The Golden House

In the aftermath of Petya Golden’s great saunter, we were obliged to accept that the hypnotherapist Murray Lett was a miracle worker in spite of his hairstyle, accent and shoes, and learned the lesson of compassion: that the truth often lies below the surface, and a man may be a great deal more than his most easily caricatured characteristics. For Petya now was like a man exonerated of a crime he had never committed and for which he had been serving a life sentence. His face was illumined by a grave joy, which both recognized the injustice of his suffering and accepted, with a gradually fading disbelief, his release from it. And as he embarked on his new life, Lett was the man on whom he leaned, whom he trusted to guide him into the world whose openness to him felt like an impossible treasure; that same world where all the rest of us so casually and often so thoughtlessly lived, failing to notice its daily carnival of wonderments, which Petya now hugged to his bosom like gifts. He went shopping for groceries with Murray Lett to D’Agostino’s, Gristedes, and Whole Foods; he sat with Murray Lett on the open-air terraces of cafés in Union Square and Battery Park; he went with Murray Lett to his first outdoor rock concert at Jones Beach, featuring Soundgarden and his beloved Nails; he was at The Stadium with Murray Lett chanting “Thank you Derek” during one of Derek Jeter’s last moments in the Bronx. And it was with Murray Lett that he picked out his new apartment, a furnished ready-to-move-in twelve-month rental “and then let’s see,” he confidently said, “maybe then it will be time to buy,” on the fourth floor of a six-story, Mondrian-ish glass and metal building on the east side of Sullivan Street.

It was only at this point that I discovered, and felt like a fool for not having known it before, that Petya had been making very large sums of money on his own all this time, as the creator and sole owner of a number of highly successful games which the whole world was playing on its smartphones and computers.

This was sensational information. We all knew that he played those games constantly, sometimes for fourteen or fifteen hours a day; how had none of us had any inkling that he was doing so much more than merely idling away his troubled hours doing something which his strange, brilliant mind was naturally good at? How did we not guess that he had taught himself code, becoming rapidly and profoundly versed in its mysteries, and that as well as endlessly playing these games he was creating them? How were we blind to the evidence, and couldn’t see that he had revealed himself to himself as a twenty-first-century genius, leaving the rest of us in his wake, floundering in a second-millennium world? It was a sign of how badly we had failed him, abandoning him for most of the hours of each day to his own devices, allowing him to stay locked away, marooned in his room as if he were our version of that old Gothic trope, the Madwoman in the Attic, our own Bertha Antoinetta Mason, the first Mrs. Rochester, thought by Jane Eyre to resemble a “Vampyre.” And all this time! All this time! Frugal, hidden Petya, changing nothing about his life, buying himself nothing, had been rising to the Everests of that secret universe, and, to be frank, outdoing us all. Another lesson to be learned: never underestimate your fellow man. One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.

They all had secrets, the Golden men. Except perhaps for Apu, who was an open book.

That was the year of the ugly Gamergate business; the gaming world was at war, men against women, “gamer identity” against diversity, and only a new-tech Neanderthal like myself could have been unaware of the hullabaloo. Somehow, in ways which I was not able to grasp, Petya had managed to stand apart from the fray, even though, when he finally agreed to talk to me about it, he revealed strong opinions about the way the male gaming community was responding to a series of criticisms by allegedly uppity women—media critics and independent game developers—publishing their addresses and phone numbers and subjecting them to worse menaces too, including large numbers of death threats which had forced some of the female targets to flee their homes. “The problem is not technological,” he said. “And there is no technological solution to it. The problem is human, human nature in general, male human nature in particular, and the permission that anonymity gives people to unleash the worst sides of that nature. Me, I just make entertainment for the kids. I’m neutral space. I’m Switzerland. Nobody bothers me. They just come visit and ski down my slopes.”

High-functioning autism had helped to make him a game-making marvel and I started digging into the possible rewards. The leading “baller apps”—apps through which you could connect to friends and play together—were earning eleven, twelve million dollars a month. The old stalwart Candy Crush Saga, which even I had heard of, was still taking in five and a half million. War games that made almost all their money by in-app purchases, less than ten percent of their income from advertising, might be making two, two and a half million. Monthly. I read off the top fifty iOS and Android titles to Petya. “Are any of those yours?” I asked. A wide grin spread across his face. “I cannot tell a lie,” he said, pointing to the number-one-ranked game. “I did it with my little hatchet.”

