Oh, weakness, weakness! He still couldn’t refuse her. Even knowing her as he now did, even understanding her true capabilities and intuiting his possible peril, he couldn’t send her away. A mortal who makes love to a goddess is doomed, but once chosen cannot avoid his fate. She continued to visit him, all dolled up, just the way he wanted her, and every day there was progress. The polar ice-cap was melting. Soon the level of the ocean would rise too high and they would surely drown.
When he left the apartment nowadays he felt like an ancient sleeper, rising. Outside, in America, everything was too bright, too loud, too strange. The city had come out in a rash of painfully punning cows. At Lincoln Center Solanka ran into Moozart and Moodama Butterfly. Outside the Beacon Theatre a trio of horned and uddered divas had taken up residence: Whitney Mooston, Mooriah Cowrey, and Bette Midler (the Bovine Miss M). Bewildered by this infestation of paronomasticating livestock, Professor Solanka suddenly felt like a visitor from Lilliput-Blefuscu or the moon or, to be straightforward, London. He was alienated, too, by the postage stamps, by the monthly, rather than quarterly, payment of gas, electricity, and telephone bills, by the unknown brands of candy in the stores (Twinkies, Ho Hos, Ring Pops), by the words “candy” and “stores,” by the armed policemen on the streets, by the anonymous faces in magazines, faces that all Americans somehow recognized at once, by the indecipherable words of popular songs which American ears could apparently make out without strain, by the end-loaded pronunciation of names like Farrar, Harrell, Candell, by the broadly spoken e’s that turned expression into axprassion, I’ll get the check into I’ll gat the chack; by, in short, the sheer immensity of his ignorance of the engulfing melee of ordinary American life. Little Brain’s memoirs filled bookstore windows here as well as in Britain, but that brought him no joy. The successful writers of the moment were unknown to him. Eggers, Pilcher: they sounded like they belonged on a restaurant menu, not a bestseller list.
Eddie Ford was often to be seen sitting alone on the neighboring stoop as Professor Solanka returned home—the websypders were evidently busy with their nets—and in the banked fire of the blond centurion’s slow-burn gaze Malik Solanka imagined he saw the belated beginnings of suspicion. Nothing was said between them, however. They nodded at each other briefly and left it at that. Then Malik entered his paneled retreat and waited for his deity to come. He took up his place in the large leather armchair that had become their preferred place of ease and set upon his lap the red velvet cushion with which, thus far, he had continued to protect what remained of his heavily compromised modesty. He closed his eyes and listened to the ticking of the mantelpiece’s antique carriage clock. And at some point Mila came soundlessly in—he had given her a set of keys—and what was to be done, what she insisted was not being done at all, was quietly done.
In that charmed space, during Mila’s visits, almost complete silence remained the norm. There were murmurs and whispers but no more. However, in the last quarter hour or so before she left, after she briskly leapt off his lap, smoothed her dress, and brought them both a glass of cranberry juice or a cup of green tea, and while she adjusted herself for the outside world, Solanka could offer her, if he so desired, his hypotheses on the country whose codes he was trying to unlock.
For example, Professor Solanka’s as-yet-unpublished theory on the differing attitudes toward oral sex in the United States and England—this aria being prompted by the president’s inane decision to start apologizing yet again for what he should always have crisply said was nobody else’s business—got a sympathetic hearing from the young woman snuggled down on his lap. “In England,” he explained in his most straitlaced style, “the heterosexual b.j. is almost never offered or received before full, penetrative coitus has taken place, and sometimes not even then. It’s considered a sign of deep intimacy. Also a sexual reward for good behavior. It’s rare. Whereas in America, with your well-established tradition of teenage, ah, ‘makeouts’ in the backs of various iconic automobiles, ‘giving head,’ to use the technical term, precedes ‘full’ missionary-position sex more often than not; indeed, it’s the most common way for young girls to preserve their virginity while keeping their sweethearts satisfied.
“In short, an acceptable alternative to fucking. Thus, when Clinton affirms that he had never had sex with that woman, Moonica, the Bovine Ms. L., everyone in England thinks he’s a pink-faced liar, whereas the whole of teen (and much of pre- and post-teen) America understands that he’s telling the truth, as culturally defined in these United States. Oral sex is precisely not sex. It’s what enables young girls to come home and with their hands on their hearts tell their parents—hell, it probably enabled you to tell your father—that you hadn’t ‘done it.’ So Slick Willy, Billy the Clint, has just been parroting what any red-blooded American teenager would have said. Arrested development? Okay, probably so, but this was why the impeachment of the president failed.”
