The Death of Eli Gold

The security guy hovered behind Freda, waiting for her conversation with the child to end. His finger had returned to his ear. Harvey had a moment of wondering if the security guy’s finger, so wide it completely obscured the earpiece, was bigger than his own penis, and then immediately feared that such a thought might be racist. He took out a bottle of Extra Tart Sour Blast Spray and gave his tongue a quick atomize. He removed his iPhone from his other pocket and tapped a few moves into Deep Green, but could see straight away that he was heading for a quick Checkmate! Tiny wins! so put it back. He considered, not for the first time, how quickly he panicked, while waiting: how quickly he needed to distract himself, before his mind and body went somewhere bad. Thinking about his body makes him suddenly feel a need to piss. Micturation, or the urge to do so, comes upon him like this these days, with no build-up, no gradual turning of the tap. He knows it is something to do with his battered and bruised prostate, the internal organ he has always been most conscious of: it will be, he knows, swollen or shrunken or just generally giving up its hanging walnut ghost, but he cannot bring himself to go to the doctor to check it out. Not because he is embarrassed about it, but because his GP in Kent is a young and pretty Pakistani woman, and there is no way he can go to the surgery and ask her about his prostate without it looking as if it’s a ruse to get her to put her finger up his anus. Even as he makes the appointment he will feel the receptionist suspecting his motivation. He needs to get over this concern, he knows, partly because Eli’s first brush with cancer was of the prostate, and partly because he actually would quite like the GP to put her finger up his anus.

The security guy was still hovering over Freda like the alien ship in Independence Day over earth as she talked. ‘Fuck it,’ Harvey said to himself, and walked quickly down the corridor, and found the rest room. Rest room. It could be restful in the toilet, Harvey felt, although only if you were sitting down – something he chose to do more and more these days, whatever the character of the ablution – but even then only really in your own private toilet, where any anxiety about sharing intimate information with strangers could not intrude. The door was locked. Harvey tried it a few times, as if under the impression that perhaps there was something wrong with the lock, but really to make it clear, to the present user, that someone was outside waiting. Eventually, the door opened, and Harvey drew back: the person exiting was a woman – Korean? Chinese? Malaysian? he felt bad about not being able to tell the difference – with tired eyes. There was no reason why it should not be a woman – the rest room door had no trousered or skirted hieroglyphic on it – but Harvey instantly wished to withdraw his aggressive shaking of the handle, somehow more acceptable had the occupant been male. It flashed through his mind to say – ‘Oh sorry, I thought you were a man’ but he quashed it. Instead, a glance passed between them, a glance he has – this is the word, guilty though he feels about it – enjoyed before. If Harvey is waiting to use a unisex toilet, on a train, say, or in a private house at a party, and a woman comes out, Harvey enjoys (he knows it’s wrong but still allows himself the minute, tawdry thrill) the moment in which their eyes meet. He thinks the glance means that, for a second, they have both shared an image of her sitting on the seat with her pants down and the sound of liquid on china, or metal. This is the glance that passed between him and the nurse. As ever, he felt bad about enjoying it, but still. He noticed, though, that she squinted at him uncertainly, as if catching that something about Harvey’s look was not accidental, so he looked away, covering his shame by moving quickly into the cabin.

When he came back to the door to Eli’s room, the security guy was waiting, finger in ear. He looked Harvey up and down once more, and then stepped aside. Harvey chanced a friendly nod at him, which was met with a blank stare, making Harvey worried that his friendly nod may have been misinterpreted as ‘see?’, but continued on past his gravitational presence and through the door.

The first thing he noticed on entering was that the room was not windowless. In fact, the bed faced a floor-to-ceiling glass rectangle, looking onto exactly the view of Manhattan – across Central Park, towards downtown – that Harvey so covets. He drank it in – or, rather, since what hit him with a rush is not beauty but envy – he sucked it up, the sweep of sky and skyscrapers, before turning and saying, ‘Hello, Freda.’ His stepmother looked up – it had never occurred to him with the same force before; two years younger than him, that was still, technically, what she was. She stared at Harvey for so long – the oddity of their interaction reinforced by her being on her knees – that he started to wonder if she was trying to remember who he was.

