The subject had changed suddenly. In the last days of the protest in Zuccotti Park, Apu had fallen out with a lot of the Occupy people, partly because of his frustration at their leaderless anarchic rudderlessness, partly because, he said, “they are more interested in the posture than the results. This language thing is part of that. Excuse me: if you clean up the language too much you kill it. Dirt is freedom. You have to leave a little dirt. Cleansing? I don’t like the sound of that.” (At a later point in my research, I met a few of the protesters, most of whom had no memory of Apu. The one who did said, “Oh, yeah, the rich painter who used to come down here to get himself some street cred. Never liked the guy.”)
I guessed that Apu’s tirade had its origins in something personal, because fundamentally he wasn’t driven by ideas. Cherchez la femme, I thought, and she spilled out of his mouth a moment later. “Ubah,” he said, “she’s totally into all of this. You know. Watch your mouth. Be careful what you say. Walk on eggshells. Every footstep could land on a land mine. Boom! Boom! Your tongue is in danger every time you open your mouth. So exhausting, I have to tell you.”
“So, are you guys not seeing each other anymore?”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Can I say that without offending less intelligent persons? Well, I say it. Of course I’m seeing her. She’s so extraordinary I can’t stop. If she wants me to watch my mouth, whatever, okay, I watch it, at least when she’s around—and then unfortunately you get the fallout because I have to let rip when she’s out of the way. But it took some doing, holding on to her after my goddamn brother destroyed her whole show. I mean her whole show. Just scrap metal now. You know how long those pieces take to make? I mean, months. Of course she was mad, and he’s my brother, for God’s sake. For a while she couldn’t speak to me. But it’s better now. She calmed down. She’s basically a calm person and a good person. She knows it’s not my fault. This is what I mean, we were never Romulus and Remus, Petya and I. I was just trying to hold it together, my family life, my boyhood, and now those days are gone, it’s all a wreck.”
He shook his head, remembering his original subject. “Oh, yeah. Excuse me. I just went off down a little fury road. I’ll come back now. What I wanted to say, at the beginning, the whole reason I sat down here with you and the tea and the cheese, is, my whole family is a wreck, and you, my brother who is not my brother, you are the only family member with whom I can discuss this. One brother is an arsonist, the other one doesn’t know if he’s my half brother or my half sister. And my father, apart from getting older and maybe beginning to lose it mentally, I mean, he totally lost it with this woman, his wife, I mean it’s hard even to say the word, and now this baby, I can’t even think of it as my brother. My half brother. My half-Russian half-brother baby. I sort of blame the baby for everything. It shows up and the world falls apart. It’s like a curse. I mean, it’s driving me mad, and I’m the sane one. But this is all just me being grouchy which as everyone knows is normal. This is not what I invited you over to tell you. I know you don’t go for this stuff, but still, listen to me. I’ve started seeing ghosts.”
It was the end of Apu’s political period. I almost laughed out loud. For the first time that day I allowed my gaze to fall on the new work he was making, and was happy to see that he had shaken off the overly strong influence of contemporary agitprop artists—Dyke Action Machine!, Otabenga Jones, Coco Fusco—and that his earlier, much richer and livelier iconography drawn from world mystical traditions had returned. One large, landscape-format painting in bright oranges and greens struck me in particular, a life-size triple portrait of his favorite witch, the mãe-de-santo of Greenpoint, flanked by her preferred deities Orisha and Oludumaré. Mysticism and psychotropic drugs were never far apart in Apu’s practice, which probably explained the advent of visions. “Are you doing ayahuasca now, is that it?” I asked. Apu recoiled in faux-shock. “Are you kidding? I would never cheat on my mãe and her guys.” (The use of ayahuasca in shamanistic practice was connected to the religion of Santo Daime in Brazil, and some people called the drug daime in honor of that saint.) “Anyway, it’s not visions of God I’ve been seeing.”
It was sometimes hard to know if he was speaking literally or figuratively. “Come and look,” he said. At the far end of the gallery there was a large canvas covered in a paint-spattered sheet. When he pulled the sheet away I saw an extraordinary scene: a vast and detailed Manhattan cityscape from which all vehicles and pedestrians had been removed, an empty city populated only by translucent figures, the male figures dressed in white, the females in saffron: green-skinned, some floating close to the ground, some up in the air. So, yes, ghosts, but whose ghosts? Ghosts of what?
Apu closed his eyes and breathed. Then, exhaling, he gave a little smile and opened the floodgates of the past.
