Right after he turned twenty-two, Nick bought his first camera, a Leica. It was autumn in Chicago. He had moved there after high school and was working as a sound technician at a local radio station. Once he bought the camera, he rented a car and set off. He never even thought about inviting anyone else to go with him. He drove around by himself for a month, rarely speaking to anyone. The only thing on his mind was photographing Louis Sullivan’s eight Midwestern Jewel-Box banks, designed and built in the early twentieth century. Nick had promised his late father, a brick mason, that he’d see them.
He bought a stack of detailed maps of the Midwestern states and photographed all the Sullivan buildings in Chicago that hadn’t been torn down after World War II. Then he drove north to Owatonna, Minnesota, site of the National Farmers’ Bank, designed by Sullivan in 1907. The bank had been restored right before Nick arrived in town. First, he photographed the building’s exterior, which soon became his standard procedure. Built in red brick, the bank had wide, horizontal bands of turquoise terracotta. He took detailed pictures of the entire building, a slew of photographs from every possible angle, and once he thought he had enough, he went in. Even inside, the bank’s reddish-brown brickwork was richly ornamented. In Nick’s mind, the room possessed a smoldering beauty, one that felt both cool and warm, as if the bank were diffused with a faint melancholy. A large mural of a blue sky with clouds covered the far wall. The acoustics in the bank resembled those in a great hall, while the daylight pouring in from two stained-glass windows enhanced the feeling that he was in a church.
He managed to photograph the majority of the bank’s most intriguing aspects before an employee approached him. Almost whispering, the bank clerk asked Nick what he was doing. He told him that he was driving around the Midwest documenting banks. The clerk informed him that such behavior was frowned upon and kindly but firmly asked him to leave. Nick drove farther south and arrived the next morning in Cedar Rapids, where Sullivan had designed the Peoples Savings Bank. According to Nick’s information, it was completed in 1911. Built in a reddish-brown brick, the bank was also highly ornamented. Once again Nick felt there was something pastoral, even religious, about it. This time he had better luck with the employees; a bank clerk in a brilliant white shirt and baggy pants asked if he could help with anything. Nick answered the same as last time—no point in being dishonest—and told him he was driving around photographing banks. The clerk shared his interest in the architectural history of the bank, so he was able to tell Nick that, at Sullivan’s behest, the bank had been built of bricks in at least fifteen different shades of red. The architect had wanted the bank’s outer walls to resemble an antique carpet. Nick listened attentively, and the clerk eventually offered him a cup of coffee. While the clerk stood drinking from a large, curry-yellow cup and talking about the building’s interior, Nick walked around taking photographs. The clerk explained that Sullivan’s original plan had gone dramatically over budget, so numerous discussions had occurred between the faded architect and the bank’s first director until they’d agreed upon a new version. Sullivan had designed the bank from the inside out, the clerk told Nick, in a kind of organic system of boxes, something you got an ever-deeper sense of the longer you worked here. The clerk suggested they go outside to look at the building together, so they walked out into the cool October wind. The clerk pointed out the areas of the bank’s facades that Nick, with a little imagination, could see resembled an antique handwoven carpet. The clerk asked where Nick got the money to drive around alone. Was a university or institute subsidizing him? Neither, replied Nick, explaining that he worked as a sound engineer at a radio station in Chicago and had managed to put aside a small sum of money. The bank clerk nodded. Every little bit helps, he said, and then he put a hand on Nick’s shoulder, almost affectionately, as if for a moment he thought of him as a son or some other close family member, and he offered to buy them lunch. Nick didn’t refuse, so they went downtown together and into the clerk’s favorite hangout. While they were eating, he asked Nick if he’d like to spend the night at his house with his family. The clerk thought Nick looked like someone who could use some company. You need to be careful with loneliness, he said, looking at Nick, or you’ll wind up hurting yourself. Nick wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean. He tried to imagine going home with the clerk to spend the night, sitting in some strange family’s kitchen, eating dinner, and maybe telling them a little about his past, his childhood. Eventually, Nick declined the offer. They parted ways on the street, under a high Midwestern sky, and then Nick drove to a deserted motel just outside of town. The following morning he found a camera shop where he bought a stack of new thirty-six-exposure film. Newspaper front pages at a drugstore reminded him of the date and the fact that the world was still turning. A gas explosion in a Japanese coal mine the previous day had killed ninety-three people; it was Saturday, October 17, 1981.
