Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Mr. Geronimo

Eight hundred and more years later, more than three and a half thousand miles away, and now more than one thousand years ago, a storm fell upon our ancestors’ city like a bomb. Their childhoods slipped into the water and were lost, the piers built of memories on which they once ate candy and pizza, the boardwalks of desire under which they hid from the summer sun and kissed their first lips. The roofs of houses flew through the night sky like disoriented bats, and the attics where they stored their past stood exposed to the elements until it seemed that everything they once were had been devoured by the predatory sky. Their secrets drowned in flooded basements and they could no longer remember them. Their power failed them. Darkness fell.

Before the power died the TV showed images taken from the sky of an immense white spiral wheeling overhead like an invading alien spaceship. Then the river poured into the power stations and trees fell on the power cables and crushed the sheds where the emergency generators were housed and the apocalypse began. Some rope that moored our ancestors to reality snapped, and as the elements screamed in their ears it was easy for them to believe that the slits in the world had reopened, the seals had been broken and there were laughing sorcerers in the sky, satanic horsemen riding the galloping clouds.

For three days and nights nobody spoke because only the language of the storm existed and our ancestors did not know how to speak that awful tongue. Then at last it passed, and like children refusing to believe in childhood’s end they wanted everything to be as it was. But when the light returned it felt different. This was a white light they had not seen before, harsh as an interrogator’s lamp, casting no shadows, merciless, leaving no place to hide. Beware, the light seemed to say, for I come to burn and judge.

Then the strangenesses began. They would continue for two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights.

This is how it has come down to us, a millennium later, as history infused with and perhaps overwhelmed by legend. This is how we think of it now, as if it were a fallible memory, or a dream of the remote past. If it’s untrue, or partly untrue, if made-up stories have been introduced into the record, it’s too late to do anything about it. This is the story of our ancestors as we choose to tell it, and so, of course, it’s our story too.

It was on the Wednesday after the great storm that Mr. Geronimo first noticed that his feet no longer touched the ground. He had awoken an hour before dawn as usual, half-remembering a strange dream in which a woman’s lips were pressed against his chest, murmuring inaudibly. His nose was blocked, his mouth dry because he’d been breathing through it in his sleep, his neck stiff thanks to his habit of putting too many pillows beneath it; the eczema on his left ankle needed to be scratched. The body in general was giving him the familiar amount of morning grief: nothing to moan about, in other words. The feet, in fact, felt fine. Mr. Geronimo had had trouble with his feet for much of his life, but they were being kind today. From time to time he suffered the pain of his fallen arches, even though he meticulously did his toe-clenching exercises last thing at night before going to sleep and first thing after waking up, and he wore insoles, and went up and down stairs on his toes. Then there was the battle with gout, and the medication that brought on diarrhea. The pain came periodically and he accepted it, consoling himself with what he had learned as a young man: that flat feet allowed you to dodge the military draft. Mr. Geronimo was long past the soldiering age but this scrap of information still comforted him. And gout after all was the disease of kings.

Lately his heels had been forming thick, cracked calluses that needed attention, but he had been too busy to visit a podiatrist. He needed his feet, was on them all day. Also, they had had a couple of days of rest, no gardening to be done during a storm like this one, so perhaps they were rewarding him, this morning, by choosing not to make a fuss. He swung his legs out of bed and stood up. Something did feel different then. He was familiar with the texture of the polished wooden floorboards in his bedroom but for some reason he didn’t feel them that Wednesday morning. There was a new softness underfoot, a kind of soothing nothingness. Maybe his feet had become numb, deadened by the thickening calluses. A man of his type, an older man with a day of hard physical work ahead of him, did not bother with such trifles. A man of his type, big, fit, strong, shrugged off niggles and got on with his day.

There was still no power and very little water, though the return of both was promised for the next day. Mr. Geronimo was a fastidious person and it pained him not to clean his teeth thoroughly, not to shower. He used some of the water that remained in his bathtub to flush the toilet. (He had filled it as a precaution before the storm began.) He climbed into his work overalls and boots and, ignoring the stalled elevator, ventured down into the ruined streets. At sixty-plus, he told himself, having reached an age at which most men would be putting their feet up, he was as fit and active as he’d ever been. The life he chose long ago had seen to that. It had taken him away from his father’s church of miracle cures, of screaming women rising from wheelchairs because possessed by the power of Christ, and away too from his uncle’s architectural practice where he might have spent long invisible sedentary years drafting that kindly gentleman’s unrecognized visions, his floor plans of disappointments and frustrations and things that might have been. Mr. Geronimo had left Jesus and drafting tables behind and moved into the open air.

In the green pickup truck, on whose sides the words Mr. Geronimo Gardener and a phone number and website URL were blocked out in yellow and drop-shadowed in scarlet, he couldn’t feel the seat under him; the cracked green leather that usually poked comfortingly into the right cheek of his behind wasn’t doing its thing today. He was definitely not himself. There was a general lessening of sensation. This was a worry. At his age, and given his chosen field of work, he had to be concerned about the small betrayals of the body, had to deal with them, to stave off the larger betrayals that awaited. He would have to get himself checked out, but not now; right now, in the aftermath of the storm, the doctors and hospitals had bigger problems to worry about. The accelerator and brake felt oddly cushioned beneath his booted feet, as if they needed a little extra pressure from him this morning. The storm had evidently messed with the psyches of motor vehicles as well as human beings. Cars lay abandoned, despondent, at odd angles beneath broken windows, and there was a melancholy yellow bus on its side. The main roads had been cleared, however, and the George Washington Bridge had reopened for traffic. There was a gas shortage but he had hoarded his own supply and reckoned he would be able to cope. Mr. Geronimo was a hoarder of fuel, gas masks, flashlights, blankets, medical supplies, canned food, water in lightweight packets; a man who expected emergencies, who counted on the fabric of society to tear and disintegrate, who knew that superglue could be used to hold cuts together, who did not trust human nature to build solidly or well. A man who expected the worst. Also a superstitious man, a crosser of fingers, who knew, for example, that in America wicked spirits lived in trees so it was necessary to knock on wood to drive them out, whereas British tree-spirits (he was an admirer of the British countryside) were friendly creatures so one touched wood to get the benefit of their benevolence. These things were important to know. One couldn’t be too careful. If you walk away from God you should probably try to stay in the good books of Luck.

He adjusted to the truck’s needs and drove up the east side of the island and over the reopened GWB. He had the radio tuned to the oldies station obviously. Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone, the old timers were singing. Good tip, he thought. So it had. And tomorrow never comes; which leaves today. The river had fallen back into its natural course but all along the banks Mr. Geronimo saw destruction and black mud, and the drowned past of the city exhumed in the black mud, the funnels of sunken riverboats periscoping through the black mud, the haunted gap-toothed Oldsmobiles mud-crusted on the shore, and darker secrets, the skeleton of the legendary Kipsy river-monster and the skulls of murdered Irish longshoremen swimming in the black mud, and there was strange news on the radio too, the ramparts of the Indian fort of Nipinichsen had been raised by the black mud, and the bedraggled furs of ancient Dutch traders, and the original casket containing the actual trinkets worth sixty guilders with which a certain Peter Minuit bought an island of hills from the Lenape Indians, had been deposited at the southern tip of Manahatta, as if the storm was telling our ancestors, Fuck you, I’m buying the island back.

