The mystical experience existed. I understood that. When my rational self reasserted itself it would say, yes, agreed, but it was an interior experience, not an exterior one; subjective, not objective. If I had stood beside Apu in his Union Square studio I would not have seen his ghosts. If I had knelt beside him on that Walkeshwar terrace seven and a half years ago the Force would not have spoken to me. Not everyone can become a Jedi knight. Many Australians say they can, that’s true. And Apu, perhaps, learned how to trust and use what he once called the spirit level. But no, no, not I.
For forty days and nights after Apu’s return, the Golden house was in mourning, off limits, its curtains drawn at noon as well as midnight, its shutters shuttered, and if anyone came and went they did so as ethereally as ghosts. Nero vanished from view. It was my guess that Petya had moved back in and maybe Lett the therapist was there also, but that was just speculation. Petya Golden did not visit his brother’s coffin while it stood in the great room of the Golden house, did not forgive him, never spoke his name again, and never asked what happened to Ubah’s body, was there a grave he could visit, he never asked. Some wounds do not heal. The folk in the Gardens got on with their lives and respected the withdrawal of the wounded house from their little world. I didn’t go there though my desire to see the little fellow Vespasian was as strong as ever. Once I thought about contacting Vasilisa to plead for some time with him but I knew the blunt response I would get, and held my tongue. It was a busy time for me anyway; Suchitra and I had our hands full. In that political season we were drawn into the world of political videos, for women’s groups in particular, defending Planned Parenthood, attacking the Republican insensitivity to women’s issues. We were becoming famous; that year our videos swept the Pollie awards for political ads, in particular for a piece in which a child victim of sex trafficking told her story. Suchitra—her professional name shortened to Suchi Roy for ease of pronunciation—was becoming a bit of a media star, and I was happy to be her helpmate. So I turned away from death and toward life. But life had become noisy and even alarming that year. Beyond the closed world of the Gardens, things were getting very strange.
To step outside that enchanted—and now tragic—cocoon was to discover that America had left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe; D.C., Suchitra said, was under attack by DC. It was the year of the Joker in Gotham and beyond. The Caped Crusader was nowhere to be seen—it was not an age of heroes—but his archrival in the purple frock coat and striped pantaloons was ubiquitous, clearly delighted to have the stage to himself and hogging the limelight with evident delight. He had seen off the Suicide Squad, his feeble competition, but he permitted a few of his inferiors to think of themselves as future members of a Joker administration. The Penguin, the Riddler, Two-Face and Poison Ivy lined up behind the Joker in packed arenas, swaying like doo-wop backing singers while their leader spoke of the unrivaled beauty of white skin and red lips to adoring audiences wearing green fright wigs and chanting in unison, Ha! Ha! Ha!
The origins of the Joker were disputed, the man himself seemed to enjoy allowing contradictory versions to fight for air space, but on one fact everyone, passionate supporters and bitter antagonists, was agreed: he was utterly and certifiably insane. What was astonishing, what made this an election year like no other, was that people backed him because he was insane, not in spite of it. What would have disqualified any other candidate made him his followers’ hero. Sikh taxi drivers and rodeo cowboys, rabid alt-right blondes and black brain surgeons agreed, we love his craziness, no milquetoast euphemisms from him, he shoots straight from the hip, says whatever he fucking wants to say, robs whatever bank he’s in the mood to rob, kills whoever he feels like killing, he’s our guy. The black bat-knight has flown! It’s a new day, and it’s going to be a scream! All hail the United States of Joker! U.S.J.! U.S.J.! U.S.J.!
It was a year of two bubbles. In one of those bubbles, the Joker shrieked and the laugh-track crowds laughed right on cue. In that bubble the climate was not changing and the end of the Arctic icecap was just a new real estate opportunity. In that bubble, gun murderers were exercising their constitutional rights but the parents of murdered children were un-American. In that bubble, if its inhabitants were victorious, the president of the neighboring country to the south which was sending rapists and killers to America would be forced to pay for a wall dividing the two nations to keep the killers and rapists south of the border where they belonged; and crime would end; and the country’s enemies would be defeated instantly and overwhelmingly; and mass deportations would be a good thing; and women reporters would be seen to be unreliable because they had blood coming out of their whatevers; and the parents of dead war heroes would be revealed to be working for radical Islam; and international treaties would not have to be honored; and Russia would be a friend and that would have nothing whatsoever to do with the Russian oligarchs propping up the Joker’s shady enterprises; and the meanings of things would change; multiple bankruptcies would be understood to prove great business expertise; and three and a half thousand lawsuits against you would be understood to prove business acumen; and stiffing your contractors would prove your tough-guy business attitude; and a crooked university would prove your commitment to education; and while the Second Amendment would be sacred the First would not be; so those who criticized the leader would suffer consequences; and African Americans would go along with it all because what the hell did they have to lose. In that bubble knowledge was ignorance, up was down, and the right person to hold the nuclear codes in his hand was the green-haired white-skinned red-slash-mouthed giggler who asked a military briefing team four times why using nuclear weapons was so bad. In that bubble, razor-tipped playing cards were funny, and lapel flowers that sprayed acid into people’s faces were funny, and wishing you could have sex with your daughter was funny, and sarcasm was funny even when what was called sarcasm was not sarcastic, and lying was funny, and hatred was funny, and bigotry was funny, and bullying was funny, and the date was, or almost was, or might soon be, if the jokes worked out as they should, nineteen eighty-four.
