The Death of Eli Gold

by David Baddiel

  He realizes now that this was what had been making Dizzy’s voice fainter while in the sauna – and therefore what had induced his panic attack. He sits up, and crosses his legs, and tries to force the headphones back into shape so that they can fit onto his head. They snap in two. He has a moment of pure depression, so total and so instant it feels cartoonish, like his Buddha-like body has been covered, suddenly, in tar.

  * * *

  Today he does not go uptown. Today, instead of walking all the way up Park Avenue, or taking the subway from 23rd straight up the green line to 86th, he takes it downtown. He is searching for the final sign. He cannot quite find it, in the Condesa Inn, in The Material, outside Mount Sinai. There have been some half-signs – the picture of Jesus, the steps marking his stepchildren – but he is looking for the last one, the one that will jump-start his destiny. What he wants is certainty: moral, religious and temporal, something that will make him know that now is the time. So he is going to Ground Zero.

  He feels, as he rides towards the World Trade Center station, like a spy, undercover, much like the way he does at the hospital, amongst people, like the blonde woman in pigtails, there to pay their respects. Because he is not going to Ground Zero to pay his respects either. He is going there because he wants to feel as certain about his destiny as Mohammed Atta did about his.

  Plus: his opinion of the 9/11 attacks is not the same as most of his countrymen, or indeed most citizens of the West. In their church, members are encouraged – through claiming as many state benefits for their enormous families as possible – to Bleed the Beast. The Beast is America. That is how his Church thinks of his country. Sometimes this attitude fights with that part of him which remembers loving The Outlaws, or which can still feel the outline of the Confederate flag underneath his skin, but then he thinks about how the America that he used to love, the one that Hughie Thomasson sung his heart out for, is nothing like the wide godless swathe that he has travelled across to be here.

  When the World Trade Center was blown up, it wasn’t taken in the usual way in American Fork. It did not shock his community. Like all members of all the Churches of the Latter-day Saints and all their sects and offshoots and splinter groups, he knew what it was: a herald of The End of Days. There had been so many portents, and he had committed them all to memory: the pure gospel of Jesus Christ, restored, and taught in His Church – this happened, on 6 April 1830; Elijah returning and giving the priesthood keys – this happened, on 3 April 1836; the Jews returning to Jerusalem and Israel – this began in 1881. Some of the portents had yet to occur. The building of a Mormon temple in Israel; a meeting of the Leaders of the Church with angels and Jesus in Adam-Ondi-Ahman, the site – in Missouri – where Adam and Eve lived after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden; and a separate appearance of Christ at the Temple in Saline County, Illinois. These things had not happened. But the Book of Revelation was clear: wars will be poured out upon all nations; nations will gather to fight Israel; and the wicked will be consumed by fire. Who were the wicked, if they were not the men and the women feeding the Beast financially? The very same men and women consumed by the jihadis’ fire on September 11, 2001? And was it not the case that The Book of Mormon teaches that we must welcome these signs, these symptoms of His Coming, for they portend only the final and eternal triumph of the Just? If ye are prepared, then shall ye not fear, says the Doctrine and Covenants of Joseph Smith. And he is prepared; he is prepared.

  Coming upon the site, he is surprised at how destroyed everything still is, a carved-open dust bowl, as if the attack only happened last week. There is something magical about skyscrapers, which makes it seem as if they should be able to rise up again just like that. But no: nearly a decade later, and still they seem only to have laid the foundations of the Freedom Tower and the Memorial and whatever else they are building here. It is a wilderness of canvas and tents and POST NO BILLS fences. He wonders if it would have been better if they had just cleared the area and left it empty: if that would have been more conducive to standing here now and remembering the dead. It would certainly have been more conducive to his own needs. He feels, looking at the multitude of JCBs shifting mountains of mud from one place to another, and the crazy mess of scaffolding and brickwork, the prickle of frustration that he has felt often on this trip – this mission, as he thinks of it – that the world will not conform to his destiny. He has come here expecting epiphany, expecting revelation, but those things are hard to find on a building site.