‘Colette,’ she said eventually, ‘come and meet your half-brother, Harvey.’

When the girl looked up, her face under her curls was set in a tight frown. She may have been crying, although not, Harvey thought, out of sadness: her expression contained that classic mix of rage and self-pity that children’s faces emit when they have just been told off. She did not do as she was told; she did not come and meet him, but stayed where she was, raising her chin defiantly and staring as if he was complicit in – perhaps even the mastermind of – whatever slight had just been perpetrated against her.

Or maybe she was sad, about her – their – dad dying, and this was just what she looked like when she was sad. After all, Harvey had never met her before. He had been sent a photograph soon after her birth of the three of them at their New England lodge (not by Eli: the accompanying note, including the statement, ‘Eli is so overjoyed about his new child’ was all in Freda’s hand). Eli, in a big fisherman’s jumper, grinning beneficently, his arms around Freda, her trademark proprietorial smile cross-fertilized with an element of self-conscious sheepishness, as if to say, ‘Can you believe what little me has ended up with?!’, and in her lap, the baby. Harvey wondered who had taken it, as it was too professional – the light too dappled, the wood-panelled walls of the lodge too burnished, the composition of the threesome too perfectly arranged – to have been done on a self-timer. It looked, he thought, like something from OK! magazine. But he could not relate his memory of that infant, looking out at him from the photograph with something of the complacent gaze of a cow, to this fierce child with the thermonuclear stare.

‘Hello,’ he said: the word felt stupid in his mouth. Colette just nodded at him, and Harvey felt suddenly furious at Freda for spiking his route to his father’s bedside with this introduction, impossible as it was to brush off because of the absurd and irreducible fact of him and this thirty-six-years-younger girl being siblings. Freda must have known that his first thought would be to get to Eli’s bedside – and Harvey had really wanted to do this, although not so much because he just wanted to see his dad, more that he wanted to get the first sight of him over with. He was scared about it. Approaching the door, he had felt much like he had as a kid watching Dr Who, knowing that a new monster was about to appear. The ten-year-old Harvey, trembling beside his mother (who let Dr Who under her steel bar of what Harvey was allowed to watch, although in later series changed her mind, deciding that the Time Lord’s always-female assistants were becoming oversexualized) in his blue, bi-planed pyjamas, would not hide behind the sofa. He would, rather, watch intently, wanting the monster to appear as soon as possible; the worst thing was not knowing. He wanted to face it, so that he could know the fear, hold it and calibrate exactly how bad it was going to be.

‘Last time I saw you, you were a tiny baby,’ he said, his voice sounding astringent against the sentiment, holding down his rage at having to have this conversation now. Surreptitiously, he flicked his eyes over towards his father’s bed, more of which was visible from this angle. The movement of his eyes sideways reminded him of the painful glancing action always prompted by an attractive woman across a room. He could see the thin hump of a wasting body underneath bedding, but still not the face. It was facing the face that filled him with dread.

‘You saw me when I was a baby?’ said Colette.

‘No. I saw a photo …’

‘Oh. OK.’ She looked at him. Her frown deepened, producing little lines on her forehead. ‘Why is your tongue blue?’

The awkward stalemate this response induced was broken by the sudden appearance of Freda with her arms outstretched. Harvey, opening his to accept the hug, looked at her frame, spread like a net in front of him, and thanked the Lord again that he didn’t find her attractive. Although younger than him, and a woman – normally enough for his needs – there was something about Freda that inhibited Harvey’s reflex interest. She had that parched-face look so common to female humanist academics that Harvey felt they should try their utmost to avoid, thinking that they had fallen into the exact trap – unfemininity – which Victorian patriarchy had predicted for women should they become learned. This particular intellectual conundrum was a hangover not from his father but his mother, who, despite being herself a female humanist academic, and an arch-feminist, never emerged from her bedroom without a cosmetic face mask three inches thick.

It had occurred to Harvey many times that, physically, Freda was the opposite of everything Eli usually went for in women – except in respect of her youth, relative to him. It did not go unnoticed by Harvey that that was, as it were, the last thing to go – that all the other staples of Eli’s desire could be sacrificed, but not this one, not even in his dotage.