Four of Sullivan’s banks were in Iowa, and Nick visited all of them. From Iowa he drove north to Wisconsin and then south to Indiana. Only one of Sullivan’s buildings was no longer functioning as a bank. That completely surprised Nick when he arrived—he didn’t think it was possible—but a jeweler had moved into the building. Nick talked a little to the owner, who was also aware of the building’s history as a bank. Anything else would be weird, said the owner. He told Nick that Sullivan’s eight Midwestern banks had been dubbed the Jewel-Box banks partly because of their modest size and partly because of their rich ornamentation and stained-glass windows, making them resemble gigantic gemstones. Strange, isn’t it, he said, that we should end up selling jewelry here. Although Nick didn’t say much, he did mention that in several of the banks he felt like he was in a church, or at the very least a solemn room, as if they housed a great sadness or some dark memory. That made the owner look down at the floor and let out a somewhat forced laugh.
He continued east, across Indiana, where he saw only one bank. Driving along Interstate 70 with only a few short breaks, he encountered little more than harvested cornfields. Late the following evening, he arrived in Newark, Ohio. He checked into a motel, and the next day visited the last bank on his route. He didn’t speak to any of the employees as he walked around. No one seemed to notice him, no one approached him, and he addressed no one. He stood for a long time staring up at the large sections of stained glass in the back wall of the bank. The glass was blue and green. Cool, underwater colors. Through the glass he could see the silhouette of treetops swaying slowly in the morning light, like an undulating forest of seaweed at the bottom of a nameless sea. Blue-green memories, Nick thought, eons, an unfathomable depth, memories older than me, but living inside me in the form of biological sensations. Evolutionary memories. Memories from a former universe, from other solar systems, life forms and beings that dive. Organisms, plankton, light. Searching up toward the surface. Searching down into the deep. I am not important.
Aiming his lens at the blue-green glass, he emptied the roll of its last few pictures. Afterwards, he located the town’s only camera shop where he had all the film he’d shot on his trip developed. It was a redemptive moment when he walked out of the store with a heavy paper bag in his hand—but it was also unnerving. Someone might rob him, might think he was hiding something valuable in the bag, and all his work over the last few weeks would be wasted.
Nick took a walk along the banks of the river that ran around the town of Newark. In several spots the river branched off into smaller tributaries, and as he walked alone beneath a strangely tropical white sky, he thought about his mother. They hadn’t spoken in the three weeks he’d been gone, and he was missing her. Maybe it was the water drifting by along the path that reminded him of his childhood. It was a strange longing, a kind of sadness. Whatever the feeling was, it made him call home when he got back to the motel room.
He didn’t leave the building for the next three days. He had the vague sense that he was the only guest at the motel, which was dead quiet. He never heard any footsteps in the halls, no hotel room doors opening or closing; not once did he see even a brush of headlights out in the empty parking lot.
The first night, he pulled down the heavy yellow blinds and laid all the photographs out on the carpet. It took an entire hour. There were hundreds of pictures, most depicting the same motif from different angles. Once he’d laid the pictures out in the proper order, he stood for a long while staring down at the motel room floor, as if the sea of photos comprised a collective whole, one single picture. As if this single picture was what he wanted to understand, what he’d been hunting for all along. As if he were viewing an impression of Louis Sullivan’s psyche, the dead’s architect’s collective, wide-ranging unconscious.
Nick took out his notebook and tried to formulate the myriad thoughts running through his head. The human mind is a landscape, he wrote, the psyche is a geography or a vast architecture, an organic zone, that we could draw a map of if only we were intelligent enough. Things I don’t understand. Dimensions of the world I’m not capable of understanding. Yet I experience them.
The second night, he stood there yet again, keeping vigil over the photos in the light of the two bedside lamps. He got the fleeting feeling that a universal truth was with him in the motel room. The sensation was spectral, though not completely pleasant, as if something cosmic and nameless had roamed into the room and taken up residence. A silent beating of wings. Then it disappeared again, leaving nothing behind. He sat down on the bed and decided that if a deeper truth about the universe had actually appeared to him, he wasn’t intelligent enough, not mentally equipped enough, to comprehend it.
