“That’s what, Z-Company?”
“It’s the mafia,” he said. “Z is for the godfather, Zamzama Alankar. Not his real name.”
She shrugged. “You want to know why I have the gun in the drawer? I’ll tell you. It’s like a bad TV show. My father Zachariassen got drunk and murdered my mother when I was home for Thanksgiving and I ran out into the street yelling help police and he fired at me as I was running and shouted I’ll find you, I’ll hunt you down. By then he was a full-blown psycho. He used to be an airline pilot for Northwest but after the Delta merger the carrier was looking to downsize and his up-and-down moods got him fired and then he started drinking and they got worse and he became a scary person. He was living with my mother in Mendota Heights, Minnesota, which is a pretty well-off first-ring suburb of the Twin Cities, above his pay grade. My mom was an orphan, her parents had died and left her money, so she had bought the house and car and I grew up there and went to a good school but after he lost his job they were struggling. By that time I was done with college, I put myself through Tufts on a scholarship and different jobs, and I was working here in the city, and after the murder I left Mendota Heights fast and closed that chapter forever. Except that I keep the gun. He’s gone to jail for like a million years without possibility of commutation or remission but I’m not getting rid of the weapon.”
She played the song on the guitar some more, but didn’t sing.
“So my sob story is better than yours,” she finally said. “And I’ll tell you why you agreed to your father’s crazy plan. You agreed because there, where you came from, you weren’t free to be who you need to be, to become who you need to become.”
“And what is that.”
“That is what I’m waiting for you to tell me.”
It’s the thing she keeps coming back to ever since he told her about it, what he did to his stepmother, her humiliation, her near-suicide. You are a loving person, I see that, she says, but this I don’t understand, how you could stoop so low.
I think, he says, that hatred can be as strong a family tie as blood, or love. And when I was younger I was full of hate and it was the bond joining me to the family and that’s why I did what I did.
It’s not enough, she says. There is more.
The limo arrives at a warehouse in Bushwick where she needs to inspect some South Asian artifacts that the Museum of Identity has been offered. Come, she had urged him, at least two of them concern the visit of Dionysus to India, so you’ll be interested. She doesn’t trust the dealer. She has been sent paperwork certifying that the items were legally exported from India but these documents can be illicitly obtained. In the old days before the Indian Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, she says, it was actually harder to smuggle stuff out, because people were not sure whom to bribe. But since 1976 the exporters know which inspectors to deal with, so it’s more straightforward. Acquisitions are complicated by such questions of provenance. Still, worth a look.
There is a painting of Dionysus surrounded by panthers and tigers and she has no interest in it. The other piece is a marble bowl around which a triumphal procession has been carved and it is exquisite, a riotous crowd of satyrs, nymphs, animals and at their heart the god. See how feminine he is, she says. He’s right on the gender borderline, you almost don’t know whether to call him goddess or god. She’s looking penetratingly at D as she speaks, an unasked question in her eyes, and he shies away.
What, he says. What is this. What do you want.
This is almost certainly an unauthorized export, she says to the dealer, handing back the bowl. The documentation is unconvincing. We can’t acquire.
They are in the car on the way home. Construction work on the approach to the Manhattan Bridge, slowing the traffic to a crawl. Come on, she says, you didn’t come to me by accident, you didn’t just show up at the MoI because you had zero interest in what we explore there. And your stepmother, maybe there’s something in you that wants to die, some part of you that doesn’t want to be alive anymore, and that’s why you pushed her to the edge of death. Here’s what you need to tell me about. Why did you want to step into her shoes? What part of you wanted to be her, the mother, the housewife, with the household keys, in charge of domestic duties? Why was that need so imperative that you did such an extreme thing? Yeah, I need to know about all that. But before me, you need to know about it yourself.
Let me out of the car, he says. Stop the fucking car.
Really, she answers without raising her voice. You’re going to get out of the car.
Stop the goddamn motherfucking car.
Afterwards he found it hard to remember the fight, he just remembered the sensations her words provoked, the explosion in his brain, the fogged vision, the pounding heart, the shaking caused by the obvious absurdity of her accusations, the insulting wrongness of her attack. He wanted to call upon an almighty judge to declare her guilty, but there was no eye of heaven watching them, no recording angel to be summoned. He wanted her to apologize. Damn it. She had to apologize. Profusely.
