The next morning he visited Dubdub, not in the main hospital, but in a good-looking old brick building standing in green, leafy grounds a little way down Trumpington Road: like a country house for the hopeless. Dubdub stood at a window smoking a cigarette, wearing crisp, wide-striped pajamas under what looked like his old school dressing-gown, a worn, stained thing that was perhaps playing the part of a security blanket. His wrists were bandaged. He looked heavier, older, but that goddamn society smile was still there, still on parade. Professor Solanka thought that if his own genes had sentenced him to wear such a mask every day of his life, he’d have been in here with bandaged wrists long ago.
“Dutch elm disease,” Dubdub said, pointing to the stumps of trees. “Frightful business. The elms of old England, lost and gone.” Lorst and gorn. Professor Solanka said nothing. He hadn’t come to talk about trees. Dubdub turned toward him, got the point. “Expect nothing and you won’t be disappointed, eh,” he murmured, looking boyishly shamefaced. “Should’ve listened to my own lectures.” Still Solanka didn’t answer. Then, for the first time in many years, Dubdub put aside the Old Etonian act. “It’s to do with suffering,” he said flatly. “Why do we all suffer so. Why is there so much of it. Why can’t you ever stop it. You can build dikes, but it always comes oozing through, and then one day the dikes just give way. And it’s not just me. I mean, it is me, but it’s everyone. It’s you, too. Why does it go on and on? It’s killing us. I mean, me. It’s killing me.”
“This sounds a little abstract,” Professor Solanka ventured, gently. “Yes, well.” That was definitely a snap. The deflector shields were back in place. “Sorry not to come up to scratch. Trouble with being a Bear of Little Brain.”
“Please,” Professor Solanka asked. “Just tell me.”
“That’s the worst part,” Dubdub said. “There’s nothing to tell. No direct or proximate cause. You just wake up one day and you aren’t a part of your life. You know this. Your life doesn’t belong to you. Your body is not, I don’t know how to make you feel the force of this, yours. There’s just life, living itself. You don’t have it. You don’t have anything to do with it. That’s all. It doesn’t sound like much, but believe me. It’s like when you hypnotize someone and persuade them there’s a big pile of mattresses outside their window. They no longer see a reason not to jump.”
“I remember it, or a lesser version of it,” Professor Solanka assented, thinking of that night in Market Hill long ago. “And you were the one who snapped me out of it. Now it’s for me to do the same for you.” The other shook his head. “This isn’t something you just snap out of, I’m afraid.” The attention he’d been getting, the celebrity status, had greatly aggravated Dubdub’s existential crisis. The more he became a Personality, the less like a person he felt. Finally he had decided on a retreat back into the cloisters of traditional academe. No more of all that globetrotting Magic Christian Derridada! No more performance. Energized by his new resolve, he had flown back to Cambridge with the literary groupie Perry Pincus, an unashamed sexual butterfly, actually believing he could set up house with her and build a stable life around the relationship. That’s how far gone he was.
Krysztof Waterford-Wajda would survive three further suicide attempts. Then, just one month before Professor Solanka metaphorically took his own life, saying good-bye to everyone and everything he held dear and striking out for America with a spiky-haired doll in his arms a special, early-period limited edition of Little Brain in bad condition, the clothes ripped, the body damaged—Dubdub dropped dead. Three arteries had been badly clogged. A simple bypass operation could have saved him, but he refused it and, like an English elm, fell. Which perhaps, if one were searching for such explanations, helped trigger Professor Solanka’s metamorphosis. Professor Solanka, remembering his dead friend in New York, realized that he had followed Dubdub in so many things: in some of his thinking, yes, but also into le monde mediatigue, into America, into crisis.
Perry Pincus had been one of the first to intuit the link between them. She had returned to her native San Diego and now taught, in a local college, the work of some of the critics and writers whom she had carnally known. Pincus 101, she called it, brazen as ever, in one of the annual Happy Holidays messages she never failed to send Professor Solanka. “It’s my personal greatest-hits collection, my Top Twenty,” she wrote, adding, a little cuttingly, “You’re not in it, Professor. I can’t walk around in a man’s work if I don’t know which entrance he prefers.” Her season’s greetings were invariably accompanied, incomprehensibly, by the gift of a soft toy—a platypus, a walrus, a polar bear. Eleanor had always been much amused by the annual parcels from California. “Because you wouldn’t fuck her,” Professor Solanka was informed by his wife, “she can’t think of you as a lover. So she’s trying to become your mother instead. How does it feel to be Perry Pinch-ass’s little boy?”
3
In his comfortable Upper West Side sublet, a handsome, high-ceilinged first- and second-floor duplex boasting majestic oak paneling and a library that spoke highly of the owners, Professor Malik Solanka nursed a glass of red Geyserville zinfandel and mourned. The decision to leave had been wholly his; still, he grieved for his old life. Whatever Eleanor said on the phone, the break was almost certainly irreparable. Solanka had never thought of himself as a bolter or quitter, yet he had shed more skins than a snake. Country, family, and not one wife but two had been left in his wake. Also, now, a child. Maybe the mistake was to see his latest exit as unusual. The harsh reality was perhaps that he was acting not against nature but according to its dictates. When he stood naked before the unvarnished mirror of truth, this was what he was really like.
Yet, like Perry Pincus, he believed himself to be a good person. Women believed it too. Sensing in him a ferocity of commitment that was rarely found in modern men, women had often allowed themselves to fall in love with him, surprising themselves—these wised-up, cautious women!—by the speed with which they charged outward into the really deep emotional water. And he didn’t let them down. He was kind, understanding, generous, clever, funny, grown-up, and the sex was good, it was always good. This is forever, they thought, because they could see him thinking it too; they felt loved, treasured, safe. He told them—each of his women in turn—that friendship was what he had instead of family ties, and, more than friendship, love. That sounded right. So they dropped their defenses and relaxed into all the good stuff, and never saw the hidden twisting in him, the dreadful torque of his doubt, until the day he snapped and the alien burst out of his stomach, baring multiple rows of teeth. They never saw the end coming until it hit them. His first wife, Sara, the one with the graphic verbal gift, put it thus: “It felt like an ax-murder.”
“Your trouble is,” Sara incandescently said near the end of their last quarrel, “that you’re really only in love with those fucking dolls. The world in inanimate miniature is just about all you can handle. The world you can make, unmake, and manipulate, filled with women who don’t answer back, women you don’t have to fuck. Or are you making them with cunts now, wooden cunts, rubber cunts, fucking inflatable cunts that squeak like balloons as you slide in and out; do you have a life-size fuck-dolly harem hidden in a shed somewhere, is that what they’ll find when one day you’re arrested for raping and chopping up some golden-haired eight-year-old, some poor fucking living doll you played with and then threw away. They’ll find her shoe in a hedge and there’ll be descriptions of a minivan on TV and I’ll be watching and you won’t be home and I’ll think, Jesus, I know that van, it’s the one he carries his fucking toys around in when he goes to his perverts’ I’ll-show-you-my-dolly-if-you’ll-show-me-yours reunions. I’ll be the wife who never knew a thing. I’ll be the fucking cow-faced wife on TV forced to defend you just to defend myself, my own unimaginable stupidity, because after all, I chose you.”