The Golden House

REGARDING LOVE: A TRAGEDY

On the day my parents died I wasn’t in the car. It was Memorial Day weekend and they were heading out of town but I changed my mind at the last moment and stayed in the city because Suchitra Roy wanted me to help her cut a video for an Italian fashion house. Of course I was in love with Suchitra, everyone who ever crossed the path of that human dynamo fell at least a little bit in love with her, and for a long time I had been too scared of her sheer energy, the scale of the woman, her black hair flying behind her in the wind on Sixth Avenue, her blue and gold skirt glowing above the latest sneakers, her arms spreading in a dozen different directions like a Hindu goddess managing to enfold the whole city in her embrace…too scared to admit to myself that I’d fallen for her, but by now there was no doubt about it, and the only question was, when was I going to tell her, or would I tell her at all. There was a voice in my head saying do it now, you fool, but a second, often louder voice, the voice of my cowardice, arguing that we had been friends for too long, that after a certain point it became impossible to transmute friendship into romantic love, that if one attempted to do so and failed one could be left without the friendship or the love, and here was Eliot’s Prufrock in my head again, agonizing in my own inner voice, Do I dare, and regarding the terrible and terrifying question of a declaration of love, Would it have been worth while / If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, / And turning toward the window, should say: / “That is not it at all, /That is not what I meant, at all.”

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.

“The problem is,” my mother said, sitting on a bench in the Gardens, “that while we are programmed to want ethics, the program doesn’t tell us what right and wrong actually are. These categories are empty in the brain and require us to fill them up with what? Thought. Judgment. Stuff of this kind.”

“One of the general principles of human behavior, I’ve found,” my father added, walking up and down in front of her, “is that in almost every situation, everyone believes himself or herself to be right, and any opponent wrong.”

To which my mother rejoined, “Also we live in a time in which there is almost no agreement on any existential questions, we can’t even concur simply on what is the case, and when the nature of the real is so disputed, so must the nature of the good be.”

When they got going like this they were like dancers, or badminton players, their words moving in harmony, their rackets wafting the shuttlecock back and forth, forth and back again. “So de idea that we have an ethics instinct doesn’t carry with it de notion that we know what those ethics should be. If that were true philosophers would be out of a job and we would live in a less contentious world,” my father was pointing at me with a finger now, you see?, you getting this?, and I like a schoolboy nodding, yes, Dad, yes Mom, I get it, we all agree on this, these are things we know.

“Yeah, but did you know there’s a word for it?” my father asked me.

A word for what, Dad.

“Definition: De supposed innate ability of de human mind to realize de basic principles of ethics and morals. A technical term of philosophy, signifying de innate principle in de moral consciousness of every man, which directs him to good and restrains him from evil.”

No, Dad, what word would that be.

“Synderesis,” my mother said. “Did you ever hear a better word?”

“There isn’t a better word,” my father concurred. “Remember it, kiddo. De best word in de world.”

These were the voices I would never hear again.

And they were wrong. The human race was savage, not moral. I had lived in an enchanted garden but the savagery, the meaninglessness, the fury had come in over the walls and killed what I loved most.

I had never seen a dead body until I saw my parents’ corpses at the Mineola morgue. I had sent over clothes for them, one of Suchitra’s interns ran that errand, and had chosen coffins online, selecting, as one does, absurdly expensive boxes for them to be burned in. Our home was full of tenured professors, male and female, helping. I had all the help in the world from the leading experts in Sumerian art, subatomic physics, First Amendment law, and Commonwealth literature. But nobody could help me look at the bodies. Suchitra drove me out there in her aging Jeep and because there was no way we could talk about what we needed to talk about we fell into black comedy, remembering particularly gruesome “corpses of the week” from the old HBO series Six Feet Under. My favorite was the woman on a girls’ night out in a rented stretch limo rising through the open sunroof to express her happiness and running face-first into the bucket of a cherry-picker truck. After which her flattened face would have been quite a task for the series regulars to fix.

And then an over-lit room with two gurneys and two horizontal beings under sheets, two horizontal beings who once, horizontal on a different, softer surface, had conjoined joyfully—maybe clumsily—maybe not—I was unable to imagine my parents as gymnastic sex fiends, but I also didn’t want them to be fumbling incompetents—and the result was this blank unthinking entity standing by the gurneys to confirm that they were no longer capable of the act that brought him into being, or of anything else.

They had done their best at the morgue. I went to my mother first and they had removed the terror from her face as well as whatever shards of glass and metal had pierced her and although she was wearing more makeup than she ever did when alive it was her, I could see it was her, and she looked, or I could persuade myself that she looked, at peace. I turned to my father and Suchitra came up behind me and put her cheek against my back and her arms around my waist. Okay, I said, okay, and lifted the sheet. Then finally I wept.

