Architecture for Monsters

Mary South

Broken Rib Cage rises above the desert of Abu Dhabi like the mirage of a satanic cathedral. The condominium tower is ninety-one stories of bleached-bone concrete curving from a central sternum. This skeletal structure, however, has not the dancer’s aplomb of a Calatrava. Halfway up, steel beams suddenly wrench apart the facade, offering a glimpse into a courtyard that’s so fecund, it’s visceral. Critics have proclaimed it a magnum opus of feral genius, while others have mocked the aesthetic as “roadkill architecture.” It is the most famous of the Damaged Organ buildings by Helen Dannenforth, an iconic, if controversial, doyenne in the field. She has repeatedly been lambasted for possessing a sensibility that is viciously carnal, if not outright bloodthirsty. “I was watching videos of surgeries,” she said of her design. “As I saw doctors crack a man’s chest and force a window to his heart, I was compelled to sketch.”

It has been a good year for Dannenforth. A MacArthur Fellowship was followed by a successful bid for the renovated Bilbao-Abando high-speed train station. The Met is putting on a retrospective of her work, a rarity for a living practitioner. Early access to the exhibition was like peering inside a cabinet of wonders. Here stood the presentation for her Memory of Skin pavilion at the Serpentine, a series of porous mesh panels rigged as the masts of a galleon upon which a plush, synthetic coral would grow via photocells. The artificial tissue would retain every indentation, every cicatrix incurred on its surface before being removed at the end of the summer. There lay her drawings done in brush pen with flourishes of watercolor, the details wrought with the precision of a miniaturist. Whispers are circulating she’s the front-runner for the coveted Pritzker Prize. None of these accolades affect the woman herself, who in a few weeks will be feted by friends and family in celebration of her fifty-fifth birthday.

I met Helen Dannenforth for our interview on Long Island, a few hours from the firm she founded in Soho. Her Cumulus House ripples in contrast to silhouettes of the surrounding stolid manors. East Hampton commonly conjures visuals of rustic shingles salted by ocean winds, gambrel roofs, wraparound verandas, shuttered bay-window seats. While she retained many of these elements—white trim, transomed doors—the classic cedar shakes have been changed to aluminum. As the pitched roof slopes into frothy formlessness, it’s as cells replicating in a petri dish or the transition of rutted terrain to sky, those eponymous cumulus witnessed from the belly of a passenger jet. The floating median marking this bifurcation, a kind of cream shiver, is a poured translucent acrylic meant to evoke clean linen. The house is a regression to precognition, its genesis from lying in her Michigan backyard as a child and staring up at sheets breezy on the line. It is an homage to laundry, weeds, naming clouds after the animals they resemble, power lines, suburbia, reverie.

“It’s supposed to feel as if the house has become atmosphere,” she explained. “I’ve been trying to tinker with softer constructions. Earlier in my career, my proposals were for buildings that had violence done to them. I was wary of the perception that I was merely feminine, too airy.”

To labor under her has been likened more to taking holy orders than a job opportunity. The lucky are plucked from courses Dannenforth has taught at Harvard, Yale, and the Architectural Association in London. Acolytes rendering are attired in monastic black or gray—de rigueur, but also required at Studio Forth by strict dress code. They muff their ears in huge headphones and don’t speak unless necessary, as if sworn to vows of silence. Helen accoutres a wardrobe that is part nun, part drag queen. A closet of monochromes surprises with the random attack of pigment. Gaudy statement jewelry scaffolds her knuckles and collarbone. She styles the opulence of her matriarch-white hair between her shoulder blades in a low chignon like a large bellows. “They say people deface Rothko and Barnett Newman canvases because of their intense swaths of color,” she told me, holding a cocktail ensemble red as a spanking to my figure. “Wear something like this to both entice and threaten a man.”

Not a single person in the community has heard her raise her voice, yet there is a pervasive fear of rousing her wrath. In general, she is unreadable, sibylline. “She shits ice cubes,” said a former employee. It is rumored that she dismissed an assistant for expressing an opinion while in Zurich for a conference. The two were reclining in a sauna at Therme Vals, and the assistant stated that Russian suprematism was “paint-by-numbers for the blind.” Helen shot back that she should pack her bags and return to the States. When, of course, this little fit wasn’t taken seriously and the unconscionably witty assistant had the temerity to show her face at dinner, the table was made to wait to eat until she had been checked out of the hotel. Then again, to be a Dannenforth favorite is to acquire a second mother who is better than a mother. Those chosen few have spent holidays at her side. They have been armchair counseled on their portfolios, their love lives, their childhoods. They have occupied rent free the guest suite in her loft apartment in the city. Oblivious, she has had conversations about current projects as her protégé du jour is nakedly lounging postcoitus with a paramour.

