If you heard it, good Wislawa, then it must be so. But you see, I was not aware... Aspects of his behavior had been escaping from his control. If he were to seek professional help, no doubt a breakdown of some sort would be diagnosed. (If he were Bronislawa Rhinehart, he would gladly take that diagnosis home with him and then start looking for somebody to sue.) It struck him with great force that a breakdown of some sort was precisely what he had been inviting all along. All those rhapsodies about wishing to be unmade! So now that certain chronological segments of himself had ceased to be in touch with others-now that he had literally dis-integrated in time-why was he so shocked? Be careful what you wish for, Malik. Remember W. W. Jacobs. The story of the monkey"s paw.
He had come to New York as the Land Surveyor came to the Castle: in ambivalence, in extremis, and in unrealistic hope. He had found his billet, a more comfortable one than the poor Surveyor"s, and ever since then had been roaming the streets, looking for a way in, telling himself that the great World-City could heal him, a city child, if he could only find the gateway to its magic, invisible, hybrid heart. This mystical proposition had clearly altered the continuum around him. Things appeared to proceed by logic, according to the laws of psychological verisimilitude and the deep inner coherences of metropolitan life, but in fact all was mystery. But perhaps his was not the only ident.i.ty to be coming apart at the seams. Behind the facade of this age of gold, this time of plenty, the contradictions and impoverishment of the Western human individual, or let"s say the human self in America, were deepening and widening. Perhaps that wider disintegration was also to be made visible in this city of fiery, jeweled garments and secret ash, in this time of public hedonism and private fear.
A change of direction was required. The story you finished was perhaps never the one you began. Yes! He would take charge of his life anew, binding his breaking selves together. Those changes in himself that he sought, he himself would initiate and make them. No more of this miasmic, absent drift. How had he ever persuaded himself that this money-mad burg would rescue him all by itself, this Gotham in which Jokers and Penguins were running riot with no Batman (or even Robin) to frustrate their schemes, this Metropolis built of Kryptonite in which no Superman dared set foot, where wealth was mistaken for riches and the joy of possession for happiness, where people lived such polished lives that the great rough truths of raw existence had been rubbed and buffed away, and in which human souls had wandered so separately for so long that they barely remembered how to touch; this city whose fabled electricity powered the electric fences that were being erected between men and men, and men and women, too? Rome did not fall because her armies weakened but because Romans forgot what being a Roman meant. Might this new Rome actually be more provincial than its provinces; might these new Romans have forgotten what and how to value, or had they never known? Were all empires so undeserving, or was this one particularly cra.s.s? Was n.o.body in all this bustling endeavor and material plenitude engaged, any longer, on the deep quarry-work of the mind and heart? O Dream-America, was civilization"s quest to end in obesity and trivia, at Roy Rogers and Planet Hollywood, in USA Today USA Today and on E!; or in million-dollar-game-show greed or fly-on-the-wall voyeurism; or in the eternal confessional booth of Ricki and Oprah and Jerry, whose guests murdered each other after the show; or in a spurt of gross-out dumb-and-dumber comedies designed for young people who sat in darkness howling their ignorance at the silver screen; or even at the unattainable tables of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Alain Duca.s.se? What of the search for the hidden keys that unlock the doors of exaltation? Who demolished the City on the Hill and put in its place a row of electric chairs, those dealers in death"s democracy, where everyone, the innocent, the mentally deficient, the guilty, could come to die side by side? Who paved Paradise and put up a parking lot? Who settled for George W. Gush"s boredom and Al Bore"s gush? Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then asked why children were getting shot? What, America, of the Grail? O ye Yankee Galahads, ye Hoosier Lancelots, O Parsifals of the stockyards, what of the Table Round? He felt a flood bursting in him and did not hold it back. Yes, it had seduced him, America; yes, its brilliance aroused him, and its vast potency too, and he was compromised by this seduction. What he opposed in it he must also attack in himself. It made him want what it promised and eternally withheld. Everyone was an American now, or at least Americanized: Indians, Iranians, Uzbeks, j.a.panese, Lilliputians, all. America was the world"s playing field, its rule book, umpire, and ball. Even anti-Americanism was Americanism in disguise, conceding, as it did, that America was the only game in town and the matter of America the only business at hand; and so, like everyone, Malik Solanka now walked its high corridors cap in hand, a supplicant at its feast; but that did not mean he could not look it in the eye. Arthur had fallen, Excalibur was lost, and dark Mordred was king. Beside him on the throne of Camelot sat the queen, his sister, the witch Morgan le Fay. and on E!; or in million-dollar-game-show greed or fly-on-the-wall voyeurism; or in the eternal confessional booth of Ricki and Oprah and Jerry, whose guests murdered each other after the show; or in a spurt of gross-out dumb-and-dumber comedies designed for young people who sat in darkness howling their ignorance at the silver screen; or even at the unattainable tables of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Alain Duca.s.se? What of the search for the hidden keys that unlock the doors of exaltation? Who demolished the City on the Hill and put in its place a row of electric chairs, those dealers in death"s democracy, where everyone, the innocent, the mentally deficient, the guilty, could come to die side by side? Who paved Paradise and put up a parking lot? Who settled for George W. Gush"s boredom and Al Bore"s gush? Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then asked why children were getting shot? What, America, of the Grail? O ye Yankee Galahads, ye Hoosier Lancelots, O Parsifals of the stockyards, what of the Table Round? He felt a flood bursting in him and did not hold it back. Yes, it had seduced him, America; yes, its brilliance aroused him, and its vast potency too, and he was compromised by this seduction. What he opposed in it he must also attack in himself. It made him want what it promised and eternally withheld. Everyone was an American now, or at least Americanized: Indians, Iranians, Uzbeks, j.a.panese, Lilliputians, all. America was the world"s playing field, its rule book, umpire, and ball. Even anti-Americanism was Americanism in disguise, conceding, as it did, that America was the only game in town and the matter of America the only business at hand; and so, like everyone, Malik Solanka now walked its high corridors cap in hand, a supplicant at its feast; but that did not mean he could not look it in the eye. Arthur had fallen, Excalibur was lost, and dark Mordred was king. Beside him on the throne of Camelot sat the queen, his sister, the witch Morgan le Fay.
Professor Malik Solanka prided himself on being a practical man. Deft with his hands, he could thread a needle, mend his own clothes, iron a dress shirt. For a time, when he first began to make his philosophy dolls, he had apprenticed himself to a Cambridge tailor and learned to cut the clothes his pint-sized thinkers would wear; also the street-fashion knockoffs he created for Little Brain. Wislawa or no, he knew how to keep his living quarters clean. Henceforth he would apply the same principles of good housekeeping to his inner life as well.
