‘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 s
omething.
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 Death of Eli Gold Page 3