New Gold Dream
by Hari Kunzru
1. Entrance hall
The billionaire stands at the foot of the stairs. He is sixty-one years old, slightly built, wearing a
shawl-collar tuxedo jacket, matching pants, a white shirt and a pair of black suede loafers
embroidered with a crest adapted by its designer from the arms of the Hapsburg family, to which the
billionaire does not belong.
Around the billionaire in the hall we see a palm in an art-nouveau planter, a tall ebony stand on
which is mounted a third-century Gandharan head of the Buddha, the billionaire’s wife and a Louis
XV sideboard on which sits a Lalique crystal dish containing a floral arrangement composed mainly
of pink roses. On the floor is a faded Afghan runner with a geometric pattern, and on the wall,
partially obscured by the palm, is an oil of a Maine seascape that the billionaire believes to be a
Winslow Homer, but which was in fact executed eight years ago by a painter working in the city of
Lishui, in Zhejiang province, south-eastern China.
The billionaire has adopted a confident pose, one leg crossed over the other, one hand in his
pocket, the other on the handrail of the staircase. Though he stares into the camera with what is
intended to be an expression of complacent command, there is something unconvincing about his face.
Perhaps it is the snub nose or his wavy, boyishly tousled hair. Perhaps it is his round brown eyes,
which have the look of chocolate buttons or the eyes of certain small pedigree dogs, terriers or Shih
Tzus or pugs.
The billionaire’s wife stands on the second step, one hand gingerly touching the banister, as
instructed by the photographer. She is tall and blonde. She wears a blue floor-length evening gown,
cut on the bias, designed by a ‘friend’ in whose business the billionaire recently bought her a 40 per
cent stake. She wears jewellery – rings and earrings and bracelets and a large pendant necklace, all
of which have been borrowed for the shoot. The billionaire’s wife and her stylist both intend to keep
at least one piece for themselves. They accept they will probably have to give back the necklace.
If the billionaire’s wife looks tense, it is not because she has a confrontational relationship with
food, though her arms and neck have the fierce stringy tone common to ambitious and disciplined
New York women. It is not because she doesn’t like having her picture taken. She can smell furniture
polish. Certain types of household polish contain n-hexane. Short-term exposure to n-hexane affects
the brain and can cause headaches, dizziness, confusion, nausea, clumsiness, drowsiness and other
neural effects reminiscent of drunkenness. High or recurring exposure over weeks and months can
damage nerves in the feet and hands, causing numbness and tingling. Other symptoms may include
muscle-wastage, paralysis and an impaired sense of touch. The billionaire’s wife thinks the smell is
emanating from the mahogany banister of the stairs: the banister she is holding.
2. Terrace
The billionaire and his wife sit at a table on the terrace. They wear dark glasses and matching white
cashmere robes over silk pyjamas in navy blue (him) and cornflower blue (her). The table is set for
breakfast. There is a coffee jug, a pitcher of orange juice and a basket of pastries. There is a folded
copy of the New York Times. Behind the table are a set of iron railings and a dwarf juniper bush
topiarized into the shape of a musical note. In the background, the green rectangle of Central Park
stretches away uptown.
In a preliminary conversation with his aesthetician, the billionaire was shown a mood board and
picked out images that corresponded to the following words or phrases:
tyke
beach bum
ruffian
li’l fella
The aesthetician interpreted these choices as an instruction to go for appealing facial angles rather
than commanding ones. The billionaire’s chin has been incised with a dimple. He has apple cheeks.
Sometimes when the billionaire sees himself in the mirror above the basin in his dressing room (off
limits for this shoot) he feels anxious. Though his mastery of the world ought to be self-evident, he
looks like an imposter in his enormous Manhattan penthouse. He looks like it does not belong to him.
The plants are a lush, artificial green. The sun is bright. The sun’s rays are falling on the leaves of
the plants. Behind her dark glasses, the eyes of the billionaire’s wife are drawn to the green leaves of
the plants. The gardener has been told to use only organic pesticides, but he arrives with plastic
bottles and sprays. The leaves look shiny. It is possible they are coated with something. It is possible
the plants are coated with atrazine. Even at low doses, laboratory studies have shown that atrazine
impairs the reproductive systems of amphibians and mammals. It has been linked to cancers such as
non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma as well as to low sperm counts in farm workers. Does the gardener have a
low sperm count? He is called Jean-Paul or Jean-Claude. He was more expensive than the rival firm,
who wanted to use Mexicans. Male frogs exposed to minute doses of atrazine develop female sex
characteristics, including hermaphroditism and the growth of eggs in the testes.
Sometimes at night the billionaire’s wife comes out here to look at the stars. She tells her husband
it is her form of prayer. When she says this, she emphasizes the word prayer. He does not react. He
has never once asked of his own accord why she comes out to pace up and down on the terrace and
look at the stars and listen to the traffic noise filtering up from the street forty storeys below, the street
which is so close, just a step away into space. To him, it seems unremarkable, a reasonable use of the
facility of the view and eight hundred feet of exterior space, which were among the main selling
features of the penthouse and added considerably to its price. Still, she drops it into conversation. For
the past four years, the billionaire’s wife has maintained the fiction that she has a strong faith in God.
