Spring, the last of the ice gone from the Hudson, and happy sails breaking out across the weekend water. Drought in California, Oscars for Birdman, but no superheroes available in Gotham. The Joker was on TV, announcing a run for president, along with the rest of the Suicide Squad. There was still more than a year and a half of the current president’s term to run but I was missing him already and nostalgic for the present, for these his good old days, the legalization of gay marriage, a new ferry service to Cuba, and the Yankees winning seven games in a row. Unable to watch the green-haired cackler make his improbable declaration, I turned to the crime pages and read about killings. A gunman shot a doctor in El Paso and then killed himself. A man shot his neighbors, a Muslim family in North Carolina, because of a parking dispute. A couple in Detroit, Michigan, pleaded guilty to torturing their son in their cellar. (Technically not a killing, this one, but a good story, so it counted.) In Tyrone, Missouri, a gunman killed seven people and then made himself his eighth victim. Also in Missouri, a certain Jeffery L. Williams shot two policemen in front of the Ferguson city police headquarters. A police officer named Michael Slager shot and killed Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, in North Charleston, South Carolina. In the absence of the Batman, Mrs. Clinton and Senator Sanders offered themselves up as the alternatives to the Suicide Squad. In a Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas—“Eats! Drinks! Scenic Views!”—nine people died in a biker war and eighteen others went to the hospital. There were floods and tornadoes across Texas and Arkansas, seventeen dead, forty missing. And it was only May.
“Dostoevsky got all his plots by reading the crime pages of the newspapers,” Suchitra mused. “STUDENT MURDERS LANDLADY. Whatever the Russian for that is. And bingo! Crime and Punishment.”
We were having breakfast—home-brewed macchiato coffee and the cronuts we had waited in line to buy on Spring Street at 5:30 A.M.—sitting at the table in the glass-window corner that looked south toward the harbor and west across the river. It occurred to me that I was happy, that I had found the person who could bring me joy, or she had allowed me to find her. Which also probably meant that I could never tell her the truth about the baby; which in turn meant that Vasilisa Golden had a hold over me which I could never break. It’s true that by revealing her secret Vasilisa would undo her own strategy as well as destroying my best chance of a good life. But maybe she was so sure of herself that it didn’t matter. She had overcome the drama of her dalliance with Masha the fitness trainer, had she not. And Nero was older every day and more and more anxious not to live and die alone….I pushed such thoughts away, understanding that I was succumbing to paranoia. Vasilisa would not tell. And meanwhile, eating my cronut and looking at the movie reviews in the Sunday Times, I was content, happy to let Suchitra think aloud, as she liked to do during these rare moments of calm in her nonstop schedule. From these Sunday brainstorms—just letting her mind freewheel, free-associate from thing to thing, she often came up with projects she wanted to pursue.
“Is that true?” I asked. “About Dostoevsky?”
That was all she needed. She nodded earnestly, waved her cronut at me while she chewed the piece in her mouth, swallowed, and was off. “True is such a twentieth-century concept. The question is, can I get you to believe it, can I get it repeated enough times to make it as good as true. The question is, can I lie better than the truth. You know what Abraham Lincoln said? ‘There’s a lot of made-up quotes on the internet.’ Maybe we should forget about making documentaries. Maybe mix up the genres, be a little genrequeer. Maybe the mockumentary is the art form of the day. I blame Orson Welles.”
“Mercury Theatre on the Air,” I said, joining in the fun. “War of the Worlds. Radio. That’s a long way back. People still believed in the truth back then.”
“Suckers,” she said. “They believed Orson. Everything starts somewhere.”
“And now seventy-two percent of all Republicans think the president’s a Muslim.”
“Now if a dead gorilla from the Cincinnati zoo runs for president he’ll get at least ten percent of the vote.”
“Now so many people in Australia state their religion as ‘Jedi’ in the census that it’s an official thing.”
“Now the only person you think is lying to you is the expert who actually knows something. He’s the one not to believe because he’s the elite and the elites are against the people, they will do the people down. To know the truth is to be elite. If you say you saw God’s face in a watermelon, more people will believe you than if you find the Missing Link, because if you’re a scientist then you’re elite. Reality TV is fake but it’s not elite so you buy it. The news: that’s elite.”
“I don’t want to be elite. Am I elite?”
“You need to work on it. You need to become post-factual.”
“Is that the same as fictional?”
“Fiction’s elite. Nobody believes it. Post-factual is mass market, information-age, troll generated. It’s what people want.”
“I blame truthiness. I blame Stephen Colbert.”
This was our Sunday banter, but on this occasion I was the one who had a lightbulb moment. My big project, based around the Goldens, should be written and shot in documentary fashion, but scripted, played by actors. The moment I had that thought the script appeared in my head, and within a few weeks it was in draft form, and by the end of the year it would be selected for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and the year after that…but I’m running ahead of myself in my excitement. Rewind to that Sunday in the spring. Because later the same day I had an appointment with my son.