Fury (26 page)

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,
you
got 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.