Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

  He adjusted to the truck’s needs and drove up the east side of the island and over the reopened GWB. He had the radio tuned to the oldies station obviously. Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone, the old timers were singing. Good tip, he thought. So it had. And tomorrow never comes; which leaves today. The river had fallen back into its natural course but all along the banks Mr. Geronimo saw destruction and black mud, and the drowned past of the city exhumed in the black mud, the funnels of sunken riverboats periscoping through the black mud, the haunted gap-toothed Oldsmobiles mud-crusted on the shore, and darker secrets, the skeleton of the legendary Kipsy river-monster and the skulls of murdered Irish longshoremen swimming in the black mud, and there was strange news on the radio too, the ramparts of the Indian fort of Nipinichsen had been raised by the black mud, and the bedraggled furs of ancient Dutch traders, and the original casket containing the actual trinkets worth sixty guilders with which a certain Peter Minuit bought an island of hills from the Lenape Indians, had been deposited at the southern tip of Manahatta, as if the storm was telling our ancestors, Fuck you, I’m buying the island back.

  He made his way down broken storm-littered roads out to La Incoerenza, the Bliss estate. Outside the city the storm had been even wilder. Lightning bolts like immense crooked pillars joined La Incoerenza to the skies, and order, which Henry James warned was only man’s dream of the universe, disintegrated beneath the power of chaos, which was nature’s law. Above the gates of the estate a live wire swung dangerously, with death at its tip. When it touched the gates blue lightning crackled along the bars. The old house stood firm but the river had burst its banks and risen up like a giant lamprey all mud and teeth and swallowed the grounds in a single gulp. It had receded but left destruction in its wake. Mr. Geronimo looking at the wreckage felt that he was present at the death of his imagination, standing at the crime scene of its murder by the thick black mud and the indestructible shit of the past. It may be that he wept. And there on those formerly rolling lawns, hidden now beneath the black mud from the swollen Hudson, as weeping a little he surveyed the ruin of more than a decade of his best landscaping work, the stone spirals that echoed the Iron Age Celts, the Sunken Garden which put its Floridian cousin in the shade, the analemma sundial, a replica of the one at the Greenwich Meridian, the rhododendron forest, the Minoan labyrinth with the fat stone Minotaur at its heart, the secret hedge-hidden nooks, all of them lost and broken beneath the black mud of history, the tree roots standing up in the black mud like the arms of drowning men—it was there that Mr. Geronimo understood that his feet had developed a significant new problem. He stepped out onto the mud and his boots neither squelched nor stuck. He took two or three bewildered steps across the blackness and looked back and saw that he had left no footprints.

  “Damn,” he cried aloud in consternation. What kind of world had the tempest flung him into? Mr. Geronimo didn’t think of himself as being easily scared but the missing footprints had him spooked. He stamped down hard, left boot, right boot, left boot. He jumped up and came down as heavily as he could. The mud was unmoved. Had he been drinking? No, though on occasion he did overdo things as an older man living alone sometimes does, and why not, but this time alcohol was not a factor. Was he still asleep, and dreaming of the estate of La Incoerenza lost beneath a mud sea? Maybe, but this didn’t feel like a dream. Was this some unworldly river-bottom mud, some river-monsterish mud previously unknown to mud scientists whose deep-water mystery gave it the power to resist the weight of a leaping man? Or—and this felt the most plausible, though also the most alarming possibility—had there been a change in himself? Some inexplicable, personal gravitational lessening? Jesus, he thought, and at once also thought of his father frowning at the blasphemy, his father berating his child-self from two feet away as if threatening his congregation from his pulpit with his weekly fire and brimstone, Jesus! He would really have to get those feet looked at now.

