The movies were infantilizing their audience, Solanka thought, or perhaps the easily infantilizable were drawn to movies of a certain simplified kind. Perhaps daily life, its rush, its overloadedness, just numbed and anesthetized people and they went into the movies’ simpler worlds to remember how to feel. As a result, in the minds of many adults, the experience on offer in the movie theaters now felt more real than what was available in the world outside. For Eddie, his movie-hoodlum riffs possessed more authenticity than any more “natural” pattern of speech, even of threatening speech, at his disposal. In his mind’s eye he was Samuel L. Jackson, about to waste some punk. He was a man in a black suit, a man named after a color, slicing up a trussed-up victim to the tune of “Stuck in the Middle with You.” None of which meant that a knife was not a knife. Pain was still pain, death still came as the end, and there was unquestionably a crazy young man waving a knife at them in the dark. Neela was awake now, sitting up beside Solanka, pulling the sheet around her nakedness, just the way people did in the movies. “You know him?” she whispered. Eddie laughed. “Oh sure, pretty lady,” he cried. “We have time for a little Qand-A. The professor and me, we’re colleagues.”
“Eddie,” a disconcertingly scarlet-eyeballed, blue-haired Mila said reprovingly from the open doorway. “You stole my keys. He stole my keys,” she said, turning to Solanka in the bed. “Sorry about that. He has, like, strong feelings. I love that in a man. He in particular entertains strong feelings about you. Understandably enough. But the knife? Wrong, Eddie.” She turned back to her fiance. “W-r-o-n-g. How are we supposed to get married if you end up behind bars?” Eddie looked crestfallen, and like a scolded schoolboy stood shifting his weight from foot to foot, diminishing in an instant from mad-dog killer to yelping pet. “Wait outside,” she ordered him, and he shambled dumbly off. “He’ll wait outside,” she said to Solanka, completely ignoring the other woman in the room. “We have to talk.”
The other woman, however, was not accustomed to being erased from any scene of which she was a part. “What does she mean he stole her keys?” Neela demanded. “Why did she have your keys? What did he mean you’re colleagues? What does she mean, ‘understandably enough’? Why does she have to talk?”
She has to talk, Professor Solanka answered silently, because she thinks I think she fucked her father, whereas in fact I know her father fucked her, this being an area of inquiry in which I have done much fieldwork of my own. He fucked her every day like a goat-like a man—and then he left her. And because she loved him as well as loathing him, she has looked ever since for cover versions, imitations of life. She is an expert in the ways of her age, this age of simulacra and counterfeits, in which you can find any pleasure known to woman or man rendered synthetic, made safe from disease or guilt—a lo-cal, to-fi, brilliantly false version of the awkward world of real blood and guts. Phony experience that feels so good that you actually prefer it to the real thing. That was me: her fake.
It was seventeen minutes past three in the morning. Mila, in a trenchcoat and boots, sat down on the edge of the bed. Malik Solanka groaned. Disaster always arrived when your defenses were at their lowest: blindsiding you, like love. “Tell her,” Mila said, at last allowing Neela to exist. “Explain why you gave me the keys to your little kingdom here. Explain about the cushion on your lap.” Mila had prepared carefully for this confrontation. She unbelted the trenchcoat and slipped it off, revealing, of all things, an absurdly short baby-doll nightie. This was an example of the use of clothing as a lethal weapon: wounded Mila was undressed to kill. “Go on, Papi,” she urged. “Tell her about us. Tell her about Mila in the afternoon.”
“Please do,” Eleanor Masters Solanka added grimly, switching on the light as she came in, accompanied by that heavyset, grizzled, bespectacled, blinking Buddhist owl, his ex-buddy Morgen Franz. “I’m sure all of us would be fascinated to hear.” Oh fine, Malik thought. Seems there’s an open-door policy around here. Please, come on in, everybody, don’t mind me, make yourselves at home. Eleanor’s flowing chestnut hair was longer than ever; she wore a long black high-necked cashmere coat and her eyes blazed. She looked amazing for three A.M., Malik noted. He also observed that Morgen Franz was holding her hand; and that Neela was climbing out of his bed and coolly getting dressed. Her eyes, too, were on fire, and Mila’s, of course, were already bright red. Solanka closed his own eyes and lay back, putting a pillow over his face on account of the sudden glare in the room.
Eleanor and Morgen had left Asmaan with his grandmother and flown in to JFK that afternoon. They had checked into a midtown hotel, intending to contact Solanka in the morning to acquaint him with the changed circumstances of their lives. (This, at least, Solanka had intuited in advance: or, rather, Asmaan had filled him in.) Anyway, I couldn’t sleep,” Eleanor said to the pillow. “So I just thought, fuck it, I’d come and wake you up. I see, however, that you are already entertaining; which makes it a good deal easier to say what I came to say.” The softness was gone from her voice. Her fists were clenched, white-knuckled. She was fighting hard to keep her voice under control. Any moment now she would open her mouth and, instead of words, unleash a Fury’s deafening, world-destroying shriek.
He should have known, Solanka thought, pulling the pillow down more firmly over his face. What chance did mortal man have against the devious malice of the gods? Here they were, the three Furies, the “good tempered ones” themselves, in full possession of the physical bodies of the women to whom his life was most profoundly joined. Their external forms were all too familiar, but the fire pouring out of these metamorphosed creatures’ eyes proved that they were no longer the women he had known but rather vessels for the descent into the Upper West Side of the malevolent Divine…… Oh, for goodness’ sake get out of bed,” Neela Mahendra snapped. “Get up right now, so that we can knock you down.”
Professor Malik Solanka rose naked to his feet under the flaming eyes of the women he had loved. The fury that had once possessed him was now theirs; and Morgen Franz was caught up in its force field, Morgen, who had so little to be proud of in his own behavior, except that he too had learned what it was to be the servant of love. Morgen, to whom Eleanor had granted the gift of her wounded self and the stewardship of her son. Crackling with the energy flowing into him from the Furies, he moved toward the naked man like a puppet on lightning strings and swung his nonviolent arm. Solanka dropped, like a tear.
17
Three weeks later he stepped out of a long-haul Airbus at Blefuscu International Aerodrome, into a hot but balmily breezy Southern Hemisphere spring day. A complex bouquet of odors filled his nostrils-hibiscus, oleander, jacaranda, perspiration, excrement, motor oil. Now the great folly of his actions hit him, even harder than the blow from his wife’s pacifist lover, the haymaker, the pacifisticuff that had put him out for the count on his own bedroom floor. What did he think he was doing, a respectable and now extremely wealthy man of fifty-five, chasing halfway around the world after a woman who had literally left him flat? Worse still, why did it agitate him so that the revolutionaries here, Filbistanis, FRM, Fremen—why couldn’t they make up their minds what they were called?—had taken on the identities of his fictions, like firefighters or workers at nuclear power plants donning protective clothing against the dangers of their work? Puppet King costumes may have become a feature of what was going on in these parts, but that didn’t make any of it his responsibility. “You are not a party to these events,” Professor Solanka rebuked himself for the umpteenth time, and himself replied, “Oh yeah? Then why is that hairless flag-waver Babur hanging out with my girl, wearing a molded-latex mask of my face?”