Fury

15

Nothing made sense. Jack’s body had been found in the Spassky Grain Building, a Tribeca construction site on the corner of Greenwich and N Moore whose developers had recently come under union fire for employing scab labor. It was a fifteen-minute walk from Jack’s Hudson Street apartment, and he had apparently strolled here with a loaded shotgun in his hand, crossed Canal—still busily crowded in spite of the late hour—without attracting attention, then broken into his chosen location, taken an elevator to the fourth floor, positioned himself by a west-facing window with a good view of the moonlit river, placed the snout of the gun in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and fallen to the rough, unfinished floor, dropping the weapon but somehow holding on to the suicide note. He had been drinking heavily: Jack Daniel’s and Coke, an absurd drink for an oenophile like Rhinehart. When he was discovered, his suit and shirt were folded neatly on the floor, and he was wearing only his socks and underpants, which, for some reason, or perhaps by chance, were on back to front. He had recently cleaned his teeth.

Neela decided to make a clean breast of it and told the detectives everything she knew—the fancy-dress costumes in Jack’s closet, her suspicions, everything. She could have been in trouble, withholding information being a serious offense, but the police had bigger fish to fry, and, besides, the two officers who came to her Bedford Street apartment to interview her and Malik Solanka were having troubles of their own in her presence. They kept breaking pencils and stepping on each other’s feet and knocking over ornaments and bursting into simultaneous speech and then falling blushingly silent, to none of which Neela paid the slightest attention. “The point is,” she concluded as the two detectives bumped heads in eager agreement, “this so-called suicide smells strongly of fish.”

Malik and Neela had known that Jack owned a gun, though they had never seen it. It dated from the black-Hemingway hunting-and-fishing period that had preceded his Tiger Woods phase. Now, like poor Ernest, most feminine of great male American writers, destroyed by his failure to be the phony, macho Papa-self he had chosen to inhabit, Jack had gone hunting for himself, the biggest game of all. That, at least, was what they were being invited to believe. On closer examination, however, this version of events became less and less convincing. Jack’s building had a doorman, who had seen him leave the premises alone at around seven P.m., carrying no bags and dressed for an evening on the town. A second witness, a plump young woman wearing a beret who had been waiting on the sidewalk for a taxi, came forward in response to a police appeal to say that she had seen a man answering to Jack’s description getting into a large black sports utility vehicle with smoked windows; through the open door, she had briefly glimpsed at least two other men, with, and she was quite clear on this point, large cigars in their mouths. An identical SUV was seen driving away along Greenwich Street soon after the established time of death. A couple of days later, analysis of the technical data from what was already provisionally being called the crime scene revealed that the damage to the Spassky Grain Building’s temporary access door had not been inflicted by Rhinehart’s shotgun. No other instrument capable of breaking down the very solid door-wooden, with a reinforcing metal frame—was found on or near his body. Moreover, it was strongly suspected that the damage to the door had not been the means of gaining entry to the premises. Somebody had had a key.

The suicide note itself was instrumental in establishing Jack’s innocence. Rhinehart was famous for the polished precision of his prose. He rarely made an error of syntax, and never, never made a spelling mistake. Yet here among his last words were solecisms of the worst kind. “Ever since my war correspondent days,” the note read, “I have had a violent streak. Sometimes in the middle of the nite I smash up the phone. Horse, Club and Stash are innocent. I killed their girls bee they would not fuck me, probably bee I was of Color.” And, finally, heartbreakingly, “Tell Nila I love her. I know I fucked up but I love her true.” Malik Solanka, when his turn came to be interviewed by the police, told them emphatically that even though the note was in Jack’s strong, unmistakable hand, it could not have been his freely written work. “Either it has been dictated by somebody with a far lower level of language skills than Jack or else he has deliberately dumbed down his style to send us a message. Don’t you see? He has even told us his three murderers’ names.”

When it was established that Keith “Club” Medford, last lover of the late Lauren Klein, was the son of the wealthy developer and unionized workers’ bete noire Michael Medford, one of whose companies was handling the conversion of the Spassky Grain Building into a mixture of high-end lofts and townhouse-style residences, and that Keith, who had been asked to plan the project’s opening-night party, possessed a set of keys, it became clear that the killers had made an irretrievable mistake. Most murderers were stupid, and a life of privilege was no defense against folly. Even the most expensive schools turned out badly educated dolts, and Marsalis, Andriessen, and Medford were semi-literate, arrogant young fools. And murderers, too. Club, faced with the accumulating facts, was the first to confess. His buddies’ defenses collapsed a few hours later.

Jack Rhinehart was buried in the depths of Queens, thirty-five minutes’ drive from the bungalow he’d bought his mother and still unmarried sister in Douglaston. “A house with a view,” he’d joked. “If you go to the end of the yard and lean all the way over to your left, you can just catch a what?, call it a whisper, of the Sound.” Now his own view would forever be of urban blight. Neela and Solanka got a car to drive them out. The cemetery was cramped, treeless, comfortless, damp. Photographers moved around the small group of mourners like pollution floating at the edges of a dark pond. Solanka had somehow forgotten that there would be media interest in Jack’s funeral. The moment the confessions had been made and the story of the S & M Club became the society scandal of the summer, Professor Solanka lost interest in the event’s public dimension. He was mourning his friend Jack Rhinehart, the great, brave journalist, who had been sucked down by glamour and wealth. To be seduced by what one loathed was a hard destiny. To lose the woman you loved to your best friend was perhaps even harder. Solanka had been a bad friend to Jack, but then it had been Jack’s fate to be betrayed. His secret sexual preferences, which he had never inflicted on Neela Mahendra, but which meant that not even Neela would finally have been enough for him, had led him into bad company. He had been loyal to men who did not merit his loyalty, had persuaded himself of their innocence—and what an effort that must have been for a natural finder-out and muckraker, what delusionary brilliance he must have employed!—and consequently had helped to shield them from the law, and his reward was to be killed by them in a clumsy attempt at scapegoating: to be sacrificed on the altar of their invincible, egomaniacal pride.

A gospel singer had been hired to sing a farewell medley of spirituals and more contemporary material: “Fix Me, Jesus” was followed by Puff Daddy’s tribute to Notorious B.I.G., “Every Breath You Take (I’ll Be Missing You)”; then came “Rock My Soul (In the Bosom of Abraham).” Rain looked imminent but was holding off. The air was moist, as if full of tears. Here were Jack’s mother and sister; also Bronislawa Rhinehart, the ex-wife, looking simultaneously devastated and sexy in a short black dress and high-fashion veil. Solanka nodded at Bronnie, to whom he’d never found anything to say, and muttered empty words at the bereaved. The Rhinehart women didn’t look sad; they looked angry. “Jack I know,” Jack’s mother said briefly, “would’ve seen through those white boys in nine seconds flat.” “Jack I know,” his sister added, “didn’t need no whips or chains to have himself some fun.” They were mad at the man they loved for the scandal but even madder at him for having put himself in harm’s way, as if he had done it to hurt them, to leave them with the lifelong pain of their bereavement. “The Jack I know,” Solanka said, “was a pretty good man, and if he’s anywhere at all right now, I’d say he’s happy to be set free from his mistakes.” Jack was right there with them, of course. Jack in the box from which he would never rise up. Solanka felt a hand tighten around his heart.

In his grief’s eye Solanka pictured Jack stretched out in an upscale loft conversion while the whole world gossiped over his corpse and photographers frothed about. Next to Jack lay the three dead girls. Released from the fear of his own involvement in their deaths, Solanka mourned them too. Here lay Lauren, who had become afraid of what she was capable of doing to others and allowing others to do to her. Bindy and Sky had tried and failed to keep her inside their charmed circle of pleasure and pain, but she had sealed her fate by threatening the club’s members with the shame of a public expose. Here lay Bindy, the first to comprehend that her friend’s death had been no random killing but a cold-blooded execution: which comprehension was her own death warrant. And here lay Uptown Sky, game-for-anything sexual athlete Sky, the wildest of the doomed three and the most sexually uninhibited, her masochistic excesses—now meticulously detailed in the delighted press—sometimes alarming even her sadistic lover, Brad the Horse. Sky, who believed herself immortal, who never thought they would come for her, because she was the empress of their world, they followed where she led, and her levels of tolerance, her thresholds, were the highest any of them had ever known. She knew about the murders and was crazily aroused by them, murmured in Marsalis’s ears that she had no intention of blowing the whistle on so much man, and whispered to both Stash and Club in turn that she would be happy to stand in for her dead friends in any way they wanted, just name it, baby, it’s yours. She also explained to all three men, in separate, luridly retold encounters, that the killings bound them together for life; they had passed the point of no return, and the contract of their love had been signed in her friends’ lifeblood. Sky, the vampire queen. She died because her killers were too scared of her sexual fury to let her live.

Three scalped girls. The public talk was of voodoo and fetishism, and above all of the icy ruthlessness of the crimes, but Solanka preferred to ponder the death of the heart. These young girls, so desperately desirous of desire, had only been able to find it at the outside extremes of human sexual behavior. And these three young men, for whom love had become a question of violence and possession, of doing and being done to, had gone to the frontier between love and death, and their fury had worn it away, the fury they could not articulate, born of what they, who had so much, had never been able to acquire: lessness, ordinariness. Real life.

In a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand horrified conversations buzzing over the dead like stench-seeking flies, the city discussed the murders’ most minute details. They killed one another’s girls! Lauren Klein had been taken out by Medford for one last grand night on the town. She sent him home, as he had planned, because of a quarrel he’d deliberately provoked near the evening’s end. A few moments later he phoned her, pretending to have had a car accident just around the corner. She ran out to help him, found his vintage Bentley unmarked and waiting with its door open. Poor babe. She thought be wanted to apologize. Annoyed at the deception but not alarmed, she climbed in, and was hit repeatedly on the head by Andriessen and Marsalis, while Medford drank margaritas in a nearby bar, announcing loudly that he was drowning his sorrows because his bitch wouldn’t put out, obliging the bartender to ask him to shut up or leave, and making sure his presence would be remembered. And then the scalping. They must’ve put down plastic sheeting to make sure the car wasn’t stained. And the body thrown like garbage in the street. The same technique worked on Belinda Candell.

Sky, however, was different. As was her way, she took the initiative, whispering her plans for the night to Bradley Marsalis over their last supper. Not tonight, he said, and she shrugged. “Okay. I’ll call Stash or Club and see if they’re up for some fun.” Furious, insulted, but obliged to stick to the game plan, Brad said good night at her lobby door, and phoned her a few minutes later, saying, “Okay, you win, but not here. Meet me at the room.” (The room was the soundproofed five-star hotel suite booked year-round by the S&M Club for the use of its noisier members. Bradley Marsalis, it was revealed, had made the booking several days in advance, which went to prove premeditation.) Sky never reached the room. A large black sports utility vehicle pulled up beside her and a voice she recognized said, “Hi, princess. Climb aboard. Horse asked us to give you a little ride.”

Twenty, nineteen, nineteen, Solanka counted. Their combined age had been just three years more than his.

And what of Jack Rhinehart, who lived through a dozen wars only to die miserably in Tribeca, who wrote so well on much that mattered and so stylishly on much that didn’t, and whose last words were, deliberately or by necessity, both poignant and inane? Jack’s story was all out in the open, too. The theft of the shotgun by Horse Marsalis. Jack’s invitation to his S&NI Club induction ceremony. You made it, man. You’re in. Even when they arrived at the Spassky Grain Building, Rhinehart had no idea he was close to death. He was probably thinking of the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut, imagining masked girls naked on podiums, waiting for the sting of his sweet lash. Solanka was weeping now. He heard the killers insist that, as part of the ritual, Rhinehart needed to drink a brimming jug of Jack and Coke, the spoiled kids’ tipple, at high speed. He heard them order Jack to strip and reverse his underpants, in the name of club tradition. As if it were being tied around his own eyes, Solanka felt the blindfold they had used on Jack (and afterward removed). His tears soaked through the imagined silk. Okay, Jack, are you ready, this’ll blow you away.—What’s happening, guys, what’s the deal? Just open your mouth, Jack. Did you clean your teeth like we said? Good Job. Say aah, Jack. This’ll kill you, doll. How pathetically easy it had been to lure this good, weak man to his death. How willingly—giving five high, getting five low—he stepped into his own hearse and took his brief last ride. Lord, rock my soul, the singer cried. Good-bye, Jack, Solanka said silently to his friend. Go on home. I’ll be calling you.

Neela took Malik back to Bedford Street, opened a bottle of red wine, drew the curtains, lit many scented candles, and disrespectfully selected a CD of Bollywood song classics from the fifties and early sixties music from his forbidden past. This was an aspect of her profound emotional wisdom. In all things pertaining to feeling, Neela Mahendra knew what worked. Kabhi meri gali aaya kard. The teasingly romantic song lilted across the darkened room. Come up and see me sometime. They hadn’t spoken since they left the graveside. She drew him down onto a cushion-strewn rug and laid his head between her breasts, wordlessly reminding him of the continued existence of happiness, even in the midst of grief.

