The Death of Eli Gold Read online

  DAVID BADDIEL

  The Death of Eli Gold

  For W.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by David Baddiel

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  … he persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that having sex with whomever you want whenever you want is the cure for ontological1 despair

  – David Foster Wallace,

  reviewing John Updike’s Towards the End of Time, New York Observer 1997

  Denise at thirty-two was still beautiful

  – Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

  I cannot live without Arthur, despite certain inner resources

  – Cynthia Koestler, suicide note

  * * *

  1When the same essay appeared in his collection Consider The Lobster, published in 2004, DFW changed ‘ontological’ to ‘human’.

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  My famous daddy is dying. Some grown-ups think I don’t understand what that means, but I do. Jada doesn’t. When her grandma died, Jada told me her mom said that she’d gone to heaven. OK, I said. But then, three days later, Jada told me that she’d asked her mom when she was coming back. So I asked Mommy, and she said she wasn’t; that she’d gone forever. So that’s why I know what it means. It means you go away and you don’t come back.

  Me and Mommy go to the hospital every day to see Daddy. The hospital is called Mount Sinai Hospital. Mount Sinai was the place in Israel where God spoke to Moses, and gave him the Ten Commandments. I read about this in a book Elaine gave me called The Beginner’s Bible: Timeless Children’s Stories. When I was younger – like five or something – I learnt the Ten Commandments by heart. I don’t know why I did that. I didn’t even know what all those words meant then. Graven. False witness. Adultery. But I still remember the three that really matter. Thou shall not kill. Thou shall not steal. And honour your father and your mother.

  The hospital isn’t much like the picture of Mount Sinai, like it looks in the book. It’s just a big building. It’s right on the park, and from the big window at the end of Daddy’s room I can see a lake. There’s a lake in the picture in The Beginner’s Bible: Timeless Children’s Stories, too, in the chapter about Moses. Moses is halfway up the mountain, holding the Ten Commandments, and looking like he’s really mad about something; there’s a crowd of people at the bottom and, behind them, a lake. Sometimes, when I’m looking out that window, I pretend that the lake in the park is the lake in the book, and that Daddy is Moses, even though he’s always lying on his bed now, and can’t stand up, or hold anything, especially not two big stones. But yesterday, Mommy came over to the window while I was pretending and told me it wasn’t a lake at all, it was the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. I said: what’s a reservoir? She said it’s a man-made body of water. I didn’t understand what she meant by a body of water. How can a body be made out of water? I wanted to ask her, and also who Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is, but then Daddy made that strange noise which is the only sound he makes now, and she rushed back to the bed.

  The first time me and Elaine went to the hospital, there were loads of photographers outside. That’s because my daddy is famous. Not like Katy Perry, or Justin Bieber, or any of those guys: he’s famous in a different way. Mommy made me a scrapbook of bits cut out of newspapers from when I was born, and nearly all of them call him the world’s ‘greatest living writer’. I haven’t read any of his books, because I’m still too young to understand them. But when I’m older – maybe eleven or something – I’ll read them all.

  Elaine told me to look down when the photographers tried to take a picture of me. Some of them shouted at me – ‘Hi, Colette! Colette! This way!’ – and I nearly looked up, but I didn’t. I just kept looking at the shoelaces in my new Gap shoes, at the white tips of the pink strings.

  ‘How do they know my name?’ I whispered to Elaine.

  ‘Because of Daddy,’ she said, but she was walking quickly and keeping her head down, too, and didn’t really explain what that meant. Then one of the photographers shouted at Elaine, ‘Are you another daughter?!’ and it was good that I had my head down because it made me laugh because she’s my nanny and is, like, sixty-five or something!!

  Daddy has been dying for a long time, even since before I was six. I know, because on my sixth birthday Elaine gave me The Heavenly Express for Daddy, which is a book to help children understand what happens when their father dies. It had a lot of pictures in it of a man who is a daddy, but much younger than mine, with black hair instead of white, and no beard; but, like mine, he gets ill and has to go to a hospital. Then, God comes and sees the man, and tells him that he’s going to put him on a special train, to come up to heaven and live there with him – but then after that I don’t know what happens, because Mommy took the book away, because she thinks Elaine likes God too much. She took the book away, and said she didn’t believe that children, just because they were young, shouldn’t be told the truth. Especially me, she said, because I’m Daddy’s daughter, and Daddy doesn’t believe in God, even though some of his books are sort of about Him. Daddy, she said – well, she called him Eli, sometimes she calls him Daddy and sometimes Eli – Eli, she said, represents a touchstone of truth in this world. I didn’t know what these words meant, but Mommy closed her eyes tight when she said them and I always know that’s when she really wants me to know something, so I made sure I learnt them off by heart, like my three Ten Commandments.

