Fury (10 page)

Mila was looking worried. “Professor? Are you okay?” He nodded rapidly, yes, yes. And briefly said: “Come inside, please. I want to tell you a story.”

PART ONE

8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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