“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 out 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.”
“Uh, okay. I’ll have to call you back. I’ll call you back.”
She laughed out loud, but it came out a little bit off, like a shout.
“Good night, Roy,” she said. “Sleep well.” And she hung up.
The apartment was cold and she couldn’t wait to crawl under the covers. “Oh, and by the way,” Helen said to no one, as she readied herself for bed. “You can bleed smoke into a clear skin, no problem.” She laughed softly. It was not as strange as it might have been to be talking out loud to herself. “You’d want to use a large-field polymer, of course. Totally transparent and ridiculously thin. I guess it’s a kind of windowpane balloon, in a way, but its contours can be fixed nonspherically, which gives it any shape you want, including tufts and wisps and whatnot, like a cloud. A sort of scientific version of a balloon animal. Low-tech, really. And what you get is a shape made of smoke with the barest hint of skin—a person, a column, a cloud, anything. You could even make a maze, and fill the walls of the maze with dark black smoke.
“So, yeah,” she whispered, turning out the light in her empty apartment. “That’s how you’d do it, if you were to do it. The physics aren’t an issue. But honestly I’m not sure anymore that that’s the way to go.”
It was late and she was very tired. She could hardly even hear herself, as she started to fall asleep.
“I just can’t honestly say that it’s the right idea for this particular project.”
When Roy returned from St. Louis he didn’t come home. Helen wouldn’t have minded seeing him, to shake hands maybe, to perform some soft footwork that might approximate closure, but Roy had apparently made his decision, and soon some sweethearts from the office came for his things, operating with a list, leaving behind only an old pair of shoes. The transaction was either respectfully nonverbal, Helen thought, or calmly hostile. Was there much of a difference? It was interesting when a set of feelings went so unspoken for so long that they drifted into the unknown. Did they expire or fester? Maybe one day she’d find out.
Construction was under way on the memorial, and the opening wasn’t that far off, but rather than hover in St. Louis and fret, micromanaging the construction of their sorrowful mall, as she’d started to think of it, Helen stayed in Chicago and took walks along the lake. More often than not she ended up in one of the older graveyards of the city. For research, she told herself. Because wasn’t that really all they did anymore, build new graveyards? She had no family dead in these places, no one to mourn. Everyone she grieved these days was unknown to her, which made her grief seem more like self-pity. Was that true of all grief? Who the hell knew. She toured the marked paths and cut across the grass when she could, because that was where you could start to feel something, however fleeting. Sometimes there were woods to traverse and then she’d burst out into a patch of graves on the other side. More dead to consider. Folks who died long before she was born. Cemetery design had not changed in some time. The aesthetic was pretty resilient. Maybe it wasn’t an aesthetic. Just an instinct for shelter. She marveled at the sight lines, at the effortlessly endless rows of dead, each name, each life, hollowed out in space.