9
“There’s a look you sometimes get that reminds me of my father before he died,” Mila Milo said, blithely unaware of how that sentence might be received by its subject. “Kind of indistinct, like a picture where the photographer’s hand shook a little? Like Robin Williams in that movie where he’s always out of focus. I once asked Dad what it meant and he said it was the look of a person who had spent too much time around other human beings. The human race is a life sentence, he said, it’s a rough confinement, and sometimes we all need to break out of jail. He was a writer, a poet mostly but a novelist also, you won’t have heard of him, but in Serbo-Croat he’s considered pretty good. More than pretty good, actually, quite amazing, one of the best of the best. Nobelisable, as the French say, but he never got it. Didn’t live long enough, I guess. Still. Take it from me. He was good. The depth of his connection to the natural world, his feeling for the ancients, for folklore: he was one of a kind. Hobgoblins jumping in and out of flowers, I teased him. The flower inside the goblin would be better, he answered. The memory of a pure shining river that lingers in Satan’s heart. You have to understand that religion was important for him. He lived in cities mostly, but his soul was in the hills. An old soul, people called him. But he was young at heart, too, you know? He really was. A barrel of monkeys. Most of the time. I don’t know how he managed it. They never let up on him, they kept messing with his head. We lived in Paris for years after he got out from under Tito, I attended the American School there until I was eight, nearly nine, my mom unfortunately passed when I was three, three and a half, breast cancer, what can you do, it just killed her real fast and real painfully, may she rest in peace. Anyway, so he would get letters from home and 1 would open them for him and there, stamped on the front page of a letter from I don’t know his sister or someone was a big official stamp saying, This letter has not been censored. HA! In the mid-eighties I came with him to New York to attend the big PEN conference, the famous one when there were all those parties, one at the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan and another at Saul and Gayfryd Steinberg’s apartment, and nobody could decide which was grander, and Norman Mailer invited George Shultz to speak at the Public Library and so the South Africans boycotted the event because he was, like, pro-apartheid, and Shultz’s security people wouldn’t let Bellow in because he’d forgotten his invitation, so that made him a possible terrorist, until Mailer vouched for him, Bellow must have liked that!, and then the women writers protested because the platform speakers were mostly men, and either Susan Sontag or Nadine Gordimer scolded them because, she said, Nadine or Susan, I forget, literature isn’t an equal opportunity employer. And Cynthia Ozick I think it was accused Bruno Kreisky of being an anti-Semite even though he was a, a Jew and b, the European politician who’d taken in the most Russian-Jewish refugees, and all this because he’d had a meeting with Arafat, one meeting, so that makes Ehud Barak and Clinton really anti-Semitic, right?, I mean it’s going to be Jew-Haters International down there at Camp David. And anyway Dad spoke, too, the conference had some grand title like ‘The Imagination of the Writer Versus the Imagination of the State,’ and after somebody, I’ve forgotten,
Breytenbach or Oz, someone like that, said that the state had no imagination, Dad said that on the contrary, not only did it have an imagination, it also had a sense of humor, and he would give an example of a joke by the state, and then he told the story of the letter that had not been censored, and I sat there in the audience feeling so proud because everybody laughed and after all I was the one who opened the letter. I went with him to every session, are you kidding?, I was crazy for writers, I’d been a writer’s daughter all my life and books to me were like the greatest thing, and it was so cool because they let me sit in on everything even though I was only small. It was so great to see my dad finally with his like peers and getting so much respect, and besides, here were all these names walking around attached to the real people they belonged to, Donald Barthelme, Gunter Grass, Czeslaw Milosz, Grace Paley, John Updike, everyone. But at the end my father had that look on his face, the one like the one on yours, and he left me with Aunt Kitty from Chelsea, not my real aunt, she and Dad had a thing for about five minutes—you should have seen him with women, he was this big sexy guy with huge hands and a thick mustache like I guess Stalin, and he would look women in the eye and start talking about animals in heat, wolves, for instance, and that was it, they were gone. I swear to God these ladies would actually make a line, he’d go up to his hotel room and they’d form right up outside, a real honest to goodness line, the greatest women you can imagine, just weak at the knees with lust; and it’s lucky I liked to read a lot, and also there was American TV to watch for once, so I was okay in the other room, I was fine, though a lot of times I wanted to go out and ask those women waiting around for it to be their turn, like, don’t you have something better to do, you know?, it’s only his pecker for Chrissakes, get a life. Yeah, I used to shock a lot of people, I grew up fast I guess because it was always my dad and me, always him and me against the world. So anyway I guess he liked Aunt Kitty, she must’ve passed the audition, because her prize was she got to look after me for two weeks while Dad went off with two professors to walk in I think the Appalachians; hill walking was what he liked to do to get rid of his people overdoses, and he always came back looking different, kind of clearer, you know? I called it his Moses look. Down from the mountain, you know, with the Decalogue. Only in Dad’s case, usually, poetry. Anyhow, long story short, about five minutes after he got back from schmoozing with the profs on a mountainside, he was offered a post