“As of this moment and this announcement, there will be a contest underway for designing architectural spaces way up there, way up in the air — more prosaically, in the airspace owned by the Government of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, as specified by the longitudinal and latitudinal co-ordinates on your fact sheets, gentlemen. I hope you’re excited. I hope you’re ready. I know we are, and I know I am. The Czech Government invites architects from any culture, country, or economic background to submit their proposal to our assembled panel of judges, who — after the cut-off date of August 3rd, 2009 — will shortly announce their decision to the world.”
Clev closed his briefing book, nodded a silent thanks to the cameras and cameramen perched in the back of the room, and left for lunch.
A young government worker quickly rising through the department’s ranks. His best party trick: whistling all the parts simultaneously to Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2. What he did his best to avoid: the scrupulously slicked hair endemic to men his age entering government. Hair was hair, and that was the long, the short, and the bald of it. What he was carrying with him as he made his way to the Charles Bridge: a folder of accumulated information, covering — in part — historical precedents and geographic hints: Potosi (in Bolivia), Jules Verne-styled watercolors of jellyfish-like constructs of metal passing over stovepipe-hat picnickers and thoroughly embellished mountains, Quito (in Ecuador), Laya (in Bhutan), and Machu Picchu.
The point to his counterpoint: Alexandr Brankova, an avid technophile and — despite the BlackBerrys and iPhones — someone who had given up his notebook for flip cameras. When an idea struck, the camera would come out of the jacket lining (hand-tailored off a cat-filled island in Greece, Brankova would repeat, with no cat-hairs to boot!), he would wander over to any corner of whatever room he was in — leaving whomever he was conversing with in a state of raised-eyebrow pause, including Jan Fischer — hunch his shoulders over the camera, and begin to whisper furiously.
Alexandr was waiting at the Charles Bridge. He waved with a manila folder of his own, and the two crossed; crossing, they saw a couple, back layered on back, lean across the edge to watch the boats, a young man twitching madly in place in a heroic effort to contain an orchestral blast of verbal abuses and lacerations as he listened to a grungy (flannel shirt out of tune with the pace of the warm weather of the day, unkempt hair, baggy jeans) man in his early twenties tell him, “See, I came to Prague to have an epiphany. I even brought a copy of Kundera? See? Kun-der-a. He’s, like, your national flag or something, right? But the thing is, now that I’m here, I just realized — you can’t force an epiphany. You know what I mean? Which is a bummer in a way, ‘cause I spent all this money on air-faire …,” and they spotted a photographer hard at work pivoting, pointing, kneeling, shooting and stopping for a moment to think on the shot he just took.
“Where are we going?” Clev asked. Alexandr was scratching at the beard on his chin, muttering that it was time to trim the old lion’s mane.
“Shall we make it Bellevue?”
Aleaxndr looked over and grunted his assent.
2.
They passed a window stacked to the brim with TV’s. President Clinton on David Letterman. They passed on. Had they heard what was being said behind the glass, they would have heard this:
Not personally, not politically, not psychologically has the human race yet mastered the complex issue of identity. Who are we? Why are we here? In order for me to know I’m separate from you, do I have to think I’m better than you? And we live in a world that is so interdependent, we really have to find a way to have what the game theorists call win-win solutions — you know, where everybody comes out ahead. So: it’s not like a basketball game with overtime or the football game with overtime — where, you know, it’s a contest: you’re supposed to have a winner and a loser. We’re living in a world where first we should look for ways to share the victories and share the responsibilities, because we share this little planet — I mean, look at this climate change thing: most of the global warming’s coming out of America and China. Australia got hit first. Africa — according to the studies — is going to get hit worse. The continent that’s contributed the least to it. We can’t escape each other, and yet we still haven’t managed this identity thing. We’re still under the illusion that if we were a little bit richer, a little more powerful, if we had a little edge over somebody, push somebody around a little bit … that somehow we’d all be better off, and in the end — maybe it’s just because I’ve slaked my ambition — but it’s not so. I mean, if you look back on your life, what you really think of as important is who liked you, who loved you, what you cared about; how the flowers smelled in the springtime; whether or not you thought you did anything that was noble or decent; did you have a child, and were you proud of him or her? I mean, people in politics should think about all these things from the perspective of real people more than momentary political advantage. I think we’re getting there, but we just don’t quite yet have the consciousness we need to deal with these conflicts. (A pause.) We need to have a bigger sense of our identity and other peoples’.
3.
“I feel like I have a hair on my face.”
“You mean — your beard?”
“No, no. Something else. Besides that.”
“… A phantom beard? Over your actual beard?”
