Fury_ A Novel Part 1

Fury_ A Novel.

by Salman Rushdie.

PART one.

1.

Professor Malik Solanka, retired historian of ideas, irascible dollmaker, and since his recent fifty-fifth birthday celibate and solitary by his own (much criticized) choice, in his silvered years found himself living in a golden age. Outside his window a long, humid summer, the first hot season of the third millennium, baked and perspired. The city boiled with money. Rents and property values had never been higher, and in the garment industry it was widely held that fas.h.i.+on had never been so fas.h.i.+onable. New restaurants opened every hour. Stores, dealers.h.i.+ps, galleries struggled to satisfy the skyrocketing demand for ever more recherche produce: limited-edition olive oils, three-hundred-dollar corkscrews, customized Humvees, the latest anti-virus software, escort services featuring contortionists and twins, video installations, outsider art, featherlight shawls made from the chin-fluff of extinct mountain goats. So many people were doing up their apartments that supplies of high-grade fixtures and fittings were at a premium. There were waiting lists for baths, doork.n.o.bs, imported hardwoods, antiqued fireplaces, bidets, marble slabs. In spite of the recent falls in the value of the Nasdaq index and the value of Amazon stock, the new technology had the city by the ears: the talk was still of start-ups, IPOs, interactivity, the unimaginable future that had just begun to begin. The future was a casino, and everyone was gambling, and everyone expected to win.

On Professor Solanka's street, well-heeled white youths lounged in baggy garments on roseate stoops, stylishly simulating indigence while they waited for the billionairedom that would surely be along sometime soon. There was a tall, green-eyed young woman with steeply slanting Central European cheekbones who particularly caught his s.e.xually abstinent but still roving eye. Her spiky strawberry-blond hair stuck out clown-fas.h.i.+on from under a black D'Angelo Voodoo Voodoo baseball cap, her lips were full and sardonic, and she giggled rudely behind a perfunctory palm as old-world, dandyish, cane-twirling little Solly Solanka in straw Panama hat and cream linen suit went by on his afternoon walk. Solly: the college ident.i.ty he'd never cared for but had not entirely managed to lose. baseball cap, her lips were full and sardonic, and she giggled rudely behind a perfunctory palm as old-world, dandyish, cane-twirling little Solly Solanka in straw Panama hat and cream linen suit went by on his afternoon walk. Solly: the college ident.i.ty he'd never cared for but had not entirely managed to lose.

"Hey, sir? Sir, excuse me?" The blonde was calling out to him, in imperious tones that insisted on a reply. Her satraps became watchful, like a Praetorian guard. She was breaking a rule of big-city life, breaking it brazenly, sure of her power, confident of her turf and posse, fearing nothing. This was just pretty-girl chutzpah; no big deal. Professor Solanka paused and turned to face the lounging G.o.ddess of the threshold, who proceeded, unnervingly, to interview him. "You walk a lot. I mean, five or six times a day, I see you walking someplace. I'm sitting here, I see you come, I see you go, but there's no dog, and it's not like you come back with lady friends or produce. Also, the hours are strange, it can't be that you're going to a job. So I'm asking myself, Why is he always out walking alone? There's a guy with a lump of concrete hitting women on the head across town, maybe you heard that, but if I thought you were a weirdo, I wouldn't be talking to you. And you have a British accent, which makes you interesting too, right. A few times there we even followed you, but you weren't going anywhere, just wandering, just covering ground. I got the impression you were looking for something, and it crossed my mind to ask you what that might be. Just being friendly, sir, just being neighborly. You're kind of a mystery. To me you are, anyhow."

Sudden anger rose in him. "What I'm looking for," he barked, "is to be left in peace." His voice trembled with a rage far bigger than her intrusion merited, the rage which shocked him whenever it coursed through his nervous system, like a flood. Hearing his vehemence, the young woman recoiled, retreating into silence.

"Man," said the largest, most protective of the Praetorian guard, her lover, no doubt, and her peroxide-blond centurion, "for an apostle of peace you sure are filled up with war."

She reminded him of someone, but he couldn't remember whom, and the little failure of memory, the "senior moment," nagged at him infuriatingly. Luckily she wasn't there anymore, no one was, when he returned from the Caribbean carnival damp-hatted and soaked through after being caught unprepared by a squall of hard, hot rain. Pa.s.sing the Congregation Shearith Israel on Central Park West (a white whale of a building with a triangular pediment supported by four count 'em four ma.s.sive Corinthian columns), Professor Solanka scurrying through the downpour remembered the newly bat-mitzvahed thirteen-year-old girl he'd glimpsed through the side door, waiting knife in hand for the ceremony of the blessing of the bread. No religion offers a ceremony of the Counting of the Blessings, mused Professor Solanka: you'd think the Anglicans, at least, would have come up with one of those. The girl's face glowed through the gathered gloom, its young round features utterly confident of achieving the highest expectations. Yes, a blessed time, if you cared to use words like "blessed;" which Solanka, a skeptic, did not.

On nearby Amsterdam Avenue there was a summer block party, a street market, doing good business in spite of the showers. Professor Solanka surmised that in the greater part of the planet the goods piled high on these cut-price barrows would have filled the shelves and display cabinets of the most exclusive little boutiques and upper-echelon department stores. In all of India, China, Africa, and much of the southern American continent, those who had the leisure and wallet for fas.h.i.+on-or more simply, in the poorer lat.i.tudes, for the mere acquisition of things-would have killed for the street merchandise of Manhattan, as also for the cast-off clothing and soft furnis.h.i.+ngs to be found in the opulent thrift stores, the reject china and designer-label bargains to be found in downtown discount emporia. America insulted the rest of the planet, thought Malik Solanka in his old-fas.h.i.+oned way, by treating such bounty with the shoulder-shrugging casualness of the inequitably wealthy. But New York in this time of plenty had become the object and goal of the world's concupiscence and l.u.s.t, and the "insult" only made the rest of the planet more desirous than ever. On Central Park West the horse-drawn carriages moved up and down. The jingling of the bells on the harnesses sounded like cash in hand.