She spoke of her beauty as something a little separate from herself. It had simply “showed up.” It wasn’t the result of anything she’d done. She took no credit for it, was grateful for the gift she’d been given, took great care of it, but mostly thought of herself as a disembodied entity living behind the eyes of this extraordinary alien, her body: looking out through its large eyes, manipulating its long limbs, not quite able to believe her luck. Her impact on her surroundings—the fallen window cleaners sitting splay-legged on various sidewalks with buckets on their heads, the skidding cars, the danger to cleaver-wielding butchers when she stopped by for meat—was a phenomenon of whose results, for all her apparent unconcern, she was sharply, precisely aware. She could control “the effect” to some degree. “Doesn’t know how to switch it off,” Jack had said, and that was true, but she could play it down with the help of loose-fitting clothes (which she detested) and wide-brimmed hats (which, as a sun hater, she adored). More impressively, she could intensify the world’s response to her by making fine-tuning adjustments to her stride length, the tilt of her chin, her mouth, her voice. At maximum intensity she threatened to reduce entire precincts to disaster areas, and Solanka had to ask her to stop, not least because of the effect she was having on his own state of body and mind. She liked compliments, described herself as a “high-maintenance girl,” and at times was prepared to concede that this compartmentalization of herself into “form” and “content” was a useful fiction. Her description of her sexual being as “the other one” who periodically came out to hunt and would not be denied was a clever ruse, a shy person’s way of tricking herself into extroversion. It allowed her to reap the rewards of her exceptional erotic presence without being troubled by the paralyzing social awkwardness that had plagued her as a stammering young girl. Too astute to speak directly of the strong sense of right and wrong that quietly informed all her actions, she preferred to quote the cartoon sex bomb Jessica Rabbit. “I’m not bad,” she liked demurely to purr. “I’m just drawn that way.”

She held him close. The contrast with the Mila liaison was very striking. With Mila, Solanka had allowed himself to sink toward the sickly allure of the unmentionable, the unallowed, whereas when Neela wrapped herself around him the opposite was true, everything became mentionable and was mentioned, everything was allowable and allowed. This was no child-woman, and what he was discovering with her was the adult joy of unforbidden love. He had thought of his addiction to Mila as a weakness; this new bond felt like strength. Mila had accused him of optimism, and she was right. Neela was optimism’s justification. And, yes, he was grateful to Mila for finding the key to the doors of his imagination. But if Mila Milo had unlocked the floodgate, Neela Mahendra was the flood.

In Neela’s arms Solanka felt himself begin to change, felt the inner demons he feared so much growing weaker by the day, felt unpredictable rage give way to the miraculous predictability of this new love. Pack your bags, Furies, he thought, you no longer reside at this address. If he was right, and the origin of fury lay in life’s accumulating disappointments, then he had found the antidote that transformed the poison into its opposite. For furia could be ecstasy, too, and Neela’s love was the philosopher’s stone that made possible the transmuting alchemy. Rage grew out of despair: but Neela was hope fulfilled.

The door to his past remained closed, and she had the grace not to push against it just yet. Her need for a degree of personal and psychological privacy was considerable. After their initial night in a hotel room, she had insisted on using her own bed for their encounters, but made it clear that he wasn’t welcome to spend the night. Her sleep was filled with nightmares, yet she didn’t want the comfort of his presence. She preferred to battle her dream-figments alone and, at the end of each night’s wars, to wake up slowly, and definitely by herself. Having no alternative, Solanka accepted her terms, and began to grow accustomed to fighting off the waves of sleep that habitually rolled over him at lovemaking’s end. He told himself that it was better for him this way as well. He was, after all, suddenly a very busy man.

He was learning her better every day, exploring her as if she were a new city in which he had sublet space and where he hoped one day to buy. She wasn’t completely at ease with that idea. Like him, she was a creature of moods, and he was becoming her personal meteorologist, predicting her weather, studying the duration of her internal gales and their sideswipe effects, in the form of crashing storms, on the golden beaches of their love. Sometimes she liked being seen in such microscopic detail, loved being understood without speaking, having her needs catered to without having to express them. On other occasions it annoyed her. He would see a cloud on her brow and ask, “What’s the matter?” In response shed look exasperated and say, “Oh, nothing. For Pete’s sake! You think you can read my mind, but you’re so often so wrong. If there’s something to be said, I’ll say it. Don’t meet trouble halfway.” She had invested a great deal of effort in building an image of strength and didn’t want the man she loved to see her weaknesses.

Medication, he soon discovered, was an issue for Neela, too, and this was another thing they had in common: that they were determined to beat their demons without entering the valley of the dolls. So when she felt low, when she needed to wrestle with herself, she would retreat from him, wouldn’t want to see him or explain why, and he was expected to understand, to be grown-up enough to allow her to be what she needed to be; in short, for perhaps the first time in his life he was being required to act his age. She was a highly strung woman, and sometimes admitted that she must be a nightmare to be around, to which he replied, “Yes, but there are compensations.” “I hope they’re big,” she said, looking genuinely worried. “If they weren’t, I d be pretty stupid, wouldn’t I?” He grinned, and she relaxed and moved in close. “That’s right,” she comforted herself. “And you’re not.”

She possessed immense physical ease, and was actually happier naked than clothed. More than once he had to remind her to dress when there was a knock at her door. But she wanted to guard some secrets, to protect her mystery. Her frequent withdrawals into herself, her habit of recoiling from being too acutely seen, had to do with this very un-American—this positively English—awareness of the value of reserve. She insisted that it had nothing to do with whether she loved him or not, which she deeply and bewilderingly did. “Look, it’s obvious,” she replied when he asked why. “You may be very creative with your dolls and websites and all, but as far as I’m concerned, your only function is to get into my bed whenever I tell you and fulfill my every whim.” At which imperious dictum Professor Majik Solanka, who had wanted to be a sex object all his life, felt quite absurdly pleased.

After making love, she lit a cigarette and went to sit naked by the window to smoke it, knowing his hatred of tobacco smoke. Lucky neighbors, he thought, but she dismissed such considerations as bourgeois and far beneath her. She returned with a straight face to the question he had asked. “The thing about you,” she offered, “is that you’ve got a heart. This is a rare quality in the contemporary guy. Take Babur: an amazing man, brilliant, really, but totally in love with the revolution. Real people are just counters in his game. With most other guys it’s status, money, power, golf, ego. Jack, for example.” Solanka hated the laudatory reference to the smooth-bodied flag-bearer of Washington Square, felt a sharp twinge of guilt at being favorably compared to his dead friend, and said so. “You see,” she marveled, “you don’t just feel, you can actually talk about it. Wow. Finally, a man worth staying with.” Solanka had the feeling that he was being obscurely sent up, but couldn’t quite identify the joke. Feeling foolish, he settled for the affection in her voice. Love Potion Number Nine. That was the healing balm.

India was insisted upon everywhere in the Bedford Street apartment, in the overemphasized manner of the diaspora: the filmi music, the candles and incense, the Krishna-and-milkmaids calendar, the dhurries on the floor, the Company School painting, the hookah coiled atop a bookcase like a stuffed green snake. Neela’s Bombay alter ego, Solanka mused, pulling on his clothes, would probably have gone for a heavily Westernized, Californian-minimalist simplicity… but never mind about Bombay. Neela was getting dressed as well, pulling on her most “aerodynamically” body-hugging black outfit, made in some nameless space-age fabric. She needed to go to the office in spite of the late hour. The pre-production period on the Lilliput documentary was almost over, and she would be leaving for the antipodes soon. There was still much to do. Get used to this, Solanka thought. Her need for absence is professional as well as personal. To be with this woman is also to learn to be without her. She tied the laces on her white street flyers-sneakers with flip-out wheels built into the soles—and took off at speed, her long black ponytail flying out behind her as she raced away. Solanka stood on the sidewalk and watched her go. The “effect,” he noted as the usual mayhem began, worked almost as well in the dark.

He went to FAO Schwarz and sent Asmaan an elephant by mail. Soon the last vestiges of old fury would have been dispelled by new happiness and he would feel confident enough to re-enter his son’s life. To do so, however, he would have to face Eleanor and confront her with the fact she still refused to accept. He would have to bury finality like a knife in her good and loving heart.

He telephoned to tell Asmaan to expect a surprise. Great excitement. “What’s inside it? What’s it saying? What would Morgen say?” Eleanor and Asmaan had been holidaying in Florence with the Franzes. “There’s no beach here. No. There’s a river, but I douldn’t swim in it. Maybe when I’m bigger I’ll come back and swim in it. I wasn’t stared, Daddy. That’s why Morgen and Lin were shouting.” Scared. “Mummy wasn’t. Mummy wasn’t shouting. She said don’t be stary, Morgen. Lin’s so nice. Mummy’s so nice too. That’s what I think, anyway. He was being a bit stary. Morgen was. A tiny bit. Was he trying to make me laugh? Probably. Do you know, Daddy? What was he saying? We went to look at statues, but Lin douldn’t come. That’s why she was trying. She stayed at home. Not our home, but. Ai caramba.” This, Solanka understood after a moment, was I can’t remember. “We stayed there. Yes. It was very good. I had my own room. I like that. I’ve got a bow and arrow. I like you, Daddy, are you coming home today? Saturday Tuesday? You should. ‘Bye.”

Eleanor took over. “Yes, it was difficult.” But Florence was lovely. How are you?” He thought for a minute. “Fine,” he said. “I’m fine.” She thought for a minute. “You shouldn’t promise him you’re coming back if you aren’t,” she said, angling for information. “What’s the matter?” he asked, changing the subject. “What’s the matter with you?” she replied.

That was all it took. He had already heard the telltale wrongness in her voice and she in his. Thrown off balance by what he had just understood, Solanka made the mistake of retreating into Neela’s dialogue: “Oh, for Pete’s sake! You think you can read my mind, but you’re so often so wrong. If there’s something to be said, I’ll say it. Don’t meet trouble halfway.” Coming from Neela this had sounded genuine enough, but in his mouth it came across as mere bluster. Eleanor was scornfully amused. “For Pete’s sake?” she wanted to know. “As in ‘Jeepers creepers,” Jiminy Cricket,’ or’ What the heck? “When did you start using Ronald Reagan’s lines?” Her manner was sharper, more irritable, non-placatory. Morgen and Lin, Solanka thought. Morgen, who had taken the trouble to ring him up to scold him for abandoning his wife, and whose own wife had informed Solanka that his behavior had brought her and her husband closer together than ever before. Mm-hm. Morgen and Eleanor and Lin in Florence. That’s why she was trying. Asmaan’s evidence left no doubt. Because she was crying. Why was she crying, Morgen? Eleanor? Would you care to fill me in on that? Would you care to explain, Eleanor, why your new lover and his wife were quarreling in the presence of my son?

The fury was passing from him, but everyone else seemed to be in exceedingly poor humor. Mila was moving. Eddie had hired a van from a company called Van-Go and was uncomplainingly hauling her possessions down from the fourth floor while she stayed in the street smoking a cigarette, drinking Irish whiskey from the bottle, and bitching. Her hair was red now, and spikier than ever: even her head looked angry. “What do you think you’re looking at?” she yelled up at Solanka when she spotted him watching her from his second-floor workroom window. “Whatever you want from me, Professor, it’s unavailable. Got it? I’m a person engaged to be married and believe me you don’t want my fiand to get mad.” Against his better judgment—for she had worked her way through most of the fifth of Jameson’s—he went down to the street to talk to her. She was moving to Brooklyn, moving in with Eddie in a small place in Park Slope, and the webspyders had opened up an office there. The Puppet Kings site was fast approaching its launch date, and things were looking good. “Don’t worry, Professor,” Mila said blurrily. “Business is great. It’s just you I can’t stand.”

Eddie Ford came down the front stairs carrying a computer monitor. When he saw Solanka, he scowled theatrically. This was a scene he had been wanting to play for a long time. “She doesn’t want to talk to you, man,” he said, setting the monitor down. “Do I make myself plain? Ms. Milo has no fuckin’ desire to fuckin’ converse. You apprehend? You want to see her, call the office and seek a fuckin’ business appointment. Send us e-mail. You show up at her fuckin place of residence, you’ll be answerin’ to me. You and the lady got no personal relationship no more. You’re fuckin’ estranged. If you ask me, she’s a fuckin’ saint to want to do business with you at all. Me, I’m not the saintly type. Me, I just want five minutes. Three hundred seconds alone with you would suffice for my fuckin’ needs. Yes, sir. You follow me, Professor? Am I on your frequency? Am I comin’ through?” Solanka bowed his head quietly and turned to go. “She told me what you tried on her,” Eddie shouted after him. “You’re one fuckin’ sad and sick old man.” And what did she tell you, Eddie, about what she tried on me? Oh, never mind.

Ah, Professor.” In the corridor outside his front door he ran into the plumber, Schlink, or, rather, Schlink was waiting for him, waving a document and bursting with words. “All is good in ze apartment? No toilet problem? So, so. What Schlink fixes stays gefixt.” He nodded and smiled furiously. “Maybe you don’t remember,” he continued. “I vos frank viz you, eh?, my life story I shared viz you for nossink. From zis you made a cruel choke. Maybe a movie, you said, could come from my poor tale. Zis you did not mean. You spoke, I am sure of it, in chest. So grand, Professor, so patronizing, you piece of shit.” Solanka was greatly taken aback. “Yes,” Schlink emphasized. “I make free to say so. I came here particular to tell you. You see, Professor, I haff followed your advice, zis advice vot to you vos chust a schoopit gag, and sanks Gott, success has blessed my effort. A film deal! See for yourself, here it is in black and white. See here, ze studio name. See here, ze financial aspect. Yes, a comedy, chust imagine. After a lifetime vizout humor I vill be played for laughs. Billy Crystal in the title role, he’s on board already, he’s crazy for it. A surefire hit, eh? Lensing soon. Opens next spring. Lotsa buzz. Goes boffo right off. Big opening veekend. Vait and see. Okay, so long, Professor Asshole, and sank you for ze title. jewboat. HA, ha, ha, HA.”

16

The inadequate summer closed overnight, like a Broadway flop. The temperature fell like a guillotine; the dollar, however, soared. Everywhere you looked, in gyms, clubs, galleries, offices, on the streets, and on the floor of the NYSE, at the city’s great sports stadia and entertainment centers, people were readying themselves for the new season, limbering up for action, flexing their bodies, minds, and wardrobes, setting themselves on their marks. Showtime on Olympus! The city was a race. Mere rats need not bother to enter this high-intensity competition. This was the main event, the blue riband contest, the world series. This was the master race, whose winners would be as gods. Second place was nowhere: “Loserville.” No silver or bronze medals would be struck, and the only rule was victory or bust.

Athletes were all over the airwaves that Olympic fall: disgraced Chinese turtle-blood drinkers, Marion Jones’s mouth murmuring into a microphone, Marion Jones’s husband testing positive for nandrolone, Michael Johnson running along a telephone and breaking records. What Jack Rhinehart had called the Divorce Olympics were hotting up, too. Solanka’s ex-wife Sara Lear Schofield’s antique of a second husband, Lester, died in his sleep before their final day in court, but not before he’d cut her out of his will. The bitter war of words between Sara, the Brazilian supermodel Ondine Marx, and Schofield’s adult children from earlier marriages pushed the Concrete-Killer Murders off the front pages at last. Sara emerged as the clear winner of these preliminary verbal hostilities. She released photocopied extracts from Schofield’s private diaries to prove that the deceased had heartily detested all his children and sworn that he’d never leave any of them so much as the price of the toll on the Triborough Bridge. She also engaged private investigators to get the goods on Ondine, the sole beneficiary of Schofield’s last, hotly contested will. Details of the model’s bisexual promiscuity and fondness for surgical improvement flooded the press. “She’s not my type, but they say she’s a great tuck,” Sara commented acidly. Ondine’s history of drug abuse and her sleazy porn-omovie past also featured prominently; and, best of all, the Pinkertons unearthed her secret liaison with the handsome Paraguayan descendant of a Nazi war criminal. These revelations led to the model’s investigation by immigration officers and rumors of the imminent cancellation of her green card. I’m still a foot soldier here but Britpack Sara commands battalions, Malik Solanka thought with a kind of admiration. I’m just a face in the crowd, but she’s one of its killer queens.

PlanetGalileo.com, the Puppet Kings project, his last stab at the big time, had acquired powerful allies. The webspyders had spread their nets well. Backers and sponsors were eager to get in on the ground floor of this important new launch by the creator of the legendary Little Brain. Major production, distribution, and marketing agreements with key players—Mattel, Amazon, Sony, Columbia, Banana Republic were already in place. A universe of toys was in the pipeline, everything from soft stuffed dolls to life-size robots with voices and flashing lights, to say nothing of Halloween-special costumes. There were boxed games and jigsaw puzzles and nine kinds of spacecraft and cyborg neutralizers and scale models of the entire planet Galileo-1, and, for the real nuts, its entire solar system, too. Amazon’s pre-orders for the back-story book Revolt of the Living Dolls were close to the Little Brain phenomenon’s record-breaking fever-pitch levels. A Playstation game was close to being shipped and was already being heavily marketed; a new fashion line bearing the Galileo label was ready to show during the 7th on Sixth fashion week; and, driven by the fear of a major actors’ and writers’ strike in the coming spring, a big-budget movie was on the verge of being green-lit. Banks competed with each other to lend money, sending the interest rate on the huge loans required spinning daily lower and lower. The largest mainland Chinese ISP had asked to come in and talk. Mila, as the webspyders’ front-woman, was working around the clock, with extraordinary results. Solanka’s relations with her remained on ice, however. Plainly, she was far angrier at being dumped than she had initially allowed herself to appear. Solanka was kept well informed by her of all developments and instructed to prepare himself for a media blitz, but as far as human contact was concerned, barbed wire might as well have stretched across the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, with duplicated, three-headed versions of Eddie Ford guarding over both. In the electronic world, Solanka and the webspyders worked closely together for hours a day. Outside it, they were strangers. That was, apparently, how it had to be.

Fortunately, Neela was still in town, though the reason for her continued presence was disturbing, and greatly distracted her. There had been a coup in Lilliput-Blefuscu, led by a certain Skyresh Bolgolam, an indigenous Elbee merchant whose argosies had all failed and who accordingly detested the prosperous Indo-Lilly traders with a passion that could have been called racist if it had not been so obviously rooted in professional envy and personal pique. The coup seemed spectacularly unnecessary; under pressure from the Bolgolamites, the country’s liberal president, Golbasto Gue, who had pushed through a program of constitutional reform designed to give Indian-Lilliputians equal electoral and property rights, had already been obliged to reverse course and throw out the new constitution only weeks after it had come into being.

Bolgolam, however, suspected a ruse and at the beginning of September marched into the Lilliputian Parliament in the city center of Mildendo, accompanied by two hundred armed ruffians, and took hostage around fifty Indo-Lilly parliamentarians and political staff members, as well as President Gue himself. At the same time, Bolgolamite goon squads attacked and imprisoned leading members of the Indo-Lilly political leadership. The country’s radio and television stations and the main telephone switchboard were seized. At Blefuscu International Aerodrome the runways were blockaded; the sea-lanes into Mildendo harbor were likewise blocked. The islands’ main Internet server, Lillicon, was closed down by the Bolgolam gang. However, some limited e-activity continued.

The whereabouts of Neela’s friend from the New York demonstration were not known; but as news slowly filtered out of Lilliput in spite of Bolgolam’s gags, it was established that Babur was not among those held hostage in the Parliament or in jail. If he hadn’t been killed, then he had gone underground. Neela decided this was the likelier alternative. “If he was dead, this rogue Bolgolam would have released the news, I’m sure. Just to demoralize the opposition even more.” Solanka saw very little of her during these post-coup days as she attempted, often in the small hours of the night on account of the thirteen-hour time difference, to make contact via World Wide Web and satphone links with what was now the Filbistani Resistance Movement (the FRM, or “Fremen”). She also busily researched ways and means of effecting an illegal entry into Lilliput-Blefuscu from Australia or Borneo, accompanied by a skeleton camera crew. Solanka began to fear greatly for her safety and, in spite of the greater historical importance of the matters presently claiming her attention, for his newfound happiness as well. Suddenly jealous of her work, he nursed imaginary grievances, told himself he was being slighted and ignored. At least his fictional Zameen of Rijk, arriving covertly on Baburian soil, had been looking for her man (though with what intent, he granted, was unclear). A dreadful further possibility presented itself. Perhaps Neela was looking for a man in Lilliput as well as a story. Now that history’s mantle had fallen on the inadequate shoulders of the hairless, bare-chested flag-waver she so admired, was it not possible that Neela had begun to think this muscle-bound Babur an altogether more attractive proposition than a sedentary middle-aged merchant of fairy tales and toys? For what other reason would she plan to risk her life by sneaking into Lilliput-Blefuscu to find him? Just for a documentary film? Ha! That rang false. There was a pretext, if you liked. And Babur, her burgeoning desire for Babur, was the text.

One night, late, and only after he’d made a big deal of it, she came to visit him at West Seventieth Street. “I thought you’d never ask,” she laughed when she arrived, trying, by sounding lighthearted, to dispel the thick cloud of tension in the air. He couldn’t tell her the truth: that in the past, Mila’s presence next door had inhibited him. They were both too tense and exhausted to make love. She had been pursuing her leads, and he had spent the day talking to journalists about life on Galdeo-1, an unnerving, hollowing kind of work, during which he could hear himself sounding false, knowing also that a second layer of falsehood would be added by the journalists’ responses to his words. Solanka and Neela watched Letterman without speaking. Unused to difficulties in their relationship, they had forged no language for dealing with trouble. The longer the silence between them lasted, the uglier it grew. Then, as if the bad feeling had burst out of their heads and taken physical form, they heard a piercing shriek. Then the sound of something shattering. Then a second, louder screech. Then, for a long time, nothing.

They went out into the street to investigate. The vestibule of Solanka’s building had an inner door that could usually only be opened with a key, but its metal frame was warped at present and the lock wouldn’t engage. The outer door, the street door, was never locked. This was worrying, even in the new, safer Manhattan. If there was danger out there, it could in theory come inside. But the street was quiet and empty, as if nobody else had heard a thing. Certainly, nobody else had come out to see what was going on. And in spite of the loud crash, there was nothing whatsoever on the pavement, no broken plant pot or vase. Neela and Solanka looked around, bemused. Other lives had touched theirs and then vanished. It was as though they had overheard the quarreling of ghosts. The sash window of what had been Mila’s apartment was wide open, however, and as they looked up, the silhouette of a man appeared and pulled it firmly shut. Then the lights went out. Neela said, “It’s got to be him. It’s like he missed her the first time but got her the second.” And the breaking noise, Solanka asked. She just shook her head, went indoors, and insisted on calling the police. “If I was being murdered and my neighbors did nothing, I’d be pretty disappointed, wouldn’t you?”

Two officers came to see them within the hour, took down statements, then left to investigate and never returned. “You’d think they would come back and say what happened,” Neela cried in frustration. “They must know we’re sitting here worried sick in the middle of the night.” Solanka snapped, letting his resentment show. “I guess they just didn’t realize it was their duty to report to you,” he said, without making any attempt to keep the cutting edge out of his void. She rounded on him at once, fully his equal in aggression. “What’s eating you, anyway?” she demanded. “I’m tired of pretending I’m not hanging out with a sore-headed bear.” And so it began, the sorry human tailspin of recrimination and counter-recrimination, the deadly accusative old game: you said no you said, you did no it was you, let me tell you I’m not just tired I’m really tired of this because you need so much and give so little, is that so well let me tell you I could give you the contents of Fort Knox and Bergdorf Goodman and it still wouldn’t be enough, and what does that mean, may I ask, you know damn well what it means. Oh. Right. Oh okay then, I guess that’s it. Sure, if that’s what you want. What I want? It’s what you’re forcing me to say. No, it’s what you’ve been dying to spit out. Jesus Christ stop putting words in my mouth. I should have known. No, I should have known. Well, now we both know. Okay then. Okay.

Just then, as they stood facing each other like bloodied gladiators, giving and receiving the wounds that would soon leave their love dead on the floor of this emotional Coliseum, Professor Malik Solanka saw a vision that stilled his lashing tongue. A great black bird sat on the roof of the house, its wings casting a deep shadow over the street. The Fury is here, he thought. One of the three sisters has come for me at last. Those weren’t screams of fear we heard; they were the Fury’s call. The noise of something shattering in the street—an explosive sound, such as a lump of concrete might make if hurled from a great height with unimaginable force—wasn’t any goddamn vase. It was the sound of a breaking life.

And who knows what might have happened, or of what, in the grip of the revenant fury, he might have become capable, if it hadn’t been for Neela, if she hadn’t been standing a whole head taller than him in her high heels and looking down like a queen, like a goddess, on his full head of long silver hair; or if she had lacked the wit to see the terror flooding across his soft, round, boyish face, the fear quivering at the corners of his Cupid’s bow mouth; or if in that last of all possible instants she had not found the inspired daring, the sheer emotional brilliance, to break the last taboo that still stood between them, to go into uncharted territory with all the courage of her love, to prove beyond all doubt that their love was stronger than fury by stretching out a long scarred arm and beginning, with great deliberation, and for the very first time in her life, to ruffle his forbidden hair, the long silver hair growing out of the top of his head.

The spell broke. He laughed out loud. A large black crow spread its wings and flew away across town, to drop dead minutes later by the Booth statue in Gramercy Park. Solanka understood that his own cure, his recovery from his rare condition, was complete. The goddesses of wrath had departed; their hold over him was broken at last. Much poison had been drained from his veins, and much that had been locked away for far too long was being set free. “I want to tell you a story,” he said; and Neela, taking his hand, led him to a sofa. “Tell me by all means, but I think it may be one I already know.”

At the end of the science fiction film Solaris, the story of an ocean-covered planet that functions as a single giant brain, can read men’s minds, and make their dreams come true, the spaceman-hero is back home at last, on the porch of his long-lost Russian dacha, with his children running joyfully around and his beautiful, dead wife alive again at his side. As the camera pulls back, endlessly, impossibly, we see that the dacha is on a tiny island set in the great ocean of Solaris: a delusion, or perhaps a deeper truth than the truth. The dacha diminishes to a speck and vanishes, and we are left with the image of the mighty, seductive ocean of memory, imagination, and dream, where nothing dies, where what you need is always waiting for you on a porch, or running toward you across a vivid lawn with childish cries and happy, open arms.

Tell me. I already know. Neela, with her heart-wisdom, had guessed why, for Professor Solanka, the past was not a joy. When he saw Solaris, he’d found that last scene horrifying. He’d known a man like this, he thought, a man who lived inside a delusion of fatherhood, trapped in a cruel mistake about the nature of fatherly love. He knew a child like this one, too, he thought, running toward the man who stood in the role of father, but that role was a be, a lie. There was no father. This was no happy home. The child was not itself. Nothing was as it seemed.

Yes, Bombay flooded back, and Solanka was living in it once again, or at least in the only part of the city that truly had a hold on him, the little patch of the past from which whole infernos could be conjured forth, his damn Yoknapatawpha, his accursed Malgudi, which had shaped his destiny and whose memory he had suppressed for over half a lifetime. Methwold’s Estate: it was more than enough for his needs. And, in particular, an apartment in a block called Noor Ville, in which for a long time he had been raised as a girl.