The hug went on for some time. Harvey, who had been hugged by Freda before, felt in it, as ever, no particular love or affection for him: but much love and affection for the idea of hugging. This one was tighter and longer than usual, but still somehow failed to convey any sense that she was pleased to see him. Uncomfortably, however, it did give him time to feel the full length of her body against his – the emotional distance between them allowed him, in a bleak, detached way, to take stock of her body in a way that he never had before – and, then, much to his consternation, come away from the hug, in spite of his long-held notions about her mannishness, with a hard-on.

‘Go …’ said Freda, pulling back from him, Harvey hoping against hope not because she had noticed it. She was speaking in what sounded to him like a stage whisper. ‘Go to him. Speak to him.’

‘Speak?’

‘He understands. He hears.’

Harvey nodded, not wanting to say anything that might disturb her reverence. The tumescence in his pants subsided. He choked down an urge – with him most days, although undoubtedly charged up by the situation – to shout an obscenity at the top of his voice. He walked towards his father’s bed, his feet padding against the quality carpet of the room.

Glancing back, he saw that Freda had crouched down again to whisper to Colette. The doctor and nurse in the room were busying themselves with notes and drips and bleepers: none of them offered to guide him – neither geographically nor spiritually nor even educationally – through the scene. Harvey felt again like a nonentity in some exclusive club, unable to make his presence felt. It even flashed through his mind to say Don’t you know who I am? He wished Stella were here, to hold his hand, even though Harvey was uncomfortable with hand-holding, because it made him feel more aware of the fact of fear, and because, sometimes, he could feel the small bones in her hands.

These thoughts were halted by the interruption into his vision, finally, of his father. Even then it wasn’t as Harvey had imagined it, a kind of naked confrontation with mortality. Eli’s head was propped up against the pillow, and covered nose to mouth with an oxygen mask. Attached to various intravenous ports, six or seven different tubes curled around his bed and into his body, like he was being gently cradled by an octopus. Machines, humming and bleeping and oscillating with sine waves, surrounded him in a stately circle, as if his father were whatever invisible deity lurks in the centre of Stonehenge. It felt to Harvey that all this apparatus was designed not just to keep Eli from death, but also his visitors: that it formed a buffer zone between them and the reality of his condition. So much so, in fact, that the sight of his father was almost an anti-climax after all the girding of his loins. Where is he? he wanted to say, and not in a metaphorical way – not in a This shrunken shell of a human being cannot be My Father! way – but physically: he wanted to rummage through all this stuff, all the sheeting and the wires and the plastic, chucking it over his head like a man sorting through the trash, to find him.

He also felt he couldn’t see him because of the things that were not there. People assume that the way to reveal an object is to remove its external trappings, but that doesn’t hold true for the human object. Glasses, for example: Eli had for Harvey’s whole life worn thick black beatnik spectacles, and without them, as now, he was somehow not Eli. The lack of glasses, along with the lack of a cigarette in his mouth – something Harvey had also grown up conditioned to see, although Eli had finally given them up two years ago – was not an unmasking. It just made him look like someone else.

But then Harvey looked more closely – having realized that he had been focusing on all the last-days’ paraphernalia exactly to avoid doing that – and, indeed, there he was: in the wet, grey clumps of hair stuck to his temples, wisps curling away from his skin like they always did; in the deep trench-like lines on his forehead – the same ones that he has just seen reproduced in miniature on his half-sister’s brow – whose up or down state the child Harvey had desperately relied upon to monitor his father’s otherwise unguessable moods; in the remnants of his beard, its close trimming evocative of his decline like some upside-down Samson, but bringing back to Harvey a distant memory of Eli scraping his emery stubble against the virgin cheek of his son, who would protest, but laughingly, finding the touch both abrasive and delightful, redolent of the rough promise of the adult world; and perhaps most of all in his hands, which were still, despite the pulse meters and the blood clots and the mountainous veinscape rising angrily from their backs, sheathed in the same skin, brown and rough as bark, and still incongruously large, still, even here, suggesting strength, the hands of a labourer, on the end of arms which had avoided heavy lifting their whole life. Harvey, a sucker for comparisons, found himself looking at his own hands by contrast – he’d done this before, of course, but the OCD lizard king in his brain always required new checks – raising his right one a Reiki hover away from his dad’s. It looked small, but Harvey has always known he has small hands, girl’s hands, easy prey for ‘you-know-what-they-say-about’ jokers. He wondered how the DNA divides it up – what fall it is of the cellular dice that has given him his father’s nose, mouth and skin, but his mother’s eyes and hands.

