Fury

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 begi

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 begi

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 mille