The Golden House

One night not long after D Golden’s suicide in the Gardens, an event that put a dark hole in Paradise for us all, Riya Zachariassen, known as Riya Z, woke up from a dream of horror to find that she had lost her grip on her picture of the world. She couldn’t remember the whole dream but she was almost sure she had been carrying a very valuable painting in a great museum and then she dropped it and the frame broke and the glass shattered and she somehow managed to put a foot through the canvas itself, but maybe that was just something she remembered from a movie, dreams were slippery as eels. As she came awake the dream itself stopped being important but she understood that the picture was the one containing everything she thought about the way things were, it was her reality, and now it was broken and somebody would come looking for her in a minute and blame her for breaking it and then she would be fired.

It is hard for a person of no faith like myself to comprehend the moment when faith dies in the human heart. The kneeling believer who suddenly understands that there is no reason to pray because nobody’s listening. Or simply the slow erosion of certainty until doubt becomes more powerful than hope: you keep walking by the river as a drought dries it up until one day there’s a dry riverbed and no water to nourish you in time of thirst. I can picture it but I can’t feel it, except perhaps as the end of love. You wake up one morning and look at the person sleeping in the bed beside you, softly snoring his familiar and until now well-loved snore, and you think, I don’t love you or your snore anymore. The scales that fall from Saul’s eyes in the Acts of the Apostles—or the things like scales, “there fell from his eyes as it had been scales,” the King James Bible says—were the scales of unbelief, after which he saw clearly and was immediately baptized. But the image also works the other way around. The somethings-like-scales fell from Riya’s eyes and she saw clearly that her reality had been an illusion, that it had been false. That’s as close as I can get.

She lay very still next to the empty space where her lover had been. She had always hated the Birkenstocks in which, in spite of her protests, D insisted on sheathing [his] feet when they were at home; but now she couldn’t move the sandals from their place on that side of the bed. They were old-fashioned enough to have, still, a landline phone, a phone that never rang. It was D’s voice on the voicemail—“It’s Riya and D, and now over to thee”—and she couldn’t bring herself to delete it. If she stayed very still and did not think, she could almost believe he would walk in from the bathroom and climb back into the bed. But she couldn’t stop thinking, so she knew that wouldn’t happen. What had happened was that she no longer thought what she had thought she thought. So she had no idea what to think.

In the gravity of her mourning solemn Riya reminded me somehow of Winona Ryder, not the wacky teenage Goth Winona of Beetlejuice, dancing in the air to a fine Belafonte calypso, shaking her body line, but rather Age of Innocence Winona, tightly controlled and less innocent than she looked. In the Scorsese movie—I confess I haven’t read the Edith Wharton novel—it’s Michelle Pfeiffer who is the unconventional one, the one who embraces a new, modern way of being and suffers terribly for it and is finally defeated by Winona Ryder’s serene conservative maneuvering. But suppose the Winona character had been the one in the grip of the new, and that one day she lost her hold on her sense of how things were and should be. That Winona could have been in this movie. That was Riya; my rewritten Winona, more lost and devastated than the original ever was, at sea without a life belt.

It is hard for new ideas to come into the world. The new ideas about men and women and how many human beings were somewhere in between those two words and needed new vocabularies to describe them and give them the feeling of being seen, of being possible and permissible, were ideas that many good people had developed and put out there for the best of reasons. And other fine people, brilliant people like Riya Z, had embraced the new thinking and made it their own and worked hard to put it into practice and make it part of a new way for the world to work.

But then one night Riya opened her eyes and realized that she had changed her mind.

DRAFT LETTERS OF RESIGNATION FROM RIYA ZACHARIASSEN TO THE MUSEUM OF IDENTITY (UNSENT)

Dear insert name of employer, This is to inform you that in accordance with and whereas and inasmuch and as per my contractual obligations and in full discharge of my responsibilities and regarding a final date and after unused days of allocated vacation time have been deducted. And loose ends and efficient handover and with gratitude for and in appreciation of and in the hope that and so on. Owing to a radical reevaluation of and evolution of thought leading to the incompatibility of my present position with the values of. Therefore the interests of the Museum are better served by my departure. Yours sincerely, the end.