He returned in a fury to the house on Macdougal Street, saying nothing to anyone, wrapped in a storm that warned everyone to leave him alone. Riya and he didn’t speak for four days. On the fifth day she called, sounding like the composed adult she was. Come home. I want company in bed. I want…Zzzzzz Company.
He began to laugh, couldn’t help it, and then it was easy to say sorry, sorry, sorry.
We’ll talk about that, she said.
She was sitting on the floor reading a book. On a small bookshelf in the Chinatown apartment she kept seven books, some famous works—by Juan Rulfo, Elsa Morante, and Anna Akhmatova—others less lofty, Green Eggs and Ham, Twilight, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Hunt for Red October. It was Akhmatova she had chosen to read.
You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the color of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.
“When I’m done with a book,” she said, “it is also done with me and moves on. I leave it on a bench in Columbus Park. Maybe the Chinese people playing cards or Go won’t want my book, the nostalgic Chinese bowing mournfully at the statue of Sun Yat-sen, but there are the couples coming out of City Hall with their wedding licenses and stars in their eyes, wandering for a minute among the cyclists and the kids, smiling with the knowledge of their newly licensed love, and I imagine they might like to discover the book, as a gift from the city to mark their special day, or the book may like to discover them. In the beginning I was just giving books away. I got a new book, I gave away an old one. I always keep just seven. But then I began to find that others were leaving books where I had left mine and I thought, these are for me. So now I replenish my library with the random gifts of unknown strangers and I never know what I will read next, I wait for the homeless books to call out: you, reader, you are for me. I do not choose what I read anymore. I am wandering through the discarded stories of the city.”
He stood in the doorway, contrite, awkward. She spoke without looking up from the page. He sat down beside her, his back against the wall. She leaned toward him, just a little, so that their shoulders touched. Her arms were crossed, her hands hugging her shoulders. She stretched out one finger and touched his arm.
“If you smoked cigarettes,” she said, “we would have something in common.”
Cut.
“The following day,” he says. It is the following day, a day in the present tense. “Here we are on the following day,” he says. “Tomorrow, one of the two impossible days. Here we are and it is tomorrow.”
“I am a free spirit,” she says, twisting her mouth dismissively, nothing special, her mouth says. “But you are everywhere in chains. You have inner voices to which you don’t listen, emotions boiling up in you which you suppress, and disturbing dreams you ignore.”
“I never dream,” he says, “except sometimes in another language, in Technic
olor, but they are always peaceful dreams. The rolling sea, the grandeur of the Himalayas, my mother smiling down at me, and green-eyed tigers.”
“I hear you,” she says. “When you are not snoring, often you howl, but it is more like an owl than a wolf. Who…who…who…that’s how you are. This is the question you can’t answer.”
They are walking on the Bowery and the pavement and sidewalk around them are ripped apart by construction work. A jackhammer starts pounding and it is impossible to hear anyone speak. He turns to her and mouths silently, really not saying anything, just opening and shutting his face. The jackhammer stops for a minute.
“That’s my answer,” he says.
Cut.
They are making love. It is still tomorrow, still the afternoon, but they are both in the mood and see no reason to wait until dark. However, they both close their eyes. Sex has many solitary aspects even when there is another person present, whom you love and wish to please. And seeing the other is no longer required once the lovers are well practiced in their favorite ways. Their bodies by now are educated in each other, each learning to move in ways that accommodate the other’s natural movement. Their mouths know how to find each other. Their hands know what to do. There are no rough edges; their lovemaking has been smoothed.
There is a way it most often goes, a difficulty that usually presents itself. He has a problem achieving and maintaining an erection. He finds her immensely attractive, he protests as much at the moment of each failure, each softening, and she accepts it and embraces him. Sometimes he does succeed for a moment and attempts to enter her but then at the moment of penetration softens again and his flaccid sex squashes up against hers. It does not matter because they have found many other ways to succeed. Her attraction to him is so great that at his first touch she approaches climax and so by touching and kissing, by the use of the secondary organs (hands, lips, tongue), he brings her to orgasm until she is laughing in spent delight. Her pleasure becomes his and often it isn’t even necessary for him to ejaculate. He is satisfied by satisfying her. They become more adventurous with each other as things progress, a little rougher, and this too is very pleasurable to them both. She thinks, but does not say, that the usual difficulty with young men is that they become hard at once and repeatedly but, lacking patience, self-control, or courtesy, they are done two minutes later. These long hours of lovemaking are infinitely more pleasurable. What she says is, and she has thought a long time before saying it: It’s as if we are two women. It feels so safe, so abandoned, both. The second because of the first.
