The Golden House

Later. Let’s say, quite a while later. Some wise man once suggested that Manhattan below 14th Street at 3 A.M. on November 28 was Batman’s Gotham City; Manhattan between 14th and 110th Streets on the brightest and sunniest day in July was Superman’s Metropolis. And Spider-Man, that Johnny-come-lately, hung upside down in Queens thinking about power and responsibility. All these cities, the invisible imaginary cities lying over and around and interwoven with the real one: all still intact, even though after the election the Joker—his hair green and luminous with triumph, his skin white as a Klansman’s hood, his lips dripping anonymous blood—now ruled them all. The Joker had indeed become a king and lived in a golden house in the sky. The citizens reached for clichés and reminded themselves that there were still birds in the trees and the sky hadn’t fallen and it was, often, still blue. The city still stood. And on the radio and on the music apps playing in the Bluetooth headphones of the careless young the beat went on. The Yankees still worrying about their pitching rotation, the Mets still underperforming, and the Knicks still doomed by the curse of being the Knicks. The internet was still full of lies and the business of the truth was broken. The best had lost all conviction and the worst were filled with passionate intensity and the weakness of the just was revealed by the wrath of the unjust. But the Republic remained more or less intact. Let me just set that down because it was a statement often made to comfort those of us who were not easily to be comforted. It’s a fiction in a way, but I repeat it. I know that after the storm, another storm, and then another. I know that stormy weather is the forecast forever and happy days aren’t here again and intolerance is the new black and the system really is rigged only not in the way the evil clown has tried to make us believe. Sometimes the bad guys win and what does one do when the world one believes in turns out to be a paper moon and a dark planet rises and says, No, I am the world. How does one live amongst one’s fellow countrymen and countrywomen when you don’t know which of them is numbered amongst the sixty-million-plus who brought the horror to power, when you can’t tell who should be counted among the ninety-million-plus who shrugged and stayed home, or when your fellow Americans tell you that knowing things is elitist and they hate elites, and all you have ever had is your mind and you were brought up to believe in the loveliness of knowledge, not that knowledge-is-power nonsense but knowledge is beauty, and then all of that, education, art, music, film, becomes a reason for being loathed, and the creature out of Spiritus Mundi rises up and slouches toward Washington, D.C., to be born. What I did was to retreat into private life—to hold on to life as I had known it, its dailiness and strength, and to insist on the ability of the moral universe of the Gardens to survive even the fiercest assault. And now therefore let my little story have its final moments in the midst of whatever macro garbage is around as you read this, whatever manufactroversy, whatever horror or stupidity or ugliness or disgrace. Let me invite the giant victorious green-haired cartoon king and his billion-dollar movie franchise to take a back seat and let real people drive the bus. Our little lives are perhaps as much as we are able to comprehend.

I remember telling Apu Golden how I wept on election night in November 2008. Those were good tears. The equal and opposite tears of 2016 washed the goodness away.

In the world of the real I had learned hard lessons. Lies can cause tragedies, both on the personal and the national scale. Lies can defeat the truth. But the truth is dangerous too. Not only can the truth teller be vulgar and offensive, as I was in the Golden house that day. Telling the truth can also cost you what you love.

There wasn’t much discussion after I told Suchitra about Vasilisa Golden’s child. She heard me out in silence and then excused herself and went into the bedroom and shut the door. Ten minutes later she reemerged, dry-eyed, in perfect command of her emotions. “I think you should move out, don’t you,” she said. “And you should do it now.” I moved back into my old room at the home of Mr. U Lnu Fnu. As to our working relationship she said she was willing to continue to support my feature film plan, which after so many years was close to being green-lit, but that apart from that we should work separately in future, which was more than fair. Also, and to my surprise and great discomfiture, she immediately launched into a series of brief but apparently passionate love affairs with high-profile men and all of these were extensively shared on social media and knocked me, I admit, for a loop. How deeply could she have cared for me if she could dive so swiftly into the next things? How real had it been? Such thoughts plagued me, though I knew, in my deepest heart, that this was me trying to shift the blame, and the blame could not be shifted, it rested firmly on my shoulders.—So this was not a good time for me but, yes, I got my film The Golden House made, my almost-decade-long obsession-project—in the end a drama, a fully fledged fiction, not a mockumentary, the screenplay completely rewritten since my time at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab—and, yes, the people I needed to like it seemed to like it, and, yes, with the help of an Italian-American producer friend in Los Angeles, North American distribution rights were acquired by Inertia Pictures. There it was in the trades, a release in the theaters and on demand in the first quarter, Variety has learned exclusively, so it had to be true. Pic is Unterlinden’s feature film writer-directorial debut. In a tough time for indie movies this was an outstanding agreement. Strangely, when the good news came through, I felt nothing at all. What was there to feel? It was just work. The main benefit was that I could now afford to rent an apartment of my own.

