Fury

by Salman Rushdie

  “I see what you mean.” Mila Milo nodded when he was done, and returned to his side, in an unexpected and overwhelming escalation of their end-of-afternoon routine, to remove the red velvet cushion from his helpless lap.

  That evening, encouraged by whispering Mila, he returned with new fire to his old craft. There’s so much inside you, waiting, she had said. I can feel it, you’re bursting with it. Here, here. Put it into your work, Papi. The furia. Okay? Make sad dolls if you’re sad, mad dolls if you’re mad. Professor Solankas new badass dolls. We need a tribe of dolls like that. Dolls that say something. You can do it. I know you can, because you made Little Brain. Make me dolls that come from her neighborhood—from that wild place in your heart. The place that isn’t a little middle-aged guy under a pile of old clothes. This place. The place for me. Blow me away, Papi. Make me forget her! Make adult dolls, R-rated, NC-17 dolls. I’m not a kid anymore, right? Make me dolls I want to play with now.

  He understood at last what Mila did for her webspyders other than dress them more fashionably than they could manage for themselves. The word “muse” was attached sooner or later to almost all beautiful women seen with gifted men, and no self-respecting, Chinese fan-twirling leader of fashion would currently be seen dead without one, but most such women were more amusement than muse. The true muse was a treasure beyond price, and Mila, Solanka discovered, was capable of being genuinely inspiring. Just moments after her potent urgings, Solanka’s ideas, so long congealed and dammed, began to burn and flow. He went out shopping and came home with crayons, paper, clay, wood, knives. Now his days would be full, and most of his nights as well. Now, when he awoke fully dressed, the street smell would not be on his clothes, nor would the odor of strong drink foul his breath. He would awake at his workbench with the tools of his trade in his hand. New figurines would be watching him through mischievous, glittering eyes. A new world was forming in him, and he had Mila to thank for the divine afflatus: the breath of life.

  Joy and relief coursed through him in long uncontrollable shudders. Like that other shudder at the end of Mila’s last visit, when the cushion came off his lap. The ending he had waited for like the addict he had become. Inspiration also soothed another, growing trouble in him. He had begun to entertain fears about Mila, to hypothesize a great, dangerous selfishness in her, an overarching ambition that made her see others, himself included, as mere stepping-stones on her own journey to the stars. Did those brilliant boys really need her? Solanka had begun to wonder. (And came close to the next question: Do I2) He had glimpsed a possible new incarnation of his living doll—in which Mila was Circe, and at her feet sat her oinking swine—but now he pushed that dark vision aside; also its even more ferocious companion, the vision of Mila as Fury, as Tisiphone, Alecto, or Megaera come down to earth in a cloak of sumptuous flesh. Mila had justified herself. She had provided the spur that had sent him back to work.

  On the cover of a leather-bound notebook he scribbled the words “Professor Kronos’s Amazing No-Strings Puppet Kings.” And then added: “Or, Revolt of the Living Dolls.” And then, “Or, Lives of the Puppet Caesars.” Then he crossed out everything except the two words “Puppet Kings,” opened the notebook, and in a great rush began to write the back-story of the demented genius who would be his antihero.

  Akasz Kronos, the great, amoral cyberneticist of the Rijk, he began, created the Puppet Kings in response to the terminal crisis of the Rijk civilization, but, on account of the deep and unimprovable flaw in his character that made him unable to consider the issue of the general good, intended them to guarantee nobody’s survival or fortune but his own.

  Jack Rhinehart rang the next afternoon, sounding wired. “Malik, wassup. You still living like a guru in an ice cave? Or a castaway on BigBrother Is Not Watching You? Or does news from the outside world still reach you from time to time.—You heard the one about the Buddhist monk in the bar? He goes up to the Tom Cruise clone with the cocktail shaker and says, ‘Make me one with everything.’—Listen: you know a broad by the name of Lear? Claims to have been your wife. Seems to me nobody deserves as much bad luck as being married to that honey. She’s like one hundred and ten years old, and ornery as a cut snake. Oh, and on the subject of wives? I’m divorced. It turned out to be easy. I just gave her everything.”

