Salman Rushdie - Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“Vow,” he cried, reeling. “It isn’t bad enough being a brown dude in America, you’re telling me I’m half fucking goblin too.”

How young he was, she thought, and stronger than he knew. Many men, seeing what he had seen in the last two nights, would have lost their minds, but he, for all his panic, was holding himself together. It was the resilience in human beings that represented their best chance of survival, their ability to look the unimaginable, the unconscionable, the unprecedented in the eye. This was the kind of thing young Jinendra confronted regularly in his art, through his somewhat derivative (and therefore unsuccessful) Hindu-deity-transplanted-to-Queens superhero: the monster rising from the deep, the destruction of your home village and the rape of your mothers, the arrival of a second sun in the sky and the consequent abolition of the night, and in the voice of his Natraj Hero he answered horror with scorn, Is that all you’ve got, is that your best shot, because guess what, we can deal with you, motherfucker, we can take you down. Now, having practiced courage in fiction, he was discovering it in his real life. And his own comic-book creation was the first monster he had to confront.

She spoke gently, maternally, to this brave young man. Be calm, your world is changing, she told him. At times of great upheaval when the wind blows and the tide of history surges, cool heads are needed to navigate a path to calmer waters. I will be here with you. Find the jinni within yourself and you may be a bigger hero than your Natraj. It’s in there. You will find it.

The wormhole closed. He was sitting on his bed holding his head in his hands. “This is what happens to me now,” he muttered. “They build a transworld railway station three feet from my bed . No construction permit, yo? There’s no, like, zoning laws in hyperspace? I’m a complain ’bout that. I’m a call 3-1-1 right now. ” His hysteria was talking. She let it play itself out. It was his way of dealing with the situation. She waited. He flung himself down on his bed and his shoulders shook. He was trying to hide his tears from her. She pretended she did not see them. She was there to tell him he was not alone, to introduce him to his cousins. Quietly, she planted the information in his mind. The jinn part of him absorbed, understood, knew. You know where they are now, she told him. You can help one another in the time that is to come.

He sat up, clutched his head again. “I don’t need all this contact info at present,” he said. “I need Vicodin. ”

She waited. He would come back to her soon. He looked up at her and attempted a smile. “It’s a lot,” he said. “Whatever that was … whatever you are … whatever you’re saying I am. I’m going to need some time.”

You don’t have time, she told him. I don’t know why the portal opened in your room. I know that what appeared last night was not your Natraj Hero. Somebody took that form, to frighten you, or just because it was funny. Somebody you should hope never to meet again. Move out. Take your mother to a safe place. She won’t understand. She won’t see the swirling black smoke because she is not of the Duniazát. That comes from your father’s side.

“That bastard,” Jimmy said. “He sure disappeared like a jinni or wat. Didn’t grant us wishes, but. Just, went off in a puff of smoke with Secretary Bird.”

Take your mother away, Dunia told him. It isn’t safe for either of you here anymore.

“Vow,” Jimmy Kapoor marveled. “Worst. Halloween. Ever.”

The discovery of a girl baby in the office of the recently elected mayor Rosa Fast, swaddled in the national flag of India and gurgling contentedly in a bassinet on the mayoral desk, was thought by our superstitious and sentimental citizenry to be, on the whole, a good thing, especially when it was announced that the baby was approximately four months old and must have been born at the time of the great storm, and survived it. Storm Baby, the media called her, and the name stuck. She became Storm Doe, conjuring up the image of a Bambi-like fawn bravely facing down the tempest on unsteady legs: an instant short-term heroine for our instant and forgetful times. It won’t be long, many of us surmised, considering her apparent South Asian ethnicity, before she’s old enough to become the national spelling bee champion. She made the cover of India Abroad and was the subject of an exhibition of “imaginary portraits” of her future, adult self, commissioned from prominent New York artists by an Indo-American arts organization and auctioned off as a fund-raising ploy. But the mystery of her arrival enraged those who were already outraged by the election of a second consecutive woman mayor of progressive inclinations. It would never have happened, these nostalgists cried, back in the tough-guy days. Whether the rest of us agreed with that or not, it was true that in the age of maximum security her arrival on Mayor Fast’s desk felt like a small miracle.

Where did Storm Doe come from and how did she get into City Hall? The evidence from the battery of security cameras that constantly swept City Hall showed a woman in a purple balaclava strolling through every checkpoint late at night, carrying the bassinet, without attracting a single flicker of attention, as if she had the power to make herself invisible, if not to the cameras, then at least to people in her immediate vicinity; but also, obviously, to the duty officers whose responsibility it was to monitor the security screens. The woman simply walked into the mayor’s office, deposited the baby, and departed. Our ancestors speculated a good deal about this female. Did she somehow catch the system napping or did she possess some sort of invisibility cloak? And if the cloak, would she not also have been invisible to the cameras? Normally down-to-earth people began to have serious dinner-table conversations about superpowers. But why would a woman with superpowers abandon her baby? And if she was the child’s mother, might Storm Doe possess some sort of magic qualities as well? Might she … because it was important not to shy away from unpleasant possibilities in the time of the war on terror … might she be dangerous? When an article appeared under the headline Is Storm Baby a Human Time Bomb? our ancestors realized that many of them had abandoned the laws of realism long ago and felt at home in the more glamorous dimensions of the fantastic. And as things turned out little Storm was indeed a visitor from the country of improbability. But at first everyone was more concerned with finding her a home.

Rosa Fast came from a prosperous Ukrainian-Jewish family based in Brighton Beach, and dressed smartly in Ralph Lauren power suits, “because his people were our neighbors,” she liked to say, “but not in Sheepshead Bay,” meaning that Ralph Lifshitz from the Bronx had ancestors in Belarus, adjacent to “her” Ukraine. Fast’s star rose as Mayor Flora Hill’s fell, and there was no love lost between her and the outgoing mayor. Mayor Hill’s term had been beset by allegations of financial improprieties, of money rerouted into secret slush funds, and two of her closest colleagues had been indicted, but the dirt had stopped short of the mayor’s office, though some of the stench had penetrated it. Rosa Fast’s successful election campaign, which hinged on her promise to clean up City Hall, had not endeared her to her predecessor, while Flora Hill’s suggestion, made after she left office, that her successor was a “closet atheist” had irritated Rosa Fast, who had, in fact, fallen far away from the faith of her ancestors, but felt that what she did in the closet of godlessness was her own business and nobody else’s. Divorced, presently unattached, fifty-three years old and childless, Fast confessed herself deeply touched by the plight of Baby Storm and made it her business to see the little girl safely into a new life, if possible out of the reach of the tabloid press. Storm was fast-tracked for adoption and successfully transferred to her new parents to make a new, anonymous beginning under a new name, or that was the idea, but within weeks the new parents approached reality-TV producers and pitched a show to be called Storm Watch which would follow the star baby as she grew. When Rosa Fast heard the news she exploded with rage and shouted at the adoption services that they had delivered an innocent child into the hands of exhibitionist pornographers who would probably take a dump on television if somebody sponsored them to do it.