He spent most of the third day sitting in bed, far into the night. The photos still lay all over the floor, but he was no longer staring at them. Instead, he decided to try to understand what the past few weeks had meant by drawing. He drew buildings, filling his notebook with them, and then experimented with peopling them with human figures. It didn’t make the buildings look like anything from reality. They didn’t resemble spaces you could inhabit; they didn’t even look like something that could be built with recognizable materials. Eventually, Nick scribbled them out thoroughly and went to sleep. The following morning, as he flipped through the pages, it occurred to him that the scribbled-out buildings resembled polyangular stones, irregular crystalline structures. Buildings, people, landscapes, he wrote before he packed up all his things. I can’t perceive the laws of nature, but they form the outer world as well as my inner. Mountain ranges and rivers, love and loneliness, they’re all one and the same. One and the same landscape.
*
The following year Nick left the US; he made the decision one afternoon. After his road trip around the Midwest, he returned briefly to life at the radio station, twisting knobs for the same few radio programs. He spent most of his time alone in his room in north Chicago; he had no concrete plans for the future. Occasionally, the thought of applying to architecture school would cross his mind, but every time the application deadline approached, he did nothing.
One day while Nick was sitting on a bench in Chicago’s container port, a man sat down next to him. At one point the man, who was quite garrulous, mentioned that he was a mechanic on one of the large cargo ships docked in the harbor. He asked Nick if he’d seen the ship, the Four Winds, but Nick shook his head: cargo ships and container ports were outside his sphere of interest. The mechanic asked if he knew that Chicago was connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the Saint Lawrence River. Nick shook his head again. He’d never really thought about it. To him, Michigan’s Great Lakes were like an enclosed network, one gigantic but isolated ecological system. He knew that the Great Lakes were the largest freshwater system in the world, but he had no idea that they were connected to the world’s oceans. The mechanic told Nick that they were docked in Chicago for one more week and then they’d set sail, initially for Europe. He also mentioned that the ship’s cook was looking for a dishwasher. Nick didn’t respond; instead, he asked about the size of the crew on the freighter. The mechanic didn’t know exactly, but at least twenty and no more than thirty. At first Nick thought he wasn’t interested—he even told the mechanic that as he got up from the bench to go home—but over the next few days his every action contradicted his own statement. The next day, without planning to do so, he went back down to the harbor and located the Four Winds. No one was on the wharf, so he continued up the gangway and down the outer passageways until he ran into a guy his own age who showed him the galley. The cook confirmed that he did, indeed, need a dishwasher. Nick didn’t seem totally wrong for the job, the cook thought; the dishwasher might just as well be him as anyone else.
The next day Nick quit his job at the radio station, rented out his furnished room, and packed the few things he thought he’d need other than clothes. Three days later he was shown the cabin that would serve as his home for the next eight months. The cabin was below the waterline. Tossing his backpack on the bed, Nick lay down and listened to the grumbling sounds of the freighter as it docked. He felt like he was in the belly of a huge mechanical beast, some mighty yet benign monster. Sleeping below sea level in a cramped cabin wasn’t something he’d ever dreamed of, so he was surprised, on his very first night, to feel an almost oceanic peace descend upon him. Some unknown metabolism deep inside seemed to settle down, as if an abstract, restless pulse started beating at a slower pace for the first time in many years. Life on board was, as he expected, simple and routine, which suited him just fine. When he wasn’t doing the dishes after daily meals, washing the floors, or changing a fuse or a fluorescent lightbulb, he was playing dice and cards with the other men on the ship—and when he wasn’t doing that, he was lying in his cabin listening to the steely macrocosm of the ship. Only rarely did he go out into the open to look out over the containers at the coast. One day the shadows of Montreal slipped by. Another day it was Quebec. Town after town passed by until one day there weren’t any. Like a river flows, surely to the sea, darling so it goes, some things are meant to be, hummed one of the mechanics the night they traversed the last nautical miles of the Saint Lawrence River. It was an Elvis song, he explained, since neither Nick nor the electrician seemed to recognize the lyrics. They were sitting at one of the tables in the living room playing cards. Outside, darkness had fallen; only the ship’s own lights were visible. At night in his cabin, Nick was struck with sensations, and not unpleasant ones, of being reborn. As if the Saint Lawrence were a birth canal the ship was slowly slipping through; as if he were in a kind of fetal state down there in his cabin; as if that was what had been so soothing to him. And the Atlantic that they were sailing into was the big, wide world.
