“The problem is,” my mother said, sitting on a bench in the Gardens, “that while we are programmed to want ethics, the program doesn’t tell us what right and wrong actually are. These categories are empty in the brain and require us to fill them up with what? Thought. Judgment. Stuff of this kind.”
“One of the general principles of human behavior, I’ve found,” my father added, walking up and down in front of her, “is that in almost every situation, everyone believes himself or herself to be right, and any opponent wrong.”
To which my mother rejoined, “Also we live in a time in which there is almost no agreement on any existential questions, we can’t even concur simply on what is the case, and when the nature of the real is so disputed, so must the nature of the good be.”
When they got going like this they were like dancers, or badminton players, their words moving in harmony, their rackets wafting the shuttlecock back and forth, forth and back again. “So de idea that we have an ethics instinct doesn’t carry with it de notion that we know what those ethics should be. If that were true philosophers would be out of a job and we would live in a less contentious world,” my father was pointing at me with a finger now, you see?, you getting this?, and I like a schoolboy nodding, yes, Dad, yes Mom, I get it, we all agree on this, these are things we know.
“Yeah, but did you know there’s a word for it?” my father asked me.
A word for what, Dad.
“Definition: De supposed innate ability of de human mind to realize de basic principles of ethics and morals. A technical term of philosophy, signifying de innate principle in de moral consciousness of every man, which directs him to good and restrains him from evil.”
No, Dad, what word would that be.
“Synderesis,” my mother said. “Did you ever hear a better word?”
“There isn’t a better word,” my father concurred. “Remember it, kiddo. De best word in de world.”
These were the voices I would never hear again.
And they were wrong. The human race was savage, not moral. I had lived in an enchanted garden but the savagery, the meaninglessness, the fury had come in over the walls and killed what I loved most.
I had never seen a dead body until I saw my parents’ corpses at the Mineola morgue. I had sent over clothes for them, one of Suchitra’s interns ran that errand, and had chosen coffins online, selecting, as one does, absurdly expensive boxes for them to be burned in. Our home was full of tenured professors, male and female, helping. I had all the help in the world from the leading experts in Sumerian art, subatomic physics, First Amendment law, and Commonwealth literature. But nobody could help me look at the bodies. Suchitra drove me out there in her aging Jeep and because there was no way we could talk about what we needed to talk about we fell into black comedy, remembering particularly gruesome “corpses of the week” from the old HBO series Six Feet Under. My favorite was the woman on a girls’ night out in a rented stretch limo rising through the open sunroof to express her happiness and running face-first into the bucket of a cherry-picker truck. After which her flattened face would have been quite a task for the series regulars to fix.
And then an over-lit room with two gurneys and two horizontal beings under sheets, two horizontal beings who once, horizontal on a different, softer surface, had conjoined joyfully—maybe clumsily—maybe not—I was unable to imagine my parents as gymnastic sex fiends, but I also didn’t want them to be fumbling incompetents—and the result was this blank unthinking entity standing by the gurneys to confirm that they were no longer capable of the act that brought him into being, or of anything else.
They had done their best at the morgue. I went to my mother first and they had removed the terror from her face as well as whatever shards of glass and metal had pierced her and although she was wearing more makeup than she ever did when alive it was her, I could see it was her, and she looked, or I could persuade myself that she looked, at peace. I turned to my father and Suchitra came up behind me and put her cheek against my back and her arms around my waist. Okay, I said, okay, and lifted the sheet. Then finally I wept.
The day after the cremation Nero Golden came across the Gardens to our house—the term “my house” made no sense; my parents were present in every inch of it—and tapped on the French windows with his cane. It was so unexpected—the king knocking on the orphaned commoner’s door—that at first I saw him as an unreal projection of my imagination. In the aftermath of death my grip on the real had loosened. There was an old lady, Mrs. Stone, living on the Gardens (in four high-ceilinged rooms on the piano nobile of a building divided into floor-through apartments), who spoke often of ghosts. This is somebody I haven’t mentioned before, and very likely will leave to her own devices after this guest appearance, a lady whom the Gardens’ children called Hat because of her love of wide-brimmed sun hats, a widow for many years, her former husband a rancher in Texas who struck oil on his land and at once gave up beef cattle for the high life and an internationally admired stamp collection. Mrs. Stone too had buttonholed me by the jungle gym to speak of loss. A death in the family, as also a newborn baby, gave permission for strangers or near strangers to come up and soliloquize. “My husband I never saw after his demise,” she confided. “It seems he was happy to get away. No effort at contact at any time. You live and you learn. But one night on Macdougal Alley I saw a liveried teenage boy—a black kid in a pretty fancy outfit—walking on his knees. Why was he walking on his knees, thought I, there’s no religious history here. Then finally I worked it out. He wasn’t walking on his knees at all. The street level of the alley had risen over time and he was walking on the old ground level and I could only see him down to his knees. A stable boy, possibly, going down the alley to work in the old stables that used to be there in the 1830s, servicing Washington Square North. Or a servant boy, employed perhaps by Gertrude Whitney, who lived there, you know, when she founded her museum. In any case, a ghost, a palpable ghost. And that’s not all.” I made my excuses and left. But the neighborhood’s ghost stories seemed to pursue me in those melancholy days. The ghost of Aaron Burr haunting the Village looking for whores. Musical ghosts, dramatic ghosts, wearing their stage costumes and performing in winter on Commerce Street. My old self wasn’t interested but my orphaned new self let people tell their tales and at night I tried to hear my parents’ laughter echoing in empty rooms. It was in this mood that I saw Nero Golden at the French windows and thought, an apparition. But he was flesh and blood.
