Fury

8

His earliest dolls, the little characters he had made, when younger, to populate the houses he’d designed, were painstakingly whittled out of soft whitewoods, clothes and all, and afterward painted, the clothing in vivid colors and the faces full of tiny but significant details: here a woman’s cheek swollen to hint at toothache, there a fan of crow’s-feet at the corners of some jolly fellow’s’ eyes. Since those distant beginnings he had lost interest in the houses, while the people he made had grown in stature and psychological complexity. Nowadays they started out as clay figurines. Clay, of which God, who didn’t exist, made man, who did. Such was the paradox of human life: its creator was fictional, but life itself was a fact.

He thought of them as people. When he was bringing them into being, they were as real to him as anyone else he knew. Once he had created them, however, once he knew their stories, he was happy to let them go their own way: other hands could manipulate them for the television camera, other craftsmen could cast and replicate them. The character and the story were all he cared about. The rest was just playing with toys.

The only one of his creations with whom he fell in love—the only one he didn’t want anyone else to handle—would break his heart. This was, of course, Little Brain: first a doll, later a puppet, then an animated cartoon, and afterward an actress, or, at various other times, a talk-show host, gymnast, ballerina, or supermodel, in a Little Brain outfit. Her first, late-night, series, of which nobody expected much, had been made more or less exactly as Malik Solanka desired. In that time-traveling quest program, “L.B.” was the disciple, while the philosophers she met were the real heroes. After the move to prime time, however, the channel’s executives soon weighed in. The original format was deemed much too highbrow. Little Brain was the star, and the new show had to be built around her, it was decreed. Instead of traveling constantly, she needed a location and a cast of recurring characters to play off. She needed a love interest, or better still a series of suitors, which would allow the hottest young male actors of the time to guest-star on the show and wouldn’t tie her down. Above all, she needed comedy: smart comedy, brainy comedy, yes, but there must definitely be a great many laughs. Probably even a laugh track. Writers could, would, be provided to work with Solanka to develop his hit idea for the mass audience that would now come into contact with it. This was what he wanted, wasn’t it—to move into the mainstream? If an idea didn’t develop, it died. These were the facts of televisual life.

Thus Little Brain moved to Brain Street in Brainville, with a whole family and neighborhood posse of Brains: she had an older brother called Little Big Brain, there was a science laboratory down the street called the Brain Drain, and even a laconic cowboy movie star neighbor (John Brayne). It was painful stuff, but the lower the comedy stooped, the higher the ratings soared. Brain Street wiped out the memory of The Adventures of Little Brain in a minute and settled in for a long, lucrative run. At a certain point Malik Solanka bowed to the inevitable and walked off the program. But he kept his credit on the show, ensured that his “moral rights” in his creation were protected, and negotiated a healthy share of the merchandising income. He couldn’t watch the show any longer. But Little Brain gave every indication of being happy to see him go.

She had outgrown her creator—literally; she was life-size now, and several inches taller than Solanka—and was making her own way in the world. Like Hawkeye or Sherlock Holmes or Jeeves, she had transcended the work that created her, had attained the fiction’s version of freedom. She now endorsed products on television, opened supermarkets, gave after-dinner speeches, emceed gong shows. By the time Brain Street had run its course she was a full-fledged television personality. She got her own talk show, made guest appearances in new hit comedies, appeared on the catwalk for Vivienne Westwood, and was attacked, for demeaning women, by Andrea Dworkin-”smart women don’t have to be dolls”—and, for emasculating men, by Karl Lagerfeld (“what true man wants a woman with a bigger shall I say vocabulary than his own?”). Both critics then immediately agreed, for high consultancy fees, to join the concept group behind “L.B.,” a team known at the BBC as the Little Brains Trust. Little Brain’s bubble-gum-poppy debut movie Brainwave was a rare false step, and flopped badly, but the first volume of her memoirs (!) went straight to the top of the Amazon bestseller charts as soon as it was announced, months before it was even published, clocking up over a quarter of a million sales in pre-orders alone, from hysterical fans who were determined to be first in line. After publication it broke all records; a second, third, and fourth volume followed, one per year, and sold, at the most conservative estimate, over fifty million copies worldwide.

She had become the Maya Angelou of the doll world, as relentless an autobiographer as that other caged bird, her life the model for millions of young people—its humble beginnings, its years of struggle, its triumphant overcomings; and, O, her dauntlessness in the face of poverty and cruelty! O, her joy when Fate chose her to be one of its Elect!—among whom West Seventieth Street’s own empress of cool, Mila Milo, was proud to be numbered. (Her unlived life! Solanka thought. Her fictive history, part Dungeons & Dragons fairy tale, part dirt-poor ghetto saga, and all ghostwritten for her by anonymous persons of phantom talent! This was not the life he had imagined for her; this had nothing to do with the back-story he had dreamed up for his pride and joy. This L.B. was an impostor, with the wrong history, the wrong dialogue, the wrong personality, the wrong wardrobe, the wrong brain. Somewhere in medialand there was a Chateau d’If in which the real Little Brain was being held captive. Somewhere there was a Doll in an Iron Mask.)

The extraordinary thing about her fan base was its catholicity: boys dug her as much as girls, adults as much as children. She crossed all boundaries of language, race, and class. She became, variously, her admirers’ ideal lover or confidante or goal. Her first book of memoirs was originally placed by the Amazon people in the nonfiction lists. The decision to move it, and the subsequent volumes, across into the world of make-believe was resisted by both readers and staff. Little Brain, they argued, was no longer a simulacrum. She was a phenomenon. The fairy’s wand had touched her, and she was real.

All this Malik Solanka witnessed from a distance with growing horror. This creature of his own imagining, born of his best self and purest endeavor, was turning before his eyes into the kind of monster of tawdry celebrity he most profoundly abhorred. His original and now obliterated Little Brain had been genuinely smart, able to hold her own with Erasmus or Schopenhauer. She had been beautiful and sharp-tongued, but she had swum in the sea of ideas, living the life of the mind. This revised edition, over which he had long ago lost creative control, had the intellect of a slightly over-average chimpanzee. Day by day she became a creature of the entertainment microverse, her music videos—yes, she was a recording artist now!—out-raunching Madonna’s, her appearances at premieres out-Hurleying every starlet who ever trod the red carpet in a dangerous frock. She was a video game and a cover girl, and this, remember, in her personal appearance mode at least, was essentially a woman whose own head was completely concealed inside the iconic doll’s. Yet many aspirants to stardom vied for the role, even though the Little Brains Trust—which had become too big for the BBC to hold on to, and had broken away to become a booming independent business, projected to break the billion-dollar barrier someday soon-insisted on utter confidentiality; the names of the women who brought Little Brain to life were never revealed, though rumors abounded, and the paparazzi of Europe and America, bringing their own special expertise to bear, claimed to be able to identify this actress or that model by those other, non-facial attributes which Little Brain so proudly put on display.

Astonishingly, the glamour-puss transformation lost latex-headed Little Brain no fans, but brought her a new legion of adult male admirers. She had become unstoppable, giving press conferences at which she spoke of setting up her own film production company, launching her own magazine in which beauty hints, lifestyle advice, and cutting-edge contemporary culture would all receive the special Little Brain treatment, and even going nationwide, in the U.S.A., on cable television. There would be a Broadway show—she was in discussion with all the major players in the musical game, dear Tim and dear Elton and dear Cameron and of course dear, dear Andrew—and a new, big-budget movie was also planned. This would not repeat the corny teenybopper mistakes of the first but grow “organically” out of the zillion-selling memoirs. “Little Brain is not some plastic-fantastic Barbie Spice,” she told the world—she had started speaking of herself in the third person—“and the new film will be very human, and quality all the way. Marry, Bobby, Brad, Gwynnie, Meg, Julia, Tom and Nic are all interested; also Jenny, Puffy, Maddy, Robbie, Mick: I guess everybody these days wants a Little Brain.”

The ballooning triumph of Little Brain inevitably occasioned much comment and analysis. Her admirers were jeered at for their lowbrow obsession, but at once eminent theater folk came forward to speak of the ancient tradition of mask theater, its origins in Greece and Japan.

“The actor in the mask is liberated from her normality, her everydayness. Her body acquires remarkable new freedoms. The mask dictates all this. The mask acts.” Professor Solanka remained aloof, refusing all invitations to discuss his out-of-control creation. The money, however, he was unable to refuse. Royalties continued to pour into his bank account. He was compromised by greed, and the compromise sealed his lips. Contractually bound not to attack the goose that laid the golden eggs, he had to bottle up his thoughts and, in keeping his own counsel, filled up with the bitter bile of his many discontents. With every new media initiative spearheaded by the character he had once delineated with such sprightliness and care, his impotent fury grew.

In Hello! magazine, Little Brain—for a reported seven-figure fee allowed readers an intimate look at her beautiful country home, which was, apparently, an old Queen Anne pile not far from the Prince of Wales’s in Gloucestershire, and Malik Solanka, whose original inspiration had been the Rijksmuseum dollhouses, was thunderstruck by the effrontery of this latest inversion. So now the big houses would belong to these uppity dolls, while most of the human race still lived in cramped accommodation? The wrongness—in his view the moral bankruptcy—of this particular development alarmed him profoundly; still, far from bankrupted himself, he held his tongue and took the dirty money. For ten years, as “Art Garfunkel” might have said into his mouthpiece, he had backed up a whole heap of self-loathing and rage. Fury stood above him like a cresting Hokusai wave. Little Brain was his delinquent child grown into a rampaging giantess, who now stood for everything he despised and trampled beneath her giant feet all the high principles he had brought her into being to extol; including, evidently, his own.

The L.B. phenomenon had seen off the 1990s and showed no sign of running out of steam in the new millennium. Malik Solanka was forced to admit a terrible truth. He hated Little Brain.

Meanwhile, nothing to which he turned his hand was bearing much fruit. He continued to approach the newly successful British claymation companies with characters and storylines but was told, kindly and unkindly, that his concepts weren’t of the moment. In a young person’s business, he had become something much worse than merely older: he was old-fashioned. At a meeting to discuss his proposal for a feature-length claymation life of Niccolo Machiavelli, he did his best to speak the new language of commercialism. The film would, of course, use anthropomorphic animals to represent human originals. “This really has everything,” he awkwardly enthused. “The golden age of Florence! The Medicis in their splendor-cool clay aristocats! Simonetta Vespussy, the most beautiful cat in the world, being immortalized by that young hound Barkicelli. The Birth of Feline Venus! The Rite of Pussy Spring! Meanwhile Amerigo Vespussy, that old sea lion, her uncle, sails off to discover America! Savona-Roland the Rat Monk ignites the Bonfire of the Vanities! And at the heart of it all, a mouse. Not just any old Mickey, though: this is the mouse who invented realpolitik, the brilliant mouse playwright, the distinguished public rodent, the republican mouse who survived being tortured by the cruel cat prince and dreamed in exile of a day of glorious return…” He was interrupted unceremoniously by an executive from the money people, a plump boy who could not have been more than twenty-three years old. “Florence is great,” he said. “No question. I love that. And Niccolb, what did you call him?, Mousiavelli sounds… possible. But what you have here—this treatment—let me put it like this. It just doesn’t deserve Florence. Maybe, yeah?, it’s not a good time right now for the Renaissance in plasticine.”

He could go back to writing books, he thought, but soon found that his heart wasn’t in it. The inexorability of happenstance, the way events have of deflecting you from your course, had corrupted him and left him good for nothing. His old life had left him forever and the new world he’d created had slipped through his fingers too. He was James Mason, a falling star, drinking hard, drowning in defeats, and that damn doll was flying high in the Judy Garland role. With Pinocchio, Geppetto’s troubles ended when the blasted puppet became a real, live boy; with Little Brain, as with Galatea, that’s when they began. Professor Solanka in drunken wrath issued anathemas against his ungrateful Frankendoll: Out of my sight let her go! Begone, unnatural child. Lo, I know you not. You shall not bear my name. Never send to ask for me, nor never seek my blessing. And call me father no more.

Out she went from his home in all her versions—the sketches, maquettes, tableaux, the infinite proliferation of her in all her myriad versions, paper, cloth, wood, plastic, animation cell, videotape, film; and with her, inevitably, went a once-precious version of himself. He hadn’t been able to bear to perform the act of expulsion personally. Eleanor agreed to take on the task. Eleanor, who could see the crisis mounting the red cracks in the eyes of the man she loved, the alcohol, the rudderless wandering—said in her gentle, efficient way, “Just go out for the day and leave it to me.” Her own career in publishing was on hold, Asmaan being all the career she needed for the moment, but she had been a high flier and was greatly in demand. This, too, she concealed from him, though he wasn’t a fool, and knew what it meant when Morgen Franz and others rang to speak to her and stayed on the phone, coaxing, for thirty minutes at a time. She was wanted, he understood that, everyone was wanted except him, but at least he could have this paltry revenge; he could not want something too, even if it was only that two-faced creature, that traitress, that, that, doll.

So he left home on the agreed day, stamping over Hampstead Heath at high speed—they lived in a capacious, double—fronted house on Willow Road and had always both rejoiced in having the Heath, North London’s treasure, its lung, just outside their door—and in his absence Eleanor had everything properly packed and taken away to a long-term storage facility. He’d have preferred the whole caboodle to end up at the Highbury garbage dump, but on this, too, he compromised. Eleanor had insisted. She had strong archival instincts and, needing her to take charge of the project, he waved a hand at her strictures as if at a mosquito, and didn’t argue. He walked for hours, allowing the Heath’s cool music to soothe his savage breast, the quiet heart-rhythms of its slow paths and trees, and, later in the day, the sweet strings of a summer con cert in the grounds of the Iveagh Bequest. When he got back, Little Brain was gone. Or, almost gone. For, unknown to Eleanor, one doll had been locked away in a cupboard in Solanka’s study. And there she remained.

