The Death of Eli Gold

by David Baddiel

  – What the fuck, says the guy, standing up. He sees the terror on his face. Then he sees him look to the door, and open his mouth.

  – I don’t wanna kill you, he says, quietly. It’s not part of what I need to do to kill anyone else. But if you shout for the security guy, I will. You’ll have a bullet in you before he’s through that door.

  The guy holds his hands up when he says this. OK, he says. OK. Whatever you say. He notices something weird about his accent. Australian, or something.

  – So keep your fucking voice down.

  Holding the gun in front of him, he glances towards the door himself. He can see the wide back of the security guy’s black neck and the edge of his Bluetooth phone in his ear. He moves backwards, to a point where even if the security guy turned round, he could not see him through the glass. All he would see is the Australian, standing there.

  – Put your hands down, he says.

  – OK, OK, says the Australian, doing so. It’s OK. Everything’s OK. What do you want?

  – I want to kill him.

  – But you’re a doctor.

  – No. I’m not.

  The Australian blinks, shakes his head.

  – No. Right. Course not.

  – So, as I said. Get away from the patient.

  He starts to move. Then he stops. The man’s bulk is still in the way. He can only see the white of the bed sheet. He cannot see The Great Satan’s face.

  – Look, says the man. Can’t we talk about this?

  – No.

  – People will be here in a minute. The security guy will come in. You’ll be caught. You’ll be executed.

  – I don’t care. Move.

  The man breathes heavily.

  – For fuck’s sake. I can’t believe this is happening.

  – I don’t want to have to tell you again.

  – He’s dying. He’s fucking dying, man.

  The ‘man’, he notices, sounds wrong coming from the Australian’s mouth.

  – He might be dead today. Tomorrow. In five minutes. Why would you need to kill someone who’s about to die?

  – I don’t have to tell you that.

  – I’m his son.

  He frowns. This is not part of his destiny. He looks again at this man, newly revealed as The Great Satan’s son. Although the man’s face is weak and full of fear, he senses that he, too, is near the end of something, and is going to see it out until that end.

  – And you know what? I’ve been hanging around in this fucking city, at this fucking hospital, waiting for him to die for two fucking months. I really really want to go home. So I should just say, go on. Please. Be my guest. You’re doing me a favour. But I can’t.

  He remains silent, just pointing the gun. The man takes a deep breath.

  – I don’t live in the moment, you see. Something people are always saying I should. And because I don’t live in the moment, I’m already thinking about the days, the months, the years ahead, where I will have to live with the terrible guilt of stepping aside and letting you kill him. So I can’t.

  – Fuck off, he says. I’m not interested in all that shit.

  He thinks that he could just shoot him. But he does not want to. It will fuck up his idea of his destiny. And he knows, too, that the sound of the gunshot will bring the security guy into the room. He is not confident that he will have time for a second shot, especially if the fat Australian son isn’t killed outright first time and continues to shield The Great Satan.

  – Just tell me why.

  – I told you I don’t have to.

  – Have some pity.

  – What pity did he have? For my sister?

  This is out of him before he can stop it. Plus: he finds that he wants to tell him. It is something to do with this man being a version, a proxy, of The Great Satan. In his dreams of this moment, the old man is always up and cogniscent and listening, allowing him to be told exactly why he has to die. He accepts the justice. Sometimes he even smiles a small smile of acceptance as the gun is raised.

  – Your sister?

  – Yes.

  – Who are you?

  – I am Pauline Gray’s brother.

  The Australian stares at him now.

  – Fuck.

  – Do you understand now? Will you move?

  – But … hey. It was a suicide pact.

  – I can’t see much of your father. But I can hear that he’s still breathing. Pauline’s been gone over fifteen years.

  – Yeah, OK, but …

  – She was tricked.

  – You don’t know that.

  – She would never have done it. We are Mormons, he wants to add, but does not.

  – She was in love with him. He was clinically depressed at the time. He said he wanted to commit suicide, she said she couldn’t live without him …

  – No.

  – Yeah, it’s mad – I didn’t even buy it myself at the time, but in Eli’s world, for Eli’s women, it’s the sort of thing that –

  – Go read The Material.

  – I beg your pardon?

  – On the internet.

  He glances at his watch. Three minutes have passed since he entered the room. It feels longer.

  – Are you talking about … do you mean that thing on unsolved. com?

  He does not reply. The son’s quick knowledge of it makes him uneasy.

  – The whole RW/EG dialogue? Commissioner Webb? All that?

  – Yes.

  The son laughs, sort of. Or an action and a sound a little like a laugh, but so filtered through fear and self-consciousness as to be more like a very short fit.

  – Eli wrote that.

  – What?

  – My dad wrote that. My dad wrote that and posted it on the internet himself. Or got someone to do it for him.

  He feels anxiety suffuse across his stomach, like salt in water.

  – You’re lying.

  – I’m not. Commissioner Webb … Did you honestly think there’s a cop in the New York City Police Department who talks like that? With such knowledge of Bellow, and Walter Benjamin, and Federico Fellini? Above all, with such knowledge of Eli fucking Gold? No. He wrote it himself.