Romance isn’t something that concerns Helen on a personal level, though she does have a daughter by an estranged ex-husband. Lily, sweet sixteen, came crashing in with keys, boots, and weekender bag during our chat over tea. It would have been easy to mistake her for the pubescent doppelgänger of her mother if not for the bits of leaves in her tangled hair, the wabi-sabi scratches and insect bites on her shins. She had gone on a camping trip with her boyfriend and unpacked by tossing makeup, snacks, tabloids, dirty clothes around the room like so much flotsam, the shipwreckage of a girl. “A girl becomes a woman when she learns everything has its place,” Dannenforth aphoristically observed. On my official introduction, when I wasn’t distracted by this charming chaos, Lily’s sunburned cheeks reminiscent of hammocks and pitchers of lemonade and sneaked cigarettes, the effortless peasant blouse I’m certain cost hundreds of dollars, did I discern the asymmetry in her features that urged me to both look away and to peer more closely at her countenance in reverie of its peculiarity.

The jaw was excruciatingly small and pulled to one side, as if she were frozen in an expression of trying to make up her mind about something or other. The mouth, despite its full lips with their pinup appeal, was similarly torqued. Helen, noticing my staring but trying not to stare, swept the hair from her daughter’s face and said, “You might as well see it all.” An ear was pierced several times with studs; the opposite ear was proportionally sized but its ridges softened, as if it were sand on the beach washed over and flattened by the tides. Lily had been born with craniofacial microsomia and classified as “severe,” using the grading scale known as OMENS. She had needed assistance even to survive, as her breathing was obstructed. When she was old enough, a rib had been taken from her to supplement the absent bone of the jaw. Cartilage from that rib went to crafting her ear. The surgeons had been the best in the world and they had done their best. I could tell she would have been conventionally beautiful had she not suffered this anomaly in the womb and she still was attractive, though mostly because she was compellingly unusual.

When the daughter went to use the shower, I dared to ask if Lily’s condition had had any influence in Helen’s notoriously ravaging style, her mangling of anatomy. The rib, the surgeries, how could it not? “That’s offensive,” she replied. “I’m asked that because of my sex. If one of Frank Gehry’s sons were disabled, would you inquire if that had affected his concept development? My interest in the body began before I became a parent. It is primal. I don’t need to use Lily for creative fodder. Remember what Juhani Pallasmaa wrote: ‘The origin of our understanding of space lies in the cavern of the mouth.’ Picture the crocheted, hoodoo majesty of the spine. I’m not the main practitioner with a corporeal bent, yet I get the nickname ‘Mrs. Biomorphosis.’ I am the one who is labeled a sociopath, a predator.”

I never knew my mother. An obsessive-compulsive lab tech who experienced paranoid delusions assaulted her and stashed the remains in a cable chase of the Genetics Department at Berkeley. She was a molecular biologist studying strawberries, specifically strains that were drought resistant versus those that were not. My father had a nervous breakdown after her death, so at twenty months old I was sent to live with my maternal grandparents. I cultivated my mother’s passion for structure, but my pursuits turned to architecture in lieu of science. Dannenforth was my heroine, a beacon of powerful estrogen in a profession hostile to female influence. The coincidences in our biographies also helped the flourishing of my worship, I admit. When Helen came to give a lecture at Rice University in Houston, where I was pursuing a master’s, I waited my turn to speak with her until I was the last student in the auditorium. As she addressed me, I muttered some phrase of thanks and fled, too filled with anxiety to permit her to become real.

Soon afterward, I dropped out of my graduate program. My grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and I returned to sell the house and set her up in an assisted-living facility. I was the sum total of extant kin. Choosing to remarry and start over, my dad didn’t reclaim custody. Boxes of knickknacks and mementos were the raw materials from which I constructed the aleatory model of my mother. Gardens were her refuge, as were birds. She kept nests. Pads of paper were filled with graphite nests, their twiggy tessellation like the still life of a tornado. It occurred to me that a nest is the epitome of dwellings, a safe haven between firmament and roots. There was a metaphysical warmth to the belongings I sorted through, as if I sensed spirits lingering under afghans, doing dishes, slamming the screen door the way she did as a child and later the way I did as a child. They say the haunted house symbolizes the border between the natural and the artificial—or is it the artificial being overtaken by the natural?

At any rate, I freelanced laser-cut shelving and patio extensions. I also wrote articles. Finally, that fortuitous day arrived when I was commissioned for a profile piece by the seminal Inhabit. Helen failed to recognize me, which wasn’t demoralizing, but what vexed me was succumbing to incoherence despite the years in between our introduction. Too cowardly to mention I was simpatico with her motherlessness, the abandonment by a father, I segued into her research on family estates with the aim that she would reveal her past. “I lift from Gothic novels,” she said. “There’s something about the entropic vision of an ancient manor that’s both creepy and welcoming. We treat architecture how we treat our physical selves, as doomed to oblivion. No effort is spared in restoring the Sistine Chapel ceiling to pristine éclat. A Matisse won’t go to waste. Take a Mies van der Rohe, though, and it’s given the care of a crypt. Preservation’s a Sisyphean task in this craft. ‘That’s all that’s left of the voice of Enrico Caruso / from all that’s left of an opera-house somewhere in Matto Grosso,’ a poet wrote.”

