Fury Fury Fury

by Salman Rushdie

  Yes, and words are not deeds, Solanka allowed, moving off fretfully. Though words can become deeds. If said in the right place and at the right time, they can move mountains and change the world. Also, uh-huh, not knowing what you’re doing—separating deeds from the words that define them—was apparently becoming an acceptable excuse. To say “I didn’t mean it” was to erase meaning from your misdeeds, at least in the opinion of the Beloved Alis of the world. Could that be so? Obviously, no. No, it simply could not. Many people would say that even a genuine act of repentance could not atone for a crime, much less this unexplained blankness—an infinitely lesser excuse, a mere assertion of ignorance that wouldn’t even register on any scale of regret. Shockingly, Solanka recognized himself in foolish young Ali Majnu: the vehemence as well as the blanks in the record. He did not, however, excuse himself. At Jack Rhinehart’s apartment, before the poleaxing arrival of Neela Mahendra had changed the subject, he had been attempting, while concealing the depth of his perturbation, to confess to Rhinehart something of his fear about the terrorist anger that kept taking him hostage. Jack, absorbed in the soccer game, nodded absently. “You must know you’ve always had a short fuse,” he said. “I mean, you are aware of that, right? You’re conscious of the number of times you’ve rung people up to apologize—the number of times you’ve rung me up—the morning after some little wine-lubricated explosion of yours? The Collected Apologies of Malik Solanka. I always thought that would make a fine book. Repetitive, maybe, but with rich comic delights.”

  Some years back, the Solankas had vacationed at the cottage in the Springs with Rhinehart and his “waitress” of the moment, a petite Southern belle—from Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, scene of the Civil War’s “Battle Above the Clouds”—who was a dead ringer for the cartoon sexpot Betty Boop and to whom Rhinehart referred affectionately as Roscoe, after Lookout Mountain’s only living celebrity, the heavy-serving tennis player Roscoe Tanner, in spite of her evident hatred of the nickname. The cottage was small and it was necessary to spend as much time as possible away from it. One night after a protracted, men-only drinking session at an East Hampton watering hole, Solanka had insisted on driving back during a heavy downpour. A period of dumbstruck terror ensued. Then Rhinehart said, as mildly as he could, “Malik, in America we drive on the other side of the road.” Solanka had blown up and, incensed at the disrespect being shown to his driving skills, had stopped the car and actually forced Rhinehart to walk home in the drenching rain. “That was one of your best apologies,” Jack now reminded him. “Particularly because the next morning you couldn’t remember doing anything wrong at all.”

  “Yes,” Solanka murmured, “but now I’m having the blackouts without the booze. And the anger events are on a completely different scale.” The noise of the TV crowd surged as he spoke, demanding Rhinehart’s attention, and the confession passed unheard. “Oh, and,” Rhinehart resumed moments later, “you can’t not know how hard your friends try to avoid certain subjects in your company. U.S. policy in Central America, for example. U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. Actually, the U.S.A. in general has been pretty much an off-limits topic for years, so don’t think I wasn’t tickled when you decided to relocate yo’ ass in the bosom of the Great Satan hisself.” Yes, but, Solanka wanted to say, rising to the bait, what’s wrong is wrong, and because of the immense goddamn power of America, the immense fucking seduction of America, those bastards in charge get away with … “There you go, you see,” Rhinehart pointed at him, chuckling. “Just swellin’ up fit to bust. Bright red, then purple, then almost black. A heart attack waiting to happen. You know what we call it when it happens? Getting Solankered. Malik’s China syndrome. It’s an honest to God fuckin’ meltdown. I mean, mah fren’, I’m the man who actually done gone to these places and brought back the bad news, but that don’t stop you from tellin’ me off ‘bout it, on account of my citizenship, which in yo’ mad eyes makes me ‘sponsible for de mighty evil dat keep gettin’ done in mah po’ name.”

  No fool like an old fool. So he and Beloved Ali were really the same after all, Solanka humbly thought. Just a few slight surface differences of vocabulary and education. No: he was worse, because Beloved was just a boy on his first day in a new job, while he, Solanka, was becoming something awful and perhaps uncontrollable. The bitter irony was that his old habits of combativeness, this evidently comic intemperateness of his, would blind even his friends to the great change in kind, the hideous deterioration, that was now taking place. This time there really was a wolf coming and nobody, not even Jack, was listening to his cries. “And furthermore,” Rhinehart caroled gaily, “remember when you ejected, oh, what’s his name from your house for misquoting Philip Larkin? Man! So you’ve been getting snappy with the neighbors? Whoo-ee. Hold the front page.”

