Fury (15 page)

Shh, she said, laying a finger across his lips. Shh, Papi, no. Nothing happened then and it’s not happening now. Her second use of the incriminating nickname had a new, pleading quality to it. She needed this, needed him to allow it. The spider was caught in her own necrophiliac web, dependent on men like Solanka to raise her lover very, very slowly from the dead. Thank the God who doesn’t exist that I have no daughters, Malik Solanka thought. Then misery choked him. No daughter, and I have also lost my son. Elian the Icon has gone home to Cardenas, Cuba, with his papa but I can’t go home to my boy. Mila’s lips were against his neck now, moving over his Adam’s apple, and he felt a gentle suction. The pain ebbed; and something more, too, was taken. His words were being removed from him. She was drawing them out and swallowing them and he would never be able to say them again, the words describing the thing that was not, that the spider-sorceress in her black majesty would never permit to be.

And what if, Solanka wildly conjectured, she was feeding off his fury? What if she was hungriest for what he feared most, the goblin anger within? For she was driven by fury also, he knew that, by the wild imperative fury of her hidden need. At that moment of revelation Solanka could easily have believed that this beautiful, accursed girl, whose weight was moving with such suggestive languor on his lap, whose fingertips touched his chest hair as faintly as a summer breeze and whose lips were working softly at his throat, might actually be the very incarnation of a Fury, one of the three deadly sisters, the scourges of mankind. Fury was their divine nature and boiling human wrath their favorite food. He could have persuaded himself that behind her low whispers, beneath her unfailingly even tempered tones, he could hear the Erinnyes’ shrieks.

Another page of her back-story revealed itself to him. Here was the poet Milo with his weak heart. This gifted, driven man had ignored all medical advice and continued, with an almost ludicrous excessiveness, to drink, smoke, and womanize. His daughter had offered an explanation of Conradian grandeur for this behavior: life must be lived until it can be lived no more. But as Solanka’s eyes opened he saw a different picture of the poet, a portrait of the artist fleeing into excess from grievous sin, from what he must have daily believed to be his soul’s death, its condemnation for all eternity to the most agonizing circle of Hell. Then came that last journey, Papi Milo’s suicidal flight toward his murderous namesake. This, too, now conveyed to Malik Solanka something other than Mila had made it mean. Fleeing one evil, Milo had gone to face what he thought of as the lesser peril. Escaping the consuming Fury, his daughter, he ran toward his full, unabbreviated name, toward himself. Mila, thought Solanka, you probably drove your maddened father to his death. And what, now, might you have in store for me?

He knew one frightening answer to that. At least one veil still hung between them, over not her story but his. He had known from the first minute of this illicit liaison that he was playing with fire, that everything he had driven deep down within himself was being stirred, the seals were being broken one by one, and that the past, which had almost destroyed him once before, might yet be given a second chance to finish the job. Between this new, unlooked-for story and that old, suppressed tale the unarticulated resonances echoed. This question of dollification. The matter of allowing oneself to be. Of having no choice but. Of the slavery of childhood when. Of need: this one’s that one’s most inexorable. Of the power of doctors to. Of the child’s impotence in the face of. Of the innocence of children in. Of the child’s guilt, its fault, its most grievous fault. Above all the matter of sentences that must never be completed, because to complete them would release the fury, and the crater of that explosion would consume everything at hand.

Oh, weakness, weakness! He still couldn’t refuse her. Even knowing her as he now did, even understanding her true capabilities and intuiting his possible peril, he couldn’t send her away. A mortal who makes love to a goddess is doomed, but once chosen cannot avoid his fate. She continued to visit him, all dolled up, just the way he wanted her, and every day there was progress. The polar ice-cap was melting. Soon the level of the ocean would rise too high and they would surely drown.

