For a period after the something-like-suicide-attempt Petya Golden found it hard to emerge from his curtained room, which was illuminated by the lights of a dozen screens and a host of lamps with pale blue lightbulbs, and in which he remained day and night, hardly sleeping, busily engaged in his electronic mysteries, including playing chess against anonymous e-opponents in Korea and Japan, and, as we afterwards discovered, rushing himself through a crash course in the history and development of video games, understanding the war-gaming programs devised in the 1940s to run on the earliest digital computers, Colossus and ENIAC, then rushing contemptuously through Tennis for Two, Spacewar!, and the early arcade games, through the age of Hunt the Wumpus and Dungeons & Dragons, skipping past the banalities of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, and on and on through SimCity, World of Warcraft, and the more sophisticated subjectivities of Assassin’s Creed and Red Dead Redemption and then into levels of sophistication at which none of us could guess; and watching the vulgar fictions of reality television; and subsisting on grilled Double Gloucester cheese sandwiches prepared by himself on a small electric stove; feeling, all this while, profoundly sickened by himself and the burden he had to bear. Then his internal weather changed and he moved from self-hatred to hatred of the world, and, in particular, as the world’s nearest representative authority figure, of his father. One night that summer, insomnia, my constant friend, forced me to get out of bed around 3 A.M., pull on some clothes and wander into the communal gardens to take the warm night air. The houses were all asleep; all but one. In the Golden residence the lights were on in a single second-floor window, in the room Nero Golden used as an office. I couldn’t see the old man but Petya’s silhouette, with the broad shoulders and the flat-top haircut, was easily recognizable. What was startling was the extreme animation of that silhouetted figure, the arms waving, the weight shifting from leg to leg. He turned slightly, and looking at him in near-profile I understood that he was screaming with rage.
I couldn’t hear anything. The study windows were well soundproofed. Some of us suspected them of actually being inch-thick bulletproof glass, a hypothesis to which the silent image of Petya shouting lent much credence. Why did Nero Golden feel the need to bulletproof his windows? No answer to that one; the rich in New York feel the need to protect themselves in unpredictable ways. In my family of academics we adopted an air of interested amusement when faced with our neighbors’ eccentricities, the painter permanently attired in silk pajamas, the magazine editor who never removed her sunglasses no matter what the hour, and so on. So, bulletproof glass, no biggie. In a way the dumb-show accentuated the power of Petya Golden’s hysterical performance. I am an admirer of German expressionist cinema in general and of the work of Fritz Lang in particular, and all of a sudden the words “Dr. Mabuse” popped unbidden into my head. At the time I brushed the thought aside, because I was more preoccupied by another consideration: perhaps Petya really was going off his rocker, not just metaphorically, but actually. Perhaps behind the autism and agoraphobia lay an actual derangement, an insanity. I resolved to watch him more carefully from then on.
What was the argument about? There was no way to know; but to my mind it seemed like an expression of Petya’s savage complaint against life itself, which had dealt him such a poor hand. The next day the old man was to be seen pensive on a bench in the Gardens, sitting there like stone, silent, immovable, unapproachable, with a darkness on his face. Many years later, when we knew everything, I remembered thinking about Lang’s great film Dr. Mabuse the Gambler that summer night in the Gardens under Nero Golden’s illuminated, silenced window. The film, of course, is about the career of a criminal mastermind.
No hint of the dramatic events at the Goldens’ party ever reached the newspapers (or the gossip websites, or any of the other digital megaphones birthed by the new technology). In spite of the high celebrity content of the guest list, in spite of the hovering team of waitstaff who might have been tempted by the easy money on offer for a salacious phone call, the code of silence under which the Goldens lived appeared to wrap itself around all who entered their presence, so that not a whisper of scandal ever escaped their powerful, almost Sicilian force field of omertà. Nero had hired the most powerful members of the city’s tribe of publicists, whose most important task was not to get, but to suppress, publicity; and so what happened in the Golden house very largely stayed in the Golden house.
I believe now that Nero Golden knew in his heart that his performance as a New Yorker without a past was short-lived. I think he knew that in the end the past would not be denied, that it would come for him, and have its way. I think that he was using his immense capacity for bravado to stave off the inevitable. “I’m a man of reason,” he informed his dinner guests on the night of Petya’s meltdown. (He had a weakness for self-praising orations.) “A man of affairs. If I may say so, a great man of affairs. Believe me. Nobody knows affairs better than I do, let me tell you that. Now, America is too God-bothered for my liking, too wrapped up in superstitions, but I’m not that kind of man. That kind of thing gets in the way of commerce. Two plus two is four, that’s me. The rest is mumbo jumbo and gobbledygook. Four plus four is eight. If America wants to be what America is capable of being, what she dreams of being, she needs to turn away from God and toward the dollar bill. The business of America is business. That is what I believe.” Such was his bold (and often repeated) assertion of pragmatic capitalism, which reassured me, incidentally, that we Unterlindens had been right about his irreligious nature; and yet he was, they all were, in the grip of a huge fantasy: the idea that men would not be judged by who they once were and what they had once done, if they only decided to be different. They wanted to step away from the responsibilities of history and be free. But history is the court before which all men, even emperors and princes, finally must stand. I think of Longfellow’s paraphrase of the Roman Sextus Empiricus: The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.