“For a long time,” Apu said, “he controlled us with money, the money he gave us to live on, the money he promised us as our share, and we did as he asked. But also with something much more powerful than money. This was the idea of the family. He was the head and we were the limbs and the body does what the head instructs it to do. We were brought up that way: in the old-school concepts. Absolute loyalty, absolute obedience, no arguments. It wore off eventually, but it worked for a long time, long into our adult lives. We are not children but for so long we jumped when he jumped, we sat when he said sit, we laughed and cried when he said cry or laugh. When we moved here, it was fundamentally because he said, now we move. But we all had our own reasons for going along with the plan. Petya of course needs a lot of support. For D, even if he didn’t know it, America was his road to this metamorphosis that he wants, or he doesn’t want, I don’t know, or he doesn’t know, but at least here he can explore it. For me, there were people to get away from. Entanglements. Not financial, though for a period I had gambling debts. I got past that time. But there were romantic difficulties. There was a woman who broke my heart, another woman who was a little crazy, good crazy most of the time but not all of it, and maybe dangerous for me, not physically but again in the heart, and a third who loved me but who stuck to me so close I had no room to breathe. I broke up with them all or they broke up with me, it doesn’t matter, but then they didn’t go away. Nobody ever goes away. They circled me like helicopters shining bright floodlights down on me and I was caught in their crossed beams like a fugitive on the run. Then a friend of mine, a writer, a good writer, said something that scared the pants off me. He said, think of life as a novel, let’s say a novel of four hundred pages, and then imagine how many pages in the book your story has already covered. And remember that after a certain point, it’s not a good idea to introduce a new major character. After a certain point you are stuck with the characters you have. So maybe you need to think of a way of introducing that new character before it’s too late, because everyone gets older, even you. He said this to me, just before my father decided we had to move. And so when my father made his decision I thought, you know, this is great. Even better than trying to introduce a new character here, where the exes are circling with their floodlights. This way I get to throw away the whole book and start writing a new story. That old book wasn’t that good anyway. So I did it, and here I am, and now I am seeing ghosts, because the trouble with trying to escape yourself is that you bring yourself along for the ride.”
In the painting, now, I picked out the figures of the hovering helicopter women, and saw the small black silhouette of a cowering man below them, the only shadow-figure in that work without shadows. The haunted man and the ghosts of the lost past, haunting him. And the present, I now perceived, was unstable, the buildings crooked and distorted, as if seen through a pane of old, uneven glass. The look of the cityscape reminded me of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. And that at once brought back my early image of Nero Golden as the master criminal Dr. Mabuse. I didn’t bring that up, but asked about German Expressionism. He shook his head. “No, the distortion is not referential. It’s actual.” He had developed a problem of the re
tina, macular degeneration, “luckily the wet kind, because for the dry kind, there’s no treatment, you lose your sight and that’s that. Also, luckily, only in the left eye. If I close the left eye everything looks normal. But if I close the right eye the world turns into this.” He jerked a thumb at the painting. “Actually I think it’s the left eye that sees the truth,” he added. “It sees everything distorted and deformed. Which in fact everything is. The right eye is the one that sees the fiction of normality. So I have truth and lies, one eye for each. It’s good.”
In spite of his customary sardonic manner I could see he was agitated. “The ghosts are real,” he said, gathering his strength. “For some reason I feel better saying this to an anti-spiritual being like yourself.” (I had once told him that I thought the word spiritual, which was now applied to everything from religion to exercise regimes and fruit juice, needed to be given a rest, for perhaps a hundred years or so.) “And it’s not a drug thing. I swear. They just appear, in the middle of the night but also in the middle of the day, in my bedroom or in the street. They are never solid. I can see through them. Sometimes they are sort of buzzy, crackling, broken up like a defective video image. Sometimes they are well defined and clear. I don’t understand. I’m just telling you what I’m seeing. I have the feeling I’m losing my mind.”
“Tell me exactly how it happens,” I said.
“Sometimes I don’t see anything,” he said. “Sometimes I just hear things. Words that are hard to make out, or, also, perfectly clear. Sometimes also the images show up. What is strange is that it’s not necessarily that they are talking to me. The circling exes, yes, for sure, but otherwise it’s like they are just getting on with their lives but I am excluded from those lives, because I have excluded myself, and there is a deep feeling of having done something wrong. All of them are from back home, you understand? All.” The smile had gone from his face now. He looked very upset. “I have studied the seeing of visions,” he said. “Joan of Arc, Saint John the Divine. There are similarities. Sometimes it’s painful. Sometimes it seems to come from within, from the region of the navel, being extruded from the body. At other times it feels purely external. Afterwards often one passes out. It’s exhausting. This is what I have to tell you. Tell me what you think.”
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” I said. “Tell me why you think it’s happening.”
“I think I left in a bad way,” he said. “I was in bad shape. I left without making my peace. This is where you will find it hard to go along with me. The familiar spirits are angry with us, the deities of the place. There is a right way and a wrong way to do these things and I, we, all of us, we just ripped ourselves away, just tore off the corner of the page where we were standing, and that was a kind of violence. It’s necessary to put the past at rest. I have the strong sense right now of not being able to see my way forward. It feels like there isn’t a way forward. Or that for there to be a way forward, first there must be a journey backwards. That’s what I believe.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “I mean, can you make offerings to propitiate whatever is doing this? This is deep water for me. I can’t feel the bottom.”
“I have to go back,” he said. “Anyway, Ubah wants to make a visit. So, think of it as a combination of a tourist trip and a cure for homesickness. Think of it as my need to find out if there’s a there there for me. Then you don’t have to endanger your rationalist worldview.” This, almost angrily. But then a grin to excuse and compensate for the harshness of his tone.