The season's. .h.i.t movie portrayed the decadence of Caesar Joaquin Phoenix's imperial Rome, in which honor and dignity, not to mention life-and-death actions and distractions, were to be found only in the computer-regenerated illusion of the great gladiatorial arena, the Flavian Amphitheatre or Colosseum. In New York, too, there were circuses as well as bread: a musical about lovable lions, a bike race on Fifth, Springsteen at the Garden with a song about the forty-one police gunshots that killed innocent Amadou Diallo, the police union's threat to boycott the Boss's concert, Hillary vs vs. Rudy, a cardinal's funeral, a movie about lovable dinosaurs, the motorcades of two largely interchangeable and certainly unlovable presidential candidates (Gush, Bore), Hillary vs vs. Rick, the lightning storms that hit the Springsteen concert and Shea Stadium, a cardinal's inauguration, a cartoon about lovable British chickens, and even a literary festival; plus a series of "exuberant" parades celebrating the city's many ethnic, national, and s.e.xual subcultures and ending (sometimes) in knifings and a.s.saults on (usually) women. Professor Solanka, who thought of himself as egalitarian by nature and a born-and-bred metropolitan of the countryside-is-for-cows persuasion, on parade days strolled sweatily cheek by jowl among his fellow citizens. One Sunday he rubbed shoulders with slim-hipped gay-pride prancers, the next weekend he got jiggy beside a big-a.s.sed Puerto Rican girl wearing her national flag as a bra. He didn't feel intruded upon amid these mult.i.tudes; to the contrary. There was a satisfying anonymity in the crowds, an absence of intrusion. n.o.body here was interested in his mysteries. Everyone was here to lose themselves. Such was the unarticulated magic of the ma.s.ses, and these days losing himself was just about Professor Solanka's only purpose in life. This particular rainy weekend there was a calypso beat in the air, not the mere Harry Belafonte Jamaica-farewells and jacka.s.s-songs of Solanka's somewhat guiltily fond memory ("Now I tell you in a positive way / don' tie me donkey down dere / 'cause me donkey will jump and bray / don tie me donkey down dere!") ("Now I tell you in a positive way / don' tie me donkey down dere / 'cause me donkey will jump and bray / don tie me donkey down dere!"), but the true satirical music of the Jamaican troubadour-polemicists, Banana Bird, Cool Runnings, Yellowbelly, live in Bryant Park and on shoulder-high boomboxes up and down Broadway.

When he got home from the parade, however, Professor Solanka was seized by melancholy, his usual secret sadness, which he sublimated into the public sphere. Something was amiss with the world. The optimistic peace-and-love philosophy of his youth having given him up, he no longer knew how to reconcile himself to an increasingly phony (he loathed, in this context, the otherwise excellent word "virtual") reality. Questions of power preyed on his mind. While the overheated citizenry was eating these many varieties of lotus, who knew what the city's rulers were getting away with-not the Giulianis and Safirs, who responded so contemptibly to the complaints of abused women until amateur videos of the incidents showed up on the evening news, not these crude glove-puppets, but the high ones who were always there, forever feeding their insatiable desires, seeking out newness, devouring beauty, and always, always wanting more? The never encountered but ever present kings of the world-G.o.dless Malik Solanka avoided crediting these human phantoms with the gift of omnipresence-the petulant, lethal Caesars, as his friend Rhinehart would say, the Bolingbrokes cold of soul, the tribunes with their hands up the mayor's and police commissioner's Coriola.n.u.ses ... Professor Solanka shuddered faintly at this last image. He knew himself well enough to be conscious of the broad scarlet streak of vulgarity in his character; still, the crude pun shocked him when he thought of it.

Puppet-masters were making us all jump and bray, Malik Solanka fretted. While we marionettes dance, who is yanking our strings?

The phone was ringing as he came through his front door, the rain still dripping off his hat brim. He answered it snappishly, s.n.a.t.c.hing off its base the cordless unit in the apartment's entrance hall. "Yes, what, please?" His wife's voice arrived in his ear via a cable on the Atlantic bed, or maybe in these days when everything was changing it was a satellite high above the ocean, he couldn't be sure. In these days when the age of pulse was giving way to the age of tone. When the epoch of a.n.a.log (which was to say also of the richness of language, of a.n.a.logy) a.n.a.logy) was giving way to the digital era, the final victory of the numerate over the literate. He had always loved her voice. Fifteen years ago in London he had telephoned Morgen Franz, a publis.h.i.+ng friend who by chance was away from his desk, and Eleanor Masters, pa.s.sing by, had picked up the clamoring instrument; they had never met but ended up talking for an hour. A week later they dined at her place, neither of them alluding to the inappropriateness of so intimate a venue for a first date. A decade and a half of togetherness ensued. So, he fell in love with her voice before the rest of her. This had always been their favorite story about each other; now, of course, in love's brutal aftermath, when memory was reinvented as pain, when voices on the phone were all they had left, it had become one of the saddest. Professor Solanka listened to the sound of Eleanor's voice and with some distaste imagined it being broken up into little parcels of digitized information, her low lovely voice first consumed and then regurgitated by a mainframe computer probably located someplace like Hyderabad-Deccan. What is the digital equivalent of lovely, he wondered. What are the digits that encode beauty, the number-fingers that enclose, transform, transmit, decode, and somehow, in the process, fail to trap or choke the soul of it. Not because of the technology but in spite of it, beauty, that ghost, that treasure, pa.s.ses undiminished through the new machines. was giving way to the digital era, the final victory of the numerate over the literate. He had always loved her voice. Fifteen years ago in London he had telephoned Morgen Franz, a publis.h.i.+ng friend who by chance was away from his desk, and Eleanor Masters, pa.s.sing by, had picked up the clamoring instrument; they had never met but ended up talking for an hour. A week later they dined at her place, neither of them alluding to the inappropriateness of so intimate a venue for a first date. A decade and a half of togetherness ensued. So, he fell in love with her voice before the rest of her. This had always been their favorite story about each other; now, of course, in love's brutal aftermath, when memory was reinvented as pain, when voices on the phone were all they had left, it had become one of the saddest. Professor Solanka listened to the sound of Eleanor's voice and with some distaste imagined it being broken up into little parcels of digitized information, her low lovely voice first consumed and then regurgitated by a mainframe computer probably located someplace like Hyderabad-Deccan. What is the digital equivalent of lovely, he wondered. What are the digits that encode beauty, the number-fingers that enclose, transform, transmit, decode, and somehow, in the process, fail to trap or choke the soul of it. Not because of the technology but in spite of it, beauty, that ghost, that treasure, pa.s.ses undiminished through the new machines.

