Fury (9 page)

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.”

Solanka had forgotten about the spraying, had walked for hours through the falling invisible poison. For a moment he considered blaming the pesticide for his memory loss. Asthmatics were having convulsions, lobsters were said to be dying by the thousand, environmentalists were squawking; why shouldn’t he? But his natural fairness prevented him from going down this route. The source of his problems was likely to be of existential rather than chemical origin.

If
you heard it, good Wislawa, then it must be so. But you see, I was not aware ...
Aspects of his behavior had been escaping from his control. If he were to seek professional help, no doubt a breakdown of some sort would be diagnosed. (If he were Bronislawa Rhinehart, he would gladly take that diagnosis home with him and then start looking for somebody to sue.) It struck him with great force that a breakdown of some sort was precisely what he had been inviting all along. All those rhapsodies about wishing to be unmade! So now that certain chronological segments of himself had ceased to be in touch with others-now that he had literally disintegrated in time-why was he so shocked? Be careful what you wish for, Malik. Remember W. W. Jacobs. The story of the monkey’s paw.

He had come to New York as the Land Surveyor came to the Castle: in ambivalence, in extremis, and in unrealistic hope. He had found his billet, a more comfortable one than the poor Surveyor’s, and ever since then had been roaming the streets, looking for a way in, telling himself that the great World-City could heal him, a city child, if he could only find the gateway to its magic, invisible, hybrid heart. This mystical proposition had clearly altered the continuum around him. Things appeared to proceed by logic, according to the laws of psychological verisimilitude and the deep inner coherences of metropolitan life, but in fact all was mystery. But perhaps his was not the only identity to be coming apart at the seams. Behind the £made of this age of gold, this time of plenty, the contradictions and impoverishment of the Western human individual, or let’s say the human self in America, were deepening and widening. Perhaps that wider disintegration was also to be made visible in this city of fiery, jeweled garments and secret ash, in this time of public hedonism and private fear.

A change of direction was required. The story you finished was perhaps never the one you began. Yes! He would take charge of his life anew, binding his breaking selves together. Those changes in himself that he sought, he himself would initiate and make them. No more of this miasmic, absent drift. How had he ever persuaded himself that this money-mad burg would rescue him all by itself, this Gotham in which Jokers and Penguins were running riot with no Batman (or even Robin) to frustrate their schemes, this Metropolis built of Kryptonite in which no Superman dared set foot, where wealth was mistaken for riches and the joy of possession for happiness, where people lived such polished lives that the great rough truths of raw existence had been rubbed and buffed away, and in which human souls had wandered so separately for so long that they barely remembered how to touch; this city whose fabled electricity powered the electric fences that were being erected between men and men, and men and women, too? Rome did not fall because her armies weakened but because Romans forgot what being a Roman meant. Might this new Rome actually be more provincial than its provinces; might these new Romans have forgotten what and how to value, or had they never known? Were all empires so undeserving, or was this one particularly crass? Was nobody in all this bustling endeavor and material plenitude engaged, any longer, on the deep quarry-work of the mind and heart? O Dream-America, was civilization’s quest to end in obesity and trivia, at Roy Rogers and Planet Hollywood, in USA Today and on E!; or in million-dollar-game-show greed or fly-on-the-wall voyeurism; or in the eternal confessional booth of Ricki and Oprah and Jerry, whose guests murdered each other after the show; or in a spurt of gross-out dumb-and-dumber comedies designed for young people who sat in darkness howling their ignorance at the silver screen; or even at the unattainable tables of Jean-Georges Uongerichten and Alain Ducasse? What of the search for the hidden keys that unlock the doors of exaltation? Who demolished the City on the Hill and put in its place a row of electric chairs, those dealers in death’s democracy, where everyone, the innocent, the mentally deficient, the guilty, could come to die side by side? Who paved Paradise and put up a parking lot? Who settled for George W. Gush’s boredom and Al Bore’s gush? Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then asked why children were getting shot? What, America, of the Grail? O ye Yankee Galahads, ye Hoosier Lancelots, O Parsifals of the stockyards, what of the Table Round? He felt a flood bursting in him and did not hold it back. Yes, it had seduced him, America; yes, its brilliance aroused him, and its vast potency too, and he was compromised by this seduction. What he opposed in it he must also attack in himself. It made him want what it promised and eternally withheld. Everyone was an American now, or at least Americanized: Indians, Iranians, Uzbeks, Japanese, Lilliputians, all. America was the world’s playing field, its rule book, umpire, and ball. Even anti-Americanism was Americanism in disguise, conceding, as it did, that America was the only game in town and the matter of America the only business at hand; and so, like everyone, Malik Solanka now walked its high corridors cap in hand, a supplicant at its feast; but that did not mean he could not look it in the eye. Arthur had fallen, Excalibur was lost, and dark Mordred was king. Beside him on the throne of Camelot sat the queen, his sister, the witch Morgan le Fay.

Professor Malik Solanka prided himself on being a practical man. Deft with his hands, he could thread a needle, mend his own clothes, iron a dress shirt. For a time, when he first began to make his philosophy dolls, he had apprenticed himself to a Cambridge tailor and learned to cut the clothes his pint-sized thinkers would wear; also the street-fashion knockoffs he created for Little Brain. Wislawa or no, he knew how to keep his living quarters clean. Henceforth he would apply the same principles of good housekeeping to his inner life as well.