The house felt emptied when he returned, voided, the way a house feels after the death of a child. Solanka felt as if he had suddenly aged by twenty or thirty years; as if, divorced from the best work of his youthful enthusiasms, he at last stood face-to-face with ruthless Time. Waterford-Wajda had spoken of such a feeling at Addenbrooke’s years ago. “Life becomes very, I don’t know, finite. You realize you don’t have anything, you belong nowhere, you’re just using things for a while. The inanimate world laughs at you: you’ll be going soon, but it will be staying on. Not very profound, Solly, it’s Pooh Bear philosophy, I know, but it rips you to pieces all the same.” This wasn’t just the death of a child, Solanka was thinking: more like a killing. Kronos devouring his daughter. He was the murderer of his fictional offspring: not flesh of his flesh but dream of his dream. There was, however, a living child still awake, overexcited by the day’s events: the arrival of the moving van, the packers, the steady come and go of boxes. “I was helping, Daddy,” eager Asmaan greeted his father. “I helped send Little Brain away.” He was bad at compound consonants, saying b for br Little B’ain. That’s about right, Solanka thought. She became the bane of my life. “Yes,” he answered absently. “Well done.” But Asmaan had more on his mind. “Why did she have to go away, Daddy? Mummy said you wanted her to go away.” Oh, Mummy said, did she. Thanks, Mummy. He glared at Eleanor, who shrugged. “Really, I didn’t know what to tell him. This one’s for you.”

On children’s television, in comic books, and in audio versions of her legendary memoirs, Little Brain’s protean persona had reached out and captured the hearts of children even younger than Asmaan Solanka. Three was not too young to fall in love with this most universally appealing of contemporary icons. “L.B.” could be driven out of the house on Willow Road, but could she be expelled from the imagination of her creator’s child? “I want her back,” Asmaan said emphatically. Back was bat. “I want Little Brain.” The pastoral symphony of Hampstead Heath gave way to the jangling discords of family life. Solanka felt the clouds gathering around him once again. “It was just time for her to go,” he said, and picked up Asmaan, who wriggled hard against him, responding unconsciously, as children do, to his father’s bad mood. “No! Put me down! Put me down!” He was exhausted and cranky and so was Solanka. “I want to watch a video,” he demanded. Viduwo. “I want to watch a Little Brain viduwo.” Malik Solanka, unbalanced by the impact of the absence of the Little Brain archive, of her exile to some DollElba, some Black Sea town, such as Ovid’s barren Tomis, for unwanted, used-up toys, had been plunged quite unexpectedly into a condition resembling deep mourning and received his son’s end-of-day petulance as an unacceptable provocation. “It’s too late. Behave yourself,” he snapped, and Asmaan, in return, crouched down on the front-room rug and produced his latest trick: a burst of impressively convincing crocodile tears. Solanka, no less childishly than his son, and without the excuse of being three years old, rounded on Eleanor. “I suppose this is your way of punishing me,” he said. “If you didn’t want to get rid of the stuff, why not just say so. Why use him. I should have known I’d come back to trouble. To some manipulative crap like this.”

“Please don’t let him hear you talking to me that way,” she said, scooping Asmaan into her arms. “He understands everything.” Solanka noted that the boy suffered himself to be taken off to bed by his mother without the slightest wriggle, nuzzling into Eleanor’s long neck. “As a matter of fact,” she went on levelly, “after doing this entire day’s work for you, I thought, stupidly as it turns out, that we might use it as the moment for a new beginning. I took a leg of lamb out of the freezer and rubbed it with cumin, I called the flower shop, oh God this is so silly, and had them deliver nasturtiums. And you’ll find three bottles of Tignanello on the kitchen table. One for pleasure, two for too much, three for bed. Perhaps you remember that. It’s your line. But I’m sure you can’t be bothered anymore to have a romantic candlelit supper with your boring, no-longer-young wife.”

They had been drifting apart, she into the engulfing, full-time experience of first-time motherhood, which fulfilled her so deeply and which she was so eager to repeat, he into that fog of failure and self disgust which was thickened, more and more, by drink. Yet the marriage had not broken, thanks in large measure to Eleanor’s generous heart, and to Asmaan. Asmaan, who loved books and could be read to for hours; Asmaan on his garden swing, asking Malik to twist him around and around so that he could untwist in a high-speed counterclockwise blur; Asmaan riding on his father’s shoulders, ducking his head under doorways (“I’m being very careful, Daddy!”); Asmaan chasing and being chased, Asmaan hiding under bedclothes and piles of pillows; Asmaan attempting to sing “Rock Around the Clock”—rot around the tot—most of all, perhaps, Asmaan bouncing. He loved to bounce on his parents’ bed, with his stuffed animals cheering him on. “Look at me,” he’d cry-look was loot—“I’m bouncing very well! I’m bouncing higher and higher!”

He was the young incarnation of their old high-bouncing love. When their child was flooding their lives with delight, Eleanor and Malik Solanka could take refuge in a fantasy of undamaged familial contentment. At other times, however, the cracks were becoming ever easier to see. She found his self-absorbed misery, his constant railing against imagined slights, duller and more of a strain than she was ever cruel enough to show; while he, locked into his downward spiral, accused her of ignoring him and his concerns. In bed, whispering so as not to wake Asmaan sleeping on a mattress on the floor beside them, she complained that Malik never initiated sex; he retorted that she had lost interest in sex entirely except at the baby-making time of the month. And at that time of the month, routinely, they fought: yes, no, please, I can’t, why not, because I don’t want to, but I need it so badly, well, I don’t need it at all, but I don’t want this lovely little boy to be an only child like me, and I don’t want to be a father again at my age, I’ll already be over seventy before Asmaan is twenty years old. And then tears and anger and, as often as not, a night for Solanka in the guest bedroom. Advice to husbands, he thought bitterly: make sure the spare room is comfortable, because sooner or later, pal, that’s your room.

Eleanor was waiting tensely by the stairs for his reply to her invitation to a night of peace and love. Time passed in slow beats, arriving at a hinge moment. He could, if he had the wit and desire, accept her invitation, and then, yes, a good evening would follow: delicious food, and, if at this age three bottles of Tignanello didn’t send him straight to sleep, then no doubt the lovemaking would be up to the old high standard. But now there was a worm in Paradise, and he failed the test. “You’re ovulating, I suppose,” he said, and she jerked her face away from him as if he’d slapped her. “No,” she lied, and then, giving in to the inevitable, “Oh, all right, yes. But can’t we just, oh, I wish you could see how desperately, oh, to hell with it, what’s the use.” She carried Asmaan away, unable to hold back her tears. “I’m going to go to sleep, too, when I put him to bed, okay?” she said, weeping angrily. “Do what you like. Just don’t leave the lamb in the fucking Aga. Take it out and throw it in the fucking bin.”

As Asmaan went upstairs in his mother’s arms, Solanka heard the worry in his tired young voice. “Daddy’s not cross,” Asmaan said, reassuring himself, wanting to be reassured. Cross was toss. “Daddy doesn’t want to send me away.”

Alone in the kitchen, Professor Malik Solanka began to drink. The wine was as good and as powerful as ever, but he wasn’t drinking for pleasure. Steadily, he worked his way through the bottles, and as he did, the demons came crawling out through the several orifices of his body, sliding down his nose and out through his ears, dribbling and squeezing through every opening they could find. By the bottom of the first bottle they were dancing on his eyeballs, his fingernails, they had wrapped their rough lapping tongues around his throat, their spears were jabbing at his genitals, and all he could hear was their scarlet song of shrill, most horrid hate. He had come through self-pity now and entered a terrible, blaming anger, and by the bottom of the second bottle, as his head slopped about on his neck, the demons were kissing him with their forked tongues and their tails were wrapped around his penis, rubbing and squeezing, and as he listened to their dirty talk, the unforgivable blame for what he had become had begun to settle on the woman upstairs, she who was nearest to hand, the traitress who had refused to destroy his enemy, his nemesis, the doll, she who had poured the poison of Little Brain into the brain of his child, turning the son against the father, she who had destroyed the peace of his home life by preferring the uncreated child of her obsession to her actually existing husband, she, his wife, his betrayer, his one great foe. The third bottle fell, half unfinished, across the kitchen table that she had so lovingly set for dinner à deux, using her mother’s old lace tablecloth and the best cutlery and a pair of long-stemmed red Bohemian wineglasses, and as the red fluid spilled across the old lace, he remembered that he’d forgotten the damn lamb, and when he opened the Aga door, the smoke poured out and set off the smoke detector in the ceiling, and the screaming of the alarm was the laughter of the demons, and to stop it STOP IT he had to get the step stool and climb up on unsteady wine-dark legs to take the battery pack out of the damn-fool thing, okay, okay, but even when he’d done that without breaking his goddamn neck, the demons went right on laughing their screaming laughter, and the room was still full of smoke, goddamn her, couldn’t she even have done this one small thing, and what would it take to stop the screaming in his head, this screaming like a knife, like a knife in his brain in his ear in his eye in his stomach in his heart in his soul, couldn’t the bitch just have taken the meat out and put it right there, on the carving board next to the sharpening steel, the long fork and the knife, the carving knife, the knife.

It was a big house and the smoke alarm had not woken Eleanor or Asmaan, who was already in her bed, Malik’s bed. Fat lot of use that alarm system turned out to be, huh. And here he was standing above them in the dark and here in his hand was the carving knife, and there was no alarm system to warn them against him, was there, Eleanor lying on her back with her mouth slightly open and a low burr of a snore rumbling in her nose, Asmaan on his side, curled tightly into her, sleeping the pure deep sleep of innocence and trust. Asmaan murmured inaudibly in his sleep and the sound of his faint voice broke through the demons’ shrieking and brought his father to his senses. Before him lay his only child, the one living being under this roof who still knew that the world was a place of wonders and life was sweet and the present moment was everything and the future was infinite and didn’t need to be thought about, while the past was useless and fortunately gone for good and he, a child wrapped in the soft sorcerer’s cloak of childhood, was loved beyond words, and safe. Malik Solanka panicked. What was he doing standing over these two sleepers with a, with a, knife, he wasn’t the sort of person who would do a thing like this, you read about those persons every day in the yellow press, coarse men and sly women who slaughtered their babies and ate their grandmothers, cold serial murderers and tormented pedophiles and unashamed sexual abusers and wicked stepfathers and dumb violent Neanderthal apes and all the world’s ill-educated uncivilized brutes, and those were other persons entirely, no persons of that nature resided in this house, ergo he, Professor Malik Solanka formerly of King’s College in the University of Cambridge, he of all people could not be in here holding in his drunken hand a savage instrument of death. Q.E.D. And anyway, 1 never was any good with the meat, Eleanor. It was always you who carved.

The doll, he thought with a belching, vinous start. Of course! That satanic doll was to blame. He had sent all the avatars of the she-devil out of the house, but one remained. That had been his mistake. She had crawled out of her cupboard and down through his nose and given him the carving knife and sent him to do her bloody work. But he knew where she was hiding. She couldn’t hide from him. Professor Solanka turned and left the bedroom, knife in hand, muttering, and if Eleanor opened her eyes after he’d gone, he did not know it; if she had watched his retreating back and knew and judged him, it must be for her to say.

It had grown dark outside on West Seventieth Street. Little Brain was on his lap as he finished speaking. Its garments were slashed and torn and you could see where the knife had made deep incisions in its body. “Even after I stabbed her, as you see, I couldn’t leave her behind. All the way to America I held her body in my arms.” Mila’s own doll silently interrogated its damaged twin. “Now you’ve heard everything, which is a great deal more than you wanted,” Solanka said. “You know how this thing has ruined my life.” Mila Milo’s green eyes were on fire. She came over and caught up both his hands between her own. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Your life isn’t ruined. And these—come on, Professor!—these are just dolls.”

