“And from you?”
“As to myself, mister René: maybe you guessed already that I am not always a saint. I am hard and boastful and used to a certain superior position and what I want I take and what I don’t want I clear out of my way. But when you are facing me you must ask yourself the following question: Is it possible to be both good and evil? Can a man be a good man when he is a bad man? If you believe Spinoza and agree that everything is determined by necessity, can the necessities that drive a man drive him to wrongdoing as well as right? What is a good man in this deterministic world? Does the adjective even mean anything? When you have the answer, tell me. But before all of this happens, tonight, we go out on the town, and drink.”
Later.
“Death, we deal with it, we accept it, we move on,” Nero Golden said. “We are the living, so we must live. Guilt, but, that’s bad. That remains and does us harm.” We were at the Russian Tea Room—his treat—holding shot glasses of ice-cold vodka. He raised his in salute; he drank, I drank. It was why we were here, and the food—blinis and caviar, dumplings, chicken Kiev—we ate only to allow us to drink more.
“If we go home sober,” Nero Golden told me, “then we will have failed. We need to reach a condition in which we will not know how exactly we got home at all.”
I bowed my head gravely. “Agreed.”
Another shot. “My late wife, you take her case,” Nero jabbed a finger at me, “don’t pretend you don’t know the story, I know the loose tongues in my household. Never mind that. As to her death, a great sadness, but not in fact a tragedy, it didn’t rise to the level of tragedy.” Another shot. “I correct myself. A personal tragedy of course. A tragedy to me and my sons. But great tragedy is universal, is it not.”
“It is.”
“So. My point. The destructive aspect for me, the life-altering destructive aspect, was not the fact of death but the fact of responsibility. Mine. My responsibility, this is the issue. This is what haunts me when at night I walk in the Gardens.”
By this stage of the evening I had begun to see it as my task to comfort him even though the purpose of the outing had been vice versa. “You had a quarrel,” I said. “This happens. It does not place upon you the burden of her death. In an ethical universe only the murderer is guilty of the murder. It must be so otherwise the universe would be morally absurd.”
He was silent, drinking, waiters hovering to bring more vodka as needed. “Let me give a different example,” I said, lofty now, finding myself at the heights of thought, feeling truly my parents’ child. “Suppose that I’m an asshole.”
“A total asshole?”
“Complete and total. And stinky.”
“I imagine it, okay.”
“Suppose that every day I stand in front of your house and I abuse you and your family.”
“Are you using bad language?”
“The worst. I abuse yourself and your loved ones in the coarsest terms.”
“This would be intolerable, naturally.”
“So, you have a gun in the house.”
“How do you know this?”
“I am hypothesizing.”
“Ah, a hypothesis. Excellent. Understood. A hypothetical gun.”
“And you take this putative weapon and you know what you do?”
“I shoot you.”
“You shoot me through the heart and I’m dead and guess what that makes you.”
“It makes me happy.”
“It makes you a murderer.”
“It makes me happy and a murderer.”
“You are guilty of murder and in court it is not a defense to say, your honor, he was an asshole.”
“It is not?”
“Even assholes when murdered are not responsible for their deaths. The murderer alone bears the burden of the crime.”
“This is philosophy?”
“I need more vodka. The philosophy is in the bottle.”
“Waiter.”
After another shot he became maudlin. “You’re young,” he said. “You don’t know what responsibility is. You don’t know guilt or shame. You know nothing. It is not important. Your parents are dead. This is the matter in hand.”
“Thank you,” I said, and after that I don’t remember.
Ends.