  Everything really was everything, he amplified: the cottage in the Springs, the fabled wine shack, and several hundreds of thousands of dollars. “And this is all right with you?” Solanka asked, astonished. “Yeah, yeah,” Rhinehart gabbled. “You should have seen Bronnie. Jaw on the floor. Grabbed the offer so fast I thought she’d herniate. So, can you believe it, she’s gone. She’s toast. It’s Neela, man. I don’t know how to say this, but she eased something in me. She made it all okay.” His voice became boyish-conspiratorial. “Have you ever seen anyone actually stop traffic? I mean one hundred percent without question arrest the motion of motor vehicles just by being around? She has that power. She climbs out of a cab and five cars and two fire trucks screech to a halt. Also, walking into lampposts. I never believed it happened outside of Mack Sennett slapstick two-reelers. Now I see guys do it every day. Sometimes, in restaurants,” Rhinehart confided, bubbling with glee, “I’d ask her to walk to the women’s room and back, just so I could watch the men at the other tables get whiplash injuries. Can you imagine, Malik, my regrettably celibate friend, what it was like to be with that? I mean, every night?”

  “You always did have an ugly turn of phrase,” Solanka said, wincing. He changed the subject. “About Sara? Talk about rising from the grave. What cemetery did you find her in?” “Oh, the usual,” Rhinehart replied tightly. “Southampton.” His ex-wife, Solanka learned, had at the age of fifty married one of the richest men in America, the cattle-feed tycoon Lester Schofield III, now aged ninety-two, and on her recent, fifty-seventh, birthday had instituted divorce proceedings on the grounds of Schofield’s adultery with Ondine, a Brazilian runway model of twenty-three. “Schofield made his billions by working out that what’s left of a grape after making grape juice would make a great dinner for a cow,” Rhinehart said, and moved into his most exaggerated Uncle Remus manner. “And now yo’ ole lady she done had de same idea. She puttin’ de big squeeze on him, I reckon. Gwine en’ up bein’ dat well-fed heifer hersel’.” All over the Eastern seaboard, it seemed, the young were climbing onto the laps of the old, offering the dying the poisoned chalice of themselves and causing nine kinds of havoc. Marriages and fortunes were foundering daily on these young rocks. “Miz Sara gave an interview,” Rhinehart told Solanka, much too merrily, “in which she announced her intention of chopping up her husband into three equal parts, planting one on each of his major properties, and then spending a third of the year with each, to express her appreciation for his love. You lucky to ‘scape old Sara when you were po’, boy. Dat Bride of Wildenstein? Dat Miz Patricia Duff? Dey doan’ even come close in de Divo’ce Tympics. Dis lady get de gol’ medal, she’ nuff. Perfesser, she done read her Shakespeare. “There were rumors that the whole thing was a cynical sting operation—that, in short, Sara Lear Schofield had put the Brazilian swan up to it—but no proof of any such conspiracy had been found.

  What was the matter with Rhinehart? If he was as deeply satisfied as he claimed, both with his own divorce and with 1’afaire Neela, why was he veering at such breakneck speed between sexual crudity—which, in fact, was very much not his usual style—and this clumsy Sara Lear material? “Jack,” Solanka asked his friend, “you really are okay, right? Because if…” “I’m fine,” Jack interrupted in his most stretched, brittle voice. “Hey, Malik? Dis here’s Br’er Jack, girlfrien’. Bawn an’ bred in a briar patch. Chill.”

  Neela Mahendra called an hour later. “Do you remember? We met during that football game. The Dutch thrashing Serbia.” “They still call it Yugoslavia in football circles,” Solanka said, “on account of Montenegro. But yes, of course I remember. You’re not that easy to forget.” She didn’t even acknowledge the compliment,
receiving such flattery as a minimum: her merest due. “Can we meet? It’s about Jack. I need to talk to someone. It’s important.” She meant immediately, was used to men abandoning, when she beckoned, whatever plans they had made. “I’m across the park from you,” she said. “Can we meet outside the Metropolitan Museum in let’s say half an hour?” Solanka, already worried about his friend’s well-being, more worried as a result of this phone call, and—yes, very well!—unable to resist the summons from gorgeous Neela, got up to go, even though these had become his day’s most precious hours: Mila’s time. He put on a light overcoat—it was a dry but overcast and unseasonably cool day—and opened the apartment’s front door. Mila stood there with his spare key in her hand. “Oh,” she said, seeing the coat. “Oh. Okay.” In that first instant, when she’d been taken by surprise, before she had time to gather herself, he glimpsed her face naked, so to speak. What was there, without question, was disappointed hunger. The vulpine hunger of an animal denied its—he tried not to think the word, but it forced its way in—its prey.