  His arms feel heavy. He has been holding the gun up for a long time.

  – Why the fuck would he do that?

  * * *

  Harvey looks back towards his father and thinks: it’s a good question. It’s hard enough to explain post-modern irony at the best of times, but when you’re shitting yourself? And to a sister-avenging Deliverance nutter?

  Although in fact he is not shitting himself. His head is clear. When the gun first came out, his mind emptied. He lived in the moment, and the moment was white fear. And then his depression began to serve him. He felt a stasis. He has read, somewhere, that depressives flourished in concentration camps, because at last their inner and their outer worlds matched. Maybe it is that. Maybe feeling so often like death has made facing it a doddle.

  He hears the word doddle in his head, and shakes it out. It is not right. He is still frightened. But it is true that he is used to dread. He has lived so long with phantom anxiety that there is almost a detachment, a fascination in experiencing what it is like to confront real danger. His mind throws up questions: if Stella walked in here now, under these neon hospital lights, would he still be frightened by the lines on her face? More, or less, frightened than by the barrel of the gun? Does the calmness come from that part of him which yearns to give up to it, to end the bad feelings for good, by making his own suicide pact with this madman?

  Enough: enough deconstruction. Something, perhaps even just adrenaline, has returned his mind to him, and maybe he is Eli Gould’s son after all, because so far the one thing that has not failed him is words. If he can keep talking for long enough, John will turn round; the doctors will come back; everything will be OK.

  ‘It’s kind of a joke.’

  Harvey sees straight away that this is the wrong thing to say. The man’s face con
torts; he raises the gun closer.

  ‘Sorry. I don’t mean a joke joke. I think … when the suicide pact thing happened … there were a lot of rumours flying about in the papers. And then it died down, but then when the internet took off it started again. And Eli: I guess … I guess he thought, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

  ‘I think he thought – I think he thought it was a good subject to write about.’

  The man takes one hand off the gun and smoothes it down over his upper lip, repeatedly.

  ‘Why would he put it on the internet?’ he says. ‘Why not in a novel? Or a play?’

  ‘Well, because the … I’m sorry to use this word, really sorry, I can’t think of another one … the joy of it is that people will think it’s real.’ He looks at Eli: the plastic mask is tight on his face, a penumbra of reddened skin around its white edge. ‘My dad is – was – very committed to the idea of misrule.’

  He returns the hand to the gun.

  ‘What the fuck is misrule?’

  ‘Messing about with people. With truth. With what’s real and what’s not.’

  There is a pause, during which Harvey remembers where he has seen this man. He has seen him, two or three times, hanging out with the Eli-worshippers who congregate at the entrance to Mount Sinai. This gives him some small hope. It means that, for whatever reason, he’s been waiting for some time to do this; which means he might be persuaded to wait just a little longer.

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘I’m his son.’

  ‘He told you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  He is. It is one of Harvey’s problems. He is very readable. It is easy to see when he is lying. This is because he does not like lying. Even the smallest untruth will make him feel like he is riding a curve of uncertainty.

  Up to this point he has not, in fact, been lying. All he has said is exactly what he thinks; what he assumes – and has always assumed, ever since one of his endless Google self-and-father-searches threw it up – to be the source of the interview of unsolved.com. But he has never actually had this assumption confirmed by his father.

  ‘And, anyway, even if he did write it – maybe he wrote it out of guilt. Guilt for my sister.’

  Harvey blinks. He has not thought of this – this interpretation. Before he has a chance to consider it further, the gunman continues, his voice now edged with genuine menace:

  ‘Not that it matters. He deserves to die anyway, if he thinks that the death of my sister, from pills they took together, is a fit subject for some genius prank.’

  Harvey starts: it seems strangely sacrilegious, and yet somehow refreshing, to hear the G-word said sarcastically in this room.

  ‘So, listen. I don’t want to kill you. But. You’ve done your thing, your bit trying to protect your father. OK? Your guilt – it’s fixed. You tried to talk me out of it. It didn’t work. You can remember that in years to come. You did your best. So now: I will kill you unless you move out of the way.’

  Harvey’s eyes swivel round. Behind the porthole, John the security guy has turned round. He is not talking on his Bluetooth phone. He is looking impassively at Harvey. Harvey, not wanting to chance any greater ‘Help me’ gesture, flicks his eyes away from his gaze, towards the gunman, whom he knows John cannot see, and back again. John frowns, shrugs, and turns away. Harvey sighs internally. He has only one card left to play. He picks his father’s limp right hand up from the side of bed. His writing hand. It feels light in his own, like a dried leaf.

  ‘Can I say goodbye?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can I say goodbye? To my dad?’

  The gunman looks at him. The wall eye makes it difficult for Harvey to judge where he is looking – where he is aiming: at him or his father. He exhales, heavily.

  ‘Make it quick,’ he says.

  * * *

  Running back along the hospital corridors, Colette Gold is thinking only that she has to get back to her Daddy. She has been feeling more and more unhappy in the room in the other building, where the grown-ups have all been standing for far too long in a big circle around Bill Clinton. She can’t believe that her mommy and all the doctors would leave Daddy alone for so long. She has said this to her mommy, but her mommy has told her to hush, they will only be half an hour, and then they will go back to Daddy’s room.