“I see what you mean.” Mila Milo nodded when he was done, and returned to his side, in an unexpected and overwhelming escalation of their end-of-afternoon routine, to remove the red velvet cushion from his helpless lap.
That evening, encouraged by whispering Mila, he returned with new fire to his old craft. There’s so much inside you, waiting, she had said. I can feel it, you’re bursting with it. Here, here. Put it into your work, Papi. The furia. Okay? Make sad dolls if you’re sad, mad dolls if you’re mad. Professor Solanka’s new badass dolls. We need a tribe of dolls like that. Dolls that say something. You can do it. I know you can, because you made Little Brain. Make me dolls that come from her neighborhood—from that wild place in your heart. The place that isn’t a little middle-aged guy under a pile of old clothes. This place. The place for me. Blow me away, Papi. Make me forget her! Make adult dolls, R-rated, NC-17 dolls. I’m not a kid anymore, right? Make me dolls I want to play with now.
He understood at last what Mila did for her webspyders other than dress them more fashionably than they could manage for themselves. The word “muse” was attached sooner or later to almost all beautiful women seen with gifted men, and no self-respecting, Chinese fan-twirling leader of fashion would currently be seen dead without one, but most such women were more amusement than muse. The true muse was a treasure beyond price, and Mila, Solanka discovered, was capable of being genuinely inspiring. Just moments after her potent urgings, Solanka’s ideas, so long congealed and dammed, began to burn and flow. He went out shopping and came home with crayons, paper, clay, wood, knives. Now his days would be full, and most of his nights as well. Now, when he awoke fully dressed, the street smell would not be on his clothes, nor would the odor of strong drink foul his breath. He would awake at his workbench with the tools of his trade in his hand. New figurines would be watching him through mischievous, glittering eyes. A new world was forming in him, and he had Mila to thank for the divine afflatus: the breath of life.
Joy and relief coursed through him in long uncontrollable shudders. Like that other shudder at the end of Mila’s last visit, when the cushion came off his lap. The ending he had waited for like the addict he had become. Inspiration also soothed another, growing trouble in him. He had begun to entertain fears about Mila, to hypothesize a great, dangerous selfishness in her, an overarching ambition that made her see others, himself included, as mere stepping-stones on her own journey to the stars. Did those brilliant boys really need her? Solanka had begun to wonder. (And came close to the next question: Do I?) He had glimpsed a possible new incarnation of his living doll—in which Mila was Circe, and at her feet sat her oinking swine—but now he pushed that dark vision aside; also its even more ferocious companion, the vision of Mila as Fury, as Tisiphone, Alecto, or Megaera come down to earth in a cloak of sumptuous flesh. Mila had justified herself. She had provided the spur that had sent him back to work.
On the cover of a leather-bound notebook he scribbled the words “Professor Kronos’s Amazing No-Strings Puppet Kings.” And then added: “Or, Revolt of the Living Dolls.”
And then, “Or, Lives of the Puppet Caesars.” Then he crossed out everything except the two words “Puppet Kings,” opened the notebook, and in a great rush began to write the back-story of the demented genius who would be his anti-hero.
Akasz Kronos, the great, amoral cyberneticist of the Rijk, he began, created the Puppet Kings in response to the terminal crisis of the Rijk civilization, but, on account of the deep and unimprovable flaw in his character that made him unable to consider the issue of the general good, intended them to guarantee nobody’s survival or fortune but his own.
Jack Rhinehart rang the next afternoon, sounding wired. “Malik, wassup. You still living like a guru in an ice cave? Or a castaway on Big Brother Is Not Watching You? Or does news from the outside world still reach you from time to time.—You heard the one about the Buddhist monk in the bar? He goes up to the Tom Cruise clone with the cocktail shaker and says, ‘Make me one with everything.’—Listen: you know a broad by the name of Lear? Claims to have been your wife. Seems to me nobody deserves as much bad luck as being married to that honey. She’s like one hundred and ten years old, and ornery as a cut snake. Oh, and on the subject of wives? I’m divorced. It turned out to be easy. I just gave her everything.”