  He decides to take one of the many tours on offer. There are seven men and five women on the tour, all tourists: Germans, Japanese, one or two other Americans. They stand on one of the platforms looking over the site, huddled together, while Sylvia, a woman with oval glasses and close-cropped hair, wearing round her neck a laminate, which says TributeNYC: OFFICIAL TOUR GUIDE, begins to speak, loudly, above the noise of machinery:

  – So, everyone happy? Can everyone see me? Does everyone speak English?

  She has an upbeat, driving voice. There is some awkward shifting about, some nodding; a German says Ja.

  – So, first, some history. The Twin Towers were dedicated in 1973. They were originally very controversial. Oh my Lord. Bigger than the Empire State Building! People weren’t sure about that. People said they lacked character. That it was bad that they were bigger than the Empire State Building, trouncing on such a great symbol of the city. But very soon they became part of the New York skyline. And people began to love them more than the Empire State Building. When you went up the Empire State Building, you were away from the view. But here, in the World Trade Center elevator, it was just glass, straight glass, and your stomach – well, it went a little crazy!

  He drifted off. He felt tired. It was difficult to sleep in the Condesa Inn, even more difficult than at home, where sheer numbers in the one house mean that some bed is always creaking, because the man next door has continued to do that thing of dragging his nails down the wall in the middle of the night. He would wake to hear it every night, terrified, scrabbling for the light: the sound was too frightening to listen to in the dark. He has knocked on the wall. He has shouted: stop that! He has prayed, and wondered while he was praying if the sound was itself a sign, or Satan, who always lives in the room next door.

  His attention refocuses on Sylvia as she begins to speak about it, the thing he wants to hear:

  – Many people do not know that September 11, 2001 was not the first day that the World Trade Center was attacked by Islamic terrorists. On January the 26th, 1993, a truck filled with 1500 pounds of explosives, planted by a man called Ramzi Yousef, detonated in the underground garage of the North Tower. Six people were killed. Although their deaths have been overshadowed by more recent events, we do not forget them here today. No, sir. But it makes you wonder, don’t it? They tried before. So. What is it about this particular building, these two towers, that so outraged the fundamentalists?

  It’s the height, he thinks, immediately, pleased at the quickness of his mind’s answer, pleased to know instinctively what it is for them. It’s the height. The arrogance: it’s the saying that we, us, America – we’ve got the biggest cock in the world. That, plus the Babelness of it, the reaching into the sky to disturb God.

  – Which brings us, neatly I guess, to those more recent events. She takes a deep, dramatic breath. And out. It was the first day of school. It was primary day. It was the day we New Yorkers were viciously, horrifically attacked.

  Sylvia’s expression has hardened; her voice has slowed, to a more emphatic rhythm. His fingers reach for the photograph in his pocket. He has not brought the one of his sister on her own, smiling and waving, looking so fine: he has brought another one, of him and her when they were toddlers, being held up by their mother. He slips it out of his pocket and stares at it, listening all the time to Sylvia’s voice become more outraged.

  It is a black-and-white photograph. Their mother is standing in front of Lake Utah, holding them both up to camera. She is sm
iling, but her eyes betray boredom, in tune with his memory of her, a woman whose commitment to herself had remained entirely undented by children. This was not a political position: even if feminism had ever made it to Utah – instead of falling, with all the other great irruptions of the 1960s, into the Grand Canyon – it would have been irrelevant to how his mother chose to live her life. She had no sense of the world beyond.

  This is why he loves his sister so much. Their father being mainly drunk, and their mother mainly herself, he and his sister had brought each other up. He has not had therapy, or any of that faggy shit, and is not given to self-analysis, but he knows in his bones that this is why his sister matters so much. She made him his breakfast, taught him how to tie his shoelaces, rubbed his back when he had childhood bugs that made him throw up all night. He knows that when he thinks of his sister, after all the grief and the anger, and the burning, religious need for revenge, underneath all that there is gratitude, the gratitude that he assumes people who have been brought up properly feel in the pit of themselves for their parents.

