13
As a young man in the early 1960s, Malik Solanka had devoured the science fiction novels of what was later recognized as the form’s golden age. In flight from his own life’s ugly reality, he found in the fantastic its parables and allegories, but also its flights of pure invention, its loopy, spiraling conceits-a ceaselessly metamorphosing alternative world in which he felt instinctively at home. He subscribed to the legendary magazines, Amazing and F&SF bought as many of the yellow-jacketed Victor Gollancz SF series as he could afford, and all but memorized the books of Ray Bradbury, Zenna Henderson, A. E. van Vogt, Clifford D. Simak, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Stanislaw Lem, James Blish, Philip K. Dick, and L. Sprague de Camp. Goldenage science fiction and science fantasy were, in Solanka’s view, the best popular vehicle ever devised for the novel of ideas and of metaphysics. At twenty, his favorite work of fiction was a story called “The Nine Billion Names of God,” in which a Tibetan monastery set up to count the names of the Almighty-believing this to be the only reason for the existence of the universe-buys a top-of-the-line computer to speed up the process. Hard-bitten industry mavens go to the monastery to help the monks get the great machine up and running. They find the whole idea of listing the names pretty laughable, and worry about how the monks might react when the job’s done and the universe goes on going on; so once they’ve done their work, they sneak quietly away. Later, on a plane home, they calculate that the computer must have finished its work. They look out of the window at the night sky, where-Solanka had never forgotten the last line-”one by one, very quietly, the stars were going out.”
To such a reader-and admirer, in the cinema, of the highbrow sci-fi of Fahrenheit 451 and Solaris-George Lucas was a kind of Antichrist and the Spielberg of Close Encounters was a kid playing in the grown-ups’ sandbox, while the Terminator films, and above all the mighty Blade Runner, were carriers of the sacred flame. And now it was his own turn. In those unreliable summer days, Professor Malik Solanka would work on the world of the Puppet Kings-the dolls as well as their stories-like a man possessed. The story of the mad scientist Akasz Kronos and his beautiful lover, Zameen, filled his mind. New York faded into the background; or, rather, everything that happened to him in the city-every random encounter, every newspaper he opened, every thought, every feeling, every dream-fed his imagination, as though prefabricated to fit into the structure he had already devised. Real life had started obeying the dictates of fiction, providing precisely the raw material he needed to transmute through the alchemy of his reborn art.
Akasz he got from aakaash, Hindi for “sky.” Sky as in Asmaan (Urdu), as in poor Sky Schuyler, as in the great sky gods: Ouranos-Varuna, Brahma, Yahweh, Manitou. And Kronos was the Greek, the child-devourer, Time. Zameen was earth, the heavens’ opposite, which embraces the sky at the horizon. Akasz he had seen clearly from the first, picturing his whole life’s arc. Zameen, though, had surprised him. In this tale of a drowning world he hadn’t expected an earth goddess - even one modeled on Neela Mahendra - to take a central role. Yet here she undeniably was, and by showing up she had valuably thickened the plot. Her presence seemed to have been prefigured, even though he hadn’t planned for it at all. Neela/Zameen of Rijk/Goddess of Victory: three versions of the same woman filled his thoughts, and he realized that he’d finally found the successor to the famous creation of his youth. “Hello to Neela,” he told himself, “and so, at last, farewell to Little Brain.”
Which was also to say, farewell to his afternoons with Mila Milo. Mila had felt the change in him at once, intuiting it when she saw him leave for his tryst with Neela on the steps of the Met. She knew what I wanted before I had even dared admit it to myself, Solanka acknowledged. It was probably finished between us there and then. Even if there had been no miracle, even if Neela hadn’t so unpredictably chosen me, Mila had seen enough. She has real beauty of her own, and pride, and isn’t about to play second fiddle to anyone. He returned to West Seventieth Street after an endlessly surprising night spent with Neela in a hotel room across the park-a night whose biggest surprise was that it was happening at all-and found Mila wrapped ostentatiously around beautiful, stupid Eddie Ford on the stoop next door; Eddie, one of nature’s bodyguards, glowing with the joy of having regained guardianship over the only body he gave a damn about. The look Eddie gave Solanka over Mila’s shoulder was impressively articulate. It said, Buddy, you don’t have access privileges at this address no more; between you and this lady there’s now a red velvet rope and your accreditation is so canceled, you shouldn’t even think about stepping in this direction, unless of course you’d like me to clean your teeth, using your spinal column as a brush.
