And everywhere I went that year, it seemed, I ran into the ranter from the park. In Vasilisa’s second trimester, he walked across the shot on Twenty-Third Street outside the SVA Theatre, where Suchitra and I were filming a street interview with Werner Herzog for my classic-movie-moments video series. At the very moment that I uttered the words “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” the old tramp crossed behind Herzog and myself, looking exactly, exactly, like the great wild-eyed madman, the Zorn Gottes Klaus Kinski himself, muttering about the accelerating speed of evil, about the growing mountain of evil right in the middle of the city, and who cared? Did anyone in America even care? Children were shooting their fathers’ dicks off in the bedroom. Did anyone even notice? It was like global warming, the fires of Hell were melting the great ice sheets of evil and the levels of evil were rising all over the world, no flood barriers could keep them out. Blam! Blam! he cried, reverting to an earlier theme. The gun monsters are coming to get you, the Decepticons, the Terminators, look out for your children’s toys, look out in your squares and malls and palaces, look out on your beaches and churches and schools, they’re on the march, blam! blam!—those things can kill.
“That guy is fabulous,” Herzog said with genuine admiration. “We should put him in the movie and maybe I will interview him.”
“Here is what I will readily confess to you, you handsome devil,” said Petya Golden, gravely. “I no longer possess a scrap of brotherly love. What is more, I believe that the widely held view that deep affection between siblings is inborn and inevitable, and that its absence reflects poorly upon the individual who lacks it, is incorrect. It is not genetically driven; rather, it is a form of social blackmail.” It was not often that visitors were invited into Petya’s lair but he had made an exception for me, perhaps because I remained, in his unique opinion, the most good-looking man on earth, and so I sat in the blue light of his room among the computers and the Anglepoise lamps, accepted his offer of grilled Double Gloucester cheese on toast, and said as little as possible, understanding that he wanted to talk, and his talk was always worth listening to, even when he was more than usually off-kilter. “In ancient Rome,” he said, “in fact in all great empires across the world and in every age, your siblings were people to be feared. At the time of the succession it was usually kill or be killed. Love? Those princes would have laughed at the word if you had brought it up.”
I asked him how he might answer William Penn, what he had to say about the idea enshrined in the name of the city of Philadelphia, which had prospered in its early years because its reputation for tolerance attracted people of many faiths and talents and had led to better than average relationships with the local Native American tribes. “The idea that all men are brothers is ingrained in much philosophy and most religion,” I ventured.
“Maybe one should seek to love mankind in general,” he retorted in accents that denoted extreme boredom. “But in general is far too general for me. I’m being specific about my dislikes here. Two persons born and one as yet unborn: these are the targets of my hostility, which may be limitless, I don’t know. I’m talking about untying the ties of blood here, not un-hugging the whole goddamned species, and do not speak to me, please, of African Eve or LUCA, the three-and-a-half-billion-year-old blob of goo that was our Last Universal Common Ancestor. I am aware of the family tree of the human race and of pre–Homo sap life on earth and to insist upon those genealogies now would be willfully to miss my point. You know what I’m saying to you. It’s only my siblings I loathe. This has become clear as I consider the baby we will soon be obliged to greet.”
I could not speak, though I felt a tide of paternal rage rising in my breast. Apparently, while my son—my secret Golden son—was blossoming in his mother’s womb, his future brother Petya had already formed a poor opinion of him. I wanted to expostulate, to defend the child and attack his foe, but in this matter silence was my doom. And Petya’s talk had already moved on. He wanted me to know that he was making a momentous decision, that he had resolved to cure his fear of the outdoors and then leave the house on Macdougal Street forever, thus becoming the last of the three sons of Nero Golden to strike out on his own. He was the one for whom the difficulties of doing so were greatest, but he now revealed unsuspected reserves of willpower. There was a force driving him, and as he spoke I understood that it was hatred, aimed at Apu Golden in particular: hatred born on the banks of the Hudson River on the night of his brother’s seduction of, or perhaps by, the metal-cutting Somali beauty Ubah, nurtured during those long solitudes bathed in blue light, and leading, finally, to action. He would cure himself of agoraphobia and leave home. He indicated the plaque above the door of his lair. Leave thy home, O youth, and seek out alien shores. “I used to think it was about moving to America,” he said, “but here in this house we are still at home, as if we brought it with us. Now, finally, I’m ready to follow my great namesake’s instructions. If not exactly to alien shores, then at least away from here, to an apartment of my own.”
I simply received the information. We both knew that agoraphobia was the lesser of Petya’s difficulties. Of the greater difficulty, he did not, on that occasion, choose to speak. But I saw a great resolve in his face. Plainly he had decided to overcome the challenges of that greater difficulty as well.
A new visitor appeared at the Golden house the next day, and after that daily and promptly at three o’clock in the afternoon, a sturdily built person sporting a bouffant blond hairstyle, Converse sneakers, a smile that insisted on its deep sincerity, an Australian accent, and—as Nero Golden pointed out—more than a passing resemblance to the retired Wimbledon champion Pat Cash. This was the individual charged with the task of rescuing Petya from his fear of open spaces: Petya’s hypnotherapist. His name was Murray Lett. “If you call me, it’s not a fault,” he liked to say; a tennis joke that only served (ouch) to increase his resemblance to the former Australian star.
It was not easy for Petya to be hypnotized, because he kept wanting to argue with the hypnotist’s suggestions and in addition he disliked certain Antipodean notes in the man’s voice, and his sense of humor, and so on. The first sessions were difficult. “I’m not in a trance,” Petya would interrupt Mr. Lett. “I’m feeling relaxed and in a good mood but I’m in full control of my wits.” Or, another day, “Oh dear, I was so nearly there at last. But a fly just went up my nose.”
Petya noticed too much. It was one of the things that most seriously got in his way. On one of my visits to the room of blue light, when he seemed willing for once to talk about the Asperger’s, I mentioned the famous Borges story, “Funes the Memorious,” about a man who was unable to forget anything, and he said, “Yes, that’s me, except it’s not just what happened or what people said. That writer of yours, he’s too wrapped up in words and deeds. You have to add smells and tastes and sounds and feelings also. And glances and shapes and the patterns of cars in the street and the relative movement of pedestrians and the silences between musical notes and the effects of dog whistles on dogs. All of them all the time running around my brain.” A sort of super-Funes, then, cursed with multiple sensory overload. It was hard to imagine what his interior world was like, how anyone could cope with the crowding in of sensations like riders on the rush-hour subway, the deafening cacophony of sobs, honks, explosions, and whispers, the kaleidoscopic blaze of images, the muddled reek of stenches. The Inferno, the carnival of the damned, must be like this. I understood then that to say that Petya lived in a kind of hell was the exact opposite of the reality, which was that a kind of hell lived inside him. This understanding allowed me to recognize, and to be embarrassed that I hadn’t recognized it before, the immense strength and courage with which Petronius Golden faced the world every day, and to have a greater compassion for his occasional savage complaints against his life, like the episodes on the windowsill and on the subway to Coney Island. And I also allowed myself to wonder: If that immense force of character were now to be dedicated to his animus against his unborn soon-to-be half brother (actually, as we know, not his brother at all, but let that thought lie for now), his troubled half brother and above all his treacherous full-blood brother, of what vengeful deed might he be capable? Should I worry for my own son’s safety, or was that instinct proof of my knee-jerk bigotry toward Petya’s condition? (Was it wrong to call it a condition? Maybe “Petya’s reality” would be better. How difficult language had become, how full of land mines. Good intentions were no longer a defense.)