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.