Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

Six months afterthe St. Louis attack, Roy and Helen had been invited to submit a proposal, and they’d gone through their usual tangled brainstorm, smoothing over the sharper ideas of their junior staff, whiteboarding a design that would appear sufficiently nonthreatening in the space, a kind of tranquilizing maze of low walls and open rooms for visitors to throw themselves around in and grieve. Roy called it the sanatorium aesthetic, and he wasn’t that far off.

One day, as the deadline loomed, they walked along the lake, which was flat and black, even as the wind pounded them. They started, brokenly, to drill down toward what they might possibly build, what it would look and sound like, what sort of feelings they were trying to create. Usually you had to dance around the stakeholders to determine the emotional bolus of a work, as they called it. But the stakeholders for this project? Only the entire population of the United States of America.

Helen didn’t want to aim high, she started to say, so much as she wanted to aim into a kind of hidden space. “I don’t want you to be able to picture it when I talk about it,” she told Roy. “You shouldn’t be able to photograph it. I mean, like the lake—you wouldn’t even want to photograph it. You shouldn’t be able to draw it. That’s my problem.”

“Gosh, that really is your problem.”

“I don’t know,” she said, gesturing at the sky, which was not particularly pretty or interesting that afternoon. It was not the kind of sky you would ever take a picture of, and Helen found that compelling. “Is there a better memorial than that? The sky?”

“Ha,” Roy said. “It’s good. It’s moody. Maybe it’s a bit obvious, though?”

“Isn’t the sky just a gravestone,” Helen said, “and we’re all buried under it?”

“Oooh. Not bad. I see what you did there. But, no offense, why are we talking about this?”

Helen had to do this, to think too grandly or wrongly in order to maybe get closer to what was called for. “It’s almost like,” she said, “what if you had to design the afterlife exactly as you really think it is. Not something aspirational, some bullshit heaven. Not a religious fantasy. The truth.”

“Yeah?” Roy said. “As in… oblivion? You want to build an oblivion theme park?”

He didn’t care about any of this right now, Helen could tell, and maybe he had a point.

“I assume you don’t believe in, well, anything?” When she thought back to their first conversations in grad school, prickly and intense and flirty, she wasn’t sure if this had ever come up. Was that possible? She had adored and then admired him for so long and now she knew him inside and out, and she felt she understood him to the core. Was it possible that he harbored private, unknowable ideas about his own death and whatever might happen after?

“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 planningwent 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.