“You permit that I enter,” he said, entering before I permitted it. And upon entering, having placed his cane against a wall and seated himself in my father’s favorite chair: “I am a direct man, mister René, plainspoken, who has never found a bush worth beating about. So I say to you regarding your loss that it is your loss. Your parents are gone, don’t concern yourself with them, they don’t exist anymore. Concern yourself with yourself. It is not only that you are wounded and must heal. It is also that now your elders no longer stand between you and the grave. This is manhood. Now you are at the front of the line and the grave yawns for you. Therefore, get wisdom; learn to be a man. If you are agreeable, I will offer my assistance.”
This was an impressive oration. If he intended to shake me out of my sadness by irritating me, he succeeded. But before I could speak he raised a peremptory hand. “I see your reaction from your face, where a thundercloud has settled, threatening a storm. Dispel it! Your anger is unnecessary. You are young and I am old. I ask you to learn from me. Your country is young. One thinks differently when one has millennia behind one. You have not even two hundred and fifty years. I say also that I am not yet blind so I am aware of your interest in my house. Because I think you are kind of a good guy I forgive this, my alternative being to have you killed, ha ha. I think that—now that you are a man—you can learn from all of us Goldens, good and bad, what to do and not do. From Petya how to fight against what is not your fault, how to play when the cards give you a bad hand. From Apu, maybe, d
on’t be like him. It is possible that he has failed to become profound. From Dionysus, my tormented one, learn about ambiguity and pain.”
“And from you?”
“As to myself, mister René: maybe you guessed already that I am not always a saint. I am hard and boastful and used to a certain superior position and what I want I take and what I don’t want I clear out of my way. But when you are facing me you must ask yourself the following question: Is it possible to be both good and evil? Can a man be a good man when he is a bad man? If you believe Spinoza and agree that everything is determined by necessity, can the necessities that drive a man drive him to wrongdoing as well as right? What is a good man in this deterministic world? Does the adjective even mean anything? When you have the answer, tell me. But before all of this happens, tonight, we go out on the town, and drink.”
Later.
“Death, we deal with it, we accept it, we move on,” Nero Golden said. “We are the living, so we must live. Guilt, but, that’s bad. That remains and does us harm.” We were at the Russian Tea Room—his treat—holding shot glasses of ice-cold vodka. He raised his in salute; he drank, I drank. It was why we were here, and the food—blinis and caviar, dumplings, chicken Kiev—we ate only to allow us to drink more.
“If we go home sober,” Nero Golden told me, “then we will have failed. We need to reach a condition in which we will not know how exactly we got home at all.”
I bowed my head gravely. “Agreed.”
Another shot. “My late wife, you take her case,” Nero jabbed a finger at me, “don’t pretend you don’t know the story, I know the loose tongues in my household. Never mind that. As to her death, a great sadness, but not in fact a tragedy, it didn’t rise to the level of tragedy.” Another shot. “I correct myself. A personal tragedy of course. A tragedy to me and my sons. But great tragedy is universal, is it not.”
“It is.”
“So. My point. The destructive aspect for me, the life-altering destructive aspect, was not the fact of death but the fact of responsibility. Mine. My responsibility, this is the issue. This is what haunts me when at night I walk in the Gardens.”
By this stage of the evening I had begun to see it as my task to comfort him even though the purpose of the outing had been vice versa. “You had a quarrel,” I said. “This happens. It does not place upon you the burden of her death. In an ethical universe only the murderer is guilty of the murder. It must be so otherwise the universe would be morally absurd.”
He was silent, drinking, waiters hovering to bring more vodka as needed. “Let me give a different example,” I said, lofty now, finding myself at the heights of thought, feeling truly my parents’ child. “Suppose that I’m an asshole.”
“A total asshole?”
“Complete and total. And stinky.”
“I imagine it, okay.”
“Suppose that every day I stand in front of your house and I abuse you and your family.”
“Are you using bad language?”
“The worst. I abuse yourself and your loved ones in the coarsest terms.”
“This would be intolerable, naturally.”
“So, you have a gun in the house.”
“How do you know this?”
“I am hypothesizing.”
“Ah, a hypothesis. Excellent. Understood. A hypothetical gun.”
“And you take this putative weapon and you know what you do?”
“I shoot you.”
“You shoot me through the heart and I’m dead and guess what that makes you.”
“It makes me happy.”
“It makes you a murderer.”
“It makes me happy and a murderer.”
“You are guilty of murder and in court it is not a defense to say, your honor, he was an asshole.”
“It is not?”
