The Death of Eli Gold. David Baddiel

On his left shoulder blade, the remnants of his tattoo – a Confederate flag, removed soon after joining the Church, because the head of their Temple, Elder James LaMoine McIntyre, known to everyone as Uncle Jimmy, explained to him that the body is perfected after death – itches. To keep him going he recites in his head, for every step, the names of his family. First, the wives: step, Leah, step, Ambree, step, Lorinda, step, Angel, step, Sedona, step, RoLyne. Then, for every step, a son or daughter: step, Janey, step, Clela, step, Fallon, step, Levoy, step, Leah, step, Darlene, step, KalieJo, step, Orus, step Rustin, step, Mayna, step, Prynne, step, Dar, step, Hosietta, step, Velroy, step, Elin. Then, a final step, and a final name: Pauline. Then he begins again. After he has been doing this for a few hours, it occurs to him that three of his children – Darlene, Rustin, Levoy – are, in fact, step-children. This takes him aback for a second, makes him stop. For a moment it strikes him as funny. But he represses the urge to laugh, and reorders it in his head as a sign, a small sign, that there is a pattern to all things. He walks on.

      The list allows him to resist New York. He has never been here before – he has never been out of Utah – but he knows enough about it from when he was young, and from what he has seen on the internet, to understand that the City will distract him from his destiny. He keeps his head down, focusing on his feet, on hitting a new name with each foot, and refuses the City – he refuses Park Avenue, even as he walks all the way down it; he refuses the Chrysler Building and the Empire State and the Waldorf-Astoria and Grand Central Station and One And Eleven Madison and all the other temptations of the Kingdom of Man. He refuses even the yellow taxis and the steam rising from the street gratings and the hotdog sellers and the WALK/ DON’T WALK signs, the things about Manhattan that might chime with its movie self, and which might draw him in through living up to its mythology, revealing its icons like a peacock its feathers.

      Just as he is getting too hot and tired to continue – the sun has been stoking the air all afternoon, and underneath his clothes his sacred white undergarments are heavy with sweat – he finds a cheap place, on East 25th Street, called the Condesa Inn. The Condesa Inn is a hippy hotel. He likes that. He was a hippy himself, once. He was a Mormon then, too, but a regular one, just born into the Church of the Latter-day Saints, and not too fussed about it neither. Him and his sister used to smoke a lot of dope together, and listen to a band called The Outlaws. He loved her most then. It was at an Outlaws gig when he first saw Jesus – the Azteca in Salt Lake, in 1975. Hughie Thomasson was really going for it, on ‘Searching’, their greatest song, their ‘Free Bird’. Hughie had just sung: Searching through the seven skies/for some place your soul can fly, and hit the strings of his Stratocaster, when he saw him: Jesu, the Lamb, rising from behind the drum kit, arms outstretched, smiling a smile that widened further as Hughie and Billy Jones dug into their guitar battle like the out-there Confederate heroes they were. It filled his heart with joy. When he told Pauline afterwards she was so pleased for him, even though she made a joke about how good the dope must have been that they smoked before they went into the club. He didn’t mind that joke. He knew she knew it was true: and that she would accept, in time, that he had to forsake Salt Lake City for American Fork, and the Church of the Latter-day Saints for the greater truth of the Latter Day Church of the True Christ.

      He knows that the Condesa Inn is the hotel he should be staying in, because every room is painted in a different way, each by a different artist. The woman on reception, who looks like she may have been a hippy as well once, shows him photographs of the rooms that are available, and there is one with a picture of Jesus across the wall. The woman says it is not Jesus – she says it is the lead singer of the Flaming Lips – but he knows that it is, because the bearded half-naked figure is enveloped by an angel. Then the woman says:

      – Well, if you want it to be Jesus, I guess it’s Jesus. It’s eighty dollars a night, shared bathroom.

