She also came to talk, as if moved by a deep need for reciprocity. She spoke at these times with an almost frightening directness and speed, pulling no punches; yet the purpose of her soliloquies was not pugilism but friendship. Solanka, receiving her words in their intended spirit, was much soothed. From her conversation he frequently learned much of importance, picking up wisdom on the fly, so to speak; there were unregarded nuggets of pleasure lying about everywhere, like discarded toys, in the corners of her talk. This, for instance, while she explained why an earlier boyfriend had dumped her, a fact she plainly found as improbable as did Solanka: “He was filthy rich and I wasn’t.” She shrugged. “It was a problem for him. I mean, I was already in my twenties and I didn’t have my unit.” Unit? Solanka had been told—by Jack Rhinehart—that the word was used in certain masculinist American circles to refer to the male genitalia, but presumably Mila had not been given the heave-ho for lacking these. Mila defined the term as if speaking to a slow but likable child, using that careful, idiot’s-guide voice into which Solanka had heard her occasionally lapse when talking to her Eddie. “A unit, Professor, is one hundred million dollars.” Solanka was dazed by the revelatory beauty of this fact. A century of big ones: the contemporary price of admission to the United States’ Elysian fields. Such was the life of the young in the America of the incipient third millennium. That a girl of exceptional beauty and high intelligence could be deemed unsuitable for so fiscally precise a reason, Solanka told Mila gravely, only showed that American standards in matters of the heart, or at least in the mating game, had risen even higher than real estate prices. “Word, Professor,” Mila replied. Then they both burst into a laughter that Solanka had not heard emerging from his own mouth in an eternity. The unfettered laughter of youth.
He understood that she had made him one of her projects. Mila’s special thing turned out to be the collection and repair of damaged people. She was up-front about this when he asked her. “It’s what I can do. I fix people up. Some people do up houses. I renovate people.” So in her eyes he was like an old mansion, or at least like this old Upper West Side duplex he had sublet, this handsome space that hadn’t been spruced up since, probably, the sixties and had begun to look a bit tragic; inside and out, she said, it was time for a whole new look. “As long as you don’t hang any cradle full of noisy, foulmouthed, beedi-smoking Punjabi decorators on my frontage,” he concurred. (The construction workers had, mercifully, done their work and left; only the characteristic din of the city street remained. Even this racket, however, seemed more muted than before.)
Her friends, the vampire stoop troop, were also unveiled by her for Solanka’s benefit, becoming a little more than mere attitudes. She had worked on them, too, and was proud of her—of their—achievements. “It took time—they actually liked their schoolboy eyewear and ugh corduroy. But now I am privileged to lead the most fashion-forward geek posse in New York, and when I say geek, Professor, I mean genius. These kids are the coolest, and when I say cool I mean hot. The Filipino who sent out the I Love You virus? Forget it. That was amateur night; this is major league. If these babies wanted to hit Gates with a virus, you can bet he’d sneeze for years. You see before you the kind of surfer boys and girls the Evil Emperor is really scared of, disguised as Gen X slackers for their own safety, to conceal them from the Empire’s Darths, Vader the Black and Maul the Red ‘n’ Horny. Or, right, you don’t like Star Wars, so then these are like hobbits I’m hiding from Sauron the Dark Lord and his Ringwraiths. Frodo, Bilbo, Sam Gamgee, the whole Fellowship of the Ring. Until the time comes and we take him down and burn his power in Mount Doom. Don’t think I’m kidding. Why should Gates fear the competitors he has, he’s beaten them already: they’re just serfs. He’s got them cold. What gives him nightmares is that some kid will come out of a cold-water walk-up someplace with the next big thing, the thing that makes him yesterday’s papers. Obsolete. That’s why he keeps buying people like us out, he’s ready to lose a few million now so that he won’t lose his billions tomorrow. Yeah, I’m with the law courts, tear that palace down, break it in half, can’t happen too soon for me. But in the meanwhile we’ve got big plans of our own. Me? Call me Yoda. Backwards I speak. Upside down I think. Inside out can I turn you. Strong with you think you the Force is? Strongest in me it moves. Seriously,” she concluded, dropping the rubber-puppet voice, “I’m just management. And at this point sales and marketing and publicity also. Keep it lean and mean, right? What you call my vampires? They’re the creative artists. Webspyder.net. We’re designing sites right now for Steve Martin, Al Pacino, Melissa Etheridge, Warren Beatty, Christina Ricci, and Will Smith. Yeah. And Dennis Rodman. And Marion Jones and Christina Aguilera and Jennifer Lopez and Todd Solondz and ’N Sync. Big business? We’re in there. Con Ed, Verizon, British Telecom, Nokia, Canal Plus, if it’s in communication, we’re in communication wit’ it. You want highbrow? These are the guys whose phones’re ringing off the hook from like Robert Wilson and the Thalia Theater of Hamburg and Robert Lepage. I’m telling you: they’re out there. It’s frontier law today, Professor, and this here’s the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. Butch, Sundance, the whole Wild Bunch. Me, I play house mother. And run the front of house.”