She waxed melancholy about the replicas of Japanese and German villages fabricated from scratch in the 1940s to test the incendiary capacity of napalm. Hollywood set decorators outfitted each domicile down to the details of toiletries and authentic newspapers. “Extraordinary amounts of effort for the simulacra of ghost towns that were then blown up,” Helen lamented. “Sounds about right.” Discussing books rekindled the embers of her monologue. In her office, Ernst Neufert’s handbook on ergonomic principles rests alongside The Castle of Otranto, The Woman in White, and Jane Eyre with its crazy wife in the attic. Recondite chambers and whimsical, old-timey chicanery are her fetish. “Any shelter should also expose ourselves. I’m a fan of that genre of literature because passages of prose describe passages through ramparts, hedge mazes, and servants’ quarters. The plot hinges on a secret in a secret room. It makes visible how the brain harbors a secret.”

Helen has her own cache of secrets. Upstate New York, on acres of rolling hills, woods, and manicured demesne is an institution ominously titled “the Retreat.” Mustering a mosquitoed tenacity, I managed to schedule a visit with a patient there, Hannah Dannenforth, her half sister. The drive in a rental without a working radio was spent feeling sorry for myself. My interview had bombed. I was in the doldrums. A woman who looked like everybody’s aunt sat down across from me in the rec center. Where Helen was lissome, Hannah was corpulent; where Helen’s hair was loosely elegant, Hannah’s was tightly cropped and turfing every which way, like a lawn in severe need of mowing; where Helen entertained in haute couture, Hannah hid in stained secondhand. “Do you know why I’m stuck here with a bunch of junkies and schizophrenics and Adirondack chairs?” she asked. I said that I didn’t—sleuthing out her contact information itself had been a test of will. “I’m here,” she replied, “because I’m Lily’s real mother.”

Of course, there is another reason for her being committed. She kidnapped Lily, twelve years old when the incident occurred. In a postmodern imitation of manifest destiny, the two began heading west, except in a Honda instead of a covered wagon. Hannah agreed to a plea deal: five years of probation on a suspended sentence provided that she voluntarily check into a psychiatric hospital. “There’s buildings devoted to locking up people like me for good,” she said. “I bet you don’t hear my sister talk about the architecture of the prison, of the sanitarium, do you?” Cupping her palms in a beseeching gesture, she went on, “Helen blames me for Lily. When she looks at her, she sees her biggest failure that she has to live with every day. I was constantly afraid while I was pregnant that I would birth one of those babies with microcephaly or spina bifida or their intestines spilling out of the body. But after I saw her, those feelings seemed so trivial. When I look at that girl, I feel proud. I made her, I think. She’s mine.”

According to Hannah, Lily was in on the abduction. Surreptitious emails and phone calls were exchanged. A lot of kids want to run away, I argued. That doesn’t mean you take them up on the offer. “This wasn’t about hating your mother because she grounded you during spring vacation,” she retorted. This was about the sanctity of the shared meal, report cards pinned on the refrigerator and pinwheels in flowerpots, coercing the dog into a costume for funny snaps, an abode that wasn’t relegated to a spread in a magazine. Yes, disappearing had been drastic, but Helen’s forsaking her was also drastic. Helen was indifferent as an oyster when she was laid off, when medical bills piled up, when her property was foreclosed. She was living out of her car like a secular mendicant—“the Wandering Spinster”—bereft of wisdom to dispense. Visits with Lily were forbidden. Plus, legal recourse wasn’t available to her because she had signed away her rights. I found myself confiding in her how I had wanted to confide with her sister. “I know how it feels,” she said, her voice wistful-intimate, “to have lost all that you cherish.”

America is an idea that there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. Gertrude Stein uttered that statement, herself a nurturer of great talent under her tent of personality. “There are vast tracts in this nation that are beyond vacant space, they’re degraded space, zombie space. It’s the pastoral of the forlorn mini mall,” Helen pontificated. We were on the topic of the factory she’d built in North Carolina for HUSK, the high-end furniture manufacturer. Redolent of palafitte, the warehouse takes pilotis to the nth degree. It is caterpillarean, raised up on disembodied legs, looking to crawl away over the terrain at an instant. When the company went out of business, it was converted into a museum of artifacts endemic to the United States: slot machines based on horror films, the face of our savior inscribed on toast and sundry pastries, toilet-seat mosaics. “A region that has been populated and then forgotten triggers sentimentality, which is why we have a predilection for kitsch. It’s funny how everything has to prove that it is what it is.”

Any geographic location can be the end of a journey. Hannah was incantatory as an oracle as she described their route past pine-tree nurseries, fields knuckled with gourds, billboards blistered on blue vistas, factories weathered as newspaper with their collection of faces crumpled as yesterday’s headlines. Here was the alleged heartland. To my mind, this prompted the performance of Francis Alÿs and five hundred volunteers with shovels moving a dune but ten centimeters outside of Lima. It’s acknowledged that something has happened, but there’s no evidence for what that might be. Novelty, for me, was always accompanied by the orchestra of longing. When I saw the Duomo in Florence, when I went on an elementary-class trip to gaze upon the pharaohs in their bandage robes supine in sarcophagi, wonder harmonized with the wonder of why an anonymous man murdered my mother. So I didn’t dare cross-examine the story of a reunion of the sort I had fantasized about and would forever be denied.