But to get that apartment would be to lose my access to the Gardens, and the Gardens were where my son played every day, even if it was impossible to approach him. Also, I had become fond of Mr. U Lnu Fnu, who tried in his gentle way to comfort me for my loss of Suchitra’s love. He asked me on what day of the week I had been born, and Suchitra too. I didn’t know, but there were websites now where you could enter the date and be told the day, and so I discovered that it was Sunday (for me) and Wednesday (for her). I told Mr. U Lnu Fnu and at once he clucked his tongue and shook his head. “You see, you see,” he said. “In Myanmar, this is known to be unlucky combination.” Saturday and Thursday, Friday and Monday, Sunday and Wednesday, Wednesday evening and Tuesday: these were the hexed pairings. “Better find someone with complementary day,” he said. “For you, Sunday child, every other day is good. Not Wednesday! Why pick the one day that has jinx? How to guarantee unhappy life!” Oddly, this superstition from across the globe did in fact offer some comfort. But then in those days when I had lost both my lover and my child, I was drowning, and clutching at straws.

Your work goes well when your life’s going terribly. Is that a rule? Loneliness and Heartbreak: these are the names of the gates of Eden?

My story has now gone beyond my film and the divergences are sharp. In the movie, the retired Indian police inspector comes to see the old bastard with murderous intent, and in fact pulls out a gun and shoots him dead, and is then shot dead by the pistol waiting in the pocketbook of the old man’s Russian wife.

In what I have to call real life, Mr. Mastan was dead within twenty-four hours of leaving the house on Macdougal Street, pushed off a subway platform into the path of a train when he was on his way to Penn Station to return to his sister’s home in Philadelphia. The attacker was a thirty-year-old Queens woman of South Asian ethnicity, who was taken into custody almost immediately and charged with second-degree murder. On being detained she said, “That was an old meddler. He interfered in a household matter.” The Times report said this: “The police described her as emotionally disturbed and said that she had made up a story just one month earlier about pushing someone onto the tracks.” That earlier statement had been quickly found to be a lie. This time, however, she had really done it. In spite of her statement, no relationship between her and the dead man could be established, and the investigating officers concluded that none existed. An emotionally disturbed female had pushed a man to his death. No further investigation seemed to be required.

Even that little life of mine had begun to feel less comprehensible by the day. I understood nothing. I had become what I always hoped I might be but without love it was all ashes. I thought every day about reaching out to Suchitra but there she was on Instagram telling the world about new liaisons that were knives in my heart. And my crime, my only son, was right outside my window growing up before my eyes, learning words, developing a character, and I helpless to be a part of it. Vasilisa had made it clear to me that if I came within fifteen feet of him she would go to court and get a restraining order. So I hung back at my Burmese mentor’s window and gazed in misery upon my forbidden flesh and blood as he approached his third birthday. Maybe it would be better for me to leave the Gardens and start a new life somewhere else, Greenpoint, for example, or Madagascar or Sichuan or Nizhny Novgorod or Timbuktu. I dreamed, sometimes, of being flayed, and walking naked and skinless through an unknown city that didn’t give a damn about my dreams. I dreamed of walking up a staircase in a familiar house and realizing suddenly that in the room I was about to enter at the head of the stairs a man was waiting for me with a hangman’s noose and my life was about to end. All this when I was, after more than a decade, an overnight success, and there were lucrative offers to direct hip-hop videos and motor car commercials and episodes of hit sixty-minute television drama series and even a second feature film. None of it made sense. I had lost my bearings and there I was sitting in my tin can whirling in the void.

Can you hear me. Can you hear me. Can you hear me.

It was Riya—Riya who had hit me so hard that my ears rang for days—who helped me take my first unsteady steps down the road to functioning adulthood. We began to meet perhaps once a week, always in the same bar-restaurant on the Bowery near the Museum of Identity, and she would talk to me about her decision to go back to her job, which her boss Orlando Wolf had with considerable sensitivity kept open for her. She described it as a relationship in which love had died but enough common ground remained to make it worth working on. Maybe with enough good effort something like love might be reborn.

This was also how she recommended I approach my own broken love. Give Suchitra time, she said. Let her go through what she’s doing now, all these second-rate boldface men. That’s her anger in charge. Give her time and I think she’ll come back to you to see what can be worked out.

