in earnest. There is a little bowl of salt on the table, with a tiny carved wooden spoon for sprinkling it on the food. He slips the spoon into his pocket. It’s an almost unconscious act, but he realizes as soon as he’s done it that it’s another present for the Devil.

  A salt spoon? he imagines the Devil asking. Whatever for?

  Salt, improvises Wakefield, is human life itself. In the Balklands the peasants traditionally greet important visitors with bread and salt.

  Sure, but in what way does a spoon stolen from a Ukrainian restaurant significantly represent your self-discovery?

  Blood, sweat, and tears, baby. Surely the Devil can appreciate how salty a woman feels after he’s made love to her. He won’t spurn a tool that can hold the crystalized essence of a lover’s sweat. Especially one hand-carved in a village by a virgin. The virgin is, of course, hypothetical, but there is nothing, Wakefield is quite sure, as dear to the Devil as salt.

  The aroma of onions browned in butter, one of Wakefield’s favorite scents, is making his mouth water, and turns his attention from the Devil. He asks his companions what their favorite smells are. Milena says her favorite is the smell of creosote on railroad ties in August, and Wakefield can imagine her, a Young Pioneer, her red cravat askew, skipping along a railroad track, a chorus of insects humming around her. The same rails have seen the trains of two world wars rattle past, but there is no train now, only a sweet, light sadness in the last quiet year before the end of the Cold War. Nothing is happening. Milena just skips from one tie to another, breathing.

  A summer smell lives in Tiffany’s olfactory memory, too. She is partial to the smell of a tomcat’s belly after he’s rolled in the dust.