In the other bubble—as my parents had taught me long ago—was the city of New York. In New York, for the moment, at least, a kind of reality still persevered, and New Yorkers could identify a con man when they saw one. In Gotham we knew who the Joker was, and wanted nothing to do with him, or the daughter he lusted after, or the daughter he never mentioned, or the sons who murdered elephants and leopards for sport. “I’ll take Manhattan!” the Joker screeched, hanging from the top of a skyscraper, but we laughed at him and not at his bombastic jokery, and he had to take his act on the road to places where people hadn’t gotten his number yet, or, worse, knew very well what he was and loved him for it: the segment of the country that was as crazy as he. His people. Too many of them for comfort.
It was the year of the great battle between deranged fantasy and gray reality, between, on the one hand, la chose en soi, the possibly unknowable but probably existing thing in itself, the world as it was independently of what was said about it or how it was seen, the Ding an sich, to use the Kantian term—and, on the other, this cartoon character who had crossed the line between the page and the stage—a sort of illegal immigrant, I thought—whose plan was to turn the whole country, faux-hilariously, into a lurid graphic novel, the modern kind, full of black crime and renegade Jews and cocksuckers and cunts, which were words he liked to use sometimes just to give the liberal elite conniptions; a comic book in which elections were rigged and the media were crooked and everything you hated was a conspiracy against you, but in the end! Yay! You won, the fright wig turned into a crown, and the Joker became the King.
It remained to be seen if, come November, the country would turn out to be in a New York state of mind, or if it would prefer to put on the green fright wigs and laugh. Ha! Ha! Ha!
As the drama of the tragedy of the Golden house moves into its later acts, I return my attention—now! But I was derelict in my duty then
!—to the increasingly painful life of Dionysus Golden. It was hard to be in any kind of regular contact with [him]. (I still used the male pronouns when I thought about [him], though that increasingly felt wrong, and so as a gesture toward [his] ambiguity I put them in square brackets. In the absence of clear guidance from [him]—“I don’t yet know what my pronouns are,” [he] told me with a kind of embarrassment—this was my interim solution.) The world around D, the world in which D felt any kind of a sense of safety, had diminished to two and a half places: the Two Bridges Girls Club on Market Street near three playgrounds in the angle of the Manhattan Bridge and the FDR, where [he] volunteered four days a week, and the Chinatown apartment where [he] lived with Riya Z. Sometimes they went to the nightspot on Orchard Street where fire-haired Ivy Manuel sang—this was the half place in [his] comfort zone—but then there was the question of how to dress, and who might approach, saying what, and D’s growing and crippling shyness. At 2-Bridge the problem of attire was solved by the club’s unisex staff uniform, a white collared shirt worn over and outside loose black Chinese pants, and black sneakers on the feet, but everywhere else D was at a loss to know how to present [himself]. After [his] adventure in Vasilisa’s clothes closet [he] had admitted to [himself] [his] pleasure in women’s clothing and had found the courage to tell Riya what had occurred and Ivy also and they had talked about it. “Good,” Riya said. “It’s a first step. Think of this as the beginning of the next three years or so. Think of transition as slow magic. Your private one thousand and one nights, in which you stop being the frog you don’t want to be and you become, maybe, the princess.” And Ivy added, “But you don’t have to go further than you want to. Maybe you’re just a frog who wants to look pretty in pink.”
[He] was getting professional help but it didn’t really help. [He] kept wanting to argue with the Professional. [He] refused to tell me who the Professional was; instead, [he] used me to vent the frustrations [he] kept to [himself] around Riya, whose thing was identity, who had dedicated herself to the idea of the transmorphic fluidity of the self, and who sometimes seemed just a little too eager for D’s MTF transition to occur, and to be a complete metamorphosis. I should have been able to help [him]. Maybe I could have prevented what happened. Maybe we all could. Or maybe D Golden was just unsuitable for life on earth.
I imagine the following conversation taking place in a bare, black-and-white, cell-like room, with the speaker sitting expressionless on an upright metal chair, and [his] interrogator, the Professional, as a highly sophisticated android, a sort of combination of Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina and the supercomputer Alpha Soixante in Godard’s Alphaville. We do not hear either of the figures in the room speaking. There is no sync sound. We hear only the Monologue; although, as the Monologue quotes direct speech, the lip movements of the figures in the room sometimes—not always—match what is being narrated. There is something about the scene that is like an encounter between a prisoner and [his] attorney on visiting day in jail. It would not be surprising if the speaker were wearing an orange jumpsuit (if the scene were in color), or shackles on [his] wrists and ankles. There is also something about the scene which, if properly filmed, might be funny.