So, over one hundred million dollars a year from that title alone. “You know what,” I said to him, “I just stopped worrying about you.”

There were studies that showed that autism could be “outgrown,” that some fortunate patients could enter the OO (or Optimal Outcome) group whose members no longer showed any of the symptoms of autistic disorder, and that a higher IQ was more likely to lead to this. Inevitably, the research was disputed, but many families offered anecdotal evidence in its support. The Petya case was different. Neither did he achieve, nor did he actually want, entry into the OO group. His HFA and his achievements were closely linked. However, in the aftermath of the breakthrough walk around Manhattan, he seemed increasingly able to manage his symptoms, to be less depressed, less likely to tailspin into crisis, less worried about living alone. He had his buddy in Murray Lett, and his father took care to visit him every day, and he still took his prescribed medication, and he was…functional. As to his new release from fear of the outdoors, nobody could say how permanent it might be, or how far from “home base” he might be willing to roam. But, on the whole, he was in the best shape he’d been in for a long time. Not worrying about him had become a possibility.

He still drank too heavily. Somehow, perhaps because this was a much more familiar problem, it concerned all of us less than it should have.

For a time after that I worried about myself instead. The baby was due soon, and to tell the truth I couldn’t stand the situation in which I found myself, so I scrambled to do as Suchitra wanted and moved out of the Golden house. And yes, my parents had had many close relationships with their neighbors on the Gardens, and to my great delight their diplomat friend from Myanmar, whom in these pages, in order to make him up more easily, I have renamed U Lnu Fnu—the sad-faced sunken-eyed bespectacled widower who had narrowly failed in his quest to follow U Thant as the second Burmese UN Secretary-General—welcomed me into his home. “It will be a pleasure for me,” he said. “It is a large apartment and to be alone in it feels like being a fly buzzing inside a bell. I hear the echo of myself and it is not a sound I love.”

As a matter of fact, my timing was perfect, because he had had a tenant in his spare room for a while, and when I asked him about possibly renting that room this tenant was on the point of vacating it. The exiting character was an airline pilot, Jack Bonney, who liked to say that he flew “for the biggest airline you’ve never heard of,” Hercules Air, which historically had carried cargo but now also accepted soldiers and other clients. “One time recently,” he said, “we had the British prime minister on board with his security detail, and I was like, should he be on your Air Force One? And the security guys said, we don’t have a plane like that. And I airlifted mercenaries into Iraq, that was something. But the biggest thing I ever flew? From London to Venezuela, two hundred million dollars’ worth of Venezuelan currency, which the Brits printed for them, who knew, right. Here’s the weird thing. At Heathrow, they’re loading the pallets, and there’s no security, I’m looking around, but there’s just the regular airport personnel, no armed escort, nothing. Then we get to Caracas and wow, just a huge military operation. Bazookas, tanks, terrifying guys in body armor with guns sticking out of them in every direction. But in London, nothing. That freaked me out.”

When he was gone and I was comfortably ensconced U Lnu Fnu visited me in my room and said in his delicate, careful voice, “I was glad of his company but glad also that you are quieter by nature. Mr. Bonney is a good man but he should be careful about his loose-tongued chitchat. Walls have ears, my dear René. Walls have ears.”

He was solicitous of my well-being, spoke once, shyly, after asking permission, about his respect for my parents and his understanding of my pain at their loss. He himself, he shyly mentioned, had suffered the pain of loss as well. Suchitra was happy about my new location but, noticing my continuing low spirits, took a different tack. “You look like a sad sack since you moved out of the Addams Family mansion. You sure you’re not hankering for a little taste of sweet Russian pastry?” Her tone was light, but it was clear she really wanted to know the answer.

I reassured her; she was a trusting soul and soon laughed it off. “I’m glad you managed to stay on in your beloved Gardens,” she said. “I can only imagine how long your face would’ve gotten if that hadn’t worked out.”

