But at the Golden house that day there were people trapped by the fire. The high drama of the event played itself out, and ended in a triple tragedy and one miracle.
Unconfirmed reports mentioned that several individuals heard the sound of someone in the upper reaches of the mansion playing a violin.
As I see in my mind’s eye the flames rising higher until they seemed to be licking at the sky itself, hellfire flames like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, it is hard to hold on to that belief in the good to which I dedicated myself, hard not to feel the heat of despair. They, the flames, seem to me to be burning away the whole world I had known, to be consuming in their orange heat all the things I had cared for, had been brought up to defend and fight for and love. Civilization itself seemed to be burning in the fire, my hopes, the hopes of women, our hopes for our planet, and for peace. I thought of all those thinkers burned at the stake, all those who stood up against the forces and orthodoxies of their time, and I felt myself and my whole disenfranchised kind bound now by strong chains and engulfed by the awful blaze, the West itself on fire, Rome burning, the barbarians not at the gates but within, our own barbarians, nurtured by ourselves, coddled and glorified by ourselves, enabled by ourselves, as much our own as our children, rising like savage children to burn the world that made them, claiming to save it even as they set it ablaze. It was the fire of our doom and it would take half a century or more to rebuild what it destroyed.
Yes, I suffer from hyperbole, it is the previously existing condition for which I need healthcare, but just sometimes a paranoid man is really being pursued, just sometimes the world is more heightened, more exaggerated, more hyperbolically infernal than even a hyperbolist-infernalist could ever, at his wildest, have dreamed.
So I saw the dark flames, the black flames of the inferno, licking at the sacred space of my childhood, the one place in the whole world in which I had always felt safe, always comforted, never threatened, the enchanted Gardens, and I learned the final lesson, the learning of which separates us from innocence. That there was no safe space, that the monster was always at the gates, and a little of the monster was within us too, we were the monsters we had always feared, and no matter what beauty enfolded us, no matter how lucky we were in life or money or family or talent or love, at the end of the road the fire was burning, and it would consume us all.
In The Exterminating Angel the revelers at the feast in Mexico found themselves trapped in the salon of the grand mansion of their host Se?or Edmundo Nóbile by an invisible force. Surrealism permitted its followers the indirections and strangenesses of poetry. Real life in the Gardens was much more prosaic. Nero, Vasilisa, her babushka and my son were all imprisoned in the Golden house by the banality, the lethal conventionality, the deadly realism of a fire.
If life were a movie I would have heard about the fire, run toward it like a superhero on speed, pushed aside the hands grasping at me and plunged into the flames, returning as burning beams fell around me with my child shielded safely in my arms. If life were a movie he would have buried his head in my shoulder and murmured, Papa, I knew you’d come. If life were a movie it would conclude with a wide-angle shot of the Village with the ashes of the Golden house smoldering in the center of the frame as I walked away with the child and a famous song welled up on the soundtrack, “Beautiful Boy” by John Lennon, perhaps, and the credits began to roll.
That didn’t happen.
By the time Suchitra and I reached Macdougal Street it was all over. Michael McNally was being treated at Mount Sinai Beth Israel and would subsequently be questioned by NYPD detectives who absolved him from responsibility for the fire. The other adults were dead before a ladder crew could get to them, Nero and the babushka quickly overpowered by the smoke, losing consciousness, never waking up again. There had been one moment of operatic emotion. The beautiful Mrs. Golden, Vasilisa, had appeared at an upstairs window holding her almost-four-year-old child, screaming “God, please save my son,” and before anyone could reach her she had thrown the child out of the window away from the fire. One of the firemen at the scene, Mariano “Mo” Vasquez, thirty-nine, who happened to be the catcher for his local baseball team on Staten Island, lunged forward and caught the soot-covered child just in time, “like a football,” he told the TV cameras later, and then blew air into the boy’s lungs and got his breathing going again. “He gave some coughs and then started yelling and crying. It was beautiful, man. Just a miracle, man, a miracle, and now I find out it’s the boy’s fourth birthday tomorrow, that kid had a guardian angel looking out for him for sure. It’s a fine and beautiful thing and I give thanks to Almighty God that I could be in the right place at the right time.”
After that Vasilisa fell backwards away from the window and all her hopes all her ambitions all her strategies fell away with her, nobody deserved such an ending no matter what they had been in life, and a few instants after she dropped from sight the fire roared out through the open window and there was no possibility of saving her. And later of course the fire was extinguished, and charred bodies, etc., no need to go into any of that. The building would have to be demolished and a new structure would be raised in its place. No other houses were damaged by the fire.
So ended the story of the Golden house. They thought they were Romans but that was just a fantasy. Their Roman games which begat their Roman names: just games. They thought of themselves as a king and his princes but they were no Caesars. A Caesar had indeed risen in America, his reign was under way, beware, Caesar, I thought, the people raise you up and carry your throne through the ecstatic glorifying streets and then they turn on you and rend your garment and push you down upon your sword. Hail Caesar. Beware the Ides of March. Hail Caesar. Beware SPQR, senatus populusque Romanus, the Senate and the people of Rome. Hail Caesar. Remember Nero the last of his line fleeing at the end to Phaon’s villa outside the city and ordering a grave to be dug for him, Nero then too cowardly to drive the sword into his own body and forcing his private secretary to do it at the last. Epaphroditos, slayer of the king. There were indeed once Caesars in the world and now in America a new incarnation on the throne. But Nero Golden was no king nor did he have a fallen Caesar’s end. Just a fire, just some random meaningless flame. What was it his underworld pals had called him in Bombay? The laundryman, yes. The dhobi. Here’s the dirty laundry, dhobi. Clean it up. No king on a throne. He was just the laundryman.
The laundryman.