I decided to stay and work with her, and at the end of the edit we would go out for a beer and I would declare myself. Yes. I would. So I did not get into my parents’ car, and because of that I am alive today. Life and death are both meaningless. They happen or don’t happen for reasons that have no weight, from which you learn nothing. There is no wisdom in the world. We are all fortune’s fools. Here is the earth and it is so beautiful and we are so lucky to be here with one another and we are so stupid and what happens to us is so stupid and we don’t deserve our stupid luck.
I’m making no sense. Let me tell you about the road.
The Long Island Expressway was a road full of family stories and when in the summer we drove out to our borrowed place on Old Stone Highway in The Springs—owned by a Columbia University grandee who, having once developed full-blown Lyme disease and suffered from it for several years, no longer wished to travel to the kingdom of the tick—we checked off all the familiar landmarks. Mineola, the cemetery there, I had a great-aunt and -uncle in whose posthumous direction to nod a respectful head. Great Neck, Little Neck, raised thoughts of Gatsby in us all, and though we did not drive by Remsenburg, where P. G. Wodehouse had lived for so many years during his postwar exile from England, we often imagined, as we drove, a fictional universe in which Fitzgerald’s and Wodehouse’s creations might visit one another. Bertie Wooster and Jeeves might have intruded on the rarefied world of the Eggs, silly-ass Bertie stepping into sensible Nick Carraway’s shoes, and Reginald Jeeves the fish-eating, Spinoza-loving gentleman’s gentleman and genius finding a way to give Jay Gatsby the happy-ever-after ending with Daisy Buchanan for which he so profoundly longed. Dix Hills, my father in a creaky Belgian dad-joke effort invariably pronounced with a French accent. Dee Heels. And I said, I always said, that it sounded to me like a daytime soap star. And Wyandanch; as we passed that exit one parent or the other would inevitably tell the story of the Montaukett chief or sachem of that name who sold most of the East End of Long Island to an Englishman named Lion Gardiner, and later died of the plague. Wyandanch often cropped up again when we had reached the East End and my parents reminisced about the story of Stephen Talkhouse, Wyandanch’s descendant, who walked fifty miles a day every day between Montauk, Sag Harbor and East Hampton. And in between Wyandanch and Talkhouse we passed a sign directing us toward an entirely fictitious Native American lady, Shirley Wading River. In reality this road sign led to two distinct communities, one called Wading River and the other Shirley, but Shirley Wading River grew large in our family lore. As sci-fi buffs we sometimes put her together with the post-apocalyptic Chiefs, Three Hydrogen Bombs and Makes Much Radiation, from William Tenn’s 1958 classic Eastward Ho!, and at other times we imagined her gigantic, like Grendel’s mother, or a sort of giant Australian-style wandjina or ancestor, shaping the landscape as she walked.
They listened to the radio as they drove. The oldies channel, 101.1, for music, WNYC for words, until the signal faded and then they waited until East Hampton Music showed up on the dial, the sign that the weekend was about to begin, nights of soft rock and lobster roll, that was another dad-joke. In between the New York stations and WEHM there were audiobooks and that year their plan was to listen to Homer. I think—I can’t be sure, but I think—that by the time they set off for their Memorial Day weekend they had reached Book Four of the Odyssey, Telemachus visiting the palace of Menelaus on the day his daughter, the daughter of recaptured Helen of Troy, married Achilles’ son.
So maybe they were listening to the passage in which Menelaus recounts the day that Helen came to the great wooden horse, suspecting that there were Greek warriors within, and with immense and seductive deception imitated the voices of all their wives (I imagine her reaching up and caressing the wooden belly of the beast erotically as she spoke), so sensually that Diomed, Menelaus himself and Ulysses too wanted to spring out of the horse then and there; but Ulysses restrained himself and his fellows, save only Anticlus, who was about to cry out, and would have done so, had Ulysses not clapped two brawny hands over his mouth and kept them there, and, according to some versions of the tale, strangled the life out of him to protect the hidden Greeks. Yes, maybe that immortal moment rang in their ears, when the metal pipe lying in the road just lying there metal fucking pipe fell off some fucking truck did the truck driver stop no he didn’t did he even know no he probably didn’t did he secure his load properly no he absolutely fucking didn’t because there in the road
the metal pipe
in the HOV lane because these were my parents my beloved my only and they weren’t speedsters no sir they preferred to trundle along safely in the no entry no exit multiple occupancy sensible road use lane marked with a diamond because why who cares why but on this occasion not so fucking safe because the metal pipe
rolling
I’m approaching the horror and must take a break to compose myself and maybe write more later.