“Even assholes when murdered are not responsible for their deaths. The murderer alone bears the burden of the crime.”
“This is philosophy?”
“I need more vodka. The philosophy is in the bottle.”
“Waiter.”
After another shot he became maudlin. “You’re young,” he said. “You don’t know what responsibility is. You don’t know guilt or shame. You know nothing. It is not important. Your parents are dead. This is the matter in hand.”
“Thank you,” I said, and after that I don’t remember.
Ends.
“In the beginning,” Suchitra said, sitting by my bedside while I groaned that my head hurt, “in the beginning there was the official Communist Party of India—CPI. But India has a population problem and its left parties also ignore birth control. So after the CPI there was the CPI(M), the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) a.k.a. CPI(M-L). Enough parties? Babe, the party’s only just getting started. Try to keep up. Now there is the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, plus the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Naxalbari, and also the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Janashakti, and in addition the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Red Star, and let us not forget the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Central Team, or neglect to mention the Revolutionary Communist Center of India (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist), to say nothing of the Communist Party of United States of India or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Red Flag, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) New Democracy, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) New Initiative, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Somnath, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Second Central Committee, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Bolshevik. Kindly continue to pay strict attention. There is proliferation among other groupuscules as well. There was the Maoist Communist Center which merged with the People’s War Group to form the Maoist Communist Center of India. Or possibly it was that the Maoist Communist Center of India merged with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War and founded the Communist Party of India (Maoist). These distinctions can be hard to make. I tell you all this to explain the decision of my Bengali mother and father, two intrepid capitalistically inclined entrepreneur types trapped in Calcutta among the many-headed Ravanas of the Communist Party of India (Uranium-Plutonium), the nuclear-fission warheads of the left, to run away and settle in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, Georgia, which is where I was born. This would perhaps have been a good idea, and in fact economically speaking it was a good idea because they succeeded in a wide range of enterprises, beauty salons, clothing stores, a real estate agency, psychic-healing services, so you see they also proliferated. But unfortunately around them the political institutions of the Hindu right were also being fruitful and multiplying on fertile American soil, expatriate branches of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh sprouted up, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad flowered, the Bharatiya Janata Party thrived, as did fund-raising organizations funneling dollars toward the same. My parents escaped from one whirlpool only to be sucked into another and when they started going to RSS gala dinners and speaking admiringly of the barrel-chested person they called NaMo, I had to love them and leave them and make my escape. So I hightailed it to NYC where I am now working my ass off trying to make you laugh and it would be kind of you at this point at least to crack a smile.”
“And this is your idea,” I said, “of a hangover cure.”
Regarding working her ass off: Suchitra did that every day, every minute of every day. I never knew anyone who worked half as hard and still had time for pleasure, in which category I was fortunate enough to be included. She woke early, went spinning, ran to her office, gave the workday everything she had, went running by the Hudson or across the Brooklyn Bridge and back, and still turned up fresh as a daisy and twice as stylish at whatever the evening had to offer, a gallery opening, a screening, a birthday party, a karaoke night, a dinner date with me, and had enough energy left for lovemaking after it all. As a lover she was equally energetic, if unoriginal, but I wasn’t
complaining. I was scarcely a sex god myself and at that moment the love of a good woman was saving me from the black pit. Nero Golden’s tough affection and his heavy-drinking vodka nights, together with Suchitra Roy’s kindly, super-speed love, brought me through those days. I thought of the story of the paramedics in the ambulance playing good cop, bad cop after Mrs. Golden’s suicide attempt and realized that this time I was the one being put on suicide watch.
THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN, OR, THE DOG IN THE BARDO
New York City was my mother and father all that summer until I learned to live without parents and accept, as Nero had recommended I accept, my adult place at the head of the queue waiting to see the last picture show. As usual it was a movie that helped me, Ingmar Bergman’s Det sjunde inseglet, “The Seventh Seal,” which the great film director himself thought “uneven” but which the rest of us revered. The knight (Max von Sydow, who would go on to play the boring artist Frederick in Hannah and Her Sisters and the immortal Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon) on his way home from the Crusades playing chess against black-cowled Death to delay the inevitable, so that he could see his wife once more before he died. Broken knight and cynical squire, Bergman’s unfunny Quixote and Sancho, looking for this year’s birds in last year’s nests. Bergman had religious issues to work out, having come from a deeply religious household, but for me it wasn’t necessary to see the film in those terms. The title was from the Book of Revelation. “And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour” (Revelation 8:1). To me, the silence in heaven, the nonappearance of God, was the truth of the secular vision of the universe, and half an hour meant the length of a human life. The opening of the seventh seal revealed that God was nowhere with nothing to say and Man was given the space of his little life to perform, as the knight wished to perform, one meaningful deed. The wife I wanted to see before I died was my dream of being a filmmaker. The meaningful deed was the film I was dreaming of making, my film of my Gardens dotted with real and imaginary beings like an Altman ensemble cast and the Goldens in their house at the far end from mine. The “deed” was the journey and the “wife” was the goal. I said something of this sort to Suchitra and she nodded gravely. “It’s time to finish your script and start raising the money.”