At first he couldn’t look his story in the eye, could only come at it sideways, by talking about the bougainvillea creeper climbing over the veranda like an Arcimboldo burglar, or like your stepfather at your bedside in the night. Or else he described the crows that came cawing like portents to his windowsill, and his conviction that he would have been able to understand their warnings if only he weren’t so unintelligent, if only he could only have concentrated a little harder, and then he could have run away from home before anything happened, so it was his own fault, his own stupid fault for failing to do the simplest thing, namely to understand the language of birds. Or, he spoke about his best friend, Chandra Venkataraghavan, whose father left home when he was ten. Malik sat in Chandra’s room and interrogated the distraught boy. Tell me how it hurts, Malik begged Chandra. I need to know. That’s how it should also hurt for me. Malik’s own father had disappeared when he was less than a year old; his pretty young mother, Mallika, had burned all the photographs and remarried within the year, gratefully taking her second husband’s name and giving it to Malik as well, cheating Malik of history as well as feeling. His father had gone and he didn’t even know his name, which was also his own. If it had been up to his mother, Malik might never have known of his father’s existence, but his stepfather told him the moment he was old enough to understand. His stepfather, who needed to excuse himself from the accusation of incest. From that if nothing else.

What had his father done for a living? Malik was never informed. Was he fat or thin, tall or short? Was his hair wavy or straight? All he could do was look in the mirror. The mystery of his father’s looks would be solved as he grew, and the face}n the glass answered his questions. “We are Solankas now,” his mother rebuked him. “It doesn’t matter about that person who never existed and who certainly doesn’t exist now. Here is your true father, who puts food on your plate and clothes on your back. Kiss his feet and do his will.”

Dr. Solanka was the second husband, a consultant at Breach Candy Hospital and a gifted composer of music in his spare time, and he was indeed a generous provider. However, as Malik discovered, his stepfather required more than just his feet to be kissed. When Malik was six years old, Mrs. Mallika Solanka—who had never conceived again, as if her absconding first husband had taken the secret of fertility away with him—was declared incapable of further childbearing and the boy’s torment began. Bring clothes and let his hair grow long and be will be our daughter as well as our son. No but, husband, how can it be, I mean, is that okay? Sure! Why not? In privacy of home all things decreed by paterfamilias are sanctioned by God Oh, my weak mother, you brought me ribbons and frocks. And when the bastard told you that your frail constitution, all wheezes and colds, would benefit from daily exercise, when he sent you away for long walks at the Hanging Gardens or Mahalaxmi Racecourse, did you not think to ask why he did not walk by your side; why, dismissing the ayah, he insisted on caring for his little “girl” alone? Oh, my poor dead mother who betrayed her only child. After a whole year of this, Malik had finally screwed up enough courage to ask the unaskable. Mummy, why does Doctor Sahib push me down? What push you down, how push you down, what nonsense is this? Mummy, when he stands there and puts his hand on my bead and pushes me down and makes me kneel. When, Mummy, he loosens his pajama, when, Mummy, when he lets it fall. She had hit him then, hard and repeatedly. Never tell me your evil lies again or I will beat you till you are deaf and dumb. For some reason you have a down on this man who is the only father you have ever known. For some reason you don’t want your mother to be happy, so you tell these lies, don’t think I don’t know you, the wickedness in your heart; how do you think itfeels when all the mothers say, your Malik, darling, such imagination, ask him a question and who knows what he’ll come out with? Oh, I know what it means: it means you are telling whoppers all over town, and l have an evil liar for a child.

After that he was deaf and dumb. After that when the pushes came on the top of his beribboned head he thudded obediently to his knees, closed his eyes, and opened his mouth. But long months later things did change. One day Dr. Solanka was visited by Chandra’s father, Mr. Balasubramanyam Venkataraghavan the important banker, and they remained closeted together for more than an hour. Voices were raised, then swiftly lowered. Mallika was summoned, then swiftly dismissed. Malik hung back at the far end of a corridor, wide-eyed, speechless, clinging to a doll. Finally, Mr. Venkat left, looking like thunder, pausing only to pick up and hug Malik (who was dressed for Venkat’s visit in a white shirt and shorts), and to mutter, with high color burning in his face, “Don’t worry, my boy. Quoth the raven: nevermore.” That same afternoon, all the dresses and bows were taken away to be burned; but Malik insisted on being allowed to keep his dolls. Dr. Solanka never laid a forger on him again. Whatever threats Mr. Venkat had made had had their effect. (When Balasubramanyam Venkataraghavan left home to become a sanyasi, ten-year-old Malik Solanka had greatly feared that his stepfather might revert to the old routine. But it seemed Dr. Solanka had learned his lesson. Malik Solanka, however, never spoke to his stepfather again.)

From that day on Malik’s mother was different, too, interminably apologizing to her young son and weeping without restraint. He could barely speak to her without provoking an awful howl of guilty grief. This alienated Mali— He needed a mother, not a waterworks utility like the one on the Monopoly board. “Please, Ammi,” he scolded her when she had embarked on one of her frequent hug-and-sob fests. “If I can control myself, so can you.” Stung, she let him go, and after that did her weeping privately, muffled by pillows. So life resumed its air of surface normality, Dr. Solanka going about his business, Mallika running the household, and Malik locking his thoughts away, confiding only in whispers, only in the hours of darkness, to the dolls who crowded around him in bed, like guardian angels, like blood kin: the only family he could bring himself to trust.

“The rest doesn’t matter,” he said, the confession over. “The rest is ordinary—getting on with it, growing up, getting away from them, having my life.” A huge burden had fallen from him. “I don’t have to carry them around anymore,” he added, full of wonder. Neela put her arms around him and moved in even closer. “Now it’s I who have imprisoned you,” she said. “I’m the one asking you to go here, do that. But this time it’s what we both want. In this prison, you’re finally free.” He relaxed against her, even though he knew there was one last gate he had not unlocked: the gate of full disclosure, of absolute, brutal truth, behind which lay the strange thing that had happened between Mila Milo and himself. But that, he persuaded himself catastrophically, was for another day.

Everywhere on earth—in Britain, in India, in distant Lilliputpeople were obsessed by the subject of success in America. Neela was a celebrity back home simply because she had gotten herself a good job – “made it big”—in the American media. In India, great pride was taken in the achievements of U.S.-based Indians in music, publishing (though not writing), Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. British levels of hysteria were even higher. British journalist gets work in U.S.A.! Incredible! British actor to play second lead in American movie! Wow, what a superstar! Cross-dressing British comic wins two Emmys! Amazing. Wwe always knew British transvestism was best! American success had become the only real validation of one’s worth. Ah, genuflection, Malik Solanka thought. Nobody knew how to argue with money these days, and all the money was here in the Promised Land.

Such reflections had become germane because in his middle fifties he was experiencing the superlative force of a real American hit, a force that blew open all the doors of the city, unlocked its secrets, and invited you to feast until you burst. The Galileo launch, an unprecedented interdisciplinary business enterprise, had gone intergalactic from day one. It turned out to be that happy accident: a necessary myth. LET THE FITTEST SURVIVE T-shirts covered some of the finest chests in the city, becoming a triumphalist slogan for the gym generation that acquired mass public currency overnight. It was proudly worn, too, over some of the flabbiest bellies around, as proof of the wearers’ sense of irony and fun. Demand for the Playstation video game accelerated past all predictions, leaving even Lara Croft floundering in its wake. At the height of the Star Wars phenomenon, spin-off merchandising had accounted for a quarter of the toy industry’s worldwide turnover; since those days, only the Little Brain phenomenon had come close. Now the saga of Galileo-1 was setting new records, and this time the global mania was being driven not by films or television but by website. The new communications medium was finally paying off. After a summer of skepticism about the potential of many massively unprofitable Internet companies, here at last was the prophesied brave new world. Professor Solanka’s surprisingly smooth beast, its hour come around at last, was slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. (There were rough edges, though: in the early days the site often crashed under the sheer weight of hits, which seemed to grow faster than the webspyders’ ability to increase access by replication and mirroring, the spinning of new threads of the shining web.)

Once again, Solanka’s fictional characters began to burst out of their cages and take to the streets. From around the world came news of their images, grown gigantic, standing many stories high on city walls. They made celebrity public appearances, singing the national anthem at ball games, publishing cookbooks, guest-hosting the Letterman show. The leading young actresses of the day vied publicly for the coveted leading role of Zameen of Rijk and her double, the cyborg Goddess of Victory. And this time Solanka felt none of the old Little Brain frustration, because, as Mila Milo had promised, it really was his show. He marveled at his own excitement. Creative and corporate meetings filled his days. The e-mail standoff with the webspyders was over. Regular “face time” had become essential. The continuing, possibly even growing, anger of sexually spurned, father-fixated Mila was the single fly in this rich, even Croesus-worthy, ointment. Mila and Eddie arrived stone-faced at the crucial meetings and left without offering Solanka a friendly word. However, her hair and eyes spoke volumes. They changed color frequently, burned like a flame one day and glowered blackly the next. Often the contact lenses clashed violently with the hair, suggesting that Mila was in an exceptionally bad mood on that particular day.

Solanka had no time to deal with the Mila problem. The Galileo project’s ground-floor partners were bursting with ideas about diversification: a restaurant chain! A theme park! A giant Las Vegas hotel, entertainment center and casino in the shape of the two islands of Baburia, to be set in an artificially created “ocean” at the desert’s heart! The number of businesses hammering on the door, pleading to be let in, was almost as hard to set down as the full decimal expression of Tr. The webspyders created and received new proposals for the future of the property almost every day, and Malik Solanka lost himself in the ecstasy, the furia, of the work.

The intervention of the living dolls from the imaginary planet Galileo-1 in the public affairs of actually existing Earth had not, however, been foreseen. It was Neela who brought Solanka the news. She arrived at West Seventieth Street in a state of high excitement. Her eyes shone as she spoke. There had been a countercoup in Lilliput. It had begun as a burglary: masked men raided Mildendo’s biggest toy store and made off with its entire, just-imported supply of Kronosian Cyborg masks and costumes. Interestingly-given the name of Neela’s shiny-chested flag-bearing pal-no Baburian outfits were taken. The FRM radicals, the revolutionary Indo-Lilly “Fremen” who had orchestrated the raid, as was afterward revealed, identified strongly with the Puppet Kings, whose inalienable right to being treated as equals—as fully moral and sentient beings—was denied by Mogol the Baburian, their deadly foe, of whom Skyresh Bolgolam was accused of being an avatar.

So far, the news sounded merely quaint, an exotic, unimportant aberration in the faraway, and therefore easily dismissed, South Pacific. But what followed was not so readily ignored. Thousands of welldisciplined “Filbistani” revolutionaries had made coordinated armed assaults on Lilliput-Blefuscu’s key installations, taking the very largely ceremonial Elbee army by surprise, and engaging the Bolgolamites occupying the Parliament, the radio and TV stations, the telephone company, and the offices of the Lillicon Internet server, as well as the aerodrome and seaport, in fierce and prolonged fighting. The foot soldiers wore the usual hats, shades and kerchiefs to hide their faces, but some officers were more grandly attired. The cyborgs of Akasz Kronos led the way in what, Malik Solanka realized, was no less than a third “revolt of the living dolls.” Many “Dollmakers” and “Zameens” were seen, confidently directing operations. “Let the fittest survive!” the Fremen were heard to shout as they charged the Bolgolamite positions. At the end of this bloody day, the FRM had gained the victory, but the price was high: hundreds dead, hundreds more seriously injured or classified as walking wounded. The medical facilities of Lilliput-Blefuscu were having great difficulty in caring for the casualties with the urgency that their injuries made necessary. Some of the wounded died while waiting to be treated. The noise of pain and fear filled the little nation’s hospital corridors throughout the night.

As Lilliput-Blefuscu resumed contact with the outside world, it emerged that both President Golbasto Gue and the leader of the original and now failed coup, Skyresh Bolgolam, had been taken alive. The leader of the FRM uprising, who was dressed from head to foot in a Kronos/Dollmaker costume and who referred to himself only as Commander Akasz, went briefly on LBTV to announce his operation’s success, to praise the martyrs, and to announce, with clenched fist, “The fittest have survived!” Then he announced his demands: the restitution of the ditched Golbasto constitution and the trial of the Bolgolam gang for high treason, which, under Elbee law, was punishable by death, although no executions had occurred in living memory and none would be expected in this case. He further stated that he, “Commander Akasz of the Fremen,” demanded the right to be consulted about LilliputBlefuscu’s next government and had his own slate of candidates for inclusion in that administration. He specified no post for himself, a piece of false modesty that fooled nobody. Bal Thackeray in Bombay and JBrg Haider in Austria had proved that a man didn’t have to hold public office to run the show. A genuine strongman had emerged. Until his demands were met, “Commander Akasz” concluded, he would “invite the respected president and the traitor Bolgolam to remain in the Parliament building as his personal guests.”

Solanka was troubled; the old problem of ends and means again. “Commander Akasz” didn’t sound to him like the servant of a just cause, and while, Solanka granted, Mandela and Gandhi weren’t the only models for revolutionaries to consider, bully-boy tactics needed always to be called by their right name. Neela, though, was elated. “The incredible thing is that it’s so unlike Indo-Lillys to be like this: militarized, disciplined, taking action in their own defense instead of just weeping and wringing their hands. What a miracle he’s worked, don’t you think?” She was leaving for Mildendo in the morning, she said. “Be happy for me. This coup makes my film really sexy. The phone’s been ringing off the hook all day.” Malik Solanka, standing at one of the high peaks of his life, feeling, like Gulliver or Alice, like a giant among pygmies, invincible, invulnerable, suddenly felt tiny invisible fingers tugging at his garments, as if a horde of little goblins were trying to drag him down to Hell. “It is him, you know,” Neela added. “‘Commander Akasz,’ I mean. I’ve seen the tape and there’s no doubt. That body: I’d know it again anywhere. He really is quite a guy.”

