There was once a wicked king who made his three sons leave their home and then kept them bottled up in a house of gold, sealing the windows with golden shutters and blocking the doors with stacks of American ingots and sacks of Spanish doubloons and racks of French louis d’or and buckets of Venetian ducats. But in the end the children turned themselves into birds resembling feathered snakes and flew up the chimney and were free. Once they were out in the open air, however, they found they could no longer fly, and tumbled painfully into the street to lie wounded and bewildered in the gutter. A crowd gathered, uncertain whether to worship or fear the fallen snake-birds, until someone threw the first stone. After that the hail of stones quickly killed all three of the changelings, and the king, alone in the golden house, saw all his gold in all his pockets all his stacks all his sacks all his buckets begin to glow more and more brightly until it caught fire, and burned. The disloyalty of my children has killed me, he said as the flames rose high all around him. But that is not the only version of the story. In another, the sons did not escape, but died with the king in the blaze. In a third variation, they murdered one another. In a fourth, they killed their father, simultaneously becoming both parricides and regicides. It is even possible that the king was not entirely wicked, or had some noble qualities as well as many appalling ones. In our age of bitterly contested realities it is not easy to agree upon what is actually happening or has happened, on what is the case, let alone upon the moral or meaning of this or any other tale.
The man calling himself Nero Golden veiled himself, in the first place, behind dead languages. He was fluent in Greek and Latin and had obliged his sons to learn them too. They conversed sometimes in the speech of Rome or Athens, as if these were everyday tongues, just a couple of the myriad vocabularies of New York. Earlier, in Bombay, he had told them, “Choose your classical names,” and in their choices we can see that the sons’ pretensions were more literary, more mythological, than the father’s imperial longings. They did not want to be kings, though the youngest, it will be noted, cloaked himself in divinity. They became Petronius, Lucius Apuleius and Dionysus. After they made their choices their father used their chosen names for them always. Brooding, damaged Petronius became, in Nero’s mouth, either Petro or Petrón, making him sound like a brand of gasoline or tequila, or, finally and enduringly, Petya, which dispatched him from ancient Rome toward the worlds of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. The second son, lively, worldly, an artist and a man about town, insisted on choosing his own nickname. “Call me Apu,” he demanded, defying his father’s objection (“We are not Bengalis!”) and answering to nothing else, until the diminutive stuck. And the youngest, whose fate would be the strangest of all, became simply “D.”
It is to the three sons of Nero Golden that we must now turn our attention, pausing only to state what all four Goldens, at one time or another, emphatically insisted upon—that their relocation to New York was not an exile, not a flight, but a choice. Which may well have been true of the sons, but, as we will see, in the case of the father, personal tragedy and private needs may not have been his only motives. There may have been people beyond whose reach he needed to place himself. Patience: I will not reveal all my secrets at once.
Dandyish Petya—conservatively attired but invariably smart—had some words of his namesake Gaius Petronius, described by Pliny the Elder, Tacitus and Plutarch as the arbiter elegantiarum or elegantiae arbiter, the judge of stylishness in Nero’s court, engraved on a bronze plaque above his bedroom door: “Leave thy home, O youth, and seek out alien shores. The far-off Danube shall know thee, the cold North-wind, the untroubled kingdom of Canopus and the men who gaze on the new birth of Phoebus or upon his setting.” It was a strange choice of quotation, since the outside world was frightening to him. But a man may dream, and in his dreams be other than he is.
I saw them in the Gardens several times a week. I grew closer to some of them than others. But to know the actual people was not the same as bringing them to life. By now I had begun to think, just write it down however it comes. Close your eyes and run the movie in your head, open your eyes and write it down. But first they had to stop being my neighbors, who lived in the Actual, and become my characters, alive in the Real. I decided to begin where they began, with their classical names. To get some clues to Petronius Golden I read The Satyricon and studied Menippean satire. “Criticize mental attitudes,” was one of my notes to myself. “Better than lampooning individuals.” I read the few extant satyr plays, Cyclops by Euripides, and the surviving fragments of The Net Fishers by Aeschylus and Sophocles’ The Trackers, as well as Tony Harrison’s modern “remake” of Sophocles, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus. Did this ancient-world material help? Yes, in that it guided me toward the burlesque and the bawdy and away from the high-mindedness of tragedy. I liked the clog-dancing satyrs in the Harrison play and made a note, “Petya—bad dancer, so absurdly uncoordinated that people find him funny.” There was also a possible plot device here, because in both Fishers and Trackers the satyrs stumble upon magic babies—Perseus in the former play, Hermes in the latter. “Reserve possibility of introducing supernaturally powerful infants,” I wrote in my notebook, and beside it, in the margin, “??? or—NO.” So I was unclear not only about the story, and about the mystery at its heart, but also about the form. Would the surreal, the fantastic, play a part? At that moment, I was unsure. And the classical sources were as confusing as they were helpful. The satyr plays, to state the obvious, were Dionysiac, their origins probably lying in rustic homages to the god. Drink, sex, music, dance. So upon whom, in my story, should they shed most light? Petya “was” Petronius, but Dionysus was his brother…in whose story the question of sex—or gender, to avoid the word his lover, the remarkable Riya, so disliked—would be central….made a note. “The characters of the brothers, to some extent, will overlap.”
And for Apu I went back to The Golden Ass, but, in my story, metamorphosis was to be a different brother’s fate. (The sibling overlap again.) I made, however, this valuable note. “A ‘golden story,’ in the time of Lucius Apuleius, was a figure of speech that denoted a tall tale, a wild conceit, something that was obviously untrue. A fairy tale. A lie.”
And as for the magic baby: instead of my earlier “??? or—NO,” I have to say that, without the help of Aeschylus or Sophocles, the answer turned out to be YES. There would be a baby in the story. Magic or cursed? Reader: you decide.