The Golden House

Spring, the last of the ice gone from the Hudson, and happy sails breaking out across the weekend water. Drought in California, Oscars for Birdman, but no superheroes available in Gotham. The Joker was on TV, announcing a run for president, along with the rest of the Suicide Squad. There was still more than a year and a half of the current president’s term to run but I was missing him already and nostalgic for the present, for these his good old days, the legalization of gay marriage, a new ferry service to Cuba, and the Yankees winning seven games in a row. Unable to watch the green-haired cackler make his improbable declaration, I turned to the crime pages and read about killings. A gunman shot a doctor in El Paso and then killed himself. A man shot his neighbors, a Muslim family in North Carolina, because of a parking dispute. A couple in Detroit, Michigan, pleaded guilty to torturing their son in their cellar. (Technically not a killing, this one, but a good story, so it counted.) In Tyrone, Missouri, a gunman killed seven people and then made himself his eighth victim. Also in Missouri, a certain Jeffery L. Williams shot two policemen in front of the Ferguson city police headquarters. A police officer named Michael Slager shot and killed Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, in North Charleston, South Carolina. In the absence of the Batman, Mrs. Clinton and Senator Sanders offered themselves up as the alternatives to the Suicide Squad. In a Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas—“Eats! Drinks! Scenic Views!”—nine people died in a biker war and eighteen others went to the hospital. There were floods and tornadoes across Texas and Arkansas, seventeen dead, forty missing. And it was only May.

“Dostoevsky got all his plots by reading the crime pages of the newspapers,” Suchitra mused. “STUDENT MURDERS LANDLADY. Whatever the Russian for that is. And bingo! Crime and Punishment.”

We were having breakfast—home-brewed macchiato coffee and the cronuts we had waited in line to buy on Spring Street at 5:30 A.M.—sitting at the table in the glass-window corner that looked south toward the harbor and west across the river. It occurred to me that I was happy, that I had found the person who could bring me joy, or she had allowed me to find her. Which also probably meant that I could never tell her the truth about the baby; which in turn meant that Vasilisa Golden had a hold over me which I could never break. It’s true that by revealing her secret Vasilisa would undo her own strategy as well as destroying my best chance of a good life. But maybe she was so sure of herself that it didn’t matter. She had overcome the drama of her dalliance with Masha the fitness trainer, had she not. And Nero was older every day and more and more anxious not to live and die alone….I pushed such thoughts away, understanding that I was succumbing to paranoia. Vasilisa would not tell. And meanwhile, eating my cronut and looking at the movie reviews in the Sunday Times, I was content, happy to let Suchitra think aloud, as she liked to do during these rare moments of calm in her nonstop schedule. From these Sunday brainstorms—just letting her mind freewheel, free-associate from thing to thing, she often came up with projects she wanted to pursue.

“Is that true?” I asked. “About Dostoevsky?”

That was all she needed. She nodded earnestly, waved her cronut at me while she chewed the piece in her mouth, swallowed, and was off. “True is such a twentieth-century concept. The question is, can I get you to believe it, can I get it repeated enough times to make it as good as true. The question is, can I lie better than the truth. You know what Abraham Lincoln said? ‘There’s a lot of made-up quotes on the internet.’ Maybe we should forget about making documentaries. Maybe mix up the genres, be a little genrequeer. Maybe the mockumentary is the art form of the day. I blame Orson Welles.”

“Mercury Theatre on the Air,” I said, joining in the fun. “War of the Worlds. Radio. That’s a long way back. People still believed in the truth back then.”

“Suckers,” she said. “They believed Orson. Everything starts somewhere.”

“And now seventy-two percent of all Republicans think the president’s a Muslim.”

“Now if a dead gorilla from the Cincinnati zoo runs for president he’ll get at least ten percent of the vote.”

“Now so many people in Australia state their religion as ‘Jedi’ in the census that it’s an official thing.”

“Now the only person you think is lying to you is the expert who actually knows something. He’s the one not to believe because he’s the elite and the elites are against the people, they will do the people down. To know the truth is to be elite. If you say you saw God’s face in a watermelon, more people will believe you than if you find the Missing Link, because if you’re a scientist then you’re elite. Reality TV is fake but it’s not elite so you buy it. The news: that’s elite.”

“I don’t want to be elite. Am I elite?”

“You need to work on it. You need to become post-factual.”

“Is that the same as fictional?”

“Fiction’s elite. Nobody believes it. Post-factual is mass market, information-age, troll generated. It’s what people want.”

