Jane Mendelsohn - Burning Down the House

I was conscious, he said. And I was listening.

So you know. She breathed deeply. I guess I wanted you to know.

The first time I met you I knew that you had been through a lot.

You said I seemed like I’d come from another world.

To other worlds, he said, and held her.

She hadn’t realized until then how much she had wanted someone else to know her story. How much she had wanted him to know it.

She couldn’t cry. She was so far past crying. But she let herself be held.

Now I know what your secret is, he said. And I will never, never forget it.

—

Once, when she had been in a desperate situation, she had placed her mind elsewhere and the question had come to her: What would one call a group of angels? A flock? No. A herd? No. A calamity, she’d thought. Because that’s what would bring a congregation of angels together and that’s what a large group of them would signify. Wings brushing wings. A thunderous rustle. A feathery gathering. Messy, sprawling clouds. She did not believe in angels but she believed that a collection of them would be called a calamity. A calamity of angels.

—

He talks to her for hours and hours in the middle of the night. He is passing on his wisdom, handing over his knowledge.

Money is a mystery, he tells her.

What does it mean? she asks.

The mystery is that there is no mystery, he says.

I’m not sure I believe that, she says.

Believe it, he says. And you will understand, sadly, practically everything there is that we can know.

But there’s so much more, she says to him.

I wish, he says, looking at the golden reflection of the sunrise hitting the buildings across the park. I wish.

—

You see, he was saying, what I have achieved is the pinnacle of capitalism. An accumulation beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. But I stayed away from buying and selling people: not politicians, not women, not anyone. Did other people do that and did I benefit? I suppose so. But now we have crossed a threshold in the world and what was democracy has become a buyer’s market. People did not realize that if you let certain principles slide — due process, separation of powers, the rights of individuals — that the very fabric of democracy could wither. We took for granted that the Constitution could withstand practically anything, but it cannot. The mid-twentieth century was a golden age and we squandered it, as humans squander every golden age. People thought our ideals were safe. People thought they could have leeway, impose some positions over others, cut corners, ignore principles in the interests of ideals, skirt around the Constitution. But that is a utopian fantasy. Or a dangerous inconsistency. Or both. And the idea that some opinions matter more than others is the antithesis of democracy. Democracy requires a level of detachment that perhaps we are not capable of anymore. An ability to put reason above emotion, to have great passions but not let them hold sway over the agreed-upon structure. I’m just an old oligarch and I probably sound ridiculous to you but I have never been more serious. Money is not speech but we have declared it to be speech. Tell me, when I speak, do coins fall from my mouth? Money is not speech; it is power, plain and simple. Speech is freedom. They are not the same thing.

—

Was he the personification of evil or a wise man? Could anyone be all one or the other? Did it save his soul that he had drawn a line in the sand? Did it absolve him of a history of domination? He had his ideals but his history had a life of its own. His history had lit a path that continued to burn in his wake, a degenerate ribbon of fire wriggling across deserts, over mountains, igniting the ocean, easily mistaken for a strand of moonlight strewn in sequins from the shore to the horizon.

—

You should get some sleep, she said.

I don’t need to sleep, he told her.

He nodded off at dawn on the couch, his enormous frame rising and falling with each struggling, risk-taking breath. Rising and falling, like an empire.

—

At the same moment the sun rose, pink and bloody, an ethereal cocktail, in Manhattan, Jonathan’s plane landed in Istanbul. Midday and the lines were long at the airport, men in T-shirts and shorts, women in burkas and glittery eye makeup, tourists and children and travelers and the sweating, teeming crowd of pilgrims snaking their way through customs. Jonathan breezed past through the Turkish Air Elite travelers’ check-in and arrived at the Four Seasons Bosphorus by three. Horrific traffic meant it took him two hours to get to the hotel, the city out the window an intricate mosaic of disparate images fit together by his brain in starts between texts and phone calls to his local contacts. Women silhouetted against an orangey-white sky, standing by the water like large black birds. A playground where children hung upside down from red and blue climbing bars, an ornate art nouveau façade behind them butting up against a modern apartment house. Crowded narrow streets with no lights, no direction, cars meeting each other face-to-face, backing up, sliding onto the sidewalk, the cursing, affectionately irritated sound of drivers and pedestrians arguing, directing, explaining, forgiving, cursing again. The avenues lined with shops, mosques, trendy restaurants, old cafés, spilling toward the water, everything moving toward the water, where the breezy, contemporary atmosphere intersected with the ancient rolling river. Wide vistas with the Asian side of the city spreading out like a fairy-tale kingdom complete with sultans’ palaces and candy-colored wooden houses sound-tracked by the throbbing music of Euro pop competing with the call to prayer.

Jonathan’s room had a terrace facing the water, and even he was moved momentarily by the spacious undulating waves above which seemed to hover the gods of Homer — he remembered them from reading the Odyssey in school; he had been impressed by Odysseus’s cleverness — Poseidon, in his athletic yoga pose holding a spear, poised on the river like a surfer. Now it was late afternoon and jagged gashes of sunlight were ripping through the water, an Olympian fleet of burning torches alighting, and in the distance vessels idled, merchant ships and oil barges waiting to be steered by expert pilots around the Golden Horn. This was where it all began, he thought. And this is where it’s happening now. Jonathan pulled a new shirt out of his suitcase and bit off the tag. He had a dinner reservation at the most fashionable restaurant in the city.

An hour in traffic later he arrived at a tall hotel and rode an elevator to the top floor. The restaurant was new and entirely wrapped in windows that seemed to gape at the sprawling metropolis which was just beginning to twinkle at this hour, its fingers of land reaching out into the green sea, its minarets pointing up to smoky-lavender clouds. The businessman whom Jonathan was meeting was already seated at a thick wooden table set for four. Jonathan joined him and they began drinking raki. A waiter leaned forward proffering a menu. The cuisine was Norwegian-Turkish fusion. The food sounded incomprehensible to Jonathan but he did not want to appear unsophisticated. He looked up. The waiter was pausing for him.

I’ll have this, Jonathan said. And sliding his finger to point at an item that came on the side with the dish he had ordered, he asked, What is that?

That? That’s birdshit. Birdshit paste.

Ah.

The business associate ordered.

As the waiter took the menus he said, It’s pistachio. The birdshit is pistachio.

Okay. Jonathan took another sip of raki. Good.

The man was named Suleyman. He helped foreign real estate developers connect with the friendliest people in government for assistance in acquiring contracts, permits, and construction crews. He picked up a large envelope that had been resting on his plate and held it in his hands. He opened the envelope and took out several oversize pages of blueprints and plans. There was an elaborate scheme for two shopping malls connected by gardens. In the drawings the gardens were populated with walnut trees and partridges and landscaped walkways. The figures in the plans were illustrated in purple ink with beautiful clothes, and the exteriors of the malls were hammered steel and decorated with alien-looking animals, and the entryways to the malls consisted of arches designed with colorful and intricate mosaics.