INTERIOR. NIGHT. PETYA GOLDEN’S APARTMENT. BEDROOM.
Sitting up in bed, still wearing his black hoodie and goggles, PETYA, with the sheets pulled up under his chin. He is sobbing uncontrollably. He pulls off the goggles and throws them across the room. Bottles of liquor open on bedside table.
INTERIOR. NIGHT. PETYA GOLDEN’S APARTMENT. LIVING ROOM.
Still weeping, almost screaming with grief, PETYA has started to smash up his new home. He throws a lamp across the room, it hits a wall and shatters. He picks up a chair and throws it after the lamp. Then he squats down on the floor with his head in his hands.
INTERIOR. DAY. PETYA’S APARTMENT. LIVING ROOM.
Mix through to the next morning, PETYA in the same position.
The DOORBELL rings. Repeatedly. He does not move.
Cut.
EXTERIOR. DAY. OUTSIDE THE “MONDRIAN BUILDING.”
NERO GOLDEN is ringing the doorbell. Cut into CLOSE-UP of his face as he speaks directly into the camera. Under the VO we can hear the ding-dong of the bell as he continues to ring it.
NERO
Of course I understand at once that it is him. They show the drawing on television and when I see it I know. This is not the Fly. This is Petronius. Also the car. He has taken the plates off but it is my car. I myself gave him the key when he moved into the apartment. He is a good driver, a safe driver. What father would expect such a thing from his son? We keep it in the parking garage under 100 Bleecker, the NYU high-rise, we sublet the space from a journalism professor living on the twentieth floor. I know the car, I know my son, I know the woman. Naturally. That is the woman that his brother took from him. This is revenge. A terrible thing, but after all he is a man.
Cut.
INTERIOR. NIGHT. PETYA’S APARTMENT.
The apartment is in disarray, but PETYA has allowed MURRAY LETT to enter. He, PETYA, is still hunched over, squatting on the floor, at rear of shot. LETT is down with him, his arms on PETYA’s shoulders. PETYA is talking nonstop. We don’t hear his monologue.
RENÉ (V/O)
He bought the blowtorch online. That was easy. After taking the plates off the Suburban he drove to a convenience store in Queens and picked up the plastic gas jerrycans. Then he drove to a different, drive-through C-store in Nassau County and filled those gas cans up. As for breaking through the security systems at the galleries, he just said it was really easy. Maybe he hadn’t expected the wave of guilt that hit him immediately after the attacks. He very nearly drowned in it. The meltdown was very severe. He became anxious, hysterical, depressed, drunk. The therapist wanted him put on suicide watch. His father hired round-the-clock nursing staff to sit with him.
Cut to PETYA, talking furiously, but we still hear only RENÉ’S narration. At times PETYA is speaking in lip sync with RENÉ.
RENÉ
His rage attack was aimed mostly at himself, full of guilt and shame. However, he also talked a lot about how much he hated his brother. His feelings for Apu had curdled into lumps of hatred so thick that they could only be dissolved by his brother’s lifeblood, he said, and maybe even that would not be enough, maybe he would subsequently also need at frequent intervals to shit on Apu’s rancid grave. In the crime pages of the cheap newspapers, he read about men who had kept women prisoner for years and he said, maybe I could do that, I could shackle and gag him and keep him in the basement near the boiler and hot water cylinder and torture him whenever I wanted. In those days after the arson attack Petya was drinking very heavily. He was also completely out of his mind.
Cut.
EXTERIOR. DAY. NERO’S STUDY. THE GOLDEN HOUSE.
NERO GOLDEN with a thunderous expression stands with his back to the window and his two DRAGON LADIES await his instructions.
NERO
I want the best criminal defense lawyer in America. Get him today and get him here.
The door opens and VASILISA GOLDEN stands there, her hands on her womb. NERO turns to her, angry at the interruption, but the look on her face silences him.
VASILISA
It’s time.
Cut.
Spring, the last of the ice gone from the Hudson, and happy sails breaking out across the weekend water. Drought in California, Oscars for Birdman, but no superheroes available in Gotham. The Joker was on TV, announcing a run for president, along with the rest of the Suicide Squad. There was still more than a year and a half of the current president’s term to run but I was missing him already and nostalgic for the present, for these his good old days, the legalization of gay marriage, a new ferry service to Cuba, and the Yankees winning seven games in a row. Unable to watch the green-haired cackler make his improbable declaration, I turned to the crime pages and read about killings. A gunman shot a doctor in El Paso and then killed himself. A man shot his neighbors, a Muslim family in North Carolina, because of a parking dispute. A couple in Detroit, Michigan, pleaded guilty to torturing their son in their cellar. (Technically not a killing, this one, but a good story, so it counted.) In Tyrone, Missouri, a gunman killed seven people and then made himself his eighth victim. Also in Missouri, a certain Jeffery L. Williams shot two policemen in front of the Ferguson city police headquarters. A police officer named Michael Slager shot and killed Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, in North Charleston, South Carolina. In the absence of the Batman, Mrs. Clinton and Senator Sanders offered themselves up as the alternatives to the Suicide Squad. In a Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas—“Eats! Drinks! Scenic Views!”—nine people died in a biker war and eighteen others went to the hospital. There were floods and tornadoes across Texas and Arkansas, seventeen dead, forty missing. And it was only May.