“I blame truthiness. I blame Stephen Colbert.”

This was our Sunday banter, but on this occasion I was the one who had a lightbulb moment. My big project, based around the Goldens, should be written and shot in documentary fashion, but scripted, played by actors. The moment I had that thought the script appeared in my head, and within a few weeks it was in draft form, and by the end of the year it would be selected for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and the year after that…but I’m running ahead of myself in my excitement. Rewind to that Sunday in the spring. Because later the same day I had an appointment with my son.

Yes, I was playing with fire, but the human program is powerful, and it wants what it wants. The idea of having no contact with my own flesh and blood was appalling to me, and so, once I had left the Golden house, I shamelessly ingratiated myself with Nero Golden, for whom the newborn child, his first in a long time, was also an obsession. Telling him I wanted to make sure we stayed in touch after all his kindness, after he had been as generous to me as if he were my own family, so that now he felt like family to me (I warned you that I was shameless), I suggested that we continue our new practice of meeting for a meal—tea, perhaps?—at the Russian Tea Room. “Oh, and it would be great if you bring the baby along,” I innocently added. The old man fell for it, and so I was able to watch my little fellow grow, and play with him, and hold him in my arms. Nero came to the Tea Room with the baby and his nanny, and the nanny handed the kid to me without any argument, and receded into a corner of the restaurant. “It’s amazing how good you are with the boy,” Nero Golden told me. “I get the feeling you’re getting a little broody yourself. That girl of yours is terrific. Maybe you should knock her up.”

I held my son close. “It’s okay,” I said. “This little guy is more than enough for now.”

The child’s mother was not happy about my strategy. “I prefer it that you make yourself scarce,” Vasilisa called me to say. “The boy has excellent parents who can provide him with everything he requires and then some, which you naturally cannot. I don’t know what is your motive, but I’m guessing maybe it is financial. This is my mistake, it should have been discussed ahead of time. So, okay, if you have a figure in mind, say what it is, and let’s see how it corresponds with the figure in my mind.”

“I don’t want your money,” I said. “I just want sometimes to have tea with my son.”

This caused a silence, in which I could hear both her incredulity and relief. Then, finally, “Fine,” she said with considerable irritation. “However, he is not your son.”

Suchitra, that Sunday, was also a little puzzled by my interest in the boy. “Is this some kind of hint?” she asked me in her straight-out shoot-from-the-hip way. “Because let me say I have a whole career developing here and stopping in my tracks to be somebody’s baby mama is not in my plans at the present time.”

“What can I tell you, I just like babies,” I said. “And the great thing about somebody else’s baby is, when you’re done playing, you get to hand it back.”

They had kept Petya out of jail. The absence of persons from the building, and the consequential lack of damage to human beings, meant that the crime was classified as arson in the third degree, a class C felony. New York law stated that the minimum punishment for a C felony was one to three years in jail, and the maximum punishment was five to fifteen. However if extenuating circumstances could be demonstrated, judges were allowed to impose alternative sentences involving much less jail time, or even none at all. The “best criminal defense lawyers in America” successfully argued that Petya’s HFA be taken into consideration. The crime passionnel argument, which might have been effective in, for example, France, was not used. Petya was ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation followed by treatment, and to be placed under community supervision and to pay the fees required, as well as making full restitution for the damage he had caused. Nero hired Murray Lett on a full-time basis and the therapist dropped his other clients and moved into Petya’s apartment to protect him from self-harm and to work on his many issues. Lett’s role was accepted by the court, which made things easier. That took care of the criminal aspect, and Petya duly reported as required to his supervising officers, submitted to random drug testing, agreed to electronic monitoring by a bracelet locked around his ankle, acquiesced in strict probation conditions, and performed his hours of community service silently and without complaint, working on the maintenance and upkeep of public buildings, permitted to work indoors because of his recrudescent agoraphobia, painting, plastering, hammering, wordlessly, uncomplainingly, passively; detached from his body, or so it appeared, allowing his limbs to do what was required of them while his thoughts went elsewhere, or nowhere.