He did not know what to do. He felt that the correct – the polite – thing to do was to speak, as Freda had advised. But looking at his father again – less like his father, and more like a mad scientist had given up halfway through making a robot version of his father – the idea of speaking was clearly ridiculous. He felt not unlike he always did in church or synagogue, fighting an urge, during the endless roll call of praise and plea, to shout ‘No one’s listening! No one’s even there to listen!!’ And what was he supposed to say? Dad: it’s me? Since even those keeping the faith in Eli’s ability to hear did not believe, presumably, that the dying man could see as well, this would then require him to say, in explanation – ‘Um … Harvey’ – like he was on the phone. And then what? How are you? Oh my God, it would just be a fucking phone call. Something more supportive? I’ve just come to say I’m going to be here for you … oh no. No. I am a dual citizen, he thought, but I will never become that American. He didn’t know what to say. He wondered who the people were who did, in this situation. He looked round, as if, at any minute, they might come into the room and tutor him.

Even the first word he might say – Dad – felt weird. It was a word he’d always had problems with. Eli had left Harvey’s mother at a time when his son – six, after all – called him Daddy. There was then a period of some years when Harvey hardly saw his father at all, but still referred to him, in his absence, as Daddy. Thus, when he began to see him again, at increasingly irregular intervals in his teens, he found he had missed out on that poignant slide from Daddy into Dad that marks out children’s first maturity. He addressed him as Dad at this point, but it felt somehow wrong, and he found himself wanting to say Daddy: not in the front of his head – like any other post-pubescent boy, he was keen to avoid any word or deed that might make him seem childish – but in his gut, in the reflex part of his linguistic centre. When he saw Eli, the word that formed in his mind was Daddy. Latterly, a number of different titles for his father were attempted, knowable as the word Harvey used following ‘Hello’ when seeing his father or hearing his voice on the phone – Father; Eli (never comfortable); Dad (still not right); an attempt at irony, Pater. Now, by his deathbed, his mind was saying, again, Daddy.

He decided not to think about it, and just trust what might come out. He coughed, something of a stage ahem. It emerged from his mouth much louder than he had expected, in a weird croak-grunt, shattering the quiet of the room. Freda had taken Colette outside for some form of pep talk, and the doctor had been whispering to one of the nurses, no doubt detailing some complex medical issue, although Harvey had been unable not to wonder if it was flirtation. Both of them looked over, surprised for a moment, before going back to their huddle. And then, at that point, almost as if he had heard, Eli stirred. His hands, one of which was still just underneath Harvey’s, stiffened, the long fingers – whose nails had, Harvey noticed, been neatly trimmed – extending like sickles. His eyes even opened, although the pupils were long gone, high up into his head, revealing just two grey-white ovals, slivers cut from an English sky. Under the oxygen mask, his mouth, previously lopsided into a shape, ironically, like a speech balloon, opened further on that side, and from the weird aperture came a sound that was part-howl and part-yawn, with something oddly synthetic in it as well, not unlike the note produced by a theramin. It was loud, and deeply disturbing: a noise that knew and did not know, like a cow makes at the touch on its temple of the stun gun, a distress call back to this world from the black country.

Immediately, the doctor and the nurse rushed over, in their long coats. Freda burst back through the door, trailing Colette, still sulky. Harvey stared at the blind, raging stump of his father, guilt-stricken, convinced that somehow this atrocious convulsion must be his fault. ‘What’s happening?’ he said. ‘Is he waking up?’

‘No,’ said the doctor – Indian, Harvey guesses, with short, tufty hair combed forward to cover a receding hairline – ‘he does this from time to time.’