The day after the cremation Nero Golden came across the Gardens to our house—the term “my house” made no sense; my parents were present in every inch of it—and tapped on the French windows with his cane. It was so unexpected—the king knocking on the orphaned commoner’s door—that at first I saw him as an unreal projection of my imagination. In the aftermath of death my grip on the real had loosened. There was an old lady, Mrs. Stone, living on the Gardens (in four high-ceilinged rooms on the piano nobile of a building divided into floor-through apartments), who spoke often of ghosts. This is somebody I haven’t mentioned before, and very likely will leave to her own devices after this guest appearance, a lady whom the Gardens’ children called Hat because of her love of wide-brimmed sun hats, a widow for many years, her former husband a rancher in Texas who struck oil on his land and at once gave up beef cattle for the high life and an internationally admired stamp collection. Mrs. Stone too had buttonholed me by the jungle gym to speak of loss. A death in the family, as also a newborn baby, gave permission for strangers or near strangers to come up and soliloquize. “My husband I never saw after his demise,” she confided. “It seems he was happy to get away. No effort at contact at any time. You live and you learn. But one night on Macdougal Alley I saw a liveried teenage boy—a black kid in a pretty fancy outfit—walking on his knees. Why was he walking on his knees, thought I, there’s no religious history here. Then finally I worked it out. He wasn’t walking on his knees at all. The street level of the alley had risen over time and he was walking on the old ground level and I could only see him down to his knees. A stable boy, possibly, going down the alley to work in the old stables that used to be there in the 1830s, servicing Washington Square North. Or a servant boy, employed perhaps by Gertrude Whitney, who lived there, you know, when she founded her museum. In any case, a ghost, a palpable ghost. And that’s not all.” I made my excuses and left. But the neighborhood’s ghost stories seemed to pursue me in those melancholy days. The ghost of Aaron Burr haunting the Village looking for whores. Musical ghosts, dramatic ghosts, wearing their stage costumes and performing in winter on Commerce Street. My old self wasn’t interested but my orphaned new self let people tell their tales and at night I tried to hear my parents’ laughter echoing in empty rooms. It was in this mood that I saw Nero Golden at the French windows and thought, an apparition. But he was flesh and blood.

“You permit that I enter,” he said, entering before I permitted it. And upon entering, having placed his cane against a wall and seated himself in my father’s favorite chair: “I am a direct man, mister René, plainspoken, who has never found a bush worth beating about. So I say to you regarding your loss that it is your loss. Your parents are gone, don’t concern yourself with them, they don’t exist anymore. Concern yourself with yourself. It is not only that you are wounded and must heal. It is also that now your elders no longer stand between you and the grave. This is manhood. Now you are at the front of the line and the grave yawns for you. Therefore, get wisdom; learn to be a man. If you are agreeable, I will offer my assistance.”

This was an impressive oration. If he intended to shake me out of my sadness by irritating me, he succeeded. But before I could speak he raised a peremptory hand. “I see your reaction from your face, where a thundercloud has settled, threatening a storm. Dispel it! Your anger is unnecessary. You are young and I am old. I ask you to learn from me. Your country is young. One thinks differently when one has millennia behind one. You have not even two hundred and fifty years. I say also that I am not yet blind so I am aware of your interest in my house. Because I think you are kind of a good guy I forgive this, my alternative being to have you killed, ha ha. I think that—now that you are a man—you can learn from all of us Goldens, good and bad, what to do and not do. From Petya how to fight against what is not your fault, how to play when the cards give you a bad hand. From Apu, maybe, don’t be like him. It is possible that he has failed to become profound. From Dionysus, my tormented one, learn about ambiguity and pain.”

“And from you?”

“As to myself, mister René: maybe you guessed already that I am not always a saint. I am hard and boastful and used to a certain superior position and what I want I take and what I don’t want I clear out of my way. But when you are facing me you must ask yourself the following question: Is it possible to be both good and evil? Can a man be a good man when he is a bad man? If you believe Spinoza and agree that everything is determined by necessity, can the necessities that drive a man drive him to wrongdoing as well as right? What is a good man in this deterministic world? Does the adjective even mean anything? When you have the answer, tell me. But before all of this happens, tonight, we go out on the town, and drink.”

Later.

