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‘Yes. Good to have you here, Harvey. Eli will be so pleased to see you. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye.’ He clicks the OK button on his phone, and forces it back into his jeans. Roth? Philip Roth? Harvey loves Philip Roth more than he has ever been able to admit to his watchful-for-literary-slights father. He feels intense desire to meet the dark bard of American sex and clear the decks of his depression, making him wonder, angrily, if he shouldn’t just turn up unannounced at this great literary lunch-time: he is, after all, Eli Gold’s son, the only one of the three adult children who has been prepared to make the journey. Then self-awareness settles like soft snow back upon him, and he realizes how far such an action is beyond him, he who has always hated confrontation anyway, and these days need only to be confronted with the smallest of obstacles for his depleted energy reserves to drain away to nothing.
Harvey moves into the Baggage Reclaim Hall, with its always palpable dynamic of tension and relief, as exhausted passengers wait nervously for their cherished belongings to be spat onto the oval belts. His conveyor, No. 4, is sparsely populated now, the phone call having slowed down his movement here. He can see his suitcase, some Samsonite-alike with pull-out handle – again, due to the particular nature of this particular journey, he didn’t know which of the numerous bags piled up under the stairs to pack – forlornly beginning what looks like its twentieth or thirtieth rotation. A woman he had noticed on the plane, sitting four or five rows in front of him on the opposite side, is there, beginning to look anxious. She is in her early twenties, dirt-blonde long hair parted like that of a Woodstock girl dancing towards the crackly camera, sea-blue eyes, and, even under the whip-lash Baggage Reclaim lights, skin so smooth that if Harvey were to reach out and touch it – as every cell in his hands is urging him to do – his fingers would slip.
Her bag, pink like bubble-gum, tumbles out of the conveyor hatch, the relief registering on her features, softening them even further, and making Harvey remember something one of his many more sexually opportune friends had told him once, about how, while waiting at airports for luggage, he would try and steal a furtive glance at the labels on the suitcases of any waiting attractive women, and then offer to share a taxi in that direction. As she picks up the bag, Harvey, impelled by the thought, does flick his eyes downwards and, catching sight of the zip code, thinks it might be an address near his hotel, but never has any intention of going through with all that stilted ‘Hey, I see you’re going my way’ shite. It just tears another little track through him, the idea that it could be done, that someone else could do it.
An older woman joins her, and helps her heave her bag onto a trolley. She moves away: she hasn’t registered Harvey’s presence, even cursorily. He looks at his watch. He now has time, far too much time. He looks again at his iPhone and ponders the text from Stella. I should call her back, he thinks, let her know I’ve landed. But then the other thing grabs his heart with its cold hands, and, instead, he sits down on the edge of Conveyor Belt No. 5, to watch his suitcase travel round Conveyor Belt No. 4, round and round and round, like a lone ship on the greyest, most mundane of seas.
* * *
Eli Gold’s first wife, Violet, is in her room just finishing lunch when she sees the item on the television news. It has been a day on which she has already veered from her normal routine. She usually watches the one o’clock news in the lounge, even though some of the other residents would always be fast asleep in there by then, and Joe Hillier’s snoring, in particular, was more than loud enough to drown out the words of the newsreader. The more able residents at Redcliffe House are allowed to make their own lunch and eat it in their rooms, and Violet takes this option as often as she can, preparing it – baked beans on toast, a cheese sandwich, a tin of ravioli – in the tiny kitchenette off to the side of the room and eating at the table by the window. Lunch always reminds her of Valerie, who is forever hinting that Violet should move to somewhere more structured, which means, Violet knows, one of the fascist old-age homes, a place where her independence would be taken away, her privacy disregarded, and the other inmates comatose, just because Valerie couldn’t bear the idea of her sister eating on her own from time to time. After lunch, she would normally get the lift down from the fourth floor, and, if it was not wet, walk the path around Redcliffe Square Gardens, which, even with a stick, would not take her more than fifteen minutes, and she was always back at Redcliffe House by five to one, ready to watch the news. She could take the lift back up to her room and watch it there, but even though Violet was a woman who liked to keep herself to herself much of the time, she felt there was no point in living in a place where so many other people lived if she never mingled with them at all: and so she always went into the lounge following her walk, and, with her cream winter coat on her knees, watched the one o’clock news.
Unless it was wet, as on the day she hears the news about Eli, a day on which she hadn’t even bothered going downstairs to check the pavements: the rain had been hitting her window all morning, a downpour blown diagonal across the pane by the wind. Over time, an errant branch from the neighbouring hostel’s enormous oak tree had grown along the walls of the house to lie pressed against her sill, and today she could count the drops on its leaves. She had just finished eating a few slices of ham and some crackers, and had already risen to take the plate into the kitchenette, when the item began.
She is shocked by seeing his face on the screen – at first some footage of him, recently giving a lecture, with the beard and the big shock of grey hair that she vaguely knew he had now, followed by an old black and white photo from round about the time they were married. For a split second, Violet thinks they might even show a photograph of her: him wearing his GI uniform, her on his arm in the white floral dress that she used to wear on their first dates.
