“I wondered if I should tell you,” Mila confided, “but then I thought, screw him, the gloves are off.” Dofia Gin was still singing, but the screaming of the Furies momentarily drowned her voice. The hungry goddesses were beating around both their heads, feeding on their rage. The Pincus interview roared in him, and Mila’s expression changed. “Shh,” she said. “Okay, I’m sorry, but will you please stop making that noise? We’ll get thrown out of here and I haven’t even had dessert yet.” It was plain that the roar had escaped into the room. People were looking. The owner-manager, a Raul Julia look-alike, was coming across the room. A glass broke in Malik Solanka’s hand. There was a messy, mingled flow of wine and blood. It became necessary to leave. Bandages were produced, a doctor’s assistance refused, the check was hurriedly brought forward and settled. Outside, it had begun to rain. Mila’s fury abated, trumped by his own. “About the woman on Howard?” she said in the eventual taxi uptown. “She came across as basically an aging nympho playing kiss and tell. You’re an older person, you should know how life is. Loose ends dangling everywhere, and once in a while they snap back and lash you across the face. Let her go. She’s nothing to you, hardly ever was, and with the amount of bad karma she’s storing up, I don’t like her chances. Enough public screaming! Jesus. Sometimes you’re scary. Mostly I think you wouldn’t hurt a fly and then suddenly you’re this Godzilla creature from the black lagoon who looks like he could rip the throat off a Tyrannosaurus Rex. You’ve got to bring that thing under control, Malik. Wherever it’s coming from, you need to send it away.”
“Islam will cleanse your soul of dirty anger,” the taxi driver interrupted, “and reveal to you the holy wrath that moves mountains.” Then he added, switching languages as another car came unacceptably close to his taxicab, “Hey! American man! You are a godless homosexual rapist of your grandmother’s pet goat.” Solanka began to laugh, the dreadful mirthless laughter of release: hard, painful, racking sobs. “Hello again, Beloved Ali,” he coughed. “Good to see you in such top form.”
One week later, Mila somewhat surprisingly called and invited him over .to talk about something else.” Her manner was friendly, businesslike, excited. She had bounced back fast, Solanka marveled, accepting her invitation. It was his first visit to Mila’s tiny fourth-floor walk-up, which, he thought, was trying hard to be an all-American apartment but failing badly: posters of Latrell Sprewell and Serena Williams hung uncomfortably on either side of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves groaning with volumes of Serbian and Eastern European literature in the original, and in French and English translation—Kic, Andris, Pavic, some of the convention-busting Klokotrizans, and, from the classical period, Obradovic and Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic; also Klima, Kadare, Nadas, Konrad, Herbert. There was no picture of her father on display; Solanka noted the significant omission. A framed monochrome photograph of a young woman in a belted floral-print frock smiled broadly at Solanka. Mila’s mother, looking like Milas younger sister. “Look how happy she is,” Mila said. “That was the last summer before she knew she was sick. I’m now the same exact age she was when she passed, so that’s one nightmare less to worry about. I made it across that hurdle. For years I didn’t think I would.” She wanted to belong to this city, this country at this time, but old European demons were screeching in her ears. In one respect, however, Mila was unreservedly of her American generation. The computer workstation was the room’s focal point: the Mac PowerBook, the older desktop Macintosh pushed to the back of the work surface, the scanner, the CD burner, the plug-in audio system, the music sequencer, the backup Zip drive, the manuals, the shelves of CDROMs, DVDs, and much other stuff, which Solanka couldn’t easily identify. Even the bed felt like an afterthought. Certainly he would never know its pleasures. She had brought him up here, he understood, to put all that behind them. It was another example of her system of inverted signs. Her dead father was the most important person in her life; therefore, no picture of Dad was visible. Solanka was now to be no more than the professor next door; ergo, invite him into your bedroom for a cup of coffee.
She had clearly prepared a speech and was in a state of high readiness, buzzing with it. Once he had been given his mug of coffee, the obviously planned olive branch was offered. “Because I’m a superior type of human being,” Mila said, with a trace of the old humor, “because I can rise above personal tragedy and function on a higher plane, and also because I really think you’re great at what you do, I talked to the guys about your new project. The cool science fiction figures you’ve been coming up with: the mad cyberneticist, the drowning planet idea, the cyborgs versus the lotus-eaters from the other side of the world, the fight to the death between the counterfeit and the real. We’d like to come and talk to you about building a site. There’s a whole presentation we have, you can get an idea of what’s possible. To tell you just one thing, they’ve developed a way of compressing video material that gives you close to DVD quality on-line, and within one generation it’ll be at least a match. It’s ahead of anything you’ll get anywhere else. You have no comprehension of the speed of things now, every year is the Stone Age to the year that follows. Just the creative potential, what can be done with an idea now. The best sites are inexhaustible, people come back and back, it’s like a world you’re giving them to belong to. Sure, you have to get the sales and delivery mechanism right, it has to be easy to buy into what you’re offering, and we have a cool pitch on that also. But the point is to make it easy for you. You already have the back-story and the characters. Which we love. Then to keep control of the concept, you’ll need to put together a master handbook, character-development parameters, storyline do’s and don’ts, the laws of your imagined universe. Inside that framework, there are so many brilliant kids who would just love to create all kinds of, you can’t even say it, they’re inventing whole new media every day. If it works, of course, the old media will come running, books, records, TV, movies, musicals, who knows.