9

“There’s a look you sometimes get that reminds me of my father before he died,” Mila Milo said, blithely unaware of how that sentence might be received by its subject. “Kind of indistinct, like a picture where the photographer’s hand shook a little? Like Robin Williams in that movie where he’s always out of focus. I once asked Dad what it meant and he said it was the look of a person who had spent too much time around other human beings. The human race is a life sentence, he said, it’s a rough confinement, and sometimes we all need to break out of jail. He was a writer, a poet mostly but a novelist also, you won’t have heard of him, but in Serbo-Croat he’s considered pretty good. More than pretty good, actually, quite amazing, one of the best of the best. Nobelisable, as the French say, but he never got it. Didn’t live long enough, I guess. Still. Take it from me. He was good. The depth of his connection to the natural world, his feeling for the ancients, for folklore: he was one of a kind. Hobgoblins jumping in and out of flowers, I teased him. The flower inside the goblin would be better, he answered. The memory of a pure shining river that lingers in Satan’s heart. You have to understand that religion was important for him. He lived in cities mostly, but his soul was in the hills. An old soul, people called him. But he was young at heart, too, you know? He really was. A barrel of monkeys. Most of the time. I don’t know how he managed it. They never let up on him, they kept messing with his head. We lived in Paris for years after he got out from under Tito, I attended the American School there until I was eight, nearly nine, my mom unfortunately passed when I was three, three and a half, breast cancer, what can you do, it just killed her real fast and real painfully, may she rest in peace. Anyway, so he would get letters from home and 1 would open them for him and there, stamped on the front page of a letter from I don’t know his sister or someone was a big official stamp saying, This letter has not been censored. HA! In the mid-eighties I came with him to New York to attend the big PEN conference, the famous one when there were all those parties, one at the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan and another at Saul and Gayfryd Steinberg’s apartment, and nobody could decide which was grander, and Norman Mailer invited George Shultz to speak at the Public Library and so the South Africans boycotted the event because he was, like, pro-apartheid, and Shultz’s security people wouldn’t let Bellow in because he’d forgotten his invitation, so that made him a possible terrorist, until Mailer vouched for him, Bellow must have liked that!, and then the women writers protested because the platform speakers were mostly men, and either Susan Sontag or Nadine Gordimer scolded them because, she said, Nadine or Susan, I forget, literature isn’t an equal opportunity employer. And Cynthia Ozick I think it was accused Bruno Kreisky of being an anti-Semite even though he was a, a Jew and b, the European politician who’d taken in the most Russian-Jewish refugees, and all this because he’d had a meeting with Arafat, one meeting, so that makes Ehud Barak and Clinton really anti-Semitic, right?, I mean it’s going to be Jew-Haters International down there at Camp David. And anyway Dad spoke, too, the conference had some grand title like ‘The Imagination of the Writer Versus the Imagination of the State,’ and after somebody, I’ve forgotten,

Breytenbach or Oz, someone like that, said that the state had no imagination, Dad said that on the contrary, not only did it have an imagination, it also had a sense of humor, and he would give an example of a joke by the state, and then he told the story of the letter that had not been censored, and I sat there in the audience feeling so proud because everybody laughed and after all I was the one who opened the letter. I went with him to every session, are you kidding?, I was crazy for writers, I’d been a writer’s daughter all my life and books to me were like the greatest thing, and it was so cool because they let me sit in on everything even though I was only small. It was so great to see my dad finally with his like peers and getting so much respect, and besides, here were all these names walking around attached to the real people they belonged to, Donald Barthelme, Gunter Grass, Czeslaw Milosz, Grace Paley, John Updike, everyone. But at the end my father had that look on his face, the one like the one on yours, and he left me with Aunt Kitty from Chelsea, not my real aunt, she and Dad had a thing for about five minutes—you should have seen him with women, he was this big sexy guy with huge hands and a thick mustache like I guess Stalin, and he would look women in the eye and start talking about animals in heat, wolves, for instance, and that was it, they were gone. I swear to God these ladies would actually make a line, he’d go up to his hotel room and they’d form right up outside, a real honest to goodness line, the greatest women you can imagine, just weak at the knees with lust; and it’s lucky I liked to read a lot, and also there was American TV to watch for once, so I was okay in the other room, I was fine, though a lot of times I wanted to go out and ask those women waiting around for it to be their turn, like, don’t you have something better to do, you know?, it’s only his pecker for Chrissakes, get a life. Yeah, I used to shock a lot of people, I grew up fast I guess because it was always my dad and me, always him and me against the world. So anyway I guess he liked Aunt Kitty, she must’ve passed the audition, because her prize was she got to look after me for two weeks while Dad went off with two professors to walk in I think the Appalachians; hill walking was what he liked to do to get rid of his people overdoses, and he always came back looking different, kind of clearer, you know? I called it his Moses look. Down from the mountain, you know, with the Decalogue. Only in Dad’s case, usually, poetry. Anyhow, long story short, about five minutes after he got back from schmoozing with the profs on a mountainside, he was offered a post at Columbia University and we moved to New York permanently. Which I loved, sure, but he was like I said a country person and a dyed-in-the-wool European person, too, so it was harder for him. Still, he was used to working with what there was, used to handling whatever life sent his way. Okay, he drank like a real Yugoslav and he smoked about a hundred a day and he had a bad heart, he knew he was never going to be an old man, but he had made a decision about his life. You know, like in The Nigger of the Narcissus. I must live until I die. And that’s what he did, he did great work and had great sex and smoked great cigarettes and drank great liquor and then the damn war started and out of nowhere he turned into this person I didn’t know, this, I guess, Serb. Listen, he despised the guy he called the other Milosevic, he hated having the same name, and that’s really why he changed it, if you want the truth. To separate Milo the poet from Milosevic the fascist gangster pig. But after it all went crazy out there in getting-to-be-ex-Yugo, he got all worked up about the demonization of the Serbs, even though he agreed with most of the analysis of what Milosevic was doing in Croatia and going to do in Bosnia, his heart was just inflamed by the anti-Serb stuff, and in some mad moment he decided it was his duty to go back and be the moral conscience of the place, you know, like Stephen Dedalus, to forge in the smithy of his soul et cetera et cetera or some Serb Solzhenitsyn. I told him to cut it out, who was Solzhenitsyn anyway but this crazy old coot in Vermont dreaming of being a prophet back in Mother Russia, but when he got home nobody was listening to his same old song, that’s definitely not the route you want to go, Dad, for you it’s women and cigarettes and booze and mountains and work work work, the idea was to let that stuff kill you, right, the plan was to stay away from Milosevic and his killers, not to mention bombs. But he didn’t listen to me, and instead of sticking to the game plan he caught a plane back there, into the fury. That’s what I started out to say, Professor, don’t talk to me about fury, I know what it can do. America, because of its omnipotence, is full of fear; it fears the fury of the world and renames it envy, or so my dad used to say. They think we want to be them, he’d say after a few hits of hooch, but really we’re just mad as hell and don’t want to take it anymore. See, he knew about fury. But then he set aside what he knew and behaved like a damn fool. Because about five minutes after he landed in Belgrade or maybe it was five hours or five days or five weeks, who, like, cares?—the fury blew him to pieces and there wasn’t enough of him found to collect up and put in a box. So, yeah, Professor, and you’re mad about a doll. Well, excuse me.”

The weather had changed. The heat of early summer had given way to a disturbed, patternless time. There were many clouds and too much rain, and days of morning heat that abruptly turned cold after lunch, sending shivers through the girls in their summer dresses and the bare-torsoed roller-bladers in the park, with those mysterious leather belts strapped tightly across their chests, like self-imposed penances, just below their pectoral muscles. In the faces of his fellow citizens Professor Solanka discerned new bewilderments; the things on which they had relied, summery summers, cheap gasoline, the pitching arms of David Cone and yes, even Orlando Hernandez, these things had begun to let them down. A Concorde crashed in France, and people imagined they saw a part of their own dreams of the future, the future in which they too would break through the barriers that held them back, the imaginary future of their own limitlessness, going up in those awful flames.

This golden age, too, must end, Solanka thought, as do all such periods in the human chronicle. Maybe this truth was just beginning to slide into people’s consciousness, like the drizzle trickling down inside the upturned collars of their raincoats, like a dagger slipping through the gaps in their armor-plated confidence. In an election year, America’s confidence was political currency. Its existence could not be denied; the incumbents took credit for it, their opponents refused them that credit, calling the boom an act of God or else of Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve. But our nature is our nature and uncertainty is at the heart of what we are, uncertainty per se, in and of itself, the sense that nothing.is written in stone, everything crumbles. As Marx was probably still saying out there in the junkyard of ideas, the intellectual St. Helena to which he had been exiled, all that is solid melts into air. In a public climate of such daily-trumpeted assurance, where did our fears go to hide? On what did they feed? On ourselves, perhaps, Solanka thought. While the greenback was all-powerful and America bestrode the world, psychological disorders and aberrations of all sorts were having a field day back home. Under the self-satisfied rhetoric of this repackaged, homogenized America, this America with the twenty-two million new jobs and the highest home-owning rate in history, this balanced-budget, low-deficit, stock-owning Mall America, people were stressed-out, cracking up, and talking about it all day long in superstrings of moronic cliché. Among the young, the inheritors of plenty, the problem was most acute. Mila, with her ultra-precocious Parisian upbringing, often referred scornfully to the confusion of her contemporaries. Everybody was scared, she said, everybody she knew, however good their facade, was quaking inside, and it didn’t make any difference that everybody was rich. Between the sexes the trouble was worst of all. “Guys don’t really know how or when or where to touch girls anymore, and girls can barely tell the difference between desire and assault, flirtation and offensiveness, love and sexual abuse.” When everything and everyone you touch turns instantly to gold, as King Midas learned in the other classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for fable, you end up not being able to touch anything, or anyone, at all.

Mila had changed too of late, but in her case the transformation was, in Professor Solanka’s opinion, a vast improvement on the feckless chick, still playing at teen queenery in her twenties, that she’d been pretending to be. To hold on to her beautiful Eddie, the college sports hero-whom she described to Solanka as “not the brightest bulb, but a dear heart” and to whom a brainy, cultured woman would no doubt be a threat and a turnoff—she had dimmed her own light. Not entirely, it had to be said: after all, she had somehow managed to lure the boyfriend and the rest of the guys into a Kieslowski double bill, which meant either that they weren’t as dumb as they looked or that she had even greater powers of persuasion than Solanka already suspected.

Day by day, she unfurled before Malik’s astonished eyes into a young woman of wit and competence. She took to visiting him at all hours: either early, to force him to eat breakfast—it was his habit not to eat until the evening, a custom that she termed “plain barbaric, and so bad for you,” and so under her tutelage he began to learn the mysteries of oatmeal and bran, and to consume, with his fresh coffee, at least one piece of daily matutinal fruit—or else in the steamy afternoon hours traditionally reserved for illicit love affairs. However, love was apparently not on her mind. She engaged him in simpler pleasures: green tea with honey, strolls in the park, shopping expeditions—“Professor, the situation is critical; we have to take immediate and drastic measures to get you some wearable clothes”—and even a visit to the Planetarium. As he stood with her in the middle of the Big Bang, hatless, casually attired, newly and springily shod in the first pair of sneakers he’d bought in thirty years, and feeling as if she were his parent and he a boy of Asmaan’s age—well, perhaps just a little older—she turned to him, bent down a little, for in her heels she was at least six inches taller than he, and actually took his face in her hands. “Here you are, Professor, at the very beginning of things. Looking good, too. Cheer up, for Chrissake! It’s good to make a new start.” All around them a new cycle of Time was being initiated. This was how everything had begun: boom! Things flew apart. The center did not hold. But the birth of the universe was a feel-good metaphor. What followed it was not mere Yeatsian anarchy. Look, matter clumped with other matter, the primal soup grew lumpy. Then came stars, planets, single-cell organisms, fish, journalists, dinosaurs, lawyers, mammals. Life, life. Yes, Finnegan, begin again, Malik Solanka thought. Finn MacCool, sleep no more, sucking your mighty thumb. Finnegan, wake.

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 card-player, 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 Harry, 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’1 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 dorit 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 Harry 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 the 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 brabmacbarya “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 start’ 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.

The boy had taken to telephoning Solanka without regard to the five-hour time difference. Eleanor had programmed the New York number into the Willow Road kitchen phone’s speed-dial system; all Asmaan had to do was push a single button. Hello, Daddy came his transatlantic voice (this first call had been at five A.M.): I had a nice time at the part, Daddy. Park, Asmaan, sleepy Solanka tried to teach his son. Say park. Part. Where are you, Daddy, are you at home? Are you not coming back? I should have put you in the car, Daddy, I should have taken you to the sings. Swings. Say swings. I should have taken you to the sa-wings, Daddy. Morgen pushed me higher and higher. Are you hinging me a peasant? Say bringing, Asmaan. Say present. You can do it. Are you ba-ringing me a pa-resent, Daddy? What’s inside it? Will I like it very much? Daddy, you not going away anymore. I won’t let you. I had an ice team in the part. Morgen bought it. It was very nice. Icecream, Asmaan. Say ice cream. Ice to-ream.

Eleanor came on to the line. “I’m sorry, he came downstairs and pushed the button all by himself. I’m afraid I didn’t wake up.” Oh, that’s okay, Solanka replied, and there followed a long silence. Then Eleanor unsteadily said, “Malik, I just don’t know what’s going on. I’m falling apart here. Can’t we, if you don’t want to come to London I could get on a, I could leave Asmaan with his grandma and we could sit down and try to work this thing, whatever it is, oh God I don’t even know what it is!, couldn’t we work it out? Or do you just hate me now, do I all of a sudden disgust you for some reason? Is there someone else? There must be, mustn’t there? Who is it? For God’s sake tell me, at least that would make sense, and then I could just be fucking furious with you instead of going slowly out of my mind.”

The truth was that her voice still lacked any trace of real wrath. Yet he had abandoned her without a word, Solanka thought: surely her grief would turn, sooner or later, to rage? Perhaps she would let her solicitor express it for her, unleashing against him the cold rage of the law. But he could not see her as a second Bronislawa Rhinehart. There was simply no vindictiveness in her nature. But for there to be so little anger: that was inhuman, even a little frightening. Or, alternatively, proof of what everybody was thinking and what Morgen and afterward Lin Franz had put into words: that she was the better person of the two of them, too good for him, and, once she had recovered from the pain, would be better off without him. None of which would be any comfort to her right now, or to the child to whose arms he did not dare—for the sake of the boy’s safety—to return.

For he knew he had not shaken the Furies off. A low, simmering, disconnected anger continued to seep and flow deep within him, threatening to rise up without warning in a mighty volcanic burst; as if it were its own master, as if he were merely the receptacle, the host, and it, the fury, were the sentient, controlling being. In spite of all the apparently necromantic strides of science these were prosaic times, in which everything was deemed capable of explication and comprehension; and throughout his life Professor Solanka, the Malik Solanka who had latterly become conscious of the inexplicable within himself, had been firmly of the prosaic party, the party of reason and science in its original and broadest meaning: scientia, knowledge. Yet even in these microscopically observed and interminably explicated days, what was bubbling inside him defied all explanations. There is that within us, he was being forced to concede, which is capricious and for which the language of explanation is inappropriate. We are made of shadow as well as light, of heat as well as dust. Naturalism, the philosophy of the visible, cannot capture us, for we exceed. We fear this in ourselves, our boundary-breaking, rule-disproving, shape-shifting, transgressive, trespassing shadow-self, the true ghost in our machine. Not in the afterlife, or in any improbably immortal sphere, but here on earth the spirit escapes the chains of what we know ourselves to be. It may rise in wrath, inflamed by its captivity, and lay reason’s world to waste.

