Bruce Wagner - Memorial

“Hero?”

“That’s right,” he said, grinning. (He reminded the old woman of a fresh-faced dancer from her favorite musical, Oklahoma! ) “You are a hero because your Blind Sister ticket — that’s what we call them — from the pool automatically purchased by the State of New York, the ticket you bought…is a winner!”

“But they haven’t announced—”

“Nor will they. The Blind Sister lottos have ‘shadow drawings’—that’s exactly what they’re called — and the ‘heroes’ (such as you) are always named within 24 to 72 hours before home state winners. Blind Sisters cannot be publicized, Mrs Herlihy. That is actually federal law. And that’s why we ask you not to share this with the vendor of original purchase.”

“Riki?”

“That’s right. We’ve already been in touch — they are very happy campers — they’ll be compensated based on a formula not all that different from the one California currently has in place. Of course, they knew about the shadow program, all vendors and merchants do. Again, something mandated by federal law.”

Marj’s door was fully open.

“And now,” he said, with a deep sigh, “I have to disclose something that inevitably doesn’t thrill our winners, be they residents of the Big Apple or be they residents of Lala-land.” He leaned over to whisper. Marj felt strange and alive and discombobulated, as if all her senses were heightened. “Unfortunately, Mrs Herlihy, you won’t be getting the amount listed on the winning ticket. Let me tell you what your share is, after taxes.” He pulled out a small calculator. “Because you’re over 65—you look 45 if you’re a day! — the Blind Sister Superfund subsidizes half the IRS burden. Your piece of the pie is kind of a ‘finder’s fee,’ Mr Michael Bloomberg’s way of saying, ‘Thank you, Mrs Herlihy.’ All right now,” he said, focusing on the little machine as he punched its keys. “Let us now see. Let us now praise famous men and women. The formula is rather complex, but that’s why they give me the big bucks…as soon as you fill out the paperwork, you’ll be collecting approximately…Wow!” He playfully tapped the instrument, as if there was something wrong. “This looks like a Social Security number!”

He gazed into her eyes like a mesmerist.

“Mrs Herlihy, I have flown here on the governor’s jet to tell you that you have just won…$6,483,572.”

Marj felt as if she were falling. The young man rushed to her side, quick on his feet, the way Chester was around the time he was in college.

Mr Weyerhauser held her arm as they went in, turning a final time to the driver before closing the door.

SHE sat at Starbucks, grouping people like an anthropologist. 2 subsets interested her this morning: the Nomadic Nesters and the Sidewalk Kings.

The Double Ns were spinsters who used the café like a personal drawing room. They spent little actual time à table, careful to bitchspray their territory with a clutter of computer, ceramic coffee cup, spiral diary notebooks, dog-eared New Age bestsellers, and peeled-off layers of outerwear. Nomadic Nesters were invariably female and may just as well have used the brackish blood of barren, precancerous wombs to delineate their turf. They hogged 2nd chairs for whatever overflow of detritus, even if the place were mobbed — a contradictory stratagem of the desperately gregarious — and in the rare moments they actually inhabited their space, waited like spiders for the victims who inevitably came along to ask if they might use said 2nd chair. The coquettish Double N would react to the request as if suddenly awakened from deep sleep, thinking her Marcel Marceau gape to be somehow attractive — the contrived and waifish acknowledgment of her own charming eccentricities, which she delusionally imagined others to revel in. Apologizing profusely for her absentmindedness, she would attempt to engage the poor soul who’d approached, with a flurry of cheery bullshit inanities before the seat got dragged to another table as she watched with an insanely intense grin and more marcelled tics, blinks, and twitters. Often the Double Ns begged a hapless neighbor to watch their things, batting Baby Jane lashes when the captive dupes reluctantly assented, rewarding them with a big-voltage desexed smile like a nun gone to rut. The Nomadic Nesters were so highly strung they could actually be seen examining thermoses and cups with Starbucks logos on shelves marked CLEARANCE. Joan feared that becoming N 2was her fate.

The Sidewalk Kings were men, usually in their 40s, who strutted in front of the coffeeshop, talking into Bluetoothed air. Sometimes they rather delicately placed an arm behind them — little Napoleons pacing a ship’s prow. They spoke just loud enough for practically everyone to hear; SK monologues were always about money. Joan had the idea of taking pictures with her Razr and leaving personalized Kinko’s-pixeled records of their peacocky boulevardier preening on Porsche windshields with notes that said, “You think you’re Warren Buffett but you’re just a dickless wonderboy.”

(Thom Mayne would never be on Bluetooth or BlackBerry or any colored toothfairy like that. At least that was Joan’s idea. The churlish beanstalk was a Luddite who only used the phone when he had to. Who cared if he blabbed about His Favorite Weekend? Who cared if Richard Meier went on and on about his “cherished” Viking Ultra-Premium grill in the New York Times? Or if Danny Libeskind let everyone know he kept the complete works of Shakespeare, “in miniature,” under his bed. Barbet cared.)

I shouldn’t have fucked him, she thought, on her way to the office, venti latte plashing from the tiny hole of its cheap plastic lid onto her Olivier Theyskens skirt. Never fuck a client. Never fuck where you hope to build. She had the spiky fantasy of Barbet waiting for her with a messengered note from Guerdon LLC, Lew’s holding company, stating that ARK was no longer in competition and thanking them for their “interest, energy, and enthusiasm.” Oh God. She literally shook the thought from her head and groaned. When she got to work, she would scrutinize her memorial file to wash it all away. She’d been thinking about what Lew said about the Mem; anyway, it was time to do what Barbet called an “intuitive run,” a mental jog through the labyrinthine realm of design possibility. She’d probably blown it sky-high by making wetspot Pratesi whoopee, but didn’t care, or at least was telling herself that. So what if they lost the gig? Let Brad Pitt have it. Wasn’t he part of Uncle Frank’s “dream team”? Give it to Hayden Christensen or Lenny Kravitz— who thinks Bauhaus is the bomb— the true Rock Starchitects of Tomorrow.

I’ll just give up my place and go live with Mom. Cave in to perimenopausal loserdom. She was becoming indifferent and dismissive about everything, and knew that was a sign of depression — the knowing of which made her care even less. She felt soul and spirit ebb like a sewage tide of N-squared nutrient-sucked wombdead blood, Joan was over, and over it, she was all over herself. It was cold comfort when Pradeep pulled glibly Googled factoids from his ass to cheer her up: Brunelleschi was 41 when he entered the Florence cathedral competition, and “the great Donato Bramante was precisely your age when he was called to rebuild St. Peter’s in Rome.”

There was no message from the holding company when she arrived and after an hour at her desk, Joan felt less paranoid. She flipped through the gigantic orange Hermès leather notebook Pradeep gave her on her last birthday and reexamined Andy Goldsworthy’s seraphic earthwork. How could she compete? For the 10,000th time, she looked at Donald Judd’s aluminum Marfan boxes and concrete bunkers in a neat desolate row but rejected any similar concept because of Freiberg’s grouping phobia. There was a xeroxed article about Michael Heizer’s awesome Earth Art “ruin” in the Nevada high desert — it all made her queasy. Déjà vu vu vu vu vu: newspapers, slick city magazines, and Sunday supplements carrying the same tired layouts on an eroto-Escherian loop: Marfa/getaways, Marfa/land boom, Marfa/Chinati ( chinati meant “raven” in Aztec — she wanted to gag), Marfa/Prada storefront installation, Marfa/ Giant, Marfa/eccentric 50something heiresses, Marfa/renovated rundown Deco buildings and adobe fixer-uppers, Marfa/ocotillos and prairie dogs, Marfa/Dan Flavin/Barracks, Marfa/“Mystery Lights”…the monthly piece somewhere, anywhere, everywhere about culinary auctions of black truffles from the foothills of the Pyrenees, or Masa Takayama’s latest psycho-expensive sushi parlor, always “tucked behind an unmarked door”…the controversy over the use of “Kobe” vs “Kobe-style”…the Coppola family compound turned lodge-resort in Belize… the Spiral Jetty (aerial shot) and Andrea Zittel/A-Z Administrative Services/A-Z Raugh/A-Z Escape Vehicles and Michael Fucking Heizer. If she read one more thing about Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (aerial shot) or the Lightning Field or Andi Joshua Tree (Mojave as Marfa) Zittel’s schoolgirl uniforms and desert hiking trips or Heizer’s cranks and idiosycrasies or High Desert Test Sites or Center for Land Use Interpretation or Dia: Beacon or Lannon Foundation Earth Sculpture Installations or for that matter anything about William T Vollman (who even looked like Robert Smithson; oddly, both Smithson and Vollman looked like Donald Judd without beards) and the Inland Empire or Imperial Valley — she was certain she would disembowel herself at the Basel Art Fair and take a few with her. There were other, different loops: the UCLA Live spring brochure with its dumbass hypey look-at-me names: Chava Alberstein, Pappa Tarahumara, Tania Libertad, Astrid (Zaha!) Hadad; the New Literary Hoaxes; the people compelled to amputate their own limbs; the affluent Manhattanites who got monstrous diseases and wrote tender trenchant diaries of their own demise…the Brian Wilson Smile and Elvis Costello classical-crossover/Metropole Orkest loop; the Walter Benjamin/Eva Hesse/Guy Debord loop; the Proust translation wars; the what-does-Steve-