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 Travell
ers’ 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 celebrit
y.
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:
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.
Yes, that feels better. But now – as ever, when he has done a bit of work – Harvey must grant himself some small reward. He turns away from the computer and takes from his pocket a small bottle of blue liquid. However bleak the journey, there were always consolations on coming to America: the Manhattan view was one, and here was another. While pushing his baggage, ill balanced on the trolley, through JFK’s anywhere-in-the-world airport mall, saliva had gathered in the corners of his mouth, sent up from his forever inflamed throat glands, and Harvey had realized that he was hungry. Not straightforwardly for food; there was something specific which was making his mouth water at that moment, something specific that his system was reminding him can only properly be got hold of in America, reminding him a split second before the words formed inside his damp, sleepless skull: sour sweets. Harvey loves sour sweets; he loves the taste contradiction, the sugar fighting the acid, his tongue a pair of apothecary’s scales holding these opposites in perfect balance. He loves the dialectic. And he loves the fact that all things are postponed during the sucking of a sour sweet; that, while the conflict between sweet and sour remains unresolved, Harvey can float, his soul buoyed up by the sensual striving towards that equilibrium, and nothing matters until it’s over. If he could only get hold of enough of the right kind of sour sweets in the UK, he thinks he may never be depressed; instead, he would be happily addicted to them, despite the terrible stomach cramps that eating them always eventually induces. But in the UK, none of the sweets – not Sour Haribos, not TongueBubbler, not even Toxic Waste – were anything like sour enough for him.
The Death of Eli Gold Page 4