The Death of Eli Gold

Film Idea

Title: SHALLOW

John Shallow is obsessed with looks. He is also an immigration officer at JFK. His obsession serves him well in his job because he always checks people’s – especially women’s – faces very thoroughly. But it doesn’t serve him so well in his marriage, which is falling apart.

However, through a long and difficult process, involving much therapy and various epiphanies (? don’t know what these are – something profound/life-changing) he comes to terms with it, and saves his marriage. Just at that point, though, while at work, he spots – because he’s still got the skill (the skill at looking) even though he’s sorted out the problems that come with it – someone coming through immigration who turns out to be Osama bin Laden, incredibly well-disguised, using plastic surgery etc (a woman?). Osama is arrested and overnight Shallow becomes a national hero and a major celebrity.

This leads to loads of sexual opportunities and wrecks his marriage.

Yes, that feels better. But now – as ever, when he has done a bit of work – Harvey must grant himself some small reward. He turns away from the computer and takes from his pocket a small bottle of blue liquid. However bleak the journey, there were always consolations on coming to America: the Manhattan view was one, and here was another. While pushing his baggage, ill balanced on the trolley, through JFK’s anywhere-in-the-world airport mall, saliva had gathered in the corners of his mouth, sent up from his forever inflamed throat glands, and Harvey had realized that he was hungry. Not straightforwardly for food; there was something specific which was making his mouth water at that moment, something specific that his system was reminding him can only properly be got hold of in America, reminding him a split second before the words formed inside his damp, sleepless skull: sour sweets. Harvey loves sour sweets; he loves the taste contradiction, the sugar fighting the acid, his tongue a pair of apothecary’s scales holding these opposites in perfect balance. He loves the dialectic. And he loves the fact that all things are postponed during the sucking of a sour sweet; that, while the conflict between sweet and sour remains unresolved, Harvey can float, his soul buoyed up by the sensual striving towards that equilibrium, and nothing matters until it’s over. If he could only get hold of enough of the right kind of sour sweets in the UK, he thinks he may never be depressed; instead, he would be happily addicted to them, despite the terrible stomach cramps that eating them always eventually induces. But in the UK, none of the sweets – not Sour Haribos, not TongueBubbler, not even Toxic Waste – were anything like sour enough for him.

Here, however, in this land where contradiction was possibility, there were sour sweets, Harvey knew, that took the concept of sour-sweetness into a whole new dimension. He had seen on the internet, available from various US confectionery sites, boxes of brightly coloured jelly beans, emblazoned with the promises Extra Sour, Extremely Sour, Very Sour Sours. Yes: Harvey has Googled the phrases ‘sour sweets’, ‘sour candy’, and ‘sour confectionery’, wrapping them in inverted commas so as to allow the computer to make no mistakes about his intention. He had Goo-ogled them, in fact, bringing up multiple images of boxes and wrappers to lasciviously stare at. Unbelievably, perhaps, for a forty-four-year-old man, he had even read reviews of some of these sweets. Zours Incredibly Sour Tangerines had got a unanimous five stars on cybercandy.com, and Harvey had been on the verge of getting them to ship a box out when he remembered he was soon to visit his native land – which, at that moment, figured in his head as Willy Wonka’s factory to Charlie.

Half mad with the craving, and once through the small hiccup in customs, he had dashed inside the first available confectionery containing store, leaving his baggage on the trolley outside, aching to be control-exploded by security. The shop had stocked no Zours, leading Harvey into a mad twenty seconds of uncertainty, his eyes riffling through the Hersheys and the Oreos, until finally asking, in a voice hoarse with desire, ‘Do you have any sour sweets?’ The store assistant, a ginger-haired, fuzzy-faced woman, looked blank, so Harvey looked down, ashamed, feeling that her blankness must contain a condemnation, a deadpan amazement that a man of his age should have such adolescent needs; at which stage he noticed that her index finger had stirred from its fellows, and was indicating downwards and to the left. Harvey’s eyes followed, past the brown and green and pinks, and nearly missed it, because it wasn’t in a wrapper: it wasn’t even a sweet as such, in the boiled, solid, chewable and/or biteable sense. But then his eyes did a double-take, and returned to the words emblazoned on the labels of three small bottles perched above a bright rack of bubblegum: Extra Tart Sour Blast Spray.

Harvey could hardly believe it. Even in all his research he hadn’t come across this: a spray, a concentrate. The sour-sweet sensation, literally bottled, distilled, injectable directly onto the tongue like morphine into the pain receptors of the brain. He bought all three bottles for what seemed at that moment like the incredible bargain price of $2.25 dollars apiece. He had intended to wait until he got to the hotel before trying them, in order to savour the moment. Unfortunately, self-control of this order – or, rather, the lack of it – lies at the very heart of Harvey Gold. This was why various lucky travellers who happened to be passing through the gates of Terminal One of JFK that day were treated to the sight of the middle-aged son of the world’s greatest living author standing in the queue for the airport taxis, mouth open and eyes closed in some small ecstasy, spraying what appeared to be a sample bottle of cheap perfume onto his stretched-out thirsty-dog tongue, gradually coating it blue.

