Human beings were creatures he had to put up with, with whom he would never feel at home.
What was hardest for him—in those early months before we found out the answers for ourselves, which eventually I told him we had done, to put him at his ease, which it failed to do—was to avoid spilling the family beans, their real names, their origins, the story of his mother’s death. Ask him a direct question and he would answer honestly because his brain made it impossible for him to lie. Yet out of loyalty to his father’s wishes he managed to find a way. He trained himself in locutions of avoidance, “I will not answer that question,” or, “Maybe you should ask someone else,” statements his nature could accept as true and therefore allow himself to make. Sometimes, it’s true, he skated perilously close to treason. “As to my family,” he said one day, apropos of nothing, as was his wont (his conversation was a series of random bombs falling out of the blue sky of his thought), “consider the nonstop insanity that went on in the palace during the time of the twelve Caesars, the incest, the matricide, the poisonings, the epilepsy, the dead babies, the stench of evil, and of course there’s Caligula’s horse to consider. Mayhem, dear boy, but when the Roman in the street looked up at the palace what did he see?” Here an arch, dramatic pause, and then, “He saw the palace, dear boy. He saw the bloody palace, immovable, unchanging, there. Indoors, the powerful were fucking their aunties and cutting off each other’s dicks. Outside, it was clear that the power structure remained unchanged. We’re like that, Papa Nero and my brothers. Behind the closed doors of the family, I freely admit, it’s hell in there. Remember Edmund Leach in his Reith lectures. ‘The family with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets is the source of all our discontents.’ Too bloody true in our case, old sport. But as far as the Roman in the street is concerned, we close ranks. We form the bloody testudo and forward march.”
Whatever else there is to say about Nero Golden—and by the time I’m done, much will be said, much of it horrifying—there was no questioning his devotion to his firstborn child. Plainly in some sense Petya would always remain part child, lurching unpredictably into crazy mishaps. As if AS wasn’t enough, by the time he came to live among us his agoraphobia was pretty bad. The communal Gardens, interestingly, didn’t scare him. Sealed off from the city on all four sides, they qualified, somehow, in that strange broken-mirror mind, as being “indoors.” But he rarely went into the streets. Then one day he took it upon himself to tilt at his mental windmills. Defying his hatred of the undefended world, challenging himself to overcome his demons, he plunged meaninglessly into the subway. The household panicked at his disappearance and a few hours later there was a call from the police precinct at Coney Island which had him in a holding cell because, growing afraid in a tunnel, he began to create a considerable disturbance, and when a security officer came on board at the next station Petya began to abuse him as a Bolshevik apparatchik, a political commissar, an agent of the secret state; and was handcuffed. Only Nero’s arrival in a large, grave, apologetic limousine saved the day. He explained his son’s condition and, unusually, was listened to, and Petya was released into his father’s custody. That happened, and, afterwards, worse things as well. But Nero Golden never wavered, looked constantly for cutting-edge medical help, and did his best for his firstborn son. When the final tally is made, that must weigh heavily in the scales of justice, on his side.
What is heroism in our time? What is villainy? How much we have forgotten, if we don’t know the answer to such questions anymore. A cloud of ignorance has blinded us, and in that fog the strange, broken mind of Petya Golden fitfully shone like a manic guiding light. What a presence he might have been! For he was born to be a star; but there was a flaw in the program. He was a brilliant talker, yes; but he was like a whole cable box full of talk-show networks that jumped channels frequently and without warning. He was often frenziedly cheerful but his condition caused a deep pain in him, because he was ashamed of himself for malfunctioning, for failing to get better, for obliging his father and a posse of doctors to keep him functional and put him back together when he broke.
So much suffering, so nobly borne. I thought of Raskolnikov. “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”