“Death, we deal with it, we accept it, we move on,” Nero Golden said. “We are the living, so we must live. Guilt, but, that’s bad. That remains and does us harm.” We were at the Russian Tea Room—his treat—holding shot glasses of ice-cold vodka. He raised his in salute; he drank, I drank. It was why we were here, and the food—blinis and caviar, dumplings, chicken Kiev—we ate only to allow us to drink more.

“If we go home sober,” Nero Golden told me, “then we will have failed. We need to reach a condition in which we will not know how exactly we got home at all.”

I bowed my head gravely. “Agreed.”

Another shot. “My late wife, you take her case,” Nero jabbed a finger at me, “don’t pretend you don’t know the story, I know the loose tongues in my household. Never mind that. As to her death, a great sadness, but not in fact a tragedy, it didn’t rise to the level of tragedy.” Another shot. “I correct myself. A personal tragedy of course. A tragedy to me and my sons. But great tragedy is universal, is it not.”

“It is.”

“So. My point. The destructive aspect for me, the life-altering destructive aspect, was not the fact of death but the fact of responsibility. Mine. My responsibility, this is the issue. This is what haunts me when at night I walk in the Gardens.”

By this stage of the evening I had begun to see it as my task to comfort him even though the purpose of the outing had been vice versa. “You had a quarrel,” I said. “This happens. It does not place upon you the burden of her death. In an ethical universe only the murderer is guilty of the murder. It must be so otherwise the universe would be morally absurd.”

He was silent, drinking, waiters hovering to bring more vodka as needed. “Let me give a different example,” I said, lofty now, finding myself at the heights of thought, feeling truly my parents’ child. “Suppose that I’m an asshole.”

“A total asshole?”

“Complete and total. And stinky.”

“I imagine it, okay.”

“Suppose that every day I stand in front of your house and I abuse you and your family.”

“Are you using bad language?”

“The worst. I abuse yourself and your loved ones in the coarsest terms.”

“This would be intolerable, naturally.”

“So, you have a gun in the house.”

“How do you know this?”

“I am hypothesizing.”

“Ah, a hypothesis. Excellent. Understood. A hypothetical gun.”

“And you take this putative weapon and you know what you do?”

“I shoot you.”

“You shoot me through the heart and I’m dead and guess what that makes you.”

“It makes me happy.”

“It makes you a murderer.”

“It makes me happy and a murderer.”

“You are guilty of murder and in court it is not a defense to say, your honor, he was an asshole.”

“It is not?”

“Even assholes when murdered are not responsible for their deaths. The murderer alone bears the burden of the crime.”

“This is philosophy?”

“I need more vodka. The philosophy is in the bottle.”

“Waiter.”

After another shot he became maudlin. “You’re young,” he said. “You don’t know what responsibility is. You don’t know guilt or shame. You know nothing. It is not important. Your parents are dead. This is the matter in hand.”

“Thank you,” I said, and after that I don’t remember.

Ends.

“In the beginning,” Suchitra said, sitting by my bedside while I groaned that my head hurt, “in the beginning there was the official Communist Party of India—CPI. But India has a population problem and its left parties also ignore birth control. So after the CPI there was the CPI(M), the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) a.k.a. CPI(M-L). Enough parties? Babe, the party’s only just getting started. Try to keep up. Now there is the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, plus the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Naxalbari, and also the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Janashakti, and in addition the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Red Star, and let us not forget the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Central Team, or neglect to mention the Revolutionary Communist Center of India (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist), to say nothing of the Communist Party of United States of India or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Red Flag, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) New Democracy, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) New Initiative, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Somnath, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Second Central Committee, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Bolshevik. Kindly continue to pay strict attention. There is proliferation among other groupuscules as well. There was the Maoist Communist Center which merged with the People’s War Group to form the Maoist Communist Center of India. Or possibly it was that the Maoist Communist Center of India merged with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War and founded the Communist Party of India (Maoist). These distinctions can be hard to make. I tell you all this to explain the decision of my Bengali mother and father, two intrepid capitalistically inclined entrepreneur types trapped in Calcutta among the many-headed Ravanas of the Communist Party of India (Uranium-Plutonium), the nuclear-fission warheads of the left, to run away and settle in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, Georgia, which is where I was born. This would perhaps have been a good idea, and in fact economically speaking it was a good idea because they succeeded in a wide range of enterprises, beauty salons, clothing stores, a real estate agency, psychic-healing services, so you see they also proliferated. But unfortunately around them the political institutions of the Hindu right were also being fruitful and multiplying on fertile American soil, expatriate branches of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh sprouted up, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad flowered, the Bharatiya Janata Party thrived, as did fund-raising organizations funneling dollars toward the same. My parents escaped from one whirlpool only to be sucked into another and when they started going to RSS gala dinners and speaking admiringly of the barrel-chested person they called NaMo, I had to love them and leave them and make my escape. So I hightailed it to NYC where I am now working my ass off trying to make you laugh and it would be kind of you at this point at least to crack a smile.”