"Malik. Solly." Solly." (This, to annoy him.) "You're not listening. You've gone off inside your head on one of your riffs and the plain fact that your son is ill hasn't even registered. The plain fact that I have to wake up every morning and listen to him asking-unbearably asking-why his father isn't home hasn't registered. Not to mention the plainest fact of all, namely that without a shred of a reason or a sc.r.a.p of credible explanation you walked out on us, you went off across an ocean and betrayed all those who need and love you most, who still do, d.a.m.n you, in spite of everything." It was only a cough, the boy didn't have anything life-threatening, but she was right; Professor Solanka had withdrawn into himself. In this small telephonic matter as in the greater business of their life once together and now apart, their marriage once considered indissoluble, the best partners.h.i.+p any of their friends had ever witnessed; and of their joint parenthood of Asmaan Solanka, now an improbably beautiful and gentle-natured three-year-old, the miraculously yellow-haired product of dark-haired parents, whom they had named so celestially (This, to annoy him.) "You're not listening. You've gone off inside your head on one of your riffs and the plain fact that your son is ill hasn't even registered. The plain fact that I have to wake up every morning and listen to him asking-unbearably asking-why his father isn't home hasn't registered. Not to mention the plainest fact of all, namely that without a shred of a reason or a sc.r.a.p of credible explanation you walked out on us, you went off across an ocean and betrayed all those who need and love you most, who still do, d.a.m.n you, in spite of everything." It was only a cough, the boy didn't have anything life-threatening, but she was right; Professor Solanka had withdrawn into himself. In this small telephonic matter as in the greater business of their life once together and now apart, their marriage once considered indissoluble, the best partners.h.i.+p any of their friends had ever witnessed; and of their joint parenthood of Asmaan Solanka, now an improbably beautiful and gentle-natured three-year-old, the miraculously yellow-haired product of dark-haired parents, whom they had named so celestially (Asmaan (Asmaan, n., m., lit lit. the sky, but also fig fig. paradise) because he was the only heaven in which they could both wholeheartedly and unreservedly believe.

Professor Solanka apologized to his wife for his distractedness, whereupon she wept, a loud honking noise that squeezed at his heart, for he was by no means a heartless man. He waited silently for her to stop. When she did, he spoke in his most mandarin manner, denying himself-denying her her-the slightest hint of emotion. "I accept that what I have done must feel inexplicable to you. I am remembering, however, what you yourself taught me about the importance of the inexplicable"-here she hung up on him, but he finished the sentence anyway-"in, ah, Shakespeare." Which unheard conclusion conjured up the vision of his wife in the nude, of Eleanor Masters fifteen years ago in her long-haired, twenty-five-year-old glory lying naked with her head in his lap and a battered Complete Works Complete Works, bound in blue leather, face down across her bush. Such had been the indecorous but sweetly swift conclusion of that first dinner. He had brought the wine, three expensive bottles of Tignanello Antinori (three! Evidence of a seducer's excessiveness there), while she had roasted a lamb shank for him and also served, to accompany the c.u.min-scented meat, a salad of fresh flowers. She wore a short black dress and walked lightly, and barefoot, through a flat much influenced by Bloomsbury Group design and craft-work, and boasting a caged parrot who imitated her laugh: a big laugh for so delicate a woman. His first and last blind date, she turned out to be fully the equal of her voice; not only beautiful but smart, somehow both confident and vulnerable, and a great cook. After eating many nasturtiums and drinking copiously of his Tuscan red, she began to explain her doctoral thesis (they were sitting on the floor of her living room by now, lounging on a handmade rug woven by Cressida Bell), but kisses interrupted her, for Professor Solanka had fallen tenderly, like a lamb, in love. They would happily argue, during their long good years, about which of them had made the first move, she always hotly (but with bright eyes) denying that she could ever have been so forward, he insisting-while knowing it to be untrue-that she had "thrown herself at him."

"Do you want to hear this stuff or not?" Yes, he'd nodded, his hand caressing one small, finely wrought breast. She put her hand over his and launched into her argument. Her proposition was that at the heart of each of the great tragedies were unanswerable questions about love, and, to make sense of the plays, we must each attempt to explicate these inexplicables in our own way. Why did Hamlet, loving his dead father, interminably delay his revenge while, loved by Ophelia, he destroyed her instead? Why did Lear, loving Cordelia best of his daughters, fail to hear the love in her opening-scene honesty and so fall prey to her sisters' unlovingness; and why was Macbeth, a man's man who loved his king and country, so easily led by the erotic but loveless Lady M. toward an evil throne of blood? Professor Solanka in New York, still absently holding the cordless telephone in his hand, recalled with awe naked Eleanor's erect nipple beneath his moving fingers; also her extraordinary answer to the problem of Oth.e.l.lo, which for her was not the "motiveless malignity" of Iago but rather the Moor's lack of emotional intelligence, "Oth.e.l.lo's incredible stupidity about love, the moronic scale of the jealousy which leads him to murder his allegedly beloved wife on the flimsiest of evidence." This was Eleanor's solution: "Oth.e.l.lo doesn't love Desdemona "Oth.e.l.lo doesn't love Desdemona. The idea just popped into my head one day. A real lightbulb moment for me. He says he does, but it can't be true. Because if he loves her, the murder makes no sense. For me, Desdemona is Oth.e.l.lo's trophy wife, his most valuable and status-giving possession, the physical proof of his risen standing in a white man's world. You see? He loves that about about her, but not her, but not her her. Oth.e.l.lo himself, obviously, is not a black man but a 'Moor': an Arab, a Muslim, his name probably a Latinization of the Arabic or Ataullah. So he's not a creature of the Christian world of sin and redemption but rather of the Islamic moral universe, whose polarities are honor and shame. Desdemona's death is an 'honor killing.' She didn't have to be guilty. The accusation was enough. The attack on her virtue was incompatible with Oth.e.l.lo's honor. That's why he didn't listen to her, or give her the benefit of the doubt, or forgive her, or do anything a man who loved a woman might have done. Oth.e.l.lo loves only himself, himself as lover and leader, what Racine, a more inflated writer, would have called his flamme flamme, his gloire gloire. She's not even a person to him. He has reified her. She's his Oscar-Barbie statuette. His doll. At least that's what I argued, and they gave me the doctorate, perhaps just as a prize for brazenness, for my sheer gall." She took a big gulp of the Tignanello, then arched her back and put both arms around his neck and pulled him down to her. Tragedy vanished from their thoughts.