But my son, my son. Impossible to be far away from him, impossible also to be close. Vasilisa Golden, heavily pregnant, on the point of delivering, walked in the Gardens every day with her headscarfed babushka of a mother, a cliché flown in to be of service in a melodrama, and I thought: my son is in the grip of people who don’t even speak English as a first language. This was an unworthy thought, but in my frenzy of frustrated fatherhood I had no thoughts except unworthy ones. Should I spill the beans? Should I remain silent? What would be best for the boy? Well, of course what would be best for him would be to know who his true father was. But I was also, I admit, more than a little afraid of Nero Golden, the fear of the young artist just starting out for the fully evolved and puissant man of the world, even in his present, slowly deteriorating state. What would he do? How might he react? Would the child be in danger? Would Vasilisa? Would I?—Well, I certainly would, I thought. I had repaid his kindness after my orphaning by impregnating his wife. At her request, it’s true, but he would not accept that as an excuse, and I feared his fists; his fists at the very least. But how could I remain silent for a lifetime? I had no answers, but the questions bombarded me night and day, and there was no bomb shelter to be found.

I felt like a fool—worse than a fool, like an errant child, guilty of a great naughtiness and fearing adult retribution—and there was nobody to talk to. For the first time in my life I felt some appreciation for the Catholic device of the confessional and the forgiveness of God that followed it. If I could have found a priest at that moment, and if a string of mea maxima culpas would have silenced the incessant interrogation taking place within me, I would gladly have gone that route. But none was available. I had no connection to that churchy world. And my parents were gone and my new landlord, U Lnu Fnu, while undoubtedly a calm and calming presence and a seasoned diplomat, had already been unhappy at his previous tenant’s talkativeness, and would certainly recoil from the radioactively emotive material I needed to unload. Suchitra was obviously out of the question. I knew, by the way, that if I could not calm myself soon she would smell a rat and that would be the worst of all possible ways for the truth to come out. No, the truth must not come out. The truth would ruin too many lives. I had to find a way of silencing the possessive voice, the voice of fatherly love that wanted its secret to be known, shouting in my ear. A therapist, then? That was the secular confessor-figure of our times. I had always loathed the idea of going to a stranger for help in examining one’s life. I myself was the would-be storyteller; I hated the idea of someone else understanding my own story better than I. The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates said and drank the hemlock, but that examination, I had always thought, should be an examination of the self by the self; autonomous, as a true individual should be, leaning on no man for explanations or absolution, free. Therein lay the Renaissance humanist idea of the self expressed in, for example, Pico della Mirandola’s De hominis dignitate, “The Dignity of Man.” Well! That high-mindedness had flown out of the window when Vasilisa announced she was with child. Ever since then, the wild storm had raged within me, beyond my power to assuage. Time, perhaps, to swallow one’s pride and find professional help? For a moment I thought of turning to Murray Lett, but saw at once that that was a stupid idea. There were excellent therapists among my parents’ circle of friends. Maybe I should turn to one of them. Maybe I needed someone to take the weight of my knowledge from me and put it in a safe and neutral place; a psychological sapper to defuse the bomb of the truth. So I wrestled with my demons; but after much inner wrangling I chose, rightly or wrongly, not to seek a stranger’s help after all, but elected to confront those demons alone.

Meanwhile the folk of the Gardens were fully absorbed in the drama unfolding at the Tagliabue place across from the Golden house, where the greatly put-upon wife Blanca Tagliabue, tired of being left at home to mind the kids while her husband Vito went out on the town, and bored of his (truthful, I believe) protestations of absolute fidelity, had begun an affair with the neighborhood’s wealthy Argentine resident, Carlos Hurlingham, whom I had dubbed “Mr. Arribista” in one of my treatments, had left the children in the care of nannies, and had flown off in Señor Hurlingham’s “P.J.” to take a look at the famous Iguazu Falls on the Argentine-Brazilian border and no doubt to indulge in various south-of-the-border activities while she was there. Vito was beside himself with rage and grief and stormed around the Gardens raging and griefing, giving immense pleasure to all his neighbors. If I had not been so preoccupied with my own difficulties I would have found some pleasure in the fact that all the disparate characters in my Gardens narrative were beginning to link and combine to form a coherent shape. But at that moment I cared only for my own sadness and so failed to keep up with the Tagliabue-Hurlingham telenovela as it unfolded.

