Chapter 4
He sits in the restaurant waiting for his brunch. He would rather the restaurant was a diner, and he would rather brunch was just called breakfast, but the nearest diner that might serve a real American breakfast is six or seven blocks away, and when he is on one of his hospital days he doesn’t like to go too far from Mount Sinai. The restaurant is called Hanratty’s.
The brunch menu has some stuff on it he doesn’t much like the sound of, but it does have steak and eggs, which he doesn’t eat that often but his mom used to make it at home sometimes when they could afford it, and she said it was the best way to start the day, the thing that would keep you going whatever happened, and so he orders it, even though he is not planning on doing much more than watching today. He remembers that Janey used to talk about focus a lot, about how that was what you needed to achieve your goals. Her goals, in the end, were to leave Salt Lake City and join the Community, but that was OK, now. He had been angry with her at the time, but now he realizes that it is all part of his destiny, and that if Janey hadn’t left that maybe he wouldn’t be here, and even if he doesn’t like being here that doesn’t matter. You don’t get to like your destiny.
So he thinks that, even though she is not here and he hasn’t heard from her in three years, he should listen to his daughter. He is listening to Janey. He is focusing. However long it takes, he will find his focus by continuing to look at The Material. Hanratty’s has broadband for its customers, so he has brought the Dell with him. This means that he can keep working while he is in the restaurant. It also means that he does not have to sit in the restaurant on his own doing nothing waiting for his food. He is a loner, yes, but he doesn’t want people thinking he is a loser.
He is hungry and the smells from the kitchen are making him hungrier, but he needs to focus, so while he waits for his food to arrive he works. He Googles ‘Eli Gold trainscript Commisioner Webb 1993 Pauline Gray suicide genuine?’. Google comes back with Did you mean ‘Eli Gold’ transcript Commissioner Webb 1993 Pauline Gray suicide genuine? He clicks on it. The key word in his selection – genuine – goes nowhere, never appears in the context he wants, which is: is the transcript on Unsolved real? He has always assumed so, but recently, certainly since he has been in New York, he has begun to question it, almost as if the city, with all its willed confusion, has crept into his understanding of things. Would The Great Satan not have brought a lawyer with him (an issue he raises in the text, but seems not to follow up on)? Would the interview have been recorded at all? Wouldn’t there have been another policeman in the room? Would they not have been too worried about The Great Satan’s status to subject him to this?
But there is no discussion anywhere else on the web of the transcript’s authenticity. It’s all just taken as read, evidence from which a thousand bloggers can link to other pages, along with whatever other conspiracy shit they’re into. Eventually, he clicks on Unsolved again, and then on the thumbnail of The Great Satan and his sister, to get to www.unsolved.goldwebbtrans.html, and reads it again:
EG: I have no obligation to answer this. If I had known the tone of these questions in advance, I would not have agreed to be brought down here. Certainly not without legal representation.
[pause]
EG: I apologize, Mr Gold, for my tone. I’m a police officer, not a great writer, and perhaps not such a judge of my own words.
EG: Yes, well –
RW: I have here a copy of your own note. Showing Mr Gold case document R45/103.
[pause]
EG: What about it?
RW: Sorry, I was just thinking about the fact that it’s a copy.
EG: So?
RW: Well, we have your wife’s suicide note. But I understand you didn’t want us to have yours.
EG: I didn’t want you to have my wife’s! It was taken from my – from our – apartment while I was still in hospital. The only reason you don’t have mine is that Larry picked it up.
RW: Yes. Record to show: Larry that is – correct me if I’m wrong – Larry Barnett, your literary agent.
EG: Yes.
RW: Who found yourself and Mrs Gold.
EG: I believe so, yes. Obviously, I was unconscious.
RW: He has a key to your apartment, does he? Larry.
EG: Not always. But I had lent him one, recently. During the last days of our marriage, when we were trying to work things out, we spent a lot of time in our lodge in New England.