They don’t – how could they, she chided herself, when the only photos that have survived of us together are all in that shoebox under the bed? I don’t suppose he kept any. The news moves on to a shot of a tall building in New York, which Violet gathers is a hospital. A doctor, an Indian, is standing in front of a crowd reading some sort of statement. Without her hearing aid she cannot hear what he is saying, but his name – Ghund … khali? – is subtitled below. She puts the plate down and turns away from the kitchenette, feeling her knees crack beneath her. She goes over to the television, a Hitachi ex-rental model made in 1973 which she brought with her when she left her flat in Cricklewood. Even turning the volume up full, she has to stand right beside it, bending her face to the screen to hear what is being said.
‘… is said to be …’ the reporter was now saying ‘… conscious rarely, if at all. His family are by his side. But it seems unlikely at this stage that this man, considered by many to be the world’s greatest living writer, will come home from hospital again. This is Rahim Khan, for BBC News, in New York.’
The screen cuts back to the main studio. The newsreader looks reverent for a second, before going on to a story about an earthquake in Sri Lanka. Violet watches for a minute, then turns it off. She sits back down by the window. The rain is easing, but even if the sun were to come out and dry the pavements, she would not go out for her walk now. Age has made Violet a creature of routine: the big surprise for her – the failing of her body – is easier to manage if she limits all other surprises. Last week, while moving the dial between her touchstones, Radios 3 and 4, she heard a plaintive voice on the wireless singing the words no alarms and no surprises, please, and it made her pause, thinking how true to her own desire that imprecation was now: since some irretrievable day in the past, all news – everything from finding one day that the gate to Redcliffe Square Gardens was unaccountably locked, to feeling the arrival on waking of some new bad ache in her bones, to hearing that another of the residents has died – all news seemed to have become bad news, and so she’d rather it all just stopped, that the news was all in. The only way she could make her life approach this condition was through habit.
But news would still intrude, breaking through the fragile circle of routine. Here it was: Eli in hospital; Eli, who she had not seen or heard from in over fifty years; her first and only husband; the only man to have touched the tender sections of her body except for the surgeon who must have at least held her breast for a few seconds before applying the scalpel to remove it in 1987. The world’s greatest living writer: did that include the letters yellowing in that shoe-box? If she took them out and read them now, which she has not done for many years, would the parchment-like paper mirror her skin, of which the words so sweetly sing? Violet Gold feels suddenly nauseous and stands up, heading as quickly as she can towards the bathroom, more aware than ever of the bandiness of her legs, the ridiculousness of her movement. By the time she gets there the wave has passed, and she feels relieved not to have to bend or, worse, kneel in front of the white china and the tiny puddle – not so much because of the horror of having to vomit, but because of the possibility that she might not be able to get up again. She lowers the plastic seat, and sits, in reach of the red panic button on her left.
Why this? she thinks. Why this physical reaction to the news about Eli? It is not unexpected: the surprise is that he’s lasted so long, what with so many wives – how many since her? Three? Four? – and his generally cavalier approach to all things healthy – although that was a long time ago, and he might have changed. And when they were young everything was different, anyway. He smoked, but so did she: so did everyone. She was smoking when they first met, she remembers; it threw off Eli’s chat-up line. ‘Oh, damn,’ he had said, the first words she heard him speak. He had been leaning against a post in the Rainbow Corner, watching the men and women dance: it was 1944, a Friday night, and the Bill Ambrose Band were playing. Violet was with her friend Gwendoline, who was a hostess, a word Violet was never sure about – the Rainbow Corner was simply the drinking and dancing section of the Red Cross Club in Shaftesbury Avenue, where many American soldiers congregated during the war, and there were always jobs to be had for girls who wanted them, but Violet was never entirely clear what being a hostess involved. Mainly, it seemed, never saying ‘no’ on being asked to dance, and Gwendoline had certainly fulfilled her obligation that night: Violet had spent most of the evening on her own watching her friend’s flower-patterned skirt twirling around five identical pairs of olive-brown trousers. She had just decided she was going to leave after finishing this last cigarette when Eli spoke.
‘Damn …’ he repeated.
‘What?’ she replied eventually, realizing he was expecting some sort of reply from her.
‘You’re smoking,’ he said. His voice was low, a throaty rumble. Violet had met enough GIs by now to recognize it as defining him as from New York or its environs. She glanced at her own cigarette, twisting her hand to her face a little self-consciously.
‘Yes …?’
‘Well, that’s scuppered my plan.’ Violet’s face remained a mask of confusion; she wondered if she’d misheard him over the music. ‘To offer you a cigarette …’ he added helpfully, taking a sky-blue packet of Newport cigarettes out of his breast pocket. His hands, she noticed, were large. Finally she understood; her features relaxed into gentle mockery, the face she reserved for suitors.
‘You could always ask me to dance.’
He shook his head, pausing to light his cigarette. Violet remembers this pause clearly, almost more than anything else about their first meeting. He stopped his head, mid-shake, cocked his lighter, lit his cigarette, took in a deep draught of Newport smoke, and then continued the shake of his head before speaking again.