He made his way down broken storm-littered roads out to La Incoerenza, the Bliss estate. Outside the city the storm had been even wilder. Lightning bolts like immense crooked pillars joined La Incoerenza to the skies, and order, which Henry James warned was only man’s dream of the universe, disintegrated beneath the power of chaos, which was nature’s law. Above the gates of the estate a live wire swung dangerously, with death at its tip. When it touched the gates blue lightning crackled along the bars. The old house stood firm but the river had burst its banks and risen up like a giant lamprey all mud and teeth and swallowed the grounds in a single gulp. It had receded but left destruction in its wake. Mr. Geronimo looking at the wreckage felt that he was present at the death of his imagination, standing at the crime scene of its murder by the thick black mud and the indestructible shit of the past. It may be that he wept. And there on those formerly rolling lawns, hidden now beneath the black mud from the swollen Hudson, as weeping a little he surveyed the ruin of more than a decade of his best landscaping work, the stone spirals that echoed the Iron Age Celts, the Sunken Garden which put its Floridian cousin in the shade, the analemma sundial, a replica of the one at the Greenwich Meridian, the rhododendron forest, the Minoan labyrinth with the fat stone Minotaur at its heart, the secret hedge-hidden nooks, all of them lost and broken beneath the black mud of history, the tree roots standing up in the black mud like the arms of drowning men — it was there that Mr. Geronimo understood that his feet had developed a significant new problem. He stepped out onto the mud and his boots neither squelched nor stuck. He took two or three bewildered steps across the blackness and looked back and saw that he had left no footprints.

“Damn,” he cried aloud in consternation. What kind of world had the tempest flung him into? Mr. Geronimo didn’t think of himself as being easily scared but the missing footprints had him spooked. He stamped down hard, left boot, right boot, left boot. He jumped up and came down as heavily as he could. The mud was unmoved. Had he been drinking? No, though on occasion he did overdo things as an older man living alone sometimes does, and why not, but this time alcohol was not a factor. Was he still asleep, and dreaming of the estate of La Incoerenza lost beneath a mud sea? Maybe, but this didn’t feel like a dream. Was this some unworldly river-bottom mud, some river-monsterish mud previously unknown to mud scientists whose deep-water mystery gave it the power to resist the weight of a leaping man? Or — and this felt the most plausible, though also the most alarming possibility — had there been a change in himself? Some inexplicable, personal gravitational lessening? Jesus, he thought, and at once also thought of his father frowning at the blasphemy, his father berating his child-self from two feet away as if threatening his congregation from his pulpit with his weekly fire and brimstone, Jesus! He would really have to get those feet looked at now.

Mr. Geronimo was a down-to-earth man, and so it did not occur to him that a new age of the irrational had begun, in which the gravitational aberration to which he had fallen victim would be only one of many outré manifestations. Further bizarreries in his own narrative were beyond his comprehension. It did not enter his mind, for example, that in the near future he might make love to a fairy princess. Nor did the transformation of global reality preoccupy him. He drew no broader conclusions from his plight. He did not imagine the imminent reappearance in the oceans of sea-monsters large enough to swallow ships in a single gulp, or the emergence of men strong enough to lift fully grown elephants, or the appearance in the skies over the earth of wizards traveling through the air at super-speed on magically propelled flying urns. He did not surmise that he could have fallen under the spell of a mighty and malevolent jinn.

However, he was methodical by nature, and so, undeniably concerned by his new condition, he reached into a pocket of his battered gardening jacket and found a folded sheet of paper, a bill from the power utility company. The power had been shut down but the bills continued to insist on prompt settlement. That was the natural order of things. He unfolded the bill and spread it out on the mud. Then he stood on it, stamped and jumped some more, tried to rub the document with his feet. It remained untouched. He reached down and tugged at it, and at once it slid out from beneath his feet. No trace of a footprint. He tried a second time, and was able to pass the utility bill cleanly under both boots. The gap between himself and the earth was tiny but unarguable. He was now permanently located at least a sheet of paper’s thickness above the planet’s surface. Mr. Geronimo straightened with the piece of paper in his hand. Giant trees lay dead around him, sinking into the mud. The Lady Philosopher, his employer the fodder heiress Miss Alexandra Bliss Fariña, was watching him through ground-floor French windows with tears streaming down her beautiful young face and something else flowing from her eyes that he couldn’t make out. It might have been fear or shock. It might even have been desire.

Mr. Geronimo’s life up to this point had been a journey of a type that was no longer uncommon in our ancestors’ peripatetic world, in which people easily became detached from places, beliefs, communities, countries, languages, and from even more important things, such as honor, morality, good judgment, and truth; in which, we may say, they splintered away from the authentic narratives of their life stories and spent the rest of their days trying to discover, or forge, new, synthetic narratives of their own. He had been born Raphael Hieronymus Manezes in Bandra, Bombay, the illegitimate son of a firebrand Catholic priest, more than sixty summers before the events that concern us now, named on another continent in another age of the world by a man (long deceased) who had come to seem as alien to him as Martians or reptiles, but was also as close as blood could make him. His holy father, Father Jerry, the Very Rev. Fr. Jeremiah D’Niza, was in his own words a “huge orson of a man,” a “whale-sized moby,” lacking earlobes but possessing, by way of compensation, the bellow of Stentor, the herald of the Greek army in the war against Troy, whose voice was as strong as fifty men. He was the neighborhood’s leading matchmaker and its benevolent tyrant, a conservative of the right type, everyone agreed. Aut Caesar aut nullus was his personal motto as it had been Cesare Borgia’s, either a Caesar or a nobody, and as Father Jerry was definitely not a nobody it followed that he must be Caesar, and in fact so complete was his authority that nobody made a fuss when he surreptitiously (meaning that everyone knew about it) made a match for himself with a grave-faced stenographer, a slip of a thing named Magda Manezes who looked like a fragile little twig next to the spreading banyan of the Father’s body. The Very Rev. Fr. Jeremiah D’Niza soon became a little less than perfectly celibate, and fathered a fine male child, instantly recognizable as his son by his distinctive ears. “The Hapsburgs and the D’Nizas are both lobeless,” Father Jerry liked to say. “Unfortunately, the wrong lot became emperors.” (The rude street boys of Bandra knew nothing of Hapsburgs. They said that Raphael’s lack of earlobes was a sign that he was not to be trusted, a sign of insanity, of being an exciting long word, a psychopath. But that was ignorant superstition, obviously. He went to the movies like everyone else and saw that psychopaths — mad killers, mad scientists, mad Mughal princes — had perfectly normal ears.)

Father Jerry’s son could not be given his father’s surname, of course, the decencies had to be observed, so he received his mother’s instead. For Christian names the good pastor named him Raphael after the patron saint of Córdoba, Spain, and Hieronymus after Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus of the city of Stridon, a.k.a. Saint Jerome. “Raffy-’Ronnimus-the-pastor’s-sonnimus” he was among the rude boys playing French cricket in Bandra’s sainted Catholic streets — St. Leo St. Alexiou St. Joseph St. Andrew St. John St. Roques St. Sebestian St. Martin — until he grew too big and strong to be teased; but to his father he was always Young Raphael Hieronymus Manezes grandly and in full. He lived with his mother Magda in East Bandra but was permitted to go over to the tonier west side on Sundays to sing in his father’s church choir and to listen to Father Jerry preach without any apparent awareness of his own hypocrisy about the fiery damnation that was the inevitable consequence of sin.