These many years later, Professor Solanka stood under a hot shower, warming himself after his soaked ramble with the calypso revelers and feeling like a pompous dope. To quote Eleanor's thesis against her was a cruelty he might easily have spared her. What was he thinking of, giving himself and his paltry actions these high Shakespearean airs? Did he truly dare to set himself beside the Moor of Venice and King Lear, to liken his humble mysteries to theirs? Such vanity was surely a more than adequate ground for divorce. He should call her back and tell her that, by way of apology. But that, too, would strike the wrong note. Eleanor didn't want a divorce. Even now, she wanted him back. "You know perfectly well," she had told him more than once, "that if you decided to give this up, this stupidity of yours, everything would be fine. It would be so fine. I can't bear it that you won't."

And this was the wife he had left! If she had a failing, it was that she didn't give b.l.o.w. .j.o.bs. (His own eccentricity was that he hated having the top of his head touched during the act of love.) If she had a failing, it was that she had so acute a sense of smell that she made him feel as if he stank the place up. (As a result, however, he had begun to wash more often.) If she had a failing, it was that she bought things without ever asking what they cost, an extraordinary trait in a woman who did not, as the British say, come from money. If she had a failing, it was that she had grown accustomed to being kept, and could spend more money on Christmas than half the population earned in a year. If she had a failing, it was that her mother-love blinded her to the rest of humanity's desires, including, to be blunt, Professor Solanka's. If she had a failing, it was that she wanted more children. That she wanted nothing else. Not all the gold of Araby.

No, she was faultless: the tenderest, most attentive of lovers, the most extraordinary mother, charismatic and imaginative, the easiest and most rewarding of companions, not a big talker but a good one (reference that first phone call), and a connoisseur not just of food and drink but of human character, too. To be smiled on by Eleanor Masters Solanka was to feel subtly, pleasingly complimented. Her friends.h.i.+p was a pat on the back. And if she spent freely, what of it? The Solankas were unexpectedly well-off, thanks to the almost shocking worldwide popularity of a female doll with a cheeky grin and the c.o.c.ky insouciance that was just beginning to be called "att.i.tude," and of whom Asmaan Solanka, born eight years later, uncannily looked like the fair-haired, dark-eyed, sweeter-natured flesh-and-blood embodiment. Though he was very much a boy, preoccupied by giant diggers, steamrollers, rocket s.h.i.+ps, and railway engines, and captivated by the I-think-I-can-I-think-I-can-I-thought-I-could-I-thought-I-could determination of Casey Jones, the indomitable circus-hauling little engine in Dumbo Dumbo, Asmaan was constantly, infuriatingly, taken for a girl, probably because of his long-eyelashed beauty, but possibly also because he reminded people of his father's earlier creation. The doll's name was Little Brain.

2.

Professor Solanka in the late 1980s despaired of the academic life, its narrowness, infighting, and ultimate provincialism. "The grave yawns for us all, but for college dons it yawns with boredom," he proclaimed to Eleanor, adding, unnecessarily as things turned out, "Prepare for poverty." Then to the consternation of his fellows, but with his wife's unqualified approval, he resigned his tenured position at King's, Cambridge-where he had been inquiring into the development of the idea of the state's responsibility to and for its citizens, and of the parallel and sometimes contradictory idea of the sovereign self-and moved to London (Highbury Hill, within shouting distance of the a.r.s.enal Stadium). Soon afterward he plunged into, yes, television; which drew down much predictably envious scorn, especially when the BBC commissioned him to develop a late-night series of popular history-of-philosophy programs whose protagonists would be Professor Solanka's notorious collection of outsize egghead dolls, all made by himself.

This was simply too much. What had been a tolerable eccentricity in a respected colleague became intolerable folly in a craven defector, and The Adventures of Little Brain The Adventures of Little Brain was unanimously derided, before it was ever screened, by "intellos" both great and small. Then it aired, and within a season, to general astonishment and the knockers' chagrin, grew from a sophisticated coterie's secret pleasure into a cult cla.s.sic with a satisfyingly youthful and rapidly expanding fan base, until at last it was handed the accolade of being moved into the coveted slot after the main evening news. Here it blossomed into a full-blooded prime-time hit. was unanimously derided, before it was ever screened, by "intellos" both great and small. Then it aired, and within a season, to general astonishment and the knockers' chagrin, grew from a sophisticated coterie's secret pleasure into a cult cla.s.sic with a satisfyingly youthful and rapidly expanding fan base, until at last it was handed the accolade of being moved into the coveted slot after the main evening news. Here it blossomed into a full-blooded prime-time hit.

It was well known at King's that in Amsterdam in his middle twenties Malik Solanka-in the city to speak on religion and politics at a left-leaning inst.i.tute funded by Faberge money-visited the Rijksmuseum and was entranced by that great treasure-trove's displays of meticulously period-furnished dollhouses, those unique descriptions of the interior life of Holland down the ages. They were open-fronted, as if bombs had knocked away their facades; or like little theaters, which he completed by being there. He was their fourth wall. He began to see everything in Amsterdam as if miniaturized: his own hotel on the Herengracht, the Anne Frank house, the impossibly good-looking Surinamese women. It was a trick of the mind to see human life made small, reduced to doll size. Young Solanka approved of the results. A little modesty about the scale of human endeavor was to be desired. Once you had thrown that switch in your head, the hard thing was to see in the old way. Small was beautiful, as Schumacher had just then begun to say.