  * * *

  Coming through arrivals at JFK, Harvey Gold thinks that, these days, he would make a good immigration officer. What do they do, these guys? They look at faces. They sit in a booth and they check real face against photo-face. Photo-face. Real face. Photo-face. Real face. All day. And me, what do I do all day, he thinks, these days? I check faces. Every face I see, I check: I check it over helplessly, looking, examining, investigating. Harvey, of course, is checking for something else, although he wonders how different it is. The immigration officers, they’re also searching for changes, for what happens to the face when it moves from stasis, from when it’s arranged. They’re checking to see how the face looks once it’s not presented, face-on.

  Whatever, he thinks, standing in line amongst the travellers, tired and bright and buzzing: I’d be fucking great. Especially – his red-eye eyes flick upwards, the pupils seeming to scratch against the back of the lids – in this light, this take-no-prisoners, angle-poised airport light. When eventually al-Qaeda decide it’s time to smuggle Osama bin Laden into America, he could have the best fucking Afghanistani surgery his siphoned-off dirty dollars can buy, he could come to my booth cut up and dyed and pixillated, and still I’d spot him. He could come in sex-changed. He smiles to himself at the thought, prompting the businessman standing next to him in the queue to frown. If he had looked closely, which he does not, the businessman might have noticed that Harvey’s smile is not pure, that it contains within it a lingering frond of bitterness.

  Harvey’s iPhone, a pocket harp, tings in his trousers: a text. He scrabbles in his jeans, which are tight around the crotch – he feels the
crotch of his trousers is always shrinking these days, from the disgust that he carries eternally around with him. He knows without looking that the text will just be AT&T offering him their services, but he glances anyway – and so it is, a message of hope and welcome to America as if from the Pilgrim Fathers themselves. He is about to force the phone back through the thin slits of his front pockets when he notices another text, this one from Stella. He taps on it with his thumbnail, a thumbnail kept long as a throwback to when he used to play the guitar and imagine himself on stage with his foot up on black monitors. Darling, the text says, hope the flight wasn’t too tough. My love goes out to everybody who’ll be there, but most to you. Be safe. XXX

  He slides the screen three windows across with his thumb, to find Deep Green. Deep Green is a chess app that Harvey is addicted to. He takes it out at the first sign of boredom or entrapment – states in which his anxiety disorder, as various therapists have christened it, is exacerbated. He now reaches for it instinctively in doctors’ waiting rooms, illegally in traffic jams, and in all queues, because he knows that if he starts to play, the end of the wait will arrive faster. The downside is that Deep Green always beats him. He plays it on Level 4, halfway through its eight settings, and knows he should go down a level but feels that that would be pointless: that any joy there might be in defeating the computer – which for reasons unknown to Harvey has christened itself Tiny: every time he loses he has to suffer a small, smug ting, accompanied by a gloating Checkmate! Tiny wins! – would be undermined by the knowledge that he had to lower its game to get there.

  He has only just begun the game – although his thumb is already hovering over the RESIGN button – when he senses the businessman beside him twitch with irritation. He looks up, and realizes that everyone is now waiting for him to cross the green line and approach the booth. He puts the phone away, fumbles for his passport in the bumbag strung badly across his thighs, and remembers at the last moment: the American one. Harvey is, in so many ways, a dual citizen, and US law, always keen to assert its global difference, states in the clearest of tones that all travellers in possession of an American passport must enter the country showing the Spread-eagled Eagle. The immigration officer, who is narrowing her eyes at Harvey as if already interpreting his delay as suspicious, is a woman of about thirty-five. As he approaches the bitter smile returns, and with it the memory of the sex-changed devil, Osama.

  Let us be clear about this. Harvey is not smiling – and was not smiling earlier – at the idea of Osama bin Laden in women’s clothes. He is smiling to himself in the manner of a man who has accepted, unhappily, something shitty about himself; who, on this issue and many, many others, has pushed the RESIGN button in his soul. He is smiling to himself because he is thinking: obviously, obviously I’d fucking spot him if he’d had a sex change. Because then he’d be a woman: and women get checked by his eyes a hundred-and-fourteen-fold. This woman, this immigration officer; Harvey will look at her face much more closely than she will his. Even as her eyes perform a thorough and competent scan of his face, flicking occasionally to its corollary on the page – greying, jowly, passport-stern, behind the watery eyes just a hint of teenage memory of going into those photo booths with friends and making stupid faces far too close to the lens – however microscopic her examination, it is as nothing compared to the manic burrowing of Harvey’s gaze all over her skin, Photoshopping her, running her face through the Rolosex in his head, gauging, gauging, gauging: smoothness, symmetry, vulnerability of eye, fullness of cheek, of lip, of hair, thickness and tastefulness of make-up, and, most importantly, of course, resistance or otherwise to the torrent of ageing. Who knew, he thinks, the American phrase entering his head like a passport stamp? Who knew that the power of work, and indeed of international security, would be as nothing compared to that of sexual psychosis?

