Nero was drowsy and distracted. (This description is a version of the testimony afterwards given by Michael McNally to the police.) Mostly he stayed in his room, half asleep, but sometimes he was to be found wandering downstairs like a sleepwalker. But he could spark into sudden, shocking life. On one occasion he grasped McNally by both shoulders and shouted into his face, Don’t you know who I am, you asshole? I have built cities. I have conquered kingdoms. I am one of the rulers of the world. I don’t know who he imagined he was talking to, McNally said. It wasn’t me. He was looking into my eyes but who knows who he saw. Maybe he saw himself in those days as the emperor whose name he bore. Maybe he thought he was in Rome. I couldn’t honestly say, McNally confessed. I don’t have that level of education.
He’s being poisoned, Vito Tagliabue called me to repeat. No question in my mind.
There was a strange occurrence two days before the fire. The Golden house awoke to find that an enormous gunnysack of dirty laundry had been left on the Macdougal Street doorstep. There was no note. When the sack was opened it was found to be full of what McNally described as foreign clothes. Could he be more specific? From his attempts to describe them I understood them to be Indian clothing. Kurtas, pajamas, lehngas, veshtis, sari blouses, petticoats. There were no instructions and the sender was unknown. Vasilisa, annoyed at the mistake, ordered them to be left out with the trash. There was no need for the master of the house to be informed. The house was not a laundry. Some ignorant foreigner had made an ignorant foreigner’s mistake.
There were construction workers digging up the street. Something to do with vital repairs to the neighborhood’s infrastructure. When McNally was sent out by Vasilisa to ask how long the disruption would last he was told, three months, maybe, shrug. Which could mean six, nine or twelve. It meant nothing except that the workers were settling in for a substantial period of time. Construction work was the city’s new brutalist art form, erecting its installations wherever you looked. Tall buildings fell and construction sites rose. Pipes and cables rose from and descended into the hidden depths. Telephone landlines ceased to work and water and power and gas services were randomly suspended. Construction work was the art of making the city become aware of itself as a fragile organism at the mercy of forces against which there was no appeal. Construction work was the mighty metropolis being taught the lessons of vulnerability and helplessness. Construction workers were the grand conceptual artists of our time and their installations, their savage holes in the ground, inspired not only hatred—because most people disliked modern art—but also awe. The hard hats, the orange jackets, the buttocks, the wolf whistles, the strength. Truly this was the trans-avant-garde at work.
Parking was suspended and the song of the jackhammers filled the air, radical, atonal, the kind of urban percussion Walt Whitman would have loved, driven by the potent sweat of large uncaring men.
From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their movements,
The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,
Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,
They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.
So it was for the two days after the incident of the laundry.
Then came the explosion.
Something to do with a gas main. The blame shifting between agencies, this safety check not carried out, that human error, a leak, a spark, kaboom. Or it might have been a cynical landlord illegally connecting pipes underground, a leak, a spark. A possible crime, an illegal gas line concealed from ConEd inspectors, possible manslaughter charges, the landlord not answering calls and unavailable at his registered address. Who sparked the spark? Unknown. Investigations will be made and a report issued in due course. Terrorism instantly ruled out. No workers injured, mercifully. The blast smashed windows and shook walls and a fireball billowed and one house, owned by Mr. Nero Golden, caught fire. Four adults and one child in the building at the time: the owner and his wife, her mother, their young son, and an employee, Mr. Michael McNally. It appeared that the building had not been correctly maintained, the indoor sprinkler system had not been serviced for a considerable time and failed to function. Mr. McNally was in the kitchen heating olive oil in a pan, preparing to cook lunch for the family. According to his initial statement the blast blew out the kitchen windows and knocked him off-balance and dazed him. He believes he lost consciousness, then recovered, and scrambled for the door into the Gardens between Macdougal and Sullivan Streets. There he lost consciousness again. When he came to his senses the kitchen was on fire and the flames were spilling out of the burning frying pan and spreading rapidly across the entire first floor. The other residents were upstairs. They had no way of getting out. The fire department responded with its usual alacrity. There were some access problems resulting from the construction work. But the fire was rapidly contained, limited to one single residence. All other properties in the neighborhood were unharmed.
In the age of the smartphone, it was natural that many photographs were taken and videos made. Many of these were afterwards submitted to the proper NYPD authority to be studied in detail for any further illumination they might provide.
But at the Golden house that day there were people trapped by the fire. The high drama of the event played itself out, and ended in a triple tragedy and one miracle.
Unconfirmed reports mentioned that several individuals heard the sound of someone in the upper reaches of the mansion playing a violin.
As I see in my mind’s eye the flames rising higher until they seemed to be licking at the sky itself, hellfire flames like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, it is hard to hold on to that belief in the good to which I dedicated myself, hard not to feel the heat of despair. They, the flames, seem to me to be burning away the whole world I had known, to be consuming in their orange heat all the things I had cared for, had been brought up to defend and fight for and love. Civilization itself seemed to be burning in the fire, my hopes, the hopes of women, our hopes for our planet, and for peace. I thought of all those thinkers burned at the stake, all those who stood up against the forces and orthodoxies of their time, and I felt myself and my whole disenfranchised kind bound now by strong chains and engulfed by the awful blaze, the West itself on fire, Rome burning, the barbarians not at the gates but within, our own barbarians, nurtured by ourselves, coddled and glorified by ourselves, enabled by ourselves, as much our own as our children, rising like savage children to burn the world that made them, claiming to save it even as they set it ablaze. It was the fire of our doom and it would take half a century or more to rebuild what it destroyed.
Yes, I suffer from hyperbole, it is the previously existing condition for which I need healthcare, but just sometimes a paranoid man is really being pursued, just sometimes the world is more heightened, more exaggerated, more hyperbolically infernal than even a hyperbolist-infernalist could ever, at his wildest, have dreamed.
So I saw the dark flames, the black flames of the inferno, licking at the sacred space of my childhood, the one place in the whole world in which I had always felt safe, always comforted, never threatened, the enchanted Gardens, and I learned the final lesson, the learning of which separates us from innocence. That there was no safe space, that the monster was always at the gates, and a little of the monster was within us too, we were the monsters we had always feared, and no matter what beauty enfolded us, no matter how lucky we were in life or money or family or talent or love, at the end of the road the fire was burning, and it would consume us all.