Saskia, Lauren, and Belinda had not been robbed. Their finger rings, earrings, chokers, and upper-arm bracelets were all found to be in place. Nor had they been sexually assaulted. No motive for the murders had emerged, but all three boyfriends raised the possibility of a stalker. In the days before their deaths, all the dead women had mentioned seeing a Panama-hatted stranger “lurking oddly.” “It’s like Sky was executed,” a somber, cigar-smoking Brad Marsalis told the press at a photo-op and Q-and-A at a hotel suite in Vineyard Haven. “It’s like somebody sentenced her to death and carried out that sentence in, like, cold blood.”
7
The news of Solanka’s split from Eleanor had sent shock waves through their circle. Each marriage that breaks interrogates those that continue to hold. Malik Solanka was conscious of having initiated a chain reaction of spoken and unspoken questions at breakfast tables across the city, and in bedrooms, and in other cities too: Are we still good? Okay, how good? Are there things you’re not telling me? Am I going to wake up one day and you’ll say something that makes me realize I’ve been sharing my bed with a stranger? How will tomorrow rewrite yesterday, how will next week unmake the past five, ten, fifteen years? Are you bored? Is it my fault? Are you weaker than I thought? Is it him? Is it her? Is it the sex? The children? Do you want to fix it? Is there anything to fix? Do you love me? Do you still love me? Do I still, oh Jesus Jesus, love you?
These agonies, for which his friends inevitably held him responsible to some unspecified degree, returned to him as echoes. In spite of his emphatic embargo, Eleanor was handing out his Manhattan phone number to anyone who wanted it. Men, more than women, seemed moved to call up and reprove. Morgen Franz, the post-hippie Buddhist publisher whose telephone Eleanor had answered all those years ago, was first in line. Morgen was Californian and had taken refuge from that fact in Bloomsbury but never shaken off his slow Haight-Ashbury drawl. “I’m not happy about this, man,” he’d called Malik to reveal, his vowels even more elongated than usual to emphasize his pain. “And what’s more, I don’t know anyone who is. I don’t know why you did this, man, and because you’re neither a dope nor a shit, I’m sure you’ll have your reasons, I’m sure you will, you know?, and they’ll be good reasons, too, man, I have no doubt of it, I mean what can I tell you, I love you, you know?, I love you both, but right now I have to say I feel a lot of anger toward you.” Solanka could visualize his friend’s reddened, short-bearded face, his small deep-set eyes blinking fiercely for emphasis. Franz was legendarily laid-back—“nobody’s cooler than the Morg,” that was his catchphrase—so this heated climax came as a jolt. Solanka, however, stayed cold, and allowed himself to express his own feelings truthfully and irrevocably.
“Six, seven, eight years ago,” he said, “Lin used to call Eleanor in tears because you refused to have a child with her, and you know what?, you had your reasons, you had your deep disenchantment with the human race to deal with every day, and on children, as on Philadelphia, you took the Fields position. And, Morgen, I ‘felt a lot of anger toward you’ in those days myself. I saw Lin settling for cats instead of babies and I didn’t like it and guess what? I never called you to scold you or to ask what was the relevant Buddhist teaching on the subject, because I decided it was none of my damn business what went on between you and your wife. That it was your private affair, given that you weren’t actually beating her up, or given, anyway, that it was merely her spirit you were breaking, not her body. So do me a favor and bugger off. This is not your story. It’s mine.” And there it went, their old friendship, eight or was it nine Christmas Days spent in turn at each other’s homes, the Trivial Pursuit, the charades, the love. Lin Franz called him the next morning to tell him that what he had said was unforgivable. “Please know,” she added, in her whisper-soft, overly formal Vietnamese-American English, “that your desertion of Eleanor has only served to bring Morgen and I even closer together. And Eleanor is a strong woman, and will pick up the reins of her life soon, when she has mourned. We will all go on without you, Malik, and you will be the poorer for having excluded us from your life. I am sorry for you.”
