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.