Then, a few years later, a man came in and slashed the canvas
with a knife. A statement was released that used the word unbalanced,
which seemed fair, although we hadn’t had a statement from the slasher,
who was still detained. When we got home the furniture and wall-hangings
had gone. The paint behind the frames had not been faded by the light, so
left an outline of the pictures like a kind of silhouette. I felt surprisingly
disarmed, like being caught off guard without a good excuse, unable to
give answers to the simplest set of questions – Who are you? What are you
doing here? – suffering a period of brief but harsh amnesia. What better
metaphor than that great city, rising from the swamp, laying its foundations
on the men who died constructing it? It makes you wonder if survivors
had a clue what they’d survived, or if the long, fantastic stories told
by nurses did the trick. One inspector wrote how the drowned horses
were impossible to count, and that the bridges may as well have been
constructed out of them. The thing is, as a child, I didn’t know how
distance worked, that it was somehow linked to passing time and that
forgetting sometimes meant that you might live through things again,
like when you feel you’re seeing mountains that you’ve never seen
before but then you find out from a photograph you came here
not that long ago. About a year went by in the same way. For them,
there was a chance to fix up the slashed masterpiece, re-hanging
it beside a plaque explaining what had happened here. For us,
there was a chance to catch up on the things we’d missed, doing
our best to make exceptions for the minute gains and losses of each
day, which tend to sweep by unannounced the way the wind disturbs
acres of dunes. During this period we visited Lake Tahoe, which I’d only
ever seen as a relief map in a restaurant – whose outer walls were made
of plastic made to look like it was made of wood – or in The Godfather: Part II
(1974), because it’s where the Corleones have a compound distanced
from New York. Driving north around the lake’s perimeter, I read aloud
that its depth is over sixteen hundred feet and that (because the water
stays so cold) there could be bodies from the fifties down there,
perfectly preserved. Six yachts were sailing to the state line with their
fibreglass reflecting light. I had a vision stitched together from stock
imagery of yachting scenes: mostly bikinis and champagne and people
diving in slow motion from the yacht into the lake. It all got nasty pretty
quickly, so I tried to think of something else. As far as I’m aware, though,
this was years before the news broke out, by which time we were back
at home. The papers barely covered other stories while the pictures
started turning up on posters, T-shirts, flags and students’ protest signs.
Eventually the men came to be discharged from the hospital. It wasn’t
that they’d all been cured, just that there wasn’t more that could be done;
it would be years before the fossils were discovered and it all made sense.