A knife held over the sleeping figures of your wife and child cannot be mentioned to anyone, much less explained. Such a knife represents a crime far worse than the substitution of a long-haired feline for a mewling babe. And Solanka had no answer to the hows and whys of this appalling, enigmatic event. Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand? There he had simply been, like guilty Macbeth, and the weapon too was simply there, impossible to wish away or to edit out of the image afterward. That he had not plunged the knife into sleeping hearts did not make him innocent. To hold the knife so and to stand thus was more than enough. Guilty, guilty! Even as he spoke his stern, friendship-breaking words to his old friend, Malik Solanka had been starkly aware of their hypocrisy, and he received Lin’s subsequent rebuke without comment. He had surrendered all his rights to protest when he ran his thumb along the Sabatier blade, testing its sharpness in the dark. This knife was his story now, and he had come to America to write it.
No! In despair, to unwrite it. Not to be but to un-be. He had flown to the land of self-creation, the home of Mark Skywalker the Jedi copywriter in red suspenders, the country whose paradigmatic modern fiction was the story of a man who remade himself—his past, his present, his shirts, even his name—for love; and here, in this place from whose narratives he was all but disconnected, he intended to attempt the first phase of such a restructuring, namely—he deliberately now applied to himself the same sort of mechanical imagery that he had so callously used against the dead women—the complete erasure, or “master deletion,” of the old program. Somewhere in the existing software there was a bug, a potentially lethal flaw. Nothing less than the unselfing of the self would do. If he could cleanse the whole machine, then maybe the bug, too, would end up in the trash. After that, he could perhaps begin to construct a new man. He fully saw that this was a fantastic, unrealistic ambition, if intended seriously, literally, instead of in-a-manner-of-speaking; nevertheless, literally was how he meant it, no matter how unhinged that might sound. For what was the alternative? Confession, fear, separation, policemen, head doctors, Broadmoor, shame, divorce, jail? The steps down into that inferno seemed inexorable. And the worse inferno he would leave behind, the burning blade turning forever in the mind’s eye of his growing son.
He had conceived, in that instant, an almost religious belief in the power of flight. Flight would save others from him, and him from himself. He would go where he was not known and wash himself in that unknowing. A memory from forbidden Bombay peremptorily insisted on his attention: the memory of the day in 1955 when Mr. Venkat—the big-deal banker whose son Chandra was the ten-year-old Malik’s best friend—became a sanyasi on his sixtieth birthday and abandoned his family forever, wearing no more than a Gandhian loincloth, with a long wooden staff in one hand and a begging bowl in the other. Malik had always liked Mr. Venkat, who would tease him by asking him to pronounce, very quickly, his full, polysyllabically tumbling South Indian name: Balasubramanyam Venkataraghavan. “Come on, boy, faster,” he’d coax Malik as his childish tongue stumbled over the syllables. “Don’t you wish you had a name as magnificent as this?”
Malik Solanka lived in a second-floor apartment in a building called Noor Ville on Methwold’s Estate off Warden Road. The Venkats occupied the other apartment on that floor, and gave every indication of being a happy family: one, in fact, that Malik envied every day of his life. Now both apartment doors stood open, and children crowded wide-eyed and grave around stricken adults as Mr. Venkat took his leave of his old life forever. From the depths of the Venkats’ apartment came the noise of a crackly seventy-eight: a song by the Ink Spots, Mr. Venkat’s favorite group. The spectacle of Mrs. Venkat crying her eyes out on his mother’s shoulder hit little Malik Solanka hard. As the banker turned to go, Malik suddenly called out to him. “Balasubramanyam Venkataraghavan!” And then, saying it faster and loud
er, until he was simultaneously gabbling and screaming: “Balasubramanyamvenkataraghavanbalasubramanyamvenkataraghavanbalasubramanyamvenkataraghawan BALASUBRAMANYAMVENKATARAGHAVAN!”