The truth was that Mr. Geronimo in later life had a poor memory, and so, much of his childhood was lost. Fragments of his father, however, remained. He remembered singing in church. Mr. Geronimo had a bit of the Latin as a child, at Christmas in song bidding the faithful come in the ancient Roman tongue, w-ing his v’s as his father commanded. Wenite, wenite in Bethlehem. Natum widete regem angelorum. But it was Genesis that got him, the Vulgate that was his namesake Saint Jerome’s work. Genesis, especially chapter one, verse three. Dixitque Deus: fiat lux. Et facta est lux. Translated by himself into his personal Bombay “Wulgate”: And God said, Cheap Italian motor car, beauty soap of the film star. And there was Lux. Please, Daddy, why did God want a small Fiat and a bar of soap, and also please, why did he get the soap only? Why couldn’t he make the car? And why not a better car, Daddy? He could’ve asked for a Jesus Chrysler, no? Which brought down upon him a predictable jeremiad from Jeremiah D’Niza, plus a thunderous reminder of his wrong-side-of-the-blanketness, Don’t call me Daddy, call me Father like everyone else, and he skipping with a giggle out of reach of the pastor’s vengeful hand, singing cheap Italian motor car beauty soap of the film star.

That was his whole childhood right there. He always knew that church wasn’t for him but he liked the songs. And on Sundays all the local Sandras came to church and he liked their flipped-up hairdos and their cheeky flouncing. Hark the herald angels sing, he taught them at Christmas, Beecham’s pills are just the thing. If you want to go to heaven, take a dose of six or seven. If you want to go to Hell, take the whole damn box as well. The Sandras liked that and let him kiss them secretly on the lips behind the choir stall. His father so apocalyptic in the pulpit hardly ever hit him, mostly just let his son’s mouth run out of blasphemous steam, understanding that bastards have their resentments and must be allowed to air them in whatever form they come out, and after Magda’s death — she was a polio victim in those olden days when not everyone had access to the Salk vaccine — he sent Hieronymus to learn a trade from his architect uncle Charles in the capital of the world, but that didn’t work either. Later, when the young man closed the architectural office on Greenwich Avenue and started the gardening business, his father wrote him a letter. You’ll never amount to anything if you can’t stick to anything. Mr. Geronimo unstuck in the grounds of La Incoerenza remembered his father’s warning. The old man knew what he was talking about.

In American mouths “Hieronymus” quickly became “Geronimo” and he enjoyed, he had to admit, the Indian-chiefy allusion. He was a big man like his father with big competent hands a thick neck and hawkish profile and with his Indian-Indian complexion and all, it was easy for Americans to see the Wild West in him and treat him with the respect reserved for remnants of peoples exterminated by the white man, which he accepted without clarifying that he was Indian from India and therefore familiar with a quite different history of imperialist oppression, but never mind. Uncle Charles Duniza (he had changed the spelling of his surname, he said, to accommodate Americans’ Italianate tastes) also lacked earlobes and had the family gift of height. He was white haired with bushy white eyebrows, his fleshy lips habitually stretched in a gentle disappointed smile, and in his modest architectural practice did not allow politics to be discussed. When he took twenty-two-year-old Geronimo to drink at an inn run by the Genovese family for drag queens and male hookers and transgendered persons, he wanted to speak only of sex, the love of men and men, which horrified and delighted his Bombay nephew who had never spoken of such matters before and to whom they had until now remained a mystery. Father Jerry, being a conservative of the right type, considered homosexuality a thing beyond the pale, to be treated as if it did not exist. But now young Geronimo was living in his homosexual uncle’s run-down brownstone on St. Mark’s Place and the house was full of Uncle Charles’s protégés, half a dozen gay Cuban refugees whom Charles Duniza, with a lighthearted, dismissive wave of the hand, collectively referred to as the Raúls. The Raúls were to be found in the bathrooms at odd hours plucking their eyebrows or languidly shaving the body hair off their chests and legs before heading out in search of love. Geronimo Manezes had no idea how to speak to them but that was okay because they had no interest in speaking to him either. He had always exuded powerfully heterosexual pheromones which induced, in the Raúls, small moues of indifference that said, You can coexist in this space with us if you must, but please know that in all essential ways you don’t exist for us at all.

As he watched them prance away into the night, Geronimo Manezes found that he envied them their carelessness, the ease with which they had shed Havana like an unwanted snakeskin, navigating this new city with their ten words of bad English, diving into the polyglot urban sea and feeling instantly at home, or, at least, adding their easy, brittle, angry, damaged misfittery to all the other square pegs in the round holes all around them, using bathhouse promiscuity to create the feeling of belonging. He wanted to be that way too, he realized. He felt what the Raúls felt: now that he was here, in this broke, dirty, inexhaustible, dangerous, irresistible metropolis, he was never going home.

Like so many unbelievers Geronimo Manezes was looking for paradise, but Manhattan Island then was anything but Edenic. After the riots that summer Uncle Charles gave up the Mafia inn. A year later he would march with the pride marchers, but uncomfortably. He wasn’t a natural protester. Reading Voltaire’s Candide, he declared himself in agreement with the tragicomic philosopher Pangloss: Il faut cultiver son jardin. “Stay home, go to work, attend to business,” he advised his nephew Geronimo. “This solidarity cum activism thing: I don’t know.” He was cautious by nature, a member of an association of gay businesspeople which, as Charles Duniza took pride in saying for years afterwards, had been addressed by Ed Koch when he was on the city council, it was the first openly gay organization he spoke to, and everyone had been too courteous to ask the future mayor anything about his own rumored sexual orientation. Charles was a regular attendee at the association’s suit-and-tie gatherings in the Village, and in his own way a conservative like his brother Father Jerry back home. But when the call came to march he put on his Sunday best and joined the wild parade, one of the few formally dressed persons in that defiant carnival of self-assertion. And Geronimo, straight as he was, went with him. By now they were fast friends and it wouldn’t have been right to let Uncle Charles go into battle alone.

The years passed and the architectural practice began to struggle. The walls of the Greenwich Avenue office were lined with dreams: buildings Charles Duniza had never built and would never build. In the late 1980s his friend the celebrated real estate developer Bento V. Elfenbein bought a hundred acres of prime property in Big Groundnut on the South Fork of Long Island — its name was taken from the Pequot Indian word later more usually translated as potato—and wanted a hundred “starchitects” to build signature homes on an acre each. One of these acres was promised to Charles—“Of course you, Charles! What do you think, I don’t remember my friends?” Bento expostulated — but the project remained in the doldrums because of complex financing issues. Uncle Charles’s smile faded a little, became a little sadder. Bento, a dandy with rakishly floppy brown hair and a colorful relationship with cravats, came across as absurdly glamorous and almost shockingly charming, the scion of a big Hollywood dynasty. He was flamboyantly intellectual, with a tendency to quote Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class with a bitter irony leavened somewhat by his own, indefatigable Hollywood grin, a Joe E. Brown dazzler full of big, bright, white teeth, inherited from a mother who had been on the screen with Chaplin. “The leisure class, a.k.a. the landed gentry, on whom my business depends,” he told Geronimo Manezes, “are the hunters, not the gatherers; they make their way by the immoral road of exploitation, not the virtuous path of industry. But I, to make my way, have to treat the rich as the good guys, the lions, the creators of wealth and guardians of freedom, which naturally I don’t mind doing because I’m an exploiter too and I also want to think of myself as virtuous.”