“I’m willing to consider it.”
Clev coughed, and wondered if he was being hypnotized by the glass on his table.
Their own private plans for the contest were betrayed by giddiness and enthusiasm, which is why the Speculative Architecture Department and its sub-departments were pivoting to the public now. They had pounded tables into footstools at restaurants as they argued over pedimented windows versus Queen Anne oriel windows, the height being the obvious determining factor, Clev would shout, or the amount of patience it took to describe the difference between Ionic porticos and Greek Revival porticos, and which would be reserved for houses in this imaginary air-space and which would be reserved for Government buildings. The miles of wrought-iron balconies that would be discussed, and whether or not their shapeliness would be at all affected by their increased proximity to the sun — they discussed it all, and the radioactivity of the practicalities sent them spiralling elsewhere.
4.
I am putting my chef duties on hold like a pancake being tossed into the air after having seen On the Waterfront mugging about with lines like, “I coulda been a pizza, I coulda been somebody,” like the shop-talk humor they must have in car lots, this, and if I were selling cars (and green motorcycles — when are those coming?), I would still be doing what I’m doing now: sneaking cool jam from a cool jar, taking a spoon, tapping the side of the jar before it’s even been dipped, standing on this door-bell of deliciousness (and if only door bells worked that way, even if they’d tried to get halfway there at a World’s Fair or in Tomorrowland), striking out into the globs of berries with a tiny scoop, and the subsequent deposit of it on one-half a slice of french bread, a spare cracker, or a malleable nub of brie, all of which have one destination: a runaway batch of joy that makes me feel like a child of 1940, or any child for that matter who exclaims “Jam!” and I’m
just
a -
bout to take a bite when the owner comes barreling into my kitchen and shouts, “Whaddya doin’?” and I shout back, “Whaddya mean?” and he pounds a bowl of fish eyeballs next to some bundled up celery, sending them squishing up into the air and he shouts through the rising mist of goop, “Because there’s some critics out there!”
“Well, how do you know?”
And the owner, this Italian, Paul, nicknamed Kazimir, he palms the bone structure around his eyes as a relaxant, these rough co-centric circles we’d see if people left La Mystere Picasso-styled lines behind them as they moved, walked, danced, watched, and went from chicken to bather to man to minotaur, just like anybody else you’d see on the morning bus or evening sweep of the subway over the river.
“‘cause they’re talkin’ about things other than the food, is why.”
“So?”
“So? So? We get a giant talking oyster who makes Barry Manilow sound pre-pubescent, stick him behind the piano player, and you’re talking to me about so? So give them some food they’ll talk about. Shoot a horse and give them besh barmak! Give them some Wuhan re gan mian! Serve them some Ipoh white coffee! Wheel in one of those glowing cheese pods from Gouda! Give them poffert for desert! Get them started with some cocildo madrileno! Or some boerek! Perhaps some Gözleme! For the main course, kaczka z jabłkami! Burn their gullets with ouzo! Toss some smažák in and see if they can tell the difference with the alien thing from Gouda. Sneak a dish of Rogan josh into this panoptic mix! Are you getting this? Are you getting this down? What are you making?”
“Ham and eggs.”
“Are you rea — oh, good, it’s shrimp scampi and jell-o. You’re a prince, Wolfgang. I applaud your butterballs, Julia. You’re not going to impress them? You’re going to get rid of them?”
“I haven’t flipped my switch to the winning Fast Eddie, Kazimir. Besides — want to know how I’d get rid of them if I wanted to?”
“How?”
“I’d start grating brie.”
“Fix us something passable, will you?”
“Tapas. In the cabinet right above your head.”
“It’s still warm.”
“Chess, Kazimir. Songs. Patterns.”
“You’re a son of a —”
And the dish was passed from my hand to the waiter’s, who brought it to —
5.
“This contest is a prelude,” Alexandr repeated for the god-knows-how-many-th time, taking a bite of glowing carne mechada and chorizo a la sidra bumping against its holding bowl like a growling water candle. “First this, and then, planet-hacking.”
Planet-hacking — two hundred years ago, what would it have been? ‘Emptying out the planet’s watch?’
Still: a term is a term, and we must carry it to term.
Hacking failed states. Smuggling Bhutan’s Minister of Happiness into a country that might need it. Re-growing rainforests. Re-constructing refugee camps that’ve lasted longer than they were meant to. Attaching strings to all the leaves of all the trees, and — come the cue — yanking every leaf from one branch to the other. Floating the poles to keep them from melting and the oceans rising, covering the immediate land in a sulfurous gas, and turning the nearby ocean into monstrous columns, so animals would not be denied access from their longtime homes. There are vast fields of information stored in the magnetic fields of other planets. There are cities that are kept terrorized by a small enclave that sends earthquakes chasing after people and buildings, so the people and buildings have learned how to jump and turn themselves invisible. This is what we mean by planet-hacking.