‘I don’t dance,’ he said, fixing her in his gaze. His face was impassive, challenging: not a hint of apology.
‘You don’t?’
‘I’m a man of words.’
‘I see.’
‘This lighter, for example … do you know what it is?’
Violet glanced down at the squat metal case. She had seen many of them, cupped in the crinkles of American soldiers’ palms.
‘What?’
‘It’s a Zippo. The lighter of choice for the American military. Since last year, Zippo have been producing and distributing them free to servicemen. We’ve all got them. But the shape …’ he weighed the lighter in his palm, the back of his hand moving gently up and down on the lever of his wrist, ‘… is actually modelled on an Austrian lighter. Can’t you tell? The heft of it, the dumb solidity. It’s so Teutonic. So Germanic. And yet …’ he patted his breast pocket ‘… we the Nazi-fighters keep them next to our very hearts.’
Violet felt at a loss to know how to react to this speech. She had never really heard anyone else talk like this – certainly not a soldier, certainly not a man trying to chat her up – and it seemed to leave her with nowhere to go. She understood his point, but could think of nothing to say in addition.
‘They give off a good strong flame though, don’t they?’ was what she said in the end, and instantly felt the banality of it. In answer, he flipped the lid of the lighter again, stroking the wheel twice before the blue flame rose once more from the wick. He moved it closer to her face: she could feel the warmth and smell the butane, its chemical scent dizzying her a little. Through the blue she could see his eyes, what seemed sadness in them now overridden by curiosity. There was an expression Gwen used about men – she used it a lot, in order to make their attention known – saying they were undressing her with their eyes; Violet felt something of this now – not that he was undressing her, because his eyes did not move from her face – but that sense of feeling a man’s eyes on your body, as if his sight were touch. It made her cheeks prickle. She felt, obscurely and for the first time, that when men are examining a woman’s face, their method of weighing her beauty is to search for flaws.
‘What’s your name?’ she said, because she wanted to know, but also because she wanted to be released from his gaze. He smiled, a wider grin than she expected, bringing his nose down over his mouth: he looked suddenly medieval, cartoonish.
‘I shall answer that in what I believe is the customary manner.’ He spoke in an exaggerated cut-glass English accent, waving his left hand in a florid eighteenth-century style. Before Violet had time to react, he stood on tiptoe, lifting the still aflame lighter above his head. It was only then that she realized he was quite a tall man: he had been slouching against the post, and bending down in order to have the conversation with her. He seemed to Violet almost to uncoil.
Her eyes went upwards, to the low ceiling of this section of the Rainbow Corner. Lifting the Zippo to the ceiling created a circle of light, revealing a messy sprawl of signatures, doodles and numbers burnt into the plaster, written by GIs keen to preserve something of themselves in this foreign country, before war or peace took them away. Dodds, 98205D she read, before the flame in the man’s hand began to move, forming a blackening line that slowly became the upright pillar of an ‘E’. Despite the general smokiness of the room, she could detect in her nostrils the acrid smell of burning plaster. A couple of other American soldiers, noticing this familiar custom being performed, clapped and cheered. The man – El someone, it seemed: was he Spanish? – seemed to be absorbed in his task. Most of the names on the ceiling were just scrawls, bearing the marks of having been written on tiptoe, in public and by drunken hands; he had the appearance, however, of deep concentration, as if he were Michelangelo on his back at the Sistine Chapel. The words were bold and clear, and he spent long enough on each letter to burn it thickly into the wood: it looked, by the end, more like an imprint, more like the International Shipbrokers company stamp that her fist had to plonk down over and over again on the envelopes at work, than letters inscribed by hand – by flame. When he had finished, he spent a little while looking up at his name, admiring his handiwork. Violet noticed that he didn’t have a very protruding Adam’s apple – there was no triangular skin stretch in the gullet pressing against his extended neck – which made her glad, as her previous boyfriend had done, and the feel of it pressing against her throat when they were kissing had always put her off.
‘Eli Gold …’ she said, intoning the words, brushing her blonde hair out of her eyes as she tilted her head back to read.
‘E-li,’ he said. He pronounced it ‘lie’. She had said ‘Ely’, like the town.
‘That’s a funny name.’
‘Is it? Eli, Eli, lema sabachtani.’
‘Beg pardon?’
‘It means God. Literally …’ And here he raised the lighter to the ceiling again, although this time unlit, ‘… Elia, the Highest.’
‘In what language?’
Eli’s face creased, his smile revealing his face to be lined for his age.
Somehow, it did not make him look old.
‘Hebrew, of course. Elia’s own language.’
‘Hebrew?’
‘I’m Jewish. On my father’s side.’
‘Oh,’ said Violet, who – having occasionally made the journey from her parents’ house in Walthamstow to Spitalfields for meat and vegetables – had seen some Jews, but only the ones in the big black hats with the curly sideburns. ‘I thought you were an American.’