He set off along Seventieth Street with the Chinese cleaners" purple laundry bag slung over his right shoulder. Turning onto Columbus, he overheard the following soliloquy. "You remember my ex-wife, Erin. Tess"s mom. Yeah, the actress; these days she does mainly commercials. So guess what? We"re seeing each other again. Pretty weird, huh. After two years of thinking she was the enemy, and five more of better but still tricky relations! I started inviting her to come over sometimes with Tess. Tess likes her mom to be around, to tell the truth. And then one night. Yeah, it was one of those Then One Night things. There was a point at which I went over and sat down next to her on the settee instead of staying in my usual chair way over across the other side of the room. You know, my desire for her never went away, it just got buried under a heap of other stuff, a whole heap of anger, to tell the truth, and so now it all just poured out, boom! An ocean of it. To tell the truth the seven years had backed up a whole load of it, desire, that is, and maybe the anger made it even more intense, so it was amazingly bigger than it used to be. But so here"s the thing. I walk over to the settee and what happens, happens, and afterwards she says, "You know, when you came over to me, I didn"t know if you were going to hit me or kiss me." I guess I didn"t know either until I reached the settee. To tell the truth."
All this spoken into the air at high volume by a gangling, frizz-haired Art Garfunkel-y man in his forties, out walking a brindled dog. It was a moment before Solanka saw the cell-phone headset through the halo of ginger hair. These days we all come across like rummies or crackpots, Solanka thought, confiding our secrets to the wind as we stroll along. Here was a striking example of the disintegrated contemporary reality that was preoccupying him. Dog-walking Art, existing for the moment only in the Telephone Continuum-lingering in the sound of silence-was quite unaware that in the alternative, or Seventieth Street Continuum, he was revealing his deepest intimacies to strangers. This about New York Professor Solanka liked a lot-this sense of being crowded out by other people"s stories, of walking like a phantom through a city that was in the middle of a story which didn"t need him as a character. And the man"s ambivalence to his wife, Solanka thought: for wife, read America. And maybe I"m still walking over to the settee.
The day"s newspapers brought unexpected comfort. He must have turned on the TV too late to hear the day"s main developments in the Sky-Ren-Bindy murder investigation. Now with lifting heart he read that the team of detectives-three precincts had joined forces on this inquiry-had hauled the three beaux in for questioning. They had later been released, and no charges had been filed for the moment, but the detectives" demeanor had been grave and the young men had been warned not to head off in a hurry for any Riviera yachts or Southeast Asian beaches. Unnamed sources close to the investigation said that the "Mr. Panama Hat" theory was being heavily discounted, which clearly implied that the suspect boyfriends were thought to have cooked up the mysterious stalker between them. Stash, Horse, and Club looked, in the photos, like three very scared young men. Press comment, wasting no time, instantly linked the unsolved triple murder to the Nicole Brown Simpson killing and the death of little JonBenet Ramsey. "In such cases," one editorial concluded, "it"s wisest to keep the search pretty close to home."
"Can I talk to you?" When he got back to the apartment, giddy with relief, Mila was waiting for him on the stoop, sans entourage, but holding in her arms a half-life size Little Brain doll. The transformation in her manner was startling. Gone was the street-G.o.ddess swagger, the queen-of-the-world att.i.tude. This was a shy, gawky young woman with stars in her green eyes. "What you said at the movies. Are you, it has to be you, right? You"re that that Professor Solanka? "Little Brain created by Prof. Malik Solanka." You brought her into being, you gave her life. Oh, wow. I even have all the videotapes of Professor Solanka? "Little Brain created by Prof. Malik Solanka." You brought her into being, you gave her life. Oh, wow. I even have all the videotapes of Adventures Adventures, and for my twenty-first birthday my dad went to a dealer and bought me the first-draft script of the Galileo episode, you know, before they made you cut all the blasphemy out?, that"s like my most treasured possession. Okay, please say I"m right, because otherwise I"m making such a fool of myself my cool is totally blown forever. Well, it"s pretty blown anyway, you have no idea what Eddie and the guys thought of me coming over here with a doll doll, for Chrissake." Solanka"s natural defenses, already lowered on account of his lightened heart, were overwhelmed by such extreme pa.s.sion. "Yes," he conceded. "Yes, that"s me." She screamed at the top of her voice, leaping high in the air about three inches away from his face. "No way!" she then hooted, unable to stop hopping up and down. "Oh my G.o.d G.o.d. I have to tell you, Professor: you totally rock rock. And your L.B., this little lady right here, has been my like total obsession obsession for most of the last ten for most of the last ten years years. I watch every move she makes. And as you spotted, she"s only the basis basis and and inspiration inspiration for my whole current for my whole current personal style." personal style." She stuck a hand out. "Mila. Mila Milo. Don"t laugh. It was Milosevic originally, but my dad wanted something everyone could say. I mean, this is America, right? Make it easy. Mee-la My-lo." Stretching the vowels out exaggeratedly, she pulled a face, then grinned. "Sounds like, I don"t know, She stuck a hand out. "Mila. Mila Milo. Don"t laugh. It was Milosevic originally, but my dad wanted something everyone could say. I mean, this is America, right? Make it easy. Mee-la My-lo." Stretching the vowels out exaggeratedly, she pulled a face, then grinned. "Sounds like, I don"t know, farm fertilizer farm fertilizer. Or maybe cereal." cereal."
He felt the old anger surge in him as she spoke, the huge, una.s.suaged Little Brain anger that had remained unexpressed, inexpressible, all these years. This was the anger that had led directly to the episode of the knife.... He made an immense effort and forced it down. This was the first day of his new phase. Today there would be no red mist, no obscene tirade, no fury-induced memory blackout. Today he would face the demon and wrestle it to the mat. Breathe, he told himself. Breathe.
Mila was looking worried. "Professor? Are you okay?" He nodded rapidly, yes, yes. And briefly said: "Come inside, please. I want to tell you a story."
PART two.
8.
His earliest dolls, the little characters he had made, when younger, to populate the houses he"d designed, were painstakingly whittled out of soft whitewoods, clothes and all, and afterward painted, the clothing in vivid colors and the faces full of tiny but significant details: here a woman"s cheek swollen to hint at toothache, there a fan of crow"s-feet at the corners of some jolly fellow"s eyes. Since those distant beginnings he had lost interest in the houses, while the people he made had grown in stature and psychological complexity. Nowadays they started out as clay figurines. Clay, of which G.o.d, who didn"t exist, made man, who did. Such was the paradox of human life: its creator was fictional, but life itself was a fact.
He thought of them as people. When he was bringing them into being, they were as real to him as anyone else he knew. Once he had created them, however, once he knew their stories, he was happy to let them go their own way: other hands could manipulate them for the television camera, other craftsmen could cast and replicate them. The character and the story were all he cared about. The rest was just playing with toys.