“Dostoevsky got all his plots by reading the crime pages of the newspapers,” Suchitra mused. “STUDENT MURDERS LANDLADY. Whatever the Russian for that is. And bingo! Crime and Punishment.”
We were having breakfast—home-brewed macchiato coffee and the cronuts we had waited in line to buy on Spring Street at 5:30 A.M.—sitting at the table in the glass-window corner that looked south toward the harbor and west across the river. It occurred to me that I was happy, that I had found the person who could bring me joy, or she had allowed me to find her. Which also probably meant that I could never tell her the truth about the baby; which in turn meant that Vasilisa Golden had a hold over me which I could never break. It’s true that by revealing her secret Vasilisa would undo her own strategy as well as destroying my best chance of a good life. But maybe she was so sure of herself that it didn’t matter. She had overcome the drama of her dalliance with Masha the fitness trainer, had she not. And Nero was older every day and more and more anxious not to live and die alone….I pushed such thoughts away, understanding that I was succumbing to paranoia. Vasilisa would not tell. And meanwhile, eating my cronut and looking at the movie reviews in the Sunday Times, I was content, happy to let Suchitra think aloud, as she liked to do during these rare moments of calm in her nonstop schedule. From these Sunday brainstorms—just letting her mind freewheel, free-associate from thing to thing, she often came up with projects she wanted to pursue.
“Is that true?” I asked. “About Dostoevsky?”
That was all she needed. She nodded earnestly, waved her cronut at me while she chewed the piece in her mouth, swallowed, and was off. “True is such a twentieth-century concept. The question is, can I get you to believe it, can I get it repeated enough times to make it as good as true. The question is, can I lie better than the truth. You know what Abraham Lincoln said? ‘There’s a lot of made-up quotes on the internet.’ Maybe we should forget about making documentaries. Maybe mix up the genres, be a little genrequeer. Maybe the mockumentary is the art form of the day. I blame Orson Welles.”
“Mercury Theatre on the Air,” I said, joining in the fun. “War of the Worlds. Radio. That’s a long way back. People still believed in the truth back then.”
“Suckers,” she said. “They believed Orson. Everything starts somewhere.”
“And now seventy-two pe
rcent of all Republicans think the president’s a Muslim.”
“Now if a dead gorilla from the Cincinnati zoo runs for president he’ll get at least ten percent of the vote.”
“Now so many people in Australia state their religion as ‘Jedi’ in the census that it’s an official thing.”
“Now the only person you think is lying to you is the expert who actually knows something. He’s the one not to believe because he’s the elite and the elites are against the people, they will do the people down. To know the truth is to be elite. If you say you saw God’s face in a watermelon, more people will believe you than if you find the Missing Link, because if you’re a scientist then you’re elite. Reality TV is fake but it’s not elite so you buy it. The news: that’s elite.”
“I don’t want to be elite. Am I elite?”
“You need to work on it. You need to become post-factual.”
“Is that the same as fictional?”
“Fiction’s elite. Nobody believes it. Post-factual is mass market, information-age, troll generated. It’s what people want.”
“I blame truthiness. I blame Stephen Colbert.”
This was our Sunday banter, but on this occasion I was the one who had a lightbulb moment. My big project, based around the Goldens, should be written and shot in documentary fashion, but scripted, played by actors. The moment I had that thought the script appeared in my head, and within a few weeks it was in draft form, and by the end of the year it would be selected for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and the year after that…but I’m running ahead of myself in my excitement. Rewind to that Sunday in the spring. Because later the same day I had an appointment with my son.
Yes, I was playing with fire, but the human program is powerful, and it wants what it wants. The idea of having no contact with my own flesh and blood was appalling to me, and so, once I had left the Golden house, I shamelessly ingratiated myself with Nero Golden, for whom the newborn child, his first in a long time, was also an obsession. Telling him I wanted to make sure we stayed in touch after all his kindness, after he had been as generous to me as if he were my own family, so that now he felt like family to me (I warned you that I was shameless), I suggested that we continue our new practice of meeting for a meal—tea, perhaps?—at the Russian Tea Room. “Oh, and it would be great if you bring the baby along,” I innocently added. The old man fell for it, and so I was able to watch my little fellow grow, and play with him, and hold him in my arms. Nero came to the Tea Room with the baby and his nanny, and the nanny handed the kid to me without any argument, and receded into a corner of the restaurant. “It’s amazing how good you are with the boy,” Nero Golden told me. “I get the feeling you’re getting a little broody yourself. That girl of yours is terrific. Maybe you should knock her up.”
I held my son close. “It’s okay,” I said. “This little guy is more than enough for now.”
The child’s mother was not happy about my strategy. “I prefer it that you make yourself scarce,” Vasilisa called me to say. “The boy has excellent parents who can provide him with everything he requires and then some, which you naturally cannot. I don’t know what is your motive, but I’m guessing maybe it is financial. This is my mistake, it should have been discussed ahead of time. So, okay, if you have a figure in mind, say what it is, and let’s see how it corresponds with the figure in my mind.”