  How could Malik Solanka speak to his mirthful friend of the abnegation of the self: how to say, America is the great devourer, and so I have come to America to be devoured? How could he say, I am a knife in the dark; I endanger those I love?

  Solanka’s hands itched. Even his skin was betraying him. He, whose baby-bottom skin had always caused women to marvel and to tease him for having led a life of cosseted ease, had begun to suffer from uncomfortable raw eruptions along his hairline and, most awkwardly of all, on both hands. The skin reddened, puckered, and broke. So far he had not visited a dermatologist. Before walking out on Eleanor, a lifetime eczema sufferer, he had raided her medicine box and brought away two thick tubes of hydrocortisone ointment. At the local Duane Reade he bought a jumbo-sized bottle of industrial-strength moisturizer and resigned himself to using it several times a day. Professor Solanka did not have a high opinion of doctors. Accordingly, he self-medicated, and itched.

  It was the age of science, but medical science was still in the hands of primitives and oafs. The main thing you learned from doctors was how little they knew. In the paper yesterday there had been a story about a doctor who had accidentally removed a woman’s healthy breast. He was “reprimanded.” It was such an everyday story that it only made a deep inside page. This was the sort of thing doctors did: the wrong kidney, the wrong lung, the wrong eye, the wrong baby. Doctors did wrong. It was just barely news.

  The news: it was right there in his hand. After getting out of Beloved Ali’s cab he’d picked up a copy of the News and the Post, then had taken an erratic route home, walking fast, as if trying to escape Something…. Ellen DeGeneres, posters proclaimed, was coming soon to the Beacon Theatre. Solanka grimaced. She’d be singing her theme song, of course: Where the hormones, there moan I. And the room would be full of women hollering, “Ellen, we love you,” and in the midst of her set of deeply so-so material the comedienne would pause, lower her head, put her hand on her heart, and say how moved she was to have become a symbol of their pain. Praise me, thank you, thank you, praise me some more, hey, look, Anne, we’re an icon!, wow!, it’s so humbling…. Science was making extraordinary discoveries, Professor Solanka thought. Scientists in London believed they had identified the medial insula, a part of the brain associated with “gut feelings,” and also that part of the anterior cingulate that was linked to euphoria, as the locations of love. Also, British and German scientists now claimed that the frontal lateral cortex was responsible for intelligence. The blood flow in this region increased when tested volunteers were called upon to solve complicated puzzles. Tell me where is fancy bred? / I’ the heart or i’ the head? And where in the brain, wild-hearted Solanka only half rhetorically asked himself, is the seat of stupidity? Eh, scientists of the world? In what insula or cortex does the blood flow increase when one shouts “I love you” at a total fucking stranger? And how about hypocrisy? Let’s get to the interesting stuff here …

  He shook his head. You’re avoiding the issue, Professor. You’re dancing all around it when what you have to do is stare it down, look it right in the face. Let’s get to anger, okay? Let’s get to the goddamn fury that actually kills. Tell me, where is murder bred? Malik Solanka, clutch
ing his newspaper, hurtled east along Seventy-second Street, scattering pedestrians. On Columbus he made a left and half-ran another dozen distraught blocks or so before coming to a halt. Even the stores hereabouts had Indian names: Bombay, Pondicherry. Everything conspired to remind him of what he was trying to forget—of, that is, home, the idea of home in general and his own home life in particular. In not Pondicherry but, yes, it cannot be denied, Bombay. He went into a Mexican-themed bar with a high Zagat’s rating, ordered a shot of tequila, and another, and then, finally, it was time for the dead.

  This one, last night’s corpse, and the two before. These were their names. Saskia “Sky” Schuyler, today’s big picture, and her predecessors Lauren “Ren” Muybridge Klein and Belinda “Bindy” Booken Candell. These were their ages: nineteen, twenty, nineteen. These were their photographs. Look at their smiles: these were the smiles of power. A lump of concrete put out those lights. These were not poor girls, but they’re penniless now.

  She was something, Sky was. Five-foot-nine, stacked, spoke six languages, reminded everyone of Christie Brinkley as the Uptown Girl, loved big hats and high fashion, could’ve walked for anyone—Jean-Paul, Donatella, Dries had all begged her, Tom Ford had gone down on his knees, but she was just too “naturally shy”—this was code for naturally upper-crust, too much a member of that old-money snobberia that thought of couturiers as tailors and runway models as just one small step better than whores—and, besides, there was her scholarship at Juilliard. Just last weekend she was in a hurry to get out to Southampton, needed something to wear, no time to choose, so she rang her great pal the high-end designer Imelda Poushine, asked her to just send over the whole collection, and messengered back, in return, a personal check for four count ’em four hundred thousand dollars.