So he had misjudged them, and they were whiz kids; except for Eddie. They were the storm troopers of the technologized future about which he had such profound misgivings; except, again, for Eddie. But then Eddie Ford had been Mila’s most ambitious project “until you came along. Also,” she said, “you and Eddie have more in common than you think.”
Eddie had a throwing arm that had brought him far from his origins in Nowheresville, all the way to Columbia, in fact, all the way to Mila Milo’s bed, one of the most sought after pieces of real estate in Manhattan; but in the end it doesn’t matter how far you can throw the football. You can’t throw away the past, and in that past, back home in Nowheresville, Nix., Eddie’s young life had been freighted with tragedy. The characters were sketched out for Solanka by Mila, whose solemnity imbued them with something close to Greek stature. Here was Eddie’s Uncle Raymond, the hero back from Vietnam, who skulked for years in a Unabomberish cottage in the pine-wooded mountains above town, believing himself unfit for human company on account of his damaged soul. Ray Ford was prone to violent rages, which could be triggered even in those remote altitudes by a backfiring truck in the valley below, a falling tree, or birdsong. And here was Ray’s “snake skunk weasel” of a brother, Eddie’s mechanic father, Tobe, cheap cardplayer, cheaper drunk, an asshole whose act of betrayal would cripple all their lives. And here finally was Eddie’s mom, Judy Carver, who in those days hadn’t started keeping company with Santa and Jesus and who out of the goodness of her heart had gone up into the mountains every week since the early seventies, until, fifteen years later, when little Eddie was ten years old, she coaxed the mountain man down into town.
Eddie was in awe of his shaggy, odorous uncle, and more than a little afraid of him; yet his childhood trips up to Ray’s place were the highlights of his life experience and formed his most vivid memories, “better than the movies,” he said. (Judy had started taking him along after his fifth birthday, hoping to tempt Ray back into the world by showing him the future, trusting in Eddie’s good nature to win the wild man’s heart.) On their way up the mountain Judy would sing old Arlo Guthrie songs and young Eddie would sing right along: “It was late last night the other day, I thought I’d go up and see Ray, So I went up and I saw Ray, There was only one thing Ray could say, was, I don’t want a pickle, Just want to ride on my motorsickle …” But this Ray wasn’t that Ray. This Ray didn’t own a Harley hog and there wasn’t no Alice with or without a restaurant. This Ray lived on beans and roots and probably bugs and germs, Eddie reckoned, and on snakes caught in his bare hands and eagles pulled out of the sky. This Ray was gimpy and had teeth like rotting wood and breath that could knock you flat at a dozen paces. And yet this was the Ray in whom Judy Carver Ford could still see the sweet boy who went to war, the
boy who could twist the silver paper inside cigarette packs into freestanding human figures and whittle pine into portraits of girls, which he’d give them in return for a kiss. (Dolls, Malik Solanka marveled. No escape from their old voodoo. Here was another goddamn dollmaker’s tale. And another sanyasi, too. That was what Mila had meant. A truer sanyasi than I, his withdrawal from society made in proper ascetic fashion. But like me in that he wanted to lose himself because of his fear of what lay beneath, what might bubble up at any moment and lay waste to the undeserving world.) Judy had once kissed Raymond herself, before making her bad mistake and settling for Tobe, whose bad back saved him from the draft, from whose bad character nobody could save her; except, she thought, Ray. If Ray came down from his fastness maybe that would be a sign, and things would change, and the brothers could go fishing and bowling, and Tobe would clean up his act, and then maybe she’d get some peace. And at long last Ray Ford did come, scrubbed and shaved and wearing a clean shirt, so spruced up that Eddie didn’t recognize him when he walked through the door. Judy had made her signature celebration dinner, the same feast of meatloaf and tuna that she afterward offered to Messrs. Christmas and Christ, and for a while there everything went well; not too much talking, but that was okay, everybody was getting used to being in the house with everybody else.