at Columbia University and we moved to New York permanently. Which I loved, sure, but he was like I said a country person and a dyed-in-the-wool European person, too, so it was harder for him. Still, he was used to working with what there was, used to handling whatever life sent his way. Okay, he drank like a real Yugoslav and he smoked about a hundred a day and he had a bad heart, he knew he was never going to be an old man, but he had made a decision about his life. You know, like in The Nigger of the Narcissus. I must live until I die. And that’s what he did, he did great work and had great sex and smoked great cigarettes and drank great liquor and then the damn war started and out of nowhere he turned into this person I didn’t know, this, I guess, Serb. Listen, he despised the guy he called the other Milosevic, he hated having the same name, and that’s really why he changed it, if you want the truth. To separate Milo the poet from Milosevic the fascist gangster pig. But after it all went crazy out there in getting-to-be-ex-Yugo, he got all worked up about the demonization of the Serbs, even though he agreed with most of the analysis of what Milosevic was doing in Croatia and going to do in Bosnia, his heart was just inflamed by the anti-Serb stuff, and in some mad moment he decided it was his duty to go back and be the moral conscience of the place, you know, like Stephen Dedalus, to forge in the smithy of his soul et cetera et cetera or some Serb Solzhenitsyn. I told him to cut it out, who was Solzhenitsyn anyway but this crazy old coot in Vermont dreaming of being a prophet back in Mother Russia, but when he got home nobody was listening to his same old song, that’s definitely not the route you want to go, Dad, for you it’s women and cigarettes and booze and mountains and work work work, the idea was to let that stuff kill you, right, the plan was to stay away from Milosevic and his killers, not to mention bombs. But he didn’t listen to me, and instead of sticking to the game plan he caught a plane back there, into the fury. That’s what I started out to say, Professor, don’t talk to me about fury, I know what it can do. America, because of its omnipotence, is full of fear; it fears the fury of the world and renames it envy, or so my dad used to say. They think we want to be them, he’d say after a few hits of hooch, but really we’re just mad as hell and don’t want to take it anymore. See, he knew about fury. But then he set aside what he knew and behaved like a damn fool. Because about five minutes after he landed in Belgrade or maybe it was five hours or five days or five weeks, who, like, cares?—the fury blew him to pieces and there wasn�
�t enough of him found to collect up and put in a box. So, yeah, Professor, and you’re mad about a doll. Well, excuse me.”
The weather had changed. The heat of early summer had given way to a disturbed, patternless time. There were many clouds and too much rain, and days of morning heat that abruptly turned cold after lunch, sending shivers through the girls in their summer dresses and the bare-torsoed roller-bladers in the park, with those mysterious leather belts strapped tightly across their chests, like self-imposed penances, just below their pectoral muscles. In the faces of his fellow citizens Professor Solanka discerned new bewilderments; the things on which they had relied, summery summers, cheap gasoline, the pitching arms of David Cone and yes, even Orlando Hernandez, these things had begun to let them down. A Concorde crashed in France, and people imagined they saw a part of their own dreams of the future, the future in which they too would break through the barriers that held them back, the imaginary future of their own limitlessness, going up in those awful flames.
This golden age, too, must end, Solanka thought, as do all such periods in the human chronicle. Maybe this truth was just beginning to slide into people’s consciousness, like the drizzle trickling down inside the upturned collars of their raincoats, like a dagger slipping through the gaps in their armor-plated confidence. In an election year, America’s confidence was political currency. Its existence could not be denied; the incumbents took credit for it, their opponents refused them that credit, calling the boom an act of God or else of Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve. But our nature is our nature and uncertainty is at the heart of what we are, uncertainty per se, in and of itself, the sense that nothing.is written in stone, everything crumbles. As Marx was probably still saying out there in the junkyard of ideas, the intellectual St. Helena to which he had been exiled, all that is solid melts into air. In a public climate of such daily-trumpeted assurance, where did our fears go to hide? On what did they feed? On ourselves, perhaps, Solanka thought. While the greenback was all-powerful and America bestrode the world, psychological disorders and aberrations of all sorts were having a field day back home. Under the self-satisfied rhetoric of this repackaged, homogenized America, this America with the twenty-two million new jobs and the highest home-owning rate in history, this balanced-budget, low-deficit, stock-owning Mall America, people were stressed-out, cracking up, and talking about it all day long in superstrings of moronic cliché. Among the young, the inheritors of plenty, the problem was most acute. Mila, with her ultra-precocious Parisian upbringing, often referred scornfully to the confusion of her contemporaries. Everybody was scared, she said, everybody she knew, however good their facade, was quaking inside, and it didn’t make any difference that everybody was rich. Between the sexes the trouble was worst of all. “Guys don’t really know how or when or where to touch girls anymore, and girls can barely tell the difference between desire and assault, flirtation and offensiveness, love and sexual abuse.” When everything and everyone you touch turns instantly to gold, as King Midas learned in the other classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for fable, you end up not being able to touch anything, or anyone, at all.