He set off along Seventieth Street with the Chinese cleaners’ purple laundry bag slung over his right shoulder. Turning onto Columbus, he overheard the following soliloquy. “You remember my ex-wife, Erin. Tess’s mom. Yeah, the actress; these days she does mainly commercials. So guess what? We’re seeing each other again. Pretty weird, huh. After two years of thinking she was the enemy, and five more of better but still tricky relations! I started inviting her to come over sometimes with Tess. Tess likes her mom to be around, to tell the truth. And then one night. Yeah, it was one of those Then One Night things. There was a point at which I went over and sat down next to her on the settee instead of staying in my usual chair way over across the other side of the room. You know, my desire for her never went away, it just got buried under a heap of other stuff, a whole heap of anger, to tell the truth, and so now it all just poured out, boom! An ocean of it. To tell the truth the seven years had backed up a whole load of it, desire, that is, and maybe the anger made it even more intense, so it was amazingly bigger than it used to be. But so here’s the thing. I walk over to the settee and what happens, happens, and afterwards she says, ‘You know, when you came over to me, I didn’t know if you were going to hit me or kiss me.’ I guess I didn’t know either until I reached the settee. To tell the truth.”

All this spoken into the air at high volume by a gangling, frizz-haired Art Garfunkel-y man in his forties, out walking a brindled dog. It was a moment before Solanka saw the cell-phone headset through the halo of ginger hair. These days we all come across like rummies or crackpots, Solanka thought, confiding our secrets to the wind as we stroll along. Here was a striking example of the disintegrated contemporary reality that was preoccupying him. Dog-walking Art, existing for the moment only in the Telephone Continuum-lingering in the sound of silence-was quite unaware that in the alternative, or Seventieth Street Continuum, he was revealing his deepest intimacies to strangers. This about New York Professor Solanka liked a lot-this sense of being crowded out by other people’s stories, of walking like a phantom through a city that was in the middle of a story which didn’t need him as a character. And the man’s ambivalence to his wife, Solanka thought: for wife, read America. And maybe I’m still walking over to the settee.

The day’s newspapers brought unexpected comfort. He must have turned on the TV too late to hear the day’s main developments in the Sky-Ren-Bindy murder investigation. Now with lifting heart he read that the team of detectives-three precincts had joined forces on this inquiry-had hauled the three beaux in for questioning. They had later been released, and no charges had been filed for the moment, but the detectives’ demeanor had been grave and the young men had been warned not to head off in a hurry for any Riviera yachts or Southeast Asian beaches. Unnamed sources close to the investigation said that the “Mr. Panama Hat” theory was being heavily discounted, which clearly implied that the suspect boyfriends were thought to have cooked up the mysterious stalker between them. Stash, Horse, and Club looked, in the photos, like three very scared young men. Press comment, wasting no time, instantly linked the unsolved triple murder to the Nicole Brown

Simpson killing and the death of little JonBenet Ramsey. “In such cases,” one editorial concluded, “it’s wisest to keep the search pretty close to home.”

“Can I talk to you?” When he got back to the apartment, giddy with relief, Mila was waiting for him on the stoop, sans entourage, but holding in her arms a half-life size Little Brain doll. The transformation in her manner was startling. Gone was the street-goddess swagger, the queen-of-the-world attitude. This was a shy, gawky young woman with stars in her green eyes. “What you said at the movies. Are you, it has to be you, right? You’re
that
Professor Solanka? ‘Little Brain created by Prof Malik Solanka.’ You brought her into being, you gave her life. Oh, wow. I even have all the videotapes of
Adventures,
and for my twenty-first birthday my dad went to a dealer and bought me the first-draft script of the Galileo episode, you know, before they made you cut all the blasphemy out?, that’s like my most treasured possession. Okay, please say I’m right, because otherwise I’m making such a fool of myself my cool is totally blown forever. Well, it’s pretty blown anyway, you have no idea what Eddie and the guys thought of me coming over here with a doll, for Chrissake.” Solanka’s natural defenses, already lowered on account of his lightened heart, were overwhelmed by such extreme passion. “Yes,” he conceded. “Yes, that’s me.” She screamed at the top of her voice, leaping high in the air about three inches away from his face. “No way!” she then hooted, unable to stop hopping up and down. “Oh my God. I have to tell you, Professor: you totally
rock.
And your L.B., this little lady right here, has been my like total
obsession
for most of the last ten
years. I
watch every move she makes. And as you spotted, she’s only the
basis
and
inspiration
for my whole current
personal style. -”
She stuck a hand out. “Mils. Mila Milo. Don’t laugh. It was Milosevic originally, but my dad wanted something everyone could say. I mean, this is America, right? Make it easy. Mee-la My-lo.” Stretching the vowels out exaggeratedly, she pulled a face, then grinned. “Sounds like, I don’t know,
farm fertilizer
Or maybe
cereal.”

He felt the old anger surge in him as she spoke, the huge, unassuaged Little Brain anger that had remained unexpressed, inexpressible, all these years. This was the anger that had led directly to the episode of the knife.... He made an immense effort and forced it down. This was the first day of his new phase. Today there would be no red mist, no obscene tirade, no fury-induced memory blackout. Today he would face the demon and wrestle it to the mat. Breathe, he told himself. Breathe.