Fury (14 page)

Everywhere you looked, thought Professor Malik Solanka, the fury was in the air. Everywhere you listened you heard the beating of the dark goddesses’ wings. Tisiphone, Alecto, Megaera: the ancient Greeks were so afraid of these, their most ferocious deities, that they didn’t even dare to speak their real name. To use that name,
Erinnyes,
Furies, might very well be to call down upon yourself those ladies’ lethal wrath. Therefore, and with deep irony, they called the enraged trinity “the good-tempered ones”:
Eumenides.
The euphemistic name did not, alas, result in much of an improvement in the goddesses’ permanent bad mood.

At first he tried to resist thinking of Mila as Little Brain come alive: and not Little Brain the hollow media re-creation at that, not Little Brain the traitress, the lobotomized baby doll of
Brain Street
and beyond, but her forgotten original, the lost L.B. of his first imagining, the star of
Adventures with Little Brain.
At first he told himself it would be wrong to do this to Mila, to dollify her thus, but then-he argued back against himself-had she not done it to herself, had she not by her own admission made early-period Little Brain her model and inspiration? Was she not quite plainly presenting herself to him in the role of the True One he had lost? She was, he now knew, a very bright young woman indeed; she must have foreseen how her performance would be received. Yes! Deliberately, to save him, she was offering him that mystery which she had somehow divined-would answer his deepest, though never articulated, need. Shyly, then, Solanka began to allow himself to see her as his creation, given life by some unlooked-for miracle and caring for him, now, as might the daughter he’d never had. Then a slip of the tongue let out his secret, but Mila seemed not at all put out. Instead she smiled a private little smile-a smile that, Solanka was obliged to concede, was full of a strange erotic pleasure, in which there was something of the patient angler’s satisfaction at the bait being finally taken, and something, too, of the prompter’s hidden joy when a much repeated cue is picked up at the last-and, instead of correcting him, she replied as if he had used her right name and not the doll’s. Malik Solanka flushed hotly, overcome by an almost incestuous shame, and stammeringly tried to apologize; whereupon she came up close, until her breasts moved against his shirt and he could feel the breath from her lips brushing against his, and murmured, “Professor, call me whatever you like. If it makes you feel good, please know that it’s good with me.” So they sank daily deeper into fantasy. Alone in his apartment in the rainy afternoons of that ruined summer, they played out their little father-and-daughter game. Mila Milo began quite deliberately to be the doll for him, to dress more and more precisely in the doll’s original sartorial image and to act out for a much-aroused Solanka a series of scenarios

derived from the early shows. He might play the part of Machiavelli, Marx, or, most often, Galileo, while she would be, oh, exactly what he wanted her to be; would sit by his chair and press his feet while he delivered himself of the wisdom of the great sages of the world; and after a little time at his feet, she might move up to his aching lap, though they would make sure, without a word being said, that a plump cushion was always placed between her body and his, so that if he, who had sworn to lie with no woman, responded to her presence there as might another, less forsworn man, then she need never know it, they need never mention it, and he need never be obliged to admit the occasional spilling weakness of his body. Like Gandhi performing his
brabmacbarya
“experiments with truth,” when the wives of his friends lay with him at night to enable him to test the mastery of mind over limb, he preserved the outward form of high propriety; and so did she, so did she.

10

Asmaan twisted in him like a knife: Asmaan in the morning, proud of performing his natural functions to a high standard before an applauding-if unashamedly biased-audience of two. Asmaan in his daytime incarnations as motorbike rider, tent dweller, sandbox emperor, good eater, bad eater, singing star, star having tantrums, fireman, spaceman, Batman. Asmaan after dinner, in his one permitted video hour, watching endless reruns of Disney movies.
Robin Hood
was popular, with its absurd “Notting Ham,” which featured a singing C&W rooster, cheap rip-offs of Baloo and Kaa from
The Jungle Book,
unadulterated American accents all over Sherwood Forest, and the frequently uttered, if previously little known, Disney Olde Englishe cry of “Oode-lally!”
Toy Story,
however, was banned. “It’s got a start’ boy in it.”
Stary
was scary, and the boy was frightening because he treated his toys badly. This betrayal of love terrified Asmaan. He identified with the toys, not their owner. The toys were like the boy’s children, and his maltreatment of them was, in Asmaan’s three-year-old moral universe, a crime too hideous to contemplate. (As was death. In Asmaan’s revisionist reading of
Peter Pan,
Captain Hook escaped the crocodile every time.) And after video-Asmaan came evening-Asmaan, Asmaan in the bath suffering Eleanor to brush his teeth and announcing preemptively, “We’re not washing my hair today.” Asmaan, finally, going to sleep holding his father’s hand.

