What was true of him, he found himself thinking once again, might also be true to some degree of everyone. The whole world was burning on a shorter fuse. There was a knife twisting in every gut, a scourge for every back. We were all grievously provoked. Explosions were heard on every side. Human life was now lived in the moment before the fury, when the anger grew, or the moment during—the fury’s hour, the time of the beast set free—or in the ruined aftermath of a great violence, when the fury ebbed and chaos abated, until the tide began, once again, to turn. Craters—in cities, in deserts, in nations, in the heart—had become commonplace. People snarled and cowered in the rubble of their own misdeeds.
In spite of all Mila Milo’s ministrations (or, often, because of them) Professor Solanka still needed, on his frequent insomniac nights, to still his boiling thoughts by walking the city streets for hours, even in the rain. They were digging up Amsterdam Avenue, the sidewalk as well as the pavement, just a couple of blocks away (some days it seemed as if they were digging up the whole town), and one night as he was out walking through a medium to heavy downpour past the untidily fenced off hole he stubbed his toe on something and burst into a three-minute tirade of invective, at the end of which an admiring voice came from beneath an oilcloth in a doorway, “Man, sure learned some new vocabulary tonight.” Solanka looked down to see what had bruised his foot, and there, lying on the sidewalk, was a broken lump of concrete paving stone; upon seeing which he broke into an ungainly limping run, fleeing that concrete lump like a guilty man leaving the scene of a crime.
Ever since the investigation of the three society killings had focused on the three rich boys, he had felt lighter of spirit, but in his heart of hearts he had not yet fully exonerated himself. He followed reports of the investigation with care. There had still been no arrests and no confessions, and the news media were growing restive; the possibility of an upper-crust serial killer was juicily enticing, and the N.Y.P.D.’s failure to crack the case was all the more frustrating as a result. Give those swanky no-goodniks the third degree! One of them must break! An unappetizing lynch-mob atmosphere was generated by this kind of speculative commentary, of which there was much to be found. Solanka’s attention was captured by the one possible new lead. Mr. Panama Hat had been replaced in the unsolved mystery’s dramatis personae by an even stranger group of characters. People in fancy-dress Disney costumes had been sighted near each of the three murder scenes: a Goofy near Lauren Klein’s corpse, a Buzz Lightyear near the body of Belinda Booken Candell, and where Saskia Schuyler lay a passerby had spotted a red fox in Lincoln green: Robin Hood himself, tormentor of the bad old Sheriff of Notting Ham, and now also eluding the Sheriffs of Manhattan. Oo-de-lally! Detectives admitted that a significant connection between the three sightings was impossible to establish for sure, but the coincidence was certainly striking—Halloween being many months away—and they were keeping it very much in mind.
In the minds of children, Solanka thought, the creatures of the imagined world—characters from books or videos or songs—actually felt more solidly real than did most living people, parents excepted. As we grew, the balance shifted and fiction was relegated to the separate reality, the world apart in which we were taught that it belonged. Yet here was macabre proof of fiction’s ability to cross that supposedly impermeable frontier. Asmans world—Disney World—was trespassing in New York and murdering the city’s young women. And one or more very scary boys were concealed somewhere in this video, too.
At least there had been no more Concrete Killer murders for a while. Also, and for this Solanka did give Mila credit, he was drinking a good deal less, and as a result there had been no more amnesiac stupors: he no longer woke up in his street clothes with terrible unanswerable questions in his aching head. There were even moments when, as he fell under Mila’s spell, he had come close, for the first time in months, to something very like happiness. And yet the dark goddesses still hovered over him, dripping their malevolence into his heart. While Mila was with him, in that wood-paneled space in which, even when thunderstorms darkened the sky, they no longer troubled to switch on any electric lights, he was held within the magic circle of her charm; but as soon as she left, the noises in his head began again. The murmuring, the beating of black wings. After his first dawn phone conversation with Asmaan and Eleanor, as the knife twisted in him, the murmurs turned for the first time against Mila, his angel of mercy, his living doll.