Eli looked at her, his composure for the first time dented. The lines around his eyes all went upwards, as he stared at Violet’s pretty, open, easy face, a face standing firmly behind the straightforwardness, the frank neutrality, of her statement. Then he laughed, loud, long peals that seemed to drown out even the brass section of the Bill Ambrose band. Violet felt frightened, but unfathomably drawn to the fear. She looked up at his name, still smoking on the ceiling. A swell hit her soul and, as can happen in moments of epiphany, she thought she saw this moment as it would be described years from now, saying to friends, perhaps to children, that it was as if he had been burning the words Eli Gold into her heart. And she did say that, to friends if not to children, and soon came to believe that such was indeed the true quality of her experience. It was only later she realized that Eli had just been writing.
* * *
He is not certain he should be wearing black, in summer. It is not the heat – that is not bothering him, though he is used to the white chill of Utah – but thinks that it might, somehow, give him away. When, earlier, he had ventured into the hospital reception area, an orderly had looked at him suspiciously. This is paradoxical, as he is wearing it to fit in. Where he comes from, no one wears black: not even any of the younger, trendier Mormons, in their younger, trendier sects, the Bullaites, or Zions Order Inc., or The Restoration Church. But he is wearing it, because his third wife, Dovetta, told him that that was the first thing she noticed when she went to New York on her mission trip, On Fire for Christ: everyone wears black.
He wears a black jacket and a black T-shirt. Blue jeans, though. That feels self-conscious, as well, because he is fifty-five, perhaps too old for jeans. Although everyone wears jeans now, even old men; even old women. They hang off them, off their legs. This sense of himself as old, an old man in blue jeans, disturbs him. Not through vanity, even though he used to be a handsome man, and maybe still is, despite the stuck eye. It disturbs him because of the task ahead.
A lot of journalists and photographers are still milling about after the doctor’s statement. Some of them clearly think he is one of them. He has to be a little careful not to be seen in the back of shot when the TV cameras are around. He doesn’t want to be spotted by somebody, somewhere, on some Summit County TV, who might recognize him and question why on earth he is there, knowing that he could not be a well-wisher, or a mourner. Also, when the doctor was talking – when he was going on about blood cell counts and secondary infections and how the hospital was doing everything that could be done – he felt an urge to shout: to heckle. At the words ‘Mount Sinai Hospital understands the responsibility it has been given in caring for this particular patient’ the urge had felt almost uncontrollable; but he used the mental effort of memorizing the doctor’s name – it was a long Indian one, and later he will need to know it – as a means of distracting himself. But now he has decided to leave. It is too early in the process and he is too raw with it. He feels if someone asked him what he is doing here he may just blurt it out.
Plus, he does not even have a hotel. He has not thought anything through. There has not been space for it. He does not have the psychic energy. That is what Janey would call it. Janey is one of his children, the oldest of fifteen, the only one born of his first wife, Leah, before she died. She is a Mormon, but does not believe, as he does, that God was once a man; she rejects the Pearl of Great Price; and, most seriously, she rejects polygamy. She no longer lives with his family.
He remembers the moment of her leaving clearly. In 1993, the Church of the Latter-day Saints, in their regular Baptism of the Dead, baptized Adolf Hitler. Despite their differences with the LDS, his own church – The Latter-day Church of the True Christ – accepted this baptism. A year later, the whole family were at Mount Timpaganos Temple, the beautiful prayer hall only just built to serve the community of American Fork, when the dictator’s name came through in the list of The Endowed. Immediately, Janey got up and left. Next time he heard from her, she had moved to Independence, Missouri, to join the Community.
But he knew, even as he watched her pass through the door, under the mural of the angel Moroni, that Hitler’s baptism was just the catalyst. She had grown disenchanted when he had taken Sedona, his second wife’s daughter, to be his fifth wife. He had seen it when he had gathered the family around him in the living room of their then house, the one at the point in American Fork where East State Road becomes West State Road, and announced his intention. They were crammed in: the house seemed to grow smaller as the family burgeoned. Everyone else was joyful, clapping and rising to congratulate Sedona and her mother, but Janey just stayed on a chair by the window, staring straight at him. He returned her stare, blankly, neutrally, letting his good eye ask her what her problem might be; but this was hard to do, because so many of his wives and children were hugging him, and because her eyes were so full of hurt and disgust and anger. They held each other’s line of vision, while the others danced between them, until at last she turned away and looked through the glass towards the white-tipped mountains of the Utah Valley.
He decides to leave the area around Mount Sinai Hospital to look for a hotel. He cannot, though, afford any of the hotels in the mid-town area. This should not be part of my story, he thinks. I am an avenging angel; I have the weight of destiny on my shoulders. But I cannot afford any of the hotels in the mid-town area.
He walks and walks. His right arm, where he has a touch of arthritis in the elbow, aches with the weight of pulling his suitcase, a blue checked bag on wheels. On his left shoulder blade, the remnants of his tattoo – a Confederate flag, removed soon after joining the Church, because the head of their Temple, Elder James LaMoine McIntyre, known to everyone as Uncle Jimmy, explained to him that the body is perfected after death – itches. To keep him going he recites in his head, for every step, the names of his family. First, the wives: step, Leah, step, Ambree, step, Lorinda, step, Angel, step, Sedona, step, RoLyne. Then, for every step, a son or daughter: step, Janey, step, Clela, step, Fallon, step, Levoy, step, Leah, step, Darlene, step, KalieJo, step, Orus, step Rustin, step, Mayna, step, Prynne, step, Dar, step, Hosietta, step, Velroy, step, Elin. Then, a final step, and a final name: Pauline. Then he begins again. After he has been doing this for a few hours, it occurs to him that three of his children – Darlene, Rustin, Levoy – are, in fact, step-children. This takes him aback for a second, makes him stop. For a moment it strikes him as funny. But he represses the urge to laugh, and reorders it in his head as a sign, a small sign, that there is a pattern to all things. He walks on.
