She was on her feet, her fingers flying at the laptop, soliciting its aid. Perspiration beaded her lip. The seventh veil falls away, Solanka thought. Fully clothed as Mila was in her daytime sportswear, she stood naked before him at last. Furia. This was the self she had never fully shown, Mila as Fury, the world-swallower, the self as pure transformative energy. In this incarnation she was simultaneously terrifying and wonderful. He could never resist a woman when she flowed at him this way, letting her riverine abundance overwhelm him. This is what he looked for in women: to be overpowered, outmatched. This Gangetic, Mississippian inexorability, whose dwindling, he sadly knew, was what had gone wrong in his marriage. Overwhelming doesn’t last for ever. No matter how astonishing the initial contact, in the end the beloved astonishes us less. She merely whelms and, even further down the road, underwhelms. But to give up on his need for excess, for the immense thing, the thing that made him feel like a surfer in the snow, riding the crest of an avalanche’s leading edge! To say good-bye to that need would also be to accept that he was, in the matter of desire, agreeing to be dead. And when the living agree with themselves to be dead, the dark fury begins. The dark fury of life, refusing to die before its allotted time.

He reached out for Mila. She knocked his arm aside. Her eyes were shining: she had recovered from him already and was resurrected as a queen. “This is what we can be to each other now, Malik. Take it or leave it. If you say no, I don’t want to talk to you ever again. But if you come aboard, we’ll work our butts off for you and there’ll be no hard feelings from me. This new world is my life, Malik, it’s the thing of my time, growing as I grow, learning as I learn, becoming as I become. It’s where I feel most alive. There, inside the electricity. I told you: you need to learn how to play. Serious play, that’s my thing. That’s the heart of what’s happening, and I know how to do it, and if you can give me the material I need to work with, well, baby, for me that’s better than what was waiting under the cushion on your lap. Nice as that was, don’t get me wrong. Nice as that undoubtedly was. Okay, I’m done. Don’t answer. Go home. Think about it. Let us make the full presentation. It’s a big decision. Take it slow. Make it when you’re ready. But make it soon.”

The computer screen burst into life. Images raced toward him like bazaar traders. This was technology as hustler, peddling its wares, Solanka thought; or, as if in a darkened nightclub, gyrating for him. Laptop as lapdancer. The auxiliary sound system poured high-definition noise over him like golden rain. “I don’t need to think about it,” he told her. “Let’s do it. Let’s go.”

14

Eleanor rang, and Solankas emotional bar went up another notch. “You know how to generate love, Malik,” his wife told him. “You just don’t know what to do with it once it’s there.” But still no anger in that mellifluous voice. “I was thinking, it was so wonderful being loved by you. I was missing you, I suppose, so I’m glad I found you in. I see us everywhere I go, isn’t it stupid, I see us having so many good times. Your son is so special. Everyone who sees him thinks so. Morgen thinks he’s the best ever, and you know what Morgen thinks of kids. But he loves Asmaan to bits. Everyone does. And you know, he’s always asking, ‘What would Daddy say? What would Daddy think? ‘You’re very much in his thoughts. And in mine. So I was only wanting to say, both of us are sending you so much love.”

Asmaan took the phone. “I want to talk to Daddy. Hello, Daddy. I’ve got a stuffed-up nose. That’s why I was crying. That’s why Olive isn’t here.” That’s why was because. Because Olive isn’t here. Olive was the mother’s helper, whom Asmaan adored. “I did a picture for you, Daddy. It’s for Mummy and you. I’ll show it to you. It has red and yellow and white. I did a picture for Grandpa. Grandpa’s dead. That’s why he was ill for a long while. Grandma isn’t dead yet. She’s okay. Maybe she’ll die tomorrow. I’m going to be a stoolboy, Daddy. That’s why I’m going to a good stool soon. I’m not going tomorrow! No. Another day. It’s a nursery stool, anyway. Not a big one. That’s why I have to be bigger for the big one. I’m not going there today! Hmm. Have you got a pa-resent, Daddy? Maybe there’s a big ephelant inside it. Could be! Probably it’s a big ephelant. Well: ‘bye!”

At dawn he woke alone in bed, roused by an agony of floorboards on the floor above. Somebody certainly was an early riser up there. All Solanka’s senses seemed to be on red alert. His hearing had grown so unnaturally sharp that he could hear the beeps of the upstairs message machine, the water pouring from his neighbor’s watering can into her window boxes and pots of indoor flowers. A fly settled on his exposed foot, and he actually leapt out of bed as if touched by a ghost and stood in the middle of the room, naked, foolish, filled with fear. Sleep was impossible. The street was already raucous. He took a long hot shower and read himself the riot act. Mila was right. He had to bring this thing under control. A doctor, he had to go to a doctor and get some proper medication. What was it Rhinehart had called him in jest? A heart attack waiting to happen. Well, delete heart. He had become an attack in waiting. His bad temper might have been comical once, but it was no joke now. If he hadn’t done anything yet, he might at any moment; if the fury hadn’t already led him into the country of the irreversible, it would, he knew it would. He feared himself already, and pretty soon he would have scared off everyone else. He wouldn’t need to drop out of the world; it would rush away from him. He would become the person people crossed the road to avoid. What if Neela made him angry? What if in a moment of passion she touched the top of his head?

Here at the outset of the third millennium, medication was readily available to deal with the irruption into the adult self of the outrageous and the inchoate. Once if he’d roared like a warlock in a public place, he might have been burned for a devil or weighted with stones to see if he’d float in the East River, like a witch. Once at the very least he might have been placed in the pillory and pelted with rotten fruit. Now all that was required was to settle one’s check rapidly and leave. And every good American knew the names of half a dozen effective mood-management medicaments. This was a nation for which the daily recitation of pharmaceutical brand names—Prozac, Halcion, Seroquil, Numscul, Lobotomine—was like a Zen koan, or the assertion of a kind of screwy patriotism: I pledge allegiance to the American drug. So what was happening to him was eminently preventable. Therefore, most people would say, it was his duty to prevent it, so that he could stop being afraid of himself, stop being a danger to others, start walking back toward his life. Toward Asmaan, the Golden Child. Asmaan the sky, who needed his father’s sheltering love.

Yes, but the medication was a mist. It was a fog you swallowed that curled around your mind. The medication was a shelf and you had to sit on it while the world went on around you. It was a translucent shower curtain, like the one in Psycho. Things grew opaque; no, no, that wasn’t right. What became opaque was you. Solanka’s scorn for this age of doctors resurfaced. You wanted to be taller? All you had to do was go to the tall doctor and let him put metal extensions into your long bones. For thinner, there was the thin doctor, the pretty doctor for prettier, and so on. Was that all there was? Was that it? Were we just cars now, cars that could take themselves to the mechanic and get themselves fixed up any way they wanted? Customized, with leopard-spotted seats and wraparound sound? Everything in him fought against the mechanization of the human. Wasn’t this exactly what his imagined world was being created to confront? What could a head doctor tell him about himself that he didn’t already know? Doctors knew nothing. All they wanted was to manage you, to tame you doggy-style or hood you like a hawk. Doctors wanted to push you down on your knees and break them, and once you started using those chemical crutches they handed out, you’d never walk on your own two legs again.