“Mr. Fnu…”
“Fnu. Now we are friends. Eat your mohinga.”
“Fnu.”
“I know what you want to say. You want to go and live with your girl, so you are giving notice, but because you love the Gardens you want to ask if it is possible to keep the access key. And because you are polite and you know I am living in solitude you will say, you have come to be very fond of me, you want often to pay a visit, and yada yada yada.”
“You watched Seinfeld?”
“Every episode, also now reruns.”
“How did you know?”
“Your girl, she called me, because she knows you become tongue-tied when you have to ask for something. Which it is my pleasure to give. Keep the key. I will rent your room to someone else, naturally, but you are always welcome to pass by.”
“The Gardens are so beautiful at this time of year.”
“I will never go home,” the old diplomat said. “Not even to the changing Myanmar of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. There is a point on the journey at which the traveler sits down by the river and knows it’s the end of the road. There is a day when he accepts that the idea of return is an illusion.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, not finding any better words.
“Also the Goldens are so interesting, aren’t they,” said U Lnu Fnu, cheering up, actually clapping his hands, and revealing a hitherto unsuspected catty side to his character. “They are falling apart as one watches, and nowadays I have a lot of time to watch.”
What sort of man was I, breakfasting on fish and noodles with an elderly lonely Burmese (Myanmaran) gentleman and pretending my love for the Gardens was merely horticultural and nostalgic. What sort of man, planning to live with the woman who loved him, preserved his ability to enter the secret space where his secret child was to be found, daily, in a stroller, guarded by a fierce Russian matriarch; and yet kept his fatherhood secret, even from his true love. What sort of man, raised in that very space by people of principle, raised to be honorable and true, would succumb as readily as he had to a siren’s call. Perhaps all men were traitors. Perhaps good men were just traitors who had not yet reached the fork in their road. Or perhaps my desire to generalize from my own behavior was just a way of excusing myself for what I had too easily done.
And Suchitra making the call to my landlord: was that loving, or was that a little strange? Did she know more than I thought? And if so, what did her behavior mean?—But of course she knew nothing about the boy. Thus guilty secrets make paranoids of us all.
Even as my personal happiness increased, so did my unspoken self-criticism, and yet, and yet, in spite of everything, here in the Gardens was my son. How could I turn my back on him and walk away—even into a life rich with love? Often now, very often, I rued the day when I allowed myself—when I chose!—to be drawn into the orbit of the Golden house, displaying such poor foresight that I believed that they were and would be my subjects and my passports to my cinematic future, that I would be the one with power over the narrative, and I failed to see that I was the subject, not any Golden man, and that the way the story worked out would tell me more about myself than about anyone else. Like many young men I was in many ways a secret from myself and from those who loved me, and before all was done those secrets would have to be revealed.
After Hubris comes Nemesis: Adrasteia, the inescapable. A good man may be a bad man, and a bad woman may be good. To be untrue to thyself, youth!, that is the highest treason. Even the strongest fortresses can be taken by a siege. And the sky that we look upon may tumble and fall, and a mountain may crumble to the sea. And in the end your rough magic, O Prospero!, will eat you away unless, like Ariel, you set it free. Unless you break your staff.
The magic baby in Aeschylus’s The Net Fishers turned out to be the superhero Perseus. The magic baby in Sophocles’ The Trackers turned out to be the god Hermes. Now there was Vespasian, named for an emperor, the magic baby in the Gardens and in my heart. To survive, did I have to let him go? Did I have to set him free?
The Clinton Oaks Correctional Facility in Jefferson Heights, Minnesota, was the only maximum-security prison in the state. After the escape of two inmates, however, investigators found that guards there had routinely failed to perform security rounds, and made false entries into prison logbooks to say they had, when they hadn’t. As many as nineteen officers were subsequently disciplined for such failures. However, the negligence of the guards was not the primary factor in the prisoners’ escape. Love—or sex and desire, anyway—turned out to be the key. The inmates, the convicted murderers Carl Zachariassen and Peter Coit, who shared a prison cell and were serving life sentences with no possibility of remission, worked in the tailor shop at the facility, and became friendly with a prison worker, Mrs. Francine Otis, married, and a mother of two boys. The friendship deepened, let us not use stronger language than that, and Otis, as she afterwards confessed, had relations with both men in a storage closet leading off the long, narrow main work area of the tailor shop. Subsequently Otis brought the men the tools they needed, including metal-cutting equipment, and they proceeded with their plan. They cut rectangular holes in the steel at the backs of their cells, beneath the bunk beds, and put dummies made from sweatshirts in their beds to fool the guards when they made their rounds. (Though, as was afterwards established, the guards made no rounds that night.) Outside the hole in the cell wall was an unused catwalk which had not been patrolled for many years. They went down it five floors to a steam pipe which was off, because the weather was warm at that time of year, and cut a hole into it and crawled along to a manhole four hundred feet beyond the prison walls, where, using the tools provided by Francine Otis, they cut away the steel lock and chain with which the manhole was secured, and so made their escape.