Bento was proud to bear one version of the first name of the philosopher Spinoza. “In a translation of myself,” he liked to say, “I would be Baruch Ivory. Maybe if I’d stayed in the motion picture business that would have been a better handle. Be that as it may. Here in New Amsterdam, I’m proud to be named after Benedito de Espinosa, Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam the Older. From him I take my famous rationalism, also my knowledge that mind and body are one and Descartes was wrong to separate them. Forget the soul. No such ghost in the machine. What happens to our mind befalls our body also. The condition of the body is also the state of the mind. Remember this. Spinoza said God had a body too, God’s mind and body were one just like ours. For this type of iconoclastic thinking they flung him out of Jewish society. They issued against him in Amsterdam an excommunicating cherem. The Catholics took the hint, put his immortal Ethics on their Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t right. He in his turn was inspired by the Andalusian Arab Averroës, who was given a pretty rough ride too, which also didn’t mean he was wrong. In my opinion, by the way, Spinoza’s theory of mind-body union applies equally to nation-states. The body politic and the ones in the control room are not separate from one another. You remember that Woody Allen movie with the operatives in the brain sending the sperm in their white outfits and hoodies to work when the body is about to get laid. Same kind of thing.”

Bento owned a building on Park Avenue South and lunched most days in the oak-paneled restaurant on its ground floor. Here he sometimes invited Geronimo Manezes to talk about the real facts of life. “A person like yourself,” he said, “uprooted, not yet re-rooted, is what my favorite, Thorstein V., called an alien of the uneasy feet. ‘A disturber of the intellectual peace, but only at the cost of becoming an intellectual wayfaring man, a wanderer in the intellectual no-man’s-land, seeking another place to rest, farther along the road, somewhere over the horizon.’ Does that sound like you to you? Or are you, as I’m guessing you are, seeking that resting place closer to home? Not over the rainbow but in the company of, to be frank, my beautiful daughter? Is Ella what you’re looking for to stop you floating away? Your anchor, is that what you want her to be for you, the one who makes your feet feel easy? She’s a kid, twenty-one last March. You’re close to fourteen years her senior. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I’m a man of the world. And anyway my princess usually gets what she wants, so let’s leave it to her to decide, okay?” Geronimo Manezes nodded, not knowing what else to do. “So, genug,” Elfenbein said, smiling his Beverly Hills smile. “Try the Dover sole.”

That winter Uncle Charles suddenly announced he wanted to make a trip back to India, and took Geronimo with him. After the long years away their hometown was a shock to the eyes, as if an alien city, “Mumbai,” had descended from space and settled on top of the Bombay they remembered. But something of Bandra had survived, its spirit as well as its buildings, and Father Jerry too, still going strong at eighty, still surrounded by the adoring women of his congregation, though probably incapable of doing much about it. The old priest’s mood had darkened with the passing years. His weight had dropped, his voice weakened. He had become, in many ways, a smaller man. “I am happy, Raphael, to have lived in my time and not in this one,” he said over Chinese food. “In my time nobody ever dared say I was not a true Bombayite or a pukka Indian. Now, they say it.” Geronimo Manezes, hearing his original given name after so long, felt a pang of a feeling he recognized as alienation, the sensation of not belonging anymore to a part of oneself, and he understood, also, that Father Jerry, shoveling chicken chow mein into his face as if it were the Last Supper, felt similarly alienated, comparably unnamed. In the new Mumbai, after a lifetime’s service, he was newly inauthentic, excluded by the rise of extremist Hindutva ideology from full membership of his country, from his city, from himself. “I tell you a family story now I never told you before,” Father Jerry said. “I did not tell you because I thought, in my error, you were not truly a part of the family and for this I ask your pardon.” For Father Jerry to ask for forgiveness was a thunderbolt, a further indication that the place to which Geronimo Manezes had returned was no longer the place young Raphael Manezes had left so many years ago, while the hitherto-untold family story sounded, to Geronimo Manezes’s Americanized ear, pretty garbled and irrelevant, a tale of ancient rumored origins in twelfth-century Spain, of conversions, expulsions, intermarriages, wanderings, illegitimate children, jinn, a mythical matriarch called Dunia, a baby-factory who might have been Scheherazade’s sister or maybe a “genie without a bottle to pop or a lamp to rub” and a philosopher-patriarch, Averroës (Father Jerry used the Westernized version of Ibn Rushd’s name and unwittingly conjured up, before Geronimo’s mind’s eye, the face of Bento Elfenbein quoting Spinoza).

“I have little truck with Averroism, a deviant school of thought descended from the priapic doctor of Córdoba,” Father Jerry growled, thumping the table with a little of his old fervor. “Even in the Middle Ages it was considered a synonym for atheism. But if the story of Dunia the fertile maybe-genie-with-the-dark-brown-hair is true, if the Córdoban indeed planted his seed in that garden, then we are his bastard brood, the ‘Duniazát’ from which maybe down the centuries emerged our garbled ‘D’Niza,’ and the curse he laid upon us all is our destiny and our doom: the curse of being out of step with God, ahead of our time or behind it, who can say; of being weathercocks, showing how the wind blows, coal mine canaries, perishing to prove the air is poisonous, or lightning rods, through whom the storm strikes first. Of being the chosen people God smashes with his fist to make an example of, whenever he wants to make a point.”

So I’m being told at this point in my life that it’s okay to be my father’s illegitimate son because we are all a wrong-side-of-the-blanket tribe of bastards, Geronimo Manezes thought, and wondered if this too was part of the old man’s idea of an apology. He found it hard to take the story seriously, or to care about it very much. “If the story is true,” he said, making conversation to be polite, to conceal his lack of interest in this old-time folderol, “we are a little bit of everything, right? Jewslim Christians. Patchwork types.” Father Jerry’s heavy brow furrowed deeply. “Being a little bit of everything was the Bombay way,” he muttered. “But it is out of fashion. The narrow mind replaces the wide skirt. Majority rules and minority, look out. So we become outsiders in our own place, and when trouble comes, and trouble is coming for sure, outsiders have a habit of getting it in the neck before anyone else.”

“By the way,” Uncle Charles said, “the real reason you never heard the family fairy tale from him is that he didn’t want to admit his Jewish origins. Or maybe his genie origins, because genies don’t exist, do they, and if they do they come from the Devil, am I right? And the reason you didn’t hear it from me is that I forgot it years ago. My sexual orientation provided all the outsiderness I needed.” Father Jerry glared at his brother. “I always thought,” he said furiously, “you should have been beaten harder as a child, to thrash the buggery out of you.” Charles Duniza pointed a noodle-wrapped fork at the priest. “I used to pretend to myself that he was joking when he came out with stuff like this,” he told Geronimo. “Now, I can’t pretend anymore.” Lunch ended in a stiff, bad-tempered silence.

