Nero Golden raised his hand to stop her in her tracks. Then, lowering the hand, he spat on the back of it.
Tell me everything, he said to me.
I told him.
I don’t have to listen to this, Riya said, and left the house. I refuse to listen to this, said Vasilisa, and stayed in the room, listening.
When I had finished he thought for a long time. Then he said, his voice strong and low, Now my wife and I must speak alone.
I turned to go, but before I left the room he said a strange thing.
If some harm should befall us both, I appoint you the boy’s guardian. I will have the lawyers draw up the paperwork today.
No harm will befall us both, Vasilisa said. Also, it’s the weekend.
We will speak privately now, Nero answered her. Please show René out.
As I walked away down Macdougal toward Houston, the adrenaline drained from my body and I was seized by fear for the future. I knew what had to be done, what I could not avoid doing. I tried to call Suchitra. Voicemail. I texted her, we need to speak. I wandered in the city making my way home down Sixth Avenue and over into Tribeca, blind to the streets. On the corner of North Moore and Greenwich I got her reply. Home late what. There was no way to answer. No prob see you whenever. I turned right on Chambers and walked past Stuyvesant High School. I expected the worst. What else could happen? What could she think of me, of what I had to tell her? Only the worst.
But if human nature were not a mystery, we’d have no need of poets.
Later. Let’s say, quite a while later. Some wise man once suggested that Manhattan below 14th Street at 3 A.M. on November 28 was Batman’s Gotham City; Manhattan between 14th and 110th Streets on the brightest and sunniest day in July was Superman’s Metropolis. And Spider-Man, that Johnny-come-lately, hung upside down in Queens thinking about power and responsibility. All these cities, the invisible imaginary cities lying over and around and interwoven with the real one: all still intact, even though after the election the Joker—his hair green and luminous with triumph, his skin white as a Klansman’s hood, his lips dripping anonymous blood—now ruled them all. The Joker had indeed become a king and lived in a golden house in the sky. The citizens reached for clichés and reminded themselves that there were still birds in the trees and the sky hadn’t fallen and it was, often, still blue. The city still stood. And on the radio and on the music apps playing in the Bluetooth headphones of the careless young the beat went on. The Yankees still worrying about their pitching rotation, the Mets still underperforming, and the Knicks still doomed by the curse of being the Knicks. The internet was still full of lies and the business of the truth was broken. The best had lost all conviction and the worst were filled with passionate intensity and the weakness of the just was revealed by the wrath of the unjust. But the Republic remained more or less intact. Let me just set that down because it was a statement often made to comfort those of us who were not easily to be comforted. It’s a fiction in a way, but I repeat it. I know that after the storm, another storm, and then another. I know that stormy weather is the forecast forever and happy days aren’t here again and intolerance is the new black and the system really is rigged only not in the way the evil clown has tried to make us believe. Sometimes the bad guys win and what does one do when the world one believes in turns out to be a paper moon and a dark planet rises and says, No, I am the world. How does one live amongst one’s fellow countrymen and countrywomen when you don’t know which of them is numbered amongst the sixty-million-plus who brought the horror to power, when you can’t tell who should be counted among the ninety-million-plus who shrugged and stayed home, or when your fellow Americans tell you that knowing things is elitist and they hate elites, and all you have ever had is your mind and you were brought up to believe in the loveliness of knowledge, not that knowledge-is-power nonsense but knowledge is beauty, and then all of that, education, art, music, film, becomes a reason for being loathed, and the creature out of Spiritus Mundi rises up and slouches toward Washington, D.C., to be born. What I did was to retreat into private life—to hold on to life as I had known it, its dailiness and strength, and to insist on the ability of the moral universe of the Gardens to survive even the fiercest assault. And now therefore let my little story have its final moments in the midst of whatever macro garbage is around as you read this, whatever manufactroversy, whatever horror or stupidity or ugliness or disgrace. Let me invite the giant victorious green-haired cartoon king and his billion-dollar movie franchise to take a back seat and let real people drive the bus. Our little lives are perhaps as much as we are able to comprehend.
I remember telling Apu Golden how I wept on election night in November 2008. Those were good tears. The equal and opposite tears of 2016 washed the goodness away.