“I wondered if I should tell you,” Mila confided, “but then I thought, screw him, the gloves are off.” Dofia Gin was still singing, but the screaming of the Furies momentarily drowned her voice. The hungry goddesses were beating around both their heads, feeding on their rage. The Pincus interview roared in him, and Mila’s expression changed. “Shh,” she said. “Okay, I’m sorry, but will you please stop making that noise? We’ll get thrown out of here and I haven’t even had dessert yet.” It was plain that the roar had escaped into the room. People were looking. The owner-manager, a Raul Julia look-alike, was coming across the room. A glass broke in Malik Solanka’s hand. There was a messy, mingled flow of wine and blood. It became necessary to leave. Bandages were produced, a doctor’s assistance refused, the check was hurriedly brought forward and settled. Outside, it had begun to rain. Mila’s fury abated, trumped by his own. “About the woman on Howard?” she said in the eventual taxi uptown. “She came across as basically an aging nympho playing kiss and tell. You’re an older person, you should know how life is. Loose ends dangling everywhere, and once in a while they snap back and lash you across the face. Let her go. She’s nothing to you, hardly ever was, and with the amount of bad karma she’s storing up, I don’t like her chances. Enough public screaming! Jesus. Sometimes you’re scary. Mostly I think you wouldn’t hurt a fly and then suddenly you’re this Godzilla creature from the black lagoon who looks like he could rip the throat off a Tyrannosaurus Rex. You’ve got to bring that thing under control, Malik. Wherever it’s coming from, you need to send it away.”

“Islam will cleanse your soul of dirty anger,” the taxi driver interrupted, “and reveal to you the holy wrath that moves mountains.” Then he added, switching languages as another car came unacceptably close to his taxicab, “Hey! American man! You are a godless homosexual rapist of your grandmother’s pet goat.” Solanka began to laugh, the dreadful mirthless laughter of release: hard, painful, racking sobs. “Hello again, Beloved Ali,” he coughed. “Good to see you in such top form.”

One week later, Mila somewhat surprisingly called and invited him over .to talk about something else.” Her manner was friendly, businesslike, excited. She had bounced back fast, Solanka marveled, accepting her invitation. It was his first visit to Mila’s tiny fourth-floor walk-up, which, he thought, was trying hard to be an all-American apartment but failing badly: posters of Latrell Sprewell and Serena Williams hung uncomfortably on either side of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves groaning with volumes of Serbian and Eastern European literature in the original, and in French and English translation—Kic, Andris, Pavic, some of the convention-busting Klokotrizans, and, from the classical period, Obradovic and Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic; also Klima, Kadare, Nadas, Konrad, Herbert. There was no picture of her father on display; Solanka noted the significant omission. A framed monochrome photograph of a young woman in a belted floral-print frock smiled broadly at Solanka. Mila’s mother, looking like Milas younger sister. “Look how happy she is,” Mila said. “That was the last summer before she knew she was sick. I’m now the same exact age she was when she passed, so that’s one nightmare less to worry about. I made it across that hurdle. For years I didn’t think I would.” She wanted to belong to this city, this country at this time, but old European demons were screeching in her ears. In one respect, however, Mila was unreservedly of her American generation. The computer workstation was the room’s focal point: the Mac PowerBook, the older desktop Macintosh pushed to the back of the work surface, the scanner, the CD burner, the plug-in audio system, the music sequencer, the backup Zip drive, the manuals, the shelves of CDROMs, DVDs, and much other stuff, which Solanka couldn’t easily identify. Even the bed felt like an afterthought. Certainly he would never know its pleasures. She had brought him up here, he understood, to put all that behind them. It was another example of her system of inverted signs. Her dead father was the most important person in her life; therefore, no picture of Dad was visible. Solanka was now to be no more than the professor next door; ergo, invite him into your bedroom for a cup of coffee.

She had clearly prepared a speech and was in a state of high readiness, buzzing with it. Once he had been given his mug of coffee, the obviously planned olive branch was offered. “Because I’m a superior type of human being,” Mila said, with a trace of the old humor, “because I can rise above personal tragedy and function on a higher plane, and also because I really think you’re great at what you do, I talked to the guys about your new project. The cool science fiction figures you’ve been coming up with: the mad cyberneticist, the drowning planet idea, the cyborgs versus the lotus-eaters from the other side of the world, the fight to the death between the counterfeit and the real. We’d like to come and talk to you about building a site. There’s a whole presentation we have, you can get an idea of what’s possible. To tell you just one thing, they’ve developed a way of compressing video material that gives you close to DVD quality on-line, and within one generation it’ll be at least a match. It’s ahead of anything you’ll get anywhere else. You have no comprehension of the speed of things now, every year is the Stone Age to the year that follows. Just the creative potential, what can be done with an idea now. The best sites are inexhaustible, people come back and back, it’s like a world you’re giving them to belong to. Sure, you have to get the sales and delivery mechanism right, it has to be easy to buy into what you’re offering, and we have a cool pitch on that also. But the point is to make it easy for you. You already have the back-story and the characters. Which we love. Then to keep control of the concept, you’ll need to put together a master handbook, character-development parameters, storyline do’s and don’ts, the laws of your imagined universe. Inside that framework, there are so many brilliant kids who would just love to create all kinds of, you can’t even say it, they’re inventing whole new media every day. If it works, of course, the old media will come running, books, records, TV, movies, musicals, who knows.

“I love these guys. They’re so hungry, they can take an idea and run with it into, like, the fifth dimension, and all you have to do is let them make it happen for you, you’re the absolute monarch, nothing happens if you don’t want it to; you just sit there and go yes, no, yes, yes, no whoa, whoa.” She made calming, pressing gestures with both hands. “Hear me out. Will you for Chrissake hear me out, you owe me that much. Malik, I know how unhappy you were—are—about the whole Little Brain saga. This is me, remember? Malik, I know that. That’s what I’m saying to you here. This time you don’t lose control. This time you have a better vehicle than even existed when you came up with Little Brain, and you drive it, totally. This is your chance to get right what went wrong before, and if it works, let’s not be coy here, the financial upside is very, very strong. We all think this could be huge if it’s done right. On Little Brain, by the way, I don’t one hundred percent agree with your position, because as you know I think she’s great, and things are changing, the whole concept of ownership as far as ideas is so different now, it’s so much more cooperative. You have to be a little more flexible, just a little bit more, okay? Let other people into your magic circle now and then. You’re still the magician, but let everyone else play with the wands sometimes. Little Brain? Let her fly, Malik, let her be what she is. She’s all grown-up now. Let her go. You can still love her. She’s still your child.”