The final match started at sunset, livening the clouds and the surface of the London Eye to crimson and purple. The announcer emcee said, “We just got a call from the White House! ‘Can you keep the sound level … UP!’” In the bleachers, we were fully revved. It was a close game, but Misty and Kerri won the match. The final set was 21-16. “Party Rock Anthem” filled the Horse Guards Parade, just as it had at that first Olympiad in Ancient Greece, those many centuries ago: Party rock is in the house tonight No one checks your credentials on the way out. I walked through the magic portal and I was no longer in the Olympics but in London on a nice summer evening. Cool breeze, gentle whirr of traffic. Now it was night, and the monuments, not the Games’ brief creations, ruled the city again. Big Ben loomed over me, imposing and bright against the blue dark. It was as if the Games had never happened. The men’s triathlon had run that morning, and now the last event at the beach volleyball arena had finished. They’d start dismantling those two venues soon; perhaps the construction crews were even now preparing to swarm over them like termites. I thought, the First Age of Women’s Beach Volleyball hath ended! Now the next generation will define the game for themselves, in their own image, make it new again. They will pull down the stadiums, pull down the 25-foot statue of Kerri Walsh as if it were a statue of Saddam Hussein. As I looked at the hands of Big Ben, I pondered, in my usual cheap and shallow way, the evanescence of all human endeavor. “Sebald, I feel weird. It’s like America won … but America kinda lost, too.” The Sebald 3000 processed this paradox and finally said, “It takes just one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes.”
Everybody gonna have a good time
And we gonna make you lose your mind
Everybody gonna have a good time