Or,

When I was a young girl in Minnesota and beginning to be concerned with living an ethical life, I thought about India, such an important part of my own heritage, and I asked myself, who in India suffers the most injustice, and the answer I came up with, aged eight, was, goats. Cows were sacred but goats got slaughtered for meat and nobody cared. I decided I would dedicate my life to the care and protection of those unloved bleating creatures. Then I grew up and changed my mind of course but it has remained my way to find the thing that needs my passion and then to dedicate myself to it without holding back. After goats there were other early obsessions: birth control, autoimmune diseases, eating disorders, water scarcity. My adulthood coincided with the dawning of the Age of Identity, and the discussions and issues and innovations in and around this subject convinced me that I had found my calling, and when the opportunity to work at the Museum offered itself it was like a dream come true and so it has seemed every day until now. I confess to you however a weakness of the passionate-obsessive cast of mind. It can happen that one day one wakes up to find that, you know what, I don’t care so much about this anymore. This is no longer for me. Previously adored goats, condoms, bulimia, water, you’re just not my thing any longer. So it is now with me and identity. I’m over it. Goodbye.

Or,

I need to think and the city is full of noise.

Or,

I acknowledge that I am a plural entity. I am the daughter of my deceased psychotic father. I am also the mourner of my dead love. I am, alternatively, one of the tribe of skinny people. I am, additionally or contrariwise, a scholar. I am, equally, dark-haired. I have these views and not those views. I can define myself in many different ways. This is what I am not: I am not one thing. I contain multitudes. Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. To be plural, to be multiform, is a singular thing, rich, unusual, and myself. To be forced into narrow definitions is a falsehood. To be told, if you are not one thing then you are nothing, is to be told a lie.

The Museum of Identity is too engaged with that lie. I can’t work in it anymore.

Or,

I suspect that identity in the modern sense—national, racial, sexual, politicized, embattled—has become a series of systems of thought some of which helped drive D Golden to his/her death. The truth is that our identities are unclear to us and maybe it’s better that they remain that way, that the self goes on being a jumble and a mess, contradictory and irreconcilable. Maybe after all D was just a man with some female feelings and [he] should have been allowed to remain in that place and not pushed toward transition by people like me. Not pushed into a femaleness [he] could neither wholly reject nor, ultimately, bear. Pushed toward [his] death by people like me, who allowed a new idea of the real to be stronger than the oldest idea of all: our love.

D told me a story about a hijra in Bombay who dressed as a man at home and in fact was a man for his/her mother and father and then changed her clothes and became a woman when she left the house. That should be all right. Flexibility should be all right. Love should dominate, not dogmas of the self.

I was ready to go with D through all [his] changes and stay with [him] when they were done. I was [his] lover when [he] was a man and I was ready to remain her lover through transition and into her new self. What does this tell me about me, about human beings, about the reality that is beyond dogma? It tells me that love is stronger than gender, stronger than definitions, stronger than the self. This is what I have learned. Identity—specifically, gender identity theory—is a narrowing of humanity, and love shows us how broad we can be. To honor my dead lover I reject the politics of identity and embrace the politics of love.

This was what the philosopher Bertrand Russell replied when asked what advice he would pass on to future generations. He said: “Love is wise.” But I understand that these are contentious times. If battle there must be, let it commence.

ACTUAL LETTER

Dear Orlando,

As I told you just now in your office, I have to resign my position. It’s hard for me to explain why and it is a tough decision and I’m ready to sit down with you and talk it through some more if you so desire. Maybe, as you say, I’m suffering an extreme grief reaction and my thoughts are therefore confused and I will think better of it when I’ve had time to mourn and process what has happened, and it was kind of you to suggest counseling and a leave of absence, but I think it’s better I just go. Thanks for everything. All the best.

Riya.