Chosen people, Geronimo thought. I’ve heard that term before.

Geronimo Manezes walking his formerly beloved streets realized that something had broken. When he left “Mumbai” a few days later he knew he would not return. He traveled the country with Uncle Charles, looking at buildings. They visited the home built by Le Corbusier in Gujarat for the matriarch of a textile dynasty. The house was cool and airy, protected by brise-soleil structures from the excesses of the sun. But it was the garden that spoke to Geronimo. It seemed to be clawing at the house, snaking its way inside, trying to destroy the barriers that separated exterior space from interior. In the upper regions of the house, flowers and grass successfully surmounted its walls, and the floor became a lawn. He left that place knowing he no longer wanted to be an architect. Uncle Charles went south to Goa but Geronimo Manezes made his way to Kyoto in Japan and sat at the feet of the great horticulturist Ryonosuke Shimura, who taught him that the garden was the outward expression of inner truth, the place where the dreams of our childhoods collided with the archetypes of our cultures, and created beauty. The land might belong to the landowner but the garden belonged to the gardener. This was the power of the horticultural art. Il faut cultiver son jardin didn’t sound so quietist when viewed through Shimura’s vision. But he had been named Hieronymus and knew from the great painter who was his mighty namesake that a garden could also be a metaphor of the infernal. In the end both Bosch’s terrifying “earthly delights” and Shimura’s murmurous mysticism helped him formulate his own thoughts and he came to see the garden, and his work in it, as somehow Blakean, a marriage of heaven and hell.

After the Indian trip Uncle Charles announced his decision to bring his small nest egg back to Goa and retire. He had bought a simple cottage there, and put up for sale the brownstone in St. Mark’s (the Raúls of the 1970s were long gone). The proceeds would take care of his old age. As to the practice, “It’s yours if you want it,” he told Geronimo, who for perhaps the first time in his life knew exactly what he did want. He took over the Greenwich Avenue office and, with a little financial help from Bento Elfenbein, reconstituted it as a gardening-landscaping service, Geronimo Gardener, to which Bento’s treasured daughter Ella added the Mr. that made it sing, that brought him into the fullness of his new American identity. Mr. Geronimo he was to everyone from then on.

Young Ella Elfenbein, of course, was what he really wanted, and unaccountably she wanted him too: motherless Ella, who had no memory of Rakel Elfenbein, lost to cancer when Ella was just two, but who was, for her father, her mother’s very image and reincarnation. It was Ella’s mysteriously unshakable love for Mr. Geronimo, whom, as she liked to say, she had after all partly invented, that led Bento to invest in the man she was going to marry. Ella was an olive-skinned beauty, her chin slightly too prominent, her ears, oddly, the same as his own, a little lacking in the lobes, and her maxillary central incisors a little too vampirishly long, but Mr. Geronimo wasn’t complaining, he knew he was a lucky man. If he believed in souls he would have said she had a good one and he knew, from the stories she couldn’t help telling him, how many men hit on her on a daily basis. But her loyalty to him was as unswerving as it was mysterious. She was, additionally, the most positive spirit Mr. Geronimo had ever encountered. She didn’t like books with unhappy endings, faced every day of her life with joy, and believed that all reverses could be turned to one’s advantage. She accepted the idea that positive thinking could help cure diseases whereas anger made you sick, and one day, searching idly through Sunday morning TV, she heard a televangelist saying God prospers the faithful, he’s going to give you whatever you want, all you have to do is truly want it, and Mr. Geronimo heard her murmur under her breath, “That’s true.” She believed in God as firmly as she hated gefilte fish, she didn’t think men descended from monkeys, and she knew, she told him, that there was a heaven, where she was going eventually, and also a hell, where unfortunately he was probably bound, except that she was going to save him, so that he could have a happy ending too. He decided he would find all this not alien but delightful and their marriage was good. The years ran on. They had no children. Ella was barren. Maybe that was why she loved the idea of his being a gardener. At least there were some seeds he could plant and watch their flowers grow.

He told her in his black-comic way about lonely men in remote localities who fucked the earth, who made a hole in the soil and planted their own seed there to see if man-plants would grow, half human, half vegetal, but she made him stop, she didn’t like stories like that, Why don’t you tell me happy stories? she scolded him, That wasn’t nice. He hung his head in mock apology and she forgave him, nothing mock about her forgiveness, she meant it, as she meant everything she said or did.

The years ran on some more. The trouble Father Jerry had predicted came to Bombay which had become Mumbai and there was a December and January of communal rioting during which nine hundred people died, mostly Muslims and Hindus, but, according to the official count, there were also forty-five “unknown” and five “others.” Charles Duniza had come to Mumbai from Goa to visit the Kamathipura red-light district in search of Manjula, his favorite hijra “sex worker,” to use the new morally neutral term, and found death instead of sex work. A mob angered by the destruction in Ayodhya of the Mughal emperor Babar’s mosque ran through the streets and perhaps the first victims of the Hindu-Muslim troubles were a Christian “other” and his transgender whore, an “other” of another kind. Nobody cared. Father Jerry was off his turf, at the Minara mosque in the Pydhonie district, trying, as a “third party,” neither Muslim or Hindu, to use his long eminence in the city to calm the passions of the faithful, but he was told to leave, and maybe somebody followed him, somebody with murder in mind, and Father Jerry never got home to Bandra. After that there were two waves of killings, and Charles and Father Jerry became insignificant statistics. The city which once prided itself on being above communal troubles was above them no longer. Bombay was gone, dying with the Very Rev. Fr. Jeremiah D’Niza. All that remained was the new, uglier Mumbai.

“You’re all I have now,” Geronimo Manezes told Ella when the news about his uncle and father reached him. Then Bento Elfenbein died, struck by lightning out of a clear night sky while he was smoking an after-dinner cigar on his beloved hundred acres in Big Groundnut after a jovial dinner with good friends, and it emerged that his entrepreneurial dealings had led him to the edge of ruin, he had been involved in a lot of funny business, not actual Ponzi schemes but similar smoke-and-mirrors con games, home improvement and office supply scams, a Max Bialystock — type movie production swindle that gave him intense pleasure, Who’d have thought, he had written in an incriminating notebook found hidden in his bedroom after his passing, that Springtime for Hitler idea would actually work in real life? There was at least one giant pyramid con in the Midwest, and his whole operation was so heavily leveraged that immediately after his death the Elfenbein house of cards went tumbling into the humiliation of seizures and foreclosures. The Groundnut acres were forfeited and not one of Bento’s dream houses was ever built. If Elfenbein had lived, he would have done jail time, Mr. Geronimo realized. The authorities were on Bento’s trail, for tax fraud and a dozen other infractions, and they were closing in. The bolt from the blue gave him a dignified exit, or rather one as flamboyant as his life. “Now,” said Ella, who inherited what she described as next to nothing, “you’re all I have too.” As he took her into his arms he felt a tremor of superstition shake his body. He remembered Father Jerry talking, at that strained Chinese lunch, about Ibn Rushd’s household being cursed by God to be lightning rods or examples. Was it possible, he wondered, that those families who were joined to his family by marriage fell under the curse as well? Stop it, he admonished himself. You don’t believe in medieval curses, or in God.