Over ice cream, Uncle Ray spoke up. Judy hadn’t been the only woman to visit him up in the woods. “There’s been somebody else,” he said, with difficulty. “Woman name of Hatty, Carole Hatty, knows there’s a few of us scattered about them woods, and from the goodness of her heart she come up to visit with us ’n bring clothes ’n pie ’n stuff, even though there’s mad bastards up there’d take an ax to anythin’ came within ten feet, man, woman, child, or rabid dog.” As he talked about the woman, Uncle Ray began to color and shift in his seat. Judy said, “She important to you, Raymond? You want us to ask her over?” Whereupon the snake skunk weasel across the kitchen table began to slap his thigh and laugh, a loud drunk snake skunk weasel traitor’s laugh, he laughed till he cried, then jumped up, knocking over his chair, and said, “Oo, Carole Hatty. Carole Easy-Over from the Big Dipper Diner on Hopper Street? That Carole Hatty? Woo. Man, I never knowed she need so much sugar she come up your way lookin’ for more. Hell, Ray, you been outa touch. Us boys, we bin bangin’ li’l Carole regular, since she was fifteen years old and beggin’.” Now Ray looked over at little Eddie, a horrible empty look, and even at ten Eddie could understand its meaning, could feel how deeply his Uncle Ray had been stabbed in the back, because Raymond Ford in his own way had been saying that he had come down from his hilltop redoubt not only for the love of family—the love of Eddie, the look said—but also for what he thought of as a good woman’s love; after the long angry years he had come in the hope of having his heart healed by these things, and what Tobe Ford had done was to puncture both those balloons, to stab him twice in the heart with a single blow.
Well, the big man stood up himself after Tobe finished talking and Judy started shrieking at both of them and trying to get Eddie behind her at the same time because the snake skunk weasel her husband had a small pistol in his hand and it was pointed at his brother’s heart. “Now, then, Raymond,” said old Tobe, grinning, “let’s be rememberin’ what the good book say on the subject of brotherly love.” Ray Ford walked out of the house and Judy was so scared she started singing “Late last night I heard the screen door slam,” and at that Tobe left too, saying he didn’t have to take the crap being handed down around here, she could take her attitude and stick it where the sun don’t shine, you hear me, Jude? Don’t judge me, bitch, you’re only my fuckin’ wife, and if you don’t care for your husband’s remarks, why don’t you just go suck old loony Raymond’s dick. Tobe went out to play cards over at the Corrigan body shop, where he worked, and before morning came, Carole Hatty had been found in an alley with a broken neck, dead, and Raymond Ford was in the junkyard full of rusting autos at the back of the Corrigan lot, with a single gunshot wound in his heart and no sign of a weapon anywhere. That was when the snake skunk weasel took off, just never came home from the card game, and even though the word on Tobias Ford, armed and dangerous, was put out in five states, nobody ever found a trace of him. Eddie’s mother was of the opinion that the bastard had really been a snake in disguise all along, and after what he’d done he simply slipped out of his human skin, just shucked it off and it crumbled to dust the moment he let it go, and one more snake wouldn’t get any attention around Nowheresville, where the houses of the Lord were full of rattlers and diamondbacks and those were just the ministers. Let him go, she said, if I’d a knowed I was marryin’ a serpent I’d a drunk poison before sayin’ my Christian vows.
Judy took comfort in her growing collection of quarts of Jack and Jim, but after what happened had happened, Eddie Ford just clammed up, hardly spoke twenty words a day. Like his uncle, but without leaving town, he had sequestered himself from the world, had locked himself away inside his own body, and as he grew he concentrated all the immense energies of that newly puissant frame on throwing the football, throwing it harder and faster than a football had ever been thrown in Nowheresville, as if by hurling it clean into outer space he could save himself from the curse of his blood, as if a touchdown pass were the same thing as freedom. And finally he threw himself as far as Mila, who rescued him from his demons, coaxing him out of his internal exile, taking for her own pleasure the beautiful body that he had made his prison cell and in return giving him back companionship, community, the world.