“And why limit it to planet-hacking? Why not form a club to ensure that there are fewer deaths in this coming century than there were in the previous? Why not try and create a world where the flame at Hiroshima can be doused, and the world will be nuclear free? How many more years of mega-business slow-creep do we have to endure before it’s only green motorcycles on the market? And are California, Hawaii, and Japan talking to each other about cleaning up that mess of trash in the Pacific? How quickly did we go after the toxins in Springdale, PA? How quickly did we tackle unemployment in Baraga and Camden? How will the culture, the laws, and the business of things shift when the price it takes to sequence one’s genome takes its inevitable nosedive?”
6.
I remember I lived in Copenhagen for a decade and one morning Bruce Springsteen was playing guitar in the middle of the street. I was sitting on the top of a bank of phones at the edge of the crowd, and sometimes those bee-lining to the phones would stop, stare at the back of the crowds, click their eyeballs from what-is-that to is-it-really?, look up at me, I’d nod, confirming it, they’d deliberate whether or not to go ahead with the phone call, and if they decided to — and this only happened once — just as they’re saying hello, I’d pick the receiver from their hands into the air as the crowd offered its own, “Who - ho - hoa, I’m on fire.”
After he finished, the crowd broke into three groups — the majority went with Bruce, of course; the second largest went off on its own direction, and the smallest group was reserved for the yellow shirt, and that made sense, I argued to myself, as those in the lead have very few near them.
My crowd — we wandered back through the center, where they’d put up a collection of odd signs from around the world — Secret Nuclear Bunker off the A128, Turn Left for a Boring Oregon City, No Trespassing Without Permission, or Dead People Things for Sale, and buskers and camera-up tourists and heads-down locals passed through.
And then somewhere along King’s New Market, I realized: Dostoyevsky’s “Pushkin” speech repeats itself. The multicolored corridor of Nyhavn opened before me. It’s there with Bruce, the speech, and how — and I’d have to call my friends in Moscow; it’s been years since I’ve visited — the Russians react to The Beatles now. The repetition of redemption — if that’s what it’s called.
I love that stadiums full of thousands of people can settle on a key to sing. I read a story somewhere about how memory was made — and the neurologists likened it to a great big orchestral blast made in the brain. It makes me wonder about the space between a stadium singing and a brain doing it, or a group of photographers and painters trying it instead.
But it was there in Copenhagen that I learned how to look — not John Berger look, mind — Alexandr look.
I would watch a morning runner or biker cross down an avenue in nothing but the Danish light and when a building would crop up, the building a piece of hair being swooped up by an invisible comb to face an invisible mirror in a sky, I’d watch how many stopped, how the shadow would affect how they walked down the sidewalk, how people would wrap around the base of the building (the only exception being the man who insisted on taking his cigarette breaks super-glued to a spot between the eighteenth and nineteenth floors), what happened when they added benches (and what kind — treating a barren financial zone like a timeshare in the Poconos ain’t my kind of fun), or the rate at which parks — not green technology, but parks themselves — started to be integrated into the sides and slopes of the more mechanical parts of a cityscape.
7.
The most popular name on the table was Krkonoše City, and it would be launched straight from the mountain that would give it its name.
“To think!” Alexandr boomed. “It’ll wave its little propellers and the base will rest its tip like a child about to tumble over the edge, and then … they’re off. Over Hradčany! Malá Strana! Nové Město! Josefov! The burst of orange roofs, like paper you pinch with your hand into a cone. Or thousands of tons of nuns habits made out of slate waiting to fall on an unsuspecting — “
”Alexandr. ”
A glass of water.
“Do you think theme parks ever throw a mascot in the wash that still has a person in it?”
“If I ran a theme park, I probably would.”
“Drowned Goofy Land.” Clev frowned, considering the name.
“What if it wasn’t a building at all?” Alexandr mused. “What if it —
— was just a shape? A hollowed-out cloud rumbling along like a caffeine-drained camel? And who catches it on their phone? A child? An important man being shepherded to the airport? And what do they do with it once they’ve caught it? Flip the phone and the subsequent film in their hands like a little coin? A collectible ball card? Or what if the most exciting thing about it is that it’s always just going away? Just about to leave the frame?”
“How many entries do you think we’ll get?”
“Does it matter? Aren’t you excited?”