The list allows him to resist New York. He has never been here before – he has never been out of Utah – but he knows enough about it from when he was young, and from what he has seen on the internet, to understand that the City will distract him from his destiny. He keeps his head down, focusing on his feet, on hitting a new name with each foot, and refuses the City – he refuses Park Avenue, even as he walks all the way down it; he refuses the Chrysler Building and the Empire State and the Waldorf-Astoria and Grand Central Station and One And Eleven Madison and all the other temptations of the Kingdom of Man. He refuses even the yellow taxis and the steam rising from the street gratings and the hotdog sellers and the WALK/ DON’T WALK signs, the things about Manhattan that might chime with its movie self, and which might draw him in through living up to its mythology, revealing its icons like a peacock its feathers.
Just as he is getting too hot and tired to continue – the sun has been stoking the air all afternoon, and underneath his clothes his sacred white undergarments are heavy with sweat – he finds a cheap place, on East 25th Street, called the Condesa Inn. The Condesa Inn is a hippy hotel. He likes that. He was a hippy himself, once. He was a Mormon then, too, but a regular one, just born into the Church of the Latter-day Saints, and not too fussed about it neither. Him and his sister used to smoke a lot of dope together, and listen to a band called The Outlaws. He loved her most then. It was at an Outlaws gig when he first saw Jesus – the Azteca in Salt Lake, in 1975. Hughie Thomasson was really going for it, on ‘Searching’, their greatest song, their ‘Free Bird’. Hughie had just sung: Searching through the seven skies/for some place your soul can fly, and hit the strings of his Stratocaster, when he saw him: Jesu, the Lamb, rising from behind the drum kit, arms outstretched, smiling a smile that widened further as Hughie and Billy Jones dug into their guitar battle like the out-there Confederate heroes they were. It filled his heart with joy. When he told Pauline afterwards she was so pleased for him, even though she made a joke about how good the dope must have been that they smoked before they went into the club. He didn’t mind that joke. He knew she knew it was true: and that she would accept, in time, that he had to forsake Salt Lake City for American Fork, and the Church of the Latter-day Saints for the greater truth of the Latter Day Church of the True Christ.
He knows that the Condesa Inn is the hotel he should be staying in, because every room is painted in a different way, each by a different artist. The woman on reception, who looks like she may have been a hippy as well once, shows him photographs of the rooms that are available, and there is one with a picture of Jesus across the wall. The woman says it is not Jesus – she says it is the lead singer of the Flaming Lips – but he knows that it is, because the bearded half-naked figure is enveloped by an angel. Then the woman says:
– Well, if you want it to be Jesus, I guess it’s Jesus. It’s eighty dollars a night, shared bathroom.
He smiles a little, a smile the woman would not be able to read. At home, he shares one bathroom with twenty-one other family members. Most days, the waiting to get into it is so long he ends up going to the bathroom outside, behind the privet hedge that surrounds their small patch of land.
– Is it a smoking room?
– No. We don’t have any rooms you can smoke in any more. You have to go stand outside. Sorry.
– OK. Do you have wi-fi internet access?
– We do. It comes and goes a bit, but, yeah.
– How much does it cost?
– On the house. When you can get it, that is.
– Is there a password?
She picks up a card with the Condesa Inn logo on it, and a pen, and scribbles on the back: H98BCARL. She hands it over, smiling. He looks at it and feels disappointed. He had thought that this word might speak to him: he had thought it would be a word connected with his destiny, or maybe at least with their shared hippiness, OUTLAWS1, or something.
OK, he says, and goes up to the room, with his suitcase. They do have a porter in the Condesa Inn, but he does not want the porter to carry his suitcase, because he only has a small amount of money and cannot afford tips. It contains, along with two changes of outer clothes and five of sacred underclothes, his own copy of The Book of Mormon: An Account Written By The Hand of Mormon Upon Plates Taken From The Plates of Nephi, his Dell PC laptop computer, the photograph of his sister, before she was raped by The Great Satan, wearing her favourite red-check dress, smiling and waving, looking so fine, and his gun. It is the gun, an Armscor 206 .38, which he bought online from GunsAmerica.com, for $308, as new, that has meant that he has to travel all the way from Utah by bus; the gun that has meant he cannot travel by airplane. There are ways of getting a gun on an airplane – he has learnt this from surfing the web, from reading the posts of some of the jihadis – but the ways are difficult and he decided against it. He goes up to the room alone.