MONOLOGUE OF D GOLDEN REGARDING [HIS] OWN SEXUALITY & ITS EXAMINATION BY THE PROFESSIONAL
Chapter One. She asks me, right at the beginning, the Professional, comes right out with it, first question, when you were a child, did you prefer the color pink or the color blue?
I am frankly amazed by the inquiry. Is this a question to be asked at this date in the history of the world, I say: blue or pink?
Indulge me, she says, humor me, as if she’s the patient and I’m the shrink.
I reply, because I’m in that kind of obstinate mood now, Diana Vreeland, editor of Vogue, once said that pink is the navy blue of India, so I guess pink and blue in India are the same thing.
Why do you find this question so irritating, she asks, it’s just a choice between two colors. I might also ask, did you prefer train sets or dolls. Would you rather answer that question instead.
I should say now in parenthesis that I have never been a Marxist but her line of attack provoked in me strong anticapitalist sentiments. I thought, I replied, that we had moved beyond the materialist categories imposed by the market, pink for a girl, blue for a boy, trains and guns for boys, dolls and frocks for girls. Why are you trying to push me back into this antique, exploded discourse?
You are responding with considerable hostility, she said. Have I touched on something that triggers this display of emotion?
Okay, I said, the truth is that my favorite color was yellow and remains yellow. For a time I tried to swear in yellow like Stephen Dedalus’s friend, damn your yellow stick, but I couldn’t hang on to the habit.
Good, she said, this is progress, yellow on the spectrum is halfway between the blue and the pink. I thought that was very stupid, Neanderthal stupid, Cro-Magnon stupid, but I swallowed that back and didn’t say it. Maybe this isn’t for me, I thought.
As to the other question, I told her, I never had a train set. My brothers had one and I watched them play, though they were too old for toys. Also Scalextric cars, it was embarrassing, I mean, grow up. I was the much younger half brother, you see. Me, I had a pair of sandalwood animals to put in the bath because water released their perfume. A sandalwood elephant and a camel. I made up adventures for my sandalwood friends and each night there was a different bath-time story. What the elephant hid in his trunk, why the camel hated the desert, and so on. Maybe I should have written them down. I don’t remember most of them now. So, in answer to your questions, I suppose, if the choice is dolls or trains, well then, sandalwood animal dolls. I never dressed them up, however. I only told them stories and got them wet.
So we went on, she pushing, I pushing back. At a certain point I told her the story of my stepmother and the keys to the house. I admit it: the worst thing I ever did. I told the Professional so. I told her my regret. She wasn’t interested in regret, she went down the same road Riya was on when we had our fight and I got out of the car. Hatred was not enough to explain why I did that, she said. In the end we got to it. Suppose I suggest, she said, that you wanted to be the lady of the house. Suppose that I suggest that that was at the bottom of it. What’s your immediate reaction to that. So my immediate reaction was, boom!, I’m out of here, this isn’t going to work, and when I’m almost at the door she asks, quietly, what are you going to do instead, and I stop, my outstretched hand falls away from the doorknob, and I come back and sit down and I say, I guess maybe you’re right. So what does that make me. Who am I.
That is what we’re here to find out, the Professional said.
Chapter Two. I ask some more about the toys and colors. Once upon a time, I say, if a boy liked pink and dolls his parents would be afraid he was homosexual and try to interest him in boy stuff. I’m saying they might have doubts about his orientation but it wouldn’t occur to them to question his gender. Now it seems you go to the other extreme. Instead of saying the kid’s a pansy you start trying to persuade him he’s a girl.
Okay, she said, then are you gay? Are you physically attracted to other guys? No, I said. This is maybe the only thing I know I am not. Good, she said. So let us stop trying to untangle the motivations of imaginary parents and focus on the task in hand, which is you. If you are not a male homosexual are you a female homosexual?
What, I said.
Are you a lesbian, the Professional asked.
I’m not yet in transition and I am living with a heterosexual woman, I said.
In the first place we are not discussing your lover’s sexuality which may also be complex and which you may be simplifying to make it serve you better, but this is not the subject. And in the second place the question does not have to do with what you are doing but with who you are. It’s the difference between saying, I work as a pizza chef, and I’m a person who loves good food.
You’re weird, I told the Professional.
/> I am not the subject, the Professional said.
How can I be a lesbian, I protested, it’s physically impossible.
Why.
For obvious reasons.
So, two questions. The first question: have you ever felt attracted to a lesbian woman? To a woman who prefers to make love with other women?
There have been occasions, I said. One or two. I did not pursue them.
Why.
For obvious reasons. They would not have wished to sleep with me.
Why.
Oh come on.