The boy had taken to telephoning Solanka without regard to the five-hour time difference. Eleanor had programmed the New York number into the Willow Road kitchen phone’s speed-dial system; all Asmaan had to do was push a single button. Hello, Daddy came his transatlantic voice (this first call had been at five A.M.): I had a nice time at the part, Daddy. Park, Asmaan, sleepy Solanka tried to teach his son. Say park. Part. Where are you, Daddy, are you at home? Are you not coming back? I should have put you in the car, Daddy, I should have taken you to the sings. Swings. Say swings. I should have taken you to the sa-wings, Daddy. Morgen pushed me higher and higher. Are you binging me a peasant? Say bringing, Asmaan. Say present. You can do it. Are you ba-ringing me a pa-resent, Daddy? What’s inside it? Will I like it very much? Daddy, you not going away anymore. I won’t let you. I had an ice team in the part. Morgen bought it. It was very nice. Ice cream, Asmaan. Say ice cream. Ice ta-ream.
Eleanor came on to the line. “I’m sorry, he came downstairs and pushed the button all by himself. I’m afraid I didn’t wake up.” Oh, that’s okay, Solanka replied, and there followed a long silence. Then Eleanor unsteadily said, “Malik, I just don’t know what’s going on. I’m falling apart here. Can’t we, if you don’t want to come to London I could get on a, I could leave Asmaan with his grandma and we could sit down and try to work this thing, whatever it is, oh God I don’t even know what it is!, couldn’t we work it out? Or do you just hate me now, do I all of a sudden disgust you for some reason? Is there someone else? There must be, mustn’t there? Who is it? For God’s sake tell me, at least that would make sense, and then I could just be fucking furious with you instead of going slowly out of my mind.”
The truth was that her voice still lacked any trace of real wrath. Yet he had abandoned her without a word, Solanka thought: surely her grief would turn, sooner or later, to rage? Perhaps she would let her solicitor express it for her, unleashing against him the cold rage of the law. But he could not see her as a second Bronislawa Rhinehart. There was simply no vindictiveness in her nature. But for there to be so little anger: that was inhuman, even a little frightening. Or, alternatively, proof of what everybody was thinking and what Morgen and afterward Lin Franz had put into words: that she was the better person of the two of them, too good for him, and, once she had recovered from the pain, would be better off without him. None of which would be any comfort to her right now, or to the child to whose arms he did not dare—for the sake of the boy’s safety—to return.
For he knew he had not shaken the Furies off. A low, simmering, disconnected anger continued to seep and flow deep within him, threatening to rise up without warning in a mighty volcanic burst; as if it were its own master, as if he were merely the receptacle, the host, and it, the fury, were the sentient, controlling being. In spite of all the apparently necromantic strides of science these were prosaic times, in which everything was deemed capable of explication and comprehension; and throughout his life Professor Solanka, the Malik Solanka who had latterly become conscious of the inexplicable within himself, had been firmly of the prosaic party, the party of reason and science in its original and broadest meaning: scientia, knowledge. Yet even in these microscopically observed and interminably explicated days, what was bubbling inside him defied all explanations. There is that within us, he was being forced to concede, which is capricious and for which the language of explanation is inappropriate. We are made of shadow as well as light, of heat as well as dust. Naturalism, the philosophy of the visible, cannot capture us, for we exceed. We fear this in ourselves, our boundary-breaking, rule-disproving, shape-shifting, transgressive, trespassing shadow-self, the true ghost in our machine. Not in the afterlife, or in any improbably immortal sphere, but here on earth the spirit escapes the chains of what we know ourselves to be. It may rise in wrath, inflamed by its captivity, and lay reason’s world to waste.
What was true of him, he found himself thinking once again, might also be true to some degree of everyone. The whole world was burning on a shorter fuse. There was a knife twisting in every gut, a scourge for every back. We were all grievously provoked. Explosions were heard on every side. Human life was now lived in the moment before the fury, when the anger grew, or the moment during—the fury’s hour, the time of the beast set free—or in the ruined aftermath of a great violence, when the fury ebbed and chaos abated, until the tide began, once again, to turn. Craters—in cities, in deserts, in nations, in the heart—had become commonplace. People snarled and cowered in the rubble of their own misdeeds.
In spite of all Mila Milo’s ministrations (or, often, because of them) Professor Solanka still needed, on his frequent insomniac nights, to still his boiling thoughts by walking the city streets for hours, even in the rain. They were digging up Amsterdam Avenue, the sidewalk as well as the pavement, just a couple of blocks away (some days it seemed as if they were digging up the whole town), and one night as he was out walking through a medium to heavy downpour past the untidily fenced off hole he stubbed his toe on something and burst into a three-minute tirade of invective, at the end of which an admiring voice came from beneath an oilcloth in a doorway, “Man, sure learned some new vocabulary tonight.” Solanka looked down to see what had bruised his foot, and there, lying on the sidewalk, was a broken lump of concrete paving-stone; upon seeing which he broke into an ungainly limping run, fleeing that concrete lump like a guilty man leaving the scene of a crime.