Inside the room, the picture of Jesus is bigger than it looks in the photograph. The only window looks out onto the back of some kind of kitchen, and the picture itself is not that brightly painted – Jesus is in a sharp profile, like he might appear on a playing card, and wears a dark red toga, in sharp contrast to the bright blue of the angels’ dress – but still, when he turns to face the mural, it nearly blinds him with light. This is proof for him that it is the Lamb of God, Lucifer’s spirit brother, again. He has to shield his eyes, which hurt like staring at the sun, something he did once when he was a kid during an eclipse, even though his father had told him not to. He did that because he didn’t understand why, if the sun was covered by the moon, you couldn’t look at it. He looked at that eclipse for five minutes, and it was beautiful, so beautiful he didn’t feel the burn in his right eye that would leave the pupil fixed in the middle of the socket, and working always at no more than 20 per cent effectiveness. He thinks of it now as his first intimation that knowing God, really knowing God, always involves pain.
The light fades. He sits on the bed. He takes a deep breath. The room is dusty. He feels as if he can feel the motes in his nostrils. He should change, but there is a comfort in the sweat of his sacred under-clothes drying on him, as if warmed by the heat and light coming off this Christ. He takes out his Dell, and waits patiently as it boots up, and then more patiently as it finds the Condesa Inn wireless signal. Poor, it says, red bars flickering into green. There is something that has been bothering him, bothering him all the way here on the Greyhound, looking out of the window as the landscape flattened towards the east. Google has been key for his destiny – Earth has shown him New York, Street View the area around 1176 Fifth Avenue, Images the internal layout of Mount Sinai, and it was the main search box which led him to The Material, there on unsolved.com – so he has feared being without it. To test it, he types the words ‘death penalty states united states’. It takes a while, but then it comes. He goes to Wikipedia first, an entry: The Death Penalty in the United States. A map comes up, in which most of the states of the country are red, but along the top, blue, a geographical clustering of mercy. The colour of New York, though, is confusing – half yellow, half orange. He goes back to the search box, and replaces the words ‘states united states’ with the words ‘New York’ and presses return again. The sixth entry is called Death Penalty FAQs. Scrolling down, the question appears, in bold: Does New York have the death penalty? And the answer: The death penalty was reinstated in 1995.
Nineteen ninety-five. Two years after his sister died: was killed. He could have done it any time over those two years. And he didn’t. A voice that seems not his speaks in his head: does he regret it? That’s what people are often asked about on TV: regret. And this voice is like a TV interviewer’s voice: polite, friendly, softly spoken. He knows this is not ‘voices in his head’. It is just something a lot of people do, imagine themselves being interviewed on the TV.
– No, he says, speaking out loud. I don’t regret it. He continues in his head: because then I was grieving, and because I thought Janey might come back then and she didn’t, and because I didn’t know until I heard the news that he was dying that I understood what it was that I had to do. It was only then that I knew my destiny. And besides, he is expecting to be caught, and imprisoned, and executed. He is not trying to commit the perfect crime. He is trying to avenge it.
– I don’t regret it, he says again out loud. He raises his chin while saying it, in an act of untargeted defiance, and as he does he catches Jesus’ eye, which looks down upon him with love.
Chapter 2
On arrival at the Sangster, Harvey Gold finds it difficult not to feel a tiny bit disappointed. He was not a man used to staying in five-star hotels if his father (or his estate) were not paying, and it might perhaps have been expected that he would only be grateful; or, if not actually grateful, at least so unaccustomed to this level of luxury as to be mollified by it. There are, however, a number of problems:
1. The Sangster, although a very beautiful hotel, is not what Harvey had pictured in his mind when, in the taxi from the airport – as a check and balance in his head to the oncoming deathbed visit – he had mused expectantly about the prospect of staying in a Manhattan hotel. For Harvey, although himself born on that island and technically a citizen of it, a stay in Manhattan still required a certain amount of cliché: that is, a room at least seventy storeys up, with floor-to-ceiling windows, giving out on a glittering nightscape of Koyaanisqatsi skyscrapers. The lift at the Sangster, however, travels to a maximum only of twenty-two floors, fourteen of which were extraneous to Harvey anyway, as his room was No. 824. It is perfectly comfortable – more than perfectly comfortable – but has a view only of the internal courtyard of the hotel, and is furnished in a faintly European style. Harvey’s entrance into the room, once he’d got over the initial flummox of American tippage – such a pain in the arse, he thinks, handing over a five to a somewhat unsmiling, virtually fancy-dressed porter – is accompanied by a small sinking of the heart, that once again he’d come to America and wasn’t staying with Kojak.
2. He is still not sure who is paying for the room. At reception, he had been asked for his credit card, along, once again, with his passport, but knew that this was standard procedure. Then again, it may have meant that the room was paid for, but he had to provide a surety for any extras. On handing over his HSBC Visa, Harvey had puffed up the courage in his rather pigeon-like chest, and said, to the autumnally suited man behind the desk: ‘Sorry … can I just ask: has my room been paid for in advance?’
It was a question he didn’t feel entirely comfortable asking, since it clearly indicated a hope on his part that it had been, and therefore was likely to generate a sense in the autumnally suited man that this particular resident may not easily be able to pay for the room should the answer be ‘no’. Harvey knew this was the case from the way he raised the tiniest eyebrow and drummed some code out on the keyboard of his computer.
