He understood that she had made him one of her projects. Mila’s special thing turned out to be the collection and repair of damaged people. She was up-front about this when he asked her. “It’s what I can do. I fix people up. Some people do up houses. I renovate people.” So in her eyes he was like an old mansion, or at least like this old Upper West Side duplex he had sublet, this handsome space that hadn’t been spruced up since, probably, the sixties and had begun to look a bit tragic; inside and out, she said, it was time for a whole new look. “As long as you don’t hang any cradle full of noisy, foulmouthed, beedi-smoking Punjabi decorators on my frontage,” he concurred. (The construction workers had, mercifully, done their work and left; only the characteristic din of the city street remained. Even this racket, however, seemed more muted than before.)

Her friends, the vampire stoop troop, were also unveiled by her for Solanka’s benefit, becoming a little more than mere attitudes. She had worked on them, too, and was proud of her—of their—achievements. “It took time—they actually liked their schoolboy eyewear and ugh corduroy. But now I am privileged to lead the most fashion-forward geek posse in New York, and when I say geek, Professor, I mean genius. These kids are the coolest, and when I say cool I mean hot. The Filipino who sent out the I Love You virus? Forget it. That was amateur night; this is major league. If these babies wanted to hit Gates with a virus, you can bet he’d sneeze for years. You see before you the kind of surfer boys and girls the Evil Emperor is really scared of, disguised as Gen X slackers for their own safety, to conceal them from the Empire’s Darths, Vader the Black and Maul the Red ‘n’ Horny. Or, right, you don’t like Star Wars, so then these are like hobbits I’m hiding from Sauron the Dark Lord and his Ringwraiths. Frodo, Bilbo, Sam Gamgee, the whole Fellowship of the Ring. Until the time comes and we take him down and burn his power in Mount Doom. Don’t think I’m kidding. Why should Gates fear the competitors he has, he’s beaten them already: they’re just serfs. He’s got them cold. What gives him nightmares is that some kid will come out of a cold-water walk-up someplace with the next big thing, the thing that makes him yesterday’s papers. Obsolete. That’s why he keeps buying people like us out, he’s ready to lose a few million now so that he won’t lose his billions tomorrow. Yeah, I’m with the law courts, tear that palace down, break it in half, can’t happen too soon for me. But in the meanwhile we’ve got big plans of our own. Me? Call me Yoda. Backwards I speak. Upside down I think. Inside out can I turn you. Strong with you think you the Force is? Strongest in me it moves. Seriously,” she concluded, dropping the rubber-puppet voice, “I’m just management. And at this point sales and marketing and publicity also. Keep it lean and mean, right? What you call my vampires? They’re the creative artists. Webspyder.net. We’re designing sites right now for Steve Martin, Al Pacino, Melissa Etheridge, Warren Beatty, Christina Ricci, and Will Smith. Yeah. And Dennis Rodman. And Marion Jones and Christina Aguilera and Jennifer Lopez and Todd Solondz and ‘N Sync. Big business? We’re in there. Con Ed, Verizon, British Telecom, Nokia, Canal Plus, if it’s in communication, we’re in communication wit’ it. You want highbrow? These are the guys whose phones’re ringing off the hook from like Robert Wilson and the Thalia Theater of Hamburg and Robert Lepage. I’m telling you: they’re out there. It’s frontier law today, Professor, and this here’s the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. Butch, Sundance, the whole Wild Bunch. Me, I play house mother. And run the front of house.”

So he had misjudged them, and they were whiz kids; except for Eddie. They were the storm troopers of the technologized future about which he had such profound misgivings; except, again, for Eddie. But then Eddie Ford had been Mila’s most ambitious project “until you came along. Also,” she said, “you and Eddie have more in common than you think.”

Eddie had a throwing arm that had brought him far from his origins in Nowheresville, all the way to Columbia, in fact, all the way to Mila Milo’s bed, one of the most sought after pieces of real estate in Manhattan; but in the end it doesn’t matter how far you can throw the football. You can’t throw away the past, and in that past, back home in Nowheresville, Nix., Eddie’s young life had been freighted with tragedy. The characters were sketched out for Solanka by Mila, whose solemnity imbued them with something close to Greek stature. Here was Eddie’s Uncle Raymond, the hero back from Vietnam, who skulked for years in a Unabomberish cottage in the pine-wooded mountains above town, believing himself unfit for human company on account of his damaged soul. Ray Ford was prone to violent rages, which could be triggered even in those remote altitudes by a backfiring truck in the valley below, a falling tree, or birdsong. And here was Ray’s “snake skunk weasel” of a brother, Eddie’s mechanic father, Tobe, cheap card-player, cheaper drunk, an asshole whose act of betrayal would cripple all their lives. And here finally was Eddie’s mom, Judy Carver, who in those days hadn’t started keeping company with Santa and Jesus and who out of the goodness of her heart had gone up into the mountains every week since the early seventies, until, fifteen years later, when little Eddie was ten years old, she coaxed the mountain man down into town.

Eddie was in awe of his shaggy, odorous uncle, and more than a little afraid of him; yet his childhood trips up to Ray’s place were the highlights of his life experience and formed his most vivid memories, “better than the movies,” he said. (Judy had started taking him along after his fifth birthday, hoping to tempt Ray back into the world by showing him the future, trusting in Eddie’s good nature to win the wild man’s heart.) On their way up the mountain Judy would sing old Arlo Guthrie songs and young Eddie would sing right along: “It was late last night the other day, I thought I d go up and see Ray, So I went up and I saw Ray, There was only one thing Ray could say, was, I don’t want a pickle, Just want to ride on my motorsickle… “ But this Ray wasn’t that Ray. This Ray didn’t own a Harley hog and there wasn’t no Alice with or without a restaurant. This Ray lived on beans and roots and probably bugs and germs, Eddie reckoned, and on snakes caught in his bare hands and eagles pulled out of the sky. This Ray was gimpy and had teeth like rotting wood and breath that could knock you flat at a dozen paces. And yet this was the Ray in whom Judy Carver Ford could still see the sweet boy who went to war, the boy who could twist the silver paper inside cigarette packs into freestanding human figures and whittle pine into portraits of girls, which he’d give them in return for a kiss. (Dolls, Malik Solanka marveled. No escape from their old voodoo. Here was another goddamn dollmaker’s tale. And another sanyasi, too. That was what Mila had meant. A truer sanyasi than I, his withdrawal from society made in proper ascetic fashion. But like me in that he wanted to lose himself because of his fear of what lay beneath, what might bubble up at any moment and lay waste to the undeserving world.) Judy had once kissed Raymond herself, before making her bad mistake and settling for Tobe, whose bad back saved him from the draft, from whose bad character nobody could save her; except, she thought, Ray. If Ray came down from his fastness maybe that would be a sign, and things would change, and the brothers could go fishing and bowling, and Tobe would clean up his act, and then maybe she’d get some peace. And at long last Ray Ford did come, scrubbed and shaved and wearing a clean shirt, so spruced up that Eddie didn’t recognize him when he walked through the door. Judy had made her signature celebration dinner, the same feast of meatloaf and tuna that she afterward offered to Messrs. Christmas and Christ, and for a while there everything went well; not too much talking, but that was okay, everybody was getting used to being in the house with everybody else.