There. She has said it. It’s out in the open. He is lying on his back staring at the ceiling. For a long moment he does not reply. Then:
Yeah, he says.
Another long silence.
Yeah what, she asks quietly, her hand on his chest, her fingers caressing him.
Yeah, he said. I think about that. I think about it a lot.
Flashback. Circular wipe.
It’s the year Michael Jackson played Bombay. Mumbai. Bombay. On the TV news men in pink and saffron turbans are at the airport, jigging frantically to the music of dhols. A large fabric sign hanging in the arrivals hall crying out NAMASTE MICHAEL NAMASTE FROM AIRPORTS AUTHORITY OF INDIA. And MJ in black hat and red blazer with gold buttons applauding the dancers. You are my special love, India, he says. May God always bless you. The boy D twelve years old in his bedroom, watching the news, teaching himself to moonwalk, mouthing the words of the famous songs, he has all the lyrics down, one hundred percent. Great day! And then the next morning sitting in the car with the driver on his way to school. They come down off the hill onto Marine Drive and there’s a traffic jam by Chowpatty Beach. And suddenly there he is, MJ himself, walking among the stationary cars! Omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod. But no, of course it’s not Michael Jackson. It’s a hijra. A hijra like a giant Michael wearing Michael’s black hat and red coat with gold buttons. Cheap imitations of. How dare you. Take those off. Those don’t belong to you. The hijra with right hand touching hat brim doing pencil turns amid the jammed traffic, clutching at his her its groin. The hijra has a battered boombox, it’s playing “Bad,” the hijra with white face-paint and red lipstick mouthing along. It’s disgusting. It’s irresistible. It’s terrifying. How can it be allowed. The hijra is right up against his car window now, the young milord on his way to Cathedral School, dance with me, young master, dance with me. Shouting against the rolled-up window, pressing red lips against the glass. Hato, hato, the driver shouts, waving an arm, get away, and the hijra laughs, a high contemptuous falsetto laugh, and walks away into the sun.
Circular wipe.
When you showed me the statue of Ardhanarishvara I blurted out, from Elephanta Island, and then I shut my mouth. But yes, I know him-her from long ago. It is the coming together of Shiva and Shakti, the Being and Doing forces of the Hindu godhead, the fire and the heat, in the body of this single double-gendered deity. Ardha, half, nari, woman, ishvara, god. Male one side, female the other. I have been thinking about her-him since boyhood. But after I saw the hijra I was afraid. Everybody was a little afraid of hijras, a little revolted, and so I was too. I was fascinated as well, that is true, but I was also afraid of the fact that I was fascinated. What did they have to do with me, these women-men? Whatever I heard about them made me shudder. Especially Operation. They call it that, Operation, in English. They take alcohol or opium but no anesthetic. The deed is done by other hijras, not a doctor, a string tied around the genitals to get a clean cut, and then a long curved knife slashing down. The raw area allowed to bleed, then cauterized with hot oil. In the days afterwards, as the wound heals, the urethra is kept open by repeated probing. In the end, a puckered scar, resembling, and usable as, a vagina. What did that have to do with me, nothing, I had no fondness for my genitals but this, this, ugh.
What did you say just then, she interrupted. No fondness for your genitals.
I didn’t say that. That is not a thing I said.
Cut.
Riya is sitting on the floor, reading from a book. “According to the poet-saints of Shaivism, Shiva is Ammai-Appar, Mother and Father combined. It is said of Brahma that he created humankind by converting himself into two persons: the first male, Manu Svayambhuva, and the first female, Satarupa. India has always understood androgyny, the man in the woman’s body, the woman in the man’s.”
D is in a state of high agitation, walking from white wall to white wall, slapping at the wall when he reaches it, turning around to walk the other way, reaching the wall, slapping, turning, walking, reaching, slapping.
I don’t know what you’re trying to do to me. That job at the Museum is fucking with your head. This is who I am. I’m not some other individual. This is me.
