“I notice,” I said, “that you didn’t mention Eagle, or Verbunden Extratech, or Murtasín.”
“I was simply listing those companies named in the scam,” he said. “The corporations you mention have not been accused of any irregularity, nor are any actions pending against them. Are you thinking of writing a film about the admittedly amazing and inevitably in part corruption-tainted proliferation of mobile phones in that faraway country? If so, you should absolutely play the lead. Because you are so good-looking, you know, René, you really should be a movie star.”
This was a new thing with him that summer. Petya had recently decided, against the evidence of everyone’s eyes but his own, that I was the most handsome man in the world. At first he declared that I was “more handsome than Tom Cruise,” then I became “much better looking than Brad Pitt,” and these days I was “a hundred times as gorgeous as that George Clooney.” Sic transit gloria, Tom, Brad, George, I thought. Petya was not expressing homosexual longings. He was telling it the way he saw it, as he always did, and all I could do was say thanks.
“Something like that,” I answered him. “But I don’t think there’s a role for me.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Write one in immediately. A big role. The romantic lead. You’re so sexy, René. I’m serious. You’re a sexpot.”
Maybe weddings bring out the romance in us all.
And at a certain point in the gaiety of the night, I did not fail to notice, Nero Golden was absent, and there was a light in his office window, and the men in the bad tuxedoes were absent also. Petya was on the dance floor. He was a bad dancer, so absurdly uncoordinated that people found him funny, the five tennis players half-tried to stifle their alpha-male sniggers, but fortunately Petya, transported by music, did not seem to notice. And then Vasilisa was dancing with her girlfriends, all glamorous, all real estate brokers, doing their New York versions of Cossack dances involving candles and shawls and hand-clapping and high kicks and boots. Instead of fur hats and military uniforms there were gossamer dresses and female skin but nobody was complaining, we danced in a circle around the dancing girls and clapped in unison and shouted “Hey! Hey!” when we were told to and drank the vodka shots we were given to drink and yes, Russia was good, Russian culture was fine, what a good Russian time we were having, one and all, and then Nero Golden reappeared in full Cossack costume, so there was at least one fur hat and one blue military coat with golden braid and buttons, and the girls danced around him like their captain, their king, which he was, and he waved his special shashka saber in the air above their heads, and we danced around them, and drank, and shouted “Hey! Hey!” some more, and so Nero and his beauty were wed.
The hotel-trade gentlemen in the bad tuxedoes, however, did not return.
A strange summer mist crept into the Gardens that night after midnight and made them look like the setting for a Japanese ghost story, Ugetsu, perhaps, or Kwaidan. The guests had all gone home and the debris of the celebration had been cleared away by the diligent staff of the catering company, to whom generous tips had been handed out by Nero Golden himself. A single lantern still hung from the branch of a tree, its candle sputtering to its end. I heard one single hoot of what might have been an owl, but it is possible I might have been mistaken. In the sky a pale moon glowing faintly through gathering rainclouds. A hurricane was coming. All was still before the storm.
As once before, my insomnia drove me out of my bed. I pulled on a sweatshirt and blue jeans and stepped out into the misty air and all at once it thickened and I was all alone in the swirl, as if the universe had vanished and there was only me. Then from far away I heard a sound, which was repeated, growing louder with each repetition. It was the sound of a man caught up in a wretched misery, sobbing uncontrollably. A cry to touch the heart.
I approached on tiptoe, my curiosity struggling against my more civilized instinct to give the weeping man his privacy. Not trusting the mist to conceal me, I did my best to lurk in the shrubbery, feeling a little ashamed (but only, I have to say, a little) of the victory of my voyeuristic desires. Finally I saw him, and was, I confess, astonished to recognize the night’s star player, around whom everything had revolved, the bridegroom himself, kneeling on the damp grass in expensive pajamas and beating his breast with his fists, ululating like a professional mourner at a funeral. What could have driven him out here in the small hours, abandoning his marital bed to howl at the vanishing moon? I crept as close as I dared and heard, or so I believe, these words: “Forgive me! I killed you both.”
Let me say now that I am not a believer in the claims of the mystically or supernaturally inclined. I have no time for heaven, hell, limbo, or any other posthumous vacation destinations. I do not believe that I will be reincarnated, neither as a dung beetle nor as George Clooney or his successor in cuteness. In spite of the enthusiasms of Joyce, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, I turn my back on metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. The Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives was probably my favorite movie that year but I do not believe that Uncle Boonmee, or I, had any previous tours of duty here on Earth. I am uninterested in demon seeds; Damien, Carrie, Rosemary’s Baby, you can keep right on sitting there on the pulp fiction shelf. I have no time for angels or devils or creatures from blue lagoons. All of which is why I am at a loss to explain what I saw that night, and why I try to tell myself that it was a hallucination caused by taking too heavy a dose of Ambien (which had failed to knock me out) and then wandering woozily into the fog: some sort of waking nightmare. But the figure of the penitent Nero was real enough, and what I saw, what I know I saw, what I think I know I saw even though my rational mind rejects the idea, was the fog around him gathering, like some kind of ectoplasm, into two human shapes, the shapes of women, standing in front of the kneeling man to hear his bitter regret. The shapes did not speak, nor did they fully achieve solid form, remaining blurred and indistinct, but the thought came into my head, as clearly as if someone had said the words aloud, that these were the two mothers of his sons, the wife who died at the Taj and the poor abandoned woman who gave up her child and who, according to Mrs. Golden, had died a lonely anonymous death in one of the places where the destitute go to die.