The cell—he had stopped thinking of it as a room—did not contain a bed, and lacked even the most rudimentary toilet facilities. Humiliation was the stock-in-trade of “Commander Akasz,” as his treatment of Neela had amply demonstrated. Solanka perceived that he was to be humiliated, too. Time passed; he lacked a watch by which to measure it. The breeze faded and died. Night, the ideologically incorrect, nonexistent night, grew humid, thickened and stretched. He had been given a bowl of unidentifiable mush to eat and a jug of suspect water. He tried to resist both, but hunger and thirst were tyrants, and in the end he did eat and drink. After that he wrestled with nature until the inevitable moment of defeat. When he could no longer contain himself, he pissed and shat wretchedly in a corner, taking off his shirt and wiping himself with it as best he could. It was hard not to fall into solipsism, hard not to see these degradations as a punishment for a clumsy, hurtful life. Lilliput-Blefuscu had reinvented itself in his image. Its streets were his biography, patrolled by figments of his imagination and altered versions of people he had known: Dubdub and Perry Pincus were here in their sci-fi versions, also mask-and-costume incarnations of Sara Lear and Eleanor Masters, Jack Rhinehart and Sky Schuyler, and Morgen Franz. There were even space-age Wislawas and Schlinks walking the Mildendo streets, as well as Mila and Neela and himself. The masks of his life circled him sternly, judging him. He closed his eyes and the masks were still there, whirling. He bowed his head before their verdict. He had wished to be a good man, to lead a good man’s life, but the truth was he hadn’t been able to hack it. As Eleanor had said, he had betrayed those whose only crime was to have loved him. When he had attempted to retreat from his darker self, the self of his dangerous fury, hoping to overcome his faults by a process of renunciation, of giving up, he had merely fallen into new, more grievous error. Seeking his redemption in creation, offering up an imagined world, he had seen its denizens move out into the world and grow monstrous; and the greatest monster of them all wore his own guilty face. Yes, deranged Babur was a mirror of himself. Seeking to right a grave injustice, to be a servant of the Good, “Commander Akasz” had come off at the hinges and become grotesque.
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.”