“I love these guys. They’re so hungry, they can take an idea and run with it into, like, the fifth dimension, and all you have to do is let them make it happen for you, you’re the absolute monarch, nothing happens if you don’t want it to; you just sit there and go yes, no, yes, yes, no whoa, whoa.” She made calming, pressing gestures with both hands. “Hear me out. Will you for Chrissake hear me out, you owe me that much. Malik, I know how unhappy you were—are—about the whole Little Brain saga. This is me, remember? Malik, I know that. That’s what I’m saying to you here. This time you don’t lose control. This time you have a better vehicle than even existed when you came up with Little Brain, and you drive it, totally. This is your chance to get right what went wrong before, and if it works, let’s not be coy here, the financial upside is very, very strong. We all think this could be huge if it’s done right. On Little Brain, by the way, I don’t one hundred percent agree with your position, because as you know I think she’s great, and things are changing, the whole concept of ownership as far as ideas is so different now, it’s so much more cooperative. You have to be a little more flexible, just a little bit more, okay? Let other people into your magic circle now and then. You’re still the magician, but let everyone else play with the wands sometimes. Little Brain? Let her fly, Malik, let her be what she is. She’s all grown-up now. Let her go. You can still love her. She’s still your child.”
She was on her feet, her fingers flying at the laptop, soliciting its aid. Perspiration beaded her lip. The seventh veil falls away, Solanka thought. Fully clothed as Mila was in her daytime sportswear, she stood naked before him at last. Furia. This was the self she had never fully shown, Mila as Fury, the world-swallower, the self as pure transformative energy. In this incarnation she was simultaneously terrifying and wonderful. He could never resist a woman when she flowed at him this way, letting her riverine abundance overwhelm him. This is what he looked for in women: to be overpowered, outmatched. This Gangetic, Mississippian inexorability, whose dwindling, he sadly knew, was what had gone wrong in his m
arriage. Overwhelming doesn’t last for ever. No matter how astonishing the initial contact, in the end the beloved astonishes us less. She merely whelms and, even further down the road, underwhelms. But to give up on his need for excess, for the immense thing, the thing that made him feel like a surfer in the snow, riding the crest of an avalanche’s leading edge! To say good-bye to that need would also be to accept that he was, in the matter of desire, agreeing to be dead. And when the living agree with themselves to be dead, the dark fury begins. The dark fury of life, refusing to die before its allotted time.
He reached out for Mila. She knocked his arm aside. Her eyes were shining: she had recovered from him already and was resurrected as a queen. “This is what we can be to each other now, Malik. Take it or leave it. If you say no, I don’t want to talk to you ever again. But if you come aboard, we’ll work our butts off for you and there’ll be no hard feelings from me. This new world is my life, Malik, it’s the thing of my time, growing as I grow, learning as I learn, becoming as I become. It’s where I feel most alive. There, inside the electricity. I told you: you need to learn how to play. Serious play, that’s my thing. That’s the heart of what’s happening, and I know how to do it, and if you can give me the material I need to work with, well, baby, for me that’s better than what was waiting under the cushion on your lap. Nice as that was, don’t get me wrong. Nice as that undoubtedly was. Okay, I’m done. Don’t answer. Go home. Think about it. Let us make the full presentation. It’s a big decision. Take it slow. Make it when you’re ready. But make it soon.”
The computer screen burst into life. Images raced toward him like bazaar traders. This was technology as hustler, peddling its wares, Solanka thought; or, as if in a darkened nightclub, gyrating for him. Laptop as lapdancer. The auxiliary sound system poured high-definition noise over him like golden rain. “I don’t need to think about it,” he told her. “Let’s do it. Let’s go.”
14
Eleanor rang, and Solankas emotional bar went up another notch. “You know how to generate love, Malik,” his wife told him. “You just don’t know what to do with it once it’s there.” But still no anger in that mellifluous voice. “I was thinking, it was so wonderful being loved by you. I was missing you, I suppose, so I’m glad I found you in. I see us everywhere I go, isn’t it stupid, I see us having so many good times. Your son is so special. Everyone who sees him thinks so. Morgen thinks he’s the best ever, and you know what Morgen thinks of kids. But he loves Asmaan to bits. Everyone does. And you know, he’s always asking, ‘What would Daddy say? What would Daddy think? ‘You’re very much in his thoughts. And in mine. So I was only wanting to say, both of us are sending you so much love.”