It took the Four Winds twelve days to cross the Atlantic. As far as Nick was concerned, they could have kept sailing for weeks—even months. He loved the atmosphere in his cabin, so he didn’t feel any sense of relief when Portugal’s coast first appeared on the horizon. They sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar, part of a larger fleet of cargo ships, and then continued up the Spanish coast, finally dropping anchor off Marseilles. They docked there for over a week.
In the evenings, he’d stand out on deck and stare through his binoculars at Marseilles’ smoldering display of light on the shore. He liked looking at the city through binoculars because, from a distance, it seemed like one unified, luminous phenomenon. In the evening, when they finally docked in the overwhelming container port and he left the ship with the rest of the crew, he felt an inexplicable reluctance. The same thing happened when they docked in Rotterdam the following month. Nick did what the others expected him to do: he went with them into the city, hit the bars, got drunk, and tried to strike up conversation with strangers. Yet, the whole time he was thinking he’d rather be back on the ship. I really don’t want to arrive, he thought the night they left Rotterdam. I just want to travel forever. The harbor lights lay like a pale sea of flame in the drizzle behind them, the mighty cranes rising from the quays.
Nick remained on board the Four Winds until spring. For eight months they sailed back and forth between the same harbors: Chicago and New York on one side of the Atlantic and a small handful of European ports on the other. They never sailed the other way around the American continent, nor did they service Asia. During his entire time aboard ship, Nick never saw the Pacific.
One day in April of 1983, they sailed down the Elbe and docked in Hamburg. Nick stayed in his cabin, rejecting the others’ offers to go out and party with them. Instead, he went to bed early. He got up the next morning and walked by himself into the city.
This harbor resembled all the others they’d visited: the same lifeless world of containers, cranes, chimneys, and silos. Once upon a time, he thought while pacing around them, these ports had been living organisms. Now, all that’s left are these enormous steel skeletons scattered all over the world’s shores. Still, Nick enjoyed roaming the docks; to him, they weren’t dead at all. He felt that the people who worked there—those who drove the forklifts and trucks, those who sat inside warehouse offices or high up in cranes lifting containers from the ships—were part of a larger order they couldn’t even comprehend. Nick didn’t understand it, either. He’d never dealt with economics or trade, at least not on a theoretical level, but in practice he sensed that his three daily dish washups in the ship’s galley also contributed to these large, abstract processes. He had no idea what was inside the containers they sailed with—whether there were cars, furniture, food, or clothes—yet he knew he felt good about contributing to the exchange of products between the world’s continents.
The sky was dark and gray the morning he went into the city. He wasn’t sure what to expect. Maybe he thought he’d see tall glass skyscrapers designed by Germany’s famous modernists in the center of Hamburg, but he encountered nothing like that. A little confused, he sat down in a lofty café and ordered a beer. It arrived in a large glass with a lot of foam on top, which perfectly suited his notions about German culture. Sitting there drinking it, Nick thought about what his father had said many years ago the day they first drove to Chicago—that Mies van der Rohe and his coconspirators in modern architecture, with their international army of steel and glass skyscrapers, had already begun to level out the unique differences between the world’s big cities in the years before the Second World War. He reconsidered his father’s words. For a moment it was as if he were running his father’s world view through an inner projector, a mental X-ray machine that made it possible for him, in flashes, to see that world view in its entirety, with all its details, insights, attitudes, and contradictions. And while he sat in the café in the center of Hamburg, surrounded by conversations he couldn’t understand a word of, Nick realized he no longer shared his father’s world view. The realization made his pulse pound, made him softly slam his fist a few times on the table in front of him. For a moment he sat and tried to imagine the different conversations surrounding him in the café, but, really, he couldn’t understand a single word. I’ve been freighted all over the world, he thought. I’ve floated along, part of the flow. I could go on like this, blind and passive, at the bottom of a container ship, sleeping beneath the surface of the sea, washing dishes. I could maintain my habits for the rest of my life. I really could, Nick thought, looking out at the sidewalk where a man in a brown trench coat crossed the street and opened the gate of a building that was probably erected long before Washington, DC, became a city. I could stand up, pay for my beer, he thought, return to the ship, say hello to the others, and go back down to my cabin. But I think I’ll stay here.