Ever since the investigation of the three society killings had focused on the three rich boys, he had felt lighter of spirit, but in his heart of hearts he had not yet fully exonerated himself. He followed reports of the investigation with care. There had still been no arrests and no confessions, and the news media were growing restive; the possibility of an upper-crust serial killer was juicily enticing, and the N.Y.P.D.’s failure to crack the case was all the more frustrating as a result. Give those swanky no-goodniks the third degree! One of them must break! An unappetizing lynch-mob atmosphere was generated by this kind of speculative commentary, of which there was much to be found. Solanka’s attention was captured by the one possible new lead. Mr. Panama Hat had been replaced in the unsolved mystery’s dramatis personae by an even stranger group of characters. People in fancy-dress Disney costumes had been sighted near each of the three murder scenes: a Goofy near Lauren Klein’s corpse, a Buzz Lightyear near the body of Belinda Booken Candell, and where Saskia Schuyler lay a passerby had spotted a red fox in Lincoln green: Robin Hood himself, tormentor of the bad old Sheriff of Notting Ham, and now also eluding the Sheriffs of Manhattan. Oo-de-lally! Detectives admitted that a significant connection between the three sightings was impossible to establish for sure, but the coincidence was certainly striking—Halloween being many months away—and they were keeping it very much in mind.
In the minds of children, Solanka thought, the creatures of the imagined world—characters from books or videos or songs—actually felt more solidly real than did most living people, parents excepted. As we grew, the balance shifted and fiction was relegated to the separate reality, the world apart in which we were taught that it belonged. Yet here was macabre proof of fiction’s ability to cross that supposedly impermeable frontier. Asmaan’s world—Disney World—was trespassing in New York and murdering the city’s young women. And one or more very scary boys were concealed somewhere in this video, too.
At least there had been no more Concrete Killer murders for a while. Also, and for this Solanka did give Mila credit, he was drinking a good deal less, and as a result there had been no more amnesiac stupors: he no longer woke up in his street clothes with terrible unanswerable questions in his aching head. There were even moments when, as he fell under Mila’s spell, he had come close, for the first time in months, to something very like happiness. And yet the dark goddesses still hovered over him, dripping their malevolence into his heart. While Mila was with him, in that wood-paneled space in which, even when thunderstorms darkened the sky, they no longer troubled to switch on any elect
ric lights, he was held within the magic circle of her charm; but as soon as she left, the noises in his head began again. The murmuring, the beating of black wings. After his first dawn phone conversation with Asmaan and Eleanor, as the knife twisted in him, the murmurs turned for the first time against Mila, his angel of mercy, his living doll.
This was her face in the half-light, its knife-edge planes moving comfortably against his half-unbuttoned shirt, the short, erect, red-gold hair brushing the underside of his chin. The reenactments of old TV shows had stopped, a pretense whose purpose had been served. These days, in the slow darkened afternoons, they barely spoke, and when they did, it was no longer of philosophy. Sometimes for an instant her tongue lapped at his breast. Everybody needs a doll to play with, she whispered. Professor, you poor angry man, it’s been so long. Shh, there’s no hurry, take your time, I’m not going anywhere, nobody’s going to disturb us, I’m here for you. Let it go. You don’t need it anymore, all that rage. You just need to remember how to play. These were her long fingers, with their blood-red nails, finding their way, by the smallest of daily increments, further inside his shirt.
Her physical memory was extraordinary. Each time she visited him, she could take up exactly the position on his cushioned lap that she had reached at the end of her last visit. The placing of her head and hands, the tightness with which her body curled into itself, the exact weight with which she leaned against him: her high-precision remembering, and infinitesimal adjustment, of these variables were themselves prodigiously arousing sexual acts. For the veils were falling away from their play, as Mila showed Professor Solanka with each (daily more explicit) touch. The effect on Professor Solanka of Mila’s strengthening caresses was electric all right, at his age and in his situation in life he had not looked to receive such benison ever again. Yes, she had turned his head, had set out to do so while pretending to be doing nothing of the sort, and now he was deeply enmeshed in her web. The queen webspyder, mistress of the whole webspyder posse, had him in her net.
Then there was another change. Just as he had let slip a doll’s name, accidentally or under the pressure of a barely conscious desire, so one afternoon she too let a forbidden word pass her lips. At once that shuttered and darkened sitting room had been magically flooded with lurid, revelatory light, and Professor Malik Solanka knew Mila Milo’s backstory. It was always my dad and me, she had said it herself, always him and me against the world. There it was in her own undisguised words. She had laid it right out in front of Solanka and he had been too blind (or too unwilling?) to see what she had so openly and unashamedly shown. But as Solanka looked at her in the aftermath of her “slip of the tongue”—which he was already more than half convinced had been no slip, for this was a woman of formidable self-control, to whom accidents most likely never happened—those sharp and somehow cryptic facial planes, those slanting eyes, that face which was most closed when it looked most open, that wise little private smile, at last revealed their secrets.
