Malik Solanka told himself he deserved no better than this. Let the worst befall. In the midst of the collective fury of these unhappy isles, a fury far greater, running far deeper than his own pitiful rage, he had discovered a personal Hell. So be it. Of course Neela would never return to him. He was not worthy of happiness. When she came to see him, she had hidden her lovely face.
It was still dark when help came. The cell door opened and a young Indo-Lilly man entered, bare-faced, wearing rubber gloves and carrying a roll of plastic refuse sacks as well as a bucket, pan, and mop. He cleaned up Solanka’s mess unflinchingly and with great delicacy, never seeking to catch the perpetrator’s eye. When he had finished, he returned with clean clothes—a pale green kurta and white pantaloon pajamas—as well as a clean towel, two new buckets, one empty, one full of water, and a bar of soap. “Please,” he said, and, “I am sorry,” and then left. Solanka washed and changed and felt a little more himself. Then Neela arrived, alone, unmasked, in a mustard-colored dress, with a blue iris in her hair.
It obviously preyed on her mind that Solanka had witnessed her timorous responses to her treatment by Babur. “Everything I’ve done, everything I’m doing, is for the story,” she said. “Wearing the mask was a gesture of solidarity, a way of earning the fighters’ trust. Also, you know, I’m here to look at what they’re doing, not to have them look at me. I could see you thought I was hiding from you behind it. That wasn’t so. Similarly with Babur. I’m not here to argue. I’m making a film.” She sounded defensive, taut. “Malik,” she said abruptly, “I don’t want to talk about us, okay? I’m caught up in something big right now. My attention has to be there.”
He went for it, gathered himself and made his play. All or nothing, Hollywood or bust: he would never get another chance. He might not have much of one anyway, but at least she had come to see him, had actually dressed up for it, and that was a good sign. “This has become much more than a documentary film project for you,” he said. “This really goes to the heart. There’s a lot riding on it—your uprooted roots are pulling hard. Your paradoxical desire to be a part of what you left. And, no, I didn’t really think you were wearing the mask to hide your face from me, or at least that wasn’t the only thing I thought. I also thought you were hiding from yourself, from the decision you’ve made somewhere along the line to cross a line and become a participant in this thing. You don’t look like an observer to me. You’re in too deep. Maybe it started out with a personal feeling about Babur—and don’t worry, this isn’t jealousy speaking, at least I’m trying hard not to let it be—but my guess is that whatever your feelings about ‘Commander Akasz’ were, they’re a lot more ambiguous now. Your problem is that you’re an idealist trying to be an extremist. You are convinced that your people, if I can use so antiquated a term, have been done down by history, that they deserve what Babur has been fighting for-voting rights, the right to own property, the whole slate of legitimate human demands. You thought this was a struggle for human dignity, a just cause, and you were actually proud of Babur for teaching your passive kinsmen and kinswomen how to fight their own battles. In consequence you were willing to overlook a certain amount of, what shall we call it, illiberalism. War is tough and so on. Certain niceties get trampled. All this you told yourself, and all the while there was another voice in your head telling you in a whisper you didn’t want to hear that you were turning into history’s whore. You know how it is. Once you’ve sold yourself, all you have left is a limited ability to negotiate the price. How much would you put up with? How much authoritarian crap in the name of justice? How much bathwater could you lose without losing the baby?—So now you’re caught up, as you say, in something big, and you’re right, it deserves your attention, but so does this: that you only went this far because of the fury that possessed you all of a sudden in my bedroom in another city in another dimension of the universe. I can’t articulate exactly what happened that night, but I do know that some sort of psychic feedback loop established itself between you and Mila and Eleanor, the fury went round and round, doubling and redoubling. It made Morgen punch me out and it blew you clean across the planet into the arms of a little Napoleon who will oppress ‘your people’ if he comes out of this on top, even more than the ethnic Elbees, who have been, at least in your eyes, the villains of this piece. Or he’ll oppress them just as much but in a different way. Please don’t misunderstand. I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick’s wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.