The boy had taken to telephoning Solanka without regard to the five-hour time difference. Eleanor had programmed the New York number into the Willow Road kitchen phone’s speed-dial system; all Asmaan had to do was push a single button. Hello, Daddy came his transatlantic voice (this first call had been at five A.M.): I had a nice time at the part, Daddy.
Park, Asmaan,
sleepy Solanka tried to teach his son.
Say park.
Part. Where are you, Daddy, are you at home? Are you not coming back? I should have put you in the car, Daddy, I should have taken you to the sings.
Swings. Say swings.
I should have taken you to the sa-wings, Daddy. Morgen pushed me higher and higher. Are you hinging me a peasant?
Say bringing, Asmaan. Say present. You can do it.
Are you ba-ringing me a pa-resent, Daddy? What’s inside it? Will I like it very much? Daddy, you not going away anymore. I won’t let you. I had an ice team in the part. Morgen bought it. It was very nice.
Ice
cream, Asmaan. Say ice cream.
Ice to-ream.

Eleanor came on to the line. “I’m sorry, he came downstairs and pushed the button all by himself. I’m afraid I didn’t wake up.” Oh, that’s okay, Solanka replied, and there followed a long silence. Then Eleanor unsteadily said, “Malik, I just don’t know what’s going on. I’m falling apart here. Can’t we, if you don’t want to come to London I could get on a, I could leave Asmaan with his grandma and we could sit down and try to work this thing, whatever it is, oh God I don’t even know what it is!, couldn’t we work it out? Or do you just hate me now, do I all of a sudden disgust you for some reason? Is there someone else? There must be, mustn’t there? Who is it? For God’s sake tell me, at least that would make sense, and then I could just be fucking furious with you instead of going slowly out of my mind.”

The truth was that her voice still lacked any trace of real wrath. Yet he had abandoned her without a word, Solanka thought: surely her grief would turn, sooner or later, to rage? Perhaps she would let her solicitor express it for her, unleashing against him the cold rage of the law. But he could not see her as a second Bronislawa Rhinehart. There was simply no vindictiveness in her nature. But for there to be so little anger: that was inhuman, even a little frightening. Or, alternatively, proof of what everybody was thinking and what Morgen and afterward Lin Franz had put into words: that she was the better person of the two of them, too good for him, and, once she had recovered from the pain, would be better off without him. None of which would be any comfort to her right now, or to the child to whose arms he did not dare-for the sake of the boy’s safety-to return.

For he knew he had not shaken the Furies off. A low, simmering, disconnected anger continued to seep and flow deep within him, threatening to rise up without warning in a mighty volcanic burst; as if it were its own master, as if he were merely the receptacle, the host, and it, the fury, were the sentient, controlling being. In spite of all the apparently necromantic strides of science these were prosaic times, in which everything was deemed capable of explication and comprehension; and throughout his life Professor Solanka, the Malik Solanka who had latterly become conscious of the inexplicable within himself, had been firmly of the prosaic party, the party of reason and science in its original and broadest meaning:
scientia,
knowledge. Yet even in these microscopically observed and interminably explicated days, what was bubbling inside him defied all explanations. There is that within us, he was being forced to concede, which is capricious and for which the language of explanation is inappropriate. We are made of shadow as well as light, of heat as well as dust. Naturalism, the philosophy of the visible, cannot capture us, for we exceed. We fear this in ourselves, our boundary-breaking, rule-disproving, shape-shifting, transgressive, trespassing shadow-self, the true ghost in our machine. Not in the afterlife, or in any improbably immortal sphere, but here on earth the spirit escapes the chains of what we know ourselves to be. It may rise in wrath, inflamed by its captivity, and lay reason’s world to waste.