“I forgot the appetite the world has for girls,” Hannah said. At a McDonald’s in Ohio, they had hunkered down with their banal origami of boxes to enjoy the heat-lamp potpourri of starch and ketchup packets and antiseptic, the nonpareil crumpling of oiled wrappers, when a bus unloaded a bunch of misfits into the parking lot. Immediately, Lily was surrounded by backpacks. They played with her hair, caressed her ear, asked her to smile and giggled at her lopsided grin. Someone produced a temporary tattoo of a butterfly. There were cries of “Put it on her face!” She contorted head over shoulder in the bathroom to scrutinize the result, planted just below her jaw. “It’s ugly,” she decided. Soaping thoroughly, she scrubbed until it was bits of torn wings and her neck was red. That children were casually cruel was one matter, but the attention of grown men was another. In the desert, they stopped for gas. A wind sock flopped on top of the shop, desolate as the horizon. The station was the spot for the stroll of a sole tumbleweed. It was a parody of itself, trusty rusty pumps flipping analog digits with current prices. When Lily went in search of Twizzlers and Slim Jims, truckers were mesmerized by her ass. “Girl,” they hollered, as if they were this moment catching on to the names for things. “Girl, girl.”

A girl, a woman, can be a slut or a tragedy, but not both—that was Hannah’s theory. When a member of our sex falters and endures unwarranted punishment, she is told she summoned her own disaster. It’s how in the aftermath of a tsunami or seismic event victims are reprimanded for putting down flooring where they are vulnerable to some tantrum of earth. “I have to work alone,” Helen said. “Women are cheated in the partnerships of our industry. Eileen Gray and the E-1027 villa is the foremost instance. Le Corbusier saw it and was smitten, so without asking for permission, he painted murals on the immaculate walls. She was furious. It was a violation. This architectural pissing act caused the press to erroneously credit it as his. I suppose there’s justice that he had this restless fascination with the machinery of aviation—the sculptural contrapposto of us against solar systems, galaxies—but did not die aloft. Swimming his laps by that villa, he drowned.”

As their flight continued, Hannah worried more about her daughter’s safety and less about being apprehended. Winded from the switchbacks of the Rockies, they rented a room that led out to a pool with clinical depression. The soullessness of these suites was an uncanny source of comfort—the oily genital smears on the mirrors, the matching TVs, duvets. Helen Dannenforth too has a fondness for the contradiction inherent to hubs of transit, which is why that train station in Spain will branch like dissected capillaries and arteries to dramatize the purpose and many pathways of travel. In the morning, Lily was missing, her twin bed a maelstrom of blankets. She wasn’t gormandizing gummy pancakes at the buffet. She wasn’t off taking the car for a joyride. Back in their uncaring accommodations, her sad, middle-aged would-be-felon mom assumed the traditional pose of defeat, cradling her head. Track blinds cut slices of shade and of sunshine swarming with dust motes, and she thought, “Someone has died on this mattress, to that neatly divided light.” Then the baritone hum of the air conditioner switched off, and she heard the glass-dulled laughter.

“I got water up my nose!” resounded a flirtatious, high-pitched protest. Lily was at the center of a group of teens goofing around by the “out of order” diving platform. Their ease had the quality of established friendships, though Hannah knew those were but the tenuous bonds of Coppertone and chlorine. A boy dipped below the surface and burst forth as a flume with Lily on his shoulders. Not pausing to deliberate, an opposing couple did the same. Both boys strutted, enjoying the ruffled crotches against their necks, the spandex cleavage grazing their buzz cuts. They waded nearer and nearer until the girls began to grapple the air like trees come to life in a nightmarish forest, if trees could also be girls at the height of their fertility. Her competitors hubristically concluded that Lily would be shy and weak and that they would topple her no problem, but she fought viciously and below the belt—yanking braids, shoulder ramming, lunging for bikini tops. She bested team after team until the last girl fell, the thunk of an elbow to the skull and the subsequent splash the signaling bell of defeat.

“She won because she’s a freak,” the loser declared, climbing up the ladder. A scratch crosshatched a string tie of her suit and blurred with moisture. “Look, I’m bleeding.” Runoff swished on the deck to the rhythm of her hips like a fluid hula skirt. The rest of the girls joined her, hiving into a clique on reclining chairs and scrunching their fairy-tale hair dry. “Is that it?” Lily challenged. “Come and get me, bitches!” The boys, unwilling to upset the girls, drifted toward the shallow end. “Lily saw our relationship differently after that,” Hannah said. “The future had shifted, if imperceptibly.” Waving grandly for her daughter’s attention and to subvert their ostracism, she yelled, “Lily! Lily!” This gesture, however, was met with an expression of deer-in-the-headlights mortification. Whenever Helen showed up, she had recontextualized Lily’s features as sexy or mysterious. A mother with a paisley nightgown tucked into her jeans and pressure socks would make her simply a mistake of biology.