The next afternoon, however, she was at his door. “Take me out somewhere great and expensive. I need to dress up and eat industrial quantities of food.” Eating was Mila’s normal reaction to misery, drinking her response to anger. Sad was probably better than mad, Solanka mused ungenerously. Easier for him, anyway. To make up for this selfish thought, he called one of the talked-about new places o£ the moment, a Cuban-themed bar-restaurant in Chelsea named Gio in honor of Dona Gioconda, an elderly diva whose star was shining brightly that Buena Vista summer and in whose languid smoke-trail of a voice all of old Havana came back to swaggering, swaying, seducing, smooching life. Solanka got a table so easily that he commented on the fact to the woman taking the booking. “City’s a ghost town righ’ now,” she agreed distantly. “It’s, like, Loserville. See jou at nine P.M.”
“You left me and I’m dying,” Gioconda sang on the restaurant’s sound system as Solanka and Mila came in, “but after three days I will rise again. Don’t go to my funeral, sucker, I’ll be out dancing with some better man. Resurrection, resurrection, and baby I’ll make sure you know when.” Mila translated the words for Solanka. “That’s perfect,” she added. Are you listening, Malik? Because if I could request a track, this would be it. As they say on the radio, the message is in the words. ‘Oh, you thought that you could break me, and it’s true that I’m in pieces now, but after three days they will wake me, from a distance you will see me take my bow. Resurrection, resurrection, gettin’ a new life any day now.’”
At the bar she downed a mojito fast and ordered another one. Solanka saw that he was in for a rougher ride than anticipated. At the bottom of the second glass she moved to the table, ordered all the most highly spiced dishes on the menu, and let him have it. “You’re a lucky man,” she told him, plunging into the complimentary guacamole, “because evidently you’re an optimist. You have to be, because it’s so easy for you to throw things away. Your child, your wife, me, whatever. Only a wild optimist, a stupid brain-dead Pollyanna or Pangloss, throws away what’s most precious, what’s so rare and satisfies his deepest need, which you know and I know you can’t even name or look at without the shutters closed and the lights out, you have to put a cushion on your lap to hide it until somebody comes along who’s smart enough to know what to do, somebody whose own unspeakable need just happens to make a perfect fit with your own. And now, now when we’ve got there, when the defenses are down and the pretense is over and were really in that room that we never allowed ourselves to believe could exist for either of us, the invisible room of our greatest fear-right at the very moment when we discover there’s no need to be afraid in that room, we can have whatever we want for as long as we want it, and maybe when we’ve had our fill we’ll wake up and notice that we’re real living people, we’re not the puppets of our desires but just this woman, this man, and then we can stop the games, open up the shutters, turn out the lights, and step out into the city street hand in hand ... this is when you choose to pick up some whore in the park and for Chrissake get a fucking room. An optimist is a man who gives up an impossible pleasure because he’s sure he’ll find it again just around the bend. An optimist thinks his dick talks better sense than, oh, never mind. I was going to say, than his girl, meaning, stupidly, me. Me, by the way, I’m a pessimist. My view is that not only does lightning not strike twice, it usually doesn’t strike once. So that was it for me, what happened between us, that was really it, and you, you just, damn, damn. I could have stayed with you, did you ever work that out? Oh, not for long, just thirty or forty years, more than you’ve got, probably. Instead, I’ll marry Eddie. You know what they say: charity begins at home.”