Day after day, Malik visited the Rijksmuseum dollhouses. Never before in his life had he thought of making anything with his hands. Now his head was full of chisels and glue, rags and needles, scissors and paste. He envisioned wallpaper and soft furnis.h.i.+ngs, dreamed bedsheets, designed bathroom fixtures. After a few visits, however, it became clear that mere houses would not be enough for him. His imaginary environments must be peopled. Without people there was no point. The Dutch dollhouses, for all their intricacy and beauty, and in spite of their ability to furnish and decorate his imagination, finally made him think of the end of the world, some strange cataclysm in which property had remained undamaged while all breathing creatures had been destroyed. (This was some years before the invention of that ultimate revenge of the inanimate upon the living, the neutron bomb.) After he had this idea, the place began to revolt him. He started imagining back rooms in the museum filled with giant heaps of the miniature dead: birds, animals, children, servants, actors, ladies, lords. One day he walked out of the great museum and never went back to Amsterdam again.

On his return to Cambridge he immediately started to construct microcosms of his own. From the beginning his dollhouses were the products of an idiosyncratic personal vision. They were fanciful at first, even fabulist; science-fiction plunges into the mind of the future instead of the past, which had already and unimprovably been captured by the miniaturist masters of the Netherlands. This sci-fi phase didn't last long. Solanka soon learned the value of working, like the great matadors, closer to the bull; that is, using the material of his own life and immediate surroundings and, by the alchemy of art, making it strange. His insight, which Eleanor would have called a "lightbulb moment," eventually led to a series of "Great Minds" dolls, often arranged in little tableaux-Bertrand Russell being clubbed by policemen at a wartime pacifist rally, Kierkegaard going to the opera for the interval so that his friends didn't think he was working too hard, Machiavelli being subjected to the excruciating torture known as the strappado strappado, Socrates drinking his inevitable hemlock, and Solanka's favorite, a two-faced, four-armed Galileo: one face muttered the truth under its breath, while one pair of arms, hidden in the folds of his garments, secreted a little model of the earth spinning around the sun; the other face, downcast and penitent under the stern gaze of the men in the red frocks, publicly recanted its knowledge, while a copy of the Bible was tightly, devoutly clutched by the second pair of arms. Years later, when Solanka quit the academy, these dolls would go to work for him. These, and the questing knowledge-seeker he created to be their television interrogator and the audience's surrogate, the female time-traveling doll Little Brain, who afterward became a star and sold in large numbers around the world. Little Brain, his hip, fas.h.i.+on-conscious, but still idealistic Candide, his Valiant-for-Truth in urban-guerrilla threads, his spiky-haired girl-Bash journeying, mendicant bowl in hand, far into the Deep North of j.a.pan.

Little Brain was smart, sa.s.sy, unafraid, genuinely interested in the deep information, in the getting of good-quality wisdom; not so much a disciple as an agent provocateur with a time machine, she goaded the great minds of the ages into surprising revelations. For example, the favorite fiction writer of the seventeenth-century heretic Baruch Spinoza turned out to be P. G. Wodehouse, an astonis.h.i.+ng coincidence, because of course the favorite philosopher of the immortal s.h.i.+mmying butler Reginald Jeeves was Spinoza. (Spinoza who cut our strings, who allowed G.o.d to retire from the post of divine marionettist and believed that revelation was an event not above human history but inside it. Spinoza who never wore unsuitable s.h.i.+rts or ties.) The Great Minds in The Adventures of Little Brain The Adventures of Little Brain could be time-hoppers, too. The Iberian Arab thinker Averroes, like his Jewish counterpart Maimonides, was a huge Yankees fan. could be time-hoppers, too. The Iberian Arab thinker Averroes, like his Jewish counterpart Maimonides, was a huge Yankees fan.

Little Brain went too far just once. In her interview with Galileo Galilei, she, in the beer-swilling, trash-talking fas.h.i.+on of the new ladettes, offered the great man her own n.o.body-f.u.c.ks-with-me point of view on his troubles. "Man, I wouldn't have taken that stuff lying down," she leaned toward him and fervently said. "If some pope had tried to get me to lie, I'd have started a f.u.c.king revolution, me. I'd have set his house on fire. I'd have burned his f.u.c.king city down." Well, the bad language got toned down-to "freaking"-at an early stage of production, but that wasn't the problem. Arson at the Vatican was too much for the bosses of the airwaves to bear and Little Brain suffered, for the first time, the numbing indignities of censors.h.i.+p. And could do nothing about it except, perhaps, to mutter the truth along with Galileo: it does too move. I would too let it all go up in flames ...

Rewind to Cambridge. Even "Solly" Solanka's first efforts-his s.p.a.ce stations and podlike domestic structures for a.s.sembly on the moon-displayed qualities of originality and imagination which, in the loud dinner-table opinion of a French Lit specialist who was working on Voltaire, were "refres.h.i.+ngly absent" from his scholarly work. The quip raised a big laugh from everyone within earshot.

"Refres.h.i.+ngly absent." This is the Oxbridge way of speech, this easy, bantering offer of insults which are simultaneously not at all serious and in deadly earnest. Professor Solanka never grew accustomed to the barbs, often received terrible injuries from them, always pretended he saw the funny side, never once saw it. Oddly, this was something he had in common with his Voltairean a.s.sailant, the alarmingly named Krysztof Waterford-Wajda, known as Dubdub, with whom he had in fact forged the most unlikely of friends.h.i.+ps. Waterford-Wajda, like Solanka, had gotten the hang of the expected conversational style under the pressure of their ferocious peer group, but he too remained uncomfortable with it. Solanka knew this, and so didn't hold "refres.h.i.+ngly absent" against him. The laughter of the listeners, however, he never forgot.

Dubdub was jovial, Old Etonian, loaded, half-Hurlingham Club deb's delight, half-Polish glowerer, the son of a self-made man, a stocky immigrant glazier who looked, talked, and drank like a backstreet fighter, made his bundle in double glazing, and married amazingly well, to the horror of the country-house set ("Sophie Waterford's married a Pole!"). Dubdub had floppy-haired Rupert Brooke good looks marred by a lantern jaw, a wardrobe full of loud tweed jackets, a drum kit, a fast car, no girlfriend. At a freshers' ball in his first term, emanc.i.p.ated young sixties women refused his invitations to dance, prompting him to cry out, plaintively, "Why are all the girls in Cambridge so rude?" To which some heartless Andree or Sharon replied, "Because most of the men are like you." In the dinner line, hooray-Henry playfully, he offered another young beauty his sausage. To which she, this deadpan Sabrina, this Nicki used to blowing off unwanted admirers, without turning a hair retorted sweetly, "Oh, but there are some animals I simply never eat."

