Thirty-two miles, give or take, is the “great saunter” around Manhattan Island. Seventy thousand steps. Twelve hours, if you’re not super-fast. Twenty parks. I didn’t go along, but I understood at once that this moment would be a high point of the film I was dreaming up, my imaginary Golden movie. Loud music on the soundtrack, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine, Zeppelin, Metallica, and the umlaut gang, Mot?rhead and M?tley Crüe. The walker walking, and (somehow making itself heard through the heavy metal noise; I hadn’t worked that part out yet) the sound of a tambourine at each footfall. In the parks he passes the figures of his life, watching him; are they phantoms, the ectoplasm of his damaged fantasy? Here, his mother in Nelson A. Rockefeller Park, definitely a ghost or a memory. Here, Apu jogging past him on the East River Promenade. Farther along, D Golden and Riya in Riverside Park, all of them motionless, watching as he walks, staring the stare of ghosts. Around them the haunted, frightened trees. Ubah Tuur standing like a sentinel in Inwood Hill Park by the Shorakkopoch Rock, which marks the spot where once upon a time under the largest tulip tree in Mannahatta Peter Minuit bought the island for sixty guilders, and in Carl Schurz Park near Gracie Mansion the bouffant Lett himself, egging him on. Maybe Lett was the one who was really there. Petya moves on, the tambourine man, far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow. And as he walks, a transformation. At mile ten, in West Harlem Piers Park, he throws away the chalk, stops drawing the line that has followed him this far, and once he has passed the mayor’s residence he throws away the garlic too. Something has changed for him. He doesn’t need to mark his territory anymore. The walk itself is the mark, and the completion of it will perfect his invisible, indelible eruv.
And by the time he returns, staggering a little, to his starting place the sky has darkened; and watched at last by the schooners Lettie G. Howard and Pioneer and the freighter Wavertree he begins, on his bandaged blistered feet, slowly and without regard for watching eyes, to dance. Beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free. And he has broken his hoodoo. One of them. And maybe learned something about his strength, his ability to confront and rise above his other challenges too. Look at his face right now: it wears the look of a slave set free.
—What of the hatred?
—Oh, that remained.
In the aftermath of Petya Golden’s great saunter, we were obliged to accept that the hypnotherapist Murray Lett was a miracle worker in spite of his hairstyle, accent and shoes, and learned the lesson of compassion: that the truth often lies below the surface, and a man may be a great deal more than his most easily caricatured characteristics. For Petya now was like a man exonerated of a crime he had never committed and for which he had been serving a life sentence. His face was illumined by a grave joy, which both recognized the injustice of his suffering and accepted, with a gradually fading disbelief, his release from it. And as he embarked on his new life, Lett was the man on whom he leaned, whom he trusted to guide him into the world whose openness to him felt like an impossible treasure; that same world where all the rest of us so casually and often so thoughtlessly lived, failing to notice its daily carnival of wonderments, which Petya now hugged to his bosom like gifts. He went shopping for groceries with Murray Lett to D’Agostino’s, Gristedes, and Whole Foods; he sat with Murray Lett on the open-air terraces of cafés in Union Square and Battery Park; he went with Murray Lett to his first outdoor rock concert at Jones Beach, featuring Soundgarden and his beloved Nails; he was at The Stadium with Murray Lett chanting “Thank you Derek” during one of Derek Jeter’s last moments in the Bronx. And it was with Murray Lett that he picked out his new apartment, a furnished ready-to-move-in twelve-month rental “and then let’s see,” he confidently said, “maybe then it will be time to buy,” on the fourth floor of a six-story, Mondrian-ish glass and metal building on the east side of Sullivan Street.
It was only at this point that I discovered, and felt like a fool for not having known it before, that Petya had been making very large sums of money on his own all this time, as the creator and sole owner of a number of highly successful games which the whole world was playing on its smartphones and computers.
This was sensational information. We all knew that he played those games constantly, sometimes for fourteen or fifteen hours a day; how had none of us had any inkling that he was doing so much more than merely idling away his troubled hours doing something which his strange, brilliant mind was naturally good at? How did we not guess that he had taught himself code, becoming rapidly and profoundly versed in its mysteries, and that as well as endlessly playing these games he was creating them? How were we blind to the evidence, and couldn’t see that he had revealed himself to himself as a twenty-first-century genius, leaving the rest of us in his wake, floundering in a second-millennium world? It was a sign of how badly we had failed him, abandoning him for most of the hours of each day to his own devices, allowing him to stay locked away, marooned in his room as if he were our version of that old Gothic trope, the Madwoman in the Attic, our own Bertha Antoinetta Mason, the first Mrs. Rochester, thought by Jane Eyre to resemble a “Vampyre.” And all this time! All this time! Frugal, hidden Petya, changing nothing about his life, buying himself nothing, had been rising to the Everests of that secret universe, and, to be frank, outdoing us all. Another lesson to be learned: never underestimate your fellow man. One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.
They all had secrets, the Golden men. Except perhaps for Apu, who was an open book.
That was the year of the ugly Gamergate business; the gaming world was at war, men against women, “gamer identity” against diversity, and only a new-tech Neanderthal like myself could have been unaware of the hullabaloo. Somehow, in ways which I was not able to grasp, Petya had managed to stand apart from the fray, even though, when he finally agreed to talk to me about it, he revealed strong opinions about the way the male gaming community was responding to a series of criticisms by allegedly uppity women—media critics and independent game developers—publishing their addresses and phone numbers and subjecting them to worse menaces too, including large numbers of death threats which had forced some of the female targets to flee their homes. “The problem is not technological,” he said. “And there is no technological solution to it. The problem is human, human nature in general, male human nature in particular, and the permission that anonymity gives people to unleash the worst sides of that nature. Me, I just make entertainment for the kids. I’m neutral space. I’m Switzerland. Nobody bothers me. They just come visit and ski down my slopes.”
High-functioning autism had helped to make him a game-making marvel and I started digging into the possible rewards. The leading “baller apps”—apps through which you could connect to friends and play together—were earning eleven, twelve million dollars a month. The old stalwart Candy Crush Saga, which even I had heard of, was still taking in five and a half million. War games that made almost all their money by in-app purchases, less than ten percent of their income from advertising, might be making two, two and a half million. Monthly. I read off the top fifty iOS and Android titles to Petya. “Are any of those yours?” I asked. A wide grin spread across his face. “I cannot tell a lie,” he said, pointing to the number-one-ranked game. “I did it with my little hatchet.”