Breathing heavily, she paused and applied herself to the carnival of food that stood before her. Solanka waited; more would soon enough be on the way. He was thinking, You can’t marry him, you mustn’t, but such advice was no longer his to give. “You’re telling yourself what we did was wrong,” she said. “I know you. You’re using guilt to set yourself free. So now you think you can walk away from me and tell yourself it’s the moral thing to do. But what we did wasn’t wrong,” and here her eyes filled with tears. “Not wrong at all. We were just comforting each other for our terrible feelings of loss. The doll thing was just a way of getting there. What, you really think I fucked my father, you imagine I wriggled my ass on his lap and pushed my nail into his nipple and licked his poor sweet throat? That’s what you’re telling yourself to give yourself an out, or was that also the in? Was that the turn-on, to be my father’s ghost? Professor, you’re the one who’s sick. I’m telling you again. What we did wasn’t wrong. It was play. Serious play, dangerous play, maybe, but play.
I thought you understood that. I thought you might just be that impossible creature, a sexually wise man who could give me a safe place, a place to be free and to set you free, too, a place where we could release all the built-up poison and anger and hurt, just let it go and be free of it, but it turns out, Professor, you’re just another fool. You were on Howard Stern today, by the way.”
That was a left turn he hadn’t expected, a fast swerve against the oncoming emotional traffic. Perry Pincus, he realized with a sudden heaviness. “She made it, then. What did she say?” “Oh,” said Mila, speaking through lamb smothered in salsa verde, “she said a mouthful.” Mila had an excellent memory and could often replay whole conversations almost verbatim. Her Perry Pincus, which she now gave with as much wounding gusto as a young Bernhardt, a Stockard Charming of the near-at-hand, was therefore, Solanka conceded with sinking heart, likely to be extremely reliable as far as accuracy was concerned. “Sometimes these so-called great male minds are textbook cases of pathetically arrested development,” Perry had told Howard and his huge audience. “Take the case of this guy Malik Solanka, not a major mind, gave up philosophy and went into television, and I should say right out that he was one of those I never, you know. Not on my resume. What was his problem, right? Well. Let me tell you that this Solanka’s whole room, and remember were talking here about a fellow o£ King’s College, Cambridge, England, was crawling with dolls, and I do mean dolls. Once I noticed that, I couldn’t leave fast enough. God forbid he should mistake me for a dolly and poke me in the stomach till I said Ma-ma. I was like, excuse me, but I never even liked dolls when I was little, and I’m a girl? What? No, no. Gay I’m comfortable with. Absolutely. I’m from California, Howard. Sure. This wasn’t gay. This was ... goo-goo. It was-what can I tell you?-icky. For a gag, I still send the guy stuffed animals at Christmas. The Coca-Cola polar bear. You got it. He never acknowledges receipt, but guess what? He never sent one back, either. Men. When you know their secrets, it’s hard not to laugh.”
“I wondered if I should tell you,” Mila confided, “but then I thought, screw him, the gloves are off.” Dofia Gin was still singing, but the screaming of the Furies momentarily drowned her voice. The hungry goddesses were beating around both their heads, feeding on their rage. The Pincus interview roared in him, and Mila’s expression changed. “Shh,” she said. “Okay, I’m sorry, but will you please stop making that noise? We’ll get thrown out of here and I haven’t even had dessert yet.” It was plain that the roar had escaped into the room. People were looking. The owner-manager, a Raul Julia look-alike, was coming across the room. A glass broke in Malik Solanka’s hand. There was a messy, mingled flow of wine and blood. It became necessary to leave. Bandages were produced, a doctor’s assistance refused, the check was hurriedly brought forward and settled. Outside, it had begun to rain. Mila’s fury abated, trumped by his own. “About the woman on Howard?” she said in the eventual taxi uptown. “She came across as basically an aging nympho playing kiss and tell. You’re an older person, you should know how life is. Loose ends dangling everywhere, and once in a while they snap back and lash you across the face. Let her go. She’s nothing to you, hardly ever was, and with the amount of bad karma she’s storing up, I don’t like her chances. Enough public screaming! Jesus. Sometimes you’re scary. Mostly I think you wouldn’t hurt a fly and then suddenly you’re this Godzilla creature from the black lagoon who looks like he could rip the throat off a Tyrannosaurus Rex. You’ve got to bring that thing under control, Malik. Wherever it’s coming from, you need to send it away.”