Now Lily had questions. What was my mother like growing up?

“She was mean. Helen’s ten years my senior,” Hannah said, “so while in charge of babysitting, she raided the liquor and poured alcohol down my throat. Sometimes she kicked, pinched, hit, or bit me where the adults wouldn’t spy the injuries. When I defied her once, she gave me a shiner.”

But was she pretty? Was she popular?

“She was out of control. The verdict was unanimous to enroll her at a boarding school in New England for her participation in the arson of a derelict cabin. The unspoken reason was the fear she would get pregnant out of wedlock like her real mother.”

Why does she hate you?

“I was a usurper. Back then, if a girl accidentally got knocked up, the option that was available to her was seeking refuge in the Upper Peninsula and clandestinely having it. That’s how Helen was born, from such a liaison. When our father was let in on her existence, he initiated contact. He didn’t intend to fall in love with her stepsister—my mother—it sort of happened. Can’t you imagine her lying awake in her dormitory and resenting me?”

Am I like her?

“I told Lily she shouldn’t desire to be like her. Helen was battling a lot of demons—I know that today, though I didn’t then. She was packed up and moved between our house and the house of her adopted parents like baggage. The positive is that out of necessity she philosophized about the meaning of rooms and became a visionary of this century.”

This apologia was gratifying to Lily, who confessed she had already been tried in skipping class, smoking pot, allowing herself to be fondled by boys. “I was nauseous with jealousy, that Lily was fascinated by my narcissistic half sister but not me,” that she aspired to toss her innocence away in imitation. Helen was the chosen mother because she was distant, unknowable, though in a sense wasn’t everyone? In a study of unknowability Studio Forth was commissioned for a church in France at the base of the Jura Mountains. It is a dome of obscure dimensions, a cocoon of mist sourced from Lake Bourget. Inside, a plexiglass column extends to an oculus through which water is poured and frozen, then the plexiglass removed. The notion was Cartesian. If the soul was like a wax, recognizable as a paraffin taper or a melted padella, God could be understood as hydrogen—as vapor, as solid, and as liquid after a chilling encounter. The column has to be continually replaced, since it is suspended in an endless process of wearing away from a patina of fingerprints.

Utah brought a bed-and-breakfast run by Mormons, a matron with a forehead smooth from her devotions carrying towels up Victorian stairs. “I’m not sure about you,” she said, “but I don’t feel like I’ve arrived somewhere until I’ve had a wash.” Upon waking, a kitchen with a bona fide family greeted them, cool scrambled eggs in a warm majolica bowl, bacon scalloped like a petticoat on a porcelain plate, toast with honey, toast with butter, toast with marmalade. The father drank coffee in a fatherly way. It was a rare lay indulgence for a man who followed religious rules. A couple girls around Lily’s age laid out place settings, methodically circling like the hands of a clock. As for Lily, she had draped a gossamer wrap around her head, sweating in defiance of the heat. Taking pains to hide her face was not like her. Usually, she flaunted her deformity like a new haircut. Reading comics, the calm in the middle of this endearing storm of preparations, was why: a boy, tall, blond, fresh as a seraphim in a fresco, his awareness limited to the nimbus of his own importance.

“When are you due on the road?” the father asked. The salt-of-the-earth wife chimed in that she suggested a detour to the salt flats, if they weren’t in a hurry. It was possible for them to spare the afternoon and be tour guides, pack a lunch, et cetera. With the family involved—that is, the son—it was obvious Lily was keen on the scheme, so Hannah consented, repeating a mantra that these acts of concession, like daily prayers, would win over her daughter. A soporific minivan spun to where the landscape blanched. Wasn’t the Dead Sea also a saline promise? It was inevitable then that a tribe of faithful would settle there, by God’s blankness. The divine liked to woo with nectar, but wed with salt. In Gnosticism, the divine is discovered through this absence, dubbed apophasis. The trunk was unloaded, gingham spread against the white, along with tinfoiled wedges of tuna and wheat, grapes, seltzer, plastic utensils shiny and pure as if by baptism. There was a scooping of chips into an avocado, then it was a ripe reminder.

Benjamin, the boy, bounced a tennis ball off a racket while his greyhound watched in anticipation, sleek and solid as the handle of a water pump. He got around to throwing the ball for the dog—leaving divots with a puff puff puff of crust. Too long at that game and they would wear those paws raw. Lily paid attention to Benjamin by way of the dog. “What a wholesome family you are,” Hannah mused. “We try to raise our kids with proper values, to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ to listen to their elders, to treat the body as a temple,” the father replied. “I thought that people preached that the body is a temple to prevent girls from living in theirs,” Hannah countered. “Female or not,” he said, “if they don’t respect themselves, then who will?” The sisters screamed, “Benji! Lunch! Lunch! Benji!” until he jogged in their direction. Dutifully, Lily accompanied him, a shadow of his shadow, but as she closed in, the wind kited her careful wrap into the air with that inanimate grace of the graveyard. She didn’t move, under the spell that if she didn’t move, no one would notice.