Now, in the hotel room, lying prone on one of his two quilted boats of bedding, he offers that same tongue up for another spray. The wardrobe door opposite has swung open from a bizarre attempt he made soon after entering the room to pack his clothes away, giving up almost instantly on the realization that – even if his father should survive longer than Freda’s projected six weeks – Harvey will continue, while here, to live out of his suitcase, like he has always done on every other trip that necessitated a suitcase. On the inner right-hand door of the wardrobe is a mirror, where Harvey can see himself, or, rather, where he can see all those parts of himself that are not hidden by the solid explosion of his stomach rising from the bed like a termite mound from the ground. His tongue is out of his mouth, and looks, blue and upside-down, like a football shirt drying on the washing line of his lower lip. He undergoes a visual epiphany, not unlike when a mirror on the bathroom door swings your toilet seat image into view, making you think: is man but this? This is a thought Harvey has about himself around five times a minute, however, and so he overrides it with a gust of Extra Tart Sour Blast Spray, flooding his aching taste buds with soursweet rain.

After the hit, trying to avoid the aspartame comedown, Harvey shifts his bulk around to the side of the bed and dials his home number on the telephone on the side table.

‘Mr Gold, how can I help you?’ a smooth, sonorous voice says. Harvey wonders, at first, if it is God, finally asking the requisite question, but then realizes his mistake.

‘Sorry, I forgot to dial …’

‘It’s nine for an outside number, sir.’

‘Yes. OK.’

‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’

Harvey thinks: everything?

‘No. Thanks.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

He clicks off, and dials again, adding the magic nine. And then at the last minute he remembers: five hours behind. His eyes flick to the hands of the faux-antique set on the bedside table: quarter to eleven. In England it will be just gone six – and then she picks up. He hears an airy silence, the rustling of sheets and blankets, before Stella’s ‘Hello?’ comes down the line, alarm penetrating her tone even though her throat is husky and clotted with sleep.

‘Sorry, darling … sorry. I forgot about the time difference. Go back to sleep.’

‘Harvey? Are you OK?’

‘Yes. Yes.’ He knows this is never true, but – not just with her, with everyone that asks it – you can’t go through it all, not every time, can you? No, I’m overweight, exhausted, I get these weird pains in my legs, I have constant low-level nausea, I have prostituted what tiny talent I have ghostwriting the lives of idiots, every woman I pass fills me with despair, my child has Asperger’s Syndrome, my father is dying and I deeply, deeply love my wife but can’t bear the idea that she is starting to grow old. And yourself?

‘Your dad … is he …?’

‘I haven’t seen him yet. No change, as far as I know. But look – what time is it there …?’

A shuffling sound. He sees the scene, familiar in his mind, the safety of the half-light, the day not started, her profile shifting towards the digital clock on her bedside draw.

‘Five forty-five.’

‘Yes. So sorry. Go back to sleep.’ He can feel, even across the wide swathe of water, how it’s too late, how his phone call has rushed consciousness up to her surface, like an air bubble floating from the deep.

‘No, it’s OK. I needed to get up early anyway. Jamie’s got the Montgomery Clinic …’

‘I thought that wasn’t until nine thirty.’

‘Yes. Well, I’ve got to wash my hair.’ In his mind’s eye, Harvey sees the process: her lying back in a full, scalding bath, her face surrounded by water, her curls spiralling away like sea snakes, the whole image a benign Medusa. When she rises out of the steam to work on her hair, her fingers on her scalp move with some precise feminine alchemy, so distinct from his soapy plonk and rub. Every so often, she rotates her head from side to side to prevent the liquid pooling in her ears. The intimacy of watching her wash her hair can feel at times overwhelming. And afterwards, when her hair is wet, falling across her face, before she lifts it into a towel – he does not know where to look. She feels too vulnerable, and his eyes too searching.

‘And I’ve got a lot of work stuff to do, as well, so it’s probably a good idea to get started …’

‘Stop trying to make it better for me.’

‘I’m not. I won’t get back to sleep now anyway. And however pissed off I am about that – which is, yeah, a bit – I’m also pleased, Harvey. To hear from you. I thought your plane must have crashed.’

He laughs, but knows she means it. Every time Harvey flies anywhere, Stella assumes his plane will crash. Her kisses, when he leaves, always have a force to them, impelled by a sense that this could be the last time.

‘That would have been on the news.’

‘The CIA might have been keeping it quiet.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. They might have imposed a security blanket.’

‘I think the word you’re after is blackout.’

‘Oh, yeah. But it’s quarter to six in the morning. I can confuse blanket and blackout. Because I’d like both.’

‘How’s Jamie?’

He hears her rearranging the pillows.

‘He’s OK. He was happy enough after school yesterday. Only got upset at bedtime that you weren’t here. Did you read his note?

‘Note?’

‘His picture. I put it in your suitcase.’

He gets up off the bed, still holding the phone. ‘What, as a surprise?’

A soft beat, her patience diffusing. ‘No, I told you it was in there, yesterday.’

‘Oh sorry, I –’

‘It’s OK. You were in one of your nervous flaps when you were leaving. I knew you weren’t really listening.’