Papi, she had said. That treacherous diminutive, that freighted term of endearment meant for a dead man’s ear, had served as the open-sesame to her lightless childhood cave. There sat the widowed poet and his precocious child. There was a cushion on his lap and she, year after year, curling and uncurling, moving against him, kissing dry his tears of shame. This was the heart of her, the daughter who sought to compensate her father for the loss of the woman he loved, no doubt in part to assuage her own loss by clinging to the parent who remained, but also to supplant that woman in this man’s affections, to fill the forbidden, vacated maternal space more fully than it had been filled by her dead mother, for he must need her, must need living Mila, more than he had ever needed his wife; she would show him new depths of needing, until he wanted her more than he had known he could want any woman’s touch. This father—after his own experience of Mila’s powers, Solanka was utterly sure of what had happened—was slowly wooed by his child, seduced millimeter by millimeter into the undiscovered country, toward his never-discovered crime. Here was the great writer, l’écrivain nobélisable, the conscience of his people, suffering those appallingly knowledgeable little hands to move at the buttons of his shirt, and at some point allowing the unallowable, crossing the frontier from which there can be no return, and beginning, tormentedly but eagerly, too, to participate. Thus was a religious man brought forever into mortal sin, forced by desire to renounce his God and sign the Devil’s treaty, while the burgeoning girl, his demon child, the goblin in the heart of the flower, whispered the vertiginous faith-murdering words that sucked him down: this isn’t happening unless we say it is, and we don’t say it is, do we, Papi, so it’s not. And because nothing was happening, nothing was wrong. The dead poet had entered that world of fantasy where everything is always safe, where the crocodile never catches Hook and a little boy never grows tired of his toys. So Malik Solanka saw his mistress’s real self unveiled, and said, “This is an echo, isn’t it, Mila, a reprise. You sang this song once before.” And immediately, silently corrected himself. No, don’t flatter yourself. Not just once. You are by no means the first.
Shh, she said, laying a finger across his lips. Shh, Papi, no. Nothing happened then and it’s not happening now. Her second use of the incriminating nickname had a new, pleading quality to it. She needed this, needed him to allow it. The spider was caught in her own necrophiliac web, dependent on men like Solanka to raise her lover very, very slowly from the dead. Thank the God who doesn’t exist that I have no daughters, Malik Solanka thought. Then misery choked him. No daughter, and I have also lost my son. Elián the Icon has gone home to Cárdenas, Cuba, with his papa but I can’t go home to my boy. Mila’s lips were against his neck now, moving over his Adam’s apple, and he felt a gentle suction. The pain ebbed; and something more, too, was taken. His words were being removed from him. She was drawing them out and swallowing them and he would never be able to say them again, the words describing the thing that was not, that the spider-sorceress in her black majesty would never permit to be.
And what if, Solanka wildly conjectured, she was feeding off his fury? What if she was hungriest for what he feared most, the goblin anger within? For she was driven by fury also, he knew that, by the wild imperative fury of her hidden need. At that moment of revelation Solanka could easily have believed that this beautiful, accursed girl, whose weight was moving with such suggestive languor on his lap, whose fingertips touched his chest hair as faintly as a summer breeze and whose lips were working softly at his throat, might actually be the very incarnation of a Fury, one of the three deadly sisters, the scourges of mankind. Fury was their divine nature and boiling human wrath their favorite food. He could have persuaded himself that behind her low whispers, beneath her unfailingly even tempered tones, he could hear the Erinnyes’ shrieks.
Another page of her back-story revealed itself to him. Here was the poet Milo with his weak heart. This gifted, driven man had ignored all medical advice and continued, with an almost ludicrous excessiveness, to drink, smoke, and womanize. His daughter had offered an explanation of Conradian grandeur for this behavior: life must be lived until it can be lived no more. But as Solanka’s eyes opened he saw a different picture of the poet, a portrait of the artist fleeing into excess from grievous sin, from what he must have daily believed to be his soul’s death, its condemnation for all eternity to the most agonizing circle of Hell. Then came that last journey, Papi Milo’s suicidal flight toward his murderous namesake. This, too, now conveyed to Malik Solanka something other than Mila had made it mean. Fleeing one evil, Milo had gone to face what he thought of as the lesser peril. Escaping the consuming Fury, his daughter, he ran toward his full, unabbreviated name, toward himself. Mila, thought Solanka, you probably drove your maddened father to his death. And what, now, might you have in store for me?
He knew one frightening answer to that. At least one veil still hung between them, over not her story but his. He had known from the first minute of this illicit liaison that he was play
ing with fire, that everything he had driven deep down within himself was being stirred, the seals were being broken one by one, and that the past, which had almost destroyed him once before, might yet be given a second chance to finish the job. Between this new, unlooked-for story and that old, suppressed tale the unarticulated resonances echoed. This question of dollification and its. The matter of allowing oneself to be. Of having no choice but. Of the slavery of childhood when. Of need: this one’s that one’s most inexorable. Of the power of doctors to. Of the child’s impotence in the face of. Of the innocence of children in. Of the child’s guilt, its fault, its most grievous fault. Above all the matter of sentences that must never be completed, because to complete them would release the fury, and the crater of that explosion would consume everything at hand.