  They are – were – twins. Being boy and girl, they are – were – not identical. Except in this photograph. In this photograph he thinks they look identical. They could both be boys, or girls. He has often wished that, somehow, they could have been identical. More of her would seem to have survived. He could look in the mirror and see her. Dimly, he senses there is something else: a need to merge with her, to bring back childhood and safety and someone looking after him, because the five wives and the fifteen children do not look after him, they look to him to look after them. If he merged with her, he would hear her, and she would tell him, surely, that his destiny was right, needed, and at hand.

  – Imagine, if you can, how it was for the people who worked in the towers that day. To be at work – a normal day – with your colleagues and friends. Maybe sharing a bit of gossip before you actually got down to it. We all do that at work, don’t we?

  A couple of the group laugh politely; the Japanese couple genuinely.

  – Maybe, because you work in the World Trade Center – because you work in the tallest building in the world …

  Sylvia says this with intensity, and pauses after it, as if it has some moment beyond the obvious: then takes a deep breath and continues,

  – … perhaps you look out at a clear and cloudless blue sky, and think about how nice it might be to be outside, soaking up the sun.

  He concentrates on the photograph. At the same time he takes Sylvia’s advice; he imagines how it was for the people that day. But not the people that she is talking about, the ones who worked in the towers. He thinks about how it must have been for the hijackers, in their cramped, sweaty cockpits, fighting off uncertainty and panic and confusion and the sound of the passengers wailing and banging on the door, with the repeated hammer of Allah Akhbar: God is great, God is great, God is great, over and over and over again. Finding in those words their destiny. Building a wall with those words against the unfitting flailing world.

  He looks at himself and his sister held up by their mother and thinks of the 9/11 hijackers. Grant me that certainty, oh Lord. Just a piece of it. Show me a sign. Sylvia says:

  – And then perhaps you might imagine how it was for me, just setting off for work, just checking my hair in the hallway mirror, when I heard a voice on the radio say that an aeroplane had crashed into one of the towers at the World Trade Center. Which one? I thought. Which one? Kept on repeating in my head. And God forgive me, God please forgive me, I was praying that it was the North Tower. Because my brother, my darling dearest brother Dan – he worked on the ninety-fourth floor of the South Tower.

  He looked up at Sylvia. She had looked away from their group, up, into the empty unbuilt-upon sky, to that phantom ninety-fourth floor. He had been expecting her to say her son or daughter. She looked old, at least as old as himself, but that did not of course mean that the person she was grieving for was her child. That was just what he had expected. Something to do with her being a woman: that’s who women grieve for, their children.

  She stays looking, up, up. The sky is not so blue today: it is greyer, sitting heavy on the air and making it muggy. But Sylvia still peers into it, narrowing her eyes as if indeed it was that other day’s blue sky and within it her brother has come into focus, waving, or falling, or stringing a tightrope between buildings to escape. This is the sign, he is sure: this sister looking for her brother.

  – He was my younger brother. He’d only just got the job. People think that it was just financiers and moneymen working in the towers, but there were many other firms who rented office space there. He just worked for Regus, an employment agency: manning the phones, helping people find work. He had brown hair, brown eyes, he was maybe fifteen to twenty pounds overweight, he liked prog rock, and he was the proudest father of his two kids, my nieces, Faye and Zoe. All he ever wanted was for life to be good for them. Better, maybe, than it was for us. And you know what? Until September 11, 2001, he was doing really well with that.