This, when she was thirty and he forty-four. She had made him a happy man. Mr. Geronimo the contented gardener, his weathered days spread out in the open like mysteries revealed, his spade trowel shears and glove speaking the language of living things as eloquently as any writer’s pen, flower-pinking the earth in spring or fighting winter ice. Perhaps it is in the nature of workers to translate themselves into what they work upon, the way dog lovers come to look like their dogs, so perhaps Mr. Geronimo’s little foible was not so peculiar after all — but often, if truth be told, he preferred to think of himself as a plant, perhaps even as one of those man-plants born of sexual congress between a human being and the earth; and, consequently, as the gardened rather than the gardener. He placed himself in the soil of time and wondered, godlessly, who might be gardening him. In these imaginings he cast himself always among the rootless plants, the epiphytes and bryophytes, who must lean upon others, being unable to stand alone. So he was, in his own fancy, a sort of moss or lichen or creeping orchid, and the one he leaned upon, the gardener of his nonexistent soul, was Ella Manezes. His loving and much-loved wife.

Sometimes when they made love she told him he smelled like smoke. Sometimes she said it was as if in the throes of his passion the edges of his body softened, became blurry, so that her body could melt into his. He told her he burned garden refuse every day. He told her she was imagining things. Neither of them suspected the truth.

Then, seven years after Bento’s death, lightning struck again.

The thousand-and-one-acre La Incoerenza property had been named by a man dedicated to numbers who believed that the world didn’t add up, Mr. Sanford Bliss the animal-feed king, producer of the famous Bliss Chows for pigs, rabbits, cats, dogs, horses, cattle, and monkeys. It was said of Sanford Bliss that there wasn’t a line of poetry in his head but every dollar figure he’d ever encountered was neatly filed away and readily accessible. He believed in cash; and in the great vault in his library concealed behind a portrait painted in the Florentine manner depicting him as a Tuscan grandee, he stored, always, an almost comical amount of cash money, well over one million dollars in bricks of notes of different denominations, because, as he said, you never know. He also believed in numerical superstitions, such as the idea that round numbers were unlucky, you never charged ten dollars for a bag of feed, you charged $9.99, and you never gave a man a hundred-dollar tip, but always one hundred and one.

When he was a college student he spent a summer in Florence as a guest of the Actons of La Pietra and at their dinner table in the company of artists and thinkers for whom numbers were meaningless or at best common and therefore beneath consideration he encountered the extraordinarily un-American idea that reality was not something given, not an absolute, but something that men made up, and that values, too, changed according to who was doing the valuing. A world that did not cohere, in which truth did not exist and was replaced by warring versions trying to dominate or even eradicate their rivals, horrified him and, being bad for business, struck him as a thing that needed altering. He named his home La Incoerenza, incoherence in Italian, to remind him daily of what he had learned in Italy, and spent a sizable proportion of his wealth promoting those politicians who held, usually because of genuine or fake religious convictions, that the eternal certainties needing protecting and that monopolies, of goods, information and ideas, were not only beneficial but essential to the preservation of American liberty. In spite of his efforts the world’s incompatibility levels, what Sanford Bliss in his numerical way came to call its index of incoherence, continued inexorably to rise. “If zero is the point of sanity at which two plus two always equals four, and one is the fucked-up place where two and two can add up to any damn thing you want them to be,” he told his daughter Alexandra, the adored child of his old age, born to his last, much more youthful, Siberian wife long after he had given up the dream of an heir, “then, Sandy, I’m sorry to tell you that we are currently located somewhere around zero point nine seven three.”

When her parents suddenly died, when they fell out of the sky into the East River, the arbitrariness of their end finally proving to Sanford Bliss’s daughter Alexandra that the universe was not only incoherent and absurd but also heartless and soulless, the young orphan inherited everything; and having neither business acumen nor entrepreneurial interest, she immediately negotiated the sale of the Bliss Chows to the Land O’Lakes agricultural cooperative of Minnesota, thus becoming, at nineteen years of age, America’s youngest billionairess. She completed her studies at Harvard, where she revealed an exceptional gift for the acquisition of languages, becoming fluent, by the end of her time at the university, in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, Hungarian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Russian, Pashto, Farsi, Arabic, and Tagalog, she picked them up in no time, people said in wonderment, like shiny pebbles on a beach; and she picked up a man too, the usual penniless Argentine polo player, a healthy slice of beef from the estancias named Manuel Fariña, picked him up and dropped him fast, married and quickly divorced. She kept his name, turned vegetarian, and sent him packing. After her divorce she retreated forever into the seclusion of La Incoerenza. Here she began her long inquiry into pessimism, inspired by both Schopenhauer and Nietzche, and, convinced of the absurdity of human life and the incompatibility of happiness and freedom, settled while still in the first bloom of youth into a lifetime of solitude and gloom, cloistered in abstraction and dressed in close-fitting white lace. Ella Elfenbein Manezes referred to her, with more than a little scorn, as the Lady Philosopher, and the name stuck, at least in Mr. Geronimo’s head.

There was a streak of masochistic stoicism in the Lady Philosopher, and in bad weather she was often to be found out of doors, ignoring the wind and drizzle or rather accepting them as truthful representatives of the growing hostility of the earth towards its occupants, sitting under an old spreading oak reading a damp book by Unamuno or Camus. The rich are obscure to us, finding ways to be unhappy when all the normal causes of unhappiness are removed. But unhappiness had touched the Lady Philosopher. Her parents were killed in their private helicopter. An elite death but at the moment of dying we are all penniless. She never spoke of it. It would be generous to understand her behavior, willful, remote, abstract, as her way of expressing grief.

The Hudson at the end of its journey is a “drowned river,” its fresh water pushed beneath the incoming salt tides of the sea. “Even the goddamn river makes no sense,” Sanford Bliss told his daughter. “Look how often it flows the wrong goddamn way.” The Indians had called it Shatemuc, the river that flows both ways. On the banks of the drowned river La Incoerenza likewise resisted order. Mr. Geronimo was called in to help. His reputation as a gardener and landscape artist had grown, and he was recommended to her manager, an avuncular British grizzlechops named Oliver Oldcastle with the beard of Karl Marx, a voice like a bassoon, a drink problem, and a Father Jerry — style Catholic upbringing that had left him loving the Bible and loathing the Church. Oldcastle ushered Mr. Geronimo into the grounds, looking like God showing Adam into Eden, and charged him with the task of bringing horticultural coherence to the place. When Mr. Geronimo started working for the Lady Philosopher tangles of thorns filled the ha-ha at the bottom of the garden as if surrounding a sleeping beauty’s castle. Obstinate voles burrowed underground and popped up everywhere, ruining the lawns. Foxes raided the chicken coops. If Mr. Geronimo had run into a snake coiled around a branch of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he wouldn’t have been surprised. The Lady Philosopher shrugged delicately at the state of things. She was barely twenty then but already spoke with the pitiless formality of a dowager. “To bring a country place to heel,” the orphan châtelaine of La Incoerenza stiffly said, “one must kill and kill and kill, one must destroy and destroy. Only after years of mayhem can a measure of stable beauty be achieved. This is the meaning of civilization. Your eyes, however, are soft. I fear you may not be the murderer I need. But anyone else would probably be just as bad.”