When he left the apartment nowadays he felt like an ancient sleeper, rising. Outside, in America, everything was too bright, too loud, too strange. The city had come out in a rash of painfully punning cows. At Lincoln Center Solanka ran into Moozart and Moodama Butterfly. Outside the Beacon Theatre a trio of horned and uddered divas had taken up residence: Whitney Mooston, Mooriah Cowrey, and Bette Midler (the Bovine Miss M). Bewildered by this infestation of paronomasticating livestock, Professor Solanka suddenly felt like a visitor from Lilliput-Blefuscu or the moon or, to be straightforward, London. He was alienated, too, by the postage stamps, by the monthly, rather than quarterly, payment of gas, electricity, and telephone bills, by the unknown brands of candy in the stores (Twinkies, Ho Hos, Ring Pops), by the words “candy” and “stores,” by the armed policemen on the streets, by the anonymous faces in magazines, faces that all Americans somehow recognized at once, by the indecipherable words of popular songs which American ears could apparently make out without strain, by the end-loaded pronunciation of names like Farrar, Harrell, Caudell, by the broadly spoken e’s that turned
expression
into axprassion, I’ll get
the check
into Il1gat
the check;
by, in short, the sheer immensity of his ignorance of the engulfing melee of ordinary American life. Little Brain’s memoirs filled bookstore windows here as well as in Britain, but that brought him no joy. The successful writers of the moment were unknown to him. Eggers, Pilcher: they sounded like they belonged on a restaurant menu, not a bestseller list.

Eddie Ford was often to be seen sitting alone on the neighboring stoop as Professor Solanka returned home-the websypders were evidently busy with their nets-and in the banked fire of the blond centurion’s slow-burn gaze Malik Solanka imagined he saw the belated beginnings of suspicion. Nothing was said between them, however. They nodded at each other briefly and left it at that. Then Malik entered his paneled retreat and waited for his deity to come. He took up his place in the large leather armchair that had become their preferred place of ease and set upon his lap the red velvet cushion with which, thus far, he had continued to protect what remained of his heavily compromised modesty. He closed his eyes and listened to the ticking of the mantelpiece’s antique carriage clock. And at some point Mila came soundlessly in-he had given her a set of keys-and what was to be done, what she insisted was not being done at all, was quietly done.

In that charmed space, during Mila’s visits, almost complete silence remained the norm. There were murmurs and whispers but no more. However, in the last quarter hour or so before she left, after she briskly leapt off his lap, smoothed her dress, and brought them both a glass of cranberry juice or a cup of green tea, and while she adjusted herself for the outside world, Solanka could offer her, if he so desired, his hypotheses on the country whose codes he was trying to unlock.

For example, Professor Solanka’s as-yet-unpublished theory on the differing attitudes toward oral sex in the United States and England this aria being prompted by the president’s inane decision to start apologizing yet again for what he should always have crisply said was nobody else’s business-got a sympathetic hearing from the young woman snuggled down on his lap. “In England,” he explained in his most straitlaced style, “the heterosexual b.j. is almost never offered or received before full, penetrative coitus has taken place, and sometimes not even then. It’s considered a sign of deep intimacy. Also a sexual reward for good behavior. It’s rare. Whereas in America, with your well-established tradition of teenage, ah, ‘makeouts’ in the backs of various iconic automobiles, ‘giving head,’ to use the technical term, precedes ‘full’ missionary-position sex more often than not; indeed, it’s the most common way for young girls to preserve their virginity while keeping their sweethearts satisfied.

“In short, an acceptable alternative to fucking. Thus, when Clinton affirms that he had never had sex with that woman, Moonica, the Bovine Ms. L., everyone in England thinks he’s a pink-faced liar, whereas the whole of teen (and much of pre- and post-teen) America understands that he’s telling the truth, as culturally defined in these United States. Oral sex is precisely not sex. It’s what enables young girls to come home and with their hands on their hearts tell their parentshell, it probably enabled you to tell your father-that you hadn’t ‘done it.’ So Slick Willy, Billy the Clint, has just been parroting what any red-blooded American teenager would have said. Arrested development? Okay, probably so, but this was why the impeachment of the president failed.”

“I see what you mean.” Mila Milo nodded when he was done, and returned to his side, in an unexpected and overwhelming escalation of their end-of-afternoon routine, to remove the red velvet cushion from his helpless lap.

That evening, encouraged by whispering Mila, he returned with new fire to his old craft. There’s so much inside you, waiting, she had said. I can feel it, you’re bursting with it. Here, here. Put it into your work, Papi. The
furia.
Okay? Make sad dolls if you’re sad, mad dolls if you’re mad. Professor Solankas new badass dolls. We need a tribe of dolls like that. Dolls that say something. You can do it. I know you can, because you made Little Brain. Make me dolls that come from her neighborhood-from that wild place in your heart. The place that isn’t a little middle-aged guy under a pile of old clothes. This place. The place for me. Blow me away, Papi. Make me forget her! Make adult dolls, R-rated, NC-17 dolls. I’m not a kid anymore, right? Make me dolls I want to play with now.