RW: And on the occasion of the … on the evening in question, 3 June 1993 … Larry Barnett was … coming round to see the two of you? That had been arranged?
[pause]
EG: Commissioner Webb. I have won the Pulitzer Prize. I have won the National Book Award twice. I have been offered the Nobel.
RW: Wow. I knew your work was admired but, no, I didn’t know all that.
EG: So: do you think I’m an idiot?
RW: No, sir.
EG: Well, what sort of idiot would invite a close friend round to their house on the night that he and his wife were planning to commit suicide?
RW: Someone who wanted to be found?
EG: Found …?
RW: After death. No one wants to rot there for days.
[unheard]
RW: Or possibly someone who wanted to be stopped. Suicide is often a cry for help.
EG: Not in our case, Commissioner.
RW: No. Of course not. Anyway, this note – why did Larry Barnett insist on keeping the original?
[pause]
RW: Does he think it may be valuable? It’s an original piece of writing, after all. By a Pulitzer Prize-winner.
EG: How long is this going to continue, Commissioner? I’m still recuperating and all these questions are making me tired.
RW: Not much longer, sir. Let’s move on from the notes for the moment. We’ll come back to them later. Showing Mr Gold document R45/107.
[pause]
EG: This is an autopsy report?
RW: Yes.
EG: I’d really rather not see this if you don’t mind. rw: I know it’s painful, but I’m keen to … [unheard] … so if you check the following page, it concludes that she died from taking a combination of Demerol and Naproxen. The doctors estimate about thirty pills of the former and twenty of the latter. Plus they found traces of … hold on … Paroxetine Hydrochloride? Is that right? In her bloodstream. But not in yours.
EG: It’s Paxil. An antidepressant.
RW: Right, right.
EG: She was on it. But had come off recently.
RW: She’d come off antidepressants recently?
EG: Yes.
RW: Why would you come off antidepressants if you were suicidal …?
[pause]
EG: I’m really not certain that psycho-pharmacology is all that simple, Commissioner. But you would have to ask an expert.
RW: You were not on antidepressants?
EG: No.
RW: Have you ever been?
[pause]
EG: No.
[pause: sound of writing]
RW: Not even when you became, as your medical records show, chronically depressed? Or during the period leading up to this – suicide attempt?
EG: … No.
[pause]
RW: OK. So let’s discount, for the moment, the Paxil as being involved in the death of Mrs Gold. The doctors also estimate, from your time in hospital, that that’s what you took. Thirty Demerol and twenty Naproxen. Would you say that was correct?
EG: More or less.
RW: More or less? You didn’t count them out? That’s what suicides tend to do.
EG: I took one pill and she took one pill. One at a time, until we’d finished both bottles. We fed them to each other. We looked into each other’s eyes as we did it. It was what we both wanted: a perfect, peaceful symmetry. Are you satisfied now, Commissioner? Now that you’ve broken into our final intimacy?
RW: That is not my intention, sir.
[pause]
RW: You’re what �
� six-foot one? Two?
EG: Six-foot two.
RW: And what do you weigh, Mr Gold?
EG: What do I weigh?
RW: Yes.
EG: At the moment, about a hundred and eighty pounds.
RW: You lost a little weight following your ordeal.
EG: I believe so.
RW: So you weighed, on 3 June, maybe … a hundred and ninety pounds?
[pause]
EG: I didn’t, on the night that me and my wife planned to exit this universe, spend much time on the scales.
RW: Your wife, on that night, according to this report, weighed a hundred and ten pounds. She was five foot two. Would you say that the amount of Xanax and Vicodin needed to kill a hundred-andten-pound, five-foot-two woman would be the same as that required to kill a six-foot, hundred-and-ninety-pound man?
[pause]
RW: Would you not say, in fact, that, pharmaceutically, the one thing required to make sure that both of you exited this universe as planned, was asymmetry?
He feels a sudden pressing need to urinate. This comes over him these days much quicker than it used to. There is no gradual buildup of pressure any more, just a switch in his bladder that flicks to urgent. He makes a mental note to make sure he doesn’t drink too much water and goes to the bathroom in good time before the day of his destiny. It would not help his focus to be thinking about that.
