The Goldens were my story, and others could steal it. Muckrakers could purloin what was mine by the divine right of I-was-here-first, the squatter’s rights of this-is-my-turf. I was the one who dug in this dirt for longest, seeing myself, almost, as a latter-day A. J. Weberman—Weberman the soi-disant Village “garbologer” of the 1970s, who rooted around in Bob Dylan’s trash to discover the secret meanings of his lyrics and the details of his private life, and although I never went that far, I thought about it, I confess, I thought about attacking the Golden garbage like a cat in search of a fishbone.
These are the times we live in, in which men hide their truths, perhaps even from themselves, and live in lies, until the lies reveal those truths in ways impossible to foretell. And now that so much is hidden, now that we live in surfaces, in presentations and falsifications of ourselves, the seeker after truth must pick up his shovel, break the surface and look for the blood beneath. Espionage isn’t easy, however. Once they were settled in their lavish home, the old man grew obsessed by the fear of being spied on by truth-seekers, he called in security personnel to sweep the property for listening devices, and when he discussed family matters with his sons, he did it in their “secret languages,” the tongues of the ancient world. He was sure we were all snooping into his business; and of course we were, in an innocent village-gossip way, according to the natural instincts of ordinary people by the parish pump or water cooler, trying to fit new pieces into the jigsaw puzzle of our lives. I was the most inquisitive of all of us, but with the blindness of the foolishly obsessed Nero Golden didn’t see that, thinking of me—quite inaccurately—as a no-account ne’er-do-well who had not found a way of making his fortune and could therefore be discounted, who could be erased from his field of vision and ignored; which suited my purposes excellently.
There was one possibility that I confess didn’t occur to me, or to any of us, even in our edgy, paranoid era. Because of their open and generous alcohol consumption, their comfort in the presence of unveiled women, and their evident failure to practice any of the major world religions, we never suspected that they might be…oh, my…Muslims. Or of Muslim origin, at least. It was my parents who worked that out. “In the age of information, my dear,” my mother said with justifiable pride when they had done their work at their computers, “everyone’s garbage is on display for all to see, and all you need to know is how to look.”
It may seem generationally upside down but in our house I was the internet-illiterate one while my parents were the super-techies. I stayed away from social media and bought “hard copies” of the Times and Post every morning at the corner bodega. My parents, however, lived inside their desktops, had had Second Life avatars ever since that other world went online, and could find the “proverbial eedle in the e-stack,” as my mother liked to say.
They were the ones who began to unlock the Goldens’ past for me, the Bombay tragedy that had driven them across the world. “It wasn’t so difficult,” my father explained, as if to a simpleton. “These are not low-key people. If a person iss vell known, a straightforward image search vill probably vork.”
“All we had to do,” my mother said, with a grin, “was to go right in the front door.” She handed me a folder. “Here’s the skinny, sugar,” she said, in her best hard-boiled gumshoe accent. “Heartbreaking material. Stinks worse than a plumber’s handkerchief. No wonder they wanted to leave it behind them. It’s like their world got broken like Humpty Dumpty. Couldn’t put it together again, so they took off and came here, where broken people are a dime a dozen. I get it. Sad stuff. We’ll be sending in our expense sheet for your early attention.”
There were people, that year, claiming that the new president was a Muslim, there was all that trumped-up birth certificate crap, and we weren’t going to fall into the elephant trap of bigotry. We knew about Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and in the days after the planes hit the buildings we had agreed, all of us in the Gardens, not to blame the innocent for the crimes of the guilty. We remembered the fearfulness that made taxi drivers put little flags on their dashboards and stick God Bless America decals on the partition screen, and attacks on Sikhs in turbans embarrassed us because of our countrymen’s ignorance. We saw the young men in their Don’t Blame Me I’m Hindu T-shirts and we didn’t blame them and were embarrassed that they felt the need to wear sectarian messages to ensure their safety. When the city calmed down and got its groove back we felt proud of our fellow New Yorkers for their sanity and so, no, we weren’t going to get hysterical about that word now. We had read the books about the prophet and the Taliban and so on and we didn’t pretend to understand everything but I made it my business to inform myself about the city from which the Goldens had come and which they did not wish to name. For a long time its citizens had prided themselves on intercommunal harmony and many Hindus were nonvegetarians there and many Muslims ate pork and it was a sophisticated place, its upper echelons were secular, not religious, and even now as that golden age faded into the past it was really Hindu extremists who were oppressing the Muslim minority, so the minority was to be sympathized with, not feared. I looked at the Goldens and I saw cosmopolitans, not bigots, and so did my parents, and we left it there, and felt good about doing it. We kept what we had learned to ourselves. The Goldens were fleeing from a terrorist tragedy and a grievous loss. They were to be welcomed, not feared.
But I couldn’t deny the words that had tumbled out of my mouth in reply to Suchitra’s challenge. The question is the question of evil.
I didn’t know where the words had come from, or what they meant. I did know that I would pursue the answer in my Tintinish, Poiroty, post-Belgian way, and that when I found it, I would have the story that I had decided was mine and mine alone to tell.