[He] reached the threshold but [he] never entered the room. Trapped between the fear and the language, [he] found [himself] unable to move, but [he] couldn’t stay where [he] was, either. The warning signs were plain enough. Riya got a call from the 2-Bridge girls’ club telling her, not unkindly, that they had had to ask [him] to stop coming in, because [he] had begun to importune the girls with intensely personal questions and they were no longer comfortable with having [him] around. The atmosphere at 2-Bridge was at once relaxed and committed, the girls felt at ease and worked hard in social justice or environmental education programs, or learning digital and audio arts, or doing introductory STEM courses, or helping to run the building’s astonishing planetarium (a gift from a wealthy benefactor), or studying dance or nutrition. I visited [him] there in the early days of [his] volunteer work, before the downward spiral began, and [he] seemed happy around their happiness, and their relaxed attitude to gender diversity seemed to help [him]. Gay or straight, cis or trans, asterisk or no asterisk, genderqueer or agender, none of this was a problem. At first this was encouraging, even exciting, but as [he] confronted [his] own roadblocks to transition, [his] physical and social fears and [his] difficulty with the new language, it didn’t help [him] to think that [he] might be suffering from generational problems, by which the generation following [him] was untroubled. I thought of the early Neanderthals in Golding’s The Inheritors looking with anger and uncomprehending envy upon the new, more sophisticated, fire-owning human race, Homo sapiens, when it showed up for the first time and doomed them, the forerunners, to extinction. So [he] began to see [himself] as a primitive entity, and the girls at 2-Bridge as the new people who were better than [he] was but who were also [his] replacements, able to go where [he] could not, able to enter the promised land which was barred to [him] by the limitations of [his] perceptions. So [he] began to harry them, to corner them in the canteen or at the doors of their classrooms or at play on the nearby softball field or hockey rink, to ask for answers they did not have and advice they did not know how to give, and, becoming aggressive, to upset them. [His] dismissal was inevitable. [He] accepted it without demur.
We took our eyes off [him]. No question of that. We should have seen [his] growing fragility and maybe we did but we all chose to look elsewhere. After Apu’s murder Nero Golden withdrew from all society into a darkness whose apparent cause was obvious but whose more occult meaning would only later become clear. He kept the urn containing his son’s ashes on his desk and, it was said, talked to him continually, every day. The two dragon ladies had access to him, and he made time for Petya, always made time for his most obviously troubled child, was constantly forgiving and supportive as Petya slowly made his way back from arson to his better self; but for his rudderless and crashing no-longer-youngest son he had next to nothing. What he did have was young Vespasian and a wife who found many ways of insisting on the infant’s special claims on his father’s affections. Little Vespa, they called him, as if he were a motor scooter they could both ride back to happiness. In little Vespa’s company Nero’s face was sometimes softened by a smile. Vasilisa treated her husband with the same motherly care she lavished on her young pride and joy, in part, I’m sure, because she saw and wanted to lessen his grief, but also, I have no doubt, for selfish reasons. Of all of us she was the one who saw most clearly the dwindling of this bullish and ferocious man. She saw the advance of his forgetfulness, the loosening of his grip on the chariot reins, and understood that in time he would be her baby too, and all this she was willing to accept because the prize at the end of her project was very great. (My thoughts regarding Vasilisa had soured considerably since the birth of my son and the wall she subsequently erected between the boy and me.) Vasilisa’s mother was in the house too but Nero had taken against her and Vasilisa kept her headscarfed babushka away, essentially using her as little Vespa’s nurse. In their relationship, it was clear, the mother had no power. She did as she was told. And she too was biding her time. She too knew the nature of the game that was being played. She stayed in the background and sang Russian songs to the boy and told him Russian stories, including perhaps the story of Baba Yaga, the witch, so that he could grow up knowing the score. If she had been able to read children’s books in the English language she might have said that Vespasian was the golden snitch.