It has to be admitted that Solanka himself had been guilty of needling Dubdub more than once. On their joint graduation day in the liberated summer of 1966, when gowned and elated and hemmed in by parents on the college front lawn they were allowing themselves to dream the future, innocent Dubdub astonis.h.i.+ngly announced his intention of becoming a novelist. "Like Kafka perhaps," he mused, grinning that big upper-cla.s.s grin, his mother's hockey-captain grin which no shadow of pain, poverty, or doubt had ever darkened and which sat so incongruously below his paternal inheritance, the beetling, dark eyebrows reminiscent of untranslatable privations endured by his ancestors in the unglamorous town of Lodz. "In the Rat Hole. Construction of a Machine Without a Purpose. Fury "In the Rat Hole. Construction of a Machine Without a Purpose. Fury. That sort of thing."

Solanka restrained his mirth, charitably telling himself that in the conflict between that smile and those eyebrows, between silver-spoon England and tin-cup Poland, between this glowing six-foot Cruella De Vil fas.h.i.+on plate of a mother and that squat, flat-faced tank of a father, there might indeed be room for a writer to germinate and flourish. Who could say? These might even be the right breeding conditions for that unlikely hybrid, an English Kafka.

"Or, alternatively," Dubdub pondered, "one could go in for the more commercial stuff. Valley of the Dollybirds Valley of the Dollybirds. Or there's the happy medium, halfway between the highbrow and the dross. Most people are middlebrow, Solly, don't argue. They want a little stimulation but not too blasted much. Also, by the by, not too blasted long. None of your great doorstops, your Tolstoy, your Proust. Short books that don't give you a headache. The great cla.s.sics retold-briefly-as pulp fiction. Oth.e.l.lo Oth.e.l.lo updated as updated as The Moor Murders The Moor Murders. What do you say to that?"

That did it. Lubricated by the Waterford-Wajdas' vintage champagne-neither of his own parents had seen fit to travel from Bombay to attend his graduation, and Dubdub had generously insisted on pouring him a gla.s.s, and refilling it frequently-Solanka erupted into an impa.s.sioned protest against Krysztof's absurd proposals, pleading earnestly that the world be spared the literary outpourings of Waterford-Wajda, author. "Please, no obscurely menacing countryhouse sagas: Brideshead Brideshead in the style of in the style of The Castle. Metamorphosis at Blandings The Castle. Metamorphosis at Blandings. Oh, have mercy. Even more, regarding s.e.x romps, restrain yourself. You're more Alex Portnoy than Jackie Susann, who said, remember, that she admired Mr. Roth's talent but wouldn't want to shake his hand. Above all, from your blockbuster cla.s.sics, desist. The Cordelia Conundrum? The Elsinore Uncertainty? The Cordelia Conundrum? The Elsinore Uncertainty? Oh, oh, oh." Oh, oh, oh."

After several minutes of such friendly-unfriendly teasing, Dubdub good-naturedly relented: "Well, p'raps I'll be a film director instead. We're just off to the South of France. They probably need film directors down there."

Malik Solanka had always had a soft spot for goofy Dubdub, in part because of his ability to say things like this, but also because of the fundamentally good and open heart concealed beneath all the posh heehaw. Also, he owed him. At the Market Hill hostel of King's College on a cold fall night in 1963, the eighteen-year-old Solanka had needed rescuing. He had spent his whole first day at college in a state of wild, overweening funk, unable to get out of bed, seeing demons. The future was like an open mouth waiting to devour him as Kronos had devoured his children, and the past-Solanka's links with his family were badly eroded-the past was a broken pot. Only this intolerable present remained, in which he found he couldn't function at all. Far easier to stay in bed and pull up the covers. In his characterless modern room of Norwegian wood and steel-frame windows he barricaded himself against whatever was next in store. There were voices at the door; he didn't answer. Footsteps came and went. At seven P.M. P.M., however, a voice unlike any other-louder, plummier, and utterly confident of a reply-shouted out, "Anyone in there mislaid a b.l.o.o.d.y great trunk with some funny wog name on it?" And Solanka, to his own surprise, spoke up. So the day of terror, of suspended animation, ended and his university years began. Dubdub's appalling voice, like a prince's kiss, had broken the evil spell.

Solanka's worldly goods had been delivered by mistake to the college's hostel on Peas Hill. Krys-he hadn't yet become Dubdub-found a cart, helped Solanka haul the trunk onto it and steer it to its proper home, then dragged the trunk's hapless owner off for a beer and dinner in the college hall. Later they sat side by side in that hall listening to the dazzlingly s.h.i.+ny Provost of King's tell them they were at Cambridge for "three things-intellect! Intellect! Intellect!" And that in the years ahead they would learn most, more than in any supervision or lecture hall, from the time they spent "in one another's rooms, fertilizing one another." Waterford-Wajda's unignorable bray-"HA, ha, ha, HA"-shattered the stunned silence that followed this remark. Solanka loved him for that irreverent guffaw.

Dubdub did not become a novelist or a film director. He did his research, got his doctorate, was eventually offered a fellows.h.i.+p, and snapped it up with the grateful look of a man who has just settled forever the whole question of the rest of his life. In that expression Solanka glimpsed the Dubdub behind the golden-boy mask, the young man desperate to escape from the privileged world into which he had been born. Solanka tried inventing for him, by way of explanation, a hollow socialite of a mother and a boorish brute of a father, but his imagination failed him; the parents he had actually met were perfectly pleasant and seemed to love their son a great deal. Yet Waterford-Wajda had certainly been desperate, and even spoke, when drunk, of the King's fellows.h.i.+p as a "blasted lifeline, the only thing I've got." This, when by anyone's ordinary standards he had so much. The fast car, the drum kit, the family spread in Roehampton, the trust fund, the Tatler Tatlerish connections. Solanka, in a failure of sympathy he later much regretted, told Dubdub not to roll about so much in the mud of self-pity. Dubdub stiffened, nodded, gave a hard laugh-"HA-ha-ha-HA"-and did not speak of personal matters again for many years.