These fictitious religious feelings centre around the use of contraception and the fulfilment of the
divine plan through the fruitful increase of the family. The billionaire himself is not a religious man.
He has two daughters and a son by his first wife.
3. Library
The billionaire stands in the library, his hand resting symbolically on an eighteenth-century Bardin
globe. He wears a padded silk smoking-jacket with a felt collar. When he wears this, he feels like a
character in a novel by Jules Verne. This is a good feeling. By his side is Buster, his French bulldog.
Also visible are a sextant, a brass telescope on a stand, a lectern, a Georgian mahogany pedestal
desk, and many shelves of books. The billionaire spent what he thought reasonable on the library. He
marked his preferences as [x] green leather predominant and [x] Olde Englishe, rather than [ ] red
leather predominant [ ] Decadent Gothic [ ] monograph predominant, which were other options
offered by the decorator.
The billionaire made his money in media. He owns TV stations, sports teams, magazines, a search
engine. Satellites marked with his corporate logo orbit the earth. On the desk behind the billionaire is
an old-fashioned blotter, and scribbled on that blotter is the name of a chain of restaurants
specializing in catfish, which he bought to please his first wife, who was from the South. For some
reason he did not divest himself of the restaurants after the divorce, though he does not like catfish or
Southern food generally. He likes French food. When he thinks of French food he thinks of the
secondary sex characteristics of beautiful obliging rural women who make charming but easily
rectifiable mistakes in English pronunciation. He has recently made enquiries, through an agent in
Bordeaux, about buying a vineyard.
4. Bedroom
The bedroom is black and white. There are black cabinets and a white carpet and black-and-white
framed photographs on the wall. On the floor by the door is a large ceramic statue of a snarling
black jaguar. There are white sheets on the ebony four-poster bed. The bed is imposing,
monumental. The linen is monogrammed. The stylist has stacked fluffy black and white pillows in a
great berm against the headboard. Normally you would see the billionaire’s contoured neck-support
pillow and the differently contoured neck-support pillow of his wife, and her white-noise machine
and back massager and his pile of Ken Burns DVDs and the remote-control unit for the bed, which
has thirty-seven separate settings and can be programmed to alter its topography and hardness during
the night, so that in the morning the billionaire will find himself lifted incrementally forwards and
upwards, and by the time the housekeeper brings in the breakfast tray, he will be nearing an upright
sitting position and can unmute the television and watch the news while his wife continues to sleep.
No one is pictured in the bedroom.
5. Dressing Room
Perchloroethylene or PERC is a chemical solvent used to dry-clean clothes. It readily evaporates
into air and has a strong, sweet odour. PERC can cause damage to the nervous system and brain.
Inhaling small quantities of PERC can induce dizziness, sleepiness, headaches and nausea. Longterm or chronic exposure to PERC, even at low doses, can lead to permanent harm, including loss of
short-term memory and concentration, or central nervous system effects such as loss of muscle coordination.
6. Kitchen
The billionaire’s wife stands by the oven. She wears a pale yellow A-line dress and a white apron.
She carries a tray of macaroons. She is kicking off one of her mules and laughing into the camera.
This is the first time she has been in the kitchen for seven weeks. It is only possible for her to avoid
the kitchen so thoroughly because one does not have to pass through it to get to any other room.
The billionaire’s wife is thirty-five years old. Between 1991 and 2007, she did covers for
magazines including Elle and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as print and TV campaigns for perfume,
accessories and jewellery. In 2007 she met the billionaire at a party for a watch brand in the
Hamptons and waited precisely seven weeks before fellating him in the master bedroom of a
guesthouse attached to an Italian politician’s villa on Lake Como. She grew up with horses. She skis
well. She has been raped twice: first by the son of family friends in a pool house in Bar Harbor,
Maine, when she was sixteen, and again three years later by a booking agent in the men’s bathroom of
a nightclub in Cap d’Antibes. The second rapist gave the Ghanaian attendant one hundred euros to
watch the door. Afterwards he escorted her back to his table, where they had their picture taken
together with a well-known rock musician.
The billionaire’s wife is thinking about bisphenol-A. BPA has been linked to cancer. BPA is
everywhere in the kitchen. It is in the filter jug and the vegetable compartment of the fridge. It is in the
epoxy resin lining of soup cans, though there are no soup cans in this kitchen. There are other things
too. Phthalates, for example. Phthalates are endocrine disruptors. Phthalates are added as a softening
agent to PVC. Foam takeout containers contain styrene, a neurotoxin. There are no foam takeout
containers in this kitchen. The fridge is full of organic food, but it has all been contaminated. She
cannot eat the food. She cannot be in the kitchen.
7. Dining Room
Earlier today both the billionaire and his wife discovered that being photographed in the dining
room was an emotionally complex experience. Accordingly, a photograph of the dining room has not
been included in this spread.