‘It’s been reserved on an AmEx card, sir … yours?’
‘No, I don’t have American Express. Well, I do, but I don’t use it.’ This was true: a lot of shops in Britain didn’t take it, and long, long ago, Harvey had forgotten the PIN. He sensed, on saying this, a suspicion from the receptionist, a resentment not unlike that he had felt at the airport from the immigration official when it had become clear that he owned an American passport but had chosen not to use it: why would you possess such a jewel and not offer it in your palm to demonstrate your kingliness? Harvey felt he could hear the resentment in the way the man went back to his computer, in the heavy dents his fingers made on the keys.
‘I’m afraid I can’t quite make out from the reservation whether or not all charges are to be drawn on the AmEx card, sir. This may be because the booking seems to be open-ended …?’
He phrased the surmise as a question. Harvey felt moved to answer with the information that his father was dying, but sadly not to a nailed-down schedule, hence his room would indeed have been booked for an open length of time. But instead he just nodded and moved away to the lifts.
3. He doesn’t have a suite. On arriving in the room, his first action – before even opening the heavy oak doors of the TV cabinet to check if the pornography channel was hard- or soft-core – had been to take his Sony Vaio laptop out of its silver case, connect it to the Plug and Play wire, and go straight to www.theSangster.com in order to torment himself with what he did not have. Fourteen suites, he had discovered, feature Steinway or Baldwin grand pianos (‘in keeping’, said the unctuously written website, ‘with the hotel’s musical heritage’) tuned twice a week. Harvey didn’t play the piano (although he still had a faint sense of the absurd needlessness of tuning any piano twice a fucking week) but nonetheless felt, on reading this, the deep, deep deprivation of not having one in his room. Further picking away at the scab of his envy, he read about the ‘legendary’ New York suite, on the twenty-second floor, with its sizeable dining room, kitchen, traditional living room, fireplace with faux-quartz logs, antique books, sunburst clocks, Lars Bolanger lacquered boxes, sage velvet seating area, another fucking piano (Steinway – tuned, no doubt, every fifteen seconds), wall-mounted plasmas, state-of-the-art Bang & Olufsen acoustic system and, of course, a ‘two-storey view of the Manhattan skyline’. He closed the computer, wondering, if he had been certain his dad was paying for it, whether or not he would have demanded an upgrade.
These three reasons finesse his dissatisfaction, each one rising and falling at different times on the graphic equalizer of his anxiety. What would his present therapist – No. 8 – tell him to tell himself? I would really like to be in a better room, with a view and a set of Lars Bolanger-lacquered boxes, but the fact that I’m not is not the end of the world. Something like that. He gets up from the leather-topped desk and flops down on one of the two twin beds in his room. Harvey doesn’t much like that either. No matter how posh the Sangster is, the presence of the twin doubles makes it feel like a room at a Travellers’ Rest somewhere on the A41. Against his overhanging gut, he feels the dig of what should have been – according to the décor – an antique silver cigarette case, but is in fact his iPhone. He takes it out, noticing that another text has come in from Stella: Darling, hope you landed safely. Call me when you have a moment.
He remembers then that the phone had trilled again halfway through the journey from JFK, where he had ignored it, because it had arrived just as the taxi set wheel on the Brooklyn Bridge, allowing him to take in his first view for ten years of Manhattan Island. However much the overall idea of this journey has upped Harvey’s already monstrous anxiety levels, he had at least been looking forward to this: this packed vertical Oz, rust-brown and silver, rising from the sea in the limpid light of the morning. It always made him catch his breath, that such an urban sight could be so beautiful. He held the view, sliced across by the cables of the bridge, for some seconds, allowing its splendour to work some small massage on his migranous soul. Then he had caught sight of the gap where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center used to be, and the view became the mouth of a prize-fighter with two teeth knocked out.
Harvey wonders about calling home. Assuming that extras above and beyond the cost of the room are definitely going to be charged to him, he worries about the cost of the phone bill. He knows that phone calls from a five-star hotel are likely to be charged at an absurd number of dollars per minute. He considers using his mobile but then thinks that that too would be very expensive internationally. There is another option: one of the many bills that arrive daily on Harvey’s brown-as-dead-grass welcome mat at home, one of the many direct debits signed years ago and eating away at his solvency ever since, is for some company, who offer – for a small monthly payment – to provide a four-digit phone number that their customers can dial while staying at hotels, especially hotels abroad, before the number of their actual call, and which fix that call at a standard local rate. Which would now be marvellously useful for Harvey if at any point on any trip since signing up to this direct debit he had remembered to write down the fucking four-digit number and bring it with him.
Putting off the decision, he decides to check his email. Harvey gets anxious if cut off from the internet. He hears about writers – he just about considers himself one, even though collating the Dictaphonic outpourings of celebrities rarely seems to qualify him as such – who, as soon as they sit down to write, unplug the modem. Not Harvey: if his home modem freezes, as it periodically does, he panics, diving immediately down on his knees amidst the wires and discarded newspapers and sweet wrappers of his study floor in order to unplug and replug it. While waiting for it to restart, he cannot work – it is as if he himself has frozen. There is no rationale for this – occasionally he needs to Google some fact, but most of the information he needs is already provided by his subjects – but the possibility of exclusion on this worldwide scale is too much. He needs to feel he is in there, one of the myriad upturned mouths sucking on the global InfoMother’s billion teats.
The Sony Vaio rumbles for while, worrying him, and then Windows Mail opens: he hits Send and Receive, and watches the bar fill to a solid blue. He has nine messages. Eight of them are Spam – Ebony Anastasia Does Interracial Dicking Time, MILF Celestine Opens Her Sweet Ass Do You Want Some?, Superhot Trannies Notwithstanding, PlayPoker UK Exclusive Promotion, Hard Erecttion in 20 Minutes, Erectile Dysfunction?, ChitChatBingo, and one which makes him feel a bit weepy entitled Let Us Protect You, Harvey (from an insurance company) – and one from his agent, Alan. He knows what Alan’s email is going to say – he knows it will be delicately poised between expressing condolences for his father’s condition and wanting to know when Harvey is going to deliver the pitch for Lark’s autobiography – but still opens it with a tiny hope, as he opens all emails, that they will carry news of something stupendously positive. It is a message delicately poised between expressing condolence for his father’s condition and wanting to know when Harvey is going to deliver the pitch for Lark’s autobiography.
Harvey pitches for a lot of autobiographies these days, many more than he actually writes. Lark, though, is a tough one, as she has done, as far as he can make out, absolutely nothing. Lark is a pop star, but Harvey, like everyone else, has never heard any of her songs, nor even seen a picture of her. This is because Lark is being kept under wraps. Her record company, her management and her PR agency – who have decided, the way these people can now, that she is going to be huge – have created a new marketing strategy around Lark, whereby she is going to burst forth fully-formed onto the public, Athena from their combined Zeus-like forehead. On some so far unspecified date in the future, Lark will be brought forth to the world – her single, her video, her MySpace page will all be let out at the same time, followed closely by her album, and her autobiography. This is what Harvey is supposed to pitch for. He does have some information about her – Alan keeps on sending it, as attachments to his increasingly urgent emails – but every time Harvey remembers the only fact he does know about Lark – that she is nineteen – he cannot face opening any of them.
He shuts down Mail and opens a document file entitled IdeasJune. Harvey has many places in which he writes down ideas. In his hand luggage, along with a newly purchased copy of Solomon’s Testament – he had wanted, because she was pretty, to blurt out to the girl behind the till at WHSmith in Terminal Four at Heathrow, that he was Eli’s son, and had a first edition inscribed to him at home with the words ‘To Harvey, may you read it when you’re ready …’ and was only buying this one because he hadn’t read it for years and, well, he didn’t really know why he was buying it now but thought he should maybe read it again on the plane over because he was going to see his father on his deathbed – along with that, his father’s masterpiece, sits a Dictaphone, and two notebooks, one covered in gold leather, and one in moleskin. Harvey fetishizes notebooks. He has a drawerful of them at home in his study desk – covered in so many materials (velvet, cloth, zebra print, PVC); large hardbound ones and small; policeman-flicking-it-open-in-the-dock ones – and in all of them he has written thoughts for novels, films, plays, even – in one of them – business ideas. They are not empty. But they are not full either; each one has a series of scrawls, written in Harvey’s lazy script, which end after about five pages. It is partly the act of writing – that is, handwriting – that fails. Harvey likes the idea of opening the gilded notebook, and marking its embossed paper with the varied scents of his mind, but when it comes to it, writing with a pen has become a bit of a faff. More than that: writing with a pen doesn’t feel significant. It feels the preserve, now, of telephone numbers and email addresses hurriedly scribbled on stickies that he knows he’s going to lose. For his words to mean something, they have to be written on a computer. He knows this, yet continues to buy notebooks.
The document IdeasJune has a number of sentences already in it. Some are fully-formed pitches: ‘Reality TV Idea: convince someone they’ve died and gone to heaven.’ Others just phrases, pending novels yet unwritten: ‘Her breasts spilled out of her bra like muscle rain.’ On a new page, Harvey writes:
Film Idea
Title: SHALLOW
John Shallow is obsessed with looks. He is also an immigration officer at JFK. His obsession serves him well in his job because he always checks people’s – especially women’s – faces very thoroughly. But it doesn’t serve him so well in his marriage, which is falling apart.
However, through a long and difficult process, involving much therapy and various epiphanies (? don’t know what these are – something profound/life-changing) he comes to terms with it, and saves his marriage. Just at that point, though, while at work, he spots – because he’s still got the skill (the skill at looking) even though he’s sorted out the problems that come with it – someone coming through immigration who turns out to be Osama bin Laden, incredibly well-disguised, using plastic surgery etc (a woman?). Osama is arrested and overnight Shallow becomes a national hero and a major celebrity.
This leads to loads of sexual opportunities and wrecks his marriage.
Harvey leans back. Something’s not right about it. He highlights the main body of the prose, and then opens the Formatting Palette, and clicks on I. This happens:
