Eddie Ford was often to be seen sitting alone on the neighboring stoop as Professor Solanka returned home—the websypders were evidently busy with their nets—and in the banked fire of the blond centurion’s slow-burn gaze Malik Solanka imagined he saw the belated beginnings of suspicion. Nothing was said between them, however. They nodded at each other briefly and left it at that. Then Malik entered his paneled retreat and waited for his deity to come. He took up his place in the large leather armchair that had become their preferred place of ease and set upon his lap the red velvet cushion with which, thus far, he had continued to protect what remained of his heavily compromised modesty. He closed his eyes and listened to the ticking of the mantelpiece’s antique carriage clock. And at some point Mila came soundlessly in—he had given her a set of keys—and what was to be done, what she insisted was not being done at all, was quietly done.
In that charmed space, during Mila’s visits, almost complete silence remained the norm. There were murmurs and whispers but no more. However, in the last quarter hour or so before she left, after she briskly leapt off his lap, smoothed her dress, and brought them both a glass of cranberry juice or a cup of green tea, and while she adjusted herself for the outside world, Solanka could offer her, if he so desired, his hypotheses on the country whose codes he was trying to unlock.
For example, Professor Solanka’s as-yet-unpublished theory on the differing attitudes toward oral sex in the United States and England this aria being prompted by the president’s inane decision to start apologizing yet again for what he should always have crisply said was nobody else’s business—got a sympathetic hearing from the young woman snuggled down on his lap. “In England,” he explained in his most straitlaced style, “the heterosexual b.j. is almost never offered or received before full, penetrative coitus has taken place, and sometimes not even then. It’s considered a sign of deep intimacy. Also a sexual reward for good behavior. It’s rare. Whereas in America, with your well-established tradition of teenage, ah, ‘makeouts’ in the backs of various iconic automobiles, ‘giving head,’ to use the technical term, precedes ‘full’ missionary-position sex more often than not; indeed, it’s the most common way for young girls to preserve their virginity while keeping their sweethearts satisfied.
“In short, an acceptable alternative to fucking. Thus, when Clinton affirms that he had never had sex with that woman, Moonica, the Bovine Ms. L., everyone in England thinks he’s a pink-faced liar, whereas the whole of teen (and much of pre- and post-teen) America understands that he’s telling the truth, as culturally defined in these United States. Oral sex is precisely not sex. It’s what enables young girls to come home and with their hands on their hearts tell their parentshell, it probably enabled you to tell your father—that you hadn’t ‘done it.’ So Slick Willy, Billy the Clint, has just been parroting what any red-blooded American teenager would have said. Arrested development? Okay, probably so, but this was why the impeachment of the president failed.”
“I see what you mean.” Mila Milo nodded when he was done, and returned to his side, in an unexpected and overwhelming escalation of their end-of-afternoon routine, to remove the red velvet cushion from his helpless lap.
That evening, encouraged by whispering Mila, he returned with new fire to his old craft. There’s so much inside you, waiting, she had said. I can feel it, you’re bursting with it. Here, here. Put it into your work, Papi. The furia. Okay? Make sad dolls if you’re sad, mad dolls if you’re mad. Professor Solankas new badass dolls. We need a tribe of dolls like that. Dolls that say something. You can do it. I know you can, because you made Little Brain. Make me dolls that come from her neighborhood—from that wild place in your heart. The place that isn’t a little middle-aged guy under a pile of old clothes. This place. The place for me. Blow me away, Papi. Make me forget her! Make adult dolls, R-rated, NC-17 dolls. I’m not a kid anymore, right? Make me dolls I want to play with now.
He understood at last what Mila did for her webspyders other than dress them more fashionably than they could manage for themselves. The word “muse” was attached sooner or later to almost all beautiful women seen with gifted men, and no self-respecting, Chinese fan-twirling leader of fashion would currently be seen dead without one, but most such women were more amusement than muse. The true muse was a treasure beyond price, and Mila, Solanka discovered, was capable of being genuinely inspiring. Just moments after her potent urgings, Solanka’s ideas, so long congealed and dammed, began to burn and flow. He went out shopping and came home with crayons, paper, clay, wood, knives. Now his days would be full, and most of his nights as well. Now, when he awoke fully dressed, the street smell would not be on his clothes, nor would the odor of strong drink foul his breath. He would awake at his workbench with the tools of his trade in his hand. New figurines would be watching him through mischievous, glittering eyes. A new world was forming in him, and he had Mila to thank for the divine afflatus: the breath of life.
Joy and relief coursed through him in long uncontrollable shudders. Like that other shudder at the end of Mila’s last visit, when the cushion came off his lap. The ending he had waited for like the addict he had become. Inspiration also soothed another, growing trouble in him. He had begun to entertain fears about Mila, to hypothesize a great, dangerous selfishness in her, an overarching ambition that made her see others, himself included, as mere stepping-stones on her own journey to the stars. Did those brilliant boys really need her? Solanka had begun to wonder. (And came close to the next question: Do I2) He had glimpsed a possible new incarnation of his living doll—in which Mila was Circe, and at her feet sat her oinking swine—but now he pushed that dark vision aside; also its even more ferocious companion, the vision of Mila as Fury, as Tisiphone, Alecto, or Megaera come down to earth in a cloak of sumptuous flesh. Mila had justified herself. She had provided the spur that had sent him back to work.
On the cover of a leather-bound notebook he scribbled the words “Professor Kronos’s Amazing No-Strings Puppet Kings.” And then added: “Or, Revolt of the Living Dolls.” And then, “Or, Lives of the Puppet Caesars.” Then he crossed out everything except the two words “Puppet Kings,” opened the notebook, and in a great rush began to write the back-story of the demented genius who would be his antihero.