8. Bathroom
The billionaire’s wife lies in the bath. She wears a diamond necklace, twin diamond bracelets and a
pair of red high-heeled shoes. The bubbles are thick and creamy and cover the whole surface of the
bath, but underneath those bubbles she might well be completely naked.
This is a fun sexy photo!
The billionaire is visible in the mirror. He is watching his beautiful wife. His beautiful wife is in
the bath and – oh, boy! – under those thick creamy bubbles she is almost certainly 100 per cent naked.
Not the nineteen-year-old Russian model, or the twenty-six-year-old male personal assistant. Not
some woman in a bar in Punta del Este, partially hidden behind a pillar in a black-and-white
photograph taken by a private investigator. Her! She is in the bath. He will have to give her half of
this bath if he wants to watch another woman in it.
The billionaire’s wife is not looking at the taps. She is not thinking about hexavalent chromium
(a.k.a. hex chrome or chromium-6), a metal used in a number of industrial processes, including
chrome plating, steel production, paint and cement-making. People are exposed to hex chrome, a
potent human carcinogen, by breathing contaminated air and drinking contaminated tap water. She is
wearing the necklace and the bracelets as a favour to a friend. A contact number for the designer
appears in a caption by the picture.
9. Nursery
The room has a nautical theme. There are semaphore flags and a toy galleon and a ship’s wheel.
Even the throw cushions on the lit bateau are embroidered with a pattern of knots. Around the bed
are the kind of old-fashioned toys that adults find charming – building blocks with the letters of the
alphabet, a rocking horse, a giant stuffed zebra, an antique drum. The billionaire’s wife perches on
the side of the bed. She is dressed in a pale-blue shift. She opens her mouth to smile, baring her
teeth.
She presents him to the camera.
Behold!
He is hers. Her beautiful strong boy. Almost six months old, he wears a little sailor suit, like one
of the doomed children of the Tsar. The billionaire has had his saliva tested to confirm that the boy is
his genetic offspring, and recently amended his will to confer a substantial settlement on him. The
billionaire’s wife is now the mother of the billionaire’s son. She bares her teeth. In another woman,
this would be a snarl.
The surveillance and security systems in this room are discreet but sophisticated. The whole
apartment is under surveillance, but of all the rooms, this is the most watched, the most protected.
Before this picture was released to the magazine, the billionaire’s security consultant ensured that the
control panel on the wall was Photoshopped out. Other features were also deleted, such as the panic
button and the motion sensors and the infrared camera whose networked feed is accessible to the
billionaire’s wife, night and day, from her phone. If she wants, she can open her purse at the gala or
the benefit and watch her child sleeping. She can watch the way the nanny behaves. She can speak
into the phone and her voice will be audible in her son’s room. She sits in bathroom stalls – at the
gala, at the benefit – and sings lullabies.
The room is a secure bubble. A womb. Though womb is a horrible word, which the billionaire’s
wife does not like to use. Formaldehyde is another horrible word. This room has been tested for
formaldehyde. It is regularly disinfected with vinegar and baking soda. The bed linen is hand-washed,
using a powder based on the oil of the soapnut tree, a powder that has been specially formulated for
the billionaire’s wife by a lifestyle consultant who specializes in adapting the ancient wisdom of
Native American peoples for use in today’s fast-paced urban environment. But all the wisdom of all
the Native Americans and all the disinfecting and all the security systems ever devised are no match
for nanomaterials. Nanomaterials can enter the lungs, penetrate the skin and pass through cell
membranes. Once inside the body, nanomaterials gain unlimited access to all tissues and organs,
including the brain. Nanomaterials, such as aluminium oxide, nanosilver, zinc oxide and carbon
nanotubes, are found in hundreds of commercial products. You can clean all you want, you can protect
your child with twenty-four-hour surveillance and an on-call VIP protection squad comprised of
former special-forces soldiers, and still there may be traces of methylene chloride in his environment.
Methylene chloride causes cancer in animals. The animals grow lung and liver and mammary
tumours. Methylene-chloride contamination can occur through breathing contaminated air, eating or
drinking contaminated food or water, or during the use of consumer products containing methylene
chloride, which may emit vapours or come into contact with the skin.
She holds him up. He is wearing a sailor suit and a pirate’s bicorn hat. His eyes are very slightly
unfocused.
10. Vestibule
The billionaire is dressed in a sober grey business suit. He carries a brown leather briefcase in his
hand, and under his arm, an ironed copy of the Wall Street Journal. He is ‘off to work’. The
billionaire’s wife wears a bright yellow bell-bottom pant-suit. It is a happy outfit. In her heels she is
almost a foot taller than her husband. Her son is clamped to her chest in a hempen sling. In her
bloodstream, there are detectable amounts of polybrominated diphenyl ethers, flame retardants,
perfluorooctanoic acid and perchlorate. As her husband leans down to kiss their son, she looks at
the camera, inviting us to savour her victory.