“Who is Kay Gonda?”

“If you have to ask, you have lost the right to know the answer.” Without saying it in as many words, enigmatic heroine Kay-not-Greta Gonda looked at Dagny Taggart with tired eyes. “You, who have not yet been written, but will be one day when Atlas shrugs, do not be jealous of me because I came before you,” she did not say to the one person she did not meet that night of January 16.

Or, maybe it was a different date. But it happened one night.

On that night Gonda rode her yet-to-be-invented Honda — for the man who lived only for himself and therefore did the greatest good for the world was still a figment of the imagination — to the homes of the handful of people whose letters she had picked out of the love notes of millions.

She knew she could bring every worthy man face-to-face with the divinity of selfishness that lay within his soul simply by looking deeply into their eyes from the silver screen. Each of them clung to their packet of popcorn, refusing to share it with the woman they had come to the theatre with.

Women. Wives or mistresses, mothers-in-law or nuns, comrades or adoring creatures, all of them existed only as mean-spirited, narrow-minded, harridans intent on sucking the spirit out of the men whose companions they were. How could they not be like Kay Gonda, who was able to convey the virtues of selfishness with her eyes alone?

That, of course, is when she was not killing the man who wanted to marry her. Why? How? And how long did it take her to renew her make-up afterwards? While the Press did not have the answer to that most important of questions, Gonda was missing.

Except she was not.

For Gonda went into the house of the hapless husband George S Perkins, who wished to shelter her from the police, as she wanted, but was seduced instead by the lure of green curtains into asking her to leave. Then there was the Communist Chuck Fink or his father-in-law Jeremiah Sliney — depending on whether it’s the play or the novel that you’re reading — who were ready to turn her in for lucre, but not before speaking like cheap, second-hand Marxist textbook.

What of the artist Dwight Langley, you ask? Langley, who just threw out the girl who loved him, the girl whose money he had been living on — symbolising the moral bankruptcy of a rotten world believed neither in capitalism nor in genius architects with orange hair. Each of Langley’s paintings was of Gonda, sometimes dressed, often not, but he was unable to recognise the genuine article when she walked into his apartment. Served the idiot right for drinking gin.

And what did Kay get from the priest Claude Ignatius Hix when she sought sanctuary for the night in his church? They could both have been defrocked that night, albeit in different ways (nudge nudge, wink wink), but Brother Hix chose instead to advise her to confess her crime at the competing church run by a woman down the road, in front of an audience of thousands. But Kay would have nun of it.

Off she went, then, to the ex-billionaire Dietrich von Esterhazy (DvE)’s hotel suite for that elusive night’s shelter. Actually, of course, she was in search for Howard Roark before he became Howard Roark. DvE seemed to be her man for a while, for he had squandered the last of his wealth that night in a tribute to the absurdity of the human existence — or was that Camus? — and now he wanted the two of them to escape to Brazil on a ship. “Kay,” said Kay, but when she realised that the “zil” of Brazil was not on his mind, she ran away.

Only, of course, to arrive at Johnnie Dawes’s garret. Where Johnnie, slim and blonde, proud and noble, possibly with degrees in physics and philosophy, showed up some time later and told her, “I’ve seen everything I want, that’s you,” sent for the police, and shot himself dead after confessing to the crime Gonda had committed.

This convenient suicide meant the remaining 3,200 pages of the novel — 2,575 of which would have been Dawes’s monologue — remained unwritten. But Dawes turned out to be a fool, because Kay hadn’t killed anyone after all, she wasn’t on the run from the police after all, and Ayn Rand had lost the plot, after all.

The only good thing that Rand did with Ideal was to not publish it as a novel. The play was bad enough. But some meddling busybody had to come along and undo that, and now you have to read it twice over, in two forms. Except you don’t. Because if you have to read it, you don’t have to read it — whatever the hell that means.

(This monthly column helps you talk about a book without having to read it.)

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