“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 porno-movie 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’ frontwoman, 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 electorial 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, accompanie
d 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 Galileo-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 voice. 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 Colosseum, 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 lie, 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 bougainvillaea 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.