I took my eyes off D Golden too. All that summer and fall Suchitra and I were busy with the Batwoman. In that electorally surreal year our sudden elevation by the video awards system to the status of political-ad stars had attracted the attention of progressive advocacy groups and big-money super-PACs supporting the Joker’s formidable, eminently qualified but unpopular opponent. The animated cartoon we made for one such advocacy group, with the help of some of the best artists ever to draw the Joker, went viral, the grinning villain in midtown New York screeching out lines his political incarnation had actually used, sneering at his own party, The fools! I could shoot someone dead in Times Square and I wouldn’t lose any votes! until a female superheroine in bat-gear swooped down to put him in a straitjacket and hand him over to the white-coated men from the funny farm. Political Batwoman was born and the candidate, or her people, reposted our ad on the official social media of the campaign, and it got three million hits in the first twenty-four hours, and in the end we made three follow-ups that all did just about as well. The election became a contest between the Batwoman and the Joker—Batwoman, who owned her dark side, but used it to fight for good, justice, and the American way, a leader who could save the country from becoming a calamitous Joke. We defined the struggle; it became what we said it was.
The Batwoman idea was Suchitra’s, though a lot of the scripting was done by me, or by the two of us together. We were a good team, but I kept wondering what she saw in me; we were so unequal, her nonstop creative brilliance so much brighter than my own little light, that there were times when I felt like her pet. Late one night when we were done with work I had enough to drink and asked her, and she laughed and laughed. “What a pair we are,” she said, “both of us so insecure and neither of us aware at all of the other’s insecurity.” Didn’t I see? I was the one with the education, I was the intellectual, I was the one who saw connections and references and echoes and arguments and shapes, she just knew how to point the camera and do a lot of other tech stuff. And that was absurdly undervaluing herself, but now it was her insecurity speaking. I reminded her of just one of the beautiful things she had taught me. An image has a shape and so does sound and so does montage and so does drama. The film sense is that art which ensures that the four shapes are the same. This was her adaptation of the theories of Sergei Eisenstein, director of Alexander Nevsky and The Battleship Potemkin. “Okay,” she conceded with a grin when I reminded her. “Yeah, okay, that was pretty good.”
Those confessions—my sense of creative inferiority, her feeling of intellectual lessness—brought us much closer. This is how we are: we fall in love with each other’s strengths, but love deepens toward permanence when we fall in love with each other’s weaknesses. We fell into the love that had been lying beneath our love like water below ice, and understood that while we had been having a lot of fun together we had been only skating on the surface, and now we were in as deep as we could go. I had never had a feeling like it, and nor had she, she said, and we stared at each other in a kind of happy disbelief. So this was where my attention was. As the Golden family plummeted, I soared. We soared, my honey lamb and I, and like the hawk in Oklahoma!, we made lazy circles in the sky.
“Oh, incidentally,” she said, somewhere in the middle of the bliss, “you know those three rules that I may have mentioned?”
“?‘Make your own money, get your own apartment, and don’t ask me to marry you.’ Yes?”
“I think they may be negotiable.”
“Oh.”
“?‘Oh’? Really? That’s all you’ve got?”
“I was just wondering,” I said, “how to break the news to my landlord, U Lnu Fnu.”
“For catfish,” said U Lnu Fnu, “I go sometimes to the Whole Foods on Union Square, but they don’t always have. Otherwise to Chinatown. Also necessary, vermicelli noodles, fish sauce, fish paste, ginger, banana stem, lemongrass, onions, garlic, chickpea flour. Sit and be patient, please. This is traditional breakfast of my country: mohinga. Sit down, please.”
“Mr. U,” I began. He stopped me with a gentle raised arm. “Now at the end I must correct you,” he said. “You know, this ‘U’ is not a name, but a title of respect given to older men holding senior positions. Also to monks. So ‘Mr. U’ is like saying, ‘Mr. Sir.’ Lnu was my father’s name which I also took. You should address me as Fnu. That is best.”