“Islam will cleanse your soul of dirty anger,” the taxi driver interrupted, “and reveal to you the holy wrath that moves mountains.” Then he added, switching languages as another car came unacceptably close to his taxicab, “Hey! American man! You are a godless homosexual rapist of your grandmother’s pet goat.” Solanka began to laugh, the dreadful mirthless laughter of release: hard, painful, racking sobs. “Hello again, Beloved Ali,” he coughed. “Good to see you in such top form.”
One week later, Mila somewhat surprisingly called and invited him over .to talk about something else.” Her manner was friendly, businesslike, excited. She had bounced back fast, Solanka marveled, accepting her invitation. It was his first visit to Mila’s tiny fourth-floor walk-up, which, he thought, was trying hard to be an all-American apartment but failing badly: posters of Latrell Sprewell and Serena Williams hung uncomfortably on either side of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves groaning with volumes of Serbian and Eastern European literature in the original, and in French and English translation - Kic, Andris, Pavic, some of the convention-busting Klokotrizans, and, from the classical period, Obradovic and Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic; also Klima, Kadare, Nadas, Konrad, Herbert. There was no picture of her father on display; Solanka noted the significant omission. A framed monochrome photograph of a young woman in a belted floral-print frock smiled broadly at Solanka. Mila’s mother, looking like Milas younger sister. “Look how happy she is,” Mila said. “That was the last summer before she knew she was sick. I’m now the same exact age she was when she passed, so that’s one nightmare less to worry about. I made it across that hurdle. For years I didn’t think I would.” She wanted to belong to this city, this country at this time, but old European demons were screeching in her ears. In one respect, however, Mila was unreservedly of her American generation. The computer workstation was the room’s focal point: the Mac PowerBook, the older desktop Macintosh pushed to the back of the work surface, the scanner, the CD burner, the plug-in audio system, the music sequencer, the backup Zip drive, the manuals, the shelves of CDROMs, DVDs, and much other stuff, which Solanka couldn’t easily identify. Even the bed felt like an afterthought. Certainly he would never know its pleasures. She had brought him up here, he understood, to put all that behind them. It was another example of her system of inverted signs. Her dead father was the most important person in her life; therefore, no picture of Dad was visible. Solanka was now to be no more than the professor next door; ergo, invite him into your bedroom for a cup of coffee.
She had clearly prepared a speech and was in a state of high readiness, buzzing with it. Once he had been given his mug of coffee, the obviously planned olive branch was offered. “Because I’m a superior type of human being,” Mila said, with a trace of the old humor, “because I can rise above personal tragedy and function on a higher plane, and also because I really think you’re great at what you do, I talked to the guys about your new project. The cool science fiction figures you’ve been coming up with: the mad cyberneticist, the drowning planet idea, the cyborgs versus the lotus-eaters from the other side of the world, the fight to the death between the counterfeit and the real. We’d like to come and talk to you about building a site. There’s a whole presentation we have, you can get an idea of what’s possible. To tell you just one thing, they’ve developed a way of compressing video material that gives you close to DVD quality on-line, and within one generation it’ll be at least a match. It’s ahead of anything you’ll get anywhere else. You have no comprehension of the speed of things now, every year is the Stone Age to the year that follows. Just the creative potential, what can be done with an idea now. The best sites are inexhaustible, people come back and back, it’s like a world you’re giving them to belong to. Sure, you have to get the sales and delivery mechanism right, it has to be easy to buy into what you’re offering, and we have a cool pitch on that also. But the point is to make it easy for you. You already have the back-story and the characters. Which we love. Then to keep control of the concept, you’ll need to put together a master handbook, character-development parameters, storyline do’s and don’ts, the laws of your imagined universe. Inside that framework, there are so many brilliant kids who would just love to create all kinds of, you can’t even say it, they’re inventing whole new media every day. If it works, of course, the old media will come running, books, records, TV, movies, musicals, who knows.
