6

“Islam will cleanse this street of godless motherfucker bad drivers,” the taxi driver screamed at a rival motorist. “Islam will purify this whole city of Jew pimp assholes like you and your whore roadhog of a Jew wife too.” All the way up Tenth Avenue the curses continued. “Infidel fucker of your underage sister, the inferno of Allah awaits you and your unholy wreck of a motorcar as well.” “Unclean offspring of a shit-eating pig, try that again and the victorious jihad will crush your balls in its unforgiving fist.” Malik Solanka, listening in to the explosive, village-accented Urdu, was briefly distracted from his own inner turmoil by the driver’s venom. ALI MAJNU said the card. Majnu meant beloved. This particular Beloved looked twenty-five or less, a nice handsome boy, tall and skinny, with a sexy John Travolta quiff, and here he was living in New York, with a steady job; what had so comprehensively gotten his goat?

Solanka silently answered his own question. When one is too young to have accumulated the bruises of one’s own experience, one can choose to put on, like a hair shirt, the sufferings of one’s world. In this case, as the Middle East peace process staggered onward and the outgoing American president, hungry for a breakthrough to buff up his tarnished legacy, was urging Barak and Arafat to a Camp David summit conference, Tenth Avenue was perhaps being blamed for the continued sufferings of Palestine. Beloved Ali was Indian or Pakistani, but, no doubt out of some misguided collectivist spirit of paranoiac pan-Islamic solidarity, he blamed all New York road users for the tribulations of the Muslim world. In between curses, he spoke to his mother’s brother on the radio—“Yes, Uncle. Yes, carefully, of course, Uncle. Yes, the car costs money. No, Uncle. Yes, courteously, always, Uncle, trust me. Yes, best policy. I know”—and also asked Solanka, sheepishly, for directions. It was the boy’s first day at work in the mean streets, and he was scared witless. Solanka, himself in a state of high agitation, treated Beloved gently but did say, as he alighted at Verdi Square, “Maybe a little less of the blue language, okay, Ali Majnu? Tone it down. Some customers might be offended. Even those who don’t understand.”

The boy looked at him blankly. “I, sir? Swearing, sir? When?” This was odd. “All the way,” Solanka explained. At everyone within shouting distance. Motherfucker, Jew, the usual repertoire. Urdu,” he added, in Urdu, to make things clear, “meri madri zaban hai. “Urdu is my mother tongue. Beloved blushed, deeply, the color spreading all the way to his collar line, and met Solanka’s gaze with bewildered, innocent dark eyes. “Sahib, if you heard it, then it must be so. But, sir, you see, I am not aware.” Solanka lost patience, turned to go. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Road rage. You were carried away. It’s not important.” As he walked off along Broadway, Beloved Ali shouted after him, needily, asking to be understood: “It means nothing, sahib. Me, I don’t even go to the mosque. God bless America, okay? It’s just words.”

Yes, and words are not deeds, Solanka allowed, moving off fretfully. Though words can become deeds. If said in the right place and at the right time, they can move mountains and change the world. Also, uhhuh, not knowing what you’re doing—separating deeds from the words that define them—was apparently becoming an acceptable excuse. To say “I didn’t mean it” was to erase meaning from your misdeeds, at least in the opinion of the Beloved Alis of the world. Could that be so? Obviously, no. No, it simply could not. Many people would say that even a genuine act of repentance could not atone for a crime, much less this unexplained blankness—an infinitely lesser excuse, a mere assertion of ignorance that wouldn’t even register on any scale of regret. Shockingly, Solanka recognized himself in foolish young Ali Majnu: the vehemence as well as the blanks in the record. He did not, however, excuse himself. At Jack Rhinehart’s apartment, before the poleaxing arrival of Neela Mahendra had changed the subject, he had been attempting, while concealing the depth of his perturbation, to confess to Rhinehart something of his fear about the terrorist anger that kept taking him hostage. Jack, absorbed in the soccer game, nodded absently. “You must know you’ve always had a short fuse,” he said. “I mean, you are aware of that, right? You’re conscious of the number of times you’ve rung people up to apologize the number of times you’ve rung me up—the morning after some little wine-lubricated explosion of yours? The Collected Apologies of Malik Solanka. I always thought that would make a fine book. Repetitive, maybe, but with rich comic delights.”

Some years back, the Solankas had vacationed at the cottage in the Springs with Rhinehart and his “waitress” of the moment, a petite Southern belle—from Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, scene of the Civil War’s “Battle Above the Clouds”—who was a dead ringer for the cartoon sexpot Betty Boop and to whom Rhinehart referred affectionately as Roscoe, after Lookout Mountain’s only living celebrity, the heavy-serving tennis player Roscoe Tanner, in spite of her evident hatred of the nickname. The cottage was small and it was necessary to spend as much time as possible away from it. One night after a protracted, men-only drinking session at an East Hampton watering hole, Solanka had insisted on driving back during a heavy downpour. A period of dumbstruck terror ensued. Then Rhinehart said, as mildly as he could, “Malik, in America we drive on the other side of the road.” Solanka had blown up and, incensed at the disrespect being shown to his driving skills, had stopped the car and actually forced Rhinehart to walk home in the drenching rain. “That was one of your best apologies,” Jack now reminded him. “Particularly because the next morning you couldn’t remember doing anything wrong at all.”

“Yes,” Solanka murmured, “but now I’m having the blackouts without the booze. And the anger events are on a completely different scale.” The noise of the TV crowd surged as he spoke, demanding Rhinehart’s attention, and the confession passed unheard. “Oh, and,” Rhinehart resumed moments later, “you can’t not know how hard your friends try to avoid certain subjects in your company. U.S. policy in Central America, for example. U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. Actually, the U.S.A. in general has been pretty much an off-limits topic for years, so don’t think I wasn’t tickled when you decided to relocate yo’ ass in the bosom of the Great Satan hisself” Yes, but, Solanka wanted to say, rising to the bait, what’s wrong is wrong, and because of the immense goddamn power of America, the immense fucking seduction of America, those bastards in charge get away with… “There you go, you see,” Rhinehart pointed at him, chuckling. “Just swellin’ up fit to bust. Bright red, then purple, then almost black. A heart attack waiting to happen. You know what we call it when it happens? Getting Solankered. Malik’s China syndrome. It’s an honest to God fuckin’ meltdown. I mean, mah fren’, Ira the man who actually done gone to these places and brought back the bad news, but that don’t stop you from tellin’ me off ‘bout it, on account of my citizenship, which in yo’ mad eyes makes me ‘sponsible for de mighty evil dat keep gettin’ done in mah po’ name.”

No fool like an old fool. So he and Beloved Ali were really the same after all, Solanka humbly thought. Just a few slight surface differences of vocabulary and education. No: he was worse, because Beloved was just a boy on his first day in a new job, while he, Solanka, was becoming something awful and perhaps uncontrollable. The bitter irony was that his old habits of combativeness, this evidently comic intemperateness of his, would blind even his friends to the great change in kind, the hideous deterioration, that was now taking place. This time there really was a wolf coming and nobody, not even Jack, was listening to his cries.