—I’m not saying that you came here because of me. You were coming anyway, right? It was our big farewell night, and as I remember, it had gone pretty well until my bedroom turned into Grand Central Station. So you’d have been here, and the pulls and pushes of being here would have worked on you whether I existed or not. But I think that what pushed you over the edge was disappointed love. You were disappointed in me and by me, which is to say by love, by the great untrammeled love you were just allowing yourself to begin to feel for me. You had just begun to trust me enough, to trust yourself enough, to let yourself go, and then suddenly the prince turns out to be a fat old toad. What happened is that the love you’d poured out went bad, it curdled, and now you’re using that sourness, that disenchantment and cynicism, to push you down Babur’s dead-end road. Why not, eh? If goodness is a fantasy and love is a magazine dream, why not? Nice guys finish second, to the victor go the spoils, et cetera. Your system is fighting itself, the bruised love is turning on the idealism and battering it into submission. And guess what? That puts you in an impossible situation, where you’re risking more even than your life. You’re risking your honor and self-respect. Here it is, Neela, your Galileo moment. Does the earth move? Don’t tell me. I already know the answer. But it’s the most important question you’re ever going to be asked, except for the one I’m going to ask you now: Neela, do you still love me? Because if you don’t, then please leave, go meet your fate and I’ll wait here for mine, but I don’t think you can do that. Because I do love you as you need to be loved. You choose: in the right corner there’s your handsome Prince Charming, who also, by a small mischance, turns out to be a psychotic megalomaniacal swine. In the wrong corner there’s the fat old toad, who knows how to give you what you need and who needs, so very badly, what you in turn know how to give him. Can right be wrong? Is the wrong thing right for you? I believe you came here tonight to find out the answer, to see if you could conquer your fury as you helped me conquer mine, to find out if you could find a way of coming back from the edge. Stay with Babur and he’ll fill you up with hatred. But you and me: we just might have a shot. I know it’s stupid to make this kind of declaration when just an hour ago I was stinking of my own shit and I still don’t have a room with a doorknob on the inside, but there it is, that’s what I crossed the world to say.”
“Wow,” she said, after allowing a suitably respectful moment of silence to elapse. “And I thought I was the big mouth on this team.”
She fished a heat-softened Toblerone bar out of her purse and Solanka fell upon it greedily. “He’s losing the men’s confidence,” she told Solanka. “The boy who helped you out tonight? There are plenty more like him, maybe as many as half the total, and for some reason they whisper to me. Kbuss puss, khuss puss. It’s so sad. ‘Madam, we are decent persons.’ Khusspuss. ‘Madam, Commander Sahib is acting strange, isn’t it? ‘Khusspuss. ‘Please, madam, do not mention my thoughts to anyone.’ I’m not the only idealist around here. These kids didn’t think they were going to war to flatten the earth or abolish the hours of darkness. They’re fighting for their families, and all this green-cheese material unnerves them. So they come to me and complain, and that puts me in a very dangerous place. It doesn’t really matter what advice I give being a second focal point, a rival center, is quite dangerous enough. One rat—one mole—is all it would take, and speaking of toads, yes, I do love you, very much. Meanwhile, what I saw on the outside before I brought the team in here was an army that’s pretty sick of being a laughingstock. My information is they’ve been talking to the Americans and the British. The rumor says that the marines and the SAS may already be in Mildendo, in fact, I’ve been feeling pretty foolish for weeks about running out on you like that. There’s a British aircraft carrier just outside territorial waters, and Babur doesn’t control the military airfields on Blefuscu, either. The truth is I’ve been thinking for a while now that it’s time to leave, but I don’t know how Babur will take it. Half of him wants to fuck me on national television and the other half wants to beat me up for making him feel that way. So now you know the real reason why I’ve been wearing the mask: it’s the next best thing to putting my head in a paper bag, and you came all this way for me and walked into the lion’s den. I guess you must really dig me too, huh. I’m working on an out. If I can get the right Fremen in the right places, I think it can be done, and I have contacts in the army that can at least get us out to the British boat or maybe a military plane. In the meanwhile I’ll make sure you get looked after. I still don’t know about Babur, how far gone he is. Maybe he thinks you’re a valuable hostage, even though I keep telling him you’re not worth the trouble, you’re just a civilian who blundered into something he didn’t understand, a little fish he should throw back into the sea. If you don’t kiss me soon, I’ll be forced to kill you with my own bare hands. Okay, that’s good. Now stay put. I’ll be back.”