What was true of him, he found himself thinking once again, might also be true to some degree of everyone. The whole world was burning on a shorter fuse. There was a knife twisting in every gut, a scourge for every back. We were all grievously provoked. Explosions were heard on every side. Human life was now lived in the moment before the fury, when the anger grew, or the moment during-the fury’s hour, the time of the beast set free-or in the ruined aftermath of a great violence, when the fury ebbed and chaos abated, until the tide began, once again, to turn. Craters-in cities, in deserts, in nations, in the heart-had become commonplace. People snarled and cowered in the rubble of their own misdeeds.

In spite of all Mila Milo’s ministrations (or, often, because of them) Professor Solanka still needed, on his frequent insomniac nights, to still his boiling thoughts by walking the city streets for hours, even in the rain. They were digging up Amsterdam Avenue, the sidewalk as well as the pavement, just a couple of blocks away (some days it seemed as if they were digging up the whole town), and one night as he was out walking through a medium to heavy downpour past the untidily fenced off hole he stubbed his toe on something and burst into a three-minute tirade of invective, at the end of which an admiring voice came from beneath an oilcloth in a doorway, “Man, sure learned some new vocabulary tonight.” Solanka looked down to see what had bruised his foot, and there, lying on the sidewalk, was a broken lump of concrete paving stone; upon seeing which he broke into an ungainly limping run, fleeing that concrete lump like a guilty man leaving the scene of a crime.

Ever since the investigation of the three society killings had focused on the three rich boys, he had felt lighter of spirit, but in his heart of hearts he had not yet fully exonerated himself. He followed reports of the investigation with care. There had still been no arrests and no confessions, and the news media were growing restive; the possibility of an upper-crust serial killer was juicily enticing, and the N.Y.P.D.’s failure to crack the case was all the more frustrating as a result. Give those swanky no-goodniks the third degree! One of them must break! An unappetizing lynch-mob atmosphere was generated by this kind of speculative commentary, of which there was much to be found. Solanka’s attention was captured by the one possible new lead. Mr. Panama Hat had been replaced in the unsolved mystery’s dramatis personae by an even stranger group of characters. People in fancy-dress Disney costumes had been sighted near each of the three murder scenes: a Goofy near Lauren Klein’s corpse, a Buzz Lightyear near the body of Belinda Booken Candell, and where Saskia Schuyler lay a passerby had spotted a red fox in Lincoln green: Robin Hood himself, tormentor of the bad old Sheriff of Notting Ham, and now also eluding the Sheriffs of Manhattan. Oo-de-lally! Detectives admitted that a significant connection between the three sightings was impossible to establish for sure, but the coincidence was certainly striking-Halloween being many months away-and they were keeping it very much in mind.

In the minds of children, Solanka thought, the creatures of the imagined world-characters from books or videos or songs-actually felt more solidly real than did most living people, parents excepted. As we grew, the balance shifted and fiction was relegated to the separate reality, the world apart in which we were taught that it belonged. Yet here was macabre proof of fiction’s ability to cross that supposedly impermeable frontier. Asmans world-Disney World-was trespassing in New York and murdering the city’s young women. And one or more very scary boys were concealed somewhere in this video, too.

At least there had been no more Concrete Killer murders for a while. Also, and for this Solanka did give Mila credit, he was drinking a good deal less, and as a result there had been no more amnesiac stupors: he no longer woke up in his street clothes with terrible unanswerable questions in his aching head. There were even moments when, as he fell under Mila’s spell, he had come close, for the first time in months, to something very like happiness. And yet the dark goddesses

still hovered over him, dripping their malevolence into his heart. While Mila was with him, in that wood-paneled space in which, even when thunderstorms darkened the sky, they no longer troubled to switch on any electric lights, he was held within the magic circle of her charm; but as soon as she left, the noises in his head began again. The murmuring, the beating of black wings. After his first dawn phone conversation with Asmaan and Eleanor, as the knife twisted in him, the murmurs turned for the first time against Mila, his angel of mercy, his living doll.