That wasn’t very important. They were at best minor characters and might not make it past the cutting-room floor. What was much worse was that in my distress I took my eye off Petya Golden. I’m not saying I could have prevented what followed if I had been more vigilant. Maybe Murray Lett should have intuited it. Maybe nobody could have done anything. But I regret my negligence nonetheless.

The Sottovoce galleries, two generous spaces all the way west on Twenty-First and Twenty-Fourth Streets, had both been taken over by one of the season’s big shows, of new work by Ubah Tuur. The large-scale pieces, reminiscent of Richard Serra’s metal monsters, but slashed and transformed by knives of flame into exquisite lacy patterns, so that they also seemed to be giant curved rusted-metal versions of the latticework stone jalis of India, stood illumined by spotlights like more playful, fanciful relatives of the stark alien “sentinels” in Kubrick’s 2001. In the Twenty-First Street location I ran into the ebullient Frankie Sottovoce, pink-cheeked with windblown white hair, waving his arms and giggling with delight. “It’s a big hit. Only the most major collectors and museums. She’s a star.”

I looked around for the artist but she wasn’t there. “You just missed her,” Sottovoce said. “She was here with Apu Golden. You should come again. They are here all the time. Most mornings. You know her from the party in the Gardens. She’s great. So incredibly smart. And beautiful, my God.” He shook a hand loosely as if it were recovering from being scorched by her beauty’s flame. “She’s a force,” he concluded, and skipped away to seduce someone more important.

“Oh,” he paused, turning back to me, his love of gossip briefly overpowering his business instinct. “The other Golden came too, the older brother, you know.” He tapped his temple to indicate the crazy one. “He saw her here with Apu and I don’t think it made him so happy. Took off like a bat out of hell. Maybe a little rivalry thing? Hmm hmm?” He laughed his silly high giggling laugh and was gone.

That’s when I should have guessed. That’s when I should have seen in my mind’s eye the red tide rising in Petya’s face, as he understood that after all this time the woman he loved remained in his brother’s arms, the woman his brother stole from him, ruining his best chance of happiness. That treacherous night under Ubah’s roof long ago, reborn in all its power in his thoughts, as if it had happened right at that moment. The rage reborn too, and with it a lust for vengeance. That one glimpse of Ubah and Apu hand in hand was all it took, and what followed, followed with the horrifying inevitability of a gunshot after a trigger is pulled. I should have known there would be trouble. But I was thinking of other things.

In New York City, FDNY dispatchers send out 44 units and 198 firefighters for a five-alarm fire. The probability of two such blazes happening within three blocks of each other on the same night is extremely remote. The likelihood of these fires being accidents is…negligible.

Security was taken seriously at the Sottovoce galleries. During opening hours there was manpower, and cameras, and an emergency lockdown procedure that could seal all the entrances in twenty seconds. This was “Situation A.” Situation B, from closing time until reopening time, was handled by laser beams which, if broken, would trigger alarms, by surveillance cameras relaying information to the security company’s command center which had eyes on the screens twenty-four hours a day, and by titanium grilles as well as roll-down steel doors, each of them worked by a double digital lock and key system: two slots for ID cards with keypads below them, and no single executive knew all the PIN codes. To open the gates, two senior Sottovoce personnel had to be present, each using his or her card and keying in their individual code. To hack the system, Frankie Sottovoce liked to say, you would need to be a genius. “The place is a fortress,” he boasted. “Even I can’t get in there if I’m passing by at night and need to take a leak.”

What exactly happened? In the night’s dead time, around 3:20 A.M., a dark-windowed Chevrolet Suburban with no plates drew up outside the Twenty-Fourth Street gallery. The driver must have visited the gallery previously and used what the NYPD’s public statement described as “very sophisticated skimming equipment” to clone the ID cards and discover the PINs. The steel doors rolled up and the titanium gates opened and then plastic jerrycans filled with gasoline were uncorked, thrown into the gallery, and set alight, perhaps by the same sort of blowtorch used to create the sculptures on display. The SUV left as the fire billowed outward, and a similar procedure was followed on Twenty-First Street. There was one witness, an unreliable wino, who described the Suburban’s driver as a man in a black hoodie and dark goggles. “He looked like the Fly,” the witness said. “Yeah. Come to think of it I remember he totally had hairy Fly arms sticking out the ends of his sleeves.” As this testimony plunged deeper into science fiction, the witness was thanked and allowed to leave. No other witnesses emerged. The investigation’s best hope was to identify the car, but it was not immediately found. And by the time the fires were extinguished the sculptures were irreparably ruined.