Everything really was everything, he amplified: the cottage in the Springs, the fabled wine shack, and several hundreds of thousands of dollars. “And this is all right with you?” Solanka asked, astonished. “Yeah, yeah,” Rhinehart gabbled. “You should have seen Bronnie. Jaw on the floor. Grabbed the offer so fast I thought she’d herniate. So, can you believe it, she’s gone. She’s toast. It’s Neela, man. I don’t know how to say this, but she eased something in me. She made it all okay.” His voice became boyish-conspiratorial. “Have you ever seen anyone actually stop traffic? I mean one hundred percent without question arrest the motion of motor vehicles just by being around? She has that power. She climbs out of a cab and five cars and two fire trucks screech to a halt. Also, walking into lampposts. I never believed it happened outside of Mack Sennett slapstick two-reelers. Now I see guys do it every day. Sometimes, in restaurants,” Rhinehart confided, bubbling with glee, “I’d ask her to walk to the women’s room and back, just so I could watch the men at the other tables get whiplash injuries. Can you imagine, Malik, my regrettably celibate friend, what it was like to be with that? I mean, every night?”
“You always did have an ugly turn of phrase,” Solanka said, wincing. He changed the subject. “About Sara? Talk about rising from the grave. What cemetery did you find her in?” “Oh, the usual,” Rhinehart replied tightly. “Southampton.” His ex-wife, Solanka learned, had at the age of fifty married one of the richest men in America, the cattle-feed tycoon Lester Schofield III, now aged ninety-two, and on her recent, fifty-seventh, birthday had instituted divorce proceedings on the grounds of Schofield’s adultery with Ondine, a Brazilian runway model of twenty-three. “Schofield made his billions by working out that what’s left of a grape after making grape juice would make a great dinner for a cow,” Rhinehart said, and moved into his most exaggerated Uncle Remus manner. “And now yo’ ole lady she done had de same idea. She puttin’ de big squeeze on him, I reckon. Gwine en’ up bein’ dat well-fed heifer hersel’.” All over the Eastern seaboard, it seemed, the young were climbing onto the laps of the old, offering the dying the poisoned chalice of themselves and causing nine kinds of havoc. Marriages and fortunes were foundering daily on these young rocks. “Miz Sara gave an interview,” Rhinehart told Solanka, much too merrily, “in which she announced her intention of chopping up her husband into three equal parts, planting one on each of his major properties, and then spending a third of the year with each, to express her appreciation for his love. You lucky to ‘scape old Sara when you were po’, boy. Dat Bride of Wildenstein? Dat Miz Patricia Duff? Dey doan’ even come close in de Divo’ce ‘Lympics. Dis lady get de gol’ medal, sho’ nuff. Perfesser, she done read her Shakespeare.” There were rumors that the whole thing was a cynical sting operation—that, in short, Sara Lear Schofield had put the Brazilian swan up to it—but no proof of any such conspiracy had been found.
What was the matter with Rhinehart? If he was as deeply satisfied as he claimed, both with his own divorce and with l’affaire Neela, why was he veering at such breakneck speed between sexual crudity—which, in fact, was very much not his usual style—and this clumsy Sara Lear material? “Jack,” Solanka asked his friend, “you really are okay, right? Because if …” “I’m fine,”Jack interrupted in his most stretched, brittle voice. “Hey, Malik? Dis here’s Br’er Jack, girlfrien’. Bawn an’ bred in a briar patch. Chill.”
Neela Mahendra called an hour later. “Do you remember? We met during that football game. The Dutch thrashing Serbia.” “They still call it Yugoslavia in football circles,” Solanka said, “on account of Montenegro. But yes, of course I remember. You’re not that easy to forget.” She didn’t even acknowledge the compliment, receiving such flattery as a minimum: her merest due. “Can we meet? It’s about Jack. I need to talk to someone. It’s important.” She meant immediately, was used to men abandoning, when she beckoned, whatever plans they had made. “I’m across the park from you,” she said. “Can we meet outside the Metropolitan Museum in let’s say half an hour?” Solanka, already worried about his friend’s well-being, more worried as a result of this phone call, and—yes, very well!—unable to resist the summons from gorgeous Neela, got up to go, even though these had become his day’s most precious hours: Mila’s time. He put on a light overcoat—it was a dry but overcast and unseasonably cool day—and opened the apartment’s front door. Mila stood there with his spare key in her hand. “Oh,” she said, seeing the coat. “Oh. Okay.” In that first instant, when she’d been taken by surprise, before she had time to gather herself, he glimpsed her face naked, so to speak. What was there, without question, was disappointed hunger. The vulpine hunger of an animal denied its—he tried not to think the word, but it forced its way in—its prey.