This was her face in the half-light, its knife-edge planes moving comfortably against his half-unbuttoned shirt, the short, erect, red-gold hair brushing the underside of his chin. The reenactments of old TV shows had stopped, a pretense whose purpose had been served. These days, in the slow darkened afternoons, they barely spoke, and when they did, it was no longer of philosophy. Sometimes for an instant her tongue lapped at his breast. Everybody needs a doll to play with, she whispered. Professor, you poor angry man, it’s been so long. Shh, there’s no hurry, take your time, I’m not going anywhere, nobody’s going to disturb us, I’m here for you. Let it go. You don’t need it anymore, all that rage. You just need to remember how to play. These were her long fingers, with their blood-red nails, finding their way, by the smallest of daily increments, further inside his shirt.

Her physical memory was extraordinary. Each time she visited him, she could take up exactly the position on his cushioned lap that she had reached at the end of her last visit. The placing of her head and hands, the tightness with which her body curled into itself, the exact weight with which she leaned against him: her high-precision remembering, and infinitesimal adjustment, of these variables were themselves prodigiously arousing sexual acts. For the veils were falling away from their play, as Mila showed Professor Solanka with each (daily more explicit) touch. The effect on Professor Solanka of Mila’s strengthening caresses was electric all right, at his age and in his situation in life he had not looked to receive such benison ever again. Yes, she had turned his head, had set out to do so while pretending to be doing nothing of the sort, and now he was deeply enmeshed in her web. The queen webspyder, mistress of the whole webspyder posse, had him in her net.

Then there was another change. Just as he had let slip a doll’s name, accidentally or under the pressure of a barely conscious desire, so one afternoon she too let a forbidden word pass her lips. At once that shuttered and darkened sitting room had been magically flooded with lurid, revelatory light, and Professor Malik Solanka knew Mila Milo’s backstory. It was always my dad and me, she had said it herself, always him and me against the world. There it was in her own undisguised words. She had laid it right out in front of Solanka and he had been too blind (or too unwilling?) to see what she had so openly and unashamedly shown. But as Solanka looked at her in the aftermath of her “slip of the tongue”-which he was already more than half convinced had been no slip, for this was a woman of formidable self-control, to whom accidents most likely never happened-those sharp and somehow cryptic facial planes, those slanting eyes, that face which was most closed when it looked most open, that wise little private smile, at last revealed their secrets.

Papi, she had said. That treacherous diminutive, that freighted term of endearment meant for a dead man’s ear, had served as the open-sesame to her lightless childhood cave. There sat the widowed poet and his precocious child. There was a cushion on his lap and she, year after year, curling and uncurling, moving against him, kissing dry his tears of shame. This was the heart of her, the daughter who sought to compensate her father for the loss of the woman he loved, no doubt in part to assuage her own loss by clinging to the parent who remained, but also to supplant that woman in this man’s affections, to fill the forbidden, vacated maternal space more frilly than it had been filled by her dead mother, for he must need her, must need living Mila, more than he had ever needed his wife; she would show him new depths of needing, until he wanted her more than he had known he could want any woman’s touch. This father-after his own experience of Mila’s powers, Solanka was utterly sure of what had happened-was slowly wooed by his child, seduced millimeter by millimeter into the undiscovered country, toward his never-discovered crime. Here was the great writer,
l’ecrivain nobelisable,
the conscience of his people, suffering those appallingly knowledgeable little hands to move at the buttons of his shirt, and at some point allowing the unallowable, crossing the frontier from which there can be no return, and beginning, tormentedly but eagerly, too, to participate. Thus was a religious man brought forever into mortal sin, forced by desire to renounce his God and sign the Devil’s treaty, while the burgeoning girl, his demon child, the goblin in the heart of the flower, whispered the vertiginous faith-murdering words that sucked him down: this isn’t happening unless we say it is, and we don’t say it is, do we, Papi, so it’s not. And because nothing was happening, nothing was wrong. The dead poet had entered that world of fantasy where everything is always safe, where the crocodile never catches Hook and a little boy never grows tired of his toys. So Malik Solanka saw his mistress’s real self unveiled, and said, “This is an echo, isn’t it, Mila, a reprise. You sang this song once before.” And immediately, silently corrected himself. No, don’t flatter yourself. Not just once. You are by no means the first.