Yes, and words are not deeds, Solanka allowed, moving off fretfully. Though words can become deeds. If said in the right place and at the right time, they can move mountains and change the world. Also, uhhuh, not knowing what you’re doing—separating deeds from the words that define them—was apparently becoming an acceptable excuse. To say “I didn’t mean it” was to erase meaning from your misdeeds, at least in the opinion of the Beloved Alis of the world. Could that be so? Obviously, no. No, it simply could not. Many people would say that even a genuine act of repentance could not atone for a crime, much less this unexplained blankness—an infinitely lesser excuse, a mere assertion of ignorance that wouldn’t even register on any scale of regret. Shockingly, Solanka recognized himself in foolish young Ali Majnu: the vehemence as well as the blanks in the record. He did not, however, excuse himself. At Jack Rhinehart’s apartment, before the poleaxing arrival of Neela Mahendra had changed the subject, he had been attempting, while concealing the depth of his perturbation, to confess to Rhinehart something of his fear about the terrorist anger that kept taking him hostage. Jack, absorbed in the soccer game, nodded absently. “You must know you’ve always had a short fuse,” he said. “I mean, you are aware of that, right? You’re conscious of the number of times you’ve rung people up to apologize the number of times you’ve rung me up—the morning after some little wine-lubricated explosion of yours? The Collected Apologies of Malik Solanka. I always thought that would make a fine book. Repetitive, maybe, but with rich comic delights.”
Some years back, the Solankas had vacationed at the cottage in the Springs with Rhinehart and his “waitress” of the moment, a petite Southern belle—from Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, scene of the Civil War’s “Battle Above the Clouds”—who was a dead ringer for the cartoon sexpot Betty Boop and to whom Rhinehart referred affectionately as Roscoe, after Lookout Mountain’s only living celebrity, the heavy-serving tennis player Roscoe Tanner, in spite of her evident hatred of the nickname. The cottage was small and it was necessary to spend as much time as possible away from it. One night after a protracted, men-only drinking session at an East Hampton watering hole, Solanka had insisted on driving back during a heavy downpour. A period of dumbstruck terror ensued. Then Rhinehart said, as mildly as he could, “Malik, in America we drive on the other side of the road.” Solanka had blown up and, incensed at the disrespect being shown to his driving skills, had stopped the car and actually forced Rhinehart to walk home in the drenching rain. “That was one of your best apologies,” Jack now reminded him. “Particularly because the next morning you couldn’t remember doing anything wrong at all.”
“Yes,” Solanka murmured, “but now I’m having the blackouts without the booze. And the anger events are on a completely different scale.” The noise of the TV crowd surged as he spoke, demanding Rhinehart’s attention, and the confession passed unheard. “Oh, and,” Rhinehart resumed moments later, “you can’t not know how hard your friends try to avoid certain subjects in your company. U.S. policy in Central America, for example. U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. Actually, the U.S.A. in general has been pretty much an off-limits topic for years, so don’t think I wasn’t tickled when you decided to relocate yo’ ass in the bosom of the Great Satan hisself” Yes, but, Solanka wanted to say, rising to the bait, what’s wrong is wrong, and because of the immense goddamn power of America, the immense fucking seduction of America, those bastards in charge get away with… “There you go, you see,” Rhinehart pointed at him, chuckling. “Just swellin’ up fit to bust. Bright red, then purple, then almost black. A heart attack waiting to happen. You know what we call it when it happens? Getting Solankered. Malik’s China syndrome. It’s an honest to God fuckin’ meltdown. I mean, mah fren’, Ira the man who actually done gone to these places and brought back the bad news, but that don’t stop you from tellin’ me off ‘bout it, on account of my citizenship, which in yo’ mad eyes makes me ‘sponsible for de mighty evil dat keep gettin’ done in mah po’ name.”
No fool like an old fool. So he and Beloved Ali were really the same after all, Solanka humbly thought. Just a few slight surface differences of vocabulary and education. No: he was worse, because Beloved was just a boy on his first day in a new job, while he, Solanka, was becoming something awful and perhaps uncontrollable. The bitter irony was that his old habits of combativeness, this evidently comic intemperateness of his, would blind even his friends to the great change in kind, the hideous deterioration, that was now taking place. This time there really was a wolf coming and nobody, not even Jack, was listening to his cries.
“And furthermore,” Rhinehart caroled gaily, “remember when you ejected, oh, what’s his name from your house for misquoting Philip Larkin? Man! So you’ve been getting snappy with the neighbors? Whoo-ee. Hold the front page.”
How could Malik Solanka speak to his mirthful friend of the abnegation of the self: how to say, America is the great devourer, and so I have come to America to be devoured? How could he say, I am a knife in the dark; I endanger those I love?
Solanka’s hands itched. Even his skin was betraying him. He, whose baby-bottom skin had always caused women to marvel and to tease him for having led a life of cosseted ease, had begun to suffer from uncomfortable raw eruptions along his hairline and, most awkwardly of all, on both hands. The skin reddened, puckered, and broke. So far he had not visited a dermatologist. Before walking out on Eleanor, a lifetime eczema sufferer, he had raided her medicine box and brought away two thick tubes of hydrocortisone ointment. At the local Duane Reade he bought a jumbo-sized bottle of industrial-strength moisturizer and resigned himself to using it several times a day. Professor Solanka did not have a high opinion of doctors. Accordingly, he self-medicated, and itched.
It was the age of science, but medical science was still in the hands of primitives and oafs. The main thing you learned from doctors was how little they knew. In the paper yesterday there had been a story about a doctor who had accidentally removed a woman’s healthy breast. He was “reprimanded.” It was such an everyday story that it only made a deep inside page. This was the sort of thing doctors did: the wrong kidney, the wrong lung, the wrong eye, the wrong baby. Doctors did wrong. It was just barely news.
The news: it was right there in his hand. After getting out of Beloved Ali’s cab he’d picked up a copy of the News and the Post, then had taken an erratic route home, walking fast, as if trying to escape something… Ellen DeGeneres, posters proclaimed, was coming soon to the Beacon Theatre. Solanka grimaced. She’d be singing her theme song, of course: Where the hormones, there moan / And the room would be full of women hollering, “Ellen, we love you,” and in the midst of her set of deeply so-so material the comedienne would pause, lower her head, put her hand on her heart, and say how moved she was to have become a symbol of their pain. Praise me, thank you, thank you, praise me some more, hey, look, Anne, we’re an icon!, wow!, it’s so humbling… . Science was making extraordinary discoveries, Professor Solanka thought. Scientists in London believed they had identified the medial insula, a part of the brain associated with “gut feelings,” and also that part of the anterior cingulate that was linked to euphoria, as the locations of love. Also, British and German scientists now claimed that the frontal lateral cortex was responsible for intelligence. The blood flow in this region increased when tested volunteers were called upon to solve complicated puzzles. Tell me where is fancy bred?/ T the heart or i’ the head? And where in the brain, wild-hearted Solanka only half rhetorically asked himself, is the seat of stupidity? Eh, scientists of the world? In what insula or cortex does the blood flow increase when one shouts “I love you” at a total fucking stranger? And how about hypocrisy? Let’s get to the interesting stuff here…