The Submission - Amy Waldman [6]
The trauma, for Paul, had come later, when he watched the replay, pledged allegiance to the devastation. You couldn’t call yourself an American if you hadn’t, in solidarity, watched your fellow Americans being pulverized, yet what kind of American did watching create? A traumatized victim? A charged-up avenger? A queasy voyeur? Paul, and he suspected many Americans, harbored all of these protagonists. The memorial was meant to tame them.
Not just any memorial now but the Garden. Paul began his remarks by encouraging the jurors to “go out there and sell it, sell it hard,” then, rethinking his word choice, urged them to “advocate” for it instead. The soft patter of the minute-taker’s typing filled the interstices of his speech, and the specter of the historical record spurred him to unsteady rhetorical heights. He drew all eyes to a gilded round mirror topped with an eagle shedding its ball and chain.
“Now, as at America’s founding, there are forces opposed to the values we stand for, who are threatened by our devotion to freedom.” The governor’s man alone nodded at Paul’s words. “But we have not been bowed, will not be. ‘Despotism can only exist in darkness,’ James Madison said, and all of you, in working so hard to memorialize the dead, have kept the lights burning in the firmament. You handled a sacred trust with grace and dignity, and your country will feel the benefit.”
Time to put a face on the design, a name with it. Another unfamiliar feeling for Paul: avid, almost childlike curiosity—glee, even—at that rarity, a genuine surprise. Best if the designer was a complete unknown or a famous artist; either would make for a compelling story to sell the design. He clumsily punched away at a cell phone that sat on the table before him. “Please bring the file for submission number 4879,” he said into the phone, enunciating the numbers slowly to avoid misunderstanding. “Four eight seven nine,” he repeated, then waited for the digits to be repeated back to him.
The jury’s chief assistant entered a few minutes later, aglow with his own importance. His long fingers clasped a slim envelope, eight and a half by eleven inches, sealed as protocol demanded. “I am dying with anticipation,” Lanny breathed as he handed the envelope to Paul, who made no reply. The envelope’s numbers and bar code matched those of the Garden; the envelope’s seal was unbroken. Paul made sure both the jurors and the minute-taker noted this and waited for the reluctant assistant to take his leave.
Once the door shut, Paul picked up the silver letter opener the young man had left behind—he did have a flair for detail—and slit the flap, taking care (again, the specter of history) not to tear the envelope. His caution somehow recalled Jacob, his eldest son, at a childhood birthday party, obsessively trying not to rip the wrapping paper, even then misunderstanding where value lay. An impatient Paul had told him to hurry it along.
Hurry it along: the same message from the room’s quiet, in which the jurors seemed to breathe as one. He pulled out the paper, sensing thirteen pairs of eyes upon him. To know the winner’s identity before the jury, not to mention the mayor or governor or president, should have been a small but satisfying token of his stature. What better measure of how high Paul Joseph Rubin, grandson of a Russian Jewish peasant, had climbed? And yet reading the name brought no pleasure, only a painful tightening in his jaw.
A dark horse indeed.