The question of financial restitution was more complex. A civil suit for damages had been brought by Frankie Sottovoce, naming Nero as well as Petya, and that was ongoing. Ubah Tuur was not involved. It turned out that Sottovoce had bought the pieces from her outright before the opening, so that at the time of the fires they belonged to him. She already had her money. The gallery was insured, but there was a sizable gap, the Sottovoce lawyers argued, between what the insurance company would pay and what the Tuur pieces would be worth if placed on the open market. Also the buildings required gut renovations and there would be much income lost from shows that could not be put on while that happened. So, a multimillion-dollar case, remaining unsettled—though the bottom line was that Petya’s earnings from his baller apps were amply sufficient to settle the suit in full—with the Golden lawyers using all the delays of the law in the hope of finally bringing Sottovoce to the negotiating table to make a more easily bearable deal, and using, too, all the concomitant legal loopholes or (perhaps a better term) flexibilities to keep Petya out of prison while the financial matters were being settled.

It was Apu Golden who first intuited that, whatever the outcome of the civil suit, Petya’s fire had badly damaged the house of Golden as well as the two Sottovoce galleries. (It had also ended his own relationship with Frankie Sottovoce, who had unceremoniously suggested he should find a new artistic home.) I visited him in the Union Square studio and he offered me some Chinese green tea from Hangzhou and a plate piled with chunks of hard Italian cheese. “I want to speak to you like a brother,” he said. “Like an honorary brother, because at this point you are that. Look at our family. You know what I’m saying? Look at it. We are, I’m sorry to put it bluntly, a wreck. It’s the beginning of the fall of the Usher place. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Macdougal Street house cracks in half and falls into the street, you know what I mean? Yeah. I have intimations of doom.”

I remained silent. He was just getting into his stride. “Romulus and Remus,” he said. “That’s how D thought of us. He was so busy feeling left out of our games that he never saw how tough it was for me to be Petya’s brother, how much work I put in to give him a good childhood, or as good as possible, considering his situation. I played with train sets and Scalextric cars into adulthood because he enjoyed those things. We all did. My father too. And now it feels like we all failed, after he crashed and burned. He crashed, the galleries burned. He’s in pieces over there with the Australian, who knows if he can be put back together. And D, who knows what’s going on with him. Or is it with her now? I don’t know? Does even he know? Or she? Crazy. Did you know you’re not supposed to say ‘crazy’ anymore, by the way? Also you’re not supposed to say ‘insane’ or, I guess, ‘nuts.’ These words are insulting to the mentally ill. There’s now a bad word for these bad words, did you know that? Nor did I. Even if you’re just saying, this shit is insane, you’re not even thinking about mentally ill people, for God’s sake, you’re still insulting them anyway, apparently. Who comes up with this stuff? They should try living with the situation for a while and see if they don’t need to let off some steam. See if they don’t need to say, yes, I’m sorry, but sane is a thing and therefore so is insane. Not crazy is a thing and so it follows that crazy also exists. If it exists we use the word. That’s language. Is that okay? Or am I a bad person? Am I nuts?”

The subject had changed suddenly. In the last days of the protest in Zuccotti Park, Apu had fallen out with a lot of the Occupy people, partly because of his frustration at their leaderless anarchic rudderlessness, partly because, he said, “they are more interested in the posture than the results. This language thing is part of that. Excuse me: if you clean up the language too much you kill it. Dirt is freedom. You have to leave a little dirt. Cleansing? I don’t like the sound of that.” (At a later point in my research, I met a few of the protesters, most of whom had no memory of Apu. The one who did said, “Oh, yeah, the rich painter who used to come down here to get himself some street cred. Never liked the guy.”)

I guessed that Apu’s tirade had its origins in something personal, because fundamentally he wasn’t driven by ideas. Cherchez la femme, I thought, and she spilled out of his mouth a moment later. “Ubah,” he said, “she’s totally into all of this. You know. Watch your mouth. Be careful what you say. Walk on eggshells. Every footstep could land on a land mine. Boom! Boom! Your tongue is in danger every time you open your mouth. So exhausting, I have to tell you.”

“So, are you guys not seeing each other anymore?”

“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Can I say that without offending less intelligent persons? Well, I say it. Of course I’m seeing her. She’s so extraordinary I can’t stop. If she wants me to watch my mouth, whatever, okay, I watch it, at least when she’s around—and then unfortunately you get the fallout because I have to let rip when she’s out of the way. But it took some doing, holding on to her after my goddamn brother destroyed her whole show. I mean her whole show. Just scrap metal now. You know how long those pieces take to make? I mean, months. Of course she was mad, and he’s my brother, for God’s sake. For a while she couldn’t speak to me. But it’s better now. She calmed down. She’s basically a calm person and a good person. She knows it’s not my fault. This is what I mean, we were never Romulus and Remus, Petya and I. I was just trying to hold it together, my family life, my boyhood, and now those days are gone, it’s all a wreck.”

