The Golden House

“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.)

Let me turn to the drinking. I’m on firmer ground there. Petya had a drinking problem; there was no disguising that. He drank alone and heavily and was a melancholy drunk but it was the way he had found to shut off the inferno within and get some sleep, or, more precisely, to pass out and spend some hours being blessedly unconscious. And in the hour before unconsciousness, on the single occasion that he allowed me to witness his nightly slide into oblivion, at the start of Vasilisa Golden’s final trimester when he said he “needed my support,” I heard with growing discomfort and even dislike the extent to which his inability to control the flood of chatter pouring into him or to censor his own linguistic flow resulted, when alcohol was added to that tumult of information, in a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy that revealed the extent to which he had internalized the adversarial fragmentation of American culture and made it a part of his personal damage. To put it plainly, his drunk nocturnal self revealed a lurch toward the extremes of conservative attitudes; the presence of a Foxy, Breitbartian other-self bubbled through his lips, fortified by liquor, enabled by isolation and his wholly justifiable fury at the world: Obamacare, terrible!, Maryland shooting, don’t politicize it!, minimum-wage rise, scandalous!, same-sex marriage, unnatural!, religious objections to serving LGBT people in Arizona, in Mississippi, freedom!, police shootings, self-defense!, Donald Sterling, free speech!, shootings on university campus in Seattle shootings in Vegas shootings in Oregon high school, guns don’t kill people!, arm the teachers!, the Constitution!, freedom!, ISIS beheading, Jihadi John, disgusting!, we have no plan!, take them all out!, we have no plan!, oh, and Ebola! Ebola! Ebola! All this and more in an incoherent torrent mixed up with his hostility toward Apu, if Apu was going left then Petya would go right to counter him, whatever Apu was for he would be against, he would construct a moral universe that inverted his brother’s reality, black was white, right was wrong, down was up and in was out. Apu himself got the rough end of Petya’s monologues a few times that year and responded gently, not taking the bait.

“Let him say what he wants to say,” he told me. “You know it’s badly wired in there.” He tapped his forehead to indicate Petya’s brain.

“He’s one of the most intelligent people I know,” I said, meaning it.

Apu grimaced. “It’s a cracked intelligence,” he said. “So it doesn’t count. Out there I’m trying to deal with a cracked world.”

“He’s trying super hard,” I ventured. “The hypnotherapy, et cetera.”

Apu dismissed this. “Call me when he stops sounding like he’s at the Tea Party with a mad hat on his head. Call me when he decides to stop being the GOP elephant in the room.”

Even more worrying to me than Petya’s voluble hostility to Apu’s politics was the drunken revelation of his phobia for the differently gendered. This, too, appeared to have its foundation in family matters. From the violence of his language, which I forbear to repeat here, it was plain that the peace treaty he had made with himself long ago, to forgive D Golden’s behavior toward his mother, no longer held; and the way his anger expressed itself was in his vehement hostility toward his half brother’s growing gender confusion. He began to aim at his half brother such loaded words as unnatural, perverted, and sick. He had somehow found out about the afternoon in Vasilisa’s clothes closet, and her complicity in his experiments with otherness led him to extend his verbal violence in her direction. The baby became the location of this part of his anger. Again, I worried for the safety of the unborn child.

The hypnosis finally began to work. The bouffant hypnotherapist Mr. Lett acquired a new bounce in his Conversed step. “How’s it going?” I asked him on his way out the door after a session and in his excitement he said a mouthful. “Virry will, thenks,” he said. “I had ivry confidince it would. Just took a moment or two. I utilize a mithodology of my own in this type of situation, I call it Personally Progremmed Power, thet’s PPP for short. It’s a quistion of working with the person stip by stip end slowly increasing silf-confidince, end what I like to call silf-ectualization. Each stip we take down the PPP road will increase the person’s belief in himsilf. We’re will along thet road now. Most diffinitely, yis. Things are will sit. It’s a quistion of giving your frind some tengible ividence, ividence which he can reproduce time after time, of his ibility to take control of his mintal prociss. To be in charge of his physical end imotional reictions. Once he knows he can do thet, he’ll feel confidint to control his ixperience in the outside world. Stip by stip. Thet’s the ticket. What I’m giving him is the ibility to choose how he wants to respond to the folks around him, end stuff thet may heppen now or in the future, end whativer situations may prisint thimsilves. I’m virry optimistic. G’day.”

As part of this process of taking control, Petya studied the structures of what he called “enchanted spaces,” the occultist pentagram and the Jewish eruv. If he could accept the private island off Miami as one such space, and, as another, Ubah Tuur’s fenced-in property upstate, where the unfortunate episode had occurred, then surely he could construct such enchanted spaces for himself. This was how he came up with the idea of the chalk circle around Manhattan Island. He would walk around the entire island and draw the circle himself. He would do this unaided and to increase the circle’s power he would sprinkle garlic as he went. To make it easier for him to surmount his fears he would wear very dark black goggles, and a hoodie. He would also listen to loud music on noise-canceling headphones, and drink a lot of water. Nobody could do this for him. It was a thing he had to accomplish on his own.

