Riya is sitting on the floor, reading from a book. “According to the poet-saints of Shaivism, Shiva is Ammai-Appar, Mother and Father combined. It is said of Brahma that he created humankind by converting himself into two persons: the first male, Manu Svayambhuva, and the first female, Satarupa. India has always understood androgyny, the man in the woman’s body, the woman in the man’s.”
D is in a state of high agitation, walking from white wall to white wall, slapping at the wall when he reaches it, turning around to walk the other way, reaching the wall, slapping, turning, walking, reaching, slapping.
I don’t know what you’re trying to do to me. That job at the Museum is fucking with your head. This is who I am. I’m not some other individual. This is me.
Riya doesn’t look up, goes on reading aloud. “Few hijras settle in their places of origin. Family rejection and disapproval probably accounts for the uprooting. Having re-created themselves as beings whom their original families often reject, hijras usually take those new identities to new places, where new families form around them and take them in.”
Stop, he shouts. I’m not prepared to hear this. You want to drag me into the gutter? I am the youngest son of Nero Golden. Did you hear me? The youngest son. I’m not ready.
“ ‘As a child I followed girlish ways and was laughed at and scolded for my girlishness.’ ‘I often thought I should live like a boy and I tried hard but I couldn’t do it.’ ‘We also are part of creation.’ ” She looks up from the book, snaps it shut, gets to her feet and goes to stand right in front of him, their faces very close together, his angry, hers absolutely expressionless and neutral.
You know what? she says. Many of them don’t have Operation. They never have it. It’s not necessary. What’s important is who they know they are.
Is that a book you found on a park bench? he asks. Really?
She shakes her head, slowly, sadly, No, of course not.
I’m leaving, he says.
He leaves. Outside in the hot afternoon street, it’s noisy, garish, crowded. It’s Chinatown.
A gigantic insect. A monstrous vermin. A verminous bug. Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from troubled dreams to discover that he had been transformed in his own bed into an ungeheuren Ungeziefer. People disagreed on the best translation. The exact nature of the creature is not precisely specified in the Kafka story. Maybe a giant cockroach. The cleaning woman says he’s a dung beetle. He himself doesn’t seem too sure. Something horrible, anyway, with an armored back and little waving legs. “Into an ungeheuren Ungeziefer.” Not a thing anyone would want to be. A thing from which everyone finally turned away in horror, his employer, his family, even his beloved and formerly loving sister. A dead thing, in the end, to be taken out with the trash and disposed of by the cleaner. This was what he was becoming, D told himself, a monstrosity, even to himself.
He was walking uptown, lost in such morbid thoughts, and though the sunshine was bright he had the sense of being enclosed in darkness—of being, to be precise, brightly illuminated by a spotlight exposing him to the scrutiny and judgment of all, but surrounded by a black miasma that made it impossible for him to make out the faces of his judges. Only when he arrived at the door of his father’s house did he realize that his feet had brought him back to Macdougal Street. He fumbled in his pocket for the key and went indoors, hoping not to have to face his family. He wasn’t ready. He was not himself. If they saw him maybe they would see his metamorphosis written all over his body and cry out in horror, Ungeziefer! He wasn’t ready for that.
How strange the interior of the house seemed to him now! This was not only for the obvious reason, namely that his father’s mistress Vasilisa Arsenyeva had embarked upon a radical “modernizing” scheme of redecorations as soon as she moved in, thus stepping up a rung on the ladder of intimacy to the status of “live-in lover.” The fourth finger of her left hand was still bare, but, all the Golden sons agreed, it would probably not be long until a diamond sparkled there, and after the diamond, a band of gold would surely also appear. Certainly she had begun to behave proprietorially. The whole mansion had been repainted in a chic oyster gray color and everything old had been or was being replaced by everything new and “high-end”—the furniture, the rugs, the art, the lighting fixtures, the table lamps, the ashtrays, the picture frames. D had asked that his room be left untouched and she had respected that, so something, at least, was familiar. But he knew that his feeling of strangeness did not have its origins in the redecoration, but in himself. If, as he moved through the hallway and up the stairs, a mood of foreboding came over him, a sense that everything was about to change and that the change would be a kind of calamity, then the reason for his premonition was not to be found in oyster paint or silver velour sectional settees, it was not hanging in the new living room drapes or glowing in the new dining room chandelier or flickering in the new gas fireplaces whose flames in winter would heat up a bed of pebbles which would glitter with fashionable delight. It was true that this renewed environment was no longer the old-school, lived-in world Nero Golden had created for them to inhabit when they first arrived. It was possessed of a disturbing, ersatz otherness which the earlier version, also a kind of imitation of life, had somehow avoided. But no! It wasn’t the house. The change was in himself. He himself was the darkness he felt around him, he was the force pulling the walls closer, the ceilings lower, like a house in a horror movie, and creating an air of oppression and claustrophobia. The house, to tell the truth, was much brighter than before. It was he who had grown dark.
He was running from the thing he also knew he was moving toward. He knew it was coming, but that didn’t mean he liked it. He hated it, there was no escaping the fact, and that created the storm that surrounded him now. He wanted to go into his room and shut the door. He wanted to disappear.
When I think about D at this critical juncture I am reminded of Theodor W. Adorno: “The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in your own home.” Yes, to be uncomfortable with comfort, uneasy about the easy, to question the assumptions of what is usually, and happily, taken for granted, to make of oneself a challenge to what for most people is the space in which they feel free from challenges; yes! That is morality raised to a pitch at which it could almost be called heroism. In this instance D Golden’s “home” was an even more intimate space than the family house; it was nothing less than his own body. He was a misfit in his own skin, experiencing, in intense form, this newly important variation of the mind/body problem. His nonphysical self, the mind, was beginning to insist on being what the body, his physical self, denied, and the result was physical and mental agony.
The Golden house was silent. He stood for a moment on the second-floor landing outside his father’s master suite. That door was closed, but the door of the room next to it, formerly a spare bedroom, now Vasilisa Arsenyeva’s dressing room, stood open, revealing in the late afternoon sunlight rack upon rack of shimmering gowns, shelf upon shelf of aggressively high heels. That’s going to be a problem for me, the words dropping into his consciousness from some unknown mother ship hovering just outside the atmosphere beyond the Kármán line, your pedal extremities are colossal, can’t use you ’cause your feet’s too big, I really hate you ’cause your feet’s too big. Yeah, Fats Waller, what you said. And now those big feet have walked him, of their own volition, right into the middle of that room where the scent of patchouli is stronger than anywhere else in the house, the scent she brought here to overpower all the scents that were here before, Vasilisa Arsenyeva, silent and haughty as cats are, leaving her spoor wherever she walks. And his hands are reaching out for those gowns, he’s burying his face in the odorous sequins, breathing in, breathing out, breathing in. The darkness around him receded; the room glowed with a light that might even have been happiness.