Now.
The pipe was seven feet long. It rolled into the path of another car which gave it what the reports called a glancing blow. The pipe spun about, somehow got itself up so that it bounced end over end, and smashed through the windshield of my parents’ car and hit my father in the head, killing him instantly. Their car, out of control, veered out of the HOV lane into the path of the fast traffic and in the multiple collision that followed my mother was also killed. To get them out of the vehicle, the emergency services had to send for the Jaws of Life, but they were both gone. Their bodies were taken to North Shore University Hospital at Plainview, in Nassau County, where they were both pronounced dead on arrival. At midnight, just after I had fearfully declared my love to Suchitra Roy in the British-style pub on the corner of Bleecker and LaGuardia and been given the almost entirely unexpected news that she also had deep feelings for me, I received the call.
For a good deal of that year I stopped thinking almost completely. All I heard was the thunderous beating of the death angel’s gigantic wings. Two people saved me. One was my new beloved, brilliant, loving Suchitra.
The other was Mr. Nero Golden.
With their characteristic carefulness—WHICH DIDN’T SAVE THEIR LIVES DID IT, THE CARELESSNESS OF OTHERS ERASES OUR OWN CARE, THE CARELESSNESS OF A PIPE REARING UP, SMASHING INTO MY FATHER’S FACE, OF WHICH MINE IS A POOR ECHO, WE WHO COME AFTER ARE THE COUNTERFEITS OF THE REAL ONES WHO PRECEDED US AND ARE GONE FOREVER, STUPIDLY, MEANINGLESSLY, SLAUGHTERED BY A RANDOM PIPE, OR A BOMB IN A NIGHTCLUB, OR A DRONE—my parents had left their affairs in good order. There were all the necessary, careful legal documents, carefully composed, which ensured that my status as sole heir was protected, and there was insurance to pay what the state required of that heir, and there would be a sum of money. So for the time being my domestic arrangements didn’t need to change, though probably in the medium term the house would need to be sold. It was too big for me, its value was high, the maintenance expenses and property taxes and so on would be difficult for me to come up with, and ET CETERA I DIDN’T CARE. I walked the streets in a blind rage and all at once it was as if all the anger gathering in the air poured into me too, I could feel it, the anger of the unjustly dead, the young men shot for walking in a stairwell while black, the young child shot for playing with a plastic gun in a playground while black, all the daily black death of America, screaming out that they deserved to live, and I could feel, too, the fury of white America at having to put up with a black man in a white house, and the frothing hatred of the homophobes, and the injured wrath of their targets, the blue-collar anger of everyone who had been Fannie Mae’d and Freddie Mac’d by the housing calamity, all the discontent of a furiously divided country, everyone believing they were right, their cause was just, their pain was unique, attention must be paid, attention must finally be paid to them and only them, and I began to wonder if we were moral beings at all or simply savages who defined their private bigotries as necessary ethics, as the only ways to be. I had been brought up by those dear departed Belgians to believe that “right” and “wrong” were ideas that came naturally to the human animal, that these concepts were born in us, not made. We believed that there was a “moral instinct”: hardwired into the DNA in the way that, according to Steven Pinker, the “language instinct” was. This was our family answer to the religious allegation that persons without religion could not be moral beings, that only the moral structure of a religious system validated by some sort of Supreme Arbiter could give human beings a firm grip on good and evil. My parents’ answer to that was “Hogwash,” or alternatively a term they had learned from Australian friends and gleefully adopted as their own: “Horse puckie.” Morality came before religion and religion was our ancestors’ way of responding to that built-in need. And if that was so then it followed that it was perfectly possible to lead a good life, to have a strong sense of right and wrong, without ever letting God and his harpies into the room.
“The problem is,” my mother said, sitting on a bench in the Gardens, “that while we are programmed to want ethics, the program doesn’t tell us what right and wrong actually are. These categories are empty in the brain and require us to fill them up with what? Thought. Judgment. Stuff of this kind.”
“One of the general principles of human behavior, I’ve found,” my father added, walking up and down in front of her, “is that in almost every situation, everyone believes himself or herself to be right, and any opponent wrong.”
To which my mother rejoined, “Also we live in a time in which there is almost no agreement on any existential questions, we can’t even concur simply on what is the case, and when the nature of the real is so disputed, so must the nature of the good be.”
When they got going like this they were like dancers, or badminton players, their words moving in harmony, their rackets wafting the shuttlecock back and forth, forth and back again. “So de idea that we have an ethics instinct doesn’t carry with it de notion that we know what those ethics should be. If that were true philosophers would be out of a job and we would live in a less contentious world,” my father was pointing at me with a finger now, you see?, you getting this?, and I like a schoolboy nodding, yes, Dad, yes Mom, I get it, we all agree on this, these are things we know.
“Yeah, but did you know there’s a word for it?” my father asked me.
A word for what, Dad.
“Definition: De supposed innate ability of de human mind to realize de basic principles of ethics and morals. A technical term of philosophy, signifying de innate principle in de moral consciousness of every man, which directs him to good and restrains him from evil.”
No, Dad, what word would that be.
“Synderesis,” my mother said. “Did you ever hear a better word?”
“There isn’t a better word,” my father concurred. “Remember it, kiddo. De best word in de world.”
These were the voices I would never hear again.
And they were wrong. The human race was savage, not moral. I had lived in an enchanted garden but the savagery, the meaninglessness, the fury had come in over the walls and killed what I loved most.