He stayed in Hamburg for over two years, still washing dishes, only now at a gigantic Indian restaurant in the center of town. At least once a week, the restaurant, which could seat a few hundred guests, was full. When one of the waiters was fired, they asked Nick if he wanted to take over his rented room above the restaurant. He agreed. The room was small—no more than ten square meters—and through the wooden floor he could hear sounds emanating from the restaurant and smell its pungent aromas. The room’s one window looked out over a backyard that was so narrow and cramped that it was difficult to discern its function. You could barely stand and smoke a cigarette down there without feeling like you were at the bottom of a deep coffin. Nick suspected that an engineer must have miscalculated something. For some reason, the work of a dishwasher was more monotonous in a restaurant than on a cargo ship, but on the other hand it was faster paced. A steady flow of glasses, plates, and silver bowls, in myriad sizes, passed through Nick’s hands. Both monotonous and hectic, the job enabled him to walk around thinking as he worked. He usually thought about the books he was reading. Nick hadn’t touched a book since he left high school over five years ago, but then, during his days off his restaurant job, he’d started reading again. He found some books in the English-language sections of the libraries, and the first one he read was a book about the origins of the guitar. Right after that, he read a book about wild horses on the plains of Mongolia and then Wages of Fear by Arthur Arnaud. The plot of the novel was simple: a group of four people had to transport two trucks filled with explosives through the South American jungle and they had to get there without the trucks blowing up. In theory, Nick thought it was a nice idea for a novel, but in practice it was boring. He pondered this inconsistency as he rinsed tikka masala and rice off some silver bowls. He also read biographies. One that really spoke to him was the biography of a famous Chinese ping-pong player from the 1970s. The more Nick read of the book, the more he noticed that it wasn’t really the ping-pong player’s life story that spoke to him; it was the landscapes where the man had lived. Although the biographer wasn’t particularly adept at describing these spaces, Nick could envision them anyway. He pictured a medium-sized Chinese industrial city with a dirty, brownish sun shining above its long straight streets. He saw huge Chinese sports halls, halls so high that meteorological systems appeared in the air above the ping-pong tables; he saw mint-green changing rooms and bus trips between provinces; he saw a storm of white ping-pong balls; he saw the same arm movement repeated over and over; he saw the same grip on the racket, the same strokes, the same speeds. Ultimately, Nick thought that a little white ball seemed to have the power to brainwash a person.
Over time he began to take a random approach to selecting books. It began one day when he was walking around the library’s bookshelves with his eyes closed. Without opening them, he pulled out a book. What does it really mean to read, he thought one night as he stood cleaning the restaurant’s large meat grinders. What effect do all these words have on me? Do they shape my thoughts? Do they alter the connections in my brain? Is it like taking vitamins? Are the books brainwashing me—and if so, is it a desirable brainwashing? Is every person in the world brainwashed in their own improbably complex way? Walking around the library’s rows with his eyes closed, Nick chose his next random selection. He read a book about ghosts from the Renaissance, a book about raising children, and a book about the migration of camels in the Sahara Desert before humans domesticated them. He read a collection of short stories that all ended with the main character dying. In the evenings while working at the restaurant, he would ponder the effects of these arbitrarily chosen books. What are the consequences, he thought, of reading about ghosts in the Renaissance and camels in the Sahara in that specific order? Would the reverse order have triggered other moods, other attitudes, other values? Yet, just like before, Nick’s questions remained unanswered. He came to no conclusions, nothing certain or factual. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to be wise, he thought one night, standing in the restaurant’s narrow backyard, smoking a cigarette on his break. I wish I were more intelligent, he thought, but this is as far as my understanding goes. An imaginary border runs right to here and no farther, as if my mind were a coast or a steep cliff. But I’m not standing in any of those places, he thought. I’m standing here in this backyard, smoking a cigarette, and now I’m going to toss it and go back inside.
He signed up for a language class. At first, he found German simple and logical, but it became increasingly complex as the course progressed. Still, after a month, he was able to form sentences with more than one clause—and he could participate in elementary conversations. I dream of designing a simple house, Nick thought one day while drawing in his notebook during German class. Simple buildings, simple constructions. Long, dark hallways. Large, bright rooms. Bricks from someplace special.
When summer arrived, he applied to architecture school.