I found that hard to believe but it made me feel better. I liked seeing Riya’s recovery too. The election result seemed to have energized her, to have given her back much of her old strength of spirit and incisiveness of mind. She stayed away from gender politics because, in her own words, she was still “broken” in that area, but worked on new rooms chronicling and displaying the rise of the new “identitarian” far right, the arrival in America of the European ultraist movement whose birthplace was the French youth movement, the Nouvelle Droite Génération Identitaire, and programming events around racial and national identity, a series she called Identity Crisis, dealing in general with racial and religious issues, but focusing, above all, on the schismatic convulsion that had gripped America following the triumph of the cackling cartoon narcissist, America torn in half, its defining myth of city-on-a-hill exceptionalism lying trampled in the gutters of bigotry and racial and male supremacism, Americans’ masks ripped off to reveal the Joker faces beneath. Sixty million. Sixty million. And ninety million more too uncaring to vote.

Once the French sent us the statue in the harbor, she said, now they send us this.

Identity was a neofascist rallying cry now and the Museum was obliged to change and Riya made herself the standard-bearer of that change. We became lazy, she said. For eight years we persuaded ourselves that the progressive, tolerant, adult America embodied by the president was what America had become, that it would just go on being like that. And that America is still there but the dark side was still there too, and it roared out of its cage and swallowed us. America’s secret identity wasn’t a superhero. Turns out it was a supervillain. We’re in the Bizarro universe and we have to engage with Bizarro-America to grasp its nature and to learn how to destroy it all over again. We have to learn how to trick Mr. Mxyztplk into saying his name backwards so that he disappears back into the fifth dimension and the world feels sane again. And we have to engage with ourselves and understand how we became so fucking weak and apathetic and how to retool and dive back into the battle. Who are we now? Who the fuck even knows.

Okay, okay, I thought, losing patience (though only inwardly) with her rant. Good for you. I’m glad you’re up and running again, and you do that, all of it, go for it. All I wanted to do was put my fingers in my ears and shout la la la la la. All I wanted was for there to be no news on the television and for the internet to collapse forever and for my friends to be my friends and to have good dinners and go listen to good music and for love to conquer all and for Suchitra somehow by magic to come back to me.

Then one night alone in my aching bed I remembered what Nero Golden said to me after my parents died. Get wisdom. Learn to be a man.

The next afternoon I presented myself at the editing suite where Suchitra was hard at work. When she saw me, she stiffened. I’m really busy, she said. I’ll wait, I said. I’ll be working really late, she said. Is it okay if I wait, I asked. She thought about it. You can wait if you want, she said. I will, then, I said. She turned away and did not look at me again for five hours and forty-three minutes and I stood still and silent in the corner and did not interrupt. When she finally began to shut down work for the day it was a quarter to eleven at night. She swiveled her chair around to face me.

You waited very patiently, she said, not unkindly. It must be important.

I love you, I said to her, and I saw her defensive barricades go up. She said nothing in reply. The computer monitor dinged and showed a dialogue box telling her that one of her open programs had canceled the shutdown. She gave a sigh of tired irritation and quit the program and restarted the shutdown. This time it worked.

Sometimes in extremis human beings receive from—depending on your belief system—either some inner or some higher power the gift of tongues, the right words to say at the right time, the language that will unlock and heal a bruised and guarded heart. So it was in that late hour amid the darkened computer screens. Not only the language but the nakedness behind the words. And behind the nakedness the music. The first words that fell from my lips were not mine. And what made them work was that I, who could never carry a tune, actually tried to sing, awkwardly at first and then with unasked-for tears running down my face: “Bird on the Wire,” swearing my traitor’s fidelity in the words of the song and promising to make profound amends. Before I had finished she had begun to laugh at me and then we were laughing together, crying and laughing, and it was all right, it was going to be all right, in our two cracked voices we were drunks in our own midnight choir, and we would try in our way to be free.

At some later point when we were in bed together I added more prosaic thoughts to the magic of the song. It had been more than a year since the Joker’s conquest of America and we were all still in shock and going through the stages of grief but now we needed to come together and set love and beauty and solidarity and friendship against the monstrous forces that faced us. Humanity was the only answer to the cartoon. I had no plan except love. I hoped another plan might emerge in time but for now there was only holding each other tightly and passing strength to each other, body to body, mouth to mouth, spirit to spirit, me to you. There was only the holding of hands and slowly learning not to be afraid of the dark.

Shut up, she said, and drew me toward her.

Sunday and Wednesday birthdays, I told her. My information from Myanmar is that we are jinxed by that combo.

I’ll tell you a secret, she said. Burmese jinxes are not permitted to enter the United States. There’s a list of countries whose jinxes aren’t allowed in. Most of them are Islamic of course but Myanmar is on there too.

So as long as we’re in the U.S. we’re safe?

We’ll have to work something out about taking vacations abroad, she said.