What would it mean if the Joker became the King and the she-bat went to jail. Outside the Gardens the giggles were becoming louder, sounding more like shrieks, and I didn’t know if they were screams of rage or joy. I was simultaneously exhausted and scared. Maybe I was wrong about my country. Maybe a life lived in the bubble had made me believe things that were not so, or not enough so to carry the day. What did anything mean if the worst happened, if brightness fell from the air, if the lies, the slanders, the ugliness, the ugliness, became the face of America. What would my story mean, my life, my work, the stories of Americans old and new, Mayflower families and Americans proudly sworn in just in time to share in the unmasking—the unmaking—of America. Why even try to understand the human condition if humanity revealed itself as grotesque, dark, not worth it. What was the point of poetry, cinema, art. Let goodness wither on the vine. Let Paradise be lost. The America I loved, gone with the wind.
I didn’t sleep well that last weekend before the vote because my mind ran on thoughts like these. Riya called me at 5 A.M. and I was wide-eyed and staring at the ceiling. You have to come, she said. Something’s going to happen and I don’t know what it is but I can’t be here alone. The old man had fallen asleep at his desk, slumped forward in his chair with his forehead against the wood. Her night had been as sleepless as mine. But she was not a Catholic priest in a Hitchcock movie and she needed to share with somebody the burden of what she had been told, of the secrets that were now also hers. I went to meet her and we sat in the Gardens before dawn and she talked. What should I do, she said. What is there to do, I replied. But I already knew the answer because I was bursting with creative excitement; the story had rescued me from the depths of my nocturnal despair. It was the missing piece I’d needed, and it gave me the dark heart of my movie, the big reveal, the point of it. Art is what it is and artists are thieves and whores but we know when the juices are flowing, when the unknown muse is whispering in our ear, talking fast, get this down, I’m only going to say it once; and then we know the answer to all the doubting whys that plague us in our night terrors. I thought of Joseph Fiennes as the young Bard in Shakespeare in Love, jumping up from the desk at which he’s writing—what? Romeo and Juliet?—and doing a little private pirouette and telling himself without vanity or shame, “God, I’m good.”
(This raises an interesting question: did Shakespeare know he was Shakespeare? But that’s for another day.)
(There is no muse of cinema, nor of fiction, neither. In this case the muses-most-likely would probably be Calliope—if what I was doing could be considered an epic—or Thalia, if comedy, or Melpomene, if I could rise to the heights required for tragedy. Not very important. Never mind.)
Let it play out, I said. Let’s see what the retired policeman has to say.
Drama has a way of bushwhacking the dramatist. Something’s going to happen and I don’t know what it is, Riya said, and called on me for support, but what neither of us guessed was that the something that was going to happen was me.
We made our way back into the Golden house and found ourselves, in the large family room that gave onto the Gardens, confronted by Vasilisa holding her young son—my young son—my son!—in one hand and a gun in the other. Small, pearl-handled, golden barrel. The girl with the golden gun. She looked like an Italian movie star in her pinkish silk nightgown over which there floated a floor-length lace peignoir—Monica Vitti, or Virna Lisi, I wasn’t sure which. The gun, however, was definitely a Godard touch. I thought of his murderer heroine in Pierrot leaving the dwarf dead with her scissors through his neck. I had no desire to become a version of that dwarf. I actually raised my hands. Play the scene, I thought. Riya looked at me as if I was mad.
Good morning, Vasilisa, Riya said in a normal, non-filmic voice. Put that thing down, please.
What are you people doing in my house? Vasilisa said, not lowering the weapon. (She, at least, was sticking to the script.)
Nero called me, Riya said. He wanted to talk.
He wanted to talk to you?
He talked for a long time. There’s a man coming to see him soon.
Who is coming? Why have I not been informed?
I came because Riya is worried, I said. About the man.
We will all meet this man, said Vasilisa. This mystery will be solved. She put the pistol back in her pocketbook, where it lived.
Cut. Then a sequence of quick shots, bridging the passage of time, intended to show Nero’s poor condition. He is unsteady on his feet and in his voice and gestures.
When she woke up her husband Nero was not in good shape. The lucidity of the long night’s oratory had vanished. He was fuzzy and indistinct, as if the effort of remembering had worn him out. Vasilisa helped him into the bedroom and said, “Shower.” After he had showered she said, “Dress.” After he had dressed she said, “Shoes.” He looked piteous. “I can’t tie the laces,” he said. “They are loafers,” she told him. “Shoes.” After the shoes were on his feet she held out a handful of pills. “Swallow,” she said. After he had swallowed she commanded, “Tell me.” He shook his head. “A man from yesterday,” he said.