He had to go through it all over again: the shaking, the pounding, the gasping for air, the shower, the darkness, the breathing, the visualization. No drugs; he had put them off-limits, and he was also avoiding head doctors. The gangster Tony Soprano might be going to a shrink, but fuck him, he was fictional. Professor Solanka had resolved to face his demon by himself. Psychoanalysis and chemistry felt like cheating. If the duel were to be truly won, if the demon that possessed him was to be wrestled to the mat and consigned to hell, it had to be just the two of them going at it, ass naked, without restraint, in a bare-knuckle fight to the death.
It was dark when Malik Solanka deemed himself fit to leave the apartment. Shaken, but putting on a show of jauntiness, he set out for the Kieslowski double bill. If he had been a Vietnam vet or even a re porter who’d seen too much, his behavior would have been more readily comprehensible. Jack Rhinehart, an American poet and war correspondent he had known for twenty years, if woken by a ringing telephone would, to this day, usually smash the instrument to bits. He couldn’t stop himself doing it, and was only half awake when it happened. Jack got through a lot of phones, but he accepted his fate. He was damaged, and thought himself lucky it wasn’t worse. But the only war Professor Solanka had been in was life itself, and life had been kind to him. He had money and what most people thought of as an ideal family. Both his wife and child were exceptional. Yet he had sat in his kitchen in the middle of the night with murder on the brain; actual murder, not the metaphorical kind. He’d even brought a carving knife upstairs and stood for a terrible, dumb minute over the body of his sleeping wife. Then he turned away, slept in the spare bedroom, and in the morning packed his bags and caught the first plane to New York without giving a reason. What had happened was beyond reason. He needed to put an ocean, at least an ocean, between himself and what he had almost done. So Ms. Mila, the empress of West Seventieth Street, had been closer to the truth than she knew. Than she must ever know.
He was waiting in line at the cinema, lost inside himself. Then a young man’s voice started up behind his right ear, disgracefully loud, not caring who listened, telling its story to a companion but also to the whole line, to the city; as if the city cared. To Eve in Metropolis was to know that the exceptional was as commonplace as diet soda, that abnormality was the popcorn norm: “So finally I called her, and I’m like, hi, Mom, wassup, and she goes, You wanna know who’s sitting down to dinner here in Nowheresville, who’s right here eating your mother’s meatloaf, we’ve got Santa Claus, that’s all. Santa Claus sitting right there at the head of the table where your snake skunk weasel father used to set his motherfuckin’ dumb-fuck ass. I swear to God. I mean it’s three P.m. and she’s already losing it. That’s what she said, word for fuckin’ word. Santa Claus. And I go, Sure, Mom, and where’s Jesus at. And she comes back with, That’s Mister Jesus Christ to you, young man, and I’ll have you know that Mister Jesus H. Christ is takin’ care of the fish course. So, that was all I could handle, so I’m like, So long, Mom, give the gentlemen my best, have a happy.” And alongside the male voice there was a woman’s hard, horrified laughter. HA-ha-ha-HA.
At this point in a Woody Allen movie (a part of Husbands and Wives had actually been filmed in Solanka’s rented apartment) the cinemagoers would have joined in the conversation, taking sides, offering personal anecdotes to rival or surpass the one they had just heard, and finding precedents for the monologue of the angry, crazy mother in late Bergman, in Ozu, in Sirk. In a Woody Allen movie Noam Chomsky or Marshall McLuhan, or maybe nowadays it would be Gurumayi or Deepak Chopra, would have stepped out from behind a potted palm and offered a few words of unctuous, polished commentary. The mother’s plight would briefly be the subject of an agonized Woody meditation—was she delusional all day or only at mealtimes? What medication was she on and were its side effects properly labeled on the bottle? What did it mean that she was possibly planning to fool around with not one but two major icons? What would Freud say about this unusual sex triangle? What did this woman’s equal need for gift-wrapped possessions and the salvation of her immortal soul tell us about her? What did it tell us about America?
Also, if those were real men in the room with her, who were they? Maybe killers on the run, holing up in this poor bourbon-soaked lady’s kitchen? Was she actually in danger? Alternatively, as open-minded thinkers, should we not allow the possibility, at least theoretically, of a genuine double miracle having occurred? In which case, what kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for? And, okay, so the Son of God was in charge of the tuna, but would there be enough meatloaf to go around?
To all of this Mariel Hemingway would pay careful but vapid attention; then, equally swiftly, it would be forgotten forever. In a Woody Allen movie the scene would have been shot in black-and-white, that most unreal of processes, which had come to stand for realism, integrity, and art. But the world is in color and is less well scripted than the movies. Malik Solanka turned around sharply, opened his mouth to remonstrate, and found himself looking at Mila and her quarterback centurion of a boyfriend. By thinking of her he had conjured them up. And behind them stood-leaned, hunched, squatted, posed—the rest of the indolent stoop troop.
They looked gorgeous, Solanka conceded; their daytime Hilfiger uniform had been sloughed off to reveal a very different, preppier style based on Calvin’s classic white-and-tan summerwear, and they all wore shades in spite of the hour. There was a commercial playing in the multiplexes in which a group of fashionable vampires—thanks to Buffy on TV, vampires were hot—sat on a dune in their Ray-Bans and waited for the dawn. The one who had forgotten his shades was fried when the sun’s rays hit him and his comrades laughed as he exploded, baring their fangs. HA-ha-ha-HA. Perhaps, thought Professor Solanka, Mila & Co. were vampires and he was the fool without the protection. Except, of course, that that would mean he was a vampire, too, a refugee from death, able to defy the laws of time… Mila removed her sunglasses and looked him provocatively in the eye, and at once he remembered who it was that she resembled.
“What do you know, it’s Mr. Garbo, who vants to be alone,” the peroxide centurion was saying, nastily, indicating that he was ready for all the trouble creaky old Professor Solanka cared to put his way. But Malik was trapped by Mila’s gaze. “Oh, my,” he said. “Oh, my, excuse me, it’s Little Brain. Excuse me, but it’s my doll.” The giant centurion found this to be an opaque, and therefore objectionable utterance, and indeed, in Solanka’s manner there was something more than surprise; something bilious, almost hostile, something that might have been disgust. “Take it easy, Greta,” the big young man said, putting the palm of an enormous hand against Solanka’s chest and applying an impressive amount of pressure; Solanka staggered backward and hit a wall.