The Submission - Amy Waldman [69]
“Find one,” Paul said.
Next Paul requisitioned reports on the design from the jury’s security consultants and summoned Khan to a meeting to go over them. They sat at the oval table where the jury had met for all those months. The consultants were advising against enclosing the garden entirely in walls because it would create too contained a target. Better to use very low perimeter walls, more like parapets. The canals were also a safety liability: “One child falls in and the whole memorial shuts down.” They recommended scrapping them.
“You can’t be serious,” Mo said when the consultants had left. He and Paul were spaced several seats apart at the round table. Khan leaned elegantly back in his chair and crossed a thin leg. A certain comfort had been achieved between them, Paul thought, for all their arguing.
“If you read the bylaws, we are allowed to impose—request—changes.”
“And I am allowed to refuse—decline—them.”
“Yes, but if you agree to make them, it might increase your chances of securing the governor’s approval.”
A skeptical smile flitted over Mo’s lips. “Do you really believe that?”
“My job is to try to achieve a meeting of the minds,” Paul said, choosing not to speak his own. “If there isn’t one—”
“Then what? If you’re making a threat, spell it out.”
“No threats, just realities. We’re meant to have a dialogue, which should lead to refinements. If the jury and the governor are not satisfied, then it becomes impossible to proceed. No winning entry is final. Any vision has to evolve. We’re the client, after all. No one is immune to compromise. You think Maya Lin wanted that statue of the soldiers near her memorial?”
“But if you’re worried about security, the walls actually provide an ideal way to screen who’s coming in and out. They can be built with strong materials—fortified, blast-resistant, you name it. Your arguments seem … specious, for lack of a better word. For every one I could offer a counterargument that’s as strong. Stronger.”
“We have sound technical or financial reasoning for all our desired changes.”
“Your changes would alter the essence of my design.”
“An essence, as it so happens, now widely equated with a paradise for martyrs. Even if you didn’t intend it that way, it’s now read that way—by your opponents, by America’s opponents. You saw the Iranian president’s statement, I’m sure. He’s delighted—delighted!—to have an Islamic paradise in Manhattan.”
“He’s a buffoon.”
“Anyway, there’s nothing sacrosanct about your design. Ever read Edmund Burke?”
“Nope.”
“His treatise On the Sublime and Beautiful—I was just rereading it. He argues for randomness over geometry: the number and disorder of the stars, the way their confusion constitutes a kind of infinity—”
“A grid subdividing endlessly can be a form of infinity, too.”
“The point he makes is that man tried to teach nature its business with straight lines and mathematical shapes, but nature wouldn’t be taught. He was writing around the time that English gardens came into being, Capability Brown and so on”—Paul’s casual mention of this belying the hour he had spent researching the genesis and proliferation of English gardens, or, rather, perusing the research that he had asked Lanny to do—“and those gardens showed that mathematical ideas are not the true measures of beauty.”
“I didn’t know beauty was what we were aiming for,” Mo said.
“The importance of variation”—Paul decided to ignore him until he finished his piece—“to have parts not be angular but melted into one another, as he puts it. ‘No work of art can be great, but as it deceives—’”
“That’s affirming, since it’s deception I’m being accused of.”
“Yes, well, that’s not the kind he means—he means tricking the eye.”
“This is a memorial, not an English lord’s estate. The Garden has order, which its geometry manifests, for a reason, which