The hypnotherapist Lett both celebrated and backed the plan, offering to go shopping and acquire the sticks of chalk and the garlic cloves. Nero Golden, however, was concerned, and made a few calls.

The appointed day dawned hot and humid under a cloudless sky. Petronius Golden descended from the room of blue light dressed as he had promised, with the grim determination of an Ethiopian marathon runner on his face. Murray Lett waited for him at the front door and before Petya stepped into the street the therapist tried to remind him of how much he had improved, counting off the achievements on his fingers and thumbs. “Rimimber now. Major edvance in silf-ifficacy! Greatly increased focus end concintration! Huge improvement in autonomy end silf-confidince! Much bitter menagement of striss! Much bitter menagement of enger! Big stips forward in impulse control! You can do this.” Petya, in that state of greatly increased focus and concentration to which Lett referred, was listening to Nine Inch Nails on his headphones and didn’t hear him. He had a satchel full of chalk sticks slung over one shoulder, and carried a backpack containing coconut water cartons, fruit, sandwiches, granola bars, and roasted chicken drumsticks. Also three extra pairs of socks. Seasoned walkers on the internet had warned him that sweaty feet in perspiration-drenched socks started to blister, and that made the walk impossible to complete. He held a bag of crushed garlic in one hand. In the other hand he flourished a walking stick to whose end he had taped the initial piece of chalk. His pockets were full of more rolls of tape so that he could change the chalk sticks when necessary. “Think about your social behavior,” shouted Murray Lett, understanding at last that he had not been heard. “Avoid introversion. Make eye contect. Those are good things to keep in mind.” But Petya was in his own world and eye contact did not seem to be in his plans. “One last thing,” shouted Murray Lett, and now Petya did him the favor of pulling his headphones down and listening. “I hope your sleep pettern has been good,” said Murray Lett in a lower voice. “Also, excuse me for asking but, the inuresis issue, we have eliminated thet, correct?” Petya Golden went so far as to roll his eyes, put his headphones back on, seemed satisfied that Axl Rose had replaced Trent Reznor, put his head down, and strode out of the door into the Uber waiting to take him to his chosen starting point, the South Street Seaport; leaving Mr. Lett in his wake. “Good on ya,” the therapist called after him. “Proud of you. Good work.”

Nero Golden was at the door too, accompanied by Mesdames Blather and Fuss, and me. “Take your time,” he told his son. “Don’t rush it. Do it comfortably. It isn’t a race.” When the car had taken Petya away, Nero spoke into his phone. His people would be in SUVs along the route. There would be eyes on Petya every step of the way.

Thirty-two miles, give or take, is the “great saunter” around Manhattan Island. Seventy thousand steps. Twelve hours, if you’re not super-fast. Twenty parks. I didn’t go along, but I understood at once that this moment would be a high point of the film I was dreaming up, my imaginary Golden movie. Loud music on the soundtrack, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine, Zeppelin, Metallica, and the umlaut gang, Motörhead and Mötley Crüe. The walker walking, and (somehow making itself heard through the heavy metal noise; I hadn’t worked that part out yet) the sound of a tambourine at each footfall. In the parks he passes the figures of his life, watching him; are they phantoms, the ectoplasm of his damaged fantasy? Here, his mother in Nelson A. Rockefeller Park, definitely a ghost or a memory. Here, Apu jogging past him on the East River Promenade. Farther along, D Golden and Riya in Riverside Park, all of them motionless, watching as he walks, staring the stare of ghosts. Around them the haunted, frightened trees. Ubah Tuur standing like a sentinel in Inwood Hill Park by the Shorakkopoch Rock, which marks the spot where once upon a time under the largest tulip tree in Mannahatta Peter Minuit bought the island for sixty guilders, and in Carl Schurz Park near Gracie Mansion the bouffant Lett himself, egging him on. Maybe Lett was the one who was really there. Petya moves on, the tambourine man, far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow. And as he walks, a transformation. At mile ten, in West Harlem Piers Park, he throws away the chalk, stops drawing the line that has followed him this far, and once he has passed the mayor’s residence he throws away the garlic too. Something has changed for him. He doesn’t need to mark his territory anymore. The walk itself is the mark, and the completion of it will perfect his invisible, indelible eruv.

And by the time he returns, staggering a little, to his starting place the sky has darkened; and watched at last by the schooners Lettie G. Howard and Pioneer and the freighter Wavertree he begins, on his bandaged blistered feet, slowly and without regard for watching eyes, to dance. Beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free. And he has broken his hoodoo. One of them. And maybe learned something about his strength, his ability to confront and rise above his other challenges too. Look at his face right now: it wears the look of a slave set free.

—What of the hatred?

—Oh, that remained.