The banker paused gravely. He was a small, bony man, kind-faced, bright-eyed. “That is very well said, and the speed is impressive too,” he commented. “And because you have repeated it five times without a mistake, I will answer five questions, if you wish to ask them.”
Where are you going? “I am going in search of knowledge and if possible of peace.” Why aren’t you wearing your office suit? “Because I have given up my employment.” Why is Mrs. Venkat crying? “That is a question for her.” When are you coming back? “This step, Malik, is once and for all.” What about Chandra? “He will understand one day.” Don’t you care about us anymore? “That is the sixth question. Over the limit. Be a good child now. Be a good friend to your friend.” Malik Solanka remembered his mother trying, after Mr. Venkat went away down the hill, to explain the philosophy of the sanyasi, of a man’s decision to give up all possessions and worldly connections, severing himself from life, in order to come closer to the Divine before it was time to die. Mr. Venkat had left his affairs in good order; his family would be well provided for. But he would never return. Malik did not understand most of what he was being told, but he had a vivid comprehension of what Chandra meant when, later that day, he broke his father’s old Ink Spots records and shouted: “I hate knowledge! And peace, too. I really hate peace a lot.”
When a man without faith mimicked the choices of the faithful, the result was likely to be both vulgar and inept. Professor Malik Solanka donned no loincloth, picked up no begging bowl. Instead of surrendering himself to the fortune of the street and the charity of strangers, he flew business class to JFK, checked briefly into the Lowell, called a real estate broker, and speedily lucked out, finding himself this commodious West Side sublet. Instead of heading for Manaus, Alice Springs, or Vladivostok, he had landed himself in a city in which he was not completely unknown, which was not completely unknown to him, in which he could speak the language and find his way around and understand, up to a point, the customs of the natives. He had acted without thinking, had been strapped into his airline seat before he allowed himself to reflect; then he’d simply accepted the imperfect choice his reflexes had made, agreed to proceed down the unlikely road onto which his feet, without prompting, had turned. A sanyasi in New York, a sanyasi with a duplex and credit card, was a contradiction in terms. Very well. He would be that contradiction and, in spite of his oxymoronic nature, pursue his goal. He too was in search of a quietus, of peace. So, his old self must somehow be canceled, put away for good. It must not rise up like a specter from the tomb to claim him at some future point, dragging him down into the sepulchre of the past. And if he failed, then he failed, but one did not contemplate what lay beyond failure while one was still trying to succeed. After all, Jay Gatsby, the highest bouncer of them all, failed too in the end, but lived out, before he crashed, that brilliant, brittle, gold-hatted, exemplary American life.
He awoke in his bed—fully dressed, again, with strong drink on his breath—without knowing how or when he’d reached it. With consciousness came fear of himself. Another night unaccounted for. Another blank snowstorm in the videotape. But as before there was no blood on his hands or clothes, no weapon on his person, not so much as a concrete lump. He lurched upright, grabbed the zapper and found the tail end of the local news on TV. Nothing about a Concrete Killer or a Panama Hat Man or a privileged beauty done to death. No breaking of a living doll. He fell back across the bed, breathing hard and fast. Then, kicking off his street shoes, he pulled the covers over his aching head.
He recognized this funk. Long ago in a Cambridge hostel he had been unable to rise and face his new undergraduate existence. Now as then, panic and demons rushed in at him from every side. He was vulnerable to demons. He heard their bat-wings flapping by his ears, felt their goblin fingers twining around his ankles to pull him down to that hell in which he didn’t believe but which kept cropping up in his language, in his emotions, in the part of him that was not his to control. That growing part of him that was running wild, out of his feeble hands … where was Krysztof Waterford-Wajda when he needed him? Come on, Dubdub, knock at the door and pull me away from the edge of the yawning Pit.—But Dubdub didn’t return from beyond Heaven’s door to knock.