“And this is your idea,” I said, “of a hangover cure.”

Regarding working her ass off: Suchitra did that every day, every minute of every day. I never knew anyone who worked half as hard and still had time for pleasure, in which category I was fortunate enough to be included. She woke early, went spinning, ran to her office, gave the workday everything she had, went running by the Hudson or across the Brooklyn Bridge and back, and still turned up fresh as a daisy and twice as stylish at whatever the evening had to offer, a gallery opening, a screening, a birthday party, a karaoke night, a dinner date with me, and had enough energy left for lovemaking after it all. As a lover she was equally energetic, if unoriginal, but I wasn’t complaining. I was scarcely a sex god myself and at that moment the love of a good woman was saving me from the black pit. Nero Golden’s tough affection and his heavy-drinking vodka nights, together with Suchitra Roy’s kindly, super-speed love, brought me through those days. I thought of the story of the paramedics in the ambulance playing good cop, bad cop after Mrs. Golden’s suicide attempt and realized that this time I was the one being put on suicide watch.

THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN, OR, THE DOG IN THE BARDO

New York City was my mother and father all that summer until I learned to live without parents and accept, as Nero had recommended I accept, my adult place at the head of the queue waiting to see the last picture show. As usual it was a movie that helped me, Ingmar Bergman’s Det sjunde inseglet, “The Seventh Seal,” which the great film director himself thought “uneven” but which the rest of us revered. The knight (Max von Sydow, who would go on to play the boring artist Frederick in Hannah and Her Sisters and the immortal Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon) on his way home from the Crusades playing chess against black-cowled Death to delay the inevitable, so that he could see his wife once more before he died. Broken knight and cynical squire, Bergman’s unfunny Quixote and Sancho, looking for this year’s birds in last year’s nests. Bergman had religious issues to work out, having come from a deeply religious household, but for me it wasn’t necessary to see the film in those terms. The title was from the Book of Revelation. “And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour” (Revelation 8:1). To me, the silence in heaven, the nonappearance of God, was the truth of the secular vision of the universe, and half an hour meant the length of a human life. The opening of the seventh seal revealed that God was nowhere with nothing to say and Man was given the space of his little life to perform, as the knight wished to perform, one meaningful deed. The wife I wanted to see before I died was my dream of being a filmmaker. The meaningful deed was the film I was dreaming of making, my film of my Gardens dotted with real and imaginary beings like an Altman ensemble cast and the Goldens in their house at the far end from mine. The “deed” was the journey and the “wife” was the goal. I said something of this sort to Suchitra and she nodded gravely. “It’s time to finish your script and start raising the money.”

And in the meanwhile the great metropolis, hugging me to its bosom and trying to teach me the lessons of life. The boat on the pond where Stuart Little sailed reminding me of the beauty of innocence, and the space on Clinton Street where Judith Malina was still just about alive and her Living Theatre was still enjoying getting naked spoke to me of old-school don’t-give-a-fuck irreverence. And on Union Square the chess players played and maybe Death was playing there too, fast games of Blitz that grabbed lives like they didn’t matter or slow games, off the clock, that allowed the black angel to pretend he respected life while still recruiting his playing partners for his danse macabre. Absences spoke to me as well as presences: the shoe stores gone from Eighth Street, the eccentricity gone from the Upper West Side where once Maya Schaper ran Cheese and Antiques and, when asked why, liked to reply, “Because these are the things I love.” Everywhere I walked the city held me in its arms and whispered comfort in my ear.

On the night of Apu’s second opening at the Sottovoce Bowery space a block from the Museum of Identity (these pictures were smart and swift and technically adept and energetic and pop-arty and they failed to move me), Laurie Anderson’s large paintings depicting the forty-nine-day experience of her beloved deceased rat terrier Lolabelle in the bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist zone between death and rebirth, were showing across town. Suchitra and I were standing in front of one of the largest images of that sweet-faced dog looking wide-eyed at us from the afterlife when all of a sudden the words It’s all right formed within me and then I said them aloud. “It’s all right,” I said, and a grin widened across my face. “It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.” A shadow lifted from me and the future looked possible and happiness seemed conceivable and life began again. It was only much later, when I thought back, that I realized that that had been the forty-ninth day since my parents’ death.

I don’t believe in the bardo. But there you have it.

“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.