He makes sure to put the Dell to sleep before he gets up, not wanting any passing nosy waiters to look at his screen. The waiter points him the way downstairs to the rest rooms.
Inside the men’s room there are framed newspapers above the urinals, mainly the New York Post, although there is one old copy of the National Enquirer with a gory front-page photo and headline that says ‘I CUT OUT HER HEART AND STOMPED ON IT’. He does not read the one above his basin at first, as all his energy is concentrated on getting his penis out of his flies quickly. Once past the swoon of relief he can breathe normally again, and notices that the framed paper in front of his face has a picture on it of Hanratty’s, with the words Rudy and Judy’s Hideaway underneath. He peers at it. When he and his sister were children they had a hideaway. It was a small natural clearing, hidden within the overgrown hedge that ran along the side of the back garden of their house near the airport in Salt Lake City. Pauline hung a series of blankets over the branches around it; once you were in there it felt like a tepee. They even tried to light a fire in the hideaway once, with some twigs and a lighter he had found in the graveyard behind the City Temple: their dad caught him and beat him hard for that. They called their hideaway by their names, too, though by their nicknames, not their real ones. Because she had protruding front teeth at the time, he called her Bugs, and she called him Swish, the noise his corduroy pants made when he ran. Swish and Bugs’ Hideaway. They got up to all sorts in there.
His piss takes a long time, long enough to read the first paragraph of the attached article, which he is pleased about, as sometimes now he needs to go really badly and yet when he does out comes nothing but a small dribble.
– Busted, eh? says a voice next to him. He looks over. His relief had been so full, he had not noticed that a man had come and stood by the adjacent urinal. He is pleased that he did not notice this, as close proximity with other men inhibits his bladder in public toilets.
He does not say anything. He looks over at the cubicles. They are a good size, he thinks. There would be room in there.
– I remember that, says the man, unperturbed. Giuliani. What a guy. All that zero-tolerance shit, and then he’s fucking some cunt on the side. And not even that on the side, he brings her here every Sunday for brunch!! Sings her fucking Italian love songs! Over waffles and eggs fucking Benedict!’
He nods. He shakes himself off, carefully – he has issues there, too – grateful to move away. But the man continues, looking over his shoulder at him, even though now he is at the washbasins.
– Still – everyone’s got some shit going on, haven’t they? And there’s always a woman at the heart of it. Isn’t there?
He feels that he should answer – the man’s questions, although rhetorical, seem to demand some gesture of agreement.
– I guess … he says.
– Zero fucking tolerance.
He feels the cold water run over his hands and watches in the mirror as the man turns, doing himself up. The man is balding, and fat enough to struggle with his fly. He sees himself, his sharp, white face, one of those faces that still looks somehow boyish even though it is old, and feels an urge to rush over and tell this man everything about his sister, about The Great Satan, about the long hard road to his destiny: and he wants the man to approve of it, to nod and purse his mouth and shake his head and say too fucking right. He doesn’t know why he so wants this man’s approval, but senses, as with the jihadis, that it is something to do with certainty.
When he gets back to the table, his steak and eggs are waiting, going cold.
* * *
I read one of Daddy’s books today. Well, Mummy read it to me. Then she had to go back to the hospital so she let Elaine carry on until it was time for me to turn my light off. I can read, of course, but Mommy didn’t want me to read it by myself. I think she wanted to read it to me. Also I worked out she wanted to check there were no bits in it that were too grown up for me to hear, about sex and stuff. When she was reading it sometimes she’d stop for a second and then the lines on her forehead would come out like they do when she’s thinking hard about something and then she’d carry on and I reckoned she was maybe missing a bit out.