He understood at last what Mila did for her webspyders other than dress them more fashionably than they could manage for themselves. The word “muse” was attached sooner or later to almost all beautiful women seen with gifted men, and no self-respecting, Chinese fan-twirling leader of fashion would currently be seen dead without one, but most such women were more amusement than muse. The true muse was a treasure beyond price, and Mila, Solanka discovered, was capable of being genuinely inspiring. Just moments after her potent urgings, Solanka’s ideas, so long congealed and dammed, began to burn and flow. He went out shopping and came home with crayons, paper, clay, wood, knives. Now his days would be full, and most of his nights as well. Now, when he awoke fully dressed, the street smell would not be on his clothes, nor would the odor of strong drink foul his breath. He would awake at his workbench with the tools of his trade in his hand. New figurines would be watching him through mischievous, glittering eyes. A new world was forming in him, and he had Mila to thank for the divine afflatus: the breath of life.

Joy and relief coursed through him in long uncontrollable shudders. Like that other shudder at the end of Mila’s last visit, when the cushion came off his lap. The ending he had waited for like the addict he had become. Inspiration also soothed another, growing trouble in him. He had begun to entertain fears about Mila, to hypothesize a great, dangerous selfishness in her, an overarching ambition that made her see others, himself included, as mere stepping-stones on her own journey to the stars. Did those brilliant boys really need her? Solanka had begun to wonder. (And came close to the next question: Do I2) He had glimpsed a possible new incarnation of his living doll-in which Mila was Circe, and at her feet sat her oinking swine-but now he pushed that dark vision aside; also its even more ferocious companion, the vision of Mila as Fury, as Tisiphone, Alecto, or Megaera come down to earth in a cloak of sumptuous flesh. Mila had justified herself. She had provided the spur that had sent him back to work.

On the cover of a leather-bound notebook he scribbled the words “Professor Kronos’s Amazing No-Strings Puppet Kings.” And then added: “Or, Revolt of the Living Dolls.” And then, “Or, Lives of the Puppet Caesars.” Then he crossed out everything except the two words “Puppet Kings,” opened the notebook, and in a great rush began to write the back-story of the demented genius who would be his antihero.

Akasz Kronos, the great, amoral cyberneticist of the Rijk,
he began,
created the Puppet Kings in response to the terminal crisis of the Rijk civilization, but, on account of the deep and unimprovable flaw in his character that made him unable to consider the issue of the general good, intended them to guarantee nobody’s survival or fortune but his own.

Jack Rhinehart rang the next afternoon, sounding wired. “Malik, wassup. You still living like a guru in an ice cave? Or a castaway on
Big
Brother Is Not Watching You?
Or does news from the outside world still reach you from time to time.-You heard the one about the Buddhist monk in the bar? He goes up to the Tom Cruise clone with the cocktail shaker and says, ‘Make me one with everything.’-Listen: you know a broad by the name of Lear? Claims to have been your wife. Seems to me
nobody
deserves as much bad luck as being married to
that
honey. She’s like one hundred and ten years old, and ornery as a cut snake. Oh, and on the subject of wives? I’m divorced. It turned out to be easy. I just gave her everything.”

Everything really was everything, he amplified: the cottage in the Springs, the fabled wine shack, and several hundreds of thousands of dollars. “And this is all right with you?” Solanka asked, astonished.
“Yeah,
yeah,” Rhinehart gabbled. “You should have seen Bronnie. Jaw on the floor. Grabbed the offer so fast I thought she’d herniate. So, can you believe it, she’s
gone.
She’s
toast.
It’s Neela, man. I don’t know how to say this, but she eased something in me. She made it all okay.” His voice became boyish-conspiratorial. “Have you ever seen anyone
actually stop traffic? I
mean one hundred percent without question
arrest the motion of motor vehicles
just by being around? She has that power. She climbs out of a cab and five cars and two fire trucks screech to a halt. Also, walking into lampposts. I never believed it happened outside of Mack Sennett slapstick two-reelers. Now I see guys do it every day. Sometimes, in restaurants,” Rhinehart confided, bubbling with glee, “I’d ask her to walk to the women’s room and back, just so I could watch the men at the other tables get whiplash injuries. Can you imagine, Malik, my regrettably celibate friend, what it was like to be with
that? I mean
,
every night?”