No.
There is no later.
Now.
The pipe was seven feet long. It rolled into the path of another car which gave it what the reports called a glancing blow. The pipe spun about, somehow got itself up so that it bounced end over end, and smashed through the windshield of my parents’ car and hit my father in the head, killing him instantly. Their car, out of control, veered out of the HOV lane into the path of the fast traffic and in the multiple collision that followed my mother was also killed. To get them out of the vehicle, the emergency services had to send for the Jaws of Life, but they were both gone. Their bodies were taken to North Shore University Hospital at Plainview, in Nassau County, where they were both pronounced dead on arrival. At midnight, just after I had fearfully declared my love to Suchitra Roy in the British-style pub on the corner of Bleecker and LaGuardia and been given the almost entirely unexpected news that she also had deep feelings for me, I received the call.
For a good deal of that year I stopped thinking almost completely. All I heard was the thunderous beating of the death angel’s gigantic wings. Two people saved me. One was my new beloved, brilliant, loving Suchitra.
The other was Mr. Nero Golden.
With their characteristic carefulness—WHICH DIDN’T SAVE THEIR LIVES DID IT, THE CARELESSNESS OF OTHERS ERASES OUR OWN CARE, THE CARELESSNESS OF A PIPE REARING UP, SMASHING INTO MY FATHER’S FACE, OF WHICH MINE IS A POOR ECHO, WE WHO COME AFTER ARE THE COUNTERFEITS OF THE REAL ONES WHO PRECEDED US AND ARE GONE FOREVER, STUPIDLY, MEANINGLESSLY, SLAUGHTERED BY A RANDOM PIPE, OR A BOMB IN A NIGHTCLUB, OR A DRONE—my parents had left their affairs in good order. There were all the necessary, careful legal documents, carefully composed, which ensured that my status as sole heir was protected, and there was insurance to pay what the state required of that heir, and there would be a sum of money. So for the time being my domestic arrangements didn’t need to change, though probably in the medium term the house would need to be sold. It was too big for me, its value was high, the maintenance expenses and property taxes and so on would be difficult for me to come up with, and ET CETERA I DIDN’T CARE. I walked the streets in a blind rage and all at once it was as if all the anger gathering in the air poured into me too, I could feel it, the anger of the unjustly dead, the young men shot for walking in a stairwell while black, the young child shot for playing with a plastic gun in a playground while black, all the daily black death of America, screaming out that they deserved to live, and I could feel, too, the fury of white America at having to put up with a black man in a white house, and the frothing hatred of the homophobes, and the injured wrath of their targets, the blue-collar anger of everyone who had been Fannie Mae’d and Freddie Mac’d by the housing calamity, all the discontent of a furiously divided country, everyone believing they were right, their cause was just, their pain was unique, attention must be paid, attention must finally be paid to them and only them, and I began to wonder if we were moral beings at all or simply savages who defined their private bigotries as necessary ethics, as the only ways to be. I had been brought up by those dear departed Belgians to believe that “right” and “wrong” were ideas that came naturally to the human animal, that these concepts were born in us, not made. We believed that there was a “moral instinct”: hardwired into the DNA in the way that, according to Steven Pinker, the “language instinct” was. This was our family answer to the religious allegation that persons without religion could not be moral beings, that only the moral structure of a religious system validated by some sort of Supreme Arbiter could give human beings a firm grip on good and evil. My parents’ answer to that was “Hogwash,” or alternatively a term they had learned from Australian friends and gleefully adopted as their own: “Horse puckie.” Morality came before religion and religion was our ancestors’ way of responding to that built-in need. And if that was so then it followed that it was perfectly possible to lead a good life, to have a strong sense of right and wrong, without ever letting God and his harpies into the room.