The storm blew up on her social media at once. (To someone as out of step as myself with his generation and the one immediately following, the thought can’t help but occur: Why put this stuff out there in the first place? Why tell a crowd of strangers that you are going through a painful and deeply personal reevaluation of your thinking? But I understand that this is no longer even a question.) From every side the invisible army of the electronic universe laid into her. Anonymous individuals with pure hearts and no sense of the hypocritical defended their certainties about identity while cloaking themselves in the disguises of false names. “So how’d you feel now about white women dressing up as Pocahontas on Halloween? What’s your position on blackface? Are those okay with you?” “Are you a SWERF now as well as a TERF? Maybe you aren’t even an RF anymore. What are you? Are you anyone?” And much bad language. And, repeatedly, Delete your account. The disapproval came from friends as well as strangers, it came from the highly assertive gender-political circles in which she had moved so comfortably for so long and which now accused her of betrayal, but also from the indie-fashionista world in which she had been something of a rising star, and from several of her erstwhile colleagues at the Museum of Identity, the thing about your new position isn’t so much that it’s wrong, or that’s it’s so regressive, it’s that it’s so poorly thought out. It’s so stupid. And we thought you were the smart one.

Across the Atlantic, in another theater of the identity wars, the British prime minister was narrowing the definition of Britishness to exclude multiplicity, internationalism, the world as the location of the self. Only little England would do to define the English. In that distant argument about the identity of the nation there were loud voices pushing back against the prime minister’s grunting narrowness. But here in America, in the language of gender, the only words that didn’t exist, Riya thought, the only unspeakable words, were “I’m not sure about any of this. I’m having second thoughts.” That kind of talk could get you de-platformed.

Ivy understood, Ivy Manuel who had always resisted being pigeonholed. “Fuck ’em if they don’t get it,” she said. “Come on over and let’s go for a fucking run by the river and let’s have a fucking drink and let’s sing a fucking improper song together. ‘My Boy Lollipop’ or some shit like that.”

One more encounter with the hobo Kinski before his big scene, which I will get to in due order, should have warned me that he was gearing up for something. But such is our desire to believe in the ordinariness of ordinary life, the normality of our dailiness, that I didn’t get it. He was skulking about outside the Red Fish, the music place on Bleecker, inside which a Faroese singer was scheduled to perform a suite of confessional songs inspired by YouTube videos—in English, not Faroese, luckily for the audience. What was Kinski’s interest in any of this, YouTube, the Faroe Islands, music? But there he was, skulking. Hey, anybody got a spare ticket, a ticket you don’t need and could maybe donate to a good cause? Him being the good cause he had in mind. I was there because the Faroese singer’s American collaborator was a friend, and Kinski, seeing a familiar face, lit up and became high energy.

“You can do this for me,” he said. “Never mind everything else. This is important. This guy. Poetry & Aeroplanes, ever heard that? Beautiful. Did you know he recorded an album in the house where Ingmar Bergman died? Did you hear his TED talk? Whoa.”

These were the most articulate words (except perhaps for his Shakespeare quote at tea in the Golden house) and the only non-apocalyptic thoughts I’d ever heard coming out of his mouth. “And you know all this, how?” I asked.

His face darkened and, to keep it company, his vocabulary deteriorated. “Fuck off,” he said. “Never mind how.”

I was curious now and, as it happened, I did have an extra ticket in my pocket, because Suchitra, of course, was working late. “If you want to get in,” I said, “I need the story.” He looked down at the sidewalk and shuffled his feet. “My buddy turned me on to him,” he muttered. “Bagram Air Base. Back in the day.”

“You’re a vet,” I said, genuinely surprised.

“You want proof?” he snarled. “Give me a blindfold and a disassembled AR-15. I’ll give you fucking proof.”

This was when, if I’d had my warning radar switched on, I should have understood that all was not well, that this was a man near an edge. But I was guilty about my ignorance of his service, and then compounded my mistake by asking him a question about his “buddy,” and getting the response I should have known I’d get. “Didn’t make it. Ambush in Pakhtunkhwa. Now can I get the fucking ticket.”

I watched him during the concert. The songs were witty, even funny, but there were tears pouring down his face.