There was a struggle against tears, then the tears. The wrap had landed on the crepitant grate of the van, so Benjamin went to the rescue, mumbling to her, “Here you go,” as he offered it up, crudely folded. “That fabric is so pretty,” the older girl said. “Where did you buy it?” the younger asked. They sat her down, untangled the fringe, and rearranged the wrap around her neck. The boy scarfed his food and was off, but Lily let him go solo. He adventured so far with the greyhound, the pale dog in alto-relievo over the pale dust was some spirit of salt. When he tired, he returned to lean on his elbows, eyes only for ozone. His dreaminess was an aphrodisiac. Not that it was perfect—on the ride back, the sisters quarreled and the mother warned that she would confiscate their cell phones, meanwhile Benjamin irritatingly rebelled by thrusting his knees into the seats. During departure, the girls hugged tentatively how girls do, avoiding pressing breasts yet expressing genuine affection. Lily blatantly ignored the boy as he said goodbye.

The family was like a faded daguerreotype as they waved in the headlights. Passing through Vegas, Lily relinquished the silence she had been fattening to say, “This is the brightest city astronauts can locate in orbit.” There was the replica of the Eiffel Tower, the pyramid of the Luxor with its fake sphinx, the Doric-columned Caesars Palace, green-felted card tables a mise en abyme of Astroturfed casino golf courses. The Strip was a name that was emblematic of a situation women find themselves in, not theirs, but troubling nonetheless—an odalisque spreading her lips on a chaise or, more appropriately, a desperate single mother of flesh and blood draped on a pole, a verb coerced into a noun. Miles out, where lodging was cheap, they checked into “Motel Apocalypse,” a science-fiction vision of the future from the past. Murals depicted Asimovian hover cars and robots but no ethnic diversity or women in roles besides housewives. Imitation too is a kind of character. Imagination is circumscribed by our circumstances. Cheesy theme motels were no exception.

The apocalypse they picked was a virus-ravaged colony on the moon, a lunar Roanoke, though the Rapture was debated. “This is stupid,” Lily complained, throwing herself on the bed in their room-as-geodesic-dome the way girls who yet throw their limbs too hard at objects do too, before they’re told not to. Watching her, her daughter seemed the personification of sun through a winter window, apricot delicate. As Hannah knelt before her to offer comfort, pressing a cheek against her cheek, she felt shaky, sacrilegious. It was the first time they had touched since setting out, and while she knew they had time, nothing but time, it was like the end of the world. She had the same feeling when holding her in the hospital for the first time. “No one will ever love me,” Lily moaned into her pillow. Kissing her on the slope of her nape, Hannah said, “Not true.” Later that night, police escorted her from Motel Apocalypse, their strobes revolving in the lobby like it was a junior-high dance.

That her daughter was missing turned out to be a revelation to Helen. She was overseas in Beijing, supervising the foundation pour for her labyrinthine concert hall, cochlear like an ear (“too literal an interpretation,” said its detractors) with a tympanic, abalone outer shell. What must Lily have made of such a design? If she saw it as a rebuke, she had reason to rebel. Those mandated with her care had been strategically confused as to the girl’s whereabouts: the housekeeper believed her to be staying with a friend, her driver that she was off with family, which in a weird way was accurate. When Lily phoned from Nevada, complaining that Hannah had kidnapped her and how much it sucked, Helen alerted law enforcement and didn’t bother to buy a plane ticket. She was needed at the site. “What Lily did was a betrayal,” Hannah said, but if life is occasionally interesting in anecdote, it’s not in the actual living, and she was worn down by forgiveness. Lily was a child, after all, and children are still subject to the whims of their boredoms. “Why do we have children? I kept asking myself that question. We can’t protect them—not with our infrastructures, our technology, our culture. They’re going to die. They’re also going to intentionally and unintentionally hurt each other. It’s selfish to have children.”

Strangulation as indicated by a fractured hyoid was the cause of my mother’s death. She had been raped. The coroner folded open her skin like a map, emptied the cadaver—or, rather, the body of evidence that was my mother—of parts, and stitched her shut with a sailmaker’s needle, while painstakingly recording the bruises, the cuts and abrasions, the vaginal swelling into a microphone. I related to what Hannah was saying, though what were those of us who were here to do? “Love,” she said. “Love as much as you can. Lily may not feel my love yet, but she will. I even love Helen.” No doubt she sounded oversaturated in therapy. Platitudes were for pharmacies and embroidery. Still, the truth is that love doesn’t vanish. Love is our legacy. When you love, she postulated, it stays with those beloved for life, passes into whom they love, and unspools through the universe, expanding with it into eternity.

I wanted to love. I wanted to believe my mother had loved me and would have continued loving me, but I didn’t feel her love. If I searched for it enough, perhaps I would find that emotional inheritance, hidden somewhere inside myself like an appendix, an organ I didn’t know was there or why I needed it until it ruptured and potentially annihilated me. Is that the reason, during my drive back to the city in the saddest rental car on earth, I fantasized about every tiny detail of that miserable Hannah-Lily odyssey? I wasn’t sure what I was writing anymore, as certainly my editors at the glossy, coffee-table magazine wouldn’t publish this mess of an article and piss off a starchitect like Dannenforth, one of the most powerful among the elite set of that portmanteau. The interview would have to serve as another bit of paper I crumpled up or tore apart and added to the model of my mother—perhaps, after this piece, that nest would finally be complete and I could curl up inside of it and be nurtured.