The only one of his creations with whom he fell in love-the only one he didn"t want anyone else to handle-would break his heart. This was, of course, Little Brain: first a doll, later a puppet, then an animated cartoon, and afterward an actress, or, at various other times, a talk-show host, gymnast, ballerina, or supermodel, in a Little Brain outfit. Her first, late-night, series, of which n.o.body expected much, had been made more or less exactly as Malik Solanka desired. In that time-traveling quest program, "L.B." was the disciple, while the philosophers she met were the real heroes. After the move to prime time, however, the channel"s executives soon weighed in. The original format was deemed much too highbrow. Little Brain was the star, and the new show had to be built around her, it was decreed. Instead of traveling constantly, she needed a location and a cast of recurring characters to play off. She needed a love interest, or better still a series of suitors, which would allow the hottest young male actors of the time to guest-star on the show and wouldn"t tie her down. Above all, she needed comedy: smart comedy, brainy comedy, yes, but there must definitely be a great many laughs. Probably even a laugh track. Writers could, would, be provided to work with Solanka to develop his. .h.i.t idea for the ma.s.s audience that would now come into contact with it. This was what he wanted, wasn"t it-to move into the mainstream? If an idea didn"t develop, it died. These were the facts of televisual life.
Thus Little Brain moved to Brain Street in Brainville, with a whole family and neighborhood posse of Brains: she had an older brother called Little Big Brain, there was a science laboratory down the street called the Brain Drain, and even a laconic cowboy movie star neighbor (John Brayne). It was painful stuff, but the lower the comedy stooped, the higher the ratings soared. Brain Street Brain Street wiped out the memory of wiped out the memory of The Adventures of Little Brain The Adventures of Little Brain in a minute and settled in for a long, lucrative run. At a certain point Malik Solanka bowed to the inevitable and walked off the program. But he kept his credit on the show, ensured that his "moral rights" in his creation were protected, and negotiated a healthy share of the merchandising income. He couldn"t watch the show any longer. But Little Brain gave every indication of being happy to see him go. in a minute and settled in for a long, lucrative run. At a certain point Malik Solanka bowed to the inevitable and walked off the program. But he kept his credit on the show, ensured that his "moral rights" in his creation were protected, and negotiated a healthy share of the merchandising income. He couldn"t watch the show any longer. But Little Brain gave every indication of being happy to see him go.
She had outgrown her creator-literally; she was life-size now, and several inches taller than Solanka-and was making her own way in the world. Like Hawkeye or Sherlock Holmes or Jeeves, she had transcended the work that created her, had attained the fiction"s version of freedom. She now endorsed products on television, opened supermarkets, gave after-dinner speeches, emceed gong shows. By the time Brain Street Brain Street had run its course she was a full-fledged television personality. She got her own talk show, made guest appearances in new hit comedies, appeared on the catwalk for Vivienne Westwood, and was attacked, for demeaning women, by Andrea Dworkin-"smart women don"t have to be dolls"-and, for emasculating men, by Karl Lagerfeld ("what true man wants a woman with a bigger shall I say had run its course she was a full-fledged television personality. She got her own talk show, made guest appearances in new hit comedies, appeared on the catwalk for Vivienne Westwood, and was attacked, for demeaning women, by Andrea Dworkin-"smart women don"t have to be dolls"-and, for emasculating men, by Karl Lagerfeld ("what true man wants a woman with a bigger shall I say vocabulary vocabulary than his own?"). Both critics then immediately agreed, for high consultancy fees, to join the concept group behind "L.B.," a team known at the BBC as the Little Brains Trust. Little Brain"s bubble-gum-poppy debut movie than his own?"). Both critics then immediately agreed, for high consultancy fees, to join the concept group behind "L.B.," a team known at the BBC as the Little Brains Trust. Little Brain"s bubble-gum-poppy debut movie Brainwave Brainwave was a rare false step, and flopped badly, but the first volume of her memoirs (!) went straight to the top of the Amazon bestseller charts as soon as it was announced, months before it was even published, clocking up over a quarter of a million sales in pre-orders alone, from hysterical fans who were determined to be first in line. After publication it broke all records; a second, third, and fourth volume followed, one per year, and sold, at the most conservative estimate, over fifty million copies worldwide. was a rare false step, and flopped badly, but the first volume of her memoirs (!) went straight to the top of the Amazon bestseller charts as soon as it was announced, months before it was even published, clocking up over a quarter of a million sales in pre-orders alone, from hysterical fans who were determined to be first in line. After publication it broke all records; a second, third, and fourth volume followed, one per year, and sold, at the most conservative estimate, over fifty million copies worldwide.
She had become the Maya Angelou of the doll world, as relentless an autobiographer as that other caged bird, her life the model for millions of young people-its humble beginnings, its years of struggle, its triumphant overcomings; and, O, her dauntlessness in the face of poverty and cruelty! O, her joy when Fate chose her to be one of its Elect!-among whom West Seventieth Street"s own empress of cool, Mila Milo, was proud to be numbered. (Her unlived life! Solanka thought. Her fictive history, part Dungeons & Dragons fairy tale, part dirt-poor ghetto saga, and all ghostwritten for her by anonymous persons of phantom talent! This was not the life he had imagined for her; this had nothing to do with the back-story he had dreamed up for his pride and joy. This L.B. was an impostor, with the wrong history, the wrong dialogue, the wrong personality, the wrong wardrobe, the wrong brain brain. Somewhere in medialand there was a Chateau d"If in which the real Little Brain was being held captive. Somewhere there was a Doll in an Iron Mask.) The extraordinary thing about her fan base was its catholicity: boys dug her as much as girls, adults as much as children. She crossed all boundaries of language, race, and cla.s.s. She became, variously, her admirers" ideal lover or confidante or goal. Her first book of memoirs was originally placed by the Amazon people in the nonfiction nonfiction lists. The decision to move it, and the subsequent volumes, across into the world of make-believe was resisted by both readers and staff. Little Brain, they argued, was no longer a simulacrum. She was a phenomenon. The fairy"s wand had touched her, and she was real. lists. The decision to move it, and the subsequent volumes, across into the world of make-believe was resisted by both readers and staff. Little Brain, they argued, was no longer a simulacrum. She was a phenomenon. The fairy"s wand had touched her, and she was real.
All this Malik Solanka witnessed from a distance with growing horror. This creature of his own imagining, born of his best self and purest endeavor, was turning before his eyes into the kind of monster of tawdry celebrity he most profoundly abhorred. His original and now obliterated Little Brain had been genuinely smart, able to hold her own with Erasmus or Schopenhauer. She had been beautiful and sharp-tongued, but she had swum in the sea of ideas, living the life of the mind. This revised edition, over which he had long ago lost creative control, had the intellect of a slightly overaverage chimpanzee. Day by day she became a creature of the entertainment microverse, her music videos-yes, she was a recording artist now!-out-raunching Madonna"s, her appearances at premieres out-Hurleying every starlet who ever trod the red carpet in a dangerous frock. She was a video game and a cover girl, and this, remember, in her personal appearance mode at least, was essentially a woman whose own head was completely concealed inside the iconic doll"s. Yet many aspirants to stardom vied for the role, even though the Little Brains Trust-which had become too big for the BBC to hold on to, and had broken away to become a booming independent business, projected to break the billion-dollar barrier someday soon-insisted on utter confidentiality; the names of the women who brought Little Brain to life were never revealed, though rumors abounded, and the paparazzi of Europe and America, bringing their own special expertise to bear, claimed to be able to identify this actress or that model by those other, nonfacial attributes which Little Brain so proudly put on display.