“I don’t want your money,” I said. “I just want sometimes to have tea with my son.”
This caused a silence, in which I could hear both her incredulity and relief. Then, finally, “Fine,” she said with considerable irritation. “However, he is not your son.”
Suchitra, that Sunday, was also a little puzzled by my interest in the boy. “Is this some kind of hint?” she asked me in her straight-out shoot-from-the-hip way. “Because let me say I have a whole career developing here and stopping in my tracks to be somebody’s baby mama is not in my plans at the present time.”
“What can I tell you, I just like babies,” I said. “And the great thing about somebody else’s baby is, when you’re done playing, you get to hand it back.”
They had kept Petya out of jail. The absence of persons from the building, and the consequential lack of damage to human beings, meant that the crime was classified as arson in the third degree, a class C felony. New York law stated that the minimum punishment for a C felony was one to three years in jail, and the maximum punishment was five to fifteen. However if extenuating circumstances could be demonstrated, judges were allowed to impose alternative sentences involving much less jail time, or even none at all. The “best criminal defense lawyers in America” successfully argued that Petya’s HFA be taken into consideration. The crime passionnel argument, which might have been effective in, for example, France, was not used. Petya was ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation followed by treatment, and to be placed under community supervision and to pay the fees required, as well as making full restitution for the damage he had caused. Nero hired Murray Lett on a full-time basis and the therapist dropped his other clients and moved into Petya’s apartment to protect him from self-harm and to work on his many issues. Lett’s role was accepted by the court, which made things easier. That took care of the criminal aspect, and Petya duly reported as required to his supervising officers, submitted to random drug testing, agreed to electronic monitoring by a bracelet locked around his ankle, acquiesced in strict probation conditions, and performed his hours of community service silently and without complaint, working on the maintenance and upkeep of public buildings, permitted to work indoors because of his recrudescent agoraphobia, painting, plastering, hammering, wordlessly, uncomplainingly, passively; detached from his body, or so it appeared, allowing his limbs to do what was required of them while his thoughts went elsewhere, or nowhere.
The question of financial restitution was more complex. A civil suit for damages had been brought by Frankie Sottovoce, naming Nero as well as Petya, and that was ongoing. Ubah Tuur was not involved. It turned out that Sottovoce had bought the pieces from her outright before the opening, so that at the time of the fires they belonged to him. She already had her money. The gallery was insured, but there was a sizable gap, the Sottovoce lawyers argued, between what the insurance company would pay and what the Tuur pieces would be worth if placed on the open market. Also the buildings required gut renovations and there would be much income lost from shows that could not be put on while that happened. So, a multimillion-dollar case, remaining unsettled—though the bottom line was that Petya’s earnings from his baller apps were amply sufficient to settle the suit in full—with the Golden lawyers using all the delays of the law in the hope of finally bringing Sottovoce to the negotiating table to make a more easily bearable deal, and using, too, all the concomitant legal loopholes or (perhaps a better term) flexibilities to keep Petya out of prison while the financial matters were being settled.
It was Apu Golden who first intuited that, whatever the outcome of the civil suit, Petya’s fire had badly damaged the house of Golden as well as the two Sottovoce galleries. (It had also ended his own relationship with Frankie Sottovoce, who had unceremoniously suggested he should find a new artistic home.) I visited him in the Union Square studio and he offered me some Chinese green tea from Hangzhou and a plate piled with chunks of hard Italian cheese. “I want to speak to you like a brother,” he said. “Like an honorary brother, because at this point you are that. Look at our family. You know what I’m saying? Look at it. We are, I’m sorry to put it bluntly, a wreck. It’s the beginning of the fall of the Usher place. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Macdougal Street house cracks in half and falls into the street, you know what I mean? Yeah. I have intimations of doom.”
I remained silent. He was just getting into his stride. “Romulus and Remus,” he said. “That’s how D thought of us. He was so busy feeling left out of our games that he never saw how tough it was for me to be Petya’s brother, how much work I put in to give him a good childhood, or as good as possibl
e, considering his situation. I played with train sets and Scalextric cars into adulthood because he enjoyed those things. We all did. My father too. And now it feels like we all failed, after he crashed and burned. He crashed, the galleries burned. He’s in pieces over there with the Australian, who knows if he can be put back together. And D, who knows what’s going on with him. Or is it with her now? I don’t know? Does even he know? Or she? Crazy. Did you know you’re not supposed to say ‘crazy’ anymore, by the way? Also you’re not supposed to say ‘insane’ or, I guess, ‘nuts.’ These words are insulting to the mentally ill. There’s now a bad word for these bad words, did you know that? Nor did I. Even if you’re just saying, this shit is insane, you’re not even thinking about mentally ill people, for God’s sake, you’re still insulting them anyway, apparently. Who comes up with this stuff? They should try living with the situation for a while and see if they don’t need to let off some steam. See if they don’t need to say, yes, I’m sorry, but sane is a thing and therefore so is insane. Not crazy is a thing and so it follows that crazy also exists. If it exists we use the word. That’s language. Is that okay? Or am I a bad person? Am I nuts?”