At some point soon after this unexpected musical run-in—maybe two days later, maybe three—Kinski got his hands on an automatic rifle, just as he had rhetorically requested outside the Fish. According to the deposition he later made at Mount Sinai Beth Israel—the deathbed confession, I should more accurately say—he neither bought nor stole it. He was kidnapped in the park, he said, and his kidnappers gave him the gun and turned him loose. It was an improbable story, even an absurd one, told in fractured mumbles and gasps, and in my view it wouldn’t have been worth taking seriously for a moment except for two things: first, it was a deathbed confession, and that had to be given its proper and solemn weight; and second, it was coming out of Kinski’s mouth, and given the crazy things that had always come out of that mouth, this was no crazier than the rest of it, so there was a tiny, crazy chance that it might be true.

The following, more or less, was Kinski’s version. When he was melancholy, he said, he went uptown to wander the relatively empty spaces to be found in the northern latitudes of the park. He got caught in a downpour and took shelter under a tree, huddling there until the heavens relented. (Note: On the particular day in question there had indeed been a change in the weather, a few days of unseasonal warmth and blue skies had given way to chilly rain.)—At this point, owing to his rapidly deteriorating physical condition, the account became fragmented and unclear.—He was approached by (two? three? more?) individuals dressed as clowns—or Jokers—he used both words—who overpowered him and put a sack over his head and bound him.—Or they didn’t bind him but just led him forward on foot.—Or not a sack but some sort of blindfold.—He couldn’t see where he was going because of the sack.—Or blindfold.—Then he was in the back of a van and the blindfold was removed and a new man, also disguised as a clown—or Joker—was talking to him about—what?—recruitment.—There was stuff about the presidential election. Its illegitimacy. It was being stolen. It was a coup orchestrated by the media—by powerful corporate interests—by China—and Americans had to take their country back.—It was hard to tell if these were Kinski’s own sentiments or if he was repeating what the supposed boss Joker in the van had told him.—Then at one point the words “We can learn from Muslim terrorists. From their self-sacrifice.”—After which, much incoherence, a mingling of self-pity, despair, and his old prophecies of imminent doom.—“Nothing to live for.”—“America.”—That was about it. The medical team intervened and stopped the deposition. Emergency procedures followed. He didn’t speak again, and didn’t last very much longer. All of which is my best effort at piecing together a coherent story from what was reported in the press and what, with some difficulty, I was able to dig out for myself.

His friend had died—who knows how many friends?—and he had returned from military service mentally ill. He had lost contact with those who might have cared for him and declined in every way and ended up as a bum ranting about guns. Over the years during which his path crossed mine his rant changed. In the beginning he sounded anti-gun, fearing the proliferation of weapons in America, coming up with the idea that guns were alive; then, with the addition of religious fervor, he amped up his end-of-days rhetoric; and finally, clowns or no clowns, Jokers or no Jokers, abduction or no abduction, he became a servant of the gun himself, the warm gun that brought happiness, and did its bidding, bang bang shoot shoot, and so people died, and so did he.

For what is an undeniable fact is that Kinski attacked the Halloween parade, and the fusillade of shots he unleashed resulted in a tally of seven people dead, nineteen wounded, before a police officer gunned him down. He was wearing a Joker mask and a Kevlar vest—a remnant, perhaps, of his days in Afghanistan—so his injuries were not immediately fatal. He was taken to the MSBI emergency room and lived long enough to make the statement above, or something like it, but it must be said that in the opinion of the hospital staff the balance of his mind was disturbed and nothing he said could be considered reliable.

On the list of the dead, two names stood out: Mr. Murray Lett and Mr. Petronius Golden, both of Manhattan, NY.

On Halloween the residents of the Gardens traditionally had a private celebration, stringing the old trees with lights, putting a DJ’s booth outside the house of the fashion magazine editor, allowing the local children to run wild playing trick or treat. Many of the adults, too, dressed up. It was a way of enjoying the festival without venturing into the great crowds that gathered on Sixth Avenue nearby to witness or participate in the parade itself.