The speed of contemporary life, thought Malik Solanka, outstripped the heart’s ability to respond. Jack’s death, Neela’s love, the defeat of fury, Asmaan’s elephant, Eleanor’s grief, Mila’s hurt, the contemptuous triumphalism of the plumber Schlink, summer’s end, the Bolgolam coup in Lilliput-Blefuscu, Solanka’s own jealousy of the FRM radical Babur, his quarrel with Neela, the shrieks in the night, the telling of his back-story, the high-speed development of the Galileo-Puppet Kings project and its gigantic success, the countercoup of “Commander Akasz,” Neela’s imminent departure: such an acceleration of the temporal flow was almost comically overpowering. Neela herself felt none of this; a creature of speed and motion, a child of her hopped-up age, she accepted the current rate of change as normal. “You sound so old when you talk that way,” she chided him. “Stop it and come here at once.” Their farewell lovemaking was unhurriedly, deliriously prolonged. No problems there of excessive postmodern rapidity. There were evidently still a few areas in which slowness was valued by the young.

He slipped into dreamless sleep but awoke, two hours later, into a nightmare. Neela was still there—she was often happy to sleep over at Solanka’s place, although she continued to dislike waking up beside him in her own bed, a double standard that he’d accepted without demur, but there was a stranger in the room, there actually was a large, no, a very large man standing by Solanka’s side of the bed, holding up—oh, awful mirror of Solanka’s own misdeed!—an ugly-looking knife. Coming fully awake at once, Solanka sat bolt upright in bed. The intruder greeted him, vaguely waving the blade in his direction. “Professor,” Eddie Ford said, not without courtesy. “Glad you could be with us tonight.”

Once before, some years ago in London, Solanka had had a knife pulled on him by a flash young black kid, who leapt out of a convertible and insisted on using a phone booth that Solanka was just entering. “It’s a woman, man,” he reasoned. “It’s urgent, right?” When Solanka said that his own call was important, too, the youth freaked out. “I’ll cut you, you bastard, don’t think I won’t. I don’t give a fuck, me.” Solanka had worked hard on his body language. The thing was not to act too scared or too confident. A fine line had to be walked. He also fought to keep his voice level. “That would be bad for me,” he’d said, “but also bad for you.” Then came a staring match, which Solanka was not stupid enough to win. “Okay, fuck you, you cunt, okay?” the knife man said, and went in to make his call. “Hey, baby, forget him, baby, let me show you what that sad sack could never know.” He began crooning into the telephone receiver lines that Solanka recognized as Bruce Springsteen’s. “Tell me now, baby, is your daddy home, did be go and leave you all alone, uh-huh, I got a bad desire; oh, oh, oh, I’m on fire.” Solanka walked quickly away, rounded a corner, and fell back, trembling, against a wall.

So here it was again, but this time it was personal, and body Language and voice skills might not suffice. This time there was a woman sleeping beside him in his bed. Eddie Ford had begun to walk slowly back and forth at the foot of the bed. “I know what’s in your head, man,” he said. “Big fuckin’ movie buff like you. Lincoln Plaza, et cetera, sure, sure. Knife in the Dark, yougot it right off, second Pink Panther movie, featurin’ the lovely Elke Sommer, am I right.” The film had been called A Shot in the Dark, but Solanka decided not to correct Eddie for the moment. “Fuckin’ knife movies,” Eddie mused. “Mila liked Bruno Ganz in Knife in the Head, but for me it has to be the old classic, Polanski’s first feature, Knife in the Water. A man starts playin’ with a knife to impress his wife. She fancied that fuckin’ blond hitchhiker. That was a bad fuckin’ mistake, lady. That was grievous.”

Neela was stirring, crying softly in her sleep, as she so often did. “Shh,” Solanka caressed her back. “It’s okay. Shh.” Eddie nodded sagely. “I expect she’ll be joinin’ us soon, man. I fuckin’ eagerly anticipate it.” Then he resumed his ruminations. “We often rank movies, Mila an’ me. Scary, scarier, scariest, like that. For her, it’s The Exorcist, man, soon to be re-released with previously unseen material, uh-huh, but I retort, no. You have to go all the way back to the classical period to my man Roman Polanski. Rosemary’s Baby, man. That’s the fuckin’ baby for me. Now, babies are somethin’ you’d know about, am I right, Professor? Babies sittin’ for instance on your fuckin’ lap day after fuckin’ day. You didn’t answer me, Professor. Allow me to rephrase. You’ve been foolin’ with what wasn’t yours to touch, and the way I see it the fuckin wrongdoer shall be punished. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Vengeance is Eddie’s, ain’t that so, Professor, wouldn’t you concede that as we face each other here, that is totally the fuckin’ reality of the case? As we face each other here, you defenseless with your lady there and me with this enormous murderin’ motherfucker of a blade in my hand waiting to cut off your balls, wouldn’t you fuckin’ accept that the Day of Judgment is fuckin’ nigh?”

The movies were infantilizing their audience, Solanka thought, or perhaps the easily infantilizable were drawn to movies of a certain simplified kind. Perhaps daily life, its rush, its overloadedness, just numbed and anesthetized people and they went into the movies’ simpler worlds to remember how to feel. As a result, in the minds of many adults, the experience on offer in the movie theaters now felt more real than what was available in the world outside. For Eddie, his movie-hoodlum riffs possessed more authenticity than any more “natural” pattern of speech, even of threatening speech, at his disposal. In his mind’s eye he was Samuel L. Jackson, about to waste some punk. He was a man in a black suit, a man named after a color, slicing up a trussed-up victim to the tune of “Stuck in the Middle with You.” None of which meant that a knife was not a knife. Pain was still pain, death still came as the end, and there was unquestionably a crazy young man waving a knife at them in the dark. Neela was awake now, sitting up beside Solanka, pulling the sheet around her nakedness, just the way people did in the movies. “You know him?” she whispered. Eddie laughed. “Oh sure, pretty lady,” he cried. “We have time for a little Qand-A. The professor and me, we’re colleagues.”

“Eddie,” a disconcertingly scarlet-eyeballed, blue-haired Mila said reprovingly from the open doorway. “You stole my keys. He stole my keys,” she said, turning to Solanka in the bed. “Sorry about that. He has, like, strong feelings. I love that in a man. He in particular entertains strong feelings about you. Understandably enough. But the knife? Wrong, Eddie.” She turned back to her fiance. “W-r-o-n-g. How are we supposed to get married if you end up behind bars?” Eddie looked crestfallen, and like a scolded schoolboy stood shifting his weight from foot to foot, diminishing in an instant from mad-dog killer to yelping pet. “Wait outside,” she ordered him, and he shambled dumbly off. “He’ll wait outside,” she said to Solanka, completely ignoring the other woman in the room. “We have to talk.”

The other woman, however, was not accustomed to being erased from any scene of which she was a part. “What does she mean he stole her keys?” Neela demanded. “Why did she have your keys? What did he mean you’re colleagues? What does she mean, ‘understandably enough’? Why does she have to talk?”

She has to talk, Professor Solanka answered silently, because she thinks I think she fucked her father, whereas in fact I know her father fucked her, this being an area of inquiry in which I have done much fieldwork of my own. He fucked her every day like a goat-like a man—and then he left her. And because she loved him as well as loathing him, she has looked ever since for cover versions, imitations of life. She is an expert in the ways of her age, this age of simulacra and counterfeits, in which you can find any pleasure known to woman or man rendered synthetic, made safe from disease or guilt—a lo-cal, to-fi, brilliantly false version of the awkward world of real blood and guts. Phony experience that feels so good that you actually prefer it to the real thing. That was me: her fake.

It was seventeen minutes past three in the morning. Mila, in a trenchcoat and boots, sat down on the edge of the bed. Malik Solanka groaned. Disaster always arrived when your defenses were at their lowest: blindsiding you, like love. “Tell her,” Mila said, at last allowing Neela to exist. “Explain why you gave me the keys to your little kingdom here. Explain about the cushion on your lap.” Mila had prepared carefully for this confrontation. She unbelted the trenchcoat and slipped it off, revealing, of all things, an absurdly short baby-doll nightie. This was an example of the use of clothing as a lethal weapon: wounded Mila was undressed to kill. “Go on, Papi,” she urged. “Tell her about us. Tell her about Mila in the afternoon.”

“Please do,” Eleanor Masters Solanka added grimly, switching on the light as she came in, accompanied by that heavyset, grizzled, bespectacled, blinking Buddhist owl, his ex-buddy Morgen Franz. “I’m sure all of us would be fascinated to hear.” Oh fine, Malik thought. Seems there’s an open-door policy around here. Please, come on in, everybody, don’t mind me, make yourselves at home. Eleanor’s flowing chestnut hair was longer than ever; she wore a long black high-necked cashmere coat and her eyes blazed. She looked amazing for three A.M., Malik noted. He also observed that Morgen Franz was holding her hand; and that Neela was climbing out of his bed and coolly getting dressed. Her eyes, too, were on fire, and Mila’s, of course, were already bright red. Solanka closed his own eyes and lay back, putting a pillow over his face on account of the sudden glare in the room.

Eleanor and Morgen had left Asmaan with his grandmother and flown in to JFK that afternoon. They had checked into a midtown hotel, intending to contact Solanka in the morning to acquaint him with the changed circumstances of their lives. (This, at least, Solanka had intuited in advance: or, rather, Asmaan had filled him in.) Anyway, I couldn’t sleep,” Eleanor said to the pillow. “So I just thought, fuck it, I’d come and wake you up. I see, however, that you are already entertaining; which makes it a good deal easier to say what I came to say.” The softness was gone from her voice. Her fists were clenched, white-knuckled. She was fighting hard to keep her voice under control. Any moment now she would open her mouth and, instead of words, unleash a Fury’s deafening, world-destroying shriek.

He should have known, Solanka thought, pulling the pillow down more firmly over his face. What chance did mortal man have against the devious malice of the gods? Here they were, the three Furies, the “good tempered ones” themselves, in full possession of the physical bodies of the women to whom his life was most profoundly joined. Their external forms were all too familiar, but the fire pouring out of these metamorphosed creatures’ eyes proved that they were no longer the women he had known but rather vessels for the descent into the Upper West Side of the malevolent Divine…… Oh, for goodness’ sake get out of bed,” Neela Mahendra snapped. “Get up right now, so that we can knock you down.”

Professor Malik Solanka rose naked to his feet under the flaming eyes of the women he had loved. The fury that had once possessed him was now theirs; and Morgen Franz was caught up in its force field, Morgen, who had so little to be proud of in his own behavior, except that he too had learned what it was to be the servant of love. Morgen, to whom Eleanor had granted the gift of her wounded self and the stewardship of her son. Crackling with the energy flowing into him from the Furies, he moved toward the naked man like a puppet on lightning strings and swung his nonviolent arm. Solanka dropped, like a tear.

17

Three weeks later he stepped out of a long-haul Airbus at Blefuscu International Aerodrome, into a hot but balmily breezy Southern Hemisphere spring day. A complex bouquet of odors filled his nostrils-hibiscus, oleander, jacaranda, perspiration, excrement, motor oil. Now the great folly of his actions hit him, even harder than the blow from his wife’s pacifist lover, the haymaker, the pacifisticuff that had put him out for the count on his own bedroom floor. What did he think he was doing, a respectable and now extremely wealthy man of fifty-five, chasing halfway around the world after a woman who had literally left him flat? Worse still, why did it agitate him so that the revolutionaries here, Filbistanis, FRM, Fremen—why couldn’t they make up their minds what they were called?—had taken on the identities of his fictions, like firefighters or workers at nuclear power plants donning protective clothing against the dangers of their work? Puppet King costumes may have become a feature of what was going on in these parts, but that didn’t make any of it his responsibility. “You are not a party to these events,” Professor Solanka rebuked himself for the umpteenth time, and himself replied, “Oh yeah? Then why is that hairless flag-waver Babur hanging out with my girl, wearing a molded-latex mask of my face?”

The mask of “Zameen of Rijk” had been modeled after Neela Mahendra, that was obvious, but in the case of Akasz Kronos,” it seemed to Solanka, the opposite was true: as time passed, he had come to resemble his creation more and more. The long silver hair, the eyes made mad by loss. (He’d always had the mouth.) A strange piece of mask theater was being played out on this remote island stage, and Professor Malik Solanka had been unable to shake off the notion that the action intimately concerned him, that the great or perhaps trivial matter of his perhaps significant, more probably rather pitiful life—but, still, his life!—was arriving, here in the South Pacific, at its final act. This was not a reasonable idea, but he had been, ever since the slightly tragic but mostly farcical events of the Night of the Furies, in an unreasonable frame of mind, having regained consciousness with a broken molar giving him considerable trouble, and a broken heart and wounded life that gave him more grief even than the pounding tooth. In the dentist’s chair, he tried to shut out the tape of early Lennon-McCartney tunes and the pleasant prattle of the New Zealander quarryman delving deep inside his jaw—it came back to him from somewhere that the Beatles had begun life as the Quarrymen. He concentrated on Neela: what she might be thinking, how to get her back. She had demonstrated that in affairs of the heart she was very like the man that women had always accused him of being. She was there until she wasn’t. When she loved you, she loved one hundred percent, with no holds barred; but plainly she was also an ax-murderer, capable at any moment of severing the head of a suddenly rejected love. Confronted by his past—a past that in his opinion had no bearing whatsoever on his love for her—she had reached her snapping point, pulled on her clothes, exited, and almost at once embarked on a twenty-four-hour plane journey across the globe without a solicitous phone call about his jaw, let alone a word of loving farewell or even a guarded promise to try and work things out later, when history let up and gave her a bit of time. But she was also a woman familiar with being pursued. She might even be a little addicted to it. At any rate—Solanka persuaded himself while the New Zealander’s babbling road-drill hammered at his jaw—he owed it to himself, having found so remarkable a woman, not to lose her by default.

To fly east was to hurtle toward the future—the jet-propelled hours rushed by too fast, the next day arrived on wings—but it felt like a return to the past. He traveled forward toward the unknown and toward Neela, but for the first half of the journey the past tugged at his heart. When he saw Bombay below him, he pulled on a sleep mask and closed his eyes. The plane stopped in the city of his birth for a full hour, but he refused a transit card and stayed on board. Even in his seat, however, he was not safe from feeling. The sleep mask was no use. Cleaners came on board, chattering and clattering, a platoon of women in shabby purples and pinks, and India arrived with them, like a disease: the erectness of their bearing, the loud nasal intonation of their speech, their dusters, their hard workers’ eyes, the remembered perfume of half-forgotten unguents and spices-coconut oil, fenugreek, kalonji—that lingered on their skin. He felt giddy, asphyxiated, as if suffering from motion discomfort, though he was never airsick and the plane was, after all, on the ground, refueling, with all its engines shut down. After takeoff, as they headed east across the Deccan, he began to breathe again. When there was water down below again, he began, a little, to relax. Neela had wanted to go to India with him, was excited by the idea of discovering the land of her forefathers with the man of her choice. He had been the man of her choice, he must hold on to that. “I hope,” she had told him, with great seriousness, “that you are the last man with whom I will ever sleep.” The power of such promises is great, and under their enchantment he had even allowed himself to dream of return, had permitted himself to believe that the past could be—had been—stripped of its power, so that in the future all things could be achieved. But now Neela had vanished like a conjurer’s assistant, and his strength had gone with her. Without her, he was convinced, he would never walk the Indian streets again.

The aerodrome, as its outdated name forewarned, was what a tourist determined to put a brave face on catastrophe would call “olde-worlde” or “quaint.” In fact it was a pigsty, decrepit, malodorous, with sweating walls and two-inch roaches crunching like nutshells underfoot. It should have been torn down years ago, and had indeed been scheduled for demolition—it was after all on the wrong island, and the helicopters that linked it to the capital, Mildendo, looked worryingly down-at-the-heels but the new airport, GGI (Golbasto Gue Intercontinental), had beaten the old place to it by falling down completely a month after it was finished, owing to the local Indo-Lilly contractors’ overimaginative, if financially beneficial, rethink of the correct relationship, in the mixing of concrete, between water and cement.

Such creative rethinking turned out to be a feature of life in Lilliput-Blefuscu. Professor Solanka walked into the Blefuscu Aerodrome’s customs hall and at once heads began to turn, for reasons that, flight-exhausted and stupid with heartache though he was, he had anticipated and immediately understood. An Indo-Lilly customs officer in dazzling whites bore down on him, staring hard. “Not possible. Not possible. No notification was received. You are who? Your good name, please?” he said suspiciously, holding out his hand for Solanka’s passport. “As I thought,” the officer finally said. “You are not.” This was gnomic, to say the least, but Solanka merely inclined his head in a gesture of mild assent. “It is unseemly” the officer added mysteriously, “to set out to mislead the public of a country in which you are only a guest, dependent on our famous tolerance and goodwill.” He made a peremptory gesture to Solanka, who duly opened his cases. The customs officer gazed vengefully upon their contents: the neatly packed fourteen pairs each of socks and underpants, fourteen handkerchiefs, three pairs of shoes, seven pairs of pants, seven shirts, seven bush-shirts, seven polo shirts, three ties, three folded and tissued linen suits, and one raincoat, just in case. After a judicious pause, he smiled broadly, revealing a set of perfect teeth that filled Solanka with envy. “Heavy duty payable,” the officer beamed. “So many dutiable items are there.” Solanka frowned. “It’s just my clothes. Surely you don’t make people pay to bring in what they need to cover their nakedness.” The customs officer stopped smiling, and frowned far more ferociously than Solanka. “Avoid obscene utterance, please, Mr. Trickster,” he instructed. “Here is much that is not clothe. Video camera is here, also wristwatches, cameras, jewelry. Heavy duty payable. If you wish to lodge protest, that is of course your democratic privilege. This is Free Indian Lilliput-Blefuscu: Filbistan! Naturally, if protest is desired, you will be welcome to take a seat in interview room and discuss all points with my boss. He will be free very soon. Twenty-four, thirty-six hours.” Solanka got the point. “How much?” he asked, and paid up. In the local sprugs it sounded like a lot, but it translated into American as eighteen dollars and fifty cents. With a great flourish, the customs officer made a large chalk X on Solanka’s bags. “You come at great historical moment,” he told Solanka portentously. “Indian people of Lilliput-Blefuscu have finally standed up for our right. Our culture is ancient and superior and will henceforth prevail. Let the fittest survive, isn’t it. For one hundred years good-for-nothing Elbee cannibals drank grog-kava, glimigrim, flunec, Jack Daniel’s and Coke, every kind of godless booze—and made us eat their shit. Now they can eat ours instead. Please: enjoy your stay.”

In the helicopter shuttle to Mildendo on the island of Lilliput, the other passengers stared at Professor Solanka as incredulously as the customs officer had. He decided to ignore their behavior and turned his attention instead to the countryside below. As they flew over the sugarcane farms of Blefuscu, he noted the high piles of black igneous boulders near the center of each field. Once indentured Indian laborers, identified only by numbers, had broken their backs to clear this land, building these rock piles under the stony supervision of Australian Coolumbers and storing in their hearts the deep resentment born of their sweat and the cancellation of their names. The rocks were icons of accumulated volcanic wrath, prophecies from the past of the eruption of Indo-Lilly fury, whose effects were everywhere to be seen. The rickety LB Air helicopter made its landing, to Solanka’s immense relief, on the still-intact apron of the ruined Golbasto Gue Intercontinental Airport, and the first thing he saw was a giant cardboard representation of “Commander Akasz,” that is to say of the FRM leader Babur in his Akasz Kronos mask and cloak. Contemplating this image, Solanka wondered with a pounding heart whether, in making his trans-global journey, he had acted as a lovelorn fool and political nail For the dominant image in Lilliput-Blefuscu—a country close to civil war, in which the president himself was still being held hostage, and a high-tension state of siege existed, and unpredictable developments could occur at any moment—was, as he had known it must be, a close likeness of himself. The face looking down at him from the top of the fifty-foot cutout—that face framed in long silver hair, with its wild eyes and dark-lipped Cupid’s bow mouth, was his very own.

He was expected. News of the Commander’s lookalike had raced ahead of the helicopter shuttle. Here in the Theater of Masks the original, the man with no mask, was perceived as the mask’s imitator: the creation was real while the creator was the counterfeit! It was as though he were present at the death of God and the god who had died was himself. Masked men and women carrying automatic weapons were waiting for him outside the shuttle’s door. He accompanied them without protest.

He was led to a chairless “holding room,” whose single piece of furniture was a battered wooden table, watched by the unflinching eyes of lizards, with thirsty flies buzzing at the moisture in the corners of his eyes. His passport, watch, and airline ticket were taken from him by a woman whose face was concealed behind a mask bearing the face of the woman he loved. Deafened by the strident martial music that was incessantly being played throughout the airport at high volume on a primitive sound system, he could still hear the elated terror in the young voices of his guards—for guerrillas weighted down with weapons were all around him—and he could also see evidence of the situation’s extreme instability in the shifting eyes of the unmasked civilians in the terminal building and in the jumpy bodies of the masked combatants. All this brought vividly home to Solanka that he had stepped a long way out of his element, leaving behind all the signs and codes by which his life’s meaning and form had been established. Here “Professor Malik Solanka” had no existence as a self, as a man with a past and future and people who cared about his fate. He was merely an inconvenient nobody with a face that everyone knew, and unless he could rapidly parlay that startling physiognomy into an advantage, his position would deteriorate, resulting, at the very best, in his early deportation. The very worst was something he refused to contemplate. The thought of being expelled without having come close to Neela was upsetting enough. I’m naked again, Solanka thought. Naked and stupid. Walking right into the approaching knockout punch.

After an hour or more, an Australian Holden station wagon drove up to the shed in which he had been detained and Solanka was invited, not tenderly, but without undue roughness, to get in the back. Guerrillas in combat fatigues pushed in on either side of him; two more got into the baggage hold and sat facing the rear, their guns sticking out of the raised back-window hatch. On the drive through Mildendo, Malik Solanka had a strong sense of deja vu, and it took him a moment to work out that he was being reminded of India. Of, to be specific, Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi’s troubled heart, where the traders crowded together in this same hugger-mugger style, where the shop fronts were as brightly colored and the interiors as crudely lit, where the roadway was even more densely thronged with walking, cycling, jostling, shouting life, where animals and human beings fought for space, and where massed car horns performed the daily unvarying symphony of the street. Solanka had not expected such crowds. Easier to predict but unnerving nonetheless was the palpable distrust between the communities, the muttering clumps of Elbee and Indo-Lilly men eyeing each other unpleasantly, the sense of living in a tinderbox and waiting for a flash. This was the paradox and the curse of communal trouble: when it came, it was your friends and neighbors who came to kill you, the very same people who had helped you, a few days earlier, start your spluttering motor scooter, who had accepted the sweetmeats you distributed when your daughter became engaged to a decent, well-educated man. The shoe-shop manager next to whose premises your tobacco store had operated for ten years or more: this was the man who would put the boot in, who would lead the men with torches to your door and fill the air with sweet Virginia smoke.

There were no tourists to be seen. (The flight to Blefuscu had been more than two thirds empty.) Few women were on the street, apart from the surprisingly large number of female FRM cadres, and no children.

Many stores were closed and barricaded; others remained warily open, and people-men-were still going about their daily tasks. Guns, however, were everywhere to be seen, and in the distance, from time to time, sporadic shooting could be heard. The police force was collaborating with the FRM personnel to maintain a measure of law and order; the Ruritanian joke of an army remained in its barracks, although the leading generals were involved in the complex negotiations taking place behind the scenes for long hours every day. FRM negotiators were meeting with the ethnic Elbee chiefs, as well as religious and business leaders. “Commander Akasz” was at least trying to give the impression of a man looking for a peaceful resolution to the crisis. But civil war bubbled just beneath the surface. Skyresh Bolgolam may have been defeated and captured, but the large proportion of Elbee youths who had backed the failed Bolgolamite coup were licking their wounds and no doubt plotting their next move. Meanwhile, the international community was moving quickly toward declaring Lilliput-Blefuscu the world’s smallest pariah state, suspending trade agreements and freezing aid programs. In these moves Solanka had seen his opportunity.

Motorcycle outriders surrounded the station wagon, escorting it to the heavily defended perimeter walls of the parliamentary compound.

The gates opened and the vehicle passed through, proceeding to a service entrance at the rear of the central complex. The kitchen entrance, thought Solanka with a wry private smile, was the true gate of power. Many people, functionaries or supplicants, could enter the great houses of power through their front doors. But to get into a service elevator, watched by white-hatted chefs and sous-chefs, to be borne slowly upward in an unornamented box with silent masked men and women all around you: that really was important. To emerge into an undistinguished bureaucratic corridor and be led through a series of increasingly unpretentious rooms was to walk down the true pathway to the center. Not bad for a dollmaker, he told himself. You’re in. Let’s see if you get out with what you want. In fact, let’s see if you manage to get out at all.

At the end of the sequence of interconnecting, blank backrooms came a room with a single door. Inside were the now-familiar spartan furnishings: a desk, two canvas chairs, a ceiling light, a filing cabinet, a telephone. He was left alone to wait. He picked up the phone; there was a dial tone, and a small label on the instrument told him to dial 9 for an outside line. As a precaution, he had researched and memorized several numbers: that of a local newspaper, the American, British, and Indian embassies, a legal practice. He tried dialing these, but each time heard a woman’s recorded voice saying, in English, Hindi, and Lilliputian, “That number cannot be dialed from this telephone.” He tried dialing the emergency services. No luck. “That number cannot be dialed.” What we have here, he told himself, is not a telephone at all but only the outward appearance or mask of a telephone. Just as this room is only wearing the costume of an office but is in fact a prison cell. No doorknob on the inside of the door. The single window: small and barred. He went over to the filing cabinet and pulled at a drawer. Empty. Yes, this was a stage set, and he had been cast in a play, but nobody had given him the script.

“Commander Akasz” swept in four hours later. By this time Solanka’s remaining confidence had all but evaporated. “Akasz” was accompanied by two young Fremen too lowly to be in costume, and followed into the room by a Steadicam operator, a boom-carrying sound recordist and—Solanka’s heart bounded with excitement—a woman wearing camouflage fatigues and a “Zameen of Rijk” mask: concealing her face behind an imitation of itself.

“That body,” Solanka greeted her, striving for lightness. “I’d know it again anywhere.” This didn’t go down especially well. “What are you here for?” Neela burst out, then disciplined herself. “Excuse me, Commander. I apologize.” Babur, in the “Akasz Kronos” outfit, was no longer the crestfallen, abashed young man Solanka remembered from Washington Square. He spoke in a barking voice that did not expect disagreements. The mask acts, Solanka remembered. “Commander Akasz,” the great man-mountain, had become a big man in this very small pond, and was acting the part. Not so big, Solanka noted, as to be immune from the Neela effect. Babur walked with a long, sweeping stride, but after every dozen steps or so, his foot somehow managed to come down on the hem of his swirling cloak, forcing his neck to jerk awkwardly back. He also managed to collide, within a minute of entering Solanka’s cell, with the table and both the chairs. This, even when her face was hidden by a mask! She never failed to exceed Solanka’s expectations. He, however, had disappointed hers. Now he must see if he could surprise her.