It’s the first time I’ve been allowed to see any of Daddy’s work. Although I did see the Butter Mountain. That was a thing he did before I was born. Daddy stopped writing for a bit then – Mommy says he had ‘writer’s block’ which is when you’re a writer and you can’t think of anything – so he became an artist, just for a little while. Mommy and Elaine took me to see it because Daddy doesn’t like it any more. It’s in a big gallery downtown. It is actually a mountain made out of butter. It’s not the same size as a real mountain but it is really big, bigger than me, and it looks exactly like a mountain, except made of butter. The gallery has to keep it in a special cold room to stop it melting. I said to Mommy, did Daddy really make this? Didn’t his hands get really greasy? Stupid questions like that, because I was only four. She said no he didn’t make it himself, but it was his idea: and that artists didn’t have to make their own things any more. I didn’t really understand that but I really loved the Butter Mountain. I wanted to tell Daddy how much I loved it when we got back but Mommy said not to, because he hates it now.
Anyway, Mommy said it was time. She said it kind of slowly, with that very serious face she sometimes puts on.
‘Time for what?’ I said.
‘Time that we introduce you to Daddy’s writing. It’s time you got to know why Daddy is such a great man.’
‘Before he dies,’ I said.
She nodded, and breathed in, without saying anything: it looked for a minute like she was holding her breath. She always does this when I say anything about Daddy dying. I don’t know if I’m not meant to talk about it. But in The Heavenly Express for Daddy they tell you that you should talk about it if you want to.
Before she started Mommy explained to me that Daddy didn’t write books for children (like I didn’t know that) but that this book was maybe the nearest thing: ‘It’s something of a latter-day fairy tale,’ she said.
‘Like café latte?’ I said.
‘What?’ she said.
‘A latte day. Is that a day when you only drink café latte?’ This is what she always orders in Starbucks (there’s one downstairs in the hospital): grande, skinny, extra-hot. When I was little I always used to be frightened that extra-hot would be so hot that she’d get burnt when she picked it up or that maybe she’d go ‘Ow!’ and then throw it up in the air and it would all land on my head or something.
She smiled that smile which means that I’ve got
something wrong, again. When she does it her front lip goes up quicker than her bottom one, so she looks a bit like a rabbit, about to bite on a juicy lettuce.
‘Latter-day, darling, not latte day …’ she said, kissing me on the cheek. She smelt of wine, though not much, just a little. I liked it. ‘It means … it means today. Mirror, Mirror is like a fairy tale for today. Except it was written over thirty years ago. We’ll just read the first chapter for now, and see how far we get.’
Mirror, Mirror was what the book was called. Daddy wrote it in 1978. It is his seventh novel. Mummy told me that when it came out it didn’t get such good reviews – that’s when people in the newspapers tell you if stuff is good or bad – but that now everyone realizes it is a classic. I put my head onto the pillow and held onto Cuddles. He was cold and I wanted to get him warmed up but Mummy had already started reading.
In this land of ours, which inspires gratitude in some and resentment in others, there was born at the start of the century a boy, whose given name was Herbert Aloysius Morris, but who would come to be known to all his friends as Herb, and to his parents [and here Mummy did that frowny forehead thing] as Herbie.
She carried on, but it was quite hard to understand, not that much like a fairy tale at all. There were no fairies, and no castles, and no witches, and no princes or princesses. I thought that Herbie was supposed to be the hero, but he was just a boy with really bad asthma like that kid Patrice at my school has got. It made me wonder how long I was going to be away from school. Mom took me out when Daddy went into hospital. Elaine does some more home teaching now: a ‘top-up’ Mommy calls it. At first I was really pleased, like I’d been given a special holiday all of my own, but when Mommy said the thing about asthma it made me think of Patrice and his funny blue inhaler thing and I realized I kind of missed it. School, I mean, not Patrice’s inhaler!
When I started thinking about school I thought that maybe I wasn’t listening hard enough so I tried to listen really hard, although then I thought I don’t know how you listen hard. Jada can make her ears move and I thought if I could do that I could maybe make them go like towards Mommy’s mouth or the book and that would be a way of listening hard.
The Death of Eli Gold Page 14