  ‘How long have you been out of the country?’ she says, startling Harvey: sometimes when he is staring at them like this he forgets that women can speak. He feels heat flush through him in response. He has hot flushes regularly – he is virtually menopausal with them – but they are not brought on by rising infertility, nor by the temperature of the June New York morning, but by fear. He has nothing to be frightened of, or at least nothing concrete, but for some time now this has been irrelevant to his physical response.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, his voice a little strangled, and aware of its laconically flat Englishness. ‘Ten years? Maybe a bit longer?’

  Her eyes, which are brown, and which Harvey has already noticed have running underneath them a series of what women’s magazines call ‘fine lines’, harden.

  ‘That’s a long time.’

  She has taken it as an affront, Harvey realizes. For these sentries posted at the gates of the promised land such a length of absence is suspicious. It is suspect, the very idea that one of their own might want to be away from the mother lode for this long a stretch. What possible delights could anywhere else in the world hold for so long? He feels a movie need to say something weary and sarcastic, but quells it underneath a nod of agreement.

  ‘Business or pleasure, this trip?’

  This makes Harvey pause. He stops running the immigration officer’s skin through a series of forensic sight-based (and, in his imagination, touch-based) tests. What is the answer? It’s multiple choice, clearly, with not enough choices.

  ‘My father is dying,’ says Harvey, as blankly as he can: he is trying not to make it a proclamation. It is not difficult to assume the blankness: as with all information of great import, both personal and political – births, deaths, relatives, wars, injustice, all the stuff of Hallmark Cards and CNN – the fact of his father’s death is taking a while to bed in. He knows it should affect him – he engages with the idea that such information should shake him to the core, should easily shake down the fog of desire and depression that pumps ceaselessly from the pores of his exhausted, clumpy brain – but viscerally, physically, he doesn’t feel it. He thinks he will, eventually, and is waiting for the moment to strike, but in the meantime remains afloat, abstracted, like a man who has been told that the plumber will arrive at some point between nine and five thirty.

  But telling this to the immigration officer doesn’t come out as blank as he wants: he is still trying to put across an idea of himself, the man so socked to by death that he has not known how to answer this question and therefore has told the bald truth. And he senses that there is something sexual here, something flirtatious, or at least, gender-biased: it is not a self that he would have presented to a man. He is trying to make a dent in this woman’s imperviousness by doing the vulnerable thing. Of course, if he had really wanted to make a dent, he realizes, he should have said, ‘My father – Eli Gold – is dying.’

  It still works, however. Abashed, muttering sad sorries, she hands back the blue book and waves Harvey on into America. In doing so, their fingertips touch briefly above the eagle’s claws, and for her it is less than nothing, but for Harvey it is a roof of the Sistine Chapel moment, divine electricity passing between their fingers. It passes immediately – Harvey is not a fool, he doesn’t believe in his fantasies; rather, he is persecuted by them – but it leaves its scar, its never-happening scar, with all the others.

  He fits the American passport awkwardly back into his overstuffed bum bag, and walks away towards the sunlit plains of the glass-roofed Arrivals terminal. Then he remembers Stella’s text, and puts his fingers back through the half-opened zip, searching for the iPhone. They alight first on his house keys, and then on all the loose puddles of change that, from the outside, make this bag look like it is suffering from a terrible allergic reaction. How could the phone have gone? He was just looking at it! Did he hand it over to immigration officer with his passport? This is why he is wearing the stupid bum bag – a thing that he knows no one wears any more, and which stops him walking properly – in order not to lose stuff. He stops. His life has always been plagued by this, the everyday disintegration of absent-m
indedness, especially as regards the whereabouts of vital personal objects – keys, phones, wallets, tickets, other people’s address cards, documentation, jewellery, scarves, gloves – anything that can be carried about the person. But until his soul started to go bad, absent-mindedness was just something he accepted, a default fault, a thing which fucked up his life in little ways every day but wasn’t worth steaming about; now, however, if he realizes he has lost something, he can’t override it, he hasn’t the energy, neither physical nor spiritual. He hasn’t the momentum. These discoveries, these interruptions in his tiny progress, just make him want to stop. Finding out that he has left his wallet at home will make him want to sit down in the street; if he is in the car and the keys are not in the most obvious pocket, he will consider never driving away. The other day he was on the toilet and realized, too late, that he had forgotten to restock the paper roll, and felt, immediately, that there was nothing to do but stay sat on the black MDF oval forever, the shit on his anus hardening over time to a brittle crust.

  He stops now, and again wants to sit, here on this faintly marbled floor scuffed with the marks of a million suitcase wheels; sit, cross-legged perhaps, until someone – God, his dying father, a woman, any woman – takes him in hand, finding for him his phone and his sanity. And then, just at the moment when the heavy hands of depression have started to push, gently, almost lovingly, on his shoulders, it rings, reminding Harvey that he put the phone back in his pocket and not in the bag at all. He pulls the iPhone out from its burial in a mini-dump of tissue dust, looks at the screen, and inwardly crumples: Freda. He considers for a moment not answering, pressing instead the DECLINE button, because his relationship with the caller is declining, because her call will only be about the decline of his father, because he, Harvey, seems to be now, perpetually, in decline. He taps ANSWER.