At first he tried to resist thinking of Mila as Little Brain come alive: and not Little Brain the hollow media re-creation at that, not Little Brain the traitress, the lobotomized baby doll of Brain Street and beyond, but her forgotten original, the lost L.B. of his first imagining, the star of Adventures with Little Brain. At first he told himself it would be wrong to do this to Mila, to dollify her thus, but then—he argued back against himself—had she not done it to herself, had she not by her own admission made early-period Little Brain her model and inspiration? Was she not quite plainly presenting herself to him in the role of the True One he had lost? She was, he now knew, a very bright young woman indeed; she must have foreseen how her performance would be received. Yes! Deliberately, to save him, she was offering him that mystery which she had somehow divined-would answer his deepest, though never articulated, need. Shyly, then, Solanka began to allow himself to see her as his creation, given life by some unlooked—for miracle and caring for him, now, as might the daughter he’d never had. Then a slip of the tongue let out his secret, but Mila seemed not at all put out. Instead she smiled a private little smile—a smile that, Solanka was obliged to concede, was full of a strange erotic pleasure, in which there was something of the patient angler’s satisfaction at the bait being finally taken, and something, too, of the prompter’s hidden joy when a much repeated cue is picked up at the last—and, instead of correcting him, she replied as if he had used her right name and not the doll’s. Malik Solanka flushed hotly, overcome by an almost incestuous shame, and stammeringly tried to apologize; whereupon she came up close, until her breasts moved against his shirt and he could feel the breath from her lips brushing against his, and murmured, “Professor, call me whatever you like. If it makes you feel good, please know that it’s good with me.” So they sank daily deeper into fantasy. Alone in his apartment in the rainy afternoons of that ruined summer, they played out their little father-and-daughter game. Mila Milo began quite deliberately to be the doll for him, to dress more and more precisely in the doll’s original sartorial image and to act out for a much-aroused Solanka a series of scenarios derived from the early shows. He might play the part of Machiavelli, Marx, or, most often, Galileo, while she would be, oh, exactly what he wanted her to be; would sit by his chair and press his feet while he delivered himself of the wisdom of the great sages of the world; and after a little time at his feet, she might move up to his aching lap, though they would make sure, without a word being said, that a plump cushion was always placed between her body and his, so that if he, who had sworn to lie with no woman, responded to her presence there as might another, less forsworn man, then she need never know it, they need never mention it, and he need never be obliged to admit the occasional spilling weakness of his body. Like Gandhi performing his brabmacbarya “experiments with truth,” when the wives of his friends lay with him at night to enable him to test the mastery of mind over limb, he preserved the outward form of high propriety; and so did she, so did she.
10
Asmaan twisted in him like a knife: Asmaan in the morning, proud of performing his natural functions to a high standard before an applauding—if unashamedly biased—audience of two. Asmaan in his daytime incarnations as motorbike rider, tent dweller, sandbox emperor, good eater, bad eater, singing star, star having tantrums, fireman, spaceman, Batman. Asmaan after dinner, in his one permitted video hour, watching endless reruns of Disney movies. Robin Hood was popular, with its absurd “Notting Ham,” which featured a singing C&W rooster, cheap rip-offs of Baloo and Kaa from The Jungle Book, unadulterated American accents all over Sherwood Forest, and the frequently uttered, if previously little known, Disney Olde Englishe cry of “Oode-lally!” Toy Story, however, was banned. “It’s got a start’ boy in it.” Stary was scary, and the boy was frightening because he treated his toys badly. This betrayal of love terrified Asmaan. He identified with the toys, not their owner. The toys were like the boy’s children, and his maltreatment of them was, in Asmaan’s three-year-old moral universe, a crime too hideous to contemplate. (As was death. In Asmaan’s revisionist reading of Peter Pan, Captain Hook escaped the crocodile every time.) And after video—Asmaan came evening—Asmaan, Asmaan in the bath suffering Eleanor to brush his teeth and announcing preemptively, “We’re not washing my hair today.” Asmaan, finally, going to sleep holding his father’s hand.
The boy had taken to telephoning Solanka without regard to the five-hour time difference. Eleanor had programmed the New York number into the Willow Road kitchen phone’s speed-dial system; all Asmaan had to do was push a single button. Hello, Daddy came his transatlantic voice (this first call had been at five A.M.): I had a nice time at the part, Daddy. Park, Asmaan, sleepy Solanka tried to teach his son. Say park. Part. Where are you, Daddy, are you at home? Are you not coming back? I should have put you in the car, Daddy, I should have taken you to the sings. Swings. Say swings. I should have taken you to the sa-wings, Daddy. Morgen pushed me higher and higher. Are you hinging me a peasant? Say bringing, Asmaan. Say present. You can do it. Are you ba-ringing me a pa-resent, Daddy? What’s inside it? Will I like it very much? Daddy, you not going away anymore. I won’t let you. I had an ice team in the part. Morgen bought it. It was very nice. Icecream, Asmaan. Say ice cream. Ice to-ream.
Eleanor came on to the line. “I’m sorry, he came downstairs and pushed the button all by himself. I’m afraid I didn’t wake up.” Oh, that’s okay, Solanka replied, and there followed a long silence. Then Eleanor unsteadily said, “Malik, I just don’t know what’s going on. I’m falling apart here. Can’t we, if you don’t want to come to London I could get on a, I could leave Asmaan with his grandma and we could sit down and try to work this thing, whatever it is, oh God I don’t even know what it is!, couldn’t we work it out? Or do you just hate me now, do I all of a sudden disgust you for some reason? Is there someone else? There must be, mustn’t there? Who is it? For God’s sake tell me, at least that would make sense, and then I could just be fucking furious with you instead of going slowly out of my mind.”
The truth was that her voice still lacked any trace of real wrath. Yet he had abandoned her without a word, Solanka thought: surely her grief would turn, sooner or later, to rage? Perhaps she would let her solicitor express it for her, unleashing against him the cold rage of the law. But he could not see her as a second Bronislawa Rhinehart. There was simply no vindictiveness in her nature. But for there to be so little anger: that was inhuman, even a little frightening. Or, alternatively, proof of what everybody was thinking and what Morgen and afterward Lin Franz had put into words: that she was the better person of the two of them, too good for him, and, once she had recovered from the pain, would be better off without him. None of which would be any comfort to her right now, or to the child to whose arms he did not dare—for the sake of the boy’s safety—to return.