Because of her belief in the growing weakness and increasing incompetence of the human race in general, she agreed to put up with Mr. Geronimo, and suffer with a sigh the consequent imperfections of her land. She retreated into thought and left Mr. Geronimo to the war of the thorns and voles. His failures went unnoticed, his successes earned him no praise. A deadly oak blight struck the region, threatening Alexandra’s beloved trees; he followed the example of scientists on the country’s far western coast who were coating or injecting oaks with a commercial fungicide that kept the fatal pathogen, Phytophthora ramorum, at bay. When he told his employer that the treatment had succeeded and all her oaks were saved, she shrugged and turned away, as if to say, Something else will kill them soon enough.

Ella Manezes and the Lady Philosopher, both young, smart and beautiful, could have become friends, but did not: what Ella called Alexandra’s “negativity,” her insistence, when challenged by the ever-hopeful Ella, that it was “impossible, at this point in history, to adopt a hopeful view of humanity,” drove them apart. Ella sometimes accompanied Mr. Geronimo to La Incoerenza and walked the grounds while he worked, or stood atop the estate’s single green hill watching the river pass by in the wrong direction; and it was on that hill, seven years after her father died, that she too was hit by lightning out of a clear sky, and died on the spot. Among the many aspects of her death that Mr. Geronimo found unbearable was this: that of the two beauties at La Incoerenza that day, the lightning had singled out the optimist for death, and had let the pessimist live.

The phenomenon colloquially known as a “bolt from the blue” works like this: the lightning flash emanates from the rear of a thundercloud and travels as many as twenty-five miles away from the storm area, then angles down and strikes the ground, or a tall building, or a lone tree in a high place, or a woman standing alone on a hilltop watching the river pass by. The storm from which it came is too far away to be seen. But the woman on the hilltop can be seen, falling slowly to the ground, like a feather complying, very reluctantly, with the law of gravity.

Mr. Geronimo thought of her dark eyes, the right eye with its floaters that hampered her sight. He conjured up her talkativeness, thinking of how she always had an opinion about everything, and wondering what he would do without her opinions now. He remembered how she hated to be photographed and listed in his thoughts all the foods she wouldn’t eat, meat, fish, eggs, dairy, tomatoes, onions, garlic, gluten, almost everything there was. And he wondered again if lightning was stalking his family; and if, by marrying into that family, Ella had called down the curse upon herself; and if he might be next in line. In the weeks that followed he began to study lightning as never before. When he learned that nine-tenths of the people who were struck by lightning survived, sometimes developing mysterious ailments, but managing to live on, he understood that lightning really had it in for Bento and his girl. Lightning wasn’t letting them off the hook. Maybe it was because he had convinced himself that he wouldn’t stand a chance if lightning ever came for him that even after he was caught in the great storm that first day, even after he discovered that his feet were suffering from the mysterious ailment of refusing to touch the ground, it took him a long time to think the obvious thought.

“Maybe lightning hit me during the hurricane and I lived but it wiped my memory clean so I didn’t remember being hit. And maybe I’m now carrying around some sort of insane electric charge and that’s why I’ve lifted off the surface of the earth.”

He didn’t think that until quite a while later, when Alexandra Fariña suggested it.

He asked the Lady Philosopher if he might bury his wife on her beloved green hill overlooking the drowned river and Alexandra said yes, of course. So he dug his wife’s grave and laid her in it and for a moment he was angry. Then there was an end to anger and he shouldered his shovel and went home alone. On the day his wife died he had worked at La Incoerenza for two years, eight months and twenty-eight days. One thousand days and one day. There was no escape from the curse of numbers.

Ten more years passed. Mr. Geronimo dug and planted and watered and pruned. He gave life and saved it. In his mind every bloom was her, every hedge and every tree. In his work he kept her alive and there was no room for anyone else. But slowly she faded. His plants and trees resumed their membership of the vegetable kingdom and ceased to be her avatars. It was as though she had left him again. After this second departure there was only emptiness and he was certain the void could never be filled. For ten years he lived in a sort of blur. The Lady Philosopher, wrapped as she was in theories, dedicated to the triumph of the worst-case scenario while eating truffled pasta and breaded veal, her head full of the mathematical formulae that provided the scientific basis for her pessimism, became herself a sort of abstraction, his chief source of income and no more. It continued to be difficult not to blame her for being the one who lived, whose survival, at the cost of his wife’s life, had not persuaded her to be grateful for her good luck and brighten her attitude to life. He looked at the land and at what grew upon it and could not raise his eyes to absorb the human being whose land it was. For ten years after his wife died he kept his distance from the Lady Philosopher, nursing his secret anger.

After a time, if you had asked him what Alexandra Bliss Fariña looked like, he would have been unable to answer with any precision. Her hair was dark like his late wife’s. She was tall, like his late wife. She didn’t like sitting in sunlight. Nor had Ella. It was said she walked her grounds at night because of her lifelong battle with insomnia. Her other employees, Manager Oldcastle and the rest, spoke of the persistent health problems that perhaps caused, or at least contributed to, her air of profound gloom. “So young, and so often sick,” Oldcastle said. He used the antique word consumption: tuberculosis, the sickness of little tubers. The potato is a tuber and there are flowers like dahlias whose fleshy roots, properly called rhizomes, are known as tubers too. Mr. Geronimo had no expertise in the tubercles that formed in human lungs. Those were issues for the house to deal with. He was out in the open. The plants he tended contained the spirit of his deceased wife. The Lady Philosopher was a phantom, though she, and not Ella, was the one who was still alive.

Alexandra never published under her own name, or in the English language. Her pseudonym of choice was “El Criticón,” taken from the title of the seventeenth-century allegorical novel by Baltasar Gracián which had greatly influenced her idol Schopenhauer, greatest of all pessimist thinkers. The novel was about the impossibility of human happiness. In a much-derided Spanish-language essay, The Worst of All Possible Worlds, “El Criticón” proposed the theory, widely ridiculed as sentimental, that the rift between the human race and the planet was approaching a tipping point, an ecological crisis that was metamorphosing into an existential one. Her academic peers patted her on the head, congratulated her on her command of castellano, and dismissed her as an amateur. But after the time of the strangenesses she would be seen as a kind of prophetess.

(Mr. Geronimo thought Alexandra Fariña’s use of pseudonyms and foreign languages indicated an uncertainty about the self. Mr. Geronimo too suffered from his own kind of ontological insecurity. At night, alone, he looked at the face in the mirror and tried to see the young chorister “Raffy-’Ronnimus-the-pastor’s-sonnimus” there, struggling to imagine the path not taken, the life not led, the other fork in the forked path of life. He could no longer imagine it. Sometimes he filled up with a kind of rage, the fury of the uprooted, the un-tribed. But mostly he no longer thought in tribal terms.)

