New York City was my mother and father all that summer until I learned to live without parents and accept, as Nero had recommended I accept, my adult place at the head of the queue waiting to see the last picture show. As usual it was a movie that helped me, Ingmar Bergman’s Det sjunde inseglet, “The Seventh Seal,” which the great film director himself thought “uneven” but which the rest of us revered. The knight (Max von Sydow, who would go on to play the boring artist Frederick in Hannah and Her Sisters and the immortal Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon) on his way home from the Crusades playing chess against black-cowled Death to delay the inevitable, so that he could see his wife once more before he died. Broken knight and cynical squire, Bergman’s unfunny Quixote and Sancho, looking for this year’s birds in last year’s nests. Bergman had religious issues to work out, having come from a deeply religious household, but for me it wasn’t necessary to see the film in those terms. The title was from the Book of Revelation. “And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour” (Revelation 8:1). To me, the silence in heaven, the nonappearance of God, was the truth of the secular vision of the universe, and half an hour meant the length of a human life. The opening of the seventh seal revealed that God was nowhere with nothing to say and Man was given the space of his little life to perform, as the knight wished to perform, one meaningful deed. The wife I wanted to see before I died was my dream of being a filmmaker. The meaningful deed was the film I was dreaming of making, my film of my Gardens dotted with real and imaginary beings like an Altman ensemble cast and the Goldens in their house at the far end from mine. The “deed” was the journey and the “wife” was the goal. I said something of this sort to Suchitra and she nodded gravely. “It’s time to finish your script and start raising the money.”
And in the meanwhile the great metropolis, hugging me to its bosom and trying to teach me the lessons of life. The boat on the pond where Stuart Little sailed reminding me of the beauty of innocence, and the space on Clinton Street where Judith Malina was still just about alive and her Living Theatre was still enjoying getting naked spoke to me of old-school don’t-give-a-fuck irreverence. And on Union Square the chess players played and maybe Death was playing there too, fast games of Blitz that grabbed lives like they didn’t matter or slow games, off the clock, that allowed the black angel to pretend he respected life while still recruiting his playing partners for his danse macabre. Absences spoke to me as well as presences: the shoe stores gone from Eighth Street, the eccentricity gone from the Upper West Side where once Maya Schaper ran Cheese and Antiques and, when asked why, liked to reply, “Because these are the things I love.” Everywhere I walked the city held me in its arms and whispered comfort in my ear.
On the night of Apu’s second opening at the Sottovoce Bowery space a block from the Museum of Identity (these pictures were smart and swift and technically adept and energetic and pop-arty and they failed to move me), Laurie Anderson’s large paintings depicting the forty-nine-day experience of her beloved deceased rat terrier Lolabelle in the bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist zone between death and rebirth, were showing across town. Suchitra and I were standing in front of one of the largest images of that sweet-faced dog looking wide-eyed at us from the afterlife when all of a sudden the words It’s all right formed within me and then I said them aloud. “It’s all right,” I said, and a grin widened across my face. “It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.” A shadow lifted from me and the future looked possible and happiness seemed conceivable and life began again. It was only much later, when I thought back, that I realized that that had been the forty-ninth day since my parents’ death.
I don’t believe in the bardo. But there you have it.
“FLASH! I LOVE YOU! BUT WE HAVE ONLY FOURTEEN HOURS TO SAVE THE EARTH!”
I was in the grip of a kind of euphoria that night, seized by the high of having forgiven my parents for dying and myself for remaining alive. Suchitra and I went home to the Gardens and I knew that it was time to do the forbidden thing. Already high on life, we broke open the long-preserved pack of Afghan Moon and inhaled. At once the third eyes in our pineal glands opened as my father had said they would and we understood the secrets of the world. We saw that the world was neither meaningless nor absurd, that in fact it had profound meaning and form, but that form and meaning had been hidden from us until now, concealed in the hieroglyphs and esoterica of power, because it was in the interests of the masters of the world to hide meaning from all but the illuminated. We understood also that it was up to the two of us to save the planet and that the force that would save the planet was love. With our heads spinning we understood that Max von Sydow as Ming the Merciless, totalitarian, whimsical and badly dressed in his bright red science fiction comic book evil genius cloak, was coming to conquer the human race, and that if sometimes Ming’s face blurred and began to look like the face of Nero Golden, then that was unfair because of his kindness to me of late, but could a man be simultaneously bad and good, we asked ourselves, and the Afghan Moon replied that irreconcilable contradiction and the union of opposites was the deepest mystery of all. Tonight was for love, said the Afghan Moon, tonight was for the celebration of living bodies and for saying farewell to the lost bodies of departed loved ones, but after the sun rose in the morning there would be no time to lose.
If you owed the bank a buck you were a deadbeat with an overdraft. If you owed a billion you were rich and the bank was working for you. It was difficult to know how wealthy Nero Golden actually was. His name was everywhere in those days, on everything from hot dogs to for-profit universities, it was walking around Lincoln Center thinking about donating a unit to refurbish Avery Fisher Hall as long as the old name got dumped and the Golden name was up there in block capitals made of gold. A unit was the shorthand term his name used to signify “one hundred million dollars,” one hundred million dollars being the price of entry into the world of the really rich, you really weren’t anybody until you had your unit. His name was walking that unit around town, it kind of wanted to put itself on the Tribeca Film Festival, but that would cost a lot less than a whole unit, so finally the Film Festival felt like chicken feed; what his name really, really wanted was to be way up there on Yankee Stadium. That would prove his name had conquered New York. After that they might just as well put it on top of City Hall.
I assumed he had brought serious funds with him when he came west, but there were persistent rumors that all his enterprises were highly leveraged, that the whole mega-business of his name was a flimflam game and bankruptcy was the shadow that went with his name whenever he took it for a stroll. I thought of him as a citizen not of New York but of the invisible city of Octavia which Marco Polo described to Kublai Khan in Calvino’s book, a spiderweb city hanging in a great net over an abyss between two mountains. “The life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities,” Calvino wrote. “They know the net will last only so long.” I thought of him too as one of those characters in animated cartoons, Wile E. Coyote perhaps, who are constantly running off the edges of canyons, but who keep going, defying gravity, until they look down, and then they fall. The knowledge of the impossibility of the attempt brings about its calamitous ending. Nero Golden kept going, perhaps, because he never looked down.