INTERIOR. NIGHT. PETYA GOLDEN’S APARTMENT. BEDROOM.

Sitting up in bed, still wearing his black hoodie and goggles, PETYA, with the sheets pulled up under his chin. He is sobbing uncontrollably. He pulls off the goggles and throws them across the room. Bottles of liquor open on bedside table.

INTERIOR. NIGHT. PETYA GOLDEN’S APARTMENT. LIVING ROOM.

Still weeping, almost screaming with grief, PETYA has started to smash up his new home. He throws a lamp across the room, it hits a wall and shatters. He picks up a chair and throws it after the lamp. Then he squats down on the floor with his head in his hands.

INTERIOR. DAY. PETYA’S APARTMENT. LIVING ROOM.

Mix through to the next morning, PETYA in the same position.

The DOORBELL rings. Repeatedly. He does not move.

Cut.

EXTERIOR. DAY. OUTSIDE THE “MONDRIAN BUILDING.”

NERO GOLDEN is ringing the doorbell. Cut into CLOSE-UP of his face as he speaks directly into the camera. Under the VO we can hear the ding-dong of the bell as he continues to ring it.

NERO

Of course I understand at once that it is him. They show the drawing on television and when I see it I know. This is not the Fly. This is Petronius. Also the car. He has taken the plates off but it is my car. I myself gave him the key when he moved into the apartment. He is a good driver, a safe driver. What father would expect such a thing from his son? We keep it in the parking garage under 100 Bleecker, the NYU high-rise, we sublet the space from a journalism professor living on the twentieth floor. I know the car, I know my son, I know the woman. Naturally. That is the woman that his brother took from him. This is revenge. A terrible thing, but after all he is a man.

Cut.

INTERIOR. NIGHT. PETYA’S APARTMENT.

The apartment is in disarray, but PETYA has allowed MURRAY LETT to enter. He, PETYA, is still hunched over, squatting on the floor, at rear of shot. LETT is down with him, his arms on PETYA’s shoulders. PETYA is talking nonstop. We don’t hear his monologue.

RENÉ (V/O)

He bought the blowtorch online. That was easy. After taking the plates off the Suburban he drove to a convenience store in Queens and picked up the plastic gas jerrycans. Then he drove to a different, drive-through C-store in Nassau County and filled those gas cans up. As for breaking through the security systems at the galleries, he just said it was really easy. Maybe he hadn’t expected the wave of guilt that hit him immediately after the attacks. He very nearly drowned in it. The meltdown was very severe. He became anxious, hysterical, depressed, drunk. The therapist wanted him put on suicide watch. His father hired round-the-clock nursing staff to sit with him.

Cut to PETYA, talking furiously, but we still hear only RENÉ’S narration. At times PETYA is speaking in lip sync with RENÉ.

RENÉ

His rage attack was aimed mostly at himself, full of guilt and shame. However, he also talked a lot about how much he hated his brother. His feelings for Apu had curdled into lumps of hatred so thick that they could only be dissolved by his brother’s lifeblood, he said, and maybe even that would not be enough, maybe he would subsequently also need at frequent intervals to shit on Apu’s rancid grave. In the crime pages of the cheap newspapers, he read about men who had kept women prisoner for years and he said, maybe I could do that, I could shackle and gag him and keep him in the basement near the boiler and hot water cylinder and torture him whenever I wanted. In those days after the arson attack Petya was drinking very heavily. He was also completely out of his mind.

Cut.

EXTERIOR. DAY. NERO’S STUDY. THE GOLDEN HOUSE.

NERO GOLDEN with a thunderous expression stands with his back to the window and his two DRAGON LADIES await his instructions.

NERO

I want the best criminal defense lawyer in America. Get him today and get him here.

The door opens and VASILISA GOLDEN stands there, her hands on her womb. NERO turns to her, angry at the interruption, but the look on her face silences him.

VASILISA

It’s time.

Cut.