The indolence of her days, the delicacy of her china, the elegance of her high-necked lace dresses, the amplitude of her estate and her carelessness regarding its condition, her fondness for marrons glacés and Turkish delight, the leather-bound aristocracy of her library, and the floral-patterned prettiness of the journals in which she made her almost military assault on the possibility of joy should have hinted to her why she was not taken seriously beyond the walls of La Incoerenza. But her small world was enough for her. She cared nothing for the opinions of strangers. Reason could not and would never triumph over savage, undimmed unreason. The heat-death of the universe was inevitable. Her glass of water was half empty. Things fell apart. The only proper response to the failure of optimism was to retreat behind high walls, walls in the self as well as in the world, and to await the inevitability of death. Voltaire’s fictional optimist, Dr. Pangloss, was, after all, a fool, and his real-life mentor, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, was in the first place a failure as an alchemist (in Nuremberg he had not managed to transmute base metal into gold), and in the second place a plagiarist (vide the damaging accusation leveled at Leibniz by associates of Sir Isaac Newton — that he, G. W. Leibniz, inventor of the infinitesimal calculus, had sneaked a look at Newton’s work on that subject and pinched the Englishman’s ideas). “If the best of all possible worlds is one in which another thinker’s ideas can be purloined,” she wrote, “then perhaps it would be better after all to accept Dr. Pangloss’s advice, and withdraw to cultivate one’s garden.”

She did not cultivate her garden. She employed a gardener.

It was a long time since Mr. Geronimo had considered sex, but recently, he had to confess, the subject had begun to cross his thoughts again. At his age such thinking veered towards the theoretical, the practical business of finding and conjoining with an actual partner being, given the ineluctable law of tempus fugit, a thing of the past. He hypothesized that there were more than two sexes, that in fact each human being was a gender unique to himself or herself, so that maybe new personal pronouns were required, better words than he or she. Obviously it was entirely inappropriate. Amid the infinity of sexes there were a very few sexes with which one could have congress, who wished to join one in congress, and with some of those sexes one was briefly compatible, or compatible for a reasonable length of time before the process of rejection began as it does in transplanted hearts or livers. In very rare cases one found the other sex with whom one was compatible for life, permanently compatible, as if the two sexes were the same, which perhaps, according to this new definition, they were. Once in his life he had found that perfect gender and the odds against doing so again were prohibitive, not that he was looking, not that he ever would. But here, now, in the aftermath of the storm, as he stood on the sea of mud full of the indestructible shit of the past, or, to be precise, as he somehow failed to stand on that sea, hovering just a fraction above it, just high enough to allow a sheet of paper to pass without difficulty under his boots, now, as he wept for the death of his imagination and was filled with fears and doubts on account of the failure of gravity in his immediate vicinity, at this absolutely inappropriate moment, here was his employer, the Lady Philosopher, the fodder heiress Alexandra Bliss Fariña, beckoning to him from her French windows.

Mr. Geronimo arriving at the French windows noted the estate manager Oliver Oldcastle positioned behind Alexandra’s left shoulder. If he had been a hawk, thought Mr. Geronimo, he would have perched upon that shoulder, ready to attack his mistress’s foes and rip their hearts out of their chests. Mistress and servant they stood together, surveying the ruin of La Incoerenza, Oliver Oldcastle looking like Marx observing the fall of Communism, Alexandra her customary enigmatic self in spite of the drying tears on her cheeks. “I can’t complain,” she said, addressing neither Mr. Geronimo nor Manager Oldcastle, rebuking herself as if she were her own governess. “People have lost their homes and have nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep. All I have lost is a garden.” Mr. Geronimo the gardener understood that he was being put in his place. But Alexandra was looking at his boots now. “It’s a miracle,” she said. “Look, Oldcastle, a real miracle. Mr. Geronimo has taken leave of solid ground and moved upwards into, let us say, more speculative territory.”

Mr. Geronimo wanted to protest that his levitation was neither his doing nor his choice, to make it plain that he would be happy to subside to the ground again and get his boots dirty. But Alexandra had a glitter in her eye. “Were you struck by lightning?” she asked. “Yes, that’s it. Lightning hit you during the hurricane and you lived, but it wiped your memory clean, so you don’t remember being hit. And now you’re filled with an unspeakably large electric charge and that’s why you’ve lifted off the surface of the earth.” This silenced Mr. Geronimo, who considered it gravely. Yes, perhaps. Though in the absence of any evidence it was no more than a supposition. He found it difficult to know what to say but there was nothing he needed to say. “Here’s another miracle,” Alexandra said, and her voice was different now, no longer imperious but confidential. “For most of my life I have set aside the possibility of love, and then, just now, I realized that it was waiting for me right here, at home, outside my French windows, stamping its boots towards the mud, but untouched by that evil filth.” Then she turned and vanished into the shadows of the house.

He feared a trap. Appointments of this sort were not on his schedule anymore, never had been, really. Manager Oldcastle jerked his head, ordering him to follow the lady of the house. So Mr. Geronimo understood that he had his orders and moved indoors, not knowing where the lady of the house had gone. But he followed the trail of her discarded clothing and found her easily enough.

His night with Alexandra Bliss Fariña began strangely. Whatever force was preventing him from touching the ground was also at work in her bed, and when she lay beneath him his body hovered above hers, just a fraction of an inch above, but there was a definite separation that made things awkward. He tried placing his hands beneath her buttocks and lifting her towards him but that was uncomfortable for them both. They solved the problem soon enough; if he was beneath her then things worked well enough, even if his back didn’t quite touch the bed. His condition seemed to arouse her, and that in turn excited him, but the moment their lovemaking was over she appeared to lose interest and swiftly fell asleep, leaving him to stare at the ceiling in the dark. And when he got out of bed to dress and leave, the gap between his feet and the floor was distinctly greater. After his night with the mistress of La Incoerenza he had lifted almost a full inch off the ground.

He left her bedchamber to find Oldcastle outside with murder in his eyes. “Don’t imagine you’re the first,” the manager told Mr. Geronimo. “Don’t imagine that at your ridiculous age you are the only love she has ever found waiting right outside her window. You pathetic old fungus. You sickening parasite. You growth, you blunted thorn, you bad seed. Get out and don’t come back.” Mr. Geronimo understood at once that Oliver Oldcastle had been driven mad by unrequited love. “My wife is buried on that hill,” he said firmly, “and I will visit her grave whenever I choose. You will have to kill me to stop me, unless I kill you first.”

“Your marriage ended last night in milady’s bedchamber,” retorted Oliver Oldcastle. “And as to which of us kills the other, that bloomin’ remains to be seen.”

There had been fires, and buildings our ancestors had had known all their lives stood charred among them, staring into the pitiless brightness through the hollow sockets of their blackened eyes, like the undead on TV. As our ancestors emerged from their places of safety and lurched through the orphaned streets, the storm began to feel like their fault. There were preachers on television calling it God’s punishment for their licentious ways. But that was not the point. It did feel, at least to some of them, that something they had made had escaped their grasp and, freed, had raged around them for days. When the earth, air and water calmed down they feared that force’s return. But for a time they were busy with repair work, with feeding the hungry and caring for the old and weeping for the fallen trees, and there was no time to think about the future. Wise voices calmed our ancestors, telling them not to think of the weather as a metaphor. It was neither a warning nor a curse. It was just the weather. This was the soothing information they wanted. They accepted it. So most of them were looking in the wrong direction and did not notice the moment when the strangenesses arrived to turn everything upside down.