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 was 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 green 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.”

“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.

Neela was wearing a knee-length mustard-colored scarf dress in silk. Her black hair was twisted up into a tight chignon and her long arms were bare. A cab stopped and expelled its passenger just in case she needed a ride. A hot dog vendor offered her anything she wanted, free of charge: “Just eat it here, lady, so I can watch you do it.” Experiencing for the first time the effect about which Jack Rhinehart had been so vulgarly effusive, Solanka felt as if he were escorting one of the Met’s more important possessions down an awestruck Fifth Avenue. No: the masterpiece he was thinking of was at the Louvre. With a light breeze blowing the dress against her body, she looked like the Winged Victory of Samothraki, only with the head on. “Nike,” he said aloud, puzzling her. “It’s who you remind me of,” he clarified. She frowned. “I make you think of sportswear?”

Sportswear was certainly thinking of her. As they turned into the park, a young man in running clothes approached them, rendered positively humble by the force of Neela’s beauty. Unable to speak directly to her at first, he addressed himself to Solanka instead. “Sir,” he said, “please don’t think I’m trying to hit on your daughter, that is, I’m not asking for a date or anything, it’s just that she is the most, I had to tell her”—and here at last he did turn toward Neela — “to tell you, you’re the most…” A great roaring rose in Malik Solanka’s breast. It would be good now to tear this young man’s tongue out from that vile fleshy mouth. It would be good to see how those muscled arms might look when detached from that highly defined torso. Cut? Ripped? How about if he was cut and ripped into about a million pieces? Howabout if I ate his fucking heart?

He felt Neela Mahendra’s hand come to rest lightly on his arm. The fury abated as quickly as it had risen. The phenomenon, his unpredictable temper’s rise and fall, had been so rapid that Malik Solanka was left feeling giddy and confused. Had it really happened? Had he really been on the verge of tearing this super-fit fellow limb from limb? And if so, then how had Neela dissipated his anger—the anger to combat which Solanka sometimes had to lie in darkened rooms for hours, doing breathing exercises and visualizing red triangles—by the merest touch? Could a woman’s hand really possess such power? And if so (the thought offered itself to him and would not be denied), was this not a woman to keep by his side and cherish for the rest of his haunted life?

He shook his head to clear it of such notions and returned his attention to the unfolding scene. Neela was giving the young runner her most dazzling smile, a smile after receiving which it would be best to die, for the rest of life was sure to be a big letdown. “He isn’t my father,” she told the smile-blinded wearer of sportswear. “He’s my live-in lover.” This information struck the poor fellow like a hammer blow; whereupon, to underscore the point, Neela Mahendra planted on the still-befuddled Solanka’s unprepared but nevertheless grateful mouth a long, explicit kiss. “And, guess what?” she panted, coming up for air to deliver the coup de grace. “He’s absolutely fantastic in bed.”

“What was that?” a flattered, more than somewhat overcome Professor Solanka asked her dizzily after the runner had departed, looking as if he were off to disembowel himself with a blunt bamboo stick. She laughed, a great wicked cackle of a noise that made even Mila’s raucous laughter seem refined. “I could see you were on the edge of losing it,” she said. “And I need you here right now, paying attention, and not in a hospital or jail.” Which explained about eighty percent of it, Solanka thought as his head stopped whirling, but didn’t fully translate the meaning of everything she had been doing with her tongue.

Jack! Jack! he reproved himself The subject for this afternoon wa Rhinehart, his pal, his best buddy, and not his friend’s girlfriend tongue, no matter how long and gymnastic it was. They sat on a bench near the pond, and all around them dog walkers were colliding wit trees, Tai Chi practitioners lost their balance, roller-bladers smashed into one another, and people out strolling just walked right into th pond as if they’d forgotten it was there. Neela Mahendra gave no sign o noticing any of this. A man walked past with an ice cream cone, which owing to his sudden but comprehensive loss of hand-to-mouth coordination, completely missed his tongue and instead made contact, messily, with his ear. Another young fellow began, with every appearance of genuine emotion, to weep copiously as he jogged by. Only the middle-aged African-American woman sitting on the next bench (who am I calling middle-aged? She’s probably younger than I am, Solanka thought disappointedly) seemed impervious to the Neela factor as she ate her way through a long egg salad hero, advertising her enjoyment of every mouthful with loud mmms and uh-huhs. Neela, meanwhile, had eyes only for Professor Malik Solanka. “Surprisingly good kiss, by the way,” she said. “Really. First class.”

She looked away from him, across the shining water. “It’s over between Jack and me,” she went on quickly. “Maybe he already told you. It’s been over for a while. I know he’s your good friend, and you should be a good friend to him at this time, but I can’t stay with a man once I lose respect for him.” A pause. Solanka said nothing. He was replaying Rhinehart’s last phone call and hearing what he had missed: the elegiac note beneath the sexual boasting. The use of the past tense. The loss. He didn’t push Neela for the story. Let it come, he thought. It’ll be here soon enough. “What do you think about the election?” she asked, making one of the dramatic conversational tacks to which Solanka would soon enough become accustomed. “I’ll tell you what I think. I think the American voters owe it to the rest of the world not to vote for Bush. It’s their duty. I’ll tell you what I hate,” she added. “I hate when people say there’s no difference between the candidates. That Gush-and-Bore stuff is getting so old. It makes me hopping mad.” Not the moment, Solanka thought, to confess his own guilty secrets. Neela wasn’t really expecting a reply, however. “No difference?” she cried. “How about, for example, geography? How about, for example, knowing where my poor little homeland is on the damn map of the world?” Malik Solanka remembered that George W. Bush had been ambushed by a journalist’s crafty question during a foreign policy Qand—A one month before the Republican convention: “Given the growing instability of the ethnic situation in Lilliput-Blefuscu, could you just indicate that nation to us on the map? And what was the name of its capital city again?” Two curve balls, two strikes.

“I’ll tell you what Jack thinks about the election.” Neela swerved back to the subject, the color rising in her face along with her voice. “New Jack, A-list Black-and-White-Ball Truman Capote Rhinehart, he thinks whatever his ‘Caesars’ in their ‘Palaces’ want him to think. Jump, Jack, and he’ll jump sky-high. Dance for us, Jack, you’re such a great dancer, and he’ll show them all the obsolete thirty-year-old moves old white people like, he’ll swim and hitchhike and walk the dog, he’ll do the mash, the funky chicken and the locomotion all night long. Make us laugh, Jack, and he’ll tell them jokes like some court jester. You probably know his favorites. After the FBI tested Monica’s dress, they announced they couldn’t make a positive I.D. from the stain, because everybody in Arkansas has the same DNA.’ Yeah, they like that one, the Caesars. Vote Republican, Jack, be pro-life, Jack, read the Bible on homosexuals, Jack, and guns don’t kill people, ain’t that right, Jack, and he goes, yes, ma’am, people kill people. Good dog, Jack. Roll over. Fetch. Sit up and fucking beg. Beg for it, Jack, you ain’t gonna get it, but we do like to see a black boy on his knees. Good dog, Jack, run off now and sleep in the kennel out the back. Oh, darling, would you throw Jack a bone, please? He’s been so sweet. Yes, she’ll do, she’s from the South.” Oh, so Rhinehart had been a bad boy, Solanka thought, and he guessed that Neela wasn’t used to being cheated on at all. She was used to being the Pied Piper, with lines of boys following wherever she was pleased to lead.

She calmed down, slumping back on the bench, and briefly closed her eyes. The woman on the next bench finished her hero, leaned over to Neela, and said, “Oh, dump that boy, honey. Cancel his ass today. You don’t need no relationship with nobody’s pet poodle.” Neela turned to her as if greeting an old friend. “Ma’am,” she said, seriously, “you’ve got milk in your refrigerator with a longer life than that relationship.”

“Let’s walk now,” she commanded, and Solanka rose to his feet. When she was sure they were out of earshot, she said, “Look, I’m pissed at Jack, that’s one thing, but I’m scared for him, too. He really needs a true friend, Malik. He’s in a pretty bad jam.” As Solanka had guessed from his phone call, Rhinehart was depressed, and not only about the collapse of his perishable milk carton of a love affair. The Sara Lear encounter, which had begun as an interview for an article about the power divorces of the age, had rebounded badly against Jack. Sara had taken against him, and her enmity had hit him hard. After the loss of the Springs place to Bronislawa, he’d found himself the tiniest of shoe boxes in the middle of a golf course way out toward Montauk Point. “You know his thing for Tiger Woods,” Neela said. “Jack’s competitive. He won’t be happy till Nike—the other Nike, I mean,” she said, flushing with undisguised pleasure, “the Nike he hasn’t disgusted yet, starts sponsoring his game too, right down to the swoosh on his cap.” After Rhinehart’s offer for the little house had been accepted by the seller, two things happened in quick succession. On Rhinehart’s third visit to the place, to which the broker had handed him the key, the police showed up less than ten minutes after he did and invited him to assume the position. Neighbors had reported an intruder on the property, and he was it. It took him close to an hour to persuade the cops that he wasn’t a burglar but a bona fide purchaser. A week later the golf club blackballed his application for membership. Sara’s arm was long. Rhinehart, for whom, as he said, “being black’s just not the issue anymore,” had rediscovered, the hard way, that it still was. “There’s a club out there that got started so Jews could play golf,” Neela said contemptuously. “Those old Wasps can sting. Jack should’ve known the score. I mean: Tiger Woods maybe of mixed race, but he knows his balls are black.

“That’s not the worst of it.” They had reached Bethesda Fountain. Double takes and slapstick routines continued all around them; they walked on until they reached a grassy slope. “Sit,” said Neela. He sat. Neela lowered her voice. “He’s become involved with some crazy boys, Malik. God knows why, but he really wants in with them, and they’re the dumbest, wildest white boys you could imagine. Did you ever hear of a secret society, it’s not even supposed to exist, called the S & M? Even the name’s a bad joke. ‘Single and Male.’ Yeah, right. Those boys are twisted way, way out of shape. It’s like that Skull and Crossbones thing they have at Yale?, right?, where they buy up stuff like Hitler’s mustache and Casanova’s dick?—only this one’s not school-specific, and it doesn’t collect memorabilia. It collects girls, young ladies with certain interests and skills. You’d be surprised how many, especially if you knew the games they’re expected to play, and I’m not talking strip poker now. Zips, nips n’ clips. Saddles, reins, harnesses, they probably end up looking like the surrey with the fringe on top. Or, you know, lash me with lashes and tie me with strings, these are a few of my favorite things. Rich girls. I swear. Your family owns a horse farm, so you get turned on being treated like a horse? I wouldn’t know. So much that’s so desirable comes so easy to these kids”—Neela couldn’t be more than five years older than the dead girls, Solanka thought-”that nothing turns them on. They have to travel further and further in search of kicks, further from home, further from safety. The wildest places of the world, the wildest chemicals, the wildest sex. That’s it, my five-cent Lucy analysis. Bored little rich girls let dumb rich boys do weird stuff to them. Dumb rich boys can’t believe their luck.”

Solanka reflected about Neela’s use of the word “kids” to describe what were, after all, members of her own generation. The word seemed honest in her mouth. Compared to, say, Mila-Mila, his own guilty secret—this was an adult woman. Mila had her charms, but they had their roots in a childlike wantonness, a greedy whimsicality born of this same crisis of dulled response, this same need to go to extremes, beyond extremes, in order to find what she needed in the way of arousal. When forbidden fruit has been your daily diet, what do you do for thrills? Lucky Mila, Solanka thought. Her rich boyfriend hadn’t understood what he might have done with her, and had let her go. If these other rich boys had ever heard about her, how far she was willing to go, what taboos she was willing to ignore, she could have been their goddess, the child-woman queen of their hidden cult. She could have ended up in the Midtown Tunnel with a smashed-in skull. “The affectless at play,” Solanka said aloud. “A tragedy of insulation. The unexamined life of the folks who’ve got their units.” He had to explain that, and was happy to hear her laugh again. “No wonder so many of those horny gorillas those Stashes, Clubs, and Horses—want in, no?” Neela sighed. “The question is, why does Jack?”

Professor Malik Solanka felt his stomach tighten. “Jack’s a member of this S & M thing?” he asked. “But aren’t these the men…’—“He’s not a member yet,” she butted in, driven by her need to share her terrible burden. “But he’s hammering on the door, begging to be let in, the stupid bastard. And that’s after the evil shit in the press. Once I knew that, I couldn’t stay with him. I’ll tell you something that wasn’t in any of the papers,” she added, dropping her voice even further. “Those three dead girls? They weren’t raped, they weren’t robbed, right? But something was done to them, and that’s what really links the three crimes, only the police don’t want it in the papers because of the copycat problem.” Solanka was beginning to be genuinely frightened. “What happened to them?” he asked weakly. Neela covered her eyes with her hands. “They were scalped,” she whispered, and wept.

To be scalped was to remain a trophy even in death. And because rarity created value, a dead girl’s scalp in your pocket—O most gruesome of mysteries!—might actually possess greater cachet than would be conferred by the same girl, alive and breathing, on your arm at a glamorous ball, or even as a willing partner in whatever sexual antics you cared to devise. The scalp was a signifier of domination, and to remove it, to see such a relic as desirable, was to value the signifier above the signified. The girls, Solanka in his revolted horror began to understand, had actually been worth more to their murderers dead than alive.