  “I’ll be back soon,” he said lamely, but she had recovered her composure now, and shrugged. “No big deal.” They went through the outside door of the building together and he walked rapidly away from her, toward Columbus Avenue, not looking around, knowing that she’d be with Eddie on the neighboring stoop, angrily sticking a thirsty tongue down his bemused, delighted throat. There were posters everywhere for The Cell, the new Jennifer Lopez movie. In it, Lopez was miniaturized and injected into the brain of a serial killer. It sounded like a remake of Fantastic Voyage, starring Raquel Welch, but so what? Nobody remembered the original. Everything’s a copy, an echo of the past, thought Professor Solanka. A song for Jennifer: We’re living in a retro world and I am a retrograde girl.

  11

  “In the future, sure theen’, they don’t listen no more to this type talk radio. Or, jou know wha’ I theen’? Porhap’ the radio weel listen to ass. We’ll be like the entortainmon’ and the machines weel be the audien’, an’ own the station, and we all like work for them. —”Yo, listen up. Dunno what jive sci-fi crap of Speedy Gonzalez there was handin’ out. Sound to me like he rent The Matrix too many times. Where I’m sittin’ the future plain ain’t arrive. Ever’thin’ look the same. I mean the exact same shinola goin’ down all over. Ever’body in the same accommodation, gettin the same education, doin’ the same recreation, looknn’ for the same… ploymentation. Check it out. We gettin’ the same bills, datin’ the same girls, goin’ to the same jails; gettin’ paid bad, laid bad’n made bad, am I right? That would be cor-recto, sefior. And my radio? It come wit’ a on-off switch, daddy-o, and I turn that sucker off anytime I choose. =“Boy, does he don’ get eet. That guy jus’ now, he dori get eet so bad he won’t see eet comin’ till eet sittin’ on his face. Jon better wise up, hermano. They got machine now eat food for fuel, jou hear that? No more gasoline. Eat human food like jou an’ me. Pizza, chili dog, tuna melt, whatev’. Pretty soon Mr. Machine gonna be takin’ a table in a restauran’. Gonna be, like, gimme the bes’ booth. Now jou tell me what’s the differen’? If eet eatin’, eet alive, I say. The future here, man, right now, jou better watch jou butt. Pretty soon Mr. Live Machine gonna be comin’ for that employmentation jou talkin’ ‘bout, maybe for jour pretty girlfrien’ too…… “Hey, hey, my paranoid Latino friend, Ricky Ricardo, I missed the name, but slow down, Desi, okay? This here’s not that communist Cuba you escaped from in yo’ rubber boat an’ got sanctuary in the land of the free…” “Don’ insul’ me, please, now. I’m sayin’ please, because I was raise polite, no? The brother here, how he’s call, Senor Cleef Hoxtaboo’ or Mr. No Good from the ‘Hood, maybe bees mother never tol’ heem right, but we goin’ out live on air here, we talkin’ to the whole metro region, less keep eet clean.”—“Can I get in here? Excuse me? I’m listening to all this?, and I’m thinking, they have electronically generated TV presenters now?, and there’s dead actors selling motor vehicles?, Steve McQueen in that car?, so I’m more with our Cuban friend?, the technology scares me? And so in the future?, like, will anyone even be thinking about our like needs? I’m an actress?, I work mainly in commercials?, and there’s this big SAG strike?, and for months now I can’t earn a dollar?, and it doesrit stop one single spot going on air?, because they can get Lara Croft?, Jar Jar Binks?, they can get Gable or Bogey or Marilyn or Max Headroom or HAL from 2001?”—“I’m going to interrupt, ma’am, because we’re out of time and this is something I know a lot of people feel strongly about. Can’t blame cutting-edge technological innovation for the fix your union’s got you in. You chose socialism, union made your bed, now you’re lying in it. My personal take on the future? You can’t turn back the clock, so go with the flow and ride the tide. Be the new thing. Seize the day. From sea to shining sea.”

