The agent’s experience converged with not only her father’s memory loss but also the country’s. It was visceral and terrifying, this experience of temporarily forgetting everything about who you are. It was a tiny, personal version of the confusion that had overtaken American politics in the years that Simon had been constructing the project. The metaphor was almost too potent: The agent, a repository of so much American history, loses his memory at the very moment when the country re-elects Donald Trump, who tries to refashion the truth in his own image. The incident dragged the project into the present tense, and it helped Simon find an ending — one that could draw all the threads together and unravel them at the same time.
The agent was reading online forums for people who had experienced transient global amnesia, and Simon contacted people from the message boards. She interviewed them about what it was like to temporarily lose their memories. She traveled to their homes to photograph them, asking them to re-enact with their bodies the stories of other characters from the project.
These became part of the crescendo of the exhibit, the final few chapters, which recapitulate some of the earlier ones. We see video showing many of the other characters from the project speaking about their lives. We see pictures of the message-board people in their living rooms, doing inexplicable, dancerly movements, followed by photo collages Simon made putting all of them together in the same frame, so that their bodies form shapes and patterns, subliminally reminding us of our own immediate memories of all the stories we have just experienced. We see photos and videos of cicadas, whose rare emergence took place as Simon was finishing the project — a natural cycle as mysterious and capricious as art-making.
At the very top of the ramp is a giant rectangular contraption with a crank, containing the balls for the ball run. Embedded in it is a video of Dick Simon’s trembling hands holding up his Kodachrome slides of buildings and sculptures and people all over the world. The hands are huge, God-like, but his voice, which plays over the images, is isolated and desperate. Simon recorded her father in a fevered state one day, when he seemed to feel he was separated from Earth. “Hello, hello, hello, hello,” he says. “Earth 2, I can’t be without them. Earth 2. … I have to speak, I have to speak. Oh, help me, help me, help me!” His voice, mingling with the other voices from the project and the chirping of the cicadas, makes a kind of symphony. But it’s also a document of profound disintegration.
All these meticulously tracked stories, this intricate map, finally collapse into fragments. We’re shown how easily history — even very recent history — might be lost. How a father, a country, can slip away. And yet it’s here, in Simon’s determined, stubborn, mad attempt to gather together all the pieces. The final thing Simon hopes viewers will do is turn the crank and send a ball racing down the ramp, where it will land with a crash into the others waiting there.