Neela was convinced of the three boyfriends’ guilt; convinced, too, that Jack knew a great deal more than he was telling anyone, even her. “It’s like heroin,” she said, drying her eyes. “He’s in so deep he doesn’t know how to get out, doesn’t want to get out, even though staying in there will destroy him. My worry is, what is he ready to do, and who is he ready to do it to? Was I being lined up for those assholes’ delectation, or what? As for the killings, who knows why? Maybe their little sex games went too far. Maybe it’s some insane sex and power thing those rich boys have. Some blood-brother manhood shit. Fuck the girl and kill her, and do it so damn cleverly that you get away with it. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just expressing class resentment here. Maybe I’ve just watched too many movies. Compulsion. Rope. You know? ‘Why do such a thing? “Because we can.’ Because they want to prove what little Caesars they are. How above and beyond they are, how exalted, godlike. The law can’t touch them. It’s such murderous crap, but Mr. Lapdog Rhinehart just goes on being loyal. ‘You don’t know jack shit about them, Neela, they’re decent enough young men.’ Bullshit. He’s so blind, he can’t see that they’ll take him down with them when they go, or, worse still, maybe they’re setting him up. He’ll take the fall for them and go to the chair singing their praises. Jack Shit. Good name for that weak little fuck. Right at this moment, that’s about what he means to me.”

“Why are you so sure of this?” Solanka asked her. “I’m sorry, but you’re sounding a little wild yourself. Those three men were questioned, but they haven’t been arrested. And as I understand it, each of them has a solid alibi for the time his girlfriend died. Witnesses, et cetera. One was seen in a bar, and so on, I forget.” His heart was beating hard. For what felt like forever, he had been accusing himself of these crimes. Knowing the disorder in his own heart, the bubbling incoherent storm, he had linked it to the disorder of the city, and come close to declaring himself guilty. Now, it seemed, exoneration was at hand, but the price of his innocence just might be his good friend’s guilt. A great turbulence was churning in his stomach, making him nauseous. “And the scalping business,” he forced himself to ask. “Where on earth did you hear a thing like that?”

“Oh God,” she wailed, letting the worst thing come out into the open at last. “I was tidying his fucking wardrobe. God knows why. I never do chores like that for a man. Get a housekeeper, you know? That’s not what I’m for. I really dug him, I guess for about five minutes there I allowed myself… so anyway, I was clearing up for him, and I found, I found.” Tears again. Solanka put his hand on her arm now, and she moved against him, hugged him hard, and sobbed. “Goofy,” she said. “I found all three of them. The fucking man-sized fancy-dress costumes. Goofy and Robin Hood and Buzz.”

She had confronted Rhinehart and he had blustered, badly. Yes, for a joke, Marsalis, Andriessen, and Medford would dress up in these outfits and spy on their girlfriends from a distance. Okay, yes, maybe it was a joke in poor taste, but it didn’t make them killers. And they hadn’t worn the outfits on the nights of the murders, that was nonsense: garbled reporting. But they were afraid, wouldn’t you be, and had asked jack to help. “He went on and on protesting their innocence, denying that his precious club is a front organization for the lewd practices of the privileged class.” Neela had refused to let the subject drop. “I set out everything I knew, half knew, intuited, and suspected, piled it all up in front of him and told him I wasn’t going to let up until he’d said what there was to say.” Finally he’d panicked and cried out, “You think I’m the kind of man who goes out at night and cuts off the tops of women’s heads?” When shed asked him what that meant, he’d looked scared to death, and claimed he’d read it in the paper. The swish of the tomahawk. The victorious warrior’s taking of the spoils. But she had gone on-line to examine the archives of every paper in the Manhattan area, and she knew. “It’s not there.”

Neela had dressed for beauty, not for warmth, and the afternoon had lost its glow. Solanka took off his coat and put it over her trembling shoulders. All around them in the park the colors were fading. The world became a place of blacks and grays. Women’s clothes—unusually for New York, it had been a season of bright colors—faded to monochrome. Under a gunmetal sky, the green leached out of the spreading trees. Neela needed to get out of this suddenly ghostly environment. “Let’s get a drink,” she proposed, getting up, and in the same instant was off in long strides. “There’s a hotel bar that’s okay on Seventy-seventh,” and Solanka hurried after her, ignoring the now familiar shocks and catastrophes she was leaving, like hurricane damage, in her wake.

She had been born “in the mid-seventies” in Mildendo, the capital of Lilliput-Blefuscu, where her family still lived. They were girmityas, descendants of one of the original migrants—her great-grandfather—who had signed an indenture agreement, a girmit, back in 1834, the year after the abolition of slavery. Biju Mahendra, from the little Indian village of Titlipur, had traveled with his brothers all the way to this double speck in the remote South Pacific. The Mahendras had gone to work in Blefuscu, the more fertile of the two islands, and the center of the sugar industry. “As an Indo-Lilly,” she said over her second cosmopolitan, “my childhood bogeyman was the Coolumber, who was big and white and spoke not in words but in numbers and would eat little girls at night if they didn’t do their homework and wash their private parts. As I grew up I learned that the ‘coolumbers’ were the sugarcane laborers’ overseers. The particular one in my family’s story was a white man called Mr. Huge-Hughes, really, I suppose—who was ‘a devil from Tasmania,’ and to whom my great-grandfather and great-uncles were no more than numbers on the list he read out every morning. My ancestors were numbers, the children of numbers. Only the indigenous Elbees were called by their true last names. It took us three generations to retrieve our family names from this numerical tyranny. By then, obviously, things between the Elbees and us had gone badly wrong. ‘We eat veggies,’ my grandmother used to say, ‘but those Elbee fatsos eat human meat.’ In fact there is a history of cannibalism in LilliputBlefuscu. They are offended when you point this out, but it’s just so. And for us the very presence of meat in the kitchen was a defilement. Long pork sounded like the devil’s own food.”

Words for drink played a distressingly big part in her back-story. In the matter of grog, yaqona, kava, beer, as in little else, the Indo-Lilliputians and Elbees were as one; both communities suffered from alcoholism and the problems associated with it. Her own father was a big boozer, and she had been glad to escape him. There were very few scholarships to America available in Lilliput-Blefuscu, but she won one of them, and fell for New York at once, as did everybody who needed, and found here, a home away from home among other wanderers who needed exactly the same thing: a haven in which to spread their wings. Yet her roots pulled at her, and she suffered badly from what she called “the guilt of relief.” She had escaped her drunkard of a father, but her mother and sisters had not. And to her community’s cause, too, she remained passionately attached. “The parades are on Sunday,” she said, ordering a third cosmopolitan. “Will you come with me?” And Solanka—it was Thursday already—inevitably agreed.

“The Elbees say we are greedy and want everything and will chase them out of their own land. We say they are lazy and if it wasn’t for us they would sit around doing nothing and starve. They say that the only end of a soft-boiled egg to break is the little one. Whereas we—or at least those of us who eat eggs—are the Big Endians, from Big Endia.” She cackled again, tickled by her own joke. “Trouble is coming soon.” It was a question, as so many things were, of the land. Even though the Indo-Lilliputians on Blefuscu now did all the farming, were responsible for most of the country’s exports, and therefore earned most of the foreign exchange; even though they had prospered and cared for their own, building their own schools and hospitals, still the land on which all this stood was owned by the “indigenous” Elbees. “I hate that word, ‘indigenous,’ “ Neela cried. “I’m fourth-generation Indo-Lilly. So I’m indigenous too.” The Elbees feared a coup-a revolutionary land grab by the Indo-Lilly, to whom the Elbee constitution still denied the right to own real estate on either island; the Big Endians, for their part, feared the same thing in reverse. They were afraid that when their hundred-year leases expired in the course of the coming decade, the Elbees would simply take back the now valuable farmland for themselves, leaving the Indians, who had developed it, with nothing.

But there was a complication, which Neela, in spite of her ethnic loyalty and three quick cosmopolitans, was honest enough to admit. “This isn’t just a question of ethnic antagonism or even of who owns what,” she said. “The Elbee culture really is different, and I can see why they are afraid. They’re collectivists. The land isn’t held by individual landowners but by the Elbee chiefs in trust for the whole Elbee people. And then we Big Endia-wallahs come along with our good business practice, entrepreneurial acumen, free-market mercantilism, and profit mentality. And the world speaks our language now, not theirs. It is the age of numbers, isn’t it? So we are numbers and the Elbees are words. We are mathematics and they are poetry. We are winning and they are losing: and so of course they’re afraid of us, it’s like the struggle inside human nature itself, between what’s mechanical and utilitarian in us and the part that loves and dreams. We all fear that the cold, machinelike thing in human nature will destroy our magic and song. So the battle between the Indo-Lillys and the Elbees is also the battle of the human spirit and, damnit, with my heart I’m probably on the other side. But my people are my people and justice is justice and after you’ve worked your butts off for four generations and you’re still treated like second-class citizens, you’ve got a right to be angry. If it comes to it I’ll go back. I’ll fight alongside them if I have to, shoulder to shoulder. I’m not kidding, I really will.” He believed her. And was thinking: how is it that, in the company of this impassioned woman I barely know, I feel so completely at ease?

The scar was the legacy of a bad car accident on the interstate near Albany; she had almost lost her arm. Neela by her own admission drove “like a maharani.” It was up to other road users to keep out of her imperious, supra-legal way. In areas where she and her car became known—Blefuscu, or the environs of her smart New England college motorists, when they saw Neela Mahendra coming, would often abandon their vehicles and run. After a series of small dings and near misses, she experienced the very unfunny Big One. Her survival was a miracle (and a close thing); the preservation of her heartbreaking beauty was an even greater astonishment. “I’ll take the scar,” she said. “I’m lucky to have it. And it’s a reminder of something I shouldn’t forget.”

In New York, fortunately, it was unnecessary for her to drive. Her regal attitude “my mother always told me I was a queen, and I believed her”—meant she preferred to be driven anyway, although she was also a terrible backseat driver, full of yelps and gasps. Her rapid success in television production enabled her to afford a car service, whose drivers quickly grew used to her frequent cries of fear. She had no sense of direction, either, and so-remarkably for a New Yorker—never knew where anything was. Her favorite stores, her preferred restaurants and nightclubs, the location of the recording studios and cutting rooms she regularly used: they could have been anywhere. “Where the car stops is where they are,” she told Solanka over the fourth cocktail, all wide-eyed innocence. “It’s amazing. They’re always right there. Right outside the door.”

Pleasure is the sweetest drug. Neela Mahendra leaned into him in their black leather booth and said, “I’m having so much fun. I never realized how easy it would be around you, you looked like such a stuffed shirt at Jack’s place, watching that stupid game.” Her head tilted toward his shoulder. Her hair was down now, and from where he was sitting it veiled much of her face. She let the back of her right hand move slowly against the back of his left hand. “Sometimes, when I drink too much, she comes out to play, the other one, and then there’s nothing I can do. She takes charge and that’s that.” Solanka was lost. She took his hand in hers and kissed the fingertips, sealing their unspoken compact. “You have scars, too,” she said, “but you never talk about them. I tell you all my secrets and you don’t say one single word. I think, why does this man never talk about his child? Yes, of course Jack told me, you think I didn’t ask? Asmaan, Eleanor, that much I know. If I had a little boy, I’d talk about him all the time. You apparently don’t even carry his photograph. I think, this man left his wife of many years, the mother of his son, and even his friend doesn’t know why. I think, he looks like a good man, a kind man, not a brute, so there must be a good reason, maybe if I open up to him he’ll tell me, but, baba, you just keep mum. And then I think, here is this Indian man, Indian from India, not Indo-Lilly like me, a son of the mother country, but apparently that also is a forbidden topic. Born in Bombay, but on the place of his birth he is silent. What are his family circumstances? Brothers, sisters? Parents dead or alive? Nobody knows. Does he ever go back to visit? Seems like not. No interest. Why? The answer must be: more scars. Malik, I think you’ve been in more accidents than me, and maybe you were even more badly hurt somewhere along the line. But if you don’t talk, what can I do? I have nothing to say to you. I can only say, here I am, and if human beings can’t save you then nothing can. That’s all I’m saying. Talk, don’t talk, it’s up to you. I’m having a good time and anyway now the other one is here, so shut up, I don’t know why men always have to talk so much when it’s obvious that words are not the thing required. Not required right now at all.”

12

Akasz Kronos, the great, cynical cyberneticist of the Rijk, created the Puppet Kings in response to the terminal crisis of the Rijk civilization, but on account of the flaw in his character that made him unable to consider the general good, he used them to guarantee nobody’s survival or fortune but his own. In those days the polar ice-caps of Galileo—I, the Rijk’s home planet, were in the last stages of melting (a large stretch of open sea had been sighted at the North Pole) and no matter how high the dikes were built, the moment was not far off when the glory of the Rijk, that highest of cultures set in the lowest of lands. which was just then enjoying the richest and most prolonged golden age in its history, would be washed away.

The Rijk fell into decline. Their artists put down their brushes for good, for how could art—which relied like good wine, on the judgment of posterity—be created once posterity had been canceled? Science failed the challenge as well. The Galileo solar system lay in a “dark quadrant near the rim of our own galaxy, a mysterious area in which few other suns burned, and in spite of their high level of technological achievement, the Rijk had never succeeded in locating an alternative home planet. A cross-section of Rijk society was dispatched, cryogenically frozen, in the Max H, a computer-controlled spacecraft programmed to wake its precious cargo if a suitable planet came within range of its sensors. When this spacecraft malfunctioned and exploded a few thousand miles into space, people lost heart. In that most open, broad-minded, and reasonable of societies there now arose a number of fire-and-brimstone preachers, who blamed the coming catastrophe on the godlessness of Rijk culture. Many citizens fell under the spell of these new, narrow men. Meanwhile the sea continued to rise. When a dike sprang a leak, the water pushed through with such violence that whole counties were sometimes flooded before repairs were complete. The economy collapsed. Lawlessness increased. People stayed home and waited for the end.