  Some of the grown-ups have talked to her for a little bit, but she knew they were only doing so in the gaps before they could go back and speak to Bill Clinton again. So she ended up on her own, looking out the window at the park. She could see a man down there with some kids, a boy her age and a girl slightly younger, trying to fly a red and white kite. They weren’t doing it very well – it kept on flapping in the sky and falling – but they were all laughing and having a good time. She wished she were one of them.

  The man and his kids had packed up the kite and started to go home. Standing alone by the window in that big room, her thoughts had crowded in on her. She didn’t like the way that she had said goodbye when she had left her daddy’s bedside just now: she thought he could have misunderstood it, that he might have thought she was not coming back. Plus she thought that maybe he might feel jealous, because she had been spending such a lot of time with Harvey recently, and he had ended up seeming sort of like he was her dad. Which, even though she liked him a lot more than she used to, he wasn’t, and never would be.

  So when her mommy wasn’t looking – when her mommy was laughing and throwing her head back at something Bill Clinton had said – she had slipped out of the room, and now here she is, running down the corridor of the fourteenth floor. Some grown-ups in the elevators and in the lobby have stared at her curiously, but she knows the hospital so well by now and is moving so confidently that no one has stopped to ask if she is lost. Her legs hurt and her chest hurts, but she feels happy in the sure and certain hope of making things better again. She runs so fast that she has to stop and walk the last bit up to outside her daddy’s door. John is there, of course.

  ‘Hi, Miss Gold,’ he says. He always calls her this. Sometimes she wishes that John would have a nickname for her, or maybe just call her Colette. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’ve been running.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’

  ‘Is there someone in there?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I can hear someone in the room.’

  John takes out the phone thing he always has in his ear.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Mr Harvey went in a bit earlier, and a doctor.’

  ‘Is that who Harvey is talking to?’

  John looks round, through the glass. ‘Uh … no, I don’t think so. He’s sitting by the bed. I guess … I guess he’s talking to your daddy.’

  ‘Oh!’ she says. ‘Would you mind … could you lift me up so I can see?’

  ‘Well, you can just go in if you want.’

  ‘No. I don’t want to disturb him. I’ll wait till he’s finished. I just want to look.’

  John smiles – she thinks how big his mouth is – and picks her up.

  She watches through the porthole. Yes, Harvey is indeed sitting by the bed. She can only see his back, but – oh – he is holding Daddy’s hand. Colette feels tears in her eyes. But not bad tears; happy ones. She is glad that Harvey has at last taken her advice. She feels proud of herself, thinking that it is her doing, her that has brought her half-brother to this better place. She watches them, and in her mind’s eye the two men, neither of whom on their own are quite the father figure she in her deepest core feels she should have, seem to meld, each one making up the deficiencies of the other. She presses her ear to the glass of the porthole, in order to hear what Harvey is saying; she shuts her eyes tight, so as to help her remember his words, because she knows how important this moment is, and she wants to write them down later on for inclusion in her diary.

  ‘… so Dad … Daddy …’ Harvey is saying, ‘… I’m
glad you’re dying, really, Dad. I think it’s best for you. Because you’re a Great Man, Dad. Yeah. Everyone says you are. I fucking know you are. But no one is Great, any more, Dad. Greatness: it’s gone. It’s over. In the old days, if you got called Great, in the right quarters, that was that. You were there for life. Now there are too many people who can speak, who can have their say, who can say No, he’s not great, he’s shit. He’s a fucking useless cunt. And they say that stuff all the time, because they all hate the idea that anyone is Great, because it means that they aren’t. And that’s just the half of it, the Great thing. The other half, the Man thing, that’s gone too. Men can’t be men, any more, not like you were a man. Destroying everything that came into the path of your cock. Flying through life holding onto that big blue vein, knowing that it would all be OK in the end because you were Great. All forgiven, because you were Great. It stops here. I should know. I’m the son of a Great Man. But I haven’t inherited any of the Greatness. I’m not Martin Amis, or Kiefer Sutherland, or Sofia Coppola, or Rebecca Miller, or George W. Bush, or Jordi Cruyff. I’m not even Julian Lennon. So no Great genes. And you know what? I may not even have inherited the Man gene. Not properly.’

  Some of this sounds strange to Colette. It is not quite the goodbye she was expecting Harvey to make. But she puts it down to words she does not understand. It is still good, in her mind. Then Colette hears another voice from somewhere.

  ‘OK, that’s enough.’

  She cannot see this voice and, because she is, after all, a child, she thinks it must be her daddy, who she has been told can understand, somehow answering. It does not sound like him but that must be just because he is in a coma. Her heart beats like a butterfly at the thought.

  Harvey says: ‘Fine. Fine. Sorry, Dad. I did my best.’

  She asks John to put her down. She bursts into the room. She says Harvey! Daddy! And Harvey looks up and he shouts her name and jumps towards her as if he is going to embrace her but he looks really weird and mad and then there is a loud bang and then everything goes black.

  * * *

  [unidentifiable noise … eg getting up and going?]