  Mr. Geronimo was a down-to-earth man, and so it did not occur to him that a new age of the irrational had begun, in which the gravitational aberration to which he had fallen victim would be only one of many outré manifestations. Further bizarreries in his own narrative were beyond his comprehension. It did not enter his mind, for example, that in the near future he might make love to a fairy princess. Nor did the transformation of global reality preoccupy him. He drew no broader conclusions from his plight. He did not imagine the imminent reappearance in the oceans of sea-monsters large enough to swallow ships in a single gulp, or the emergence of men strong enough to lift fully grown elephants, or the appearance in the skies over the earth of wizards traveling through the air at super-speed on magically propelled flying urns. He did not surmise that he could have fallen under the spell of a mighty and malevolent jinn.

  However, he was methodical by nature, and so, undeniably concerned by his new condition, he reached into a pocket of his battered gardening jacket and found a folded sheet of paper, a bill from the power utility company. The power had been shut down but the bills continued to insist on prompt settlement. That was the natural order of things. He unfolded the bill and spread it out on the mud. Then he stood on it, stamped and jumped some more, tried to rub the document with his feet. It remained untouched. He reached down and tugged at it, and at once it slid out from beneath his feet. No trace of a footprint. He tried a second time, and was able to pass the utility bill cleanly under both boots. The gap between himself and the earth was tiny but unarguable. He was now permanently located at least a sheet of paper’s thickness above the planet’s surface. Mr. Geronimo straightened with the piece of paper in his hand. Giant trees lay dead around him, sinking into the mud. The Lady Philosopher, his employer the fodder heiress Miss Alexandra Bliss Fariña, was watching him through ground-floor French windows with tears streaming down her beautiful young face and something else flowing from her eyes that he couldn’t make out. It might have been fear or shock. It might even have been desire.

  Mr. Geronimo’s life up to this point had been a journey of a type that was no longer uncommon in our ancestors’ peripatetic world, in which people easily became detached from places, beliefs, communities, countries, languages, and from even more important things, such as honor, morality, good judgment, and truth; in which, we may say, they splintered away from the authentic narratives of their life stories and spent the rest of their days trying to discover, or forge, new, synthetic narratives of their own. He had been born Raphael Hieronymus Manezes in Bandra, Bombay, the illegitimate son of a firebrand Catholic priest, more than sixty summers before the events that concern us now, named on another continent in another age of the world by a man (long deceased) who had come to seem as alien to him as Martians or reptiles, but was also as close as blood could make him. His holy father, Father Jerry, the Very Rev. Fr. Jeremiah D’Niza, was in his own words a “huge orson of a man,” a “whale-sized moby,” lacking earlobes but possessing, by way of compensation, the bellow of Stentor, the herald of the Greek army in the war against Troy, whose voice was as strong as fifty men. He was the neighborhood’s leading matchmaker and its benevolent tyrant, a conservative of the right type, everyone agreed. Aut Caesar aut nullus was his personal motto as it had been Cesare Borgia’s, either a Caesar or a nobody, and as Father Jerry was definitely not a nobody it followed that he must be Caesar, and in fact so complete was his authority that nobody made a fuss when he surreptitiously (meaning that everyone knew about it) made a match for himself with a grave-faced stenographer, a slip of a thing named Magda Manezes who looked like a fragile little twig next to the spreading banyan of the Father’s body. The Very Rev. Fr. Jeremiah D’Niza soon became a little less than perfectly celibate, and fathered a fine male child, instantly recognizable as his son by his distinctive ears. “The Hapsburgs and the D’Nizas are both lobeless,” Father Jerry liked to say. “Unfortunately, the wrong lot became emperors.” (The rude street boys of Bandra knew nothing of Hapsburgs. They said that Raphael’s lack of earlobes was a sign that he was not t
o be trusted, a sign of insanity, of being an exciting long word, a psychopath. But that was ignorant superstition, obviously. He went to the movies like everyone else and saw that psychopaths—mad killers, mad scientists, mad Mughal princes—had perfectly normal ears.)