  Yes, says Imelda in Rush & Molloy, the check cleared two days ago. She was a great girl, a living doll, but business is business, I guess. We’ll all miss her dreadfully. Yes, it’ll be at the family plot, right there in the best part, right across from Jimmy Stewart. Everybody’s going. Big security operation. I hear they decided to lay her to rest in the wedding gown. So honored. She’ll look beautiful, but that girl would’ve looked beautiful in rags, believe me. Yes, I’ll be dressing her. Are you kidding? My privilege. It’s an open-casket situation. They’ve booked the best: Sally H. for the hair, Rafael for the makeup, Herb for the photographs. Sky’s the limit, I guess, no pun intended. Her mother’s handling it all. That woman is made of iron. Not a tear. Just fifty herself and drop-dead gor, excuse me, don’t print that, okay. No pun intended.

  The inheritors disinherited, the masters made victims: that was the angle. All that wasted training! For Saskia at nineteen was not only a linguist, pianist, and dedicated fashionista; she was also already an expert horsewoman, an archer with hopes of making the Sydney Olympic team, a long-distance swimmer, a fabulous dancer, a great cook, a happy weekend painter, a bel canto singer, a hostess in her mother’s grand manner, and, to judge by the openly worldly sensuality of her newspaper smile, skilled, too, in other arts to which the tabloid press was utterly devoted but whereof it dared not speak freely in such a context. The papers contented themselves with printing photographs of Saskia’s handsome beau, the polo player Bradley Marsalis III, of whom all regular readers knew at least this: that his teammates called him Horse, in honor of the way he was hung.

  A stone from a Lost Boy’s slingshot had felled the beautiful Wendy Bird. Make that birds: for what was said of Sky Schuyler applied equally to Bindy Candell and Ren Klein. All three were beautiful, all three long and blond and formidably accomplished. If the financial future of their great families rested in the hands of their superlatively confident brothers, then these young women had been reared to take charge of the personae of their clans—their style, their class. Their image. Looking at their stunned menfolk now, it was easy to gauge the size of their loss. We boys can take care of business, said the silent grieving faces of the families, but our girls make us who we are. We are the boat and they are the ocean. We are the vehicle, they’re the motion. Who, now, will tell us how to be? And there was fear too: who’ll be next? Of all the ripe girls given to us to pluck from their branches like the golden apples of the sun, who’s next for the fatal worm?

  A living doll. These young women were born to be trophies, fully accessorized Oscar-Barbies, to use Eleanor Masters Solanka’s phrase. It was obvious that the young men of their class were reacting to the three deaths exactly as if some coveted medallions, some golden bowls or silver cups, had been stolen from their clubhouse plinths. A secret society of gilded young men calling itself the S&M, which stood, it was suggested, for Single & Male, was reportedly planning a midnight gathering to mourn the loss of its members’ much-loved main squeezes. “Horse” Marsalis, Anders “Stash” Andriessen—the Candell girl’s restaurateur Eurohunk—and Lauren Klein’s good-time guy Keith Medford (“Club”) would lead the mourners. As the S&M was a secret society, all its members flatly denied its existence and refused to verify the rumors that the mourning ceremonies would climax with mixed-sex war-painted naked dancing and skinny-dipping on a private Vineyard beach, at which time candidates for the vacancies in the big guys’ beds would be intimately auditioned.

  All three dead girls, and their living sisters, thus conformed to Eleanor’s definition of Desdemonas. They were property. And now there was a murderous Othello on the loose—in this case, perhaps, destroying what he could not possess, because that very non-possession insulted his honor. Not for their infidelity but for their uninterest was he killing them in this Y2K revision of the play. Or perhaps he broke them simply to reveal their lack of humanity, their breakability. Their dollness. For these had been—yes!—android women, dolls of the modern age, mechanized, computerized, not the simple effigies of bygone nurseries but fully realized avatars of human beings.

