He awoke in his bed-fully dressed, again, with strong drink on his breath-without knowing how or when he’d reached it. With consciousness came fear of himself. Another night unaccounted for. Another blank snowstorm in the videotape. But as before there was no blood on his hands or clothes, no weapon on his person, not so much as a concrete lump. He lurched upright, grabbed the zapper and found the tail end of the local news on TV. Nothing about a Concrete Killer or a Panama Hat Man or a privileged beauty done to death. No breaking of a living doll. He fell back across the bed, breathing hard and fast. Then, kicking off his street shoes, he pulled the covers over his aching head.
He recognized this funk. Long ago in a Cambridge hostel he had been unable to rise and face his new undergraduate existence. Now as then, panic and demons rushed in at him from every side. He was vulnerable to demons. He heard their bat-wings flapping by his ears, felt their goblin fingers twining around his ankles to pull him down to that hell in which he didn’t believe but which kept cropping up in his language, in his emotions, in the part of him that was not his to control. That growing part of him that was running wild, out of his feeble hands… where was Krysztof Waterford-Wajda when he needed him? Come on, Dubdub, knock at the door and pull me away from the edge of the yawning Pit.—But Dubdub didn’t return from beyond Heaven’s door to knock.
This wasn’t it, Solanka told himself feverishly. This wasn’t the story that had brought him all this way! Not this Jekyll and Hyde melodrama, a saga of a lower order entirely. There was no Gothic strain in the architecture of his life, no mad scientist’s laboratory, no bubbling retorts, no gulped potion of demonic metamorphosis. Yet the fear, the funk, would not leave him. He drew the covers down more tightly over his head. He could smell the street on his clothes. There was no evidence linking him to any crime. Nor was he under investigation for anything at all. How many men, in an average Manhattan summer, wore Panama hats? Hundreds, at least? Why, then, was he tormenting himself so? Because if the knife was possible, so was this. And then the circumstances: three failures of nocturnal memory, three dead women. This was the conjunction that required his silence as absolutely as the knife in the dark but which he could not hide from himself. Also that stream of obscenities unknowingly spoken in Cafe Mozart. Not enough for any court to convict, but he was his own judge, and the jury was out.
Blearily, he dialed a number and waited through the interminable mechanized-voice preliminaries to receive his voice mail. You have one!—new message.—The following—one!—new message—has NOT been heard.—First message. Then came Eleanor’s voice, with which long ago he fell in love. “Malik, you say you want to forget yourself. I say you have already forgotten yourself. You say you don’t want to be ruled by your anger. I say your anger has never ruled you more. I remember you though you have forgotten me. I remember you before that doll screwed up our lives: you used to be interested in everything. I loved that. I remember your gaiety, your terrible singing, your funny voices. You taught me to love cricket; now I want Asmaan to love it too. I remember your longing to know, of human beings, the best that we are capable of, but also to look without illusions at the worst. I remember your love of life, of our son, and of me. You abandoned us, but we have not abandoned you. Come home, darling. Please come home.” Naked, courageous, heart-tearing stuff. But here was another gap. When had he spoken to Eleanor of anger and forgetting? Perhaps he had come home drunk and wanted to explain himself. Maybe he had left her a message, to which this was her answer. And she, as ever, had heard much more than he had said. Had heard, in short, his fear.
He made himself get up, stripped and showered. He was brewing coffee in the kitchen when he realized that the apartment was empty. Yet it was one of Wislawa’s days. Why wasn’t she here? Solanka dialed her number. “Yes?” It was her voice all right. “Wislawa?” he demanded. “Professor Solanka. Aren’t you supposed to be working today?” There was a long pause. “Professor?” said Wislawa’s voice, sounding timid and small. “You do not remember?” He felt his body temperature dropping rapidly. “What? Remember what?” Now Wislawa’s voice grew tearful. “Professor, you fire me. You fire me, for what? For nothing. Of course you remember. And the words. Such words from an educated man, I never heard. After this, it’s over for me. Even now that you call to ask me, I cannot return.” Somebody spoke behind her, another woman’s voice, and Wislawa rallied, to add with considerable determination, “However, cost of my work is included in your contract. Since you fire me unjustly I will continue to receive this. I have spoken to landlord and they are agree. I think they will speak also to you. You know, I work for Mrs. Jay long time.” Malik Solanka put the receiver down without another word.
You’re fired. As if in a movie. The red-skirted cardinal descends the golden steps to deliver the pope’s adieu. The driver, a woman, waits in her little car, and when the cruel messenger leans into her window, he wears Solanka’s face.
The city was being sprayed with the pesticide Anvil. Several birds, mostly from the Staten Island wetlands, had died of West Nile virus, and the mayor was taking no chances. Everyone was on high mosquito alert. Stay indoors at dusk! Wear long sleeves! During spraying, close all windows and turn all air-conditioning units off! Such interventionist radicalism, although not a single human being had contracted the illness since the beginning of the new millennium. (Later, a few cases were reported; but no deaths.) The timorousness of Americans in the face of the unknown, their overcompensation, had always made Europeans laugh. “A car backfires in Paris,” Eleanor Solanka—even Eleanor, the least bitchy of human beings—liked to say, “and the next day a million Americans cancel their holidays.”
Solanka had forgotten about the spraying, had walked for hours through the falling invisible poison. For a moment he considered blaming the pesticide for his memory loss. Asthmatics were having convulsions, lobsters were said to be dying by the thousand, environmentalists were squawking; why shouldn’t he? But his natural fairness prevented him from going down this route. The source of his problems was likely to be of existential rather than chemical origin.