To such a reader—and admirer, in the cinema, of the highbrow sci-fi of Fahrenheit 451 and Solaris—George Lucas was a kind of Antichrist and the Spielberg of Close Encounters was a kid playing in the grown-ups’ sandbox, while the Terminator films, and above all the mighty Blade Runner, were carriers of the sacred flame. And now it was his own turn. In those unreliable summer days, Professor Malik Solanka would work on the world of the Puppet Kings—the dolls as well as their stories—like a man possessed. The story of the mad scientist Akasz Kronos and his beautiful lover, Zameen, filled his mind. New York faded into the background; or, rather, everything that happened to him in the city-every random encounter, every newspaper he opened, every thought, every feeling, every dream-fed his imagination, as though prefabricated to fit into the structure he had already devised. Real life had started obeying the dictates of fiction, providing precisely the raw material he needed to transmute through the alchemy of his reborn art.
Akasz he got from aakaash, Hindi for “sky.” Sky as in Asmaan (Urdu), as in poor Sky Schuyler, as in the great sky gods: Ouranos-Varuna, Brahma, Yahweh, Manitou. And Kronos was the Greek, the child-devourer, Time. Zameen was earth, the heavens’ opposite, which embraces the sky at the horizon. Akasz he had seen clearly from the first, picturing his whole life’s arc. Zameen, though, had surprised him. In this tale of a drowning world he hadn’t expected an earth goddess—even one modeled on Neela Mahendra—to take a central role. Yet here she undeniably was, and by showing up she had valuably thickened the plot. Her presence seemed to have been prefigured, even though he hadn’t planned for it at all. Neela/Zameen of Rijk/Goddess of Victory: three versions of the same woman filled his thoughts, and he realized that he’d finally found the successor to the famous creation of his youth. “Hello to Neela,” he told himself, “and so, at last, farewell to Little Brain.”
Which was also to say, farewell to his afternoons with Mila Milo. Mila had felt the change in him at once, intuiting it when she saw him leave for his tryst with Neela on the steps of the Met. She knew what I wanted before I had even dared admit it to myself, Solanka acknowledged. It was probably finished between us there and then. Even if there had been no miracle, even if Neela hadn’t so unpredictably chosen me, Mila had seen enough. She has real beauty of her own, and pride, and isn’t about to play second fiddle to anyone. He returned to West Seventieth Street after an endlessly surprising night spent with Neela in a hotel room across the park—a night whose biggest surprise was that it was happening at all—and found Mila wrapped ostentatiously around beautiful, stupid Eddie Ford on the stoop next door; Eddie, one of nature’s bodyguards, glowing with the joy of having regained guardianship over the only body he gave a damn about. The look Eddie gave Solanka over Mila’s shoulder was impressively articulate. It said, Buddy, you don’t have access privileges at this address no more; between you and this lady there’s now a red velvet rope and your accreditation is so canceled, you shouldn’t even think about stepping in this direction, unless of course you’d like me to clean your teeth, using your spinal column as a brush.
The next afternoon, however, she was at his door. “Take me out somewhere great and expensive. I need to dress up and eat industrial quantities of food.” Eating was Mila’s normal reaction to misery, drinking her response to anger. Sad was probably better than mad, Solanka mused ungenerously. Easier for him, anyway. To make up for this selfish thought, he called one of the talked-about new places of the moment, a Cuban-themed bar-restaurant in Chelsea named Gio in honor of Dona Gioconda, an elderly diva whose star was shining brightly that Buena Vista summer and in whose languid smoke-trail of a voice all of old Havana came back to swaggering, swaying, seducing, smooching life. Solanka got a table so easily that he commented on the fact to the woman taking the booking. “City’s a ghost town righ’ now,” she agreed distantly. “It’s, like, Loserville. See jou at nine P.M.”
“You left me and I’m dying,” Gioconda sang on the restaurant’s sound system as Solanka and Mila came in, “but after three days I will rise again. Don’t go to my funeral, sucker, I’ll be out dancing with some better man. Resurrection, resurrection, and baby I’ll make sure you know when.” Mila translated the words for Solanka. “That’s perfect,” she added. Are you listening, Malik? Because if I could request a track, this would be it. As they say on the radio, the message is in the words. ‘Oh, you thought that you could break me, and it’s true that I’m in pieces now, but after three days they will wake me, from a distance you will see me take my bow. Resurrection, resurrection, gettin’ a new life any day now.’”
At the bar she downed a mojito fast and ordered another one. Solanka saw that he was in for a rougher ride than anticipated. At the bottom of the second glass she moved to the table, ordered all the most highly spiced dishes on the menu, and let him have it. “You’re a lucky man,” she told him, plunging into the complimentary guacamole, “because evidently you’re an optimist. You have to be, because it’s so easy for you to throw things away. Your child, your wife, me, whatever. Only a wild optimist, a stupid brain-dead Pollyanna or Pangloss, throws away what’s most precious, what’s so rare and satisfies his deepest need, which you know and I know you can’t even name or look at without the shutters closed and the lights out, you have to put a cushion on your lap to hide it until somebody comes along who’s smart enough to know what to do, somebody whose own unspeakable need just happens to make a perfect fit with your own. And now, now when we’ve got there, when the defenses are down and the pretense is over and were really in that room that we never allowed ourselves to believe could exist for either of us, the invisible room of our greatest fear—right at the very moment when we discover there’s no need to be afraid in that room, we can have whatever we want for as long as we want it, and maybe when we’ve had our fill we’ll wake up and notice that we’re real living people, we’re not the puppets of our desires but just this woman, this man, and then we can stop the games, open up the shutters, turn out the lights, and step out into the city street hand in hand… this is when you choose to pick up some whore in the park and for Chrissake get a fucking room. An optimist is a man who gives up an impossible pleasure because he’s sure he’ll find it again just around the bend. An optimist thinks his dick talks better sense than, oh, never mind. I was going to say, than his girl, meaning, stupidly, me. Me, by the way, I’m a pessimist. My view is that not only does lightning not strike twice, it usually doesn’t strike once. So that was it for me, what happened between us, that was really it, and you, you just, damn, damn. I could have stayed with you, did you ever work that out? Oh, not for long, just thirty or forty years, more than you’ve got, probably. Instead, I’ll marry Eddie. You know what they say: charity begins at home.”