  Father Jerry’s son could not be given his father’s surname, of course, the decencies had to be observed, so he received his mother’s instead. For Christian names the good pastor named him Raphael after the patron saint of Córdoba, Spain, and Hieronymus after Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus of the city of Stridon, a.k.a. Saint Jerome. “Raffy-’Ronnimus-the-pastor’s-sonnimus” he was among the rude boys playing French cricket in Bandra’s sainted Catholic streets—St. Leo St. Alexiou St. Joseph St. Andrew St. John St. Roques St. Sebestian St. Martin—until he grew too big and strong to be teased; but to his father he was always Young Raphael Hieronymus Manezes grandly and in full. He lived with his mother Magda in East Bandra but was permitted to go over to the tonier west side on Sundays to sing in his father’s church choir and to listen to Father Jerry preach without any apparent awareness of his own hypocrisy about the fiery damnation that was the inevitable consequence of sin.

  The truth was that Mr. Geronimo in later life had a poor memory, and so, much of his childhood was lost. Fragments of his father, however, remained. He remembered singing in church. Mr. Geronimo had a bit of the Latin as a child, at Christmas in song bidding the faithful come in the ancient Roman tongue, w-ing his v’s as his father commanded. Wenite, wenite in Bethlehem. Natum widete regem angelorum. But it was Genesis that got him, the Vulgate that was his namesake Saint Jerome’s work. Genesis, especially chapter one, verse three. Dixitque Deus: fiat lux. Et facta est lux. Translated by himself into his personal Bombay “Wulgate”: And God said, Cheap Italian motor car, beauty soap of the film star. And there was Lux. Please, Daddy, why did God want a small Fiat and a bar of soap, and also please, why did he get the soap only? Why couldn’t he make the car? And why not a better car, Daddy? He could’ve asked for a Jesus Chrysler, no? Which brought down upon him a predictable jeremiad from Jeremiah D’Niza, plus a thunderous reminder of his wrong-side-of-the-blanketness, Don’t call me Daddy, call me Father like everyone else, and he skipping with a giggle out of reach of the pastor’s vengeful hand, singing cheap Italian motor car beauty soap of the film star.

  That was his whole childhood right there. He always knew that church wasn’t for him but he liked the songs. And on Sundays all the local Sandras came to church and he liked their flipped-up hairdos and their cheeky flouncing. Hark the herald angels sing, he taught them at Christmas, Beecham’s pills are just the thing. If you want to go to heaven, take a dose of six or seven. If you want to go to Hell, take the whole damn box as well. The Sandras liked that and let him kiss them secretly on the lips behind the choir stall. His father so apocalyptic in the pulpit hardly ever hit him, mostly just let his son’s mouth run out of blasphemous steam, understanding that bastards have their resentments and must be allowed to air them in whatever form they come out, and after Magda’s death—she was a polio victim in those olden days when not everyone had access to the Salk vaccine—he sent Hieronymus to learn a trade from his architect uncle Charles in the capital of the world, but that didn’t work either. Later, when the young man closed the architectural office on Greenwich Avenue and started the gardening business, his father wrote him a letter. You’ll never amount to anything if you can’t stick to anything. Mr. Geronimo unstuck in the grounds of La Incoerenza remembered his father’s warning. The old man knew what he was talking about.

  In American mouths “Hieronymus” quickly became “Geronimo” and he enjoyed, he had to admit, the Indian-chiefy allusion. He was a big man like his father with big competent hands a thick neck and hawkish profile and with his Indian-Indian complexion and all, it was easy for Americans to see the Wild West in him and treat him with the respect reserved for remnants of peoples exterminated by the white man, which he accepted without clarifying that he was Indian from India and therefore familiar with a quite different history of imperialist oppression, but never mind. Uncle Charles Duniza (he had changed the spelling of his surname, he said, to accommodate Americans’ Italianate tastes) also lacked earlobes and had the family gift of height. He was white haired with bushy white eyebrows, his fleshy lips habitually stretched in a gentle disappointed smile, and in his modest architectural practice did not allow politics to be discussed. When he took twenty-two-year-old Geronimo to drink at an inn run by the Genovese family for drag queens and male hookers and transgendered persons, he wanted to speak only of sex, the love of men and men, which horrified and delighted his Bombay nephew who had never spoken of such matters before and to whom they had until now remained a mystery. Father Jerry, being a conservative of the right type, considered homosexuality a thing beyond the pale, to be treated as if it did not exist. But now young Geronimo was living in his homosexual uncle’s run-down brownstone on St. Mark’s Place and the house was full of Uncle Charles’s protégés, half a dozen gay Cuban refugees whom Charles Duniza, with a lighthearted, dismissive wave of the hand, collectively referred to as the Raúls. The Raúls were to be found in the bathrooms at odd hours plucking their eyebrows or languidly shaving the body hair off their chests and legs before heading out in search of love. Geronimo Manezes had no idea how to speak to them but that was okay because they had no interest in speaking to him either. He had always exuded powerfully heterosexual pheromones which induced, in the Raúls, small moues of indifference that said, You can coexist in this space with us if you must, but please know that in all essential ways you don’t exist for us at all.