      He smiles a little, a smile the woman would not be able to read. At home, he shares one bathroom with twenty-one other family members. Most days, the waiting to get into it is so long he ends up going to the bathroom outside, behind the privet hedge that surrounds their small patch of land.

      – Is it a smoking room?

      – No. We don’t have any rooms you can smoke in any more. You have to go stand outside. Sorry.

      – OK. Do you have wi-fi internet access?

      – We do. It comes and goes a bit, but, yeah.

      – How much does it cost?

      – On the house. When you can get it, that is.

      – Is there a password?

      She picks up a card with the Condesa Inn logo on it, and a pen, and scribbles on the back: H98BCARL. She hands it over, smiling. He looks at it and feels disappointed. He had thought that this word might speak to him: he had thought it would be a word connected with his destiny, or maybe at least with their shared hippiness, OUTLAWS1, or something.

      OK, he says, and goes up to the room, with his suitcase. They do have a porter in the Condesa Inn, but he does not want the porter to carry his suitcase, because he only has a small amount of money and cannot afford tips. It contains, along with two changes of outer clothes and five of sacred underclothes, his own copy of The Book of Mormon: An Account Written By The Hand of Mormon Upon Plates Taken From The Plates of Nephi, his Dell PC laptop computer, the photograph of his sister, before she was raped by The Great Satan, wearing her favourite red-check dress, smiling and waving, looking so fine, and his gun. It is the gun, an Armscor 206 .38, which he bought online from GunsAmerica.com, for $308, as new, that has meant that he has to travel all the way from Utah by bus; the gun that has meant he cannot travel by airplane. There are ways of getting a gun on an airplane – he has learnt this from surfing the web, from reading the posts of some of the jihadis – but the ways are difficult and he decided against it. He goes up to the room alone.

      Inside the room, the picture of Jesus is bigger than it looks in the photograph. The only window looks out onto the back of some kind of kitchen, and the picture itself is not that brightly painted – Jesus is in a sharp profile, like he might appear on a playing card, and wears a dark red toga, in sharp contrast to the bright blue of the angels’ dress – but still, when he turns to face the mural, it nearly blinds him with light. This is proof for him that it is the Lamb of God, Lucifer’s spirit brother, again. He has to shield his eyes, which hurt like staring at the sun, something he did once when he was a kid during an eclipse, even though his father had told him not to. He did that because he didn’t understand why, if the sun was covered by the moon, you couldn’t look at it. He looked at that eclipse for five minutes, and it was beautiful, so beautiful he didn’t feel the burn in his right eye that would leave the pupil fixed in the middle of the socket, and working always at no more than 20 per cent effectiveness. He thinks of it now as his first intimation that knowing God, really knowing God, always involves pain.

      The light fades. He sits on the bed. He takes a deep breath. The room is dusty. He feels as if he can feel the motes in his nostrils. He should change, but there is a comfort in the sweat of his sacred under-clothes drying on him, as if warmed by the heat and light coming off this Christ. He takes out his Dell, and waits patiently as it boots up, and then more patiently as it finds the Condesa Inn wireless signal. Poor, it says, red bars flickering into green. There is something that has been bothering him, bothering him all the way here on the Greyhound, looking out of the window as the landscape flattened towards the east. Google has been key for his destiny – Earth has shown him New York, Street View the area around 1176 Fifth Avenue, Images the internal layout of Mount Sinai, and it was the main search box which led him to The Material, there on unsolved.com – so he has feared being without it. To test it, he types the words ‘death penalty states united states’. It takes a while, but then it comes. He goes to Wikipedia first, an entry: The Death Penalty in the United States. A map comes up, in which most of the states of the country are red, but along the top, blue, a geographical clustering of mercy. The colour of New York, though, is confusing – half yellow, half orange. He goes back to the search box, and replaces the words ‘states united states’ with the words ‘New York’ and presses return again. The sixth entry is called Death Penalty FAQs. Scrolling down, the question appears, in bold: Does New York have the death penalty? And the answer: