A soundtrack, courtesy of Bobby Darin, accompanied the watery parade:
First the tide rushes in…plants a kiss on the shore—
“My son put that together. I guess it’s his way of dealing — with whatever. It didn’t make me happy.”
“How old is he?”
“14.”
“It’s just that age. Teen angst.”
“Yeah, well, I’m my age.” He sighed. “It’s creative, anyway. I think he got the clips from MTV. Burned them on his PowerBook. Or whatever they do.”
“Was he close to his uncle?”
“Very.” He ejected the disc. “Mr Darin: nice touch. Or maybe it was Kevin Spacey.”
Joan changed tack, deciding to be heretical.
“I know this is a weird segue but it’s something I wanted to ask. Architects are funny. Sometimes we work in a vacuum, and that’s good. Depends on the client. We like vacuums; we like to fill them up. (Oops. Wrong metaphor.) But sometimes we ignore the obvious, and that’s not good. Is there anything you envision for the Memorial, Lew? We’ve talked a lot, but is there anything that’s persistently in your head? When you wake up in the middle of the night. Or when you’re brushing your teeth.”
He appeared to be musing. Then:
“Not really. Something…simple — elegant. Not too much bullshit.” His mouth tensed at the word, before softening to a smile. “Big help, huh?”
“Yeah,” she said, without irony. “It actually is.”
He led her to the dining area. She sat at the table and he brought over wine. The fuck-loop streamed through her brain — she flashed on that hotel pool flood — before quickly shutting off.
“Joan — I see all these…Holocaust memorials, and…the thousand slabs. The thousand crosses in Berlin. Oklahoma: the 168 Chairs, the 168 Seconds of Silence. I hate that—literal shit. One of the WTC things was only going to be open to the public from the exact minute the 1st plane hit to the exact minute the 2nd tower fell. Another of the…proposals had these lights—I don’t know how many — but it was the number of people in the towers that couldn’t be identified by DNA! The 92 trees native to New York planted in the soil of the 92 nations the victims came from, the wall with 92 Messages of Hope.”
“I know,” said Joan, simpatico. “Paul Murdoch. He’s here in LA. Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. A 93-foot-tower with 40 wind chimes inside. One for each passenger and crew member. 40 groves of mixed maple trees the closer you get to the site. Then, 40 rows of—”
“The 1,776-foot tower. Make me wanna holler!” (The last, he shouted like Eddie Cantor.) “And that’s not even going to remotely happen. That’s why I like Andy — Goldsworthy. Cause he’ll do something outside the box. Something natural. I’d like to do Goldsworthy and someone…something else, more permanent, or permanent-looking. Andy can do his cairns or his water and stones and snakes — I think he’s going to use water, which I don’t object to. We’ve got 400 acres and the actual Mem is gonna be a pretty small ‘footprint,’ as they like to say. But I want it churchy. Like stumbling across the ruins of a church. Now, whether that’s at the end of a grove, or an allée, or up on a hill — fuck, I don’t know, Joan. I just don’t want to wind up with something honoring a quarter of a million dead people! You can’t do that shit with any kind of literality. Is that a word? I mean, how? Did you know that a hundred thousand people died in Sumatra in 15 minutes? One of my guys said the quake was so strong, it actually affected the earth’s rotation. How do you memorialize that? You know what I’m saying, honey? What happened to my brother and his wife, and their kids, and to me and my family—is personal. And for that very reason, the scale should be intimate. For any fuckin reason. A prayer. Let the world fucking carp. The world is always going to carp and piss and moan. The world wants Trump and Disney — America wants to sell tram-tickets to cemeteries with bling. Hallowed ground don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing! Do you know how many calls we still get about Katrina? To help with that shit? Where is George fucking Bush? My brother didn’t die in St Bernard Parish, he died on the coast of India. I mean, is that OK? Does that not meet with everyone’s approval? It’s obscene. Do I know what it means to miss New Orleans? Maybe. But sorry! Samuel’s in Elysian Fields — and his Fields ain’t got a Looziana zip. Wanna hear a Katrina joke? My pilot told it to me — man, he’s dark! A drowned horse walks into a Texas bar. Bartender says, ‘Why the long, bloated, maggoty face?’ Oh, you don’t get it! Hey Joan, know how many people died over there? 230,000. There’s another 50,000 missing. And those are only guesstimates. Know how many died in Pakistan? 80 thou. Know how many people swallowed water in Louisiana? What was it, 900? Losing the city itself was the fundamental…that’s what’s tragic. And everybody knows it. That makes sense. The money poured into the tsunami? They don’t even know how to disperse it! There’s such a surplus, they’ve been asking people to divert to other causes. That’s how fucked up and confused everyone is. The relief agencies and the schmucks who run em are bankrupt, spiritually, morally, and every other kinda which way. A guy lost his entire family of 37 in Ban Bang Sak — send computers, Bono! You know, I have zero interest in donating PCs to all the little Sambos before they rape and burn each other. They will be raped and burned. I don’t want to save rifle-toting black children! Let Bono knock himself out! Does that make me a bad guy? I employ people. Right? Thousands of fucking people. Families. I don’t renege on healthcare or pension promises. Right? And I want to honor my brother and his wife and in so doing, honor those who died. You know what, Joan? I don’t believe ‘We All Have AIDS.’ I don’t — not so far as my doctor’s told me. Sharon Stone can suck my 5,000,000,000 dollar cock and write a song from the coal mines of menopause and go talk about it on GMA. I do have a foundation, but it’s not about relief, it’s about cancer research. My mother, Mamie, had leukemia. When she died, that was worse than 200,000 people getting swept away, OK? Can you understand? I mean, how do you…represent that? This isn’t ‘We Are the World,’ this is she was my world. And now it’s about He Was My Brother. Samuel Freiberg, RIP. Someone said I should put a plaque up for whatever we wind up doing. Joan, do we need a fucking plaque?”
“No, Lew. You don’t need a plaque.”