“I’ll be back soon,” he said lamely, but she had recovered her composure now, and shrugged. “No big deal.” They went through the outside door of the building together and he walked rapidly away from her, toward Columbus Avenue, not looking around, knowing that she’d be with Eddie on the neighboring stoop, angrily sticking a thirsty tongue down his bemused, delighted throat. There were posters everywhere for The Cell, the new Jennifer Lopez movie. In it, Lopez was miniaturized and injected into the brain of a serial killer. It sounded like a remake of Fantastic Voyage, starring Raquel Welch, but so what? Nobody remembered the original. Everything’s a copy, an echo of the past, thought Professor Solanka. A song for Jennifer: We’re living in a retro world and I am a retrograde girl.
11
“In the future, sure theen’, they don’t listen no more to this type talk radio. Or, jou know wha’ I theen’? Porhap’ the radio weel listen to oss. We’ll be like the entortainmon’ and the machines weel be the audien’, an’ own the station, and we all like work for them.”—“Yo, lissen up. Dunno what jive sci-fi crap ol’ Speedy Gonzalez there was handin’ out. Sound to me like he rent The Matrix too many times. Where I’m sittin’ the future plain ain’t arrive. Ever’thin’ look the same. I mean the exact same shinola goin’ down all over. Ever’body in the same accommodation, gettin’ the same education, doin’ the same recreation, lookin’ for the same … ploymentation. Check it out. We gettin’ the same bills, datin’ the same girls, goin’ to the same jails; gettin’ paid bad, laid bad ‘n’ made bad, am I right? That would be cor-recto, señor. And my radio? It come wit’ a on-off switch, daddy-o, and I turn that sucker off anytime I choose.”—“Boy, does he don’ get eet. That guy jus’ now, he don’ get eet so bad he won’t see eet comin’ till eet sittin’ on his face. Jou better wise up, hermano. They got machine now eat food for fuel, jou hear that? No more gasoline. Eat human food like jou an’ me. Pizza, chili dog, tuna melt, whatev’. Pretty soon Mr. Machine gonna be takin’ a table in a restauran’. Gonna be, like, gimme the b
es’ booth. Now jou tell me what’s the differen’? If eet eatin’, eet alive, I say. The future here, man, right now, jou better watch jou butt. Pretty soon Mr. Live Machine gonna be comin’ for that employmentation jou talkin’ ‘bout, maybe for jour pretty girlfrien’ too.”—“Hey, hey, my paranoid Latino friend, Ricky Ricardo, I missed the name, but slow down, Desi, okay? This here’s not that communist Cuba you escaped from in yo’ rubber boat an’ got sanctuary in the land of the free …” “Don’ insul’ me, please, now. I’m sayin’ please, because I was raise polite, no? The brother here, how he’s call, Señor Cleef Hoxtaboo’ or Mr. No Good from the ‘Hood, maybe hees mother never tol’ heem right, but we goin’ out live on air here, we talkin’ to the whole metro region, less keep eet clean.”—“Can I get in here? Excuse me? I’m listening to all this?, and I’m thinking, they have electronically generated TV presenters now?, and there’s dead actors selling motor vehicles?, Steve McQueen in that car?, so I’m more with our Cuban friend?, the technology scares me? And so in the future?, like, will anyone even be thinking about our like needs? I’m an actress?, I work mainly in commercials?, and there’s this big SAG strike?, and for months now I can’t earn a dollar?, and it doesn’t stop one single spot going on air?, because they can get Lara Croft?, Jar Jar Binks?, they can get Gable or Bogey or Marilyn or Max Headroom or HAL from 2001?”—“I’m going to interrupt, ma’am, because we’re out of time and this is something I know a lot of people feel strongly about. Can’t blame cutting-edge technological innovation for the fix your union’s got you in. You chose socialism, union made your bed, now you’re lying in it. My personal take on the future? You can’t turn back the clock, so go with the flow and ride the tide. Be the new thing. Seize the day. From sea to shining sea.”