This was her face in the half-light, its knife-edge planes moving comfortably against his half-unbuttoned shirt, the short, erect, red-gold hair brushing the underside of his chin. The reenactments of old TV shows had stopped, a pretense whose purpose had been served. These days, in the slow darkened afternoons, they barely spoke, and when they did, it was no longer of philosophy. Sometimes for an instant her tongue lapped at his breast. Everybody needs a doll to play with, she whispered. Professor, you poor angry man, it’s been so long. Shh, there’s no hurry, take your time, I’m not going anywhere, nobody’s going to disturb us, I’m here for you. Let it go. You don’t need it anymore, all that rage. You just need to remember how to play. These were her long fingers, with their blood-red nails, finding their way, by the smallest of daily increments, further inside his shirt.
Her physical memory was extraordinary. Each time she visited him, she could take up exactly the position on his cushioned lap that she had reached at the end of her last visit. The placing of her head and hands, the tightness with which her body curled into itself, the exact weight with which she leaned against him: her high-precision remembering, and infinitesimal adjustment, of these variables were themselves prodigiously arousing sexual acts. For the veils were falling away from their play, as Mila showed Professor Solanka with each (daily more explicit) touch. The effect on Professor Solanka of Mila’s strengthening caresses was electric all right, at his age and in his situation in life he had not looked to receive such benison ever again. Yes, she had turned his head, had set out to do so while pretending to be doing nothing of the sort, and now he was deeply enmeshed in her web. The queen webspyder, mistress of the whole webspyder posse, had him in her net.
Then there was another change. Just as he had let slip a doll’s name, accidentally or under the pressure of a barely conscious desire, so one afternoon she too let a forbidden word pass her lips. At once that shuttered and darkened sitting room had been magically flooded with lurid, revelatory light, and Professor Malik Solanka knew Mila Milo’s backstory. It was always my dad and me, she had said it herself, always him and me against the world. There it was in her own undisguised words. She had laid it right out in front of Solanka and he had been too blind (or too unwilling?) to see what she had so openly and unashamedly shown. But as Solanka looked at her in the aftermath of her “slip of the tongue”—which he was already more than half convinced had been no slip, for this was a woman of formidable self-control, to whom accidents most likely never happened—those sharp and somehow cryptic facial planes, those slanting eyes, that face which was most closed when it looked most open, that wise little private smile, at last revealed their secrets.
Papi, she had said. That treacherous diminutive, that freighted term of endearment meant for a dead man’s ear, had served as the open-sesame to her lightless childhood cave. There sat the widowed poet and his precocious child. There was a cushion on his lap and she, year after year, curling and uncurling, moving against him, kissing dry his tears of shame. This was the heart of her, the daughter who sought to compensate her father for the loss of the woman he loved, no doubt in part to assuage her own loss by clinging to the parent who remained, but also to supplant that woman in this man’s affections, to fill the forbidden, vacated maternal space more frilly than it had been filled by her dead mother, for he must need her, must need living Mila, more than he had ever needed his wife; she would show him new depths of needing, until he wanted her more than he had known he could want any woman’s touch. This father—after his own experience of Mila’s powers, Solanka w
as utterly sure of what had happened—was slowly wooed by his child, seduced millimeter by millimeter into the undiscovered country, toward his never-discovered crime. Here was the great writer, l’ecrivain nobelisable, the conscience of his people, suffering those appallingly knowledgeable little hands to move at the buttons of his shirt, and at some point allowing the unallowable, crossing the frontier from which there can be no return, and beginning, tormentedly but eagerly, too, to participate. Thus was a religious man brought forever into mortal sin, forced by desire to renounce his God and sign the Devil’s treaty, while the burgeoning girl, his demon child, the goblin in the heart of the flower, whispered the vertiginous faith-murdering words that sucked him down: this isn’t happening unless we say it is, and we don’t say it is, do we, Papi, so it’s not. And because nothing was happening, nothing was wrong. The dead poet had entered that world of fantasy where everything is always safe, where the crocodile never catches Hook and a little boy never grows tired of his toys. So Malik Solanka saw his mistress’s real self unveiled, and said, “This is an echo, isn’t it, Mila, a reprise. You sang this song once before.” And immediately, silently corrected himself. No, don’t flatter yourself. Not just once. You are by no means the first.