The sole surviving portrait of Akasz Kronos shows a man with a full head of long silver hair framing a soft, round. surprisingly boyish face dominated by a wine-dark Cupid’s bow of a mouth. He wears a floor-length gray tunic. with gold embroidery at the cuffs and neckline, over a frilled white high-collared shirt: the very picture of the dignified genius. But the eyes are mad. As we peer into the darkness around him, we make out fine white filaments floating from his fingertips. Only after much study do we notice the small bronze-colored figure of a puppet man at the bottom left of the picture, and even then it takes a while before we realize that the puppet has broken free of the puppeteer’s control. The homunculus turns its back on its maker and sets off to forge its own destiny, while Kronos, the abandoned creator, takes leave not only of his creation but of his senses, too.

Professor Kronos was not only a great scientist but an entrepreneur of Machiavellian daring and skill. As the Rijk lands drowned, he quietly moved his center of operations to the two small mountain-islands that formed the primitive but independent nation of Baburia, at the Galilean antipodes. Here he negotiated and signed an advantageous treaty with the local ruler, the Moyol. The Baburians would retain ownership of their territory, but Kronos would be granted long leases over the high mountain pastures, for which he agreed to pay what seemed to the Mogol a very high rent indeed: an annual pair of wooden shoes for every Baburian man. woman, and child. In addition. Kronos undertook to guarantee the defense of Baburia against the assault that must certainly come as the Rijk’s lands sank below the rising waves. For this he was accorded the title of National savior and granted droit de seigneur over all the islands’ new brides. Having come to terms. Kronos proceeded with the creation of the masterpieces that would prove his undoing, the so-called Monstrous Dynasty of Puppet Caesars, also known as Professor Kronos’s No-Strings Puppet Kings.

His own lover, Zameen, the legendary beauty of the Rijk and the only scientist whom Kronos regarded as his peer, refused to accompany him to his new antipodean world. Her place was with her people, she said, and she would die with them if that was what destiny decreed. Akasz Kronos abandoned her without a second thought, perhaps preferring the sexual multiplicity available on the other side of the world.

The broken strings in the Kronos portrait are purely metaphorical. The Professor’s artificial life-forms were string-free from the start. They walked and talked: they had stomachs.” sophisticated fueling centers that could process ordinary food and drink, with solar-cell backupsystems that enabled them to stay alert, and work, for longer hours than any flesh-and-blood human being. They were faster, stronger, smarter—“better,” Kronos told them—than their human, antpodean hosts. “You are kings and queens,” he taught his creatures. “Carry yourselves well. You are the masters now.” He even gave them the power to reproduce themselves. Each cyborg was given his or her own blueprint so that it could, in theory, endlessly re-create itself in its own image. But in the master program Kronos added a Prime Directive: whatever order he gave, the cyborgs and their replicas were obliged to obey, even to the point of acquiescing in their own destruction. should he deem that necessary. He dressed them in finery and gave them the illusion of freedom, but they were his slaves. He gave them no names. There were seven-digit numbers branded on their wrists, and they were known by these.

No two Kronosian creations were the same. Each was given its own sharply delineated personality traits: the Aristocratic Philosopher:the Promiscuous Child-Woman:the First Rich Ex—Wife (a Bitch):the Aging Groupie: the Pope’sDriver:the Underwater Plumber: the Traumatized Quarterback: the Blackballed Golfer: the Three Society Girls: the Playboys: the Golden Child and His Ideal Mother:the Deceitful Publisher: the Angry Professor: the Goddess of Victory (an exceptionally beautiful cyborg modeled after Kronos’s abandoned lover. Zameen of Rijk): the Runners:the Cell-Phone Woman: the Cell-Phone Man:the Human Spiders: the Woman Who Saw Visions: the Astro-Adman; even a Dollmaker. And as well as characters, strengths, weaknesses, habits, memories, allergies, lusts—he gave them a value system by which to live. The greatness of Akasz Kronos, which was also his downfall, may be judged by this: that the virtues and vices he inculcated in his creations were not wholly, or not only, his own. Self-serving, opportunistic, unscrupulous, he nevertheless permitted his cybernetic life-forms a degree of ethical independence. The possibility of idealism was allowed.

Lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, consistency: these were the six high Kronosian values, but instead of embedding single definitions of these principles in the cyborgs’ default programs, he offered his creations a series of multiple-choice options. Thus lightness might be defined as “doing lightly what is in reality a heavy duty,” that is to say, grace: but it might also be “treating frivolously what is serious,” or even “making light of what is grave. that is, amorality. And quickness could be “doing swiftly whatever is necessary,” in other words, efficiency: however, if the emphasis were to be placed on the second part of that phrase, a kind of ruthlessness could result. Exactitude could tend toward “precision or “tyranny.” “visibility” might be “clarity of action” or “attention-seeking.” Multiplicity was capable of being both open-mindedness” and “duplicity.” and “consistency, “the most important of the six, could mean either “trustworthiness” or “obsessiveness”—the consistency of—we may use our own world’s models here, for the sake of easy comparison—Bardeby the Scrivener, who preferred not to, or of Michael Kohlhaas, with his inexorable and world-shattering search for redress. Sancho Panza is consistent in the reliable sense of the word, but so, contrariwise, is erratic, fixated, chivalry-maddened Quixote. And note, too, the tragic consistency of the Land Surveyor, eternally yearning toward what he can never attain, or of Ahab in his pursuit of the whale. This is the consistency that destroys the consistent; for the Ahabs perish. while the inconsistent, the Ishmaels, survive. “The fullness of a living self is inexpressible, obscure,” Kronos told his mechanical fictions. “In that mystery is freedom, which is what I have given you. In that obscurity is light.”

Why did he permit the Puppet Kings such psychological and moral liberty? Perhaps because the scientist and scholar in him could not resist seeing how these new life-forms resolved the battle that rages within all sentient creatures, between light and dark, heart and mind, spirit and machine.

At first the Puppet Kings served Kronos well. They made the shoes that paid for the land leases, tended the livestock. and tilled the soil. He had dressed them all in court finery, but their long brocaded skirts and dress uniforms quickly grew soiled and torn, and they made themselves new clothes more suited to their labors. As the ice-caps continued to melt and the water levels rose, they prepared to defend their shrinking new home against the foretold Rilkattack. By now they had learned how to modify their own systems without Kronos’s help, and they added new skills and aptitudes by the day. One such innovation enabled them to use the local firewater as flying fuel. Carrying bottles of the toddy with them in case they wanted topping up, the cyborg air force took flight without any need for airplanes, and caught and destroyed the incoming Rijk craft in spydernets. the giant booby-trapped metal webs that they hung across the sky. Underwater, too, they laid similar spidery traps (they had modified their “lungs” for submarine use and were therefore able to sabotage and scuttle the entire Rijk fleet from below). The so-called Battle of the Antipodes was won, and the skies and seas fell silent. On the far side of Galileo—I, floodwaters engulfed the Rijk. If Akasz Kronos felt any compassion as his countrymen drowned, he did not record it.

After the victory, however, things changed. The Puppet Kings returned from the wars with a new sense of individual worth, even of “rights.” To bring them into line, Kronos announced an urgent maintenance-and-repair schedule. Many cyborgs failed to keep their appointments at his workshop, preferring—in the case of those damaged in battle—to live with their disabilities: their malfunctioning servo-mechanisms and partially burned-out circuitry. Groups of the Puppet Kings became secretive, conspiratorial, surly. Kronos suspected that they were meeting covertly to plot against him and heard rumors that at these meetings they addressed one another not by number but by new names, which they had chosen for themselves. He became tyrannical, and when one of the Three Society Girls was insolent to his face, he made an example of her, turning against her his much feared master blaster,’ which caused an instant, irreversible deletion of all programs: in other words, cybernetic death.

The execution was counterproductive. Dissension grew more rapidly than before. Many cyborgs went underground, erecting, around their hideouts, sophisticated anti-surveillance electronic shields, which even Kronos could not easily penetrate, and moving frequently, so that by the time the Professor had broken down one set of defenses, the revolutionaries had already disappeared behind the next. We cannot say for sure exactly when the Dollmaker, whom Akasz Kronos had created in his own image and imbued with many of his own characteristics, learned how to override the Prime Directive. But soon after that breakthrough it was Professor Akasz Kronos who disappeared. No longer safe from his creations, he had to go underground while the Peekay revolution triumphantly emerged into the daylight to be greeted by the cheers of all the cyborgs in Baburia.

The so-called lost word from Kronos exists only in the form of an electronic message to his usurper, the cyborg Dollmaker. It is a rambling, incoherent text, self-exculpatory and full of accusations of ingratitude, threats, and curses. However, there is good reason to suppose that this text is a forgery, perhaps the work of the Dollmaker himself. The creation of a “mad Kronos.” whose sane mirror image he was, suited the cyborg’s purposes perfectly: and such is history’s appetite for the lurid that this version was widely accepted. (That single portrait of Kronos is notable, as we have remarked, for the scientists insane eyes.) Lately, the discovery of fragments of Professor Kronos’s journals has shed new light on his state of mind. A very different Kronos emerges from these fragments, whose authenticity seems beyond dispute: the handwriting is clearly the Professor’s. “The gods. too. murdered the Titans who made them,” Kronos writes. “Artificial life here merely mirrors the real thing. For man is born in chains but everywhere seeks to be free. I too once had strings. I loved my puppets, knowing that, like children. they might walk away from me one day. But they cannot leave me behind. I made them with love, and my love is in each one of them, in their circuits and plastics. In their wood.” Yet this Kronos, so free from bitterness, seems too good to be true. The Professor, a master of dissimulation, may have been plotting his vengeance behind a screen of fatalism.

After Kronos’s disappearance, a PK delegation led by the Dollmaker and his lover, the Goddess of Victory, took the scientist’s place at the next annual Day ofthe Shoes, and informed the Mogol that the Professor’s con tract was to be considered void. Henceforth the “Peekays” and Baburians must live on their twin islands as equals. Before walking out of the Mogol’s presence (instead of shuffling out backward as protocol dictated—a custom that even Kronos had not dared to ignore) the Goddess of Victory threw down the challenge that still reverberates between the two communities: “Let the fittest survive.”

A few days later a small. battered amphibious craft landed unnoticed in a forested corner of the northern island of Baburia. Zameen of Rijk had escaped the destruction of her lost civilization and made her way, against overwhelming odds, to the island refuge of the man who had left her to die. Had she come to renew their love or to avenge her abandonment? Was she here as lover or assassin? Her uncanny resemblance to the cyborg Dollmaker’s lover, the Goddess of Victory, meant that the Puppet Kings deferred to her without question, believing her to be their new queen. What would happen when the two women confronted each other? How would the Dollmaker react to the “real” version of the woman he loved? How would she. the real woman, react to this mechanical avatar of her former lover? What would the Puppet Kings’ new enemies, the andpodeans to whose territory they had now staked so extensive a claim, make of her? How would she deal with them? And what had actually befallen Professor Kronos? If he was dead, how did he die? If alive, how great were his remaining powers? Had he genuinely been overthrown, or was his disappearance some sort of fiendish ploy? So many questions! And behind them, the greatest riddle of all. The Puppet Kings had been offered by Kronos a choice between their original, mechanical selves and some, at least, of the ambiguities of human nature. What would be their choice: wisdom—or fury? Peace—or fury? Love—or fury? The fury of genius, of creation, or of the murderer or tyrant. the wild shrieking fury that must never be named?

The continuing story of the twin goddesses and doubled professors, of Zameen’s search for the vanished Akasz Kronos, and of the struggle for power between the two communities of Baburia will be reported on this site in regular bulletins. Click on the links for more PK info or on the icons below for answers to 101 FAQs, access to interactivides, and to see the wide range of PK merchandise available for INSTANT shipping NOW All major credit cards accepted.

13

As a young man in the early 1960s, Malik Solanka had devoured the science fiction novels of what was later recognized as the form’s golden age. In flight from his own life’s ugly reality, he found in the fantastic its parables and allegories, but also its flights of pure invention, its loopy, spiraling conceits—a ceaselessly metamorphosing alternative world in which he felt instinctively at home. He subscribed to the legendary magazines, Amazing and F&SF bought as many of the yellow-jacketed Victor Gollancz SF series as he could afford, and all but memorized the books of Ray Bradbury, Zenna Henderson, A. E. van Vogt, Clifford D. Simak, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Stanislaw Lem, James Blish, Philip K. Dick, and L. Sprague de Camp. Goldenage science fiction and science fantasy were, in Solanka’s view, the best popular vehicle ever devised for the novel of ideas and of metaphysics. At twenty, his favorite work of fiction was a story called “The Nine Billion Names of God,” in which a Tibetan monastery set up to count the names of the Almighty-believing this to be the only reason for the existence of the universe-buys a top-of-the-line computer to speed up the process. Hard-bitten industry mavens go to the monastery to help the monks get the great machine up and running. They find the whole idea of listing the names pretty laughable, and worry about how the monks might react when the job’s done and the universe goes on going on; so once they’ve done their work, they sneak quietly away. Later, on a plane home, they calculate that the computer must have finished its work. They look out of the window at the night sky, where—Solanka had never forgotten the last line—“one by one, very quietly, the stars were going out.”