He shook his head, remembering his original subject. “Oh, yeah. Excuse me. I just went off down a little fury road. I’ll come back now. What I wanted to say, at the beginning, the whole reason I sat down here with you and the tea and the cheese, is, my whole family is a wreck, and you, my brother who is not my brother, you are the only family member with whom I can discuss this. One brother is an arsonist, the other one doesn’t know if he’s my half brother or my half sister. And my father, apart from getting older and maybe beginning to lose it mentally, I mean, he totally lost it with this woman, his wife, I mean it’s hard even to say the word, and now this baby, I can’t even think of it as my brother. My half brother. My half-Russian half-brother baby. I sort of blame the baby for everything. It shows up and the world falls apart. It’s like a curse. I mean, it’s driving me mad, and I’m the sane one. But this is all just me being grouchy which as everyone knows is normal. This is not what I invited you over to tell you. I know you don’t go for this stuff, but still, listen to me. I’ve started seeing ghosts.”

It was the end of Apu’s political period. I almost laughed out loud. For the first time that day I allowed my gaze to fall on the new work he was making, and was happy to see that he had shaken off the overly strong influence of contemporary agitprop artists—Dyke Action Machine!, Otabenga Jones, Coco Fusco—and that his earlier, much richer and livelier iconography drawn from world mystical traditions had returned. One large, landscape-format painting in bright oranges and greens struck me in particular, a life-size triple portrait of his favorite witch, the mãe-de-santo of Greenpoint, flanked by her preferred deities Orisha and Oludumaré. Mysticism and psychotropic drugs were never far apart in Apu’s practice, which probably explained the advent of visions. “Are you doing ayahuasca now, is that it?” I asked. Apu recoiled in faux-shock. “Are you kidding? I would never cheat on my mãe and her guys.” (The use of ayahuasca in shamanistic practice was connected to the religion of Santo Daime in Brazil, and some people called the drug daime in honor of that saint.) “Anyway, it’s not visions of God I’ve been seeing.”

It was sometimes hard to know if he was speaking literally or figuratively. “Come and look,” he said. At the far end of the gallery there was a large canvas covered in a paint-spattered sheet. When he pulled the sheet away I saw an extraordinary scene: a vast and detailed Manhattan cityscape from which all vehicles and pedestrians had been removed, an empty city populated only by translucent figures, the male figures dressed in white, the females in saffron: green-skinned, some floating close to the ground, some up in the air. So, yes, ghosts, but whose ghosts? Ghosts of what?

Apu closed his eyes and breathed. Then, exhaling, he gave a little smile and opened the floodgates of the past.

“For a long time,” Apu said, “he controlled us with money, the money he gave us to live on, the money he promised us as our share, and we did as he asked. But also with something much more powerful than money. This was the idea of the family. He was the head and we were the limbs and the body does what the head instructs it to do. We were brought up that way: in the old-school concepts. Absolute loyalty, absolute obedience, no arguments. It wore off eventually, but it worked for a long time, long into our adult lives. We are not children but for so long we jumped when he jumped, we sat when he said sit, we laughed and cried when he said cry or laugh. When we moved here, it was fundamentally because he said, now we move. But we all had our own reasons for going along with the plan. Petya of course needs a lot of support. For D, even if he didn’t know it, America was his road to this metamorphosis that he wants, or he doesn’t want, I don’t know, or he doesn’t know, but at least here he can explore it. For me, there were people to get away from. Entanglements. Not financial, though for a period I had gambling debts. I got past that time. But there were romantic difficulties. There was a woman who broke my heart, another woman who was a little crazy, good crazy most of the time but not all of it, and maybe dangerous for me, not physically but again in the heart, and a third who loved me but who stuck to me so close I had no room to breathe. I broke up with them all or they broke up with me, it doesn’t matter, but then they didn’t go away. Nobody ever goes away. They circled me like helicopters shining bright floodlights down on me and I was caught in their crossed beams like a fugitive on the run. Then a friend of mine, a writer, a good writer, said something that scared the pants off me. He said, think of life as a novel, let’s say a novel of four hundred pages, and then imagine how many pages in the book your story has already covered. And remember that after a certain point, it’s not a good idea to introduce a new major character. After a certain point you are stuck with the characters you have. So maybe you need to think of a way of introducing that new character before it’s too late, because everyone gets older, even you. He said this to me, just before my father decided we had to move. And so when my father made his decision I thought, you know, this is great. Even better than trying to introduce a new character here, where the exes are circling with their floodlights. This way I get to throw away the whole book and start writing a new story. That old book wasn’t that good anyway. So I did it, and here I am, and now I am seeing ghosts, because the trouble with trying to escape yourself is that you bring yourself along for the ride.”