This wasn’t it, Solanka told himself feverishly. This wasn’t the story that had brought him all this way! Not this Jekyll and Hyde melodrama, a saga of a lower order entirely. There was no Gothic strain in the architecture of his life, no mad scientist’s laboratory, no bubbling retorts, no gulped potion of demonic metamorphosis. Yet the fear, the funk, would not leave him. He drew the covers down more tightly over his head. He could smell the street on his clothes. There was no evidence linking him to any crime. Nor was he under investigation for anything at all. How many men, in an average Manhattan summer, wore Panama hats? Hundreds, at least? Why, then, was he tormenting himself so? Because if the knife was possible, so was this. And then the circumstances: three failures of nocturnal memory, three dead women. This was the conjunction that required his silence as absolutely as the knife in the dark but which he could not hide from himself. Also that stream of obscenities unknowingly spoken in Café Mozart. Not enough for any court to convict, but he was his own judge, and the jury was out.
Blearily, he dialed a number and waited through the interminable mechanized-voice preliminaries to receive his voice mail. You have—one!—new message.—The following—one!—new message—has NOT been heard.—First message. Then came Eleanor’s voice, with which long ago he fell in love. “Malik, you say you want to forget yourself. I say you have already forgotten yourself. You say you don’t want to be ruled by your anger. I say your anger has never ruled you more. I remember you though you have forgotten me. I remember you before that doll screwed up our lives: you used to be interested in everything. I loved that. I remember your gaiety, your terrible singing, your funny voices. You taught me to love cricket; now I want Asmaan to love it too. I remember your longing to know, of human beings, the best that we are capable of, but also to look without illusions at the worst. I remember your love of life, of our son, and of me. You abandoned us, but we have not abandoned you. Come home, darling. Please come home.” Naked, courageous, heart-tearing stuff. But here was another gap. When had he spoken to Eleanor of anger and forgetting? Perhaps he had come home drunk and wanted to explain himself. Maybe he had left her a message, to which this was her answer. And she, as ever, had heard much more than he had said. Had heard, in short, his fear.
He made himself get up, stripped and showered. He was brewing coffee in the kitchen when he realized that the apartment was empty. Yet it was one of Wislawa’s days. Why wasn’t she here? Solanka dialed her number. “Yes?” It was her voice all right. “Wislawa?” he demanded. “Professor Solanka. Aren’t you supposed to be working today?” There was a long pause. “Professor?” said Wislawa’s voice, sounding timid and small. “You do not remember?” He felt his body temperature dropping rapidly. “What? Remember what?” Now Wislawa’s voice grew tearful. “Professor, you fire me. You fire me, for what? For nothing. Of course you remember. And the words. Such words from an educated man, I never heard. After this, it’s over for me. Even now that you call to ask me, I cannot return.” Somebody spoke behind her, another woman’s voice, and Wislawa rallied, to add with considerable determination, “However, cost of my work is included in your contract. Since you fire me unjustly I will continue to receive this. I have spoken to landlord and they are agree. I think they will speak also to you. You know, I work for Mrs. Jay long time.” Malik Solanka put the receiver down without another word.
You’re fired. As if in a movie. The red-skirted cardinal descends the golden steps to deliver the pope’s adieu. The driver, a woman, waits in her little car, and when the cruel messenger leans into her window, he wears Solanka’s face.
The
city was being sprayed with the pesticide Anvil. Several birds, mostly from the Staten Island wetlands, had died of West Nile virus, and the mayor was taking no chances. Everyone was on high mosquito alert. Stay indoors at dusk! Wear long sleeves! During spraying, close all windows and turn all air-conditioning units off! Such interventionist radicalism, although not a single human being had contracted the illness since the beginning of the new millennium. (Later, a few cases were reported; but no deaths.) The timorousness of Americans in the face of the unknown, their overcompensation, had always made Europeans laugh. “A car backfires in Paris,” Eleanor Solanka—even Eleanor, the least bitchy of human beings—liked to say, “and the next day a million Americans cancel their holidays.”