The fifty-fifth birthday party for Helen Dannenforth was held at Cumulus House. Clusters of blown glass that collected radiant energy became glowing globules. Helen was right—these fey environs did indicate the evolution of a tender ideology. A recent installation of hers at the Tate Modern was similar in tone. Suspended alveolar sacs gave visitors the chance to climb inside the knitted webbing and sway, read, or nap for whatever duration they wished. A faint pulse beat was also broadcast throughout Turbine Hall, imparting less a sensation of nestling within a pair of lungs than the womb’s secure embrace. “I was charmed that tourists and commuters, away from their cubicles on lunch, would let down their guard in a public space the same as a private one,” she had said. The ambiance was somehow oddly sterile. In search of her, I navigated a bespoke obstacle course of bankers, effete photographers with their gallerina companions, architects in glasses thick like a second pair of eyebrows layered over their eyebrows and lazy cognoscenti.

They talked about art that has inspired architecture, architecture that has inspired film, literature that has inspired architecture, architecture that has inspired literature, musicians who have inspired artists who have inspired architects, arcane illustrations of vivisectionists and botanists that have inspired architecture, how psychoanalysis has influenced architecture and how architecture influences psychology, architecture during war and architecture during peace, the architecture of fashion, the architecture of cuisine, the architecture of children’s toys. They talked about the obsolescence of libraries, movie theaters, and journalism. They talked about curators and what would happen to a curatorial vocation in the digital era. They talked about innovation—thermal metals that breathe like a rubbery shark pelt, printing customizable chairs with fungi, neon electronic tattoos that would blush with a touch. They talked about the weather. They talked about the parties they had been to and how annoying those parties were and the parties they planned on attending and how annoying those parties would be.

I observed Helen as she clung to her latest darling. As they mingled together with each group of guests, he ensured she was well lubricated with wine, he smiled benignly but not enough to be ingratiating, he mentioned a story he had heard on public radio during a pause. She was gracious, but she was also intimidating as per normal in a backless Chanel dress, Hermès bangles, and Louboutin heels. Despite his ministrations, he was inadequate to stop her increasing unsteadiness on those heels. They dug into a patch of sod and she stepped out of them. Their two red soles stranded in the grass looked lewd and yet not lewd, like the undersides of tongues. Conversations drifted onto the topic of the hostess, on whether she was sleeping with that attractive man she was mentoring (“They’re very cozy”), whether or not she had slept with past mentees (“They tend to be male”), whether she was sleeping with her ex-husband (“No, he’s investigating the tribal beats of Balinese rain-drum music in Indonesia”), whether she had slept with a Saudi prince when she was in the Middle East (“He gifted her with Lorraine Schwartz earrings worth one mil”). They just had to gossip.

Ensconced in a corner by the alfresco bar were Lily and her boyfriend, a reedy, bland kid in an awkward blazer who attended Horace Mann. She didn’t budge from her position or speak unless addressed point-blank, though he frequently sallied forth in order to bring back heaping portions of artisanal junk food—burgers, chicken strips, fish sandwiches—with “deconstructed” aiolis, as if they were bougie hunter-gatherers. “She’s drunk,” Lily said, implicating her mother with a glance, and she ushered him into the house. At an unsuspicious distance, I tailed them—I had something to give her, for her and no one else. They evaded me behind a closed door upstairs, so instead of interrupting, I snooped. Alas, it was as expected—the medications, the thread count—though in an underwear drawer I did find a gleaming chrome dildo. The dildo was less of a dildo than a Brancusi or a parametric mock-up of a bridge or a spaceship. Perhaps I perceived it so because of whose dildo it was. Briefly, I contemplated stealing the dildo. For the rest of my life, I’d display it and pronounce, “This dildo used to pleasure Helen Dannenforth.”

A voice accused, “I understand you met with Hannah.” The feet of one of the few women renowned for her talents these days were muddy and her chignon was straggly so that the yin-yang roles were reversed and she was the fully grown, sophisticated doppelgänger of her daughter returned from a camping trip. “I did,” I replied. Unfortunately, that meant she or a member of her staff would have to sign off on what I had written before it went to print, she informed me. Demanding that was unethical and a bit insulting, I communicated without thinking, simultaneously taken aback by my impromptu lackadaisical attitude. I could have told her I no longer planned to publish. Perhaps she or a member of her staff preferred to pen the entire article? I was slightly light-headed during this confrontation, like it was like a high. At least I now would be “seen” by her, albeit negatively. The sentiments expressed by her sister, I said, might strike her as a very welcome volte-face.

