Chapter 26: The Architect Completes What He Came Back to Complete

What follows is a partial reconstruction.

That is the only honest framing I can offer for this chapter, and I offer it at the outset rather than burying it in a footnote where it might pass unexamined. I have worked with incomplete records before—the nature of archival compilation is, at its foundation, the art of making coherent argument from fragmentary evidence—but the incompleteness here is of a different order than the gaps I have grown accustomed to navigating. Other chapters in this volume suffer from the ordinary depredations of time: documents misfiled, memories imprecisely rendered, testimony offered years after the fact by minds shaped by what they survived. The incompleteness of this chapter is structural. The record does not fail to tell me what the Architect did during these final days because the record was lost or damaged or suppressed. The record fails because, as nearly as I have been able to determine across eighteen months of cross-referencing fourteen distinct archival sources, the Architect did not, in any conventional sense, leave one.

There are traces. There are always traces, when one knows how to look, and I have been looking for eleven years. What I have assembled from those traces I will set down here as plainly as I am able. I note that plain assembly is a harder task than it has been for any previous chapter of this compilation, and I note further that the difficulty does not feel, entirely, like a scholarly one. I am recording this observation in the interests of the transparency I committed to in my preface. I do not know what else to do with it.