  She keeps looking in the sky all the time she is talking. A sister looking for a brother; for vengeance; for destiny. He is so sure it is the sign he feels tears in his eyes. Tears of joy, tears of thanks, tears of finally found purpose. Not tears, he is absolutely certain – he knows this because he can see them welling in the eyes of others in his group, and he needs no mirror to know his are shinier, brighter, fatter with truth – not tears of sadness over the wasteful, useless death of Sylvia’s darling dearest brother Dan.

  * * *

  I love Daddy so much – with all my heart – but he’s really starting to smell. Today, when we arrived at the hospital, I went to kiss him and tell him I love him like I always do, and I noticed it even before I put my lips on his cheek. I like kissing Daddy, even though the look of his skin since he’s been in hospital does make me feel weird. I used to like it a lot when I was little. I liked the feel of his beard, all rough on my skin. I didn’t like it when he shaved, like he sometimes did before he went out at night to get a big award or something. Sometimes he would kiss me on the lips, but sometimes he would move his face so that his cheek was there for me to kiss. He would move his face in a funny way that made me laugh, like someone had snapped his head to one side.

  The thing is, I’ve got a really AMAZING sense of smell. Jada says it’s like a superpower; like I should have a secret identity, and be called Smellgirl or Supersmell (I wasn’t so sure about that because the trouble with the word smell is that even though it can mean that you’ve got a great sense of smell it can also mean you smell, so Smellgirl or Supersmell might be superheroes who just smell a lot. I wouldn’t want people to think I was like, the Human Skunk). I don’t know what this superhero would do – I guess I could follow the trail of a baddie, if I knew what he was supposed to smell like.

  So when I got close to Daddy today I suddenly caught this really gross whiff. Like gone-off broccoli. It made me feel sick, so that I didn’t want to kiss him. So because Mommy was talking to Dr Ghundkhali, and no one else was looking, I didn’t kiss him, I just moved my head away at the last minute.

  I didn’t say anything to anyone about the smell. I wanted to, but I knew it would just sound really childish, saying to one of the doctors, ‘Why does my Daddy smell so bad?’ And anyway, I know why he smells so bad. It’s because he’s dying.

  (I did tell Jada about it when she phoned me – she has her own cell! – after we got back home. She said: ‘Maybe they should make like special deodorants or something for people who are dying.’ Which I thought was a really good idea. I mean, just because you’re dying doesn’t mean you don’t care about that stuff. It’s never too late to make a first impression, Elaine says. Although I guess this would be more like a last impression.)

  The thing was, though, I felt really bad about not kissing Daddy. I started to think that maybe if I didn’t kiss him like normal at the start and at the end of my visit then maybe he would die. I mean, like, straight away, maybe as soon I
went home, or maybe even when I was there. And then as soon as I thought that all the machines started beeping like mad, and he started making that awful groaning noise he makes, and the nurses started rushing in and crowding round his bed, and I started to feel really bad because I thought it was all my fault, that because I didn’t kiss him he was going to die. So I rushed over to his bed, too, but I couldn’t get through to Daddy because all the doctors were all there, all five or six of them and some of the nurses and Mommy, too. I wanted to scream, ‘Let me through! I have to kiss him!’ but I knew they would all just think I was being a stupid little kid. So I told him in my thoughts. I thought maybe if he can hear me when I talk to him even though he’s in a coma maybe he can hear my thoughts as well. I told Daddy in my thoughts that I was really sorry that I hadn’t kissed him, and that I would definitely kiss him before I left, whatever he smelled like, double extra hard, and please don’t die before I do that.

  Anyway, after about five minutes, the machines stopped beeping and everything calmed down, and the doctors moved away, and then it all went back to normal. Then, when it was time to go, I went over to Daddy’s bed again. His mask was on his face again. It looked like it was too tight, like when they take it off there would be red lines on his cheeks. His hair was lying over his forehead, which was all sweaty. It was like whatever had happened today, when he’d started to make all that noise and the doctors had all rushed round, had been really tiring for him. I brushed his hair back, and said: ‘That’s better, now.’