Asmaan took the phone. “I want to talk to Daddy. Hello, Daddy. I’ve got a stuffed-up nose. That’s why I was crying. That’s why Olive isn’t here.” That’s why was because. Because Olive isn’t here. Olive was the mother’s helper, whom Asmaan adored. “I did a picture for you, Daddy. It’s for Mummy and you. I’ll show it to you. It has red and yellow and white. I did a picture for Grandpa. Grandpa’s dead. That’s why he was ill for a long while. Grandma isn’t dead yet. She’s okay. Maybe she’ll die tomorrow. I’m going to be a stoolboy, Daddy. That’s why I’m going to a good stool soon. I’m not going tomorrow! No. Another day. It’s a nursery stool, anyway. Not a big one. That’s why I have to be bigger for the big one. I’m not going there today! Hmm. Have you got a pa-resent, Daddy? Maybe there’s a big ephelant inside it. Could be! Probably it’s a big ephelant. Well: ‘bye!”
At dawn he woke alone in bed, roused by an agony of floorboards on the floor above. Somebody certainly was an early riser up there. All Solanka’s senses seemed to be on red alert. His hearing had grown so unnaturally sharp that he could hear the beeps of the upstairs message machine, the water pouring from his neighbor’s watering can into her window boxes and pots of indoor flowers. A fly settled on his exposed foot, and he actually leapt out of bed as if touched by a ghost and stood in the middle of the room, naked, foolish, filled with fear. Sleep was impossible. The street was already raucous. He took a long hot shower and read himself the riot act. Mila was right. He had to bring this thing under control. A doctor, he had to go to a doctor and get some proper medication. What was it Rhinehart had called him in jest? A heart attack waiting to happen. Well, delete heart. He had become an attack in waiting. His bad temper might have been comical once, but it was no joke now. If he hadn’t done anything yet, he might at any moment; if the fury hadn’t already led him into the country of the irreversible, it would, he knew it would. He feared himself already, and pretty soon he would have scared off everyone else. He wouldn’t need to drop out of the world; it would rush away from him. He would become the person people crossed the road to avoid. What if Neela made him angry? What if in a moment of passion she touched the top of his head?
Here at the outset of the third millennium, medication was readily available to deal with the irruption into the adult self of the outrageous and the inchoate. Once if he’d roared like a warlock in a public place, he might have been burned for a devil or weighted with stones to see if he’d float in the East River, like a witch. Once at the very least he might have been placed in the pillory and pelted with rotten fruit. Now all that was required was to settle one’s check rapidly and leave. And every good American knew the names of half a dozen effective mood-management medicaments. This was a nation for which the daily recitation of pharmaceutical brand names—Prozac, Halcion, Seroquil, Numscul, Lobotomine—was like a Zen koan, or the assertion of a kind of screwy patriotism: I pledge allegiance to the American drug. So what was happening to him was eminently preventable. Therefore, most people would say, it was his duty to prevent it, so that he could stop being afraid of himself, stop being a danger to others, start walking back toward his life. Toward Asmaan, the Golden Child. Asmaan the sky, who needed his father’s sheltering love.
Yes, but the medication was a mist. It was a fog you swallowed that curled around your mind. The medication was a shelf and you had to sit on it while the world went on around you. It was a translucent shower curtain, like the one in Psycho. Things grew opaque; no, no, that wasn’t right. What became opaque was you. Solanka’s scorn for this age of doctors resurfaced. You wanted to be taller? All you had to do was go to the tall doctor and let him put metal extensions into your long bones. For thinner, there was the thin doctor, the pretty doctor for prettier, and so on. Was that all there was? Was that it? Were we just cars now, cars that could take themselves to the mechanic and get themselves fixed up any way they wanted? Customized, with leopard-spotted seats and wraparound sound? Everything in him fought against the mechanization of the human. Wasn’t this exactly what his imagined world was being created to confront? What could a head doctor tell him about himself that he didn’t already know? Doctors knew nothing. All they wanted was to manage you, to tame you doggy-style or hood you like a hawk. Doctors wanted to push you down on your knees and break them, and once you started using those chemical crutches they handed out, you’d never walk on your own two legs again.
All around him the American self was reconceiving itself in mechanical terms, but was everywhere running out of control. This self talked constantly about itself, barely touching on any other topic. An industry of controllers—witch doctors whose role was to augment and “gap-fill” the work of the already witchy doctors—had arisen to deal with its problems of performance. Redefinition was this industry’s basic mode of operation. Unhappiness was redefined as physical unfitness, despair as a question of good spinal alignment. Happiness was better food, wiser furniture orientation, deeper breathing technique. Happiness was selfishness. The rudderless self was told to be its own steering mechanism, the rootless self was instructed to root itself in itself while, plainly, continuing to pay for the services of the new guides, the cartographers of the altered states of America. Of course, the old industries of control were still available, still making their own, more familiar cases. The vice-pres
idential candidate of the Democratic party blamed the movies for the national malaise and praised, by contrast, God. God must move closer to the center of the country’s life. (Closer? Solanka thought. If the Almighty got any closer to the presidency, he’d be living at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue and doing the damn job himself.) George Washington was exhumed to be a soldier for Jesus. No morality without religion, George thundered, standing pale and earthy in his grave, holding his little hatchet. And in Washington’s country, the supposedly insufficiently devout citizenry said, when asked, that over ninety percent of them would vote for a Jew or homosexual for president, but only forty-nine percent would vote for an atheist. Praise the Lord!
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