Shh, she said, laying a finger across his lips. Shh, Papi, no. Nothing happened then and it’s not happening now. Her second use of the incriminating nickname had a new, pleading quality to it. She needed this, needed him to allow it. The spider was caught in her own necrophiliac web, dependent on men like Solanka to raise her lover very, very slowly from the dead. Thank the God who doesn’t exist that I have no daughters, Malik Solanka thought. Then misery choked him. No daughter, and I have also lost my son. Elian the Icon has gone home to Cardenas, Cuba, with his papa but I can’t go home to my boy. Mila’s lips were against his neck now, moving over his Adam’s apple, and he felt a gentle suction. The pain ebbed; and something more, too, was taken. His words were being removed from him. She was drawing them out and swallowing them and he would never be able to say them again, the words describing the thing that was not, that the spider-sorceress in her black majesty would never permit to be.
And what if, Solanka wildly conjectured, she was feeding off his fury? What if she was hungriest for what he feared most, the goblin anger within? For she was driven by fury also, he knew that, by the wild imperative fury of her hidden need. At that moment of revelation Solanka could easily have believed that this beautiful, accursed girl, whose weight was moving with such suggestive languor on his lap, whose fingertips touched his chest hair as faintly as a summer breeze and whose lips were working softly at his throat, might actually be the very incarnation of a Fury, one of the three deadly sisters, the scourges of mankind. Fury was their divine nature and boiling human wrath their favorite food. He could have persuaded himself that behind her low whispers, beneath her unfailingly even tempered tones, he could hear the Erinnyes’ shrieks.
Another page of her back-story revealed itself to him. Here was the poet Milo with his weak heart. This gifted, driven man had ignored all medical advice and continued, with an almost ludicrous excessiveness, to drink, smoke, and womanize. His daughter had offered an explanation of Conradian grandeur for this behavior: life must be lived until it can be lived no more. But as Solanka’s eyes opened he saw a different picture of the poet, a portrait of the artist fleeing into excess from grievous sin, from what he must have daily believed to be his soul’s death, its condemnation for all eternity to the most agonizing circle of Hell. Then came that last journey, Papi Milo’s suicidal flight toward his murderous namesake. This, too, now conveyed to Malik Solanka something other than Mila had made it mean. Fleeing one evil, Milo had gone to face what he thought of as the lesser peril. Escaping the consuming Fury, his daughter, he ran toward his full, unabbreviated name, toward himself. Mila, thought Solanka, you probably drove your maddened father to his death. And what, now, might you have in store for me?
He knew one frightening answer to that. At least one veil still hung between them, over not her story but his. He had known from the first minute of this illicit liaison that he was playing with fire, that everything he had driven deep down within himself was being stirred, the seals were being broken one by one, and that the past, which had almost destroyed him once before, might yet be given a second chance to finish the job. Between this new, unlooked—for story and that old, suppressed tale the unarticulated resonances echoed. This question of dollification. The matter of allowing oneself to be. Of having no choice but. Of the slavery of childhood when. Of need: this one’s that one’s most inexorable. Of the power of doctors to. Of the child’s impotence in the face of. Of the innocence of children in. Of the child’s guilt, its fault, its most grievous fault. Above all the matter of sentences that must never be completed, because to complete them would release the fury, and the crater of that explosion would consume everything at hand.
Oh, weakness, weakness! He still couldn’t refuse her. Even knowing her as he now did, even understanding her true capabilities and intuiting his possible peril, he couldn’t send her away. A mortal who makes love to a goddess is doomed, but once chosen cannot avoid his fate. She continued to visit him, all dolled up, just the way he wanted her, and every day there was progress. The polar ice-cap was melting. Soon the level of the ocean would rise too high and they would surely drown.