Everywhere you looked, thought Professor Malik Solanka, the fury was in the air. Everywhere you listened you heard the beating of the dark goddesses’ wings. Tisiphone, Alecto, Megaera: the ancient Greeks were so afraid of these, their most ferocious deities, that they didn’t even dare to speak their real name. To use that name, Erinnyes, Furies, might very well be to call down upon yourself those ladies’ lethal wrath. Therefore, and with deep irony, they called the enraged trinity “the good-tempered ones”: Eumenides. The euphemistic name did not, alas, result in much of an improvement in the goddesses’ permanent bad mood.
• • •
At first he tried to resist thinking of Mila as Little Brain come alive: and not Little Brain the hollow media re-creation at that, not Little Brain the traitress, the lobotomized baby doll of Brain Street and beyond, but her forgotten original, the lost L.B. of his first imagining, the star of Adventures with Little Brain. At first he told himself it would be wrong to do this to Mila, to dollify her thus, but then—he argued back against himself—had she not done it to herself, had she not by her own admission made early-period Little Brain her model and inspiration? Was she not quite plainly presenting herself to him in the role of the True One he had lost? She was, he now knew, a very bright young woman indeed; she must have foreseen how her performance would be received. Yes! Deliberately, to save him, she was offering him that mystery which—she had somehow divined—would answer his deepest, though never articulated, need. Shyly, then, Solanka began to allow himself to see her as his creation, given life by some unlooked-for miracle and caring for him, now, as might the daughter he’d never had. Then a slip of the tongue let out his secret, but Mila seemed not at all put out. Instead she smiled a private little smile—a smile that, Solanka was obliged to concede, was full of a strange erotic pleasure, in which there was something of the patient angler’s satisfaction at the bait being finally taken, and something, too, of the prompter’s hidden joy when a much repeated cue is picked up at the last—and, instead of correcting him, she replied as if he had used her right name and not the doll’s. Malik Solanka flushed hotly, overcome by an almost incestuous shame, and stammeringly tried to apologize; whereupon she came up close, until her breasts moved against his shirt and he could feel the breath from her lips brushing against his, and murmured, “Professor, call me whatever you like. If it makes you feel good, please know that it’s good with me.” So they sank daily deeper into fantasy. Alone in his apartment in th
e rainy afternoons of that ruined summer, they played out their little father-and-daughter game. Mila Milo began quite deliberately to be the doll for him, to dress more and more precisely in the doll’s original sartorial image and to act out for a much-aroused Solanka a series of scenarios derived from the early shows. He might play the part of Machiavelli, Marx, or, most often, Galileo, while she would be, oh, exactly what he wanted her to be; would sit by his chair and press his feet while he delivered himself of the wisdom of the great sages of the world; and after a little time at his feet, she might move up to his aching lap, though they would make sure, without a word being said, that a plump cushion was always placed between her body and his, so that if he, who had sworn to lie with no woman, responded to her presence there as might another, less forsworn man, then she need never know it, they need never mention it, and he need never be obliged to admit the occasional spilling weakness of his body. Like Gandhi performing his brahmacharya “experiments with truth,” when the wives of his friends lay with him at night to enable him to test the mastery of mind over limb, he preserved the outward form of high propriety; and so did she, so did she.
10
Asmaan twisted in him like a knife: Asmaan in the morning, proud of performing his natural functions to a high standard before an applauding—if unashamedly biased—audience of two. Asmaan in his daytime incarnations as motorbike rider, tent dweller, sandbox emperor, good eater, bad eater, singing star, star having tantrums, fireman, spaceman, Batman. Asmaan after dinner, in his one permitted video hour, watching endless reruns of Disney movies. Robin Hood was popular, with its absurd “Notting Ham,” which featured a singing C&W rooster, cheap rip-offs of Baloo and Kaa from The Jungle Book, unadulterated American accents all over Sherwood Forest, and the frequently uttered, if previously little known, Disney Olde Englishe cry of “Oode-lally!” Toy Story, however, was banned. “It’s got a stary boy in it.” Stary was scary, and the boy was frightening because he treated his toys badly. This betrayal of love terrified Asmaan. He identified with the toys, not their owner. The toys were like the boy’s children, and his maltreatment of them was, in Asmaan’s three-year-old moral universe, a crime too hideous to contemplate. (As was death. In Asmaan’s revisionist reading of Peter Pan, Captain Hook escaped the crocodile every time.) And after video-Asmaan came evening-Asmaan, Asmaan in the bath suffering Eleanor to brush his teeth and announcing preemptively, “We’re not washing my hair today.” Asmaan, finally, going to sleep holding his father’s hand.
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