He does? thought Harvey. Over the last few weeks, Freda had somehow implied to him that Eli’s unconsciousness was serene – even, perhaps, that the coma was itself a work of art, a kind of late period ripeness-is-all evocation of tranquillity. Not this – this roaring zombie, this Eli Agonistes.

Freda had taken hold of his hand, clutching it with both of hers. ‘He’s still so strong,’ she said, looking up at Harvey. ‘So strong.’

Freda’s face, constipated with hope, forcing out the positive from this indigestible horror – something pitiful in that, Harvey realized: this woman, for whom it was such a prize, capturing Eli, never quite realizing how much she would have to pay for it, and how soon – it is Freda’s face which seems to reflect back to Harvey from the window of the cab as the light of the Sangster forecourt creates of its glass a mirror. It dissolves like aspirin in water as men in autumnal uniforms come gliding towards the passenger door in order to smooth his passage to the lobby.

* * *

He has spent two days now in his room at the Condesa Inn, going over The Material. He has gone over The Material many times before but he thinks that now, so close to the act, it has a different force. It feels shaping and controlling: it feels as if it’s making clearer what he has to do. The why helps the how, he thinks.

He has not contacted his wives. It has crossed his mind often on his journey to do so. He would prefer to write to them than to telephone. He feels that he could Lie for the Lord – lying to preserve a greater spiritual truth, a Mormon practice that Uncle Jimmy explained to him once – easier that way. But none of his wives are allowed to have a computer, or use email, and, at any rate, the only computer in the family house is the Dell, which sits at this moment on the white sheet of his bed, cradled underneath by his crossed legs. He knows what his absence will have occasioned. Ambree, as the most senior now that Leah is dead, will have called a meeting. It will have been held in the kitchen, because, although the living room is bigger, the kitchen is the enclave of the wives, and they will have found it easier to shut the door to the children, although RoLyne would still probably have brought in Elin, his youngest, to breast-feed her. He is confident that Ambree, the most virtuous of his wives, will have led the meeting to the correct decision – despite protests from, he suspects, Angel and maybe even Sedona – that he was their husband, and he knew best: that if he had taken it upon himself to disappear for days without explanation, why, that was no different from Our Lord deciding to enter the desert for forty days in order truly to understand Himself and His Mission. Our job, he was sure she would say, our job as his celestial wives, is in the meantime to care for his house and his children, and be ready to welcome him on his return.

Having thought this through, the urge to communicate with his loved ones recedes, and he turns back to The Material. The intermittent wireless connection at the Condesa Inn troubles him, but also helps. It helps because it makes it harder to watch streaming internet pornography, tube8, or pornhub, or keez, which he normally watches a lot. Thus the intermittent connection is a good thing, as he would feel ashamed of watching these in front of Jesus, and, also, they distract him from his destiny.

The ones that don’t distract him are GunAmerica, and Justice Coalition, and Unsolved, and Restless Sleep, and the jihadi ones. A part of him likes them best. He is even enrolled on the forum at al-jinan.org under the name Pbuh53. Pbuh – he found this out on another website – is the Islamic name for Jesus. He wasn’t sure about this: he was worried it might be seen by God as saying that he himself was Pbuh, was Jesus – writing it into the electronic login form, he felt the butterflies in his stomach that he always feels when he thinks he might be doing something wrong by the Lord – but he went ahead, because it was surely a way of spreading His Name amongst the heathen. And then the site told him he had to add some numbers too, so he wrote his age, as well. That was two years ago.

He enrolled on al-jinan because, when he hears the jihadis speak, something in him stirs. He likes the fierce commitment to God; he likes the language, the poetry of rage, purged of all the trivial inflections of modernity; and he likes the belief in – no, the knowledge of – destiny. To know absolutely both the nature and the quality of destiny – to know what role God has chosen for you and exactly how heroic that role is – that is what he would want for himself. He watches some of the videos that suicide bombers make before they embark on their missions, and he sees in their eyes no sway, no diversion, and it inspires him, even as he knows that the Jesus-less path they have chosen is wrong. He sees how only revenge inspires true religiosity.