The question of Dubdub's intellectual capacity remained, for many of his colleagues, unanswerable: the Dubdub Conundrum. He seemed so foolish so often-a nickname that never caught on, because it was too unkind even for Cambridge men, was Pooh, after the immortal Bear of Little Brain-yet his academic performance won him much preferment. The thesis on Voltaire that got him his doctorate and provided the launchpad for his later fame read like a defense of Pangloss-both of that imaginary worthy's initial Leibnizian over-optimism and of his later espousal of fenced-in quietism. This ran so profoundly counter to the dystopic, collectivist, politically engage current of the times in which he wrote it as to be, for Solanka as for others, quite seriously shocking. Dubdub gave an annual series of lectures called "Cultiver Son Jardin." "Cultiver Son Jardin." Few lectures at Cambridge-Pevsner's, Leavis's, no others-had attracted comparable crowds. The young (or, to be exact, the younger, because Dubdub for all his fogeyish attire had by no means done with his youth) came to heckle and boo but left more quietly and thoughtfully, seduced by his deep sweetness of nature, by that same blue-eyed innocence and concomitant certainty of being heard that had roused Malik Solanka from his first-day funk. Few lectures at Cambridge-Pevsner's, Leavis's, no others-had attracted comparable crowds. The young (or, to be exact, the younger, because Dubdub for all his fogeyish attire had by no means done with his youth) came to heckle and boo but left more quietly and thoughtfully, seduced by his deep sweetness of nature, by that same blue-eyed innocence and concomitant certainty of being heard that had roused Malik Solanka from his first-day funk.

Times change. One morning in the mid-seventies, Solanka slipped in at the back of his friend's lecture hall. What impressed him now was the toughness of what Dubdub was saying and the way in which his strongly contrasting, almost Pythonesque twittishness defused it. If you looked at him you saw a tweedy fop, hopelessly out of touch with what was then still being called the zeitgeist. But if you listened, you heard something very different: an enveloping Beckettian bleakness. "Expect nothing, don't you know," Dubdub told them, leftist radicals and beaded hairies alike, waving a crumbling copy of Candide Candide. "That's what the good book says. There will be no improvement in the way life is. Dreadful news, I know, but there you have it. This is as good as it gets. The perfectibility of man is just, as you might say, G.o.d's bad joke."

Ten years earlier, when various utopias, marxist, hippyish, seemed just around the corner, when economic prosperity and full employment allowed the intelligent young to indulge their brilliant, idiotic fantasies of dropout or revolutionary Erewhons, he might have been lynched, or at least heckled into silence. But this was the England in the aftermath of the miners' strike and the three-day week, a cracked England in the image of Lucky's great soliloquy in G.o.dot G.o.dot, in which man in brief was seen to shrink and dwindle, and that golden moment of optimism, when the best of all possible worlds seemed just around the bend, was fading fast. Dubdub's Stoical take on Pangloss-rejoice in the world, warts and all, because it's all you've got, and rejoicing and despair are therefore interchangeable terms-was rapidly coming into its own.

Solanka himself was affected by it. As he struggled to formulate his thoughts on the perennial problem of authority and the individual, he sometimes heard Dubdub's voice egging him on. These were statist times, and it was in part Waterford-Wajda who allowed him not to run with the crowd. The state couldn't make you happy, Dubdub whispered in his ear, it couldn't make you good or heal a broken heart. The state ran schools, but could it teach your children to love reading, or was that your job? There was a National Health Service, but what could it do about the high percentage of people who went to their doctors when they didn't need to? There was state housing, sure, but neighborliness was not a government issue. Solanka's first book, a small volume called What We Need What We Need, an account of the s.h.i.+fting att.i.tudes in European history toward the state-vs.-individual problem, was attacked from both ends of the political spectrum and later described as one of the "pre/texts" of what came to be called Thatcherism. Professor Solanka, who loathed Margaret Thatcher, guiltily conceded the partial truth of what felt like an accusation. Thatcherite Conservatism was the counterculture gone wrong: it shared his generation's mistrust of the inst.i.tutions of power and used their language of opposition to destroy the old power-blocs-to give the power not to the people, whatever that meant, but to a web of fat-cat cronies. This was trickle-up economics, and it was the sixties' fault. Such reflections contributed greatly to Professor Solanka's decision to quit the world of thought.

By the late 1970s Krysztof Waterford-Wajda was a bit of a star. Academics had become charismatic. The victory of science, when physics would become the new metaphysics, and microbiology, not philosophy, would grapple with the great question of what it is to be human, was as yet a little way off; literary criticism was the glamour act, and its t.i.tans strode from continent to continent in seven-league boots to strut upon an ever larger international stage. Dubdub traveled the world with personal wind effects ruffling his tousled, prematurely silvery locks, even indoors, like Peter Sellers in The Magic Christian The Magic Christian. Sometimes he was mistaken by eager delegates for the mighty Frenchman Jacques Derrida, but this honor he would wave away with an English self-deprecating smile, while his Polish eyebrows frowned at the insult.

This was the period in which the two great industries of the future were being born. The industry of culture would in the coming decades replace that of ideology, becoming "primary" in the way that economics used to be, and sp.a.w.n a whole new nomenklatura nomenklatura of cultural commissars, a new breed of apparatchiks engaged in great ministries of definition, exclusion, revision, and persecution, and a dialectic based on the new dualism of defense and offense. And if culture was the world's new secularism, then its new religion was fame, and the industry-or, better, the church-of celebrity would give meaningful work to a new of cultural commissars, a new breed of apparatchiks engaged in great ministries of definition, exclusion, revision, and persecution, and a dialectic based on the new dualism of defense and offense. And if culture was the world's new secularism, then its new religion was fame, and the industry-or, better, the church-of celebrity would give meaningful work to a new ecclesia ecclesia, a proselytizing mission designed to conquer this new frontier, building its glitzy celluloid vehicles and its cathode-ray rockets, developing new fuels out of gossip, flying the Chosen Ones to the stars. And to fulfill the darker requirements of the new faith, there were occasional human sacrifices, and steep, wing-burning falls.