To such a reader—and admirer, in the cinema, of the highbrow sci-fi of Fahrenheit 451 and Solaris—George Lucas was a kind of Antichrist and the Spielberg of Close Encounters was a kid playing in the grown-ups’ sandbox, while the Terminator films, and above all the mighty Blade Runner, were carriers of the sacred flame. And now it was his own turn. In those unreliable summer days, Professor Malik Solanka would work on the world of the Puppet Kings—the dolls as well as their stories—like a man possessed. The story of the mad scientist Akasz Kronos and his beautiful lover, Zameen, filled his mind. New York faded into the background; or, rather, everything that happened to him in the city-every random encounter, every newspaper he opened, every thought, every feeling, every dream-fed his imagination, as though prefabricated to fit into the structure he had already devised. Real life had started obeying the dictates of fiction, providing precisely the raw material he needed to transmute through the alchemy of his reborn art.

Akasz he got from aakaash, Hindi for “sky.” Sky as in Asmaan (Urdu), as in poor Sky Schuyler, as in the great sky gods: Ouranos-Varuna, Brahma, Yahweh, Manitou. And Kronos was the Greek, the child-devourer, Time. Zameen was earth, the heavens’ opposite, which embraces the sky at the horizon. Akasz he had seen clearly from the first, picturing his whole life’s arc. Zameen, though, had surprised him. In this tale of a drowning world he hadn’t expected an earth goddess—even one modeled on Neela Mahendra—to take a central role. Yet here she undeniably was, and by showing up she had valuably thickened the plot. Her presence seemed to have been prefigured, even though he hadn’t planned for it at all. Neela/Zameen of Rijk/Goddess of Victory: three versions of the same woman filled his thoughts, and he realized that he’d finally found the successor to the famous creation of his youth. “Hello to Neela,” he told himself, “and so, at last, farewell to Little Brain.”

Which was also to say, farewell to his afternoons with Mila Milo. Mila had felt the change in him at once, intuiting it when she saw him leave for his tryst with Neela on the steps of the Met. She knew what I wanted before I had even dared admit it to myself, Solanka acknowledged. It was probably finished between us there and then. Even if there had been no miracle, even if Neela hadn’t so unpredictably chosen me, Mila had seen enough. She has real beauty of her own, and pride, and isn’t about to play second fiddle to anyone. He returned to West Seventieth Street after an endlessly surprising night spent with Neela in a hotel room across the park—a night whose biggest surprise was that it was happening at all—and found Mila wrapped ostentatiously around beautiful, stupid Eddie Ford on the stoop next door; Eddie, one of nature’s bodyguards, glowing with the joy of having regained guardianship over the only body he gave a damn about. The look Eddie gave Solanka over Mila’s shoulder was impressively articulate. It said, Buddy, you don’t have access privileges at this address no more; between you and this lady there’s now a red velvet rope and your accreditation is so canceled, you shouldn’t even think about stepping in this direction, unless of course you’d like me to clean your teeth, using your spinal column as a brush.

The next afternoon, however, she was at his door. “Take me out somewhere great and expensive. I need to dress up and eat industrial quantities of food.” Eating was Mila’s normal reaction to misery, drinking her response to anger. Sad was probably better than mad, Solanka mused ungenerously. Easier for him, anyway. To make up for this selfish thought, he called one of the talked-about new places of the moment, a Cuban-themed bar-restaurant in Chelsea named Gio in honor of Dona Gioconda, an elderly diva whose star was shining brightly that Buena Vista summer and in whose languid smoke-trail of a voice all of old Havana came back to swaggering, swaying, seducing, smooching life. Solanka got a table so easily that he commented on the fact to the woman taking the booking. “City’s a ghost town righ’ now,” she agreed distantly. “It’s, like, Loserville. See jou at nine P.M.”

“You left me and I’m dying,” Gioconda sang on the restaurant’s sound system as Solanka and Mila came in, “but after three days I will rise again. Don’t go to my funeral, sucker, I’ll be out dancing with some better man. Resurrection, resurrection, and baby I’ll make sure you know when.” Mila translated the words for Solanka. “That’s perfect,” she added. Are you listening, Malik? Because if I could request a track, this would be it. As they say on the radio, the message is in the words. ‘Oh, you thought that you could break me, and it’s true that I’m in pieces now, but after three days they will wake me, from a distance you will see me take my bow. Resurrection, resurrection, gettin’ a new life any day now.’”

At the bar she downed a mojito fast and ordered another one. Solanka saw that he was in for a rougher ride than anticipated. At the bottom of the second glass she moved to the table, ordered all the most highly spiced dishes on the menu, and let him have it. “You’re a lucky man,” she told him, plunging into the complimentary guacamole, “because evidently you’re an optimist. You have to be, because it’s so easy for you to throw things away. Your child, your wife, me, whatever. Only a wild optimist, a stupid brain-dead Pollyanna or Pangloss, throws away what’s most precious, what’s so rare and satisfies his deepest need, which you know and I know you can’t even name or look at without the shutters closed and the lights out, you have to put a cushion on your lap to hide it until somebody comes along who’s smart enough to know what to do, somebody whose own unspeakable need just happens to make a perfect fit with your own. And now, now when we’ve got there, when the defenses are down and the pretense is over and were really in that room that we never allowed ourselves to believe could exist for either of us, the invisible room of our greatest fear—right at the very moment when we discover there’s no need to be afraid in that room, we can have whatever we want for as long as we want it, and maybe when we’ve had our fill we’ll wake up and notice that we’re real living people, we’re not the puppets of our desires but just this woman, this man, and then we can stop the games, open up the shutters, turn out the lights, and step out into the city street hand in hand… this is when you choose to pick up some whore in the park and for Chrissake get a fucking room. An optimist is a man who gives up an impossible pleasure because he’s sure he’ll find it again just around the bend. An optimist thinks his dick talks better sense than, oh, never mind. I was going to say, than his girl, meaning, stupidly, me. Me, by the way, I’m a pessimist. My view is that not only does lightning not strike twice, it usually doesn’t strike once. So that was it for me, what happened between us, that was really it, and you, you just, damn, damn. I could have stayed with you, did you ever work that out? Oh, not for long, just thirty or forty years, more than you’ve got, probably. Instead, I’ll marry Eddie. You know what they say: charity begins at home.”

Breathing heavily, she paused and applied herself to the carnival of food that stood before her. Solanka waited; more would soon enough be on the way. He was thinking, You can’t marry him, you mustn’t, but such advice was no longer his to give. “You’re telling yourself what we did was wrong,” she said. “I know you. You’re using guilt to set yourself free. So now you think you can walk away from me and tell yourself it’s the moral thing to do. But what we did wasn’t wrong,” and here her eyes filled with tears. “Not wrong at all. We were just comforting each other for our terrible feelings of loss. The doll thing was just a way of getting there. What, you really think I fucked my father, you imagine I wriggled my ass on his lap and pushed my nail into his nipple and licked his poor sweet throat? That’s what you’re telling yourself to give yourself an out, or was that also the in? Was that the turn-on, to be my father’s ghost? Professor, you’re the one who’s sick. I’m telling you again. What we did wasn’t wrong. It was play. Serious play, dangerous play, maybe, but play.

I thought you understood that. I thought you might just be that impossible creature, a sexually wise man who could give me a safe place, a place to be free and to set you free, too, a place where we could release all the built-up poison and anger and hurt, just let it go and be free of it, but it turns out, Professor, you’re just another fool. You were on Howard Stern today, by the way.”

That was a left turn he hadn’t expected, a fast swerve against the oncoming emotional traffic. Perry Pincus, he realized with a sudden heaviness. “She made it, then. What did she say?” “Oh,” said Mila, speaking through lamb smothered in salsa verde, “she said a mouthful.” Mila had an excellent memory and could often replay whole conversations almost verbatim. Her Perry Pincus, which she now gave with as much wounding gusto as a young Bernhardt, a Stockard Charming of the near-at-hand, was therefore, Solanka conceded with sinking heart, likely to be extremely reliable as far as accuracy was concerned. “Sometimes these so-called great male minds are textbook cases of pathetically arrested development,” Perry had told Howard and his huge audience. “Take the case of this guy Malik Solanka, not a major mind, gave up philosophy and went into television, and I should say right out that he was one of those I never, you know. Not on my resume. What was his problem, right? Well. Let me tell you that this Solanka’s whole room, and remember were talking here about a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, England, was crawling with dolls, and I do mean dolls. Once I noticed that, I couldn’t leave fast enough. God forbid he should mistake me for a dolly and poke me in the stomach till I said Ma-ma. I was like, excuse me, but I never even liked dolls when I was little, and I’m a girl? What? No, no. Gay I’m comfortable with. Absolutely. I’m from California, Howard. Sure. This wasn’t gay. This was… goo-goo. It was—what can I tell you?—icky. For a gag, I still send the guy stuffed animals at Christmas. The Coca-Cola polar bear. You got it. He never acknowledges receipt, but guess what? He never sent one back, either. Men. When you know their secrets, it’s hard not to laugh.”

“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 marriage. 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-presidential 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!

In spite of all the chatter, all the diagnosis, all the new consciousness, the most powerful communications made by this new, much-articulated national self were inarticulate. For the real problem was damage not to the machine but to the desirous heart, and the language of the heart was being lost. An excess of this heart damage was the issue, not muscle tone, not food, neither feng shui nor karma, neither godlessness nor God. This was the Jitter Bug that made people mad: excess not of commodities but of their dashed and thwarted hopes. Here in Boom America, the real-life manifestation of Keats’s fabulous realms of gold, here in the doubloon-heavy pot at the rainbow’s end, human expectations were at the highest levels in human history, and so, therefore, were human disappointments. When arsonists lit fires that burned the West, when a man picked up a gun and began killing strangers, when a child picked up a gun and began killing friends, when lumps of concrete smashed the skulls of rich young women, this disappointment for which the word “disappointment” was too weak was the engine driving the killers’ tongue-tied expressiveness. This was the only subject: the crushing of dreams in a land where the right to dream was the national ideological cornerstone, the pulverizing cancellation of personal possibility at a time when the future was opening up to reveal vistas of unimaginable, glittering treasures such as no man or woman had ever dreamed of before. In the tormented flames and anguished bullets Malik Solanka heard a crucial, ignored, unanswered, perhaps unanswerable question the same question, loud and life-shattering as a Munch scream, that he had just asked himself: is this all there is? What, this is it? This is it? People were waking up like Krysztof Waterford-Wajda and realizing that their lives didn’t belong to them. Their bodies didn’t belong to them, and nobody else’s bodies belonged to anyone, either. They no longer saw a reason not to shoot.

Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. The Furies hovered over Malik Solanka, over New York and America, and shrieked. In the streets below, the traffic, human and inhuman, screamed back its enraged assent.

Showered, a little more settled, Solanka remembered that he still hadn’t called Jack. It struck him that he didn’t want to. The Jack unveiled by Neela had disappointed and unnerved him, which in itself should not have mattered. Certainly, Jack must have been disappointed in him many times, even put off by his famous “Solankering” temper. Friends should hurdle such obstacles; yet Solanka did not pick up the phone. Why, then, he was a bad friend too; add that to the lengthening charge sheet. Neela stood between them now. That was it. Never mind that she had broken off her relationship with Jack before anything had started between her and Solanka. What mattered was how Jack would see it, and he would see it as treason. And, if he was honest with himself, Solanka silently admitted, he saw it as a betrayal, too.

Moreover, Neela was now also an obstacle between himself and Eleanor. He had left home for one apparent and one underlying reason: the horrifying fact of the knife in the dark, and, beneath the surface of the marriage, the erosion of what had once overwhelmed. Furious and newly kindled desire was hard to give up for that calmer, gentler old flame. “There must be someone else,” Eleanor had said; and now there was, there was. Neela Mahendra, the last big emotional gamble of his life. Beyond her, if he lost her as he probably would, he saw a desert, its slow white dunes sliding toward a sandy grave. The dangers of the enterprise, accentuated by the differences in age and background, by the damage in him and the whimsicality in her, were considerable. How does a woman for whom every man hungers decide that one is enough? Near the end of their first night together, she had said, “I wasn’t looking for this. I’m not sure I’m ready for it.” She meant that it had started feeling so deep so fast that it scared her. “The risk might be too big.” He had twisted his mouth a little too sourly. “I wonder which of us,” he asked, “is taking the bigger emotional risk.” She had had no trouble with that question. “Oh, you are,” she said.

Wislawa returned to work. Soft-spoken Simon Jay had called Solanka from his farm to say that he and his wife had soothed the angry house cleaner, but a contrite phone call from Solanka would help. Gentle as he was, Mr. Jay did not fail to point out that the lease required the apartment to be properly maintained. Solanka gritted his teeth and made the call. “Okay, I come, why not,” Wislawa had agreed. “You are lucky 1 am big in the heart.” Her work was even less satisfactory than before, but Solanka said nothing. There was an imbalance of power in the apartment. Wislawa entered like a queen—like a Goddess of Victory who had cut her strings—and after a few hours of wandering around the duplex like a monarch on a royal progress, waving her duster like a royal kerchief, departed with a contemptuous expression on her bony face. Those who formerly served were now the masters, Solanka thought. As on Galileo-1, so also in New York.

His imagined world absorbed him more and more. He drew furiously, modeled in clay, whittled soft woods; above all, and furiously, he wrote. Mila Milo’s troop had begun to treat him with a kind of surprised reverence: who’d have thought, their manner seemed to say, that an old duffer could have come up with stuff as hip as this? Even slow, resentful Eddie went along with the new attitude. Solanka, despised by his own house cleaner, was much mollified by the young men’s respect and grew determined to prove worthy of it. Neela took up his nights, but he worked long hours during the days. Three or four hours of sleep proved to be enough. The blood seemed to pump harder through his veins. This, he thought, wondering at his undeserved good fortune, was renewal. Life had unexpectedly dealt him a strong hand, and he would make the most of it. It was time for a long, concentrated, perhaps even healing, burst of what Mila called serious play.

