In The Exterminating Angel the revelers at the feast in Mexico found themselves trapped in the salon of the grand mansion of their host Señor Edmundo Nóbile by an invisible force. Surrealism permitted its followers the indirections and strangenesses of poetry. Real life in the Gardens was much more prosaic. Nero, Vasilisa, her babushka and my son were all imprisoned in the Golden house by the banality, the lethal conventionality, the deadly realism of a fire.
If life were a movie I would have heard about the fire, run toward it like a superhero on speed, pushed aside the hands grasping at me and plunged into the flames, returning as burning beams fell around me with my child shielded safely in my arms. If life were a movie he would have buried his head in my shoulder and murmured, Papa, I knew you’d come. If life were a movie it would conclude with a wide-angle shot of the Village with the ashes of the Golden house smoldering in the center of the frame as I walked away with the child and a famous song welled up on the soundtrack, “Beautiful Boy” by John Lennon, perhaps, and the credits began to roll.
That didn’t happen.
By the time Suchitra and I reached Macdougal Street it was all over. Michael McNally was being treated at Mount Sinai Beth Israel and would subsequently be questioned by NYPD detectives who absolved him from responsibility for the fire. The other adults were dead before a ladder crew could get to them, Nero and the babushka quickly overpowered by the smoke, losing consciousness, never waking up again. There had been one moment of operatic emotion. The beautiful Mrs. Golden, Vasilisa, had appeared at an upstairs window holding her almost-four-year-old child, screaming “God, please save my son,” and before anyone could reach her she had thrown the child out of the window away from the fire. One of the firemen at the scene, Mariano “Mo” Vasquez, thirty-nine, who happened to be the catcher for his local baseball team on Staten Island, lunged forward and caught the soot-covered child just in time, “like a football,” he told the TV cameras later, and then blew air into the boy’s lungs and got his breathing going again. “He gave some coughs and then started yelling and crying. It was beautiful, man. Just a miracle, man, a miracle, and now I find out it’s the boy’s fourth birthday tomorrow, that kid had a guardian angel looking out for him for sure. It’s a fine and beautiful thing and I give thanks to Almighty God that I could be in the right place at the right time.”
After that Vasilisa fell backwards away from the window and all her hopes all her ambitions all her strategies fell away with her, nobody deserved such an ending no matter what they had been in life, and a few instants after she dropped from sight the fire roared out through the open window and there was no possibility of saving her. And later of course the fire was extinguished, and charred bodies, etc., no need to go into any of that. The building would have to be demolished and a new structure would be raised in its place. No other houses were damaged by the fire.
So ended the story of the Golden house. They thought they were Romans but that was just a fantasy. Their Roman games which begat their Roman names: just games. They thought of themselves as a king and his princes but they were no Caesars. A Caesar had indeed risen in America, his reign was under way, beware, Caesar, I thought, the people raise you up and carry your throne through the ecstatic glorifying streets and then they turn on you and rend your garment and push you down upon your sword. Hail Caesar. Beware the Ides of March. Hail Caesar. Beware SPQR, senatus populusque Romanus, the Senate and the people of Rome. Hail Caesar. Remember Nero the last of his line fleeing at the end to Phaon’s villa outside the city and ordering a grave to be dug for him, Nero then too cowardly to drive the sword into his own body and forcing his private secretary to do it at the last. Epaphroditos, slayer of the king. There were indeed once Caesars in the world and now in America a new incarnation on the throne. But Nero Golden was no king nor did he have a fallen Caesar’s end. Just a fire, just some random meaningless flame. What was it his underworld pals had called him in Bombay? The laundryman, yes. The dhobi. Here’s the dirty laundry, dhobi. Clean it up. No king on a throne. He was just the laundryman.
The laundryman.
The dirty laundry on the doorstep. The gunnysack full of Indian clothes.
I began feverishly to search the media for photographs of the fire scene, iPhone videos, everything, wherever I could find them, whatever had been shot professionally or posted by the public at large. The rubbernecking crowd behind the safety barriers. Faces seen through smoke and water. Nothing. Nothing again. And then something.
Two South Asian men in a photograph, watching the fire burn, one of them a dwarf. It was impossible to see the feet of his companion but I guessed that they would be unusually big.
Time passes. Big men dwindle, small men grow. This man shrinks into old age, those men’s reach grows longer. They can stretch out their arms and touch places and people they couldn’t reach before. There are companies here to lend assistance to companies there, to facilitate journeys, to execute strategies. Clowns become kings, old crowns lie in the gutter. Things change. It is the way of the world.
The news reports the next day were unanimous. The crooked landlord charged with manslaughter in the second degree. A tragedy. And a wonder that the young boy survived. Case closed.
And another story, not of interest to the American media, which I found by chance on my computer. The death in a distant country of a once-feared South Asian mafia don. Mr. Zamzama Alankar, formerly the godfather of the powerful Z-Company crime family, had gone to stand before the last judgment seat. An unconfirmed report.
There is a dawn mist on the river and crossing the harbor a Chinese junk with her brown sails set fair and the sun low and silver and the sunlight skipping over the water like a stone. At the glass-topped table in the glass corner where two windows met we sit with glass tears in our eyes not knowing where to look or how to see. Below us running through the whiteness a woman with wild red hair and a tiara on her head like a queen escaping a kidnap and running for her life. Suchitra and I sit facing each other and the steam rising from the coffee cups and the smoke from her cigarette make three wandering columns in the air.
Imagine a cube of air, maybe twelve inches by twelve inches by twelve, moving through the vast open spaces of the world. This or something like it I once heard the Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg say. The cube is what the camera sees and the way the cube moves is the meaning of it. That is what it is to make a film, to move that cube through the world and see what it captures, what it makes beautiful, and what it makes sense of. That is the art of the cinema.
See us facing each other, both in profile, in wide-screen format and desaturated color. See the camera move between us, to the midpoint between us, and then turn on its axis, in full circles, slowly, many times, so that our faces slide by one by one and in between our faces the river of the city and the fog slowly lifting and the light rising on the day. In her hand a sheet of paper. This is the subject. This is the meaning of the scene.