When he left the apartment nowadays he felt like an ancient sleeper, rising. Outside, in America, everything was too bright, too loud, too strange. The city had come out in a rash of painfully punning cows. At Lincoln Center Solanka ran into Moozart and Moodama Butterfly. Outside the Beacon Theatre a trio of horned and uddered divas had taken up residence: Whitney Mooston, Mooriah Cowrey, and Bette Midler (the Bovine Miss M). Bewildered by this infestation of paronomasticating livestock, Professor Solanka suddenly felt like a visitor from Lilliput-Blefuscu or the moon or, to be straightforward, London. He was alienated, too, by the postage stamps, by the monthly, rather than quarterly, payment of gas, electricity, and telephone bills, by the unknown brands of candy in the stores (Twinkies, Ho Hos, Ring Pops), by the words “candy” and “stores,” by the armed policemen on the streets, by the anonymous faces in magazines, faces that all Americans somehow recognized at once, by the indecipherable words of popular songs which American ears could apparently make out without strain, by the end-loaded pronunciation of names like Farrar, Harrell, Caudell, by the broadly spoken e’s that turned expression into axprassion, I’ll get the check into Il1gat the check; by, in short, the sheer immensity of his ignorance of the engulfing melee of ordinary American life. Little Brain’s memoirs filled bookstore windows here as well as in Britain, but that brought him no joy. The successful writers of the moment were unknown to him. Eggers, Pilcher: they sounded like they belonged on a restaurant menu, not a bestseller list.
Eddie Ford was often to be seen sitting alone on the neighboring stoop as Professor Solanka returned home—the websypders were evidently busy with their nets—and in the banked fire of the blond centurion’s slow-burn gaze Malik Solanka imagined he saw the belated beginnings of suspicion. Nothing was said between them, however. They nodded at each other briefly and left it at that. Then Malik entered his paneled retreat and waited for his deity to come. He took up his place in the large leather armchair that had become their preferred place of ease and set upon his lap the red velvet cushion with which, thus far, he had continued to protect what remained of his heavily compromised modesty. He closed his eyes and listened to the ticking of the mantelpiece’s antique carriage clock. And at some point Mila came soundlessly in—he had given her a set of keys—and what was to be done, what she insisted was not being done at all, was quietly done.
In that charmed space, during Mila’s visits, almost complete silence remained the norm. There were murmurs and whispers but no more. However, in the last quarter hour or so before she left, after she briskly leapt off his lap, smoothed her dress, and brought them both a glass of cranberry juice or a cup of gree
n tea, and while she adjusted herself for the outside world, Solanka could offer her, if he so desired, his hypotheses on the country whose codes he was trying to unlock.
For example, Professor Solanka’s as-yet-unpublished theory on the differing attitudes toward oral sex in the United States and England this aria being prompted by the president’s inane decision to start apologizing yet again for what he should always have crisply said was nobody else’s business—got a sympathetic hearing from the young woman snuggled down on his lap. “In England,” he explained in his most straitlaced style, “the heterosexual b.j. is almost never offered or received before full, penetrative coitus has taken place, and sometimes not even then. It’s considered a sign of deep intimacy. Also a sexual reward for good behavior. It’s rare. Whereas in America, with your well-established tradition of teenage, ah, ‘makeouts’ in the backs of various iconic automobiles, ‘giving head,’ to use the technical term, precedes ‘full’ missionary-position sex more often than not; indeed, it’s the most common way for young girls to preserve their virginity while keeping their sweethearts satisfied.
“In short, an acceptable alternative to fucking. Thus, when Clinton affirms that he had never had sex with that woman, Moonica, the Bovine Ms. L., everyone in England thinks he’s a pink-faced liar, whereas the whole of teen (and much of pre- and post-teen) America understands that he’s telling the truth, as culturally defined in these United States. Oral sex is precisely not sex. It’s what enables young girls to come home and with their hands on their hearts tell their parentshell, it probably enabled you to tell your father—that you hadn’t ‘done it.’ So Slick Willy, Billy the Clint, has just been parroting what any red-blooded American teenager would have said. Arrested development? Okay, probably so, but this was why the impeachment of the president failed.”
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