“FLASH! I LOVE YOU! BUT WE HAVE ONLY FOURTEEN HOURS TO SAVE THE EARTH!”
I was in the grip of a kind of euphoria that night, seized by the high of having forgiven my parents for dying and myself for remaining alive. Suchitra and I went home to the Gardens and I knew that it was time to do the forbidden thing. Already high on life, we broke open the long-preserved pack of Afghan Moon and inhaled. At once the third eyes in our pineal glands opened as my father had said they would and we understood the secrets of the world. We saw that the world was neither meaningless nor absurd, that in fact it had profound meaning and form, but that form and meaning had been hidden from us until now, concealed in the hieroglyphs and esoterica of power, because it was in the interests of the masters of the world to hide meaning from all but the illuminated. We understood also that it was up to the two of us to save the planet and that the force that would save the planet was love. With our heads spinning we understood that Max von Sydow as Ming the Merciless, totalitarian, whimsical and badly dressed in his bright red science fiction comic book evil genius cloak, was coming to conquer the human race, and that if sometimes Ming’s face blurred and began to look like the face of Nero Golden, then that was unfair because of his kindness to me of late, but could a man be simultaneously bad and good, we asked ourselves, and the Afghan Moon replied that irreconcilable contradiction and the union of opposites was the deepest mystery of all. Tonight was for love, said the Afghan Moon, tonight was for the celebration of living bodies and for saying farewell to the lost bodies of departed loved ones, but after the sun rose in the morning there would be no time to lose.
If you owed the bank a buck you were a deadbeat with an overdraft. If you owed a billion you were rich and the bank was working for you. It was difficult to know how wealthy Nero Golden actually was. His name was everywhere in those days, on everything from hot dogs to for-profit universities, it was walking around Lincoln Center thinking about donating a unit to refurbish Avery Fisher Hall as long as the old name got dumped and the Golden name was up there in block capitals made of gold. A unit was the shorthand term his name used to signify “one hundred million dollars,” one hundred million dollars being the price of entry into the world of the really rich, you really weren’t anybody until you had your unit. His name was walking that unit around town, it kind of wanted to put itself on the Tribeca Film Festival, but that would cost a lot less than a whole unit, so finally the Film Festival felt like chicken feed; what his name really, really wanted was to be way up there on Yankee Stadium. That would prove his name had conquered New York. After that they might just as well put it on top of City Hall.
I assumed he had brought serious funds with him when he came west, but there were persistent rumors that all his enterprises were highly leveraged, that the whole mega-business of his name was a flimflam game and bankruptcy was the shadow that went with his name whenever he took it for a stroll. I thought of him as a citizen not of New York but of the invisible city of Octavia which Marco Polo described to Kublai Khan in Calvino’s book, a spiderweb city hanging in a great net over an abyss between two mountains. “The life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities,” Calvino wrote. “They know the net will last only so long.” I thought of him too as one of those characters in animated cartoons, Wile E. Coyote perhaps, who are constantly running off the edges of canyons, but who keep going, defying gravity, until they look down, and then they fall. The knowledge of the impossibility of the attempt brings about its calamitous ending. Nero Golden kept going, perhaps, because he never looked down.
For many months I was busy closing up our house, locking up what I wanted to keep in a Manhattan Mini Storage facility on the West Side, the one with the funny billboards on the wall overlooking the Highway, New York has six professional sports teams, and also the Mets, and If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married, and “In my father’s house there are many rooms”—John 14:2—Clearly Jesus was not a New Yorker, and Remember, if you leave the city, you’ll have to live in America. Yeah, ha ha, I got it, but mostly I was in a sour mood again, trying hard not to show it in Suchitra’s company, but she knew what I was going through. Then the time came to put the house up for sale and Vasilisa Golden came up to me in the Gardens and put her arm around me and kissed me on the cheek and said, let me do this for you, let’s keep it in the family, which was such a nice thing to say that I just nodded dumbly and let her handle the sale.
Again, it was hard for me to be objective about the Goldens that year. On the one hand there was Nero’s kindness to me, and now his wife’s kindness also. On the other, there seemed little doubt that he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Romney presidential campaign, and his remarks about the president and his wife teetered on the edge of bigotry, of course he likes the gays, he’s married to a man, that was a mild one. Very often he told his “funny Republican joke,” the one about the older white guy who goes up to a White House sentry at some point after the end of the present administration, several days in a row, and each time asks to meet President Obama. The third or fourth time he shows up, the exasperated officer says, Sir, you keep coming back and I keep telling you, Mr. Obama is no longer the president of these United States, and no longer resides at this address. So you know that and still you keep coming back and asking the same question and you get the same answer, so why do you keep asking? And the older white guy says, Oh, I just like to hear it.
This, I put up with, though I feared on Nero’s behalf that his dark side would overpower the light. I gave him to read the great short story “The Shadow” by Hans Christian Andersen about the man whose shadow detaches itself from him, travels the world, becomes more sophisticated than his former “owner,” returns to seduce and marry the princess to whom the man is betrothed, and, together with the (pretty ruthless) princess, condemns the real man to death. I wanted him to understand the danger his soul was in, if a godless person may be permitted to use such a term, but he wasn’t a reader of literature, and returned the book containing the story with a dismissive gesture of the hand. “I don’t like fairy tales,” he said.
But then…the two of them, husband and wife, summoned me to their presence and announced their decision regarding me. “What you need to do,” Vasilisa Golden said, “is to come to live with us in this house. It is a big house with many rooms and two of the three boys are not so much here anymore and the third is Petya who hardly comes out of his room. So there is plenty of space for yourself and you will be excellent company for us both.”
“Temporarily,” Nero Golden said.
“With the girl, who knows what happens,” Vasilisa pointed out. “You want to move in with her, you decide to break up, time will tell. Take the pressure off. You don’t need pressure right now.”
“For the moment,” Nero Golden said.
It was an offer of true generosity—admittedly a short-term offer—made in absolute good faith; and I didn’t see how I could accept it. I opened my mouth to object and Vasilisa raised an empress’s hand. “There is no question of refusing,” she said. “Go and pack your bags and we will send people to carry them.”
So in the fall of 2012 I went to live in the Golden house, temporarily, for the moment, feeling, on the one hand, deeply grateful, like a serf offered a bedroom in a palace, and, on the other, as if I had done a deal with the devil. The only way of knowing which it was, would be to unwrap all the mysteries around Nero, his present as well as his past, so that I could truly judge him, and maybe to do that it would be better to be within the walls than outside them. They opened the gates and pulled me into their world and then I was the wooden horse standing inside the gates of Troy. And inside me, Odysseus and the warriors. And standing before me, the Helen of this American Ilium. And before our story was done I would betray them, and the woman I loved, and myself. And the topless towers would burn.