Riya doesn’t look up, goes on reading aloud. “Few hijras settle in their places of origin. Family rejection and disapproval probably accounts for the uprooting. Having re-created themselves as beings whom their original families often reject, hijras usually take those new identities to new places, where new families form around them and take them in.”
Stop, he shouts. I’m not prepared to hear this. You want to drag me into the gutter? I am the youngest son of Nero Golden. Did you hear me? The youngest son. I’m not ready.
“ ‘As a child I followed girlish ways and was laughed at and scolded for my girlishness.’ ‘I often thought I should live like a boy and I tried hard but I couldn’t do it.’ ‘We also are part of creation.’ ” She looks up from the book, snaps it shut, gets to her feet and goes to stand right in front of him, their faces very close together, his angry, hers absolutely expressionless and neutral.
You know what? she says. Many of them don’t have Operation. They never have it. It’s not necessary. What’s important is who they know they are.
Is that a book you found on a park bench? he asks. Really?
She shakes her head, slowly, sadly, No, of course not.
I’m leaving, he says.
He leaves. Ou
tside in the hot afternoon street, it’s noisy, garish, crowded. It’s Chinatown.
A gigantic insect. A monstrous vermin. A verminous bug. Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from troubled dreams to discover that he had been transformed in his own bed into an ungeheuren Ungeziefer. People disagreed on the best translation. The exact nature of the creature is not precisely specified in the Kafka story. Maybe a giant cockroach. The cleaning woman says he’s a dung beetle. He himself doesn’t seem too sure. Something horrible, anyway, with an armored back and little waving legs. “Into an ungeheuren Ungeziefer.” Not a thing anyone would want to be. A thing from which everyone finally turned away in horror, his employer, his family, even his beloved and formerly loving sister. A dead thing, in the end, to be taken out with the trash and disposed of by the cleaner. This was what he was becoming, D told himself, a monstrosity, even to himself.
He was walking uptown, lost in such morbid thoughts, and though the sunshine was bright he had the sense of being enclosed in darkness—of being, to be precise, brightly illuminated by a spotlight exposing him to the scrutiny and judgment of all, but surrounded by a black miasma that made it impossible for him to make out the faces of his judges. Only when he arrived at the door of his father’s house did he realize that his feet had brought him back to Macdougal Street. He fumbled in his pocket for the key and went indoors, hoping not to have to face his family. He wasn’t ready. He was not himself. If they saw him maybe they would see his metamorphosis written all over his body and cry out in horror, Ungeziefer! He wasn’t ready for that.
How strange the interior of the house seemed to him now! This was not only for the obvious reason, namely that his father’s mistress Vasilisa Arsenyeva had embarked upon a radical “modernizing” scheme of redecorations as soon as she moved in, thus stepping up a rung on the ladder of intimacy to the status of “live-in lover.” The fourth finger of her left hand was still bare, but, all the Golden sons agreed, it would probably not be long until a diamond sparkled there, and after the diamond, a band of gold would surely also appear. Certainly she had begun to behave proprietorially. The whole mansion had been repainted in a chic oyster gray color and everything old had been or was being replaced by everything new and “high-end”—the furniture, the rugs, the art, the lighting fixtures, the table lamps, the ashtrays, the picture frames. D had asked that his room be left untouched and she had respected that, so something, at least, was familiar. But he knew that his feeling of strangeness did not have its origins in the redecoration, but in himself. If, as he moved through the hallway and up the stairs, a mood of foreboding came over him, a sense that everything was about to change and that the change would be a kind of calamity, then the reason for his premonition was not to be found in oyster paint or silver velour sectional settees, it was not hanging in the new living room drapes or glowing in the new dining room chandelier or flickering in the new gas fireplaces whose flames in winter would heat up a bed of pebbles which would glitter with fashionable delight. It was true that this renewed environment was no longer the old-school, lived-in world Nero Golden had created for them to inhabit when they first arrived. It was possessed of a disturbing, ersatz otherness which the earlier version, also a kind of imitation of life, had somehow avoided. But no! It wasn’t the house. The change was in himself. He himself was the darkness he felt around him, he was the force pulling the walls closer, the ceilings lower, like a house in a horror movie, and creating an air of oppression and claustrophobia. The house, to tell the truth, was much brighter than before. It was he who had grown dark.