I remained silent. He was just getting into his stride. “Romulus and Remus,” he said. “That’s how D thought of us. He was so busy feeling left out of our games that he never saw how tough it was for me to be Petya’s brother, how much work I put in to give him a good childhood, or as good as possible, considering his situation. I played with train sets and Scalextric cars into adulthood because he enjoyed those things. We all did. My father too. And now it feels like we all failed, after he crashed and burned. He crashed, the galleries burned. He’s in pieces over there with the Australian, who knows if he can be put back together. And D, who knows what’s going on with him. Or is it with her now? I don’t know? Does even he know? Or she? Crazy. Did you know you’re not supposed to say ‘crazy’ anymore, by the way? Also you’re not supposed to say ‘insane’ or, I guess, ‘nuts.’ These words are insulting to the mentally ill. There’s now a bad word for these bad words, did you know that? Nor did I. Even if you’re just saying, this shit is insane, you’re not even thinking about mentally ill people, for God’s sake, you’re still insulting them anyway, apparently. Who comes up with this stuff? They should try living with the situation for a while and see if they don’t need to let off some steam. See if they don’t need to say, yes, I’m sorry, but sane is a thing and therefore so is insane. Not crazy is a thing and so it follows that crazy also exists. If it exists we use the word. That’s language. Is that okay? Or am I a bad person? Am I nuts?”
The subject had changed suddenly. In the last days of the protest in Zuccotti Park, Apu had fallen out with a lot of the Occupy people, partly because of his frustration at their leaderless anarchic rudderlessness, partly because, he said, “they are more interested in the posture than the results. This language thing is part of that. Excuse me: if you clean up the language too much you kill it. Dirt is freedom. You have to leave a little dirt. Cleansing? I don’t like the sound of that.” (At a later point in my research, I met a few of the protesters, most of whom had no memory of Apu. The one who did said, “Oh, yeah, the rich painter who used to come down here to get himself some street cred. Never liked the guy.”)
I guessed that Apu’s tirade had its origins in something personal, because fundamentally he wasn’t driven by ideas. Cherchez la femme, I thought, and she spilled out of his mouth a moment later. “Ubah,” he said, “she’s totally into all of this. You know. Watch your mouth. Be careful what you say. Walk on eggshells. Every footstep could land on a land mine. Boom! Boom! Your tongue is in danger every time you open your mouth. So exhausting, I have to tell you.”
“So, are you guys not seeing each other anymore?”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Can I say that without offending less intelligent persons? Well, I say it. Of course I’m seeing her. She’s so extraordinary I can’t stop. If she wants me to watch my mouth, whatever, okay, I watch it, at least when she’s around—and then unfortunately you get the fallout because I have to let rip when she’s out of the way. But it took some doing, holding on to her after my goddamn brother destroyed her whole show. I mean her whole show. Just scrap metal now. You know how long those pieces take to make? I mean, months. Of course she was mad, and he’s my brother, for God’s sake. For a while she couldn’t speak to me. But it’s better now. She calmed down. She’s basically a calm person and a good person. She knows it’s not my fault. This is what I mean, we were never Romulus and Remus, Petya and I. I was just trying to hold it together, my family life, my boyhood, and now those days are gone, it’s all a wreck.”
He shook his head, remembering his original subject. “Oh, yeah. Excuse me. I just went off down a little fury road. I’ll come back now. What I wanted to say, at the beginning, the whole reason I sat down here with you and the tea and the cheese, is, my whole family is a wreck, and you, my brother who is not my brother, you are the only family member with whom I can discuss this. One brother is an arsonist, the other one doesn’t know if he’s my half brother or my half sister. And my father, apart from getting older and maybe beginning to lose it mentally, I mean, he totally lost it with this woman, his wife, I mean it’s hard even to say the word, and now this baby, I can’t even think of it as my brother. My half brother. My half-Russian half-brother baby. I sort of blame the baby for everything. It shows up and the world falls apart. It’s like a curse. I mean, it’s driving me mad, and I’m the sane one. But this is all just me being grouchy which as everyone knows is normal. This is not what I invited you over to tell you. I know you don’t go for this stuff, but still, listen to me. I’ve started seeing ghosts.”
It was the end of Apu’s political period. I almost laughed out loud. For the first time that day I allowed my gaze to fall on the new work he was making, and was happy to see that he had shaken off the overly strong influence of contemporary agitprop artists—Dyke Action Machine!, Otabenga Jones, Coco Fusco—and that his earlier, much richer and livelier iconography drawn from world mystical traditions had returned. One large, landscape-format painting in bright oranges and greens struck me in particular, a life-size triple portrait of his favorite witch, the m?e-de-santo of Greenpoint, flanked by her preferred deities Orisha and Oludumaré. Mysticism and psychotropic drugs were never far apart in Apu’s practice, which probably explained the advent of visions. “Are you doing ayahuasca now, is that it?” I asked. Apu recoiled in faux-shock. “Are you kidding? I would never cheat on my m?e and her guys.” (The use of ayahuasca in shamanistic practice was connected to the religion of Santo Daime in Brazil, and some people called the drug daime in honor of that saint.) “Anyway, it’s not visions of God I’ve been seeing.”
It was sometimes hard to know if he was speaking literally or figuratively. “Come and look,” he said. At the far end of the gallery there was a large canvas covered in a paint-spattered sheet. When he pulled the sheet away I saw an extraordinary scene: a vast and detailed Manhattan cityscape from which all vehicles and pedestrians had been removed, an empty city populated only by translucent figures, the male figures dressed in white, the females in saffron: green-skinned, some floating close to the ground, some up in the air. So, yes, ghosts, but whose ghosts? Ghosts of what?