“I’m guessing she told you she has ultimately overcome the wounding at the core of her identity or guileless id or what have you to walk a healing path of forgiveness,” she replied, buoyed by rage. “She also said that the meaning of life is love, am I correct? This isn’t some unsung epiphany. She’s a pathological liar.” Who pays for her indefinite stay at “the Retreat,” essentially a spa with papier-mâché-type activities where she can whine about how wronged she feels? Helen pays, though she doesn’t have to, and Hannah was deemed just fine, perfectly sane, although, she added, definitely crazy, posthaste. Who spent that “road trip” with Lily insinuating Helen had been abusive toward Hannah when they were growing up and so on? The worst, however, is the reminiscing about her pregnancy and manipulating newcomers like me into believing Hannah is Lily’s “real” mother and that Helen maliciously hinders them from having a relationship par excellence.

“My Lily is my Lily.” Helen Dannenforth was emphatic so as to be absolutely clear. Lily was her genetic daughter. Hannah had been the surrogate, after recourses of IVF, acupuncture, herbal steam baths, pro-uterine diets, and pretty much every snake-oil remedy under the sun had failed. She supported her half sister on account of vestigial gratitude. “How you cope with loneliness determines whether you are strong or weak, particularly if you are a woman,” she said. “Hannah isn’t equipped to cope.” Sad as that was, Helen wasn’t about to let Hannah turn her daughter against her. I stood at a loss. When I interviewed Helen, it felt fake, rehearsed. There was no vulnerability, no spontaneous insight. Hannah was scrupulously candid, exposed as a stumbled-upon ramshackle widowed of its human owners in the wilderness. “My responses were premeditated,” was her justification, “in that I’m dedicated to meditating upon what responses I would give to questions. Don’t blame the subject for your poor skill.”

She could tell I was intelligent, but I hadn’t been educated as to the drollness of my conventional views or yet shed the nacreous snakeskin of my naïveté. “There isn’t one blueprint for how to build a life. Character and family are also constructions.” This advice of hers wasn’t new either. Architecture hierarchizes us, and not the reverse, from medieval thatched cottages where they slept communally on a straw dais and if there were extramarital shenanigans, well, it had to have been that roguish incubus, to our contemporary thrall to individualism borne out in individualistic enclosures like the capsule pods for rent in Tokyo, daintily segmented as a bento box, or the micro apartments in Manhattan. All individuals require their own tiny niche, their own luminous screen to satellites, social media. “We have separated ourselves out,” Helen has said in previous interviews, “as the home was separated out in the Industrial Revolution. What was the source of work, play, sex, the gamut, has been butchered and sold as chops and steaks.”

Neither I nor society at large—strangers—had the privilege to judge how she raised her daughter—it was evil—or how she demonstrated her love. “Thoroughly fact-check your piece before it appears in Inhabit. Oh, and if you were scouring my house for a souvenir, feel free to select whatever you fancy from my stuff.”

After my preceding tête-à-tête with Helen, I had a disturbing dream—please pardon me. A woman went through an excruciating metamorphosis. Her sinews stretched, her bones elongated into a suprascaffolding, her joints a joinery, like some kind of hellish transformer. She towered in agony. I roamed her muscular corridors, investigating the warp and thrum of a high-rise circulating with lymph, hemoglobin, nerves, hormones. It was a monstrous architecture, an architecture for monsters. We take for granted that our mothers accept whatever risks to bear us, that they would die for us, or that they otherwise gladly sacrifice for us their quotidian hours, days, and weeks, but this is a fallacy. If children are born or become cruel and reproducing is a vice, as Hannah Dannenforth posited, perhaps it is not because it is in our nature, but because we too easily forget the unique identity of our mothers.

Hannah had composed a letter I said I would pass along to Lily. I tore the envelope and convinced myself that I was ostensibly reading it to ascertain that she wasn’t trying to abscond with her again or malign her real “real” mother as a monster, but I was reading it as a cipher for myself. Was there some clue as to whether my brilliant, dead mother would have loved me or resented me, or if I would have loved her?

I slipped it under Lily’s door after reading these words:

“Did you know, my dearest daughter, that in sanatoriums and prisons there are classes in designing your ideal house? We request catalogs, tiles, and swatches from area stores. I’ve been at leisure to ruminate on it, and the house I would build for you would be a miracle of staircases and country stars. Great fires burn in a stone hearth. It will be sprawling, but not so sprawling that if you shout, there’s a danger of not receiving an answer. Nooks and crannies are scattered around for when dinner is served but you’re not ready yet. An attic holds trunks with crystal globes of your memories. You’ll be able to list all the plants that spike like cuneiform in the garden. Perhaps it’s along the coast of the sea—or, no, in the mountains—or its own island, or poised above a city like Siena or Buenos Aires or Istanbul. You can’t reach the house unless it’s by boat or dirigible. The forecast reflects your mood—rainy when you want it to rain, sunny when you want sun, in the midst of a blizzard when you want to feel your sanctuary as a sanctuary. Within brisk walk or bicycle, there will be a quaint grocery and anything you seek—a salon, an arcade, a scary orchard—and a Benjamin who adores you. There’s more, but what I hope you intuit is that we would be happy.”