“I love these guys. They’re so hungry, they can take an idea and run with it into, like, the fifth dimension, and all you have to do is let them make it happen for you, you’re the absolute monarch, nothing happens if you don’t want it to; you just sit there and go yes, no, yes, yes, no whoa, whoa.” She made calming, pressing gestures with both hands. “Hear me out. Will you for Chrissake hear me out, you owe me that much. Malik, I know how unhappy you were-are-about the whole Little Brain saga. This is me, remember? Malik, I know that. That’s what I’m saying to you here. This time you don’t lose control. This time you have a better vehicle than even existed when you came up with Little Brain, and you drive it, totally. This is your chance to get right what went wrong before, and if it works, let’s not be coy here, the financial upside is very, very strong. We all think this could be huge if it’s done right. On Little Brain, by the way, I don’t one hundred percent agree with your position, because as you know I think she’s great, and things are changing, the whole concept of ownership as far as ideas is so different now, it’s so much more cooperative. You have to be a little more flexible, just a little bit more, okay? Let other people into your magic circle now and then. You’re still the magician, but let everyone else play with the wands sometimes. Little Brain? Let her fly, Malik, let her be what she is. She’s all grown-up now. Let her go. You can still love her. She’s still your child.”
She was on her feet, her fingers flying at the laptop, soliciting its aid. Perspiration beaded her lip. The seventh veil falls away, Solanka thought. Fully clothed as Mila was in her daytime sportswear, she stood naked before him at last. Furia. This was the self she had never fully shown, Mila as Fury, the world-swallower, the self as pure transformative energy. In this incarnation she was simultaneously terrifying and wonderful. He could never resist a woman when she flowed at him this way, letting her riverine abundance overwhelm him. This is what he looked for in women: to be overpowered, outmatched. This Gangetic, Mississippian inexorability, whose dwindling, he sadly knew, was what had gone wrong in his marriage. Overwhelming doesn’t last for ever. No matter how astonishing the initial contact, in the end the beloved astonishes us less. She merely whelms and, even further down the road, underwhelms. But to give up on his need for excess, for the immense thing, the thing that made him feel like a surfer in the snow, riding the crest of an avalanche’s leading edge! To say good-bye to that need would also be to accept that he was, in the matter of desire, agreeing to be dead. And when the living agree with themselves to be dead, the dark fury begins. The dark fury of life, refusing to die before its allotted time.
He reached out for Mila. She knocked his arm aside. Her eyes were shining: she had recovered from him already and was resurrected as a queen. “This is what we can be to each other now, Malik. Take it or leave it. If you say no, I don’t want to talk to you ever again. But if you come aboard, we’ll work our butts off for you and there’ll be no hard feelings from me. This new world is my life, Malik, it’s the thing of my time, growing as I grow, learning as I learn, becoming as I become. It’s where I feel most alive. There, inside the electricity. I told you: you need to learn how to play. Serious play, that’s my thing. That’s the heart of what’s happening, and I know how to do it, and if you can give me the material I need to work with, well, baby, for me that’s better than what was waiting under the cushion on your lap. Nice as that was, don’t get me wrong. Nice as that undoubtedly was. Okay, I’m done. Don’t answer. Go home. Think about it. Let us make the full presentation. It’s a big decision. Take it slow. Make it when you’re ready. But make it soon.”
The computer screen burst into life. Images raced toward him like bazaar traders. This was technology as hustler, peddling its wares, Solanka thought; or, as if in a darkened nightclub, gyrating for him. Laptop as lapdancer. The auxiliary sound system poured high-definition noise over him like golden rain. “I don’t need to think about it,” he told her. “Let’s do it. Let’s go.”