“What do you think would happen if you didn’t go?”
“If I didn’t go,” he said, “then I think a dark force out of the past would fly across the world and probably destroy us all.”
“Oh.”
“Maybe it’s too late. Maybe the dark force has made up its mind anyway. But I’m going to try. And in the meanwhile Ubah can stroll on Marine Drive in the evening and see the hanging gardens on Malabar Hill and visit a movie studio, and maybe we’ll take a side trip to look at the tomb of Taj Bibi in Agra, why not.”
“You’ll go soon?”
“Tonight,” he said. “Before it’s too late.”
Every time I heard something about the family’s past, I became aware of the gaps in the Golden family narrative. There were things that were not being told and it was hard to know how to get beyond the veil that fell across the story. Apu seemed frightened of something, but whatever it was, it wasn’t a ghost. Skeletons in the cupboard seemed likelier. I found myself thinking, not for the first or last time, about the story Nero Golden told me in the Russian Tea Room on our first visit there together, the story of “Don Corleone.”
I said to Suchitra later that day, “I wish I was going along with them on their trip. It might be an important part of the story.”
“If it’s a mockumentary you’re making now,” she said, “then make it up.”
I was a little shocked. “Just make it up?”
“You have an imagination,” she said. “Imagine it.”
A golden story, I remembered. For the Romans, a tall tale, a wild conceit. A lie.
It so happened, and it did not so happen, that the great sitarist Ravi Shankar in all his life only ever played on four sitars, and on one of those four he taught the Beatle George Harrison something about the instrument, and those lessons took place in a suite at the grand hotel by the harbor, and now Ravi Shankar was gone but the sitar remained in a glass case, benevolently watching the suite’s guests come and go. The grand hotel had been beautifully restored after the terrorist atrocity, the strength of the old stone building had enabled it to stand firm, and the interior looked better than ever, but half the rooms were empty. Outside the grand hotel there were barriers and metal detectors and all the mournful apparatus of security, and the defenses were a reminder of horror and the opposite of an invitation. Inside the hotel the many celebrated stores in the shopping arcades reported a decrease in sales of fifty percent or more. The consequence of terror was fear and though many people spoke of their determination to support the grand hotel by the harbor in its period of rebirth the tough language of the numbers said, not enough did. Courting couples and ladies of quality no longer splashed out on tea and snacks at the Sea Lounge and many foreigners too went elsewhere. You could repair the fabric of the building but the damage to its magic remained.
What am I here for, the man who now called himself Apuleius Golden said to Ubah Tuur while the sitar of Ravi Shankar listened in. This is the building where my mother died. This is the city I stopped loving. Am I really so crazy that I believe in ghosts and fly across the world for what? Some sort of exorcism? It’s stupid. It’s like I’m waiting for something to happen. What can happen? Nothing. Let’s be tourists and go home. Let’s go to Leopold for coffee and for art to Bhau Daji Lad Museum and also Prince of Wales Museum which I refuse to call Chhatrapati Shivaji Museum because he didn’t give a damn about artworks. Let’s eat street food on Chowpatty Beach and get a stomach upset like real foreigners. Let’s buy some silver bracelets in Chor Bazaar and look at Kipling’s father’s friezes and eat garlic crabs in Kala Ghoda and feel sad that Rhythm House has closed and mourn Café Samovar also. Let’s go to Blue Frog for the music and Aer for the high-rise view and Aurus for the sea and Tryst for the lights and Trilogy for the girls and Hype for the hype. Fuck it. Here we are. Let’s do it.
Calm down, she said. You sound hysterical.
Something’s going to happen, he said. I was pulled across the world for a reason.
In the lobby a glamorous woman flung herself upon him. Groucho! she cried. You’re back! Then she saw the tall Somali beauty watching her. Oh, excuse I, she said. I’ve known this one since he was a boy. We called his older brother Harpo, you know. She tapped her temple. Poor boy. And this one Groucho because he was always grouchy and he chased women.
Tell me about it, said Ubah Tuur.
We have to throw a party! said the glamorous woman. Call me, darling! Call me! I’ll round
up everybody. She rushed off, talking into her phone.
Ubah Tuur’s eyebrow interrogated Apu.
I don’t remember her name, he said. It’s like I never saw her before in my life.
Groucho, said Ubah Tuur, amused.
Yes, he replied. And D got called Chico. We were the fucking Marx brothers. Get your tutsi-frutsi ice cream here. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member. That’s in every contract, that’s what they call a sanity clause. Ha ha ha…you can’t fool me. There ain’t no Santy Claus. How much would you charge to run into an open manhole? Just the cover charge. I’ve had a great evening, but this wasn’t it. I’d kill you for money. Ha ha ha. No, you’re my friend. I’d kill you for nothing. That was worth running halfway around the world to get away from.
It’s already worth the trip here, she said. I’m learning things about you I never knew before, and we haven’t even left the hotel.
I’ve been looking for a girl like you, he said, groucholy. Not you, but a girl like you.