  Sitting on the steps of the great museum, caught in a sudden burst of slanting, golden afternoon sunlight, scanning the Times while he waited for Neela, Professor Malik Solanka felt more than ever like a refugee in a small boat, caught between surging tides: reason and unreason, war and peace, the future and the past. Or like a boy in a rubber ring who watched his mother slip under the black water and drown. And after the terror and the thirst and the sunburn there was the noise, the incessant adversarial buzz of voices on a taxi driver’s radio, drowning his own inner voice, making thought impossible, or choice, or peace. How to defeat the demons of the past when the demons of the future were all around him in full cry? The past was rising up; it could not be denied. As well as Sara Lear, here in the TV listings was Krysztof Waterford-Wajda’s little Ms. Pinch-ass back from the dead. Perry Pincus—she must be, what, forty by now—had written a tell-all book about her years as the eggheads’ premier groupie, Men with Pens, and Charlie Rose was talking to her about it this very night. Oh poor Dubdub, Malik Solanka thought. This is the girl you wanted to settle down with, and now she’s going to dance on your grave. If tonight it’s Charlie “Tell me what sort of qualms this project gave you, Perry; as an intellectual yourself, you must have had serious misgivings. Say how you overcame those scruples”—then tomorrow it’ll be Howard Stern: “Chicks dig writers. But then, a lot of writers dug this chick.” Halloween, Walpurgisnacht, did indeed seem to be early this year. The witches were gathering for their sabbat.

  Yet another story was being half told behind his back; another stranger’s fairy tale of the city poured into his defenseless ear. “Yeah, it went great, honey. No, no problems, I’m en route to the trustees’ meeting, that’s why I’m calling you on my cell. Conscious all the time, but doped-up, sure. So, semiconscious. Yeah, the knife comes right at your eyeball, but the chemical assistance makes you think it’s a feather. No, no bruising, and let me tell you it’s amazing what my visual world now contains. Amazing grace, yeah, good one. Was blind but now I see. Really. Look at all this stuff out here. I’ve been missing so much. Well, think about it. He really is the laser king. I asked around a lot as you know and the same name kept coming up. A little dryness is all, but that goes away in a few weeks, he says. Okay, love ya. I’ll be home late. What can you do. Don’t wait up.” And of course he turned around, of course he saw that the young woman was not alone, a man was nuzzling at her even as she flipped her cell phone shut. She, gladly allowing herself to be nuzzled, met Solanka’s eye; and, seeing herself caught in her lie, beamed guiltily, and shrugged. What can you do, as she had said on the phone. The heart has its reasons, and we are all the servants of love.

  Twenty minutes to ten in London. Asmaan would be asleep. Five and a half hours later in India. Turn the watch upside down in London and you got the time in the town of Malik Solanka’s birth, the Forbidden City by the Arabian Sea. That, too, was coming back. The thought filled him with dread: of what, driven by his long-sealed-away fury, he might become. Even after all these years it defined him, had not lost any of its power over him. And if he finished the sentences of that untold tale?… That question must be for another day. He shook his head. Neela was late.
Solanka put down his newspaper, pulled a piece of wood and a Swiss Army knife out of an overcoat pocket, and began, with complete absorption, to whittle.

  “Who is he?” Neela Mahendra’s shadow fell across him. The sun was behind her, and in silhouette she looked even taller than he remembered. “He’s an artist,” Solanka replied. “The most dangerous man in the world.” She dusted off a spot on the museum steps and sat down beside him. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “I know a lot of dangerous men, and none of them ever created a credible work of art. Also, trust me, not a single one of them was made of wood.” They sat there in silence for a while, he whittling, she simply still, offering the world the gift of her being in it. Afterward Malik Solanka, remembering their first moments alone together, would dwell particularly on the silence and stillness, on how easy that had been. “I fell in love with you when you weren’t saying a word,” he told her. “How was I to know you were the most talkative woman on earth? I know a lot of talkative women and, trust me, compared to you, every single one of them was made of wood.”

  After a few minutes he put the half-finished figure away and apologized for being so distracted. “No apology required,” she said. “Work is work.” They got up to make their way down the great flight of steps toward the park, and as she rose, a man slipped on the step above her and rolled heavily and painfully down a dozen or more steps, narrowly missing Neela on his way down; his fall was broken by a group of schoolgirls sitting screaming in his way. Professor Solanka recognized the man as the one who had been necking so enthusiastically with the mobile-phone prevaricator. He looked around for Ms. Cell Phone, and after a moment spotted her storming off uptown on foot, hailing off-duty cabs that ignored her angry arm.