Mila had changed too of late, but in her case the transformation was, in Professor Solanka’s opinion, a vast improvement on the feckless chick, still playing at teen queenery in her twenties, that she’d been pretending to be. To hold on to her beautiful Eddie, the college sports hero-whom she described to Solanka as “not the brightest bulb, but a dear heart” and to whom a brainy, cultured woman would no doubt be a threat and a turnoff—she had dimmed her own light. Not entirely, it had to be said: after all, she had somehow managed to lure the boyfriend and the rest of the guys into a Kieslowski double bill, which meant either that they weren’t as dumb as they looked or that she had even greater powers of persuasion than Solanka already suspected.
Day by day, she unfurled before Malik’s astonished eyes into a young woman of wit and competence. She took to visiting him at all hours: either early, to force him to eat breakfast—it was his habit not to eat until the evening, a custom that she termed “plain barbaric, and so bad for you,” and so under her tutelage he began to learn the mysteries of oatmeal and bran, and to consume, with his fresh coffee, at least one piece of daily matutinal fruit—or else in the steamy afternoon hours traditionally reserved for illicit love affairs. However, love was apparently not on her mind. She engaged him in simpler pleasures: green tea with honey, strolls in the park, shopping expeditions—“Professor, the situation is critical; we have to take immediate and drastic measures to get you some wearable clothes”—and even a visit to the Planetarium. As he stood with her in the middle of the Big Bang, hatless, casually attired, newly and springily shod in the first pair of sneakers he’d bought in thirty years, and feeling as if she were his parent and he a boy of Asmaan’s age—well, perhaps just a little older—she turned to him, bent down a little, for in her heels she was at least six inches taller than he, and actually took his face in her hands. “Here you are, Professor, at the very beginning of things. Looking good, too. Cheer up, for Chrissake! It’s good to make a new start.” All around them a new cycle of Time was being initiated. This was how everything had begun: boom! Things flew apart. The center did not hold. But the birth of the universe was a feel-good metaphor. What followed it was not mere Yeatsian anarchy. Look, matter clumped with other matter, the primal soup grew lumpy. Then came stars, planets, single-cell organisms, fish, journalists, dinosaurs, lawyers, mammals. Life, life. Yes, Finnegan, begin again, Malik Solanka thought. Finn MacCool, sleep no more, sucking your mighty thumb. Finnegan, wake.
She also came to talk, as if moved by a deep need for reciprocity. She spoke at these times with an almost frightening directness and speed, pulling no punches; yet the purpose of her soliloquies was not pugilism but friendship. Solanka, receiving her words in their intended spirit, was much soothed. From her conversation he frequently learned much of importance, picking up wisdom on the fly, so to speak; there were unregarded nuggets of pleasure lying about everywhere, like discarded toys, in the corners of her talk. This, for instance, while she explained why an earlier boyfriend had dumped her, a fact she plainly found as improbable as did Solanka: “He was filthy rich and I wasn’t.” She shrugged. “It was a problem for him. I mean, I was already in my twenties and I didn’t have my unit.” Unit? Solanka had been told—by Jack Rhinehart—that the word was used in certain masculinist American circles to refer to the male genitalia, but presumably Mila had not been given the heave-ho for lacking these. Mila defined the term as if speaking to a slow but likable child, using that careful, idiot’s-guide voice into which Solanka had heard her occasionally lapse when talking to her Eddie. “A unit, Professor, is one hundred million dollars.” Solanka was dazed by the revelatory beauty of this fact. A century of big ones: the contemporary price of admission to the United States’ Elysian fields. Such was the life of the young in the America of the incipient third millennium. That a girl of exceptional beauty and high intelligence could be deemed unsuitable for so fiscally precise a reason, Solanka told Mila gravely, only showed that American standards in matters of the heart, or at least in the mating game, had risen even higher than real estate prices. “Word, Professor,” Mila replied. Then they both burst into a laughter that Solanka had not heard emerging from his own mouth in an eternity. The unfettered laughter of youth.
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 c
onstruction 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.”
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