Babur had already acquired the royal we. “We are familiar with you, naturally,” he said without preamble. “Who right now is not cognizant of the creator of the Puppet Kings? No doubt you have good reasons for presenting yourself,” he said, with a half turn of his body toward Neela Mahendra. No fool, then, Solanka thought. No point denying what he already knows to be true. “Our conundrum is, what shall we do with you? Sister Zameen? Something to say?” Neela shrugged. “Send him home,” she said in a dull, uninterested voice that shook Solanka. “I’ve got no use for him.” Babur laughed. “The sister says you are useless, Professor Sahib. Are you so? Jolly good! Shall we throw you in the bin?”

Solanka launched into his prepared spiel. “My proposal,” he said, “which I have come a long way to make, is this: allow me to be your intermediary. Your connection with my project needs no comment from me. We can give you a link to a mass global audience, to win hearts and minds. This you urgently need to do. The tourist industry is already as dead as your legendary Hurgo bird. If you lose your export markets and the support of the major regional powers, this country will be bankrupt within weeks, certainly within months. You need to persuade people that your cause is just, that you are fighting for democratic principles, not against them. For the repudiated Golbasto constitution, I mean. You need to give that mask a human face. Let Neela and me work on this with my New York people, on a complimentary basis. Consider it pro bono work on a freedom movement’s behalf “This is how far he was prepared to go for love, his unspoken thoughts said to Neela. Her cause was his. If she forgave him, he would be the servant of all her desires.

“Commander Akasz” waved the idea away. “The situation has developed,” he said. “Other parties—bad eggs, the lot of them!—have been intransigent. As a result we also have hardened our stance.” Solanka didn’t follow. “We have demanded total executive authority,” he said. “No more nambying or pambying. What is needed in Filbistan is for a real chap to take charge. Isn’t that so, sister?” Neela was silent. “Sister?” repeated Babur, turning to face her and raising his voice; and she, lowering her head, answered almost inaudibly, “Yes.” Babur nodded. “A period of discipline,” he said. “If we say the moon is made of cheese, then of what, sister, is it made?” “Cheese,” said Neela in the same low voice. “And if we tell you the world is flat? What shape is it?” “Flat, Commander.” “And if tomorrow we decree that the sun goes round the earth?” “Then, Commander, the sun it will be that goes around.” Babur nodded with satisfaction. “Jolly good! That is the message for the world to grasp,” he said. “A leader has arisen in Filbistan, and it is for everyone to follow, or suffer the needful consequences. Oh, by the by, Professor, you have studied ideas at the University of Cambridge in England, isn’t it. Therefore be so good as to enlighten us on a vexed point: is it better to be loved or feared?” Solanka did not answer. “Come, come, Professor,” Babur urged. “Make your good effort! You can do better than that.” The FRM cadres accompanying “Commander Akasz” began to fiddle meaningfully with their Uzis. In an expressionless voice, Solanka quoted Machiavelli. “ ‘Men are less hesitant about harming someone who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared.’” He began to speak with greater animation, and looked directly at Neela Mahendra. “ ‘Because love is held together by a chain of obligation which, since men are a sorry lot, is broken on every occasion in which their own self-interest is concerned; but fear is held together by a dread of punishment which will never abandon you.’” Babur brightened. “Good egg,” he cried, thumping Solanka on the back. “You aren’t useless after all! So, so. We’ll think about your proposal. Jolly good! Stay awhile. Be our guest. We already have the president and Mr. Bolgolam in residence. You, too, will witness these first bright hours of our beloved Filbistan, upon which the sun never sets. Sister, be so kind as to confirm. How often does the sun go down?” And Neela Mahendra, who had always carried herself like a queen, bowed her head like a slave and said, “Commander, it never does.”

The cell—he had stopped thinking of it as a room—did not contain a bed, and lacked even the most rudimentary toilet facilities. Humiliation was the stock-in-trade of “Commander Akasz,” as his treatment of Neela had amply demonstrated. Solanka perceived that he was to be humiliated, too. Time passed; he lacked a watch by which to measure it. The breeze faded and died. Night, the ideologically incorrect, nonexistent night, grew humid, thickened and stretched. He had been given a bowl of unidentifiable mush to eat and a jug of suspect water. He tried to resist both, but hunger and thirst were tyrants, and in the end he did eat and drink. After that he wrestled with nature until the inevitable moment of defeat. When he could no longer contain himself, he pissed and shat wretchedly in a corner, taking off his shirt and wiping himself with it as best he could. It was hard not to fall into solipsism, hard not to see these degradations as a punishment for a clumsy, hurtful life. Lilliput-Blefuscu had reinvented itself in his image. Its streets were his biography, patrolled by figments of his imagination and altered versions of people he had known: Dubdub and Perry Pincus were here in their sci-fi versions, also mask-and-costume incarnations of Sara Lear and Eleanor Masters, Jack Rhinehart and Sky Schuyler, and Morgen Franz. There were even space-age Wislawas and Schlinks walking the Mildendo streets, as well as Mila and Neela and himself. The masks of his life circled him sternly, judging him. He closed his eyes and the masks were still there, whirling. He bowed his head before their verdict. He had wished to be a good man, to lead a good man’s life, but the truth was he hadn’t been able to hack it. As Eleanor had said, he had betrayed those whose only crime was to have loved him. When he had attempted to retreat from his darker self, the self of his dangerous fury, hoping to overcome his faults by a process of renunciation, of giving up, he had merely fallen into new, more grievous error. Seeking his redemption in creation, offering up an imagined world, he had seen its denizens move out into the world and grow monstrous; and the greatest monster of them all wore his own guilty face. Yes, deranged Babur was a mirror of himself. Seeking to right a grave injustice, to be a servant of the Good, “Commander Akasz” had come off at the hinges and become grotesque.

Malik Solanka told himself he deserved no better than this. Let the worst befall. In the midst of the collective fury of these unhappy isles, a fury far greater, running far deeper than his own pitiful rage, he had discovered a personal Hell. So be it. Of course Neela would never return to him. He was not worthy of happiness. When she came to see him, she had hidden her lovely face.

It was still dark when help came. The cell door opened and a young Indo-Lilly man entered, bare-faced, wearing rubber gloves and carrying a roll of plastic refuse sacks as well as a bucket, pan, and mop. He cleaned up Solanka’s mess unflinchingly and with great delicacy, never seeking to catch the perpetrator’s eye. When he had finished, he returned with clean clothes—a pale green kurta and white pantaloon pajamas—as well as a clean towel, two new buckets, one empty, one full of water, and a bar of soap. “Please,” he said, and, “I am sorry,” and then left. Solanka washed and changed and felt a little more himself. Then Neela arrived, alone, unmasked, in a mustard-colored dress, with a blue iris in her hair.

It obviously preyed on her mind that Solanka had witnessed her timorous responses to her treatment by Babur. “Everything I’ve done, everything I’m doing, is for the story,” she said. “Wearing the mask was a gesture of solidarity, a way of earning the fighters’ trust. Also, you know, I’m here to look at what they’re doing, not to have them look at me. I could see you thought I was hiding from you behind it. That wasn’t so. Similarly with Babur. I’m not here to argue. I’m making a film.” She sounded defensive, taut. “Malik,” she said abruptly, “I don’t want to talk about us, okay? I’m caught up in something big right now. My attention has to be there.”

He went for it, gathered himself and made his play. All or nothing, Hollywood or bust: he would never get another chance. He might not have much of one anyway, but at least she had come to see him, had actually dressed up for it, and that was a good sign. “This has become much more than a documentary film project for you,” he said. “This really goes to the heart. There’s a lot riding on it—your uprooted roots are pulling hard. Your paradoxical desire to be a part of what you left. And, no, I didn’t really think you were wearing the mask to hide your face from me, or at least that wasn’t the only thing I thought. I also thought you were hiding from yourself, from the decision you’ve made somewhere along the line to cross a line and become a participant in this thing. You don’t look like an observer to me. You’re in too deep. Maybe it started out with a personal feeling about Babur—and don’t worry, this isn’t jealousy speaking, at least I’m trying hard not to let it be—but my guess is that whatever your feelings about ‘Commander Akasz’ were, they’re a lot more ambiguous now. Your problem is that you’re an idealist trying to be an extremist. You are convinced that your people, if I can use so antiquated a term, have been done down by history, that they deserve what Babur has been fighting for-voting rights, the right to own property, the whole slate of legitimate human demands. You thought this was a struggle for human dignity, a just cause, and you were actually proud of Babur for teaching your passive kinsmen and kinswomen how to fight their own battles. In consequence you were willing to overlook a certain amount of, what shall we call it, illiberalism. War is tough and so on. Certain niceties get trampled. All this you told yourself, and all the while there was another voice in your head telling you in a whisper you didn’t want to hear that you were turning into history’s whore. You know how it is. Once you’ve sold yourself, all you have left is a limited ability to negotiate the price. How much would you put up with? How much authoritarian crap in the name of justice? How much bathwater could you lose without losing the baby?—So now you’re caught up, as you say, in something big, and you’re right, it deserves your attention, but so does this: that you only went this far because of the fury that possessed you all of a sudden in my bedroom in another city in another dimension of the universe. I can’t articulate exactly what happened that night, but I do know that some sort of psychic feedback loop established itself between you and Mila and Eleanor, the fury went round and round, doubling and redoubling. It made Morgen punch me out and it blew you clean across the planet into the arms of a little Napoleon who will oppress ‘your people’ if he comes out of this on top, even more than the ethnic Elbees, who have been, at least in your eyes, the villains of this piece. Or he’ll oppress them just as much but in a different way. Please don’t misunderstand. I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick’s wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.—I’m not saying that you came here because of me. You were coming anyway, right? It was our big farewell night, and as I remember, it had gone pretty well until my bedroom turned into Grand Central Station. So you’d have been here, and the pulls and pushes of being here would have worked on you whether I existed or not. But I think that what pushed you over the edge was disappointed love. You were disappointed in me and by me, which is to say by love, by the great untrammeled love you were just allowing yourself to begin to feel for me. You had just begun to trust me enough, to trust yourself enough, to let yourself go, and then suddenly the prince turns out to be a fat old toad. What happened is that the love you’d poured out went bad, it curdled, and now you’re using that sourness, that disenchantment and cynicism, to push you down Babur’s dead-end road. Why not, eh? If goodness is a fantasy and love is a magazine dream, why not? Nice guys finish second, to the victor go the spoils, et cetera. Your system is fighting itself, the bruised love is turning on the idealism and battering it into submission. And guess what? That puts you in an impossible situation, where you’re risking more even than your life. You’re risking your honor and self-respect. Here it is, Neela, your Galileo moment. Does the earth move? Don’t tell me. I already know the answer. But it’s the most important question you’re ever going to be asked, except for the one I’m going to ask you now: Neela, do you still love me? Because if you don’t, then please leave, go meet your fate and I’ll wait here for mine, but I don’t think you can do that. Because I do love you as you need to be loved. You choose: in the right corner there’s your handsome Prince Charming, who also, by a small mischance, turns out to be a psychotic megalomaniacal swine. In the wrong corner there’s the fat old toad, who knows how to give you what you need and who needs, so very badly, what you in turn know how to give him. Can right be wrong? Is the wrong thing right for you? I believe you came here tonight to find out the answer, to see if you could conquer your fury as you helped me conquer mine, to find out if you could find a way of coming back from the edge. Stay with Babur and he’ll fill you up with hatred. But you and me: we just might have a shot. I know it’s stupid to make this kind of declaration when just an hour ago I was stinking of my own shit and I still don’t have a room with a doorknob on the inside, but there it is, that’s what I crossed the world to say.”

“Wow,” she said, after allowing a suitably respectful moment of silence to elapse. “And I thought I was the big mouth on this team.”

She fished a heat-softened Toblerone bar out of her purse and Solanka fell upon it greedily. “He’s losing the men’s confidence,” she told Solanka. “The boy who helped you out tonight? There are plenty more like him, maybe as many as half the total, and for some reason they whisper to me. Kbuss puss, khuss puss. It’s so sad. ‘Madam, we are decent persons.’ Khusspuss. ‘Madam, Commander Sahib is acting strange, isn’t it? ‘Khusspuss. ‘Please, madam, do not mention my thoughts to anyone.’ I’m not the only idealist around here. These kids didn’t think they were going to war to flatten the earth or abolish the hours of darkness. They’re fighting for their families, and all this green-cheese material unnerves them. So they come to me and complain, and that puts me in a very dangerous place. It doesn’t really matter what advice I give being a second focal point, a rival center, is quite dangerous enough. One rat—one mole—is all it would take, and speaking of toads, yes, I do love you, very much. Meanwhile, what I saw on the outside before I brought the team in here was an army that’s pretty sick of being a laughingstock. My information is they’ve been talking to the Americans and the British. The rumor says that the marines and the SAS may already be in Mildendo, in fact, I’ve been feeling pretty foolish for weeks about running out on you like that. There’s a British aircraft carrier just outside territorial waters, and Babur doesn’t control the military airfields on Blefuscu, either. The truth is I’ve been thinking for a while now that it’s time to leave, but I don’t know how Babur will take it. Half of him wants to fuck me on national television and the other half wants to beat me up for making him feel that way. So now you know the real reason why I’ve been wearing the mask: it’s the next best thing to putting my head in a paper bag, and you came all this way for me and walked into the lion’s den. I guess you must really dig me too, huh. I’m working on an out. If I can get the right Fremen in the right places, I think it can be done, and I have contacts in the army that can at least get us out to the British boat or maybe a military plane. In the meanwhile I’ll make sure you get looked after. I still don’t know about Babur, how far gone he is. Maybe he thinks you’re a valuable hostage, even though I keep telling him you’re not worth the trouble, you’re just a civilian who blundered into something he didn’t understand, a little fish he should throw back into the sea. If you don’t kiss me soon, I’ll be forced to kill you with my own bare hands. Okay, that’s good. Now stay put. I’ll be back.”

