This was a genuine puzzlement. “Because of the British empire, I mean. On which the sun never sets. There’s no offense intended. That’s what I want to be sure of. That the line doesn’t come across as an insult to your country’s glorious past.” Professor Solanka felt huge irritation rise up in his breast. He experienced a strong desire to screech at this fellow with the damn-fool alias, to call him names and perhaps actually smack him across the face with an open hand. It took an effort to restrain himself, and in a level voice to reassure earnest young Mark in his David Ogilvy-clone outfit that even the most red-faced colonels in England were unlikely to be upset by his banal formulation. Then he hurried into his apartment, shut the door with his heart pounding, leaned against the wall, closed his eyes, gasped, and shook. Yes, this was the other side of the coin of his new hi-how-you-doin’, up-front, in-your face, MASTECTOMY BRA environment: this new cultural hypersensitivity, this almost pathological fear of giving offense. Okay, he knew that, everybody knew it, that wasn’t the point. The point was, where was all this anger coming from? Why was he being caught off guard, time and again, by surges of rage that almost overwhelmed his will?
He took a cold shower. Then for two hours he lay in his darkened bedroom with both air conditioner and ceiling fan working flat-out to battle the heat and humidity. Controlling his breathing helped, and he also used visualization techniques to relax. He imagined the anger as a physical object, a soft dark throbbing lump, and mentally drew a red triangle around it. Then he slowly made the triangle smaller until the lump disappeared. This worked. His heartbeat returned to normal. He switched on the bedroom television, a whirring and clanking old monster of a set dating from an earlier generation of technology, and watched El Duque on the mound, his amazing, hyperbolic action. The pitcher coiled himself up until his knee almost touched his nose, then unwound like a whip. Even in this erratic, almost panicky season in the Bronx, Hernandez inspired calm.
Professor Solanka made the mistake of flipping briefly to CNN, where it was all Elian, all the time. Professor Solanka was nauseated by people’s eternal need for totems. A little boy had been rescued from a rubber ring in the sea, his mother drowned, and at once the religious hysteria had begun. The dead mother became almost a Marian figure and there were posters reading ELIAN, SAVE US. The cult, born of Miami’s necessary demonology—according to which Castro the devil, Hannibal-the-Cannibal Castro, would eat the boy alive, would tear out his immortal soul and munch it down with a few fava beans and a glass of red wine-instantly developed a priesthood as well. The dreadful media-fixated uncle was anointed pope of Elianismo, and his daughter, poor Marisleysis, with her “nervous exhaustion,” was exactly the type who would, any day now, start witnessing the seven-year-old’s first miracles. There was even a fisherman involved. And of course apostles, spreading the word: the photographer living in Elian’s bedroom, the TV-movie people waving contracts, publishing houses doing likewise, CNN itself and all the other news crews with their uplink dishes and fuzzy mikes. Meanwhile in Cuba, the little boy was being transformed into quite another totem. A dying revolution, a revolution of the old and straggle-bearded, held the child up as proof of its renewed youth. In this version, Elian rising from the waters became an image of the revolution’s immortality: a lie. Fidel, that ancient infidel, made interminable speeches wearing an Elian mask.
And for a long time the father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, stayed in his hometown of Cardenas and said little. He said he wanted his son back, which was perhaps dignified, and perhaps enough. Pondering what he himself might do if his uncles and cousins were to come between him and Asmaan, Professor Solanka snapped a pencil in half. Then he switched channels back to the ball game, but it was too late. El Duque, himself a Cuban refugee, would not be of Solanka’s mind in this. That mind, in which Asmaan Solanka and Elian Gonzalez blurred and joined, was overheating again, pointing out that in his own case no relatives had needed to get between Solanka and his child. He had achieved the rupture without outside assistance. As the helpless rage mounted in him he used, again, his well-practiced techniques of sublimation, and directed the anger outward, at the ideologically deranged Miami mob, transformed by experience into what they hated most. Their flight from bigotry had turned them into bigots. They screamed at journalists, abused politicians who disagreed with them, shook their fists at passing cars. They spoke of the evils of brainwashing, but their own brains were self-evidently unclean. “Not washing but staining,” Solanka found himself actually yelling aloud at the Cuban pitcher on TV. “You people have been brainstained by your lives. And that little boy on a swing with a hundred camera snouts nosing at his confusion: what are you telling him about his dad?”
He had to go through it all over again: the shaking, the pounding, the gasping for air, the shower, the darkness, the breathing, the visualization. No drugs; he had put them off-limits, and he was also avoiding head doctors. The gangster Tony Soprano might be going to a shrink, but fuck him, he was fictional. Professor Solanka had resolved to face his demon by himself. Psychoanalysis and chemistry felt like cheating. If the duel were to be truly won, if the demon that possessed him was to be wrestled to the mat and consigned to hell, it had to be just the two of them going at it, ass naked, without restraint, in a bare-knuckle fight to the death.
It was dark when Malik Solanka deemed himself fit to leave the apartment. Shaken, but putting on a show of jauntiness, he set out for the Kieslowski double bill. If he had been a Vietnam vet or even a re porter who’d seen too much, his behavior would have been more readily comprehensible. Jack Rhinehart, an American poet and war correspondent he had known for twenty years, if woken by a ringing telephone would, to this day, usually smash the instrument to bits. He couldn’t stop himself doing it, and was only half awake when it happened. Jack got through a lot of phones, but he accepted his fate. He was damaged, and thought himself lucky it wasn’t worse. But the only war Professor Solanka had been in was life itself, and life had been kind to him. He had money and what most people thought of as an ideal family. Both his wife and child were exceptional. Yet he had sat in his kitchen in the middle of the night with murder on the brain; actual murder, not the metaphorical kind. He’d even brought a carving knife upstairs and stood for a terrible, dumb minute over the body of his sleeping wife. Then he turned away, slept in the spare bedroom, and in the morning packed his bags and caught the first plane to New York without giving a reason. What had happened was beyond reason. He needed to put an ocean, at least an ocean, between himself and what he had almost done. So Ms. Mila, the empress of West Seventieth Street, had been closer to the truth than she knew. Than she must ever know.
He was waiting in line at the cinema, lost inside himself. Then a young man’s voice started up behind his right ear, disgracefully loud, not caring who listened, telling its story to a companion but also to the whole line, to the city; as if the city cared. To Eve in Metropolis was to know that the exceptional was as commonplace as diet soda, that abnormality was the popcorn norm: “So finally I called her, and I’m like, hi, Mom, wassup, and she goes, You wanna know who’s sitting down to dinner here in Nowheresville, who’s right here eating your mother’s meatloaf, we’ve got Santa Claus, that’s all. Santa Claus sitting right there at the head of the table where your snake skunk weasel father used to set his motherfuckin’ dumb-fuck ass. I swear to God. I mean it’s three P.m. and she’s already losing it. That’s what she said, word for fuckin’ word. Santa Claus. And I go, Sure, Mom, and where’s Jesus at. And she comes back with, That’s Mister Jesus Christ to you, young man, and I’ll have you know that Mister Jesus H. Christ is takin’ care of the fish course. So, that was all I could handle, so I’m like, So long, Mom, give the gentlemen my best, have a happy.” And alongside the male voice there was a woman’s hard, horrified laughter. HA-ha-ha-HA.