Petya might have been happy in the Gardens but Leo the cat wanted to go to the parade, Petya told Murray Lett, and what Leo wanted, Leo was going to get. He was feeling good!, he said, really very good!, he felt he had really emerged from his time of crisis, he could put it behind him, he wanted to embrace life, and life was out there on All Hallows’ Eve on Monday, marching down Sixth Avenue dressed up as skeletons, zombies and whores. “Even with the Gardens party, this house feels so funereal,” he cried. “Let’s find ourselves some kick-ass costumes and kick some parade ass!” His fear of open spaces had ebbed, he said, and besides when the Village was this crowded it didn’t feel like an open space anyway. Murray Lett the Australian had never fully embraced the over-the-topness of the American Halloween. Once he had been invited to a party on the Upper West Side and had gone as Mars Attacks! in a huge Tim Burton Martian head that was hot inside and meant he couldn’t eat or drink. Another year he had been Darth Vader, wearing overly bulky plastic armor that made sitting down difficult, and a black helmet with a voice-changer box, which gave him the same problems as the Mars Attacks! head regarding heat, food, and liquid intake. Nowadays he tended to stay in his apartment and hope no trick-or-treating kids rang the doorbell. But Petya would not be denied. “We will be Romans!” he cried. “I of course, being Petronius, will be Trimalchio, host of the Satyricon feast, and you—you can be a reveler of some sort. Our costumes will be inspired by Fellini. There will be togas! And laurel wreaths upon our brows, and flagons of wine in our hands. Marvelous! We will run toward life and drink deeply at its watering holes and we will be drunk on life by the morning.” When I heard the plan I thought of Gatsby, of course, Gatsby which Fitzgerald came close to calling Trimalchio in West Egg, and that was a sad thought for it brought back to my mind my nights of laughter with my parents, and so also inevitably the dreadful manner of their ending, and I succumbed briefly to renewed sadness; but then Petya’s glee was infectious and I thought, yes, why not, some gaiety after everything, good idea, and if Petya wished to be, for one night, life’s high-bouncing lover, then yes! Let him wear his toga and bounce.

Costumes at short notice were a tall order, but that was what Fuss and Blather were for, and anyway a toga was just a bedsheet with big ideas. Roman sandals were found, and laurel, and a bundle of birch twigs tied with red ribbon—the Roman fasces—which Petya would hold as a symbol of his consular authority. A completely anachronistic fool’s cap and bells were found and offered to Murray Lett and I very much wanted him to choose to wear them so that he could channel Danny Kaye in The Court Jester and practice his tongue-twisters, The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true! But he went for a toga to be like Petya and if Petya was going to hold the fasces then Lett would carry the cat.

So it was; and so imperially attired they went away from the Gardens, away from that house weighed down by death into the parade that celebrated life; and so, running toward life and away from death, they found death waiting for them, as the old story had prophesied, in Samarra, which was to say, on Sixth Avenue between Fourth Street and Washington Place. Death in a Joker costume carrying an AR-15. The gun’s soft chatter inaudible beneath the cacophony of the crowds, the honking of horns, the megaphoned messages, the bands. Then people began to fall and harsh uncostumed reality ruined the party. There was no reason to believe that Petya or Murray Lett had been specifically targeted. Guns were alive in America, and death was their random gift.

And the cat, the alpine lynx. Here, in close-up, the outstretched arm of the dead Roman, the fasces fallen from his grasp. (A deliberate echo, in the framing, of the inert arm of the fallen Kong at the end of the original 1933 movie.) And Leo snarling hatred at anyone who dared come near. And when all of it was done, when the screaming had subsided, when the crowd running, falling, had calmed and been dispersed and those dead and wounded by the bullets and those crushed underfoot by fear had all been taken to their necessary places, when the avenue was empty except for windblown trash and police cars, when it was really over, the cat was gone, and nobody ever saw Leo the lynx again.

And the King, alone in the golden house, saw all his gold in all his pockets all his stacks all his sacks all his buckets begin to glow more and more brightly until it caught fire, and burned.