The back-story of events on Galileo—I had taken on a proliferating life of its own. Never before had Solanka needed—wanted—to go into such detail. Fiction had him in its grip, and the figurines themselves began to feel secondary: not ends in themselves, but means. He, who had been so dubious about the coming of the brave new electronic world, was swept off his feet by the possibilities offered by the new technology, with its formal preference for lateral leaps and its relative uninterest in linear progression, a bias that had already bred in its users a greater interest in variation than in chronology. This freedom from the clock, from the tyranny of what happened next, was exhilarating, allowing him to develop his ideas in parallel, without worrying about sequence or step-by-step causation. Links were electronic now, not narrative. Everything existed at once. This was, Solanka realized, an exact mirror of the divine experience of time. Until the advent of hyperlinks, only God had been able to see simultaneously into past, present, and future alike; human beings were imprisoned in the calendar of their days. Now, however, such omniscience was available to all, at the merest click of a mouse.

On the website, as it came into being, visitors would be able to wander at will between the project’s different storylines and themes: Zameen of Rijk’s search for Akasz Kronos, Zameen vs. the Goddess of Victory, the Tale of Two Dollmakers, Mogol the Baburian, Revolt of the Living Dolls 1: The Fall of Kronos, Revolt of the Living Dolls lI (This Time It’s War), The Humanization of the Machines vs. the Mechanization of the Humans, the Battle of the Doubles, Mogol Captures Kronos (or Is It the Dollmaker?), the Recantation of the Dollmaker (or Was It Kronos?), and the grand finale, Revolt of the Living Dolls III: The Fall of the Mogol Empire. Each of these in turn would lead to further pages, plunging ever deeper into the multidimensioned world of the Puppet Kings, offering games to play, video segments to watch, chat rooms to enter, and, naturally, things to buy.

Professor Solanka was intoxicated for hours on end by the Puppet Kings’ six-pack of ethical dilemmas; was at once fascinated and revolted by the emerging personality of Mogol the Baburian, who turned out to be a competent poet, expert astronomer, passionate cultivator of gardens, but also a soldier of Coriolanus-like blood lust, and the most cruel of princes; and was deliriously entranced by the shadow-play possibilities (intellectual, symbolic, confrontational, mystificational, even sexual) of the two sets of doubles, the encounters between “real” and “real,” “real” and “double,” “double” and “double,” which blissfully demonstrated the dissolution of the frontiers between the categories. He found himself inhabiting a world he greatly preferred to the one outside his window, and thus came to understand what Mila Milo had meant when she said that this was where she felt most alive. Here, inside the electricity, Malik Solanka emerged from the half-life of his Manhattan exile, traveled daily to Galileo-1, and began, once more, to live.

Ever since Little Brain’s censored remarks to Galileo Galilei, questions of knowledge and power, surrender and defiance, ends and means, had gnawed at Solanka. “Galileo moments,” those dramatic occasions when life asked the living whether they would dangerously stand by the truth or prudently recant it, increasingly seemed to him to lie close to the heart of what it was to be human. Man, I wouldn’t have taken that stufflying down. I’d have started a fucking revolution, me. When the possessor of truth was weak and the defender of the lie was strong, was it better to bend before the greater force? Or, by standing firm against it, might one discover a deeper strength in oneself and lay the despot low? When the soldiers of truth launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of the lie, should they be seen as liberators or had they, by using their enemy’s weapons against him, themselves become the scorned barbarians (or even Baburians) whose houses they had set on fire? What were the limits of tolerance? How far, in the pursuit of the right, could we go before we crossed a line, arrived at the antipodes of ourselves, and became wrong?

Near the climax of the back-story of Galileo-1, Solanka embedded one such defining moment. Akasz Kronos, a fugitive from his own creations, was captured in great old age by the Mogol’s soldiers and brought in chains to the Baburian court. By this time the Puppet Kings and the Baburians had been at war for a long generation, locked in a stalemate as debilitating as the Trojan War, and ancient Kronos, as creator of the cyborgs, was blamed for all their deeds. His explanation of his creations’ arrival at autonomy was rejected by the Mogol with a snort of disbelief. There followed, in the pages Solanka wrote, a long dispute between the two men on the nature of life itself—life as created by a biological act, and life as brought into being by the imagination and skill of the living. Was life “natural,” or could the “unnatural” be said to be alive? Was the imagined world necessarily inferior to the organic one? Kronos was still a creative genius in spite of his downfall and long penurious concealment, and he proudly defended his cyborgs: by every definition of sentient existence, they had grown into full-fledged lifeforms. Like Homo faber, they were users of tools; like Homo sapiens, they reasoned and engaged in moral debate. They could attend to their ills and reproduce their species, and by shedding him, their maker, they had set themselves free. The Mogol rejected these arguments out of hand. A malfunctioning dishwasher did not become a busboy, he argued. By the same token, a rogue puppet was still a doll, a renegade robot was still a robot. This was not a fit direction for their discussions to take. Rather, it was for Kronos to recant his theories and then provide the Baburian authorities with the technological data required to bring the Peekay machines under control. If he refused, the Mogol added, changing the tenor of the conversation, he would of course be tortured and, if necessary, torn limb from limb.

The “recantation of Kronos,” his declaration that machines had no souls whereas man was immortal, was greeted by the deeply religious Baburian people as a mighty victory. Armed with information provided by the broken scientist, the antipodean army created new weapons, which paralyzed the cyborgs’ neurosystems and rendered them inoperative. (The term “killed” was forbidden; what was not alive could not be dead.) The Peekay forces fled in disarray, and a Baburian victory looked assured. The Dollmaker cyborg himself lay among the fallen. Too egotistical—too “consistent”—to have created any replicas of himself, the Dollmaker was still one of a kind; thus his character was erased with his termination. The only person who could have re-created him was Akasz Kronos, whose fate was obscure. Perhaps the Mogol killed him, even after his abject surrender; or perhaps he was blinded like Tiresias and permitted, by way of further humiliation, to wander the world, begging bowl in hand, “speaking the truth that no man would believe,” while from every quarter he heard tales of the collapse of his own great enterprises, of the reduction of the great Kronosian Puppet Kings, the sentient cyborgs from Rijk, the first machines ever to cross the frontier between mechanical entities and living beings, into piles of useless junk. And while nobody would now believe the truth that he had himself denied, he himself had no choice but to accept the reality of the catastrophe that his own cowardice, his lack of moral fortitude, had brought about.

At the eleventh hour, however, the tide turned. The Puppet Kings regrouped under a new, dual leadership. Zameen of Rijk and her cyborg counterpart the Goddess of Victory joined forces, like twin Ranis of Jhansi rising up against imperialist oppression, or like Little Brain in a new, double-trouble incarnation, leading her promised revolution. They used their combined scientific brilliance to build electronic shields against the new Baburian weapons. Then, with Zameen and the Goddess at their head, the Peekay army began a major offensive and invested the Mogol’s citadel. Thus began the Siege of Baburia, which would not end for a generation or more…

In the world of the imagination, in the creative cosmos that had begun with simple doll-making and then proliferated into this many-armed, multimedia beast, it wasn’t necessary to answer questions; far better to find interesting ways of rephrasing them. Nor was it necessary to end the story-indeed, it was vital to the project’s long-term prospects that the tale be capable of almost indefinite prolongation, with new adventures and themes being grafted onto it at regular intervals and new characters to sell in doll, toy, and robot form. The back-story was a skeleton that periodically grew new bones, the framework for a fictional beast capable of constant metamorphosis, which fed on every scrap it could find: its creator’s personal history, scraps of gossip, deep learning, current affairs, high and low culture, and the most nourishing diet of all-namely, the past. The ransacking of the world’s storehouse of old stories and ancient histories was entirely legitimate. Few Web users were familiar with the myths, or even the facts, of the past; all that was needed was to give the old material a fresh, contemporary twist. Transmutation was all. The Puppet Kings website went on-line and at once achieved and sustained a high level of “hits.” Comments flooded in, and the river of Solanka’s imagination was fed from a thousand streams. It began to swell and grow.

Because the work never settled, never stopped being a work in progress but remained in a condition of perpetual revolution, a degree of untidiness was inevitable. The histories of characters and places, even their names, sometimes changed as Solanka’s vision of his fictitious universe clarified and sharpened. Certain storyline possibilities turned out to be stronger than he had at first realized, and were greatly amplified. The Zameen/Goddess of Victory strand was the most important of these. In the initial conception, Zameen had simply been a beauty, not a scientist at all. Later, however, when Solanka-prompted, he had to concede, by Mila Milo-understood how important Zameen would be in the story’s climactic phase, he went back and added much material to her early life, turning her into Kronos’s scientific equal as well as his sexual and moral superior. Other avenues turned out to be blind alleys and were discarded. For example, in an early draft of the back-story, Solanka imagined that the “Galilean” figure captured by the Mogol was the cyborg Dollmaker, not the vanished Akasz Kronos. In this version the Dollmaker’s denial of his right to be called a “life-form,” his confession of his own inferiority, became a crime against himself and his own race. Later the Dollmaker escaped from his Baburian jailers, and when news of his “recantation” was spread by the Mogol’s propaganda machine with the aim of undermining his leadership, the cyborg hotly denied the accusations, announcing that he had not been the prisoner in question, that in fact his human avatar, Kronos, was the real traitor to the truth. Even though he discarded this version, Solanka retained a soft spot for it, and often wondered if he’d been wrong. Eventually, benefiting from the Web’s fondness for variora, he added the excised story to the site, as a possible alternate version of the facts.

The names Baburia and Mogol were late additions, too. Mogul of course came from “Mughal,” and Babur had been the first of the Mughal emperors. But the Babur of whom Malik Solanka had been thinking wasn’t an old dead king. He was the designated leader of the aborted “Indo-Lilly” parade-demonstration in New York, to whom, in Solanka’s opinion, Neela Mahendra had paid far too much attention. The parade had started out as a poor affair and ended up as a brawl. At the northwest corner of Washington Square, under the faintly interested scrutiny of assorted cold-drink salesmen, magic tricksters, unicyclists and cutpurses, one hundred or so men and a handful of women of Indian-Lilliputian origin assembled, their numbers augmented by American friends, lovers, spouses, members of the usual left groupuscules, token “solidarity cadres” from other diaspora—Indian communities in Brooklyn and Queens, and the inevitable demonstration tourists. Over a thousand in toto, the organizers claimed; around two hundred and fifty, said the police. The parallel demonstration of the “indigenous” Elbees had been even less well attended, and had shamefacedly dispersed without marching. However, groups of disgruntled and well-lubricated Elbee males had found their way to Washington Square to taunt the Indo-Lilly men and hurl sexual insults at the women. Scuffles broke out; the N.Y.P.D., looking amazed that so tiny an event could have generated such heat, moved in a few beats too late. As the crowd fled the advancing police officers, several quick knifings took place, none of them lethal. Within instants, the square was empty of demonstrators, except for Neela Mahendra, Malik Solanka, and a hairless giant, who stood stripped to the waist, holding a megaphone in one hand and in the other a wooden flagstaff bearing the new saffron-and-green flag of the proposed “Republic of Filbistan”—the FILB stood for “Free Indian Lilliput-Blefuscu” and the rest was added on because it sounded like a word from “home.” This was Babur, the young political leader who had traveled all the way from his distant islands to address the “rally,” and who now looked so forlorn, so shorn of purpose as well as hair, so unexpressed, that Neela Mahendra hastened to his side, leaving Solanka where he stood. When he saw Neela approaching, the young giant let go of the flagstaff, which thumped him on the head as it fell. He staggered but, to his considerable credit, remained upright. Neela was all solicitude, evidently believing that by giving Babur the full benefit of her beauty she could make up for his long, useless trip. And Babur did indeed brighten, and began, after a few moments, to address Neela as if she were the enormous and politically significant public meeting he had hoped for. He spoke of a Rubicon being crossed, of no compromise and no surrender. Now that the hard-won constitution had been abrogated and Indo-Lilly participation in the government of Lilliput-Blefuscu so shamefully terminated, he said, only extreme measures would suffice. “Rights are never given by those who have them,” he declaimed, “only taken by those in need.” Neela’s eyes brightened. She mentioned her television project, and Babur nodded gravely, seeing that something might be salvaged from the rubble of the day. “Come,” he said, taking her arm. (Solanka noted the ease with which she slipped her arm through her countryman’s.) “Come. We must discuss these things for many hours. There is much that needs urgently to be done.” Neela left with Babur without a backward glance.

Solanka was still in Washington Square at closing time that night, sitting wretchedly on a bench. As a patrol car was ordering him to leave, his cell phone rang. “I’m really sorry, honey,” Neela said. “He was so unhappy, and it is my work, we did need to talk. Anyway, I don’t need to explain. You’re a smart man. I’m sure you worked it out. You should meet Babur. He’s so full of passion it’s scary, and after the revolution he may even be president. Oh, can you hold on, honey? It’s the other line.” She had spoken of the revolution as an inevitability. With a deep rumble of alarm, Solanka, on hold, remembered her own declaration of war. I’ll fight alongside them if I have to, shoulder to shoulder. Ira not kidding, I really will. He looked at the bloodstains drying on the darkened square, evidence here in New York City of the force of a gathering fury on the far side of the world: a group fury, born of long injustice, beside which his own unpredictable temper was a thing of pathetic insignificance, the indulgence, perhaps, of a privileged individual with too much selfinterest. And too much time on his hands. He could not give Neela up to this higher, antipodean rage. Come back, he wanted to say. Come to me, my darling, please don’t go. But she was back on the line, and her voice had changed. “It’s Jack,” she said. “He’s dead, his head’s been blown off, and there’s a confession in his hand.” You’ve seen the headless Winged Victory, Solanka dully thought. You’ve heard of the Headless Horseman. Give it up for my headless friend Jack Rhinehart, the Wingless, Horseless Defeat.