Astonishingly, the glamour-puss transformation lost latex-headed Little Brain no fans, but brought her a new legion of adult male admirers. She had become unstoppable, giving press conferences at which she spoke of setting up her own film production company, launching her own magazine in which beauty hints, lifestyle advice, and cutting-edge contemporary culture would all receive the special Little Brain treatment, and even going nationwide, in the U.S.A., on cable television. There would be a Broadway show-she was in discussion with all the major players in the musical game, dear Tim and dear Elton and dear Cameron and of course dear, dear Andrew-and a new, big-budget movie was also planned. This would not repeat the corny teenybopper mistakes of the first but grow "organically" out of the zillion-selling memoirs. "Little Brain is not some plastic-fantastic Barbie Spice," she told the world-she had started speaking of herself in the third person-"and the new film will be very human, and quality all the way. Marty, Bobby, Brad, Gwynnie, Meg, Julia, Tom and Nic are all interested; also Jenny, Puffy, Maddy, Robbie, Mick: I guess everybody these days wants a Little Brain."
The ballooning triumph of Little Brain inevitably occasioned much comment and a.n.a.lysis. Her admirers were jeered at for their lowbrow obsession, but at once eminent theater folk came forward to speak of the ancient tradition of mask theater, its origins in Greece and j.a.pan. "The actor in the mask is liberated from her normality, her everydayness. Her body acquires remarkable new freedoms. The mask dictates all this. The mask acts." Professor Solanka remained aloof, refusing all invitations to discuss his out-of-control creation. The money, however, he was unable to refuse. Royalties continued to pour into his bank account. He was compromised by greed, and the compromise sealed his lips. Contractually bound not to attack the goose that laid the golden eggs, he had to bottle up his thoughts and, in keeping his own counsel, filled up with the bitter bile of his many discontents. With every new media initiative spearheaded by the character he had once delineated with such sprightliness and care, his impotent fury grew.
In h.e.l.lo! h.e.l.lo! magazine, Little Brain-for a reported seven-figure fee-allowed readers an intimate look at her beautiful country home, which was, apparently, an old Queen Anne pile not far from the Prince of Wales"s in Gloucestershire, and Malik Solanka, whose original inspiration had been the Rijksmuseum dollhouses, was thunderstruck by the effrontery of this latest inversion. So now the big houses would belong to these uppity dolls, while most of the human race still lived in cramped accommodation? The wrongness-in his view the moral bankruptcy-of this particular development alarmed him profoundly; still, far from bankrupted himself, he held his tongue and took the dirty money. For ten years, as "Art Garfunkel" might have said into his mouthpiece, he had backed up a whole heap of self-loathing and rage. Fury stood above him like a cresting Hokusai wave. Little Brain was his delinquent child grown into a rampaging giantess, who now stood for everything he despised and trampled beneath her giant feet all the high principles he had brought her into being to extol; including, evidently, his own. magazine, Little Brain-for a reported seven-figure fee-allowed readers an intimate look at her beautiful country home, which was, apparently, an old Queen Anne pile not far from the Prince of Wales"s in Gloucestershire, and Malik Solanka, whose original inspiration had been the Rijksmuseum dollhouses, was thunderstruck by the effrontery of this latest inversion. So now the big houses would belong to these uppity dolls, while most of the human race still lived in cramped accommodation? The wrongness-in his view the moral bankruptcy-of this particular development alarmed him profoundly; still, far from bankrupted himself, he held his tongue and took the dirty money. For ten years, as "Art Garfunkel" might have said into his mouthpiece, he had backed up a whole heap of self-loathing and rage. Fury stood above him like a cresting Hokusai wave. Little Brain was his delinquent child grown into a rampaging giantess, who now stood for everything he despised and trampled beneath her giant feet all the high principles he had brought her into being to extol; including, evidently, his own.
The L.B. phenomenon had seen off the 1990s and showed no sign of running out of steam in the new millennium. Malik Solanka was forced to admit a terrible truth. He hated Little Brain.
Meanwhile, nothing to which he turned his hand was bearing much fruit. He continued to approach the newly successful British claymation companies with characters and storylines but was told, kindly and unkindly, that his concepts weren"t of the moment. In a young person"s business, he had become something much worse than merely older: he was old-fashioned. At a meeting to discuss his proposal for a feature-length claymation life of Niccol Machiavelli, he did his best to speak the new language of commercialism. The film would, of course, use anthropomorphic animals to represent human originals. "This really has everything," he awkwardly enthused. "The golden age of Florence! The Medicis in their splendor-cool clay aristocats! Simonetta Vesp.u.s.s.y, the most beautiful cat in the world, being immortalized by that young hound Barkicelli. The Birth of Feline Venus! The Rite of p.u.s.s.y Spring! Meanwhile Amerigo Vesp.u.s.s.y, that old sea lion, her uncle, sails off to discover America! Savona-Roland the Rat Monk ignites the Bonfire of the Vanities! And at the heart of it all, a mouse. Not just any old Mickey, though: this is the mouse who invented realpolitik, the brilliant mouse playwright, the distinguished public rodent, the republican mouse who survived being tortured by the cruel cat prince and dreamed in exile of a day of glorious return ..." He was interrupted unceremoniously by an executive from the money people, a plump boy who could not have been more than twenty-three years old. "Florence is great," he said. "No question. I love that. And Niccol, what did you call him?, Mousiavelli sounds ... possible. But what you have here-this treatment-let me put it like this. It just doesn"t deserve deserve Florence. Maybe, yeah?, it"s not a good time right now for the Renaissance in plasticine." Florence. Maybe, yeah?, it"s not a good time right now for the Renaissance in plasticine."
He could go back to writing books, he thought, but soon found that his heart wasn"t in it. The inexorability of happenstance, the way events have of deflecting you from your course, had corrupted him and left him good for nothing. His old life had left him forever and the new world he"d created had slipped through his fingers too. He was James Mason, a falling star, drinking hard, drowning in defeats, and that d.a.m.n doll was flying high in the Judy Garland role. With Pinocchio, Geppetto"s troubles ended when the blasted puppet became a real, live boy; with Little Brain, as with Galatea, that"s when they began. Professor Solanka in drunken wrath issued anathemas against his ungrateful Frankendoll: Out of my sight let her go! Begone, unnatural child. Lo, I know you not. You shall not bear my name. Never send to ask for me, nor never seek my blessing. And call me father no more.
Out she went from his home in all her versions-the sketches, maquettes, tableaux, the infinite proliferation of her in all her myriad versions, paper, cloth, wood, plastic, animation cell, videotape, film; and with her, inevitably, went a once-precious version of himself. He hadn"t been able to bear to perform the act of expulsion personally. Eleanor agreed to take on the task. Eleanor, who could see the crisis mounting-the red cracks in the eyes of the man she loved, the alcohol, the rudderless wandering-said in her gentle, efficient way, "Just go out for the day and leave it to me." Her own career in publishing was on hold, Asmaan being all the career she needed for the moment, but she had been a high flier and was greatly in demand. This, too, she concealed from him, though he wasn"t a fool, and knew what it meant when Morgen Franz and others rang to speak to her and stayed on the phone, coaxing, for thirty minutes at a time. She was wanted, he understood that, everyone was wanted except him, but at least he could have this paltry revenge; he could not want something too, even if it was only that two-faced creature, that traitress, that, that, doll.
So he left home on the agreed day, stamping over Hampstead Heath at high speed-they lived in a capacious, double-fronted house on Willow Road and had always both rejoiced in having the Heath, North London"s treasure, its lung, just outside their door-and in his absence Eleanor had everything properly packed and taken away to a long-term storage facility. He"d have preferred the whole caboodle to end up at the Highbury garbage dump, but on this, too, he compromised. Eleanor had insisted. She had strong archival instincts and, needing her to take charge of the project, he waved a hand at her strictures as if at a mosquito, and didn"t argue. He walked for hours, allowing the Heath"s cool music to soothe his savage breast, the quiet heart-rhythms of its slow paths and trees, and, later in the day, the sweet strings of a summer concert in the grounds of the Iveagh Bequest. When he got back, Little Brain was gone. Or, almost gone. For, unknown to Eleanor, one doll had been locked away in a cupboard in Solanka"s study. And there she remained.
The house felt emptied when he returned, voided, the way a house feels after the death of a child. Solanka felt as if he had suddenly aged by twenty or thirty years; as if, divorced from the best work of his youthful enthusiasms, he at last stood face-to-face with ruthless Time. Waterford-Wajda had spoken of such a feeling at Addenbrooke"s years ago. "Life becomes very, I don"t know, finite. You realize you don"t have anything, you belong nowhere, you"re just using things for a while. The inanimate world laughs at you: you"ll be going soon, but it will be staying on. Not very profound, Solly, it"s Pooh Bear philosophy, I know, but it rips you to pieces all the same." This wasn"t just the death of a child, Solanka was thinking: more like a killing. Kronos devouring his daughter. He was the murderer of his fictional offspring: not flesh of his flesh but dream of his dream. There was, however, a living child still awake, overexcited by the day"s events: the arrival of the moving van, the packers, the steady come and go of boxes. "I was helping, Daddy," eager Asmaan greeted his father. "I helped send Little Brain away." He was bad at compound consonants, saying b b for for br: br: Little B"ain. That"s about right, Solanka thought. She became the bane of my life. "Yes," he answered absently. "Well done." But Asmaan had more on his mind. "Why did she have to go away, Daddy? Mummy said you wanted her to go away." Oh, Mummy said, did she. Thanks, Mummy. He glared at Eleanor, who shrugged. "Really, I didn"t know what to tell him. This one"s for you." Little B"ain. That"s about right, Solanka thought. She became the bane of my life. "Yes," he answered absently. "Well done." But Asmaan had more on his mind. "Why did she have to go away, Daddy? Mummy said you wanted her to go away." Oh, Mummy said, did she. Thanks, Mummy. He glared at Eleanor, who shrugged. "Really, I didn"t know what to tell him. This one"s for you."
On children"s television, in comic books, and in audio versions of her legendary memoirs, Little Brain"s protean persona had reached out and captured the hearts of children even younger than Asmaan Solanka. Three was not too young to fall in love with this most universally appealing of contemporary icons. "L.B." could be driven out of the house on Willow Road, but could she be expelled from the imagination of her creator"s child? "I want her back," Asmaan said emphatically. Back was bat bat. "I want Little B"ain." The pastoral symphony of Hampstead Heath gave way to the jangling discords of family life. Solanka felt the clouds gathering around him once again. "It was just time for her to go," he said, and picked up Asmaan, who wriggled hard against him, responding unconsciously, as children do, to his father"s bad mood. "No! Put me down! Put me down!" He was exhausted and cranky and so was Solanka. "I want to watch a video," he demanded. Viduwo Viduwo. "I want to watch a Little B"ain viduwo." Malik Solanka, unbalanced by the impact of the absence of the Little Brain archive, of her exile to some DollElba, some Black Sea town, such as Ovid"s barren Tomis, for unwanted, used-up toys, had been plunged quite unexpectedly into a condition resembling deep mourning and received his son"s end-of-day petulance as an unacceptable provocation. "It"s too late. Behave yourself," he snapped, and Asmaan, in return, crouched down on the front-room rug and produced his latest trick: a burst of impressively convincing crocodile tears. Solanka, no less childishly than his son, and without the excuse of being three years old, rounded on Eleanor. "I suppose this is your way of punishing me," he said. "If you didn"t want to get rid of the stuff, why not just say so. Why use him. I should have known I"d come back to trouble. To some manipulative c.r.a.p like this."
"Please don"t let him hear you talking to me that way," she said, scooping Asmaan into her arms. "He understands everything." Solanka noted that the boy suffered himself to be taken off to bed by his mother without the slightest wriggle, nuzzling into Eleanor"s long neck. "As a matter of fact," she went on levelly, "after doing this entire day"s work for you, I thought, stupidly as it turns out, that we might use it as the moment for a new beginning. I took a leg of lamb out of the freezer and rubbed it with c.u.min, I called the flower shop, oh G.o.d this is so silly, and had them deliver nasturtiums. And you"ll find three bottles of Tignanello on the kitchen table. One for pleasure, two for too much, three for bed. Perhaps you remember that. It"s your line. But I"m sure you can"t be bothered anymore to have a romantic candlelit supper with your boring, no-longer-young wife."
They had been drifting apart, she into the engulfing, full-time experience of first-time motherhood, which fulfilled her so deeply and which she was so eager to repeat, he into that fog of failure and self-disgust which was thickened, more and more, by drink. Yet the marriage had not broken, thanks in large measure to Eleanor"s generous heart, and to Asmaan. Asmaan, who loved books and could be read to for hours; Asmaan on his garden swing, asking Malik to twist him around and around so that he could untwist in a high-speed counterclockwise blur; Asmaan riding on his father"s shoulders, ducking his head under doorways ("I"m being very careful, Daddy!"); Asmaan chasing and being chased, Asmaan hiding under bedclothes and piles of pillows; Asmaan attempting to sing "Rock Around the Clock"-rot around the tot-most of all, perhaps, Asmaan bouncing. He loved to bounce on his parents" bed, with his stuffed animals cheering him on. "Look at me," he"d cry-look was loot loot-"I"m bouncing very well! I"m bouncing higher and higher!"
He was the young incarnation of their old high-bouncing love. When their child was flooding their lives with delight, Eleanor and Malik Solanka could take refuge in a fantasy of undamaged familial contentment. At other times, however, the cracks were becoming ever easier to see. She found his self-absorbed misery, his constant railing against imagined slights, duller and more of a strain than she was ever cruel enough to show; while he, locked into his downward spiral, accused her of ignoring him and his concerns. In bed, whispering so as not to wake Asmaan sleeping on a mattress on the floor beside them, she complained that Malik never initiated s.e.x; he retorted that she had lost interest in s.e.x entirely except at the baby-making time of the month. And at that time of the month, routinely, they fought: yes, no, please, I can"t, why not, because I don"t want to, but I need it so badly, well, I don"t need it at all, but I don"t want this lovely little boy to be an only child like me, and I don"t want to be a father again at my age, I"ll already be over seventy before Asmaan is twenty years old. And then tears and anger and, as often as not, a night for Solanka in the guest bedroom. Advice to husbands, he thought bitterly: make sure the spare room is comfortable, because sooner or later, pal, that"s your room.
Eleanor was waiting tensely by the stairs for his reply to her invitation to a night of peace and love. Time pa.s.sed in slow beats, arriving at a hinge moment. He could, if he had the wit and desire, accept her invitation, and then, yes, a good evening would follow: delicious food, and, if at this age three bottles of Tignanello didn"t send him straight to sleep, then no doubt the lovemaking would be up to the old high standard. But now there was a worm in Paradise, and he failed the test. "You"re ovulating, I suppose," he said, and she jerked her face away from him as if he"d slapped her. "No," she lied, and then, giving in to the inevitable, "Oh, all right, yes. But can"t we just, oh, I wish you could see how desperately, oh, to h.e.l.l with it, what"s the use." She carried Asmaan away, unable to hold back her tears. "I"m going to go to sleep, too, when I put him to bed, okay?" she said, weeping angrily. "Do what you like. Just don"t leave the lamb in the f.u.c.king Aga. Take it out and throw it in the f.u.c.king bin."
As Asmaan went upstairs in his mother"s arms, Solanka heard the worry in his tired young voice. "Daddy"s not cross," Asmaan said, rea.s.suring himself, wanting to be rea.s.sured. Cross was toss toss. "Daddy doesn"t want to send me away."
Alone in the kitchen, Professor Malik Solanka began to drink. The wine was as good and as powerful as ever, but he wasn"t drinking for pleasure. Steadily, he worked his way through the bottles, and as he did, the demons came crawling out through the several orifices of his body, sliding down his nose and out through his ears, dribbling and squeezing through every opening they could find. By the bottom of the first bottle they were dancing on his eyeb.a.l.l.s, his fingernails, they had wrapped their rough lapping tongues around his throat, their spears were jabbing at his genitals, and all he could hear was their scarlet song of shrill, most horrid hate. He had come through self-pity now and entered a terrible, blaming anger, and by the bottom of the second bottle, as his head slopped about on his neck, the demons were kissing him with their forked tongues and their tails were wrapped around his p.e.n.i.s, rubbing and squeezing, and as he listened to their dirty talk, the unforgivable blame for what he had become had begun to settle on the woman upstairs, she who was nearest to hand, the traitress who had refused to destroy his enemy, his nemesis, the doll, she who had poured the poison of Little Brain into the brain of his child, turning the son against the father, she who had destroyed the peace of his home life by preferring the uncreated child of her obsession to her actually existing husband, she, his wife, his betrayer, his one great foe. The third bottle fell, half unfinished, across the kitchen table that she had so lovingly set for dinner a deux a deux, using her mother"s old lace tablecloth and the best cutlery and a pair of long-stemmed red Bohemian winegla.s.ses, and as the red fluid spilled across the old lace, he remembered that he"d forgotten the d.a.m.n lamb, and when he opened the Aga door, the smoke poured out and set off the smoke detector in the ceiling, and the screaming of the alarm was the laughter of the demons, and to stop it STOP IT he had to get the step stool and climb up on unsteady wine-dark legs to take the battery pack out of the d.a.m.n-fool thing, okay, okay, but even when he"d done that without breaking his G.o.dd.a.m.n neck, the demons went right on laughing their screaming laughter, and the room was still full of smoke, G.o.dd.a.m.n her, couldn"t she even have done this one small thing, and what would it take to stop the screaming in his head, this screaming like a knife, like a knife in his brain in his ear in his eye in his stomach in his heart in his soul, couldn"t the b.i.t.c.h just have taken the meat out and put it right there, on the carving board next to the sharpening steel, the long fork and the knife, the carving knife, the knife.
It was a big house and the smoke alarm had not woken Eleanor or Asmaan, who was already in her bed, Malik"s bed. Fat lot of use that alarm system turned out to be, huh. And here he was standing above them in the dark and here in his hand was the carving knife, and there was no alarm system to warn them against him, was there, Eleanor lying on her back with her mouth slightly open and a low burr of a snore rumbling in her nose, Asmaan on his side, curled tightly into her, sleeping the pure deep sleep of innocence and trust. Asmaan murmured inaudibly in his sleep and the sound of his faint voice broke through the demons" shrieking and brought his father to his senses. Before him lay his only child, the one living being under this roof who still knew that the world was a place of wonders and life was sweet and the present moment was everything and the future was infinite and didn"t need to be thought about, while the past was useless and fortunately gone for good and he, a child wrapped in the soft sorcerer"s cloak of childhood, was loved beyond words, and safe. Malik Solanka panicked. What was he doing standing over these two sleepers with a, with a, knife, he wasn"t the sort of person who would do a thing like this, you read about those persons every day in the yellow press, coa.r.s.e men and sly women who slaughtered their babies and ate their grandmothers, cold serial murderers and tormented pedophiles and unashamed s.e.xual abusers and wicked stepfathers and dumb violent Neanderthal apes and all the world"s ill-educated uncivilized brutes, and those were other persons entirely, no persons of that nature resided in this house, ergo he, Professor Malik Solanka formerly of King"s College in the University of Cambridge, he of all people could not be in here holding in his drunken hand a savage instrument of death. Q.E.D. And anyway, I never was any good with the meat, Eleanor. It was always you who carved.
The doll, he thought with a belching, vinous start. Of course! That satanic doll was to blame. He had sent all the avatars of the she-devil out of the house, but one remained. That had been his mistake. She had crawled out of her cupboard and down through his nose and given him the carving knife and sent him to do her b.l.o.o.d.y work. But he knew where she was hiding. She couldn"t hide from him. Professor Solanka turned and left the bedroom, knife in hand, muttering, and if Eleanor opened her eyes after he"d gone, he did not know it; if she had watched his retreating back and knew and judged him, it must be for her to say.
It had grown dark outside on West Seventieth Street. Little Brain was on his lap as he finished speaking. Its garments were slashed and torn and you could see where the knife had made deep incisions in its body. "Even after I stabbed her, as you see, I couldn"t leave her behind. All the way to America I held her body in my arms." Mila"s own doll silently interrogated its damaged twin. "Now you"ve heard everything, which is a great deal more than you wanted," Solanka said. "You know how this thing has ruined my life." Mila Milo"s green eyes were on fire. She came over and caught up both his hands between her own. "I don"t believe it," she said. "Your life isn"t ruined. And these-come on, Professor!-these are just dolls." dolls."
9.
"There"s a look you sometimes get that reminds me of my father before he died," Mila Milo said, blithely unaware of how that sentence might be received by its subject. "Kind of indistinct, like a picture where the photographer"s hand shook a little? Like Robin Williams in that movie where he"s always out of focus. I once asked Dad what it meant and he said it was the look of a person who had spent too much time around other human beings. The human race is a life sentence, he said, it"s a rough confinement, and sometimes we all need to break out of jail. He was a writer, a poet mostly but a novelist also, you won"t have heard of him, but in Serbo-Croat he"s considered pretty good. More than pretty good, actually, quite amazing, one of the best of the best. n.o.belisable n.o.belisable, as the French say, but he never got it. Didn"t live long enough, I guess. Still. Take it from me. He was good. The depth of his connection to the natural world, his feeling for the ancients, for folklore: he was one of a kind. Hobgoblins jumping in and out of flowers, I teased him. The flower inside the goblin would be better, he answered. The memory of a pure shining river that lingers in Satan"s heart. You have to understand that religion was important for him. He lived in cities mostly, but his soul was in the hills. An old soul, people called him. But he was young at heart, too, you know? He really was. A barrel of monkeys. Most of the time. I don"t know how he managed it. They never let up on him, they kept messing with his head. We lived in Paris for years after he got out from under t.i.to, I attended the American School there until I was eight, nearly nine, my mom unfortunately pa.s.sed when I was three, three and a half, breast cancer, what can you do, it just killed her real fast and real painfully, may she rest in peace. Anyway, so he would get letters from home and I would open them for him and there, stamped on the front page of a letter from I don"t know his sister sister or someone was a big official stamp saying, or someone was a big official stamp saying, This letter has not been censored This letter has not been censored. HA! In the mid-eighties I came with him to New York to attend the big PEN conference, the famous one when there were all those parties, one at the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan and another at Saul and Gayfryd Steinberg"s apartment, and n.o.body could decide which was grander, and Norman Mailer invited George Shultz to speak at the Public Library and so the South Africans boycotted the event because he was, like, pro-apartheid, and Shultz"s security people wouldn"t let Bellow in because he"d forgotten his invitation, so that made him a possible terrorist, until Mailer vouched for him, Bellow must have liked that! that!, and then the women writers protested because the platform speakers were mostly men, and either Susan Sontag or Nadine Gordimer scolded them because, she said, Nadine or Susan, I forget, literature isn"t an equal opportunity employer. And Cynthia Ozick I think it was accused Bruno Kreisky of being an anti-Semite even though he was a, a Jew and b, the European politician who"d taken in the most Russian-Jewish refugees, and all this because he"d had a meeting with Arafat, one meeting, so that makes Ehud Barak and Clinton really really anti-Semitic, right?, I mean it"s going to be Jew-Haters International down there at Camp David. And anyway Dad spoke, too, the conference had some grand t.i.tle like "The Imagination of the Writer Versus the Imagination of the State," and after somebody, I"ve forgotten, Breytenbach or Oz, someone like that, said that the state had no imagination, Dad said that on the contrary, not only did it have an imagination, it also had a sense of humor, and he would give an example of a joke by the state, and then he told the story of the letter that had not been censored, and I sat there in the audience feeling so proud because everybody laughed and after all I was the one who opened the letter. I went with him to every session, are you kidding?, I was crazy for writers, I"d been a writer"s daughter all my life and books to me were like the greatest thing, and it was so cool because they let me sit in on everything even though I was only small. It was so great to see my dad finally with his like peers and getting so much respect, and besides, here were all these names walking around attached to the real people they belonged to, Donald Barthelme, Gunter Gra.s.s, Czeslaw Milosz, Grace Paley, John Updike, everyone. But at the end my father had that look on his face, the one like the one on yours, and he left me with Aunt Kitty from Chelsea, not my real aunt, she and Dad had a thing for about five minutes-you should have seen him with women, he was this big s.e.xy guy with huge hands and a thick mustache like I guess Stalin, and he would look women in the eye and start talking about animals in heat, wolves, for instance, and that was it, they were gone. I swear to G.o.d these ladies would actually make a line, he"d go up to his hotel room and they"d form right up outside, a real honest to goodness line, the greatest women you can imagine, just weak at the knees with l.u.s.t; and it"s lucky I liked to read a lot, and also there was American TV to watch for once, so I was okay in the other room, I was fine, though a lot of times I wanted to go out and ask those women waiting around for it to be their turn, like, don"t you have something better to do, you know?, it"s only his p.e.c.k.e.r for Chrissakes, get a life. Yeah, I used to shock a lot of people, I grew up fast I guess because it was always my dad and me, always him and me against the world. So anyway I guess he liked Aunt Kitty, she must"ve pa.s.sed the audition, because her prize was she got to look after me for two weeks while Dad went off with two professors to walk in I think the Appalachians; hill walking was what he liked to do to get rid of his people overdoses, and he always came back looking different, kind of clearer, you know? I called it his Moses look. Down from the mountain, you know, with the Decalogue. Only in Dad"s case, usually, poetry. Anyhow, long story short, about five minutes after he got back from schmoozing with the profs on a mountainside, he was offered a post at Columbia University and we moved to New York permanently. Which I loved, sure, but he was like I said a country person and a dyed-in-the-wool European person, too, so it was harder for him. Still, he was used to working with what there was, used to handling whatever life sent his way. Okay, he drank like a real Yugoslav and he smoked about a hundred a day and he had a bad heart, he knew he was never going to be an old man, but he had made a decision about his life. You know, like in anti-Semitic, right?, I mean it"s going to be Jew-Haters International down there at Camp David. And anyway Dad spoke, too, the conference had some grand t.i.tle like "The Imagination of the Writer Versus the Imagination of the State," and after somebody, I"ve forgotten, Breytenbach or Oz, someone like that, said that the state had no imagination, Dad said that on the contrary, not only did it have an imagination, it also had a sense of humor, and he would give an example of a joke by the state, and then he told the story of the letter that had not been censored, and I sat there in the audience feeling so proud because everybody laughed and after all I was the one who opened the letter. I went with him to every session, are you kidding?, I was crazy for writers, I"d been a writer"s daughter all my life and books to me were like the greatest thing, and it was so cool because they let me sit in on everything even though I was only small. It was so great to see my dad finally with his like peers and getting so much respect, and besides, here were all these names walking around attached to the real people they belonged to, Donald Barthelme, Gunter Gra.s.s, Czeslaw Milosz, Grace Paley, John Updike, everyone. But at the end my father had that look on his face, the one like the one on yours, and he left me with Aunt Kitty from Chelsea, not my real aunt, she and Dad had a thing for about five minutes-you should have seen him with women, he was this big s.e.xy guy with huge hands and a thick mustache like I guess Stalin, and he would look women in the eye and start talking about animals in heat, wolves, for instance, and that was it, they were gone. I swear to G.o.d these ladies would actually make a line, he"d go up to his hotel room and they"d form right up outside, a real honest to goodness line, the greatest women you can imagine, just weak at the knees with l.u.s.t; and it"s lucky I liked to read a lot, and also there was American TV to watch for once, so I was okay in the other room, I was fine, though a lot of times I wanted to go out and ask those women waiting around for it to be their turn, like, don"t you have something better to do, you know?, it"s only his p.e.c.k.e.r for Chrissakes, get a life. Yeah, I used to shock a lot of people, I grew up fast I guess because it was always my dad and me, always him and me against the world. So anyway I guess he liked Aunt Kitty, she must"ve pa.s.sed the audition, because her prize was she got to look after me for two weeks while Dad went off with two professors to walk in I think the Appalachians; hill walking was what he liked to do to get rid of his people overdoses, and he always came back looking different, kind of clearer, you know? I called it his Moses look. Down from the mountain, you know, with the Decalogue. Only in Dad"s case, usually, poetry. Anyhow, long story short, about five minutes after he got back from schmoozing with the profs on a mountainside, he was offered a post at Columbia University and we moved to New York permanently. Which I loved, sure, but he was like I said a country person and a dyed-in-the-wool European person, too, so it was harder for him. Still, he was used to working with what there was, used to handling whatever life sent his way. Okay, he drank like a real Yugoslav and he smoked about a hundred a day and he had a bad heart, he knew he was never going to be an old man, but he had made a decision about his life. You know, like in The n.i.g.g.e.r of the Narcissus The n.i.g.g.e.r of the Narcissus. I must live until I die. And that"s what he did, he did great work and had great s.e.x and smoked great cigarettes and drank great liquor and then the d.a.m.n war started and out of nowhere he turned into this person I didn"t know, this, I guess, Serb. Listen, he despised the guy he called the other Milosevic, he hated having the same name, and that"s really why he changed it, if you want the truth. To separate Milo the poet from Milosevic the fascist gangster pig. But after it all went crazy out there in getting-to-be-ex-Yugo, he got all worked up about the demonization of the Serbs, even though he agreed with most of the a.n.a.lysis of what Milosevic was doing in Croatia and going to do in Bosnia, his heart was just inflamed by the anti-Serb stuff, and in some mad moment he decided it was his duty to go back and be the moral conscience of the place, you know, like Stephen Dedalus, to forge in the smithy of his soul et cetera et cetera or some Serb Solzhenitsyn. I told him to cut it out, who was Solzhenitsyn anyway but this crazy old coot in Vermont dreaming of being a prophet back in Mother Russia, but when he got home n.o.body was listening to his same old song, that"s definitely not the route you want to go, Dad, for you it"s women and cigarettes and booze and mountains and work work work, the idea was to let that stuff kill you, right, the plan was to stay away from Milosevic and his killers, not to mention bombs. But he didn"t listen to me, and instead of sticking to the game plan he caught a plane back there, into the fury. That"s what I started out to say, Professor, don"t talk to me about fury, I know what it can do. America, because of its omnipotence, is full of fear; it fears the fury of the world and renames it envy, or so my dad used to say. They think we want to be them, he"d say after a few hits of hooch, but really we"re just mad as h.e.l.l and don"t want to take it anymore. See, he knew about fury. But then he set aside what he knew and behaved like a d.a.m.n fool. Because about five minutes after he landed in Belgrade-or maybe it was five hours or five days or five weeks, who, like, cares? cares?-the fury blew him to pieces and there wasn"t enough of him found to collect up and put in a box. So, yeah, Professor, and you"re mad about a doll. Well, excuse me." me."
The weather had changed. The heat of early summer had given way to a disturbed, patternless time. There were many clouds and too much rain, and days of morning heat that abruptly turned cold after lunch, sending shivers through the girls in their summer dresses and the baretorsoed rollerbladers in the park, with those mysterious leather belts strapped tightly across their chests, like self-imposed penances, just below their pectoral muscles. In the faces of his fellow citizens Professor Solanka discerned new bewilderments; the things on which they had relied, summery summers, cheap gasoline, the pitching arms of David Cone and yes, even Orlando Hernandez, these things had begun to let them down. A Concorde crashed in France, and people imagined they saw a part of their own dreams of the future, the future in which they too would break through the barriers that held them back, the imaginary future of their own limitlessness, going up in those awful flames.
This golden age, too, must end, Solanka thought, as do all such periods in the human chronicle. Maybe this truth was just beginning to slide into people"s consciousness, like the drizzle trickling down inside the upturned collars of their raincoats, like a dagger slipping through the gaps in their armor-plated confidence. In an election year, America"s confidence was political currency. Its existence could not be denied; the inc.u.mbents took credit for it, their opponents refused them that credit, calling the boom an act of G.o.d or else of Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve. But our nature is our nature and uncertainty is at the heart of what we are, uncertainty per se, in and of itself, the sense that nothing is written in stone, everything crumbles. As Marx was probably still saying out there in the junkyard of ideas, the intellectual St. Helena to which he had been exiled, all that is solid melts into air. In a public climate of such daily-trumpeted a.s.surance, where did our fears go to hide? On what did they feed? On ourselves, perhaps, Solanka thought. While the greenback was all-powerful and America bestrode the world, psychological disorders and aberrations of all sorts were having a field day back home. Under the self-satisfied rhetoric of this repackaged, h.o.m.ogenized America, this America with the twenty-two million new jobs and the highest home-owning rate in history, this balanced-budget, low-deficit, stock-owning Mall America, people were stressed-out, cracking up, and talking about it all day long in superstrings of moronic cliche. Among the young, the inheritors of plenty, the problem was most acute. Mila, with her ultra-precocious Parisian upbringing, often referred scornfully to the confusion of her contemporaries. Everybody was scared, she said, everybody she knew, however good their facade, was quaking inside, and it didn"t make any difference that everybody was rich. Between the s.e.xes the trouble was worst of all. "Guys don"t really know how or when or where to touch girls anymore, and girls can barely tell the difference between desire and a.s.sault, flirtation and offensiveness, love and s.e.xual abuse." When everything and everyone you touch turns instantly to gold, as King Midas learned in the other cla.s.sic be-careful-what-you-wish-for fable, you end up not being able to touch anything, or anyone, at all.
Mila had changed too of late, but in her case the transformation was, in Professor Solanka"s opinion, a vast improvement on the f.e.c.kless chick, still playing at teen queenery in her twe