Dubdub was an early Icarus-like flameout. Solanka saw little of him in his golden years. Life separates us with its apparently casual happenstance, and when one day we shake our heads as if waking from a reverie, our friends have become strangers and can't be retrieved: "Does n.o.body here know poor Rip van Winkle?" we ask plaintively, and n.o.body, any longer, does. So it was with the two old college pals. Dubdub was mostly in America now, some sort of a chair had been invented for him at Princeton, and there were phone calls back and forth at first, then Christmas and birthday cards, then silence. Until, one balmy Cambridge summer evening in 1984, when the old place was its most perfectly storybook self, an American woman knocked on the oak, the outer door of Professor Solanka's rooms-formerly occupied by E. M. Forster-on "A" staircase, above the students' bar. Her name was Perry Pincus; she was small-boned, dark, big-breasted, s.e.xy, young, but fortunately not young enough to be a student. All these things quickly made a good impression on Solanka's melancholy consciousness. He was recovering from the end of a first, childless marriage, and Eleanor Masters was some way in the future. "Krysztof and I got to Cambridge yesterday," Perry Pincus said. "We're at the Garden House. Or, I'm I'm at the Garden House. He's in Addenbrooke's. Last night he cut his wrists. He's been very depressed. He asked for you. Can I get a drink?" at the Garden House. He's in Addenbrooke's. Last night he cut his wrists. He's been very depressed. He asked for you. Can I get a drink?"

She came in and took in her surroundings appreciatively. The houses, little and largeish, and the humanoid figures sitting everywhere, tiny figures in the houses, of course, but also others outside them, on Professor Solanka's furniture, in the corners of his rooms, soft and hard figures, male and female, also both largeish and small. Perry Pincus was carefully-if heavily-painted, her eyelids weighed down by heavy black eyelash extensions, and she wore full s.e.x-kitten battle dress, a short tight outfit, stiletto heels. Not the customary attire of a woman whose lover has just attempted suicide, but she made no excuses for herself. Perry Pincus was a young Eng Lit person who liked to f.u.c.k the stars of her increasingly uncloistered world. As a devotee of the casual encounter, consequences (wives, suicides) were not her thing. Yet she was bright, lively, and like all of us believed herself to be an acceptable person, even, perhaps, a good one. After her first shot of vodka-Professor Solanka always kept a bottle in the freezer-she said, matter-of-factly, "It's clinical depression. I don't know what to do. He's sweet, but I'm no good at sticking by men in trouble. I'm not the nurse type. I like a take-charge guy." After two shots she said, "I think he was a virgin when he met me. Is that even possible? He didn't admit it, of course. Said back home he was quite a catch. That turns out to be true, financially speaking, but I'm not the money-grubbing type." After three shots she said, "All he ever wanted was to get a b.j. or, alternatively, f.u.c.k me in the a.s.s. Which was okay, you know, whatever. I get a lot of that. It's one of my looks: boy-with-t.i.ts. It gets the s.e.xually confused guys. Trust me on this. I know." After four shots, she said, "Talking of s.e.xually confused, Professor, great dolls." dolls."

He decided he was hungry, but not this hungry, and gently coaxed her downstairs onto King's Parade and into a taxi. She stared at him through the window with smudged eyes and a puzzled expression, then leaned back, closed her eyes, faintly shrugged. Whatever Whatever. Afterward he learned that in her own way Perry "Pinch-a.s.s" was famous on the global literary circuit. You could be famous for anything nowadays, and she was.

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 dressinggown, a worn, stained thing that was perhaps playing the part of a security blanket. His wrists were bandaged. He looked heavier, older, but that G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 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 s.h.i.+elds 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 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 a.s.sented, 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 Magic Christian Derridada! No more Derridada! No more performance performance. Energized by his new resolve, he had flown back to Cambridge with the literary groupie Perry Pincus, an unashamed s.e.xual b.u.t.terfly, actually believing he could set up house with her and build a stable life around the relations.h.i.+p. 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 bypa.s.s 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 mediatique le monde mediatique, 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 f.u.c.k 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-a.s.s'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 gla.s.s 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 s.e.x 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 friends.h.i.+p was what he had instead of family ties, and, more than friends.h.i.+p, 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 f.u.c.king 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 f.u.c.k. Or are you making them with c.u.n.ts now, wooden c.u.n.ts, rubber c.u.n.ts, f.u.c.king inflatable c.u.n.ts that squeak like balloons as you slide in and out; do you have a life-size f.u.c.k-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 f.u.c.king 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 f.u.c.king 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 f.u.c.king cow-faced wife on TV forced to defend you just to defend myself, my own unimaginable stupidity, because after all, I chose you."

Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury-s.e.xual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal-drives us to our finest heights and coa.r.s.est depths. Out of furia furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, pa.s.sion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; s.h.i.+va dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about G.o.ds! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise-the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from f.u.c.king limb. comes creation, inspiration, originality, pa.s.sion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; s.h.i.+va dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about G.o.ds! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise-the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from f.u.c.king limb.

Her name was Lear, Sara Jane Lear, some sort of distant relative of the writer and watercolorist, but there wasn't a trace of antic Edward's immortal nonsense in her. How pleasant to know Sara Lear, who remembers such volumes of stuff! Some folks think her awfully queer, but I find her pleasant enough How pleasant to know Sara Lear, who remembers such volumes of stuff! Some folks think her awfully queer, but I find her pleasant enough. The revised verse didn't raise the ghost of a smile. "Imagine how many times people have recited those exact words to me and you'll excuse me for not being impressed." She was a year or so his senior and was writing a thesis on Joyce and the French nouveau roman nouveau roman. In her second-floor flat on Chesterton Road, "love"-which in retrospect looked more like fear, a mutual clutching at the life belt of the other while drowning in twentysomething loneliness-made him plow his way twice through Finnegans Wake Finnegans Wake. Also the dour pages of Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, and Butor. When he looked up miserably from the great heaps of their slow, obscure sentences, he found her watching him from the other armchair, turning in his direction that angular devil-mask of a face, beautiful but sly. Sly-eyed lady of the Fenlands. He couldn't read her expression. It might have been contempt.

They married too quickly for thought and felt trapped by the mistake almost immediately. Yet they stayed together for several miserable years. Afterward, when he told the story of his life to Eleanor Masters, Solanka cast his first wife as the one with the exit strategies, the player most likely to resign the game. "She gave up early on everything