In Athens the Furies were thought to be Aphrodite’s sisters. Beauty and vengeful wrath, as Homer knew, sprang from the self-same source. That was one story. Hesiod, however, said that the Furies were born of Earth and Air, and that their siblings included Terror, Strife, Lies, Vengeance, Intemperance, Altercation, Fear, and Battle. In those days they avenged blood crimes, pursuing those who harmed (especially) their mothers—Orestes, long pursued by them after he killed bloody-handed Clytemnestra, knew all about that. The leirion, or blue iris, sometimes placated the Furies, but Orestes wore no flowers in his hair. Even the bow of horn that the Pythoness, the Delphic Oracle, gave him to repel their assaults proved to be of little use. “Serpent-haired, dogheaded, bat-winged,” the Erinnyes hounded him for the rest of his life, denying him peace.

These days the goddesses, less regarded, were hungrier, wilder, casting their nets more widely. As the bonds of family weakened, so the Furies began to intervene in all of human life. From New York to Lilliput-Blefuscu there was no escape from the beating of their wings.

She didn’t come back. Young men and women attended to Solanka’s daily needs. These were some of the weary, immured fighters who, fearing their own leader, Babur, as much as the enemy outside the compound walls, had gone to their dark Aphrodite for advice; but when Solanka asked about Neela, they made dumb don’t-know gestures and went away. “Commander Akasz” didn’t show up, either. Professor Solanka, forgotten, washed up on the edge of things, dozed, talked aloud to himself, drifted into unreality, lurching between daydreams and panic attacks. Through the small barred window he heard the noise of battle, growing more frequent, coming closer. Pillars of smoke rose high into the air. Solanka thought of Little Brain. I’d have set his house on fire. I’d have burned his city down.

Violent action is unclear to most of those who get caught up in it. Experience is fragmentary; cause and effect, why and how, are torn apart. Only sequence exists. First this then that. And afterward, for those who survive, a lifetime of trying to understand. The assault came on Solanka’s fourth day in Mildendo. At dawn the door of his cell was opened. There stood the same taciturn young man—now carrying an automatic weapon, and with two knives stuck in his belt—who had so uncomplainingly cleaned up his mess a few days earlier. “Come quickly, please,” he said. Solanka followed him, and then it was into the labyrinth again, the bleak interconnecting rooms with masked fighters guarding the way, approaching each door as if it were booby-trapped, turning each corner as if an ambush lurked just beyond; and in the distance Solanka heard the inarticulate conversation of battle, the chatter of automatic rifles, the grunts of heavy artillery, and, high above it all, the leathery beating of bat-wings and the screeches of the dog-headed Three. Then he was enclosed in the service elevator, manhandled through the ruined kitchens, and pushed into an unmarked, windowless van; after which, for a long time, nothing. High-speed motion, alarming halts, raised voices, the motion renewed. Noise. Where was that shrieking coming from? Who was dying, who was killing? What was the story here? To know so little was to feel insignificant, even a little insane.

Thrown this way and that in the hurtling, swerving van, Malik Solanka howled aloud. But this, after all, was a rescue. Somebody—Neela?—had decreed him worthy. War erases the individual, but he was being saved from the war.

The door opened; he squinted into the blinding daylight. An officer saluted him—an exotically mustachioed ethnic Elbee wearing the absurdly braided uniform of the Lilliputian army. “Professor. So happy to see you safe, sir.” He reminded Solanka of Sergius, the stiff-backed officer in Shaw’s Arms and the Man. Sergius, who never apologized. This fellow had plainly been assigned to chaperone Solanka, a task he fulfilled briskly, marching ahead like an overwound toy. He led Solanka into a building bearing the insignia of the International Red Cross. Later there was food. A British military aircraft was waiting to carry him, along with a group of other foreign passport-holders, back to London. “My passport was taken,” Solanka told Sergius. “None of that matters now, sir,” the officer replied. “I can’t leave without Neela,” Solanka went on. “I don’t know anything about that, sir,” Sergius said. “My orders are to get you on board that aircraft double-quick.”

All the seats on the British plane faced toward the tail. Solanka, taking his allotted chair, recognized the men across the aisle as Neela’s cameraman and sound recordist. When they stood up and embraced him, he knew the news was bad. “Unbelievable, mate,” the soundman said. “She got you out, too. Amazing woman.” Where is she. None of this matters, your life, mine, he thought. Will she be here soon. “She did the whole thing,” the cameraman said. “Organized the Fremen who were sick of Babur, contacted the army on shortwave radio, arranged the guaranteed safe-conducts, the lot. The president’s out. Bolgolam, too. That bastard tried to thank her, called her a national heroine. She cut him short. In her own eyes she was a traitor, betraying the only cause she ever believed in. She was helping the bad guys win, and it killed her. But she could see what Babur had become.” Malik Solanka had grown very still and quiet. “The army got tired of the jokes,” the sound engineer said. “They called up all reservists and dusted off a lot of old but still serviceable pieces of heavy artillery. Helicopter gunships from the Vietnam era, bought secondhand from the United States years ago, ground-based mortars, a few small tanks. Last night they took back control of the compound perimeter. Still Babur wasn’t worried.” The cameraman indicated a silver box. “We got it all,” he said. “She arranged incredible access. Just incredible. He never believed they would use the heavy stuff against the Parliament building, and certainly not while he was holding his hostages. He was wrong about the building. Underestimated their determination. But the hostages were the key, and Neela turned that lock. The four of us came out together. And then there was the whole second route, which she set up just for you.” After that nothing was said. The terrible thing hung between them like a fierce light, but it was too bright to look at. The soundman began to cry. What happened, Solanka finally asked. How could you leave her. Why didn’t she run with you, toward safety. Toward me. The cameraman shook his head. “What she did,” he said, “it tore her apart. She betrayed him, but she couldn’t run. That would have been desertion under fire.” But she wasn’t a soldier! Oh God. God. She was a journalist. Didn’t she know that? Why did she have to cross that goddamn line? The soundman put his arm around Solanka. “There was something she had to do,” he said. “The plan wouldn’t have worked if she hadn’t stayed behind.” “To distract Babur,” the cameraman said, dull-voiced, and there it was, the worst thing in the world. To distract him: how? What did that mean? Why did it have to be her? “You know how,” the soundman said. “And you know what it means. And you know why it had to be her.” Solanka closed his eyes. “She sent you this,” the cameraman was saying. Helicopter gunships and heavy mortars, authorized by the freed President Golbasto Gue, were blasting holes in the Lilliputian Parliament. A bomber shed its load. The building was exploding, crumbling, on fire. Dirty smoke and clouds of masonry dust climbed high into the sky. Three thousand reservists and frontline troops assaulted the complex, taking no prisoners. Tomorrow the world would condemn this ruthless action, but today was for getting it done. Somewhere in the wreckage lay a man wearing Solanka’s face and a woman wearing her own. Not even Neela Mahendra’s beauty could affect the trajectory of the mortars, the bombs like deadly fishes swimming downward through the air. Come to me, she murmured to Babur, I am your assassin, the murderer of my own hopes. Come here and let me watch you die.

Malik Solanka opened his eyes and read the handwritten note. “Professor Sahib, I know the answer to your question.” Neela’s last words. “The earth moves. The earth goes round the sun.”

18

From a distance the boy’s hair was still golden, although the new growth beneath was darker. By his approaching fourth birthday the yellow hair would have mostly gone. The sun was shining as Asmaan rode his tricycle with great attack down a sloping path on the flowering springtime Heath. “Look at me!” he shouted. “I’m going really fast!” He had grown, and his diction was much clearer, but he was still clothed in childhood’s radiance, that brightest of cloaks. His mother ran to keep up with him, her long hair twisted away beneath a large straw hat. It was a perfect April day at the height of the foot-and-mouth epidemic. The government was simultaneously ahead in the polls and unpopular, and the prime minister, Tony Ozymandias, seemed shocked by the paradox: what, you don’t like us? But it’s us, folks, we’re the good guys! People, people: it’s me! Malik Solanka, a traveler from an antique land, watching his son from the privacy of a grove of oaks, uncomplainingly allowed a black Labrador to sniff at him. The dog moved on, having established that Solanka was not suitable for his purposes. The dog was right. There were few purposes for which Solanka felt suitable right now. Nothing beside remains.

Morgen Franz did not run. He didn’t “do running.” Beaming myopically, the publisher lumbered down the slope toward the waiting woman and child. “Did you see that, Morgen? It was very good driving, wasn’t it? What would Daddy say?” Asmaan’s tendency always to speak at top volume carried his words up to Solanka’s hiding place. Franz’s reply was inaudible, but Malik could easily write his lines. “Far out, Asmaan, man. Really nice.” The old hippie shit. To his eternal credit, the boy frowned. “But what would Daddy say?” Solanka felt a little surge of fatherly pride. Good for you, kid. You remind that Buddhist hypocrite who’s who.

Asmaan’s Heath—or at least Kenwood—was studded with magical trees. A gigantic fallen oak, its roots twisting in air, was one such enchanted zone. Another tree, with a hole at the base of its trunk, housed a set of storybook creatures, with whom Asmaan carried out ritual dialogues each time he passed this way. A third tree was the home of Winnie-the-Pooh. Nearer Kenwood House were large spreading rhododendron bushes inside which witches lived and where fallen twigs became magic wands. The Hepworth sculpture was a sacred spot, and the words “Barbara Hepworth” had been a part of Asmaan’s lexicon almost from the start. Solanka knew the route Eleanor would take, and knew, too, how to follow the little group without being noticed. He wasn’t sure he was ready to be noticed, wasn’t certain he was ready for his life. Asmaan was asking to be carried along the next part of the path, not wanting to ride the trike uphill. This was an old laziness, entrenched by habit. Eleanor had a weak back and so Morgen hoisted the boy up on his shoulders. That had always been one of Solanka and Asmaan’s special things. “Can I ride on my shoulders, Daddy?” “Your shoulders, Asmaan. Say, ‘your shoulders.’” “My shoulders.” There goes everything I love on this earth, Solanka thought. I’ll just watch him awhile. I’ll just watch over him from here.

Once again he had withdrawn from the world. Even checking his voice mail was hard. Mila had married, Eleanor left tight, miserable messages about lawyers. The divorce was all but done. Solanka’s days began, passed, ended. He had given up the New York sublet and taken a suite at Claridge’s. Most days he only left it to allow the cleaners to get in. He contacted no friends, made no business calls, bought no newspaper. Retiring early, he lay wide-eyed and rigid in his comfortable bed, listening to the noises of distant fury, trying to hear Neela’s silenced voice. On Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve he ordered room service and watched brainless television. This expedition by taxi to North London was his first real outing in months. He had been far from sure he would even see the boy, but Asmaan and Eleanor were creatures of custom, and their movements were relatively easy to predict.

It was a holiday weekend, so there were funfairs on the Heath. On their way back to the house on Willow Road—it would be on the market any day now—Asmaan, Eleanor, and Morgen wandered through the usual rides and stalls. Asmaan was thawing toward Franz, Solanka observed: laughing with him, asking him questions, his hand disappearing inside Uncle Morg’s great hairy-knuckled fist. They went in a bumper car together while Eleanor took photographs. When Asmaan leaned his head against Morgen’s sports coat, something broke in Malik Solanka’s heart.

Eleanor saw him. He was lounging by a coconut shy and she looked right at him and stiffened. Then she shook her head vehemently, and her mouth silently but very emphatically made the word “no.” No, this was not the right time; after such a long gap it would be too much of a shock for the lad. Call me, she mouthed. Before any future meeting they ought to discuss how, when, where, and what Asmaan should be told. The little fellow needed to be prepared. This was how Solanka had known she would react. He turned away from her and saw the bouncy castle. It was bright blue, blue as an iris, with a bouncy staircase at one side. You climbed up the stairs to a bouncy ledge, slid and tumbled down a wide, bouncy slope, and then, to your heart’s content, you bounced and bounced. Malik Solanka paid his money and slipped off his shoes. “‘Ang about,” the enormous woman attendant cried. “Kids only, guv. No adults allowed.” But he was too quick for her, and with his long leather coat flying in the breeze, he leapt up on the wobbly-wobbly stairs, leaving astonished children floundering in his wake, and at the top of the stairs, standing high above the fairground on the wibblywobbly ledge, he began to jump and shout with all his might. The noise that emerged from him was awful and immense, a roar from the Inferno, the cry of the tormented and the lost. But grand and high was his bouncing; and he was damned if he was going to stop leaping or desist from yelling until that little boy looked around, until he made Asmaan Solanka hear him in spite of the enormous woman and the gathering crowd and the mouthing mother and the man holding the boy’s hand and above all the lack of a golden hat, until Asmaan turned and saw his father up there, his only true father flying against the sky, asmaan, the sky, conjuring up all his lost love and hurling it high up into the sky like a white bird plucked from his sleeve. His only true father taking flight like a bird, to live in the great blue vault of the only heaven in which he had ever been able to believe. “Look at me!” shrieked Professor Malik Solanka, his leather coattails flapping like wings. “Look at me, Asmaan! I’m bouncing very well! I’m bouncing higher and higher!”