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

Our ancestors learned, during those two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights, to be constantly on their guard against the dangers of the jinn. The safety of their children became a deep concern. They began to leave lights on in their children’s bedrooms and locked their windows even if the boys and girls complained that the rooms were airless and stuffy. Some of the jinn were child snatchers and no one could say what became of the children they seized. Also: it was a good idea, when entering an empty room, to go in right foot first while muttering excuse me under one’s breath. And above all: it was wise not to bathe in the dark because the jinn were attracted to darkness and moisture. The hammam, with its low light levels and high humidity, was a place of considerable danger. All this our ancestors came to know gradually during those years. But when Giacomo Donizetti entered the well-appointed Turkish baths on Elizabeth Street, he did not know the risk he was taking. A mischievous jinn must have been waiting for him, because when he left the hammam he was a changed man.

In short: women no longer fell in love with him, no matter how gratefully he wooed them; whereas he had only to glance at a woman to tumble helplessly, hopelessly into a horrible puppyish love. Wherever he went, at work or play or in the street, he dressed with his familiar sharpness, in a three-thousand-dollar bespoke suit, Charvet shirt and Hermès tie, yet no woman swooned, while every female who crossed his path set his heart pounding, turned his legs to jelly and inspired in him an overwhelming desire to send her a large bouquet of pink roses. He wept in the street as three-hundred-pound pedicurists and ninety-pound anorexics rushed past him ignoring his protestations as if he were a drunk or panhandler and not one of the most sought-after bachelors on at least four continents. His business colleagues asked him to stay away from work because he was embarrassing the hatcheck girls, waitresses and maîtresses d’ at his various nightlife hotspots. Within a few days his life became a torment to him. He sought medical help, willing to be declared a sex addict if necessary, though fearing the cure. However, in the doctor’s waiting room he felt obliged to fall to one knee and ask the homely Korean American receptionist if she would consider doing him the honor of becoming his wife. She showed him her wedding band and pointed to the photograph of her children on her desk and he burst into tears and had to be asked to leave.

He began to fear both the randomness of the sidewalk and the erotic thrum of enclosed spaces. In the city streets the overload of women to fall in love with was so great that he genuinely feared a heart seizure. All interiors were dangerous because so few of them were single-sex. Elevators were particularly humiliating because he was trapped with ladies who spurned him with expressions of faint, or not so faint, disgust. He sought out all-male clubs where he could sleep fitfully in a leather armchair, and he seriously considered the monastic life. Alcohol and narcotics offered an easier and less taxing escape, and he spiraled downwards towards self-destruction.

One night as he staggered towards his Ferrari he understood with the true clarity of the drunk that he was friendless, that nobody loved him, that everything on which he had based his life was tawdry and as cheap as fool’s gold, and that he almost certainly ought not to be driving a motor vehicle. He remembered being taken by one of his amours, back in the day when he was the one in the driving seat, to see the only Bollywood movie of his life, in which a man and a woman contemplating suicide on the Brooklyn Bridge see each other, like what they see, decide not to jump, and go to Las Vegas instead. He wondered if he should drive to the bridge and prepare to jump and hope to be rescued by a beautiful movie star who would love him forever as deeply as he loved her. But then he remembered that thanks to the occult consequences of the new strangeness that gripped him, he would continue to fall in love with every woman who crossed his path on the bridge or in Vegas or wherever they ended up, so that the movie goddess would undoubtedly dump him and he would be even more miserable than before.

He was no longer a man. He had become a beast in the thrall of the monster Love, la belle dame sans merci herself, multiplying herself and inhabiting the bodies of all the world’s dames whether belles or not, and he needed to go home and lock the door and hope that he was suffering from a curable illness that would eventually run its course and allow him to resume his normal life, although at that moment the word normal seemed to have lost its meaning. Yes, home, he urged himself, accelerating towards his Lower Manhattan penthouse, the Ferrari adding its own dose of recklessness to the driver’s, and at a certain moment on a certain intersection in the least fashionable part of the island there was a pickup truck with on its sides the words Mr. Geronimo Gardener and a phone number and website URL blocked out in yellow and drop-shadowed in scarlet and the Ferrari jumping the light was clearly in the wrong and then there were frantic turnings of driving wheels and screechings of brakes and it was okay, nobody died, the Ferrari took some heavy damage to a fender and there was gardening equipment spilling onto the roadway from the back of the pickup, but both drivers were ambulatory, they got out without assistance to examine the damage, and that was when Giacomo Donizetti, dizzy and trembling, finally knew he had lost his mind, and fainted right there in the street, because the physically imposing older man coming towards him was walking on air, several inches off the ground.

More than a year had passed since Mr. Geronimo lost contact with the earth. During that time the gap between the soles of his feet and solid horizontal surfaces had increased and was now three and a half, perhaps even four inches wide. In spite of the obviously alarming aspects of his condition, as he had begun to call it, he found it impossible to think of it as permanent. He envisaged his condition as an illness, the product of a previously unknown virus: a gravity bug. The infection would pass, he told himself. Something inexplicable had happened to him, whose effects would surely fade. Normality would reassert itself. The laws of nature could not be defied for long, even by a sickness unknown to the Centers for Disease Control. In the end he would certainly descend. This was how he sought to reassure himself every day. Consequently the inescapable signs of the worsening of his condition hit him hard and it took much of his remaining willpower to suppress feelings of panic. Frequently, without any warning, his thoughts began to swim wildly about, even though he prided himself on being for the most part a stoical individual. What was happening to him was impossible, but it was happening, so it was possible. The meanings of words— possible, impossible— were changing. Could science explain it to him? Could religion? The idea that there might be no explanation and no cure was a notion he was not willing to entertain. He began to delve into the literature. Gravitons were elementary particles with no mass that somewhere transmitted gravitational pull. Maybe they could be created or destroyed and if so that could account for an