In the painting, now, I picked out the figures of the hovering helicopter women, and saw the small black silhouette of a cowering man below them, the only shadow-figure in that work without shadows. The haunted man and the ghosts of the lost past, haunting him. And the present, I now perceived, was unstable, the buildings crooked and distorted, as if seen through a pane of old, uneven glass. The look of the cityscape reminded me of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. And that at once brought back my early image of Nero Golden as the master criminal Dr. Mabuse. I didn’t bring that up, but asked about German Expressionism. He shook his head. “No, the distortion is not referential. It’s actual.” He had developed a problem of the retina, macular degeneration, “luckily the wet kind, because for the dry kind, there’s no treatment, you lose your sight and that’s that. Also, luckily, only in the left eye. If I close the left eye everything looks normal. But if I close the right eye the world turns into this.” He jerked a thumb at the painting. “Actually I think it’s the left eye that sees the truth,” he added. “It sees everything distorted and deformed. Which in fact everything is. The right eye is the one that sees the fiction of normality. So I have truth and lies, one eye for each. It’s good.”

In spite of his customary sardonic manner I could see he was agitated. “The ghosts are real,” he said, gathering his strength. “For some reason I feel better saying this to an anti-spiritual being like yourself.” (I had once told him that I thought the word spiritual, which was now applied to everything from religion to exercise regimes and fruit juice, needed to be given a rest, for perhaps a hundred years or so.) “And it’s not a drug thing. I swear. They just appear, in the middle of the night but also in the middle of the day, in my bedroom or in the street. They are never solid. I can see through them. Sometimes they are sort of buzzy, crackling, broken up like a defective video image. Sometimes they are well defined and clear. I don’t understand. I’m just telling you what I’m seeing. I have the feeling I’m losing my mind.”

“Tell me exactly how it happens,” I said.

“Sometimes I don’t see anything,” he said. “Sometimes I just hear things. Words that are hard to make out, or, also, perfectly clear. Sometimes also the images show up. What is strange is that it’s not necessarily that they are talking to me. The circling exes, yes, for sure, but otherwise it’s like they are just getting on with their lives but I am excluded from those lives, because I have excluded myself, and there is a deep feeling of having done something wrong. All of them are from back home, you understand? All.” The smile had gone from his face now. He looked very upset. “I have studied the seeing of visions,” he said. “Joan of Arc, Saint John the Divine. There are similarities. Sometimes it’s painful. Sometimes it seems to come from within, from the region of the navel, being extruded from the body. At other times it feels purely external. Afterwards often one passes out. It’s exhausting. This is what I have to tell you. Tell me what you think.”

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” I said. “Tell me why you think it’s happening.”

“I think I left in a bad way,” he said. “I was in bad shape. I left without making my peace. This is where you will find it hard to go along with me. The familiar spirits are angry with us, the deities of the place. There is a right way and a wrong way to do these things and I, we, all of us, we just ripped ourselves away, just tore off the corner of the page where we were standing, and that was a kind of violence. It’s necessary to put the past at rest. I have the strong sense right now of not being able to see my way forward. It feels like there isn’t a way forward. Or that for there to be a way forward, first there must be a journey backwards. That’s what I believe.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “I mean, can you make offerings to propitiate whatever is doing this? This is deep water for me. I can’t feel the bottom.”

“I have to go back,” he said. “Anyway, Ubah wants to make a visit. So, think of it as a combination of a tourist trip and a cure for homesickness. Think of it as my need to find out if there’s a there there for me. Then you don’t have to endanger your rationalist worldview.” This, almost angrily. But then a grin to excuse and compensate for the harshness of his tone.

“What do you think would happen if you didn’t go?”

“If I didn’t go,” he said, “then I think a dark force out of the past would fly across the world and probably destroy us all.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe it’s too late. Maybe the dark force has made up its mind anyway. But I’m going to try. And in the meanwhile Ubah can stroll on Marine Drive in the evening and see the hanging gardens on Malabar Hill and visit a movie studio, and maybe we’ll take a side trip to look at the tomb of Taj Bibi in Agra, why not.”

“You’ll go soon?”

“Tonight,” he said. “Before it’s too late.”