Bellows (part two)

(Click here for part one.)

Suicide, for me, has never been an option. And so, faced with the way things are, have been, and can be, the only thing for me to do was say: Let there be life, light, and water to reflect it. Not that my signature on the project plan was inevitable: things could have been otherwise: my blue-inked scribble represented a courage and vision unmatched. It represented the audacity demanded by a modern city built against an edifice of overwhelming financial and social risk. Broad strokes. An enthusiasm born of old testament passion, trials by fire and salt. I haven't attended services in decades, half a century perhaps, not since before my mother's death, oh, not since long before that, when I could have sat at her side on the hard wooden pew, when she might have set her hand on my hands, whispering, when she could have told me to stop fidgeting, such flagrant disrespect in and for the house of the Lord our God Jesus Christ and all the Angels in Heaven where your dear father waits for you with Fury and Love, in the old church where everything smelled like dust soaked with the perfume of old ladies and the host tasted like burnt butter on my tongue, but I think some measure of the old preacherman's scorn for sin and weakness became ingrained in my veins in my youth, and that, in times of fear and doubt, his voice runs through me, as it did when I announced my plans at the board room table to my team of advisors and partners only moments before signing the plan into action. Nothing could be foretold. Still, I foretold. Initiating this project was to pick up a strange gun, point it at my face, and proclaim my certainty that this weapon contained flowers, not bullets. And then to fire.

Of course, though the rousing applause and the chorus of laudations that its signing occasioned were real--there are those city builders who employ nothing but lackeys, but I've always selected free-thinking individuals, believing that challenging thoughts makes them thrive, with the understanding at all times that properly placed layoffs could give life to any desired measure of momentum, and so I could rest certain that night that the praise was genuine, if underwhelming--the project plan was less so; little more than a symbolic document, the kind of thing they had to have on hand at the National City Planning Oversight Bureau in case anybody anywhere should ever sue someone over something, the document did little more than say that, yes, GWB Enterprises intended to build a city, details to come, Latin Latin, etcetera and so forth, sine qua non. We began hashing out the details that evening. It was a late night. So was the next night. And all the nights that followed. We worked with fervor: nobody was let off the hook: husbands phoned their wives in the hallway outside the boardroom, apologized for missing dinner, apologized for not making it home in days, requested shipment of fresh clothing and new deodorant, apologized for missing birthdays, apologized for missing their children's first steps, first words, first questions. We ate salads from boxes and pizzas on paper plates. Managers slept on their office floors. Planes were booked and vacations were cancelled. Secretaries became dishevelled, lawyers billed triple time, janitors lamented their lot in life, and I never once faltered. We kept busy.

First and foremost came the selection of a site. This came long before the decisions we'd come to make about the clothing our city's new citizens would enjoy (for casual wear, short blue skirts covered in white polka dots and brown light sweaters for the ladies, plaid shorts and dark green polo shirts with popped collars for the gentlemen, and the most adorable tiny suits and sun dresses for the babies and children), the dominant architectural themes of our new city's buildings (modern!, modern!!, modern!!! for our new downtown, hypermodern and tall and functional and sleek and strong, able to withstand the coming strain, a skyline shaped like a whipcrack surrounded on all sides by a residential mix of neo-southern plantations and lush, hypoallergenic growth, large yards and wraparound porches and white gazebos, quaint but freshly painted and entirely inspiring compared to the desperate sameness and gray blockiness of the eastern bloc-esque slums that would slash through one side of the city like an oversight or an error), green space and road plans (tricky, tricky), and the like. We chose a spot in central Ohio for the available space and the elegant distance between it and the jewels of the east coast. It was near enough that nobody would mind travelling to it, but distant enough that, even were it not constructed to be my own personal calling card, had we not painted it to be a true work of art, it would still feel exotic. Almost paradisaical. Debate rose, of course; one subgroup never stopped pushing or Iowa, but Iowa is nonsense; always has been; once a trend, now nothing more than a regret. Pennsylvania and Illinois both close, but Ohio? Ohio, as it always did, when it came time to do, would have to do.