  As he watched them prance away into the night, Geronimo Manezes found that he envied them their carelessness, the ease with which they had shed Havana like an unwanted snakeskin, navigating this new city with their ten words of bad English, diving into the polyglot urban sea and feeling instantly at home, or, at least, adding their easy, brittle, angry, damaged misfittery to all the other square pegs in the round holes all around them, using bathhouse promiscuity to create the feeling of belonging. He wanted to be that way too, he realized. He felt what the Raúls felt: now that he was here, in this broke, dirty, inexhaustible, dangerous, irresistible metropolis, he was never going home.

  Like so many unbelievers Geronimo Manezes was looking for paradise, but Manhattan Island then was anything but Edenic. After the riots that summer Uncle Charles gave up the Mafia inn. A year later he would march with the pride marchers, but uncomfortably. He wasn’t a natural protester. Reading Voltaire’s Candide, he declared himself in agreement with the tragicomic philosopher Pangloss: Il faut cultiver son jardin. “Stay home, go to work, attend to business,” he advised his nephew Geronimo. “This solidarity cum activism thing: I don’t know.” He was cautious by nature, a member of an association of gay businesspeople which, as Charles Duniza took pride in saying for years afterwards, had been addressed by Ed Koch when he was on the city council, it was the first openly gay organization he spoke to, and everyone had been too courteous to ask the future mayor anything about his own rumored sexual orientation. Charles was a regular attendee at the association’s suit-and-tie gatherings in the Village, and in his own way a conservative like his brother Father Jerry back home. But when the call came to march he put on his Sunday best and joined the wild parade, one of the few formally dressed persons in that defiant carnival of self-assertion. And Geronimo, straight as he was, went with him. By now they were fast friends and it wouldn’t have been right to let Uncle Charles go into battle alone.

  The years passed and the architectural practice began to struggle. The walls of the Greenwich Avenue office were lined with dreams: buildings Charles Duniza had never built and would never build. In the late 1980s his friend the celebrated real estate developer Bento V. Elfenbein bought a hundred acres of prime property in Big Groundnut on the South Fork of Long Island—its name was taken from the Pequot Indian word later more usually translated as potato—and wanted a hundred “starch
itects” to build signature homes on an acre each. One of these acres was promised to Charles—“Of course you, Charles! What do you think, I don’t remember my friends?” Bento expostulated—but the project remained in the doldrums because of complex financing issues. Uncle Charles’s smile faded a little, became a little sadder. Bento, a dandy with rakishly floppy brown hair and a colorful relationship with cravats, came across as absurdly glamorous and almost shockingly charming, the scion of a big Hollywood dynasty. He was flamboyantly intellectual, with a tendency to quote Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class with a bitter irony leavened somewhat by his own, indefatigable Hollywood grin, a Joe E. Brown dazzler full of big, bright, white teeth, inherited from a mother who had been on the screen with Chaplin. “The leisure class, a.k.a. the landed gentry, on whom my business depends,” he told Geronimo Manezes, “are the hunters, not the gatherers; they make their way by the immoral road of exploitation, not the virtuous path of industry. But I, to make my way, have to treat the rich as the good guys, the lions, the creators of wealth and guardians of freedom, which naturally I don’t mind doing because I’m an exploiter too and I also want to think of myself as virtuous.”