  In its origin, the doll was not a thing in itself but a representation. Long before the earliest rag dolls and golliwogs, human beings had made dolls as portraits of particular children and adults, too. It was always a mistake to let others possess the doll of yourself; who owned your doll owned a crucial piece of you. The extreme expression of this idea was of course the voodoo doll, the doll you could stick pins in to hurt the one it represented, the doll whose neck you could wring to kill a living being, at a distance, as effectively as a Muslim cook deals with a chicken. Then came mass production, and the link between man and doll was broken; dolls became themselves and clones of themselves. They became reproductions, assembly-line versions, characterless, uniform. In the present day, all that was changing again. Solanka’s own bank balance owed everything to the desire of modern people to own dolls with not just personality but individuality. His dolls had tales to tell.

  But now living women wanted to be doll-like, to cross the frontier and look like toys. Now the doll was the original, the woman the representation. These living dolls, these stringless marionettes, were not just “dolled up” on the outside. Behind their high-style exteriors, beneath that perfectly lucent skin, they were so stuffed full of behavioral chips, so thoroughly programmed for action, so perfectly groomed and wardrobed, that there was no room left in them for messy humanity. Sky, Bindy, and Ren thus represented the final step in the transformation of the cultural history of the doll. Having conspired in their own dehumanization, they ended up as mere totems of their class, the class that ran America, which in turn ran the world, so that an attack on them was also, if you cared to see it that way, an attack on the great American empire, the Pax Americana, itself…. A dead body on a street, thought Malik Solanka, coming down to earth, looks a lot like a broken doll.

  … Oh, who even thought like this anymore, other than himself? Was there anyone else left in America with such ugly, misconceived notions in his head? If you’d asked these young women, these tall confident beauties on their way to summa cum laude college degrees and glamorous yachting weekends, these Princesses of the Now, with their limo services and charity work and m
ile-a-minute lives and tame, adoring superheroes striving to win their favor, they would have told you they were free, freer than any women in any country in any time, and they belonged to no man, whether father or lover or boss. They were nobody’s dolls, but their own women, playing with their own appearance, their own sexuality, their own stories: the first generation of young women to be truly in control, in thrall neither to the old patriarchy nor to the man-hating hard-line feminism that had battered at Bluebeard’s gate. They could be businesswomen and flirts, profound and superficial, serious and light, and they would make those decisions for themselves. They had it all—emancipation, sex appeal, cash—and they loved it. And then somebody came and took it away from them by hitting them hard on the back of their heads, the first blow to knock them out and the rest to finish them off. So, who killed them? If it was dehumanization you were interested in, the murderer was your man. Not they themselves but he, the Concrete Killer, had dehumanized them. Professor Malik Solanka, tears running down his face as he sat hunched over his tequila on a bar stool, buried his head in his hands.

  Saskia Schuyler had lived in a many-roomed but low-ceilinged apartment in what she called “the ugliest building on Madison Avenue,” a blue brick monstrosity opposite the Armani store, whose “only good point,” in Sky’s opinion, was that she could call the store and have them hold dresses up to the window so that she could check them out through binoculars. She hated the apartment, her parents’ former Manhattan pied-à-terre. The Schuylers lived mostly out of town, on a gated estate set in rolling landscape near Chappaqua, New York, and spent much time complaining about the Clintons’ purchase of a house in their hometown. Sky, said Bradley Marsalis, liked to reassure her parents that Hillary wouldn’t be there long. “If she wins, she’ll be off to D.C. and the Senate, and if she loses, she’ll leave even faster.” Meanwhile, Sky wanted to sell up on Madison and move to Tribeca, but the co-op board had three times turned down the purchasers she had found. On the subject of the board, Sky was vociferous. “It’s full of lacquered old dames covered in tight shiny fabric, like overstuffed sofas, and I guess if you want to get in, you have to look like furniture too.” The building did have a twenty-four-hour doorman service, however, and the night-duty doorman, old Abe Green, reported that on the date in question Miss Schuyler, “lookin’ like a million dollars” after a big night out at a music-awards gala (“Horse” had industry connections), got home around one-thirty. She parted at the door from a plainly reluctant Mr. Marsalis—“Boy, did he look pissed,” Green noted—and walked unhappily to the elevator. Green rode up with her. “To make her smile, I told her, Too bad you only live on the fifth, miss, otherwise I could enjoy lookin’ at you a little longer.” Fifteen minutes later she buzzed for the elevator again. “Everything okay, miss?” Abe asked her. “Oh, I guess so. Yeah, sure, Abe,” she said. “Sure.” Then she walked out by herself, still in her party finery, and never came back. Her body was found a long way downtown, near the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel. A study of the last hours of Lauren Klein and Bindy Candell showed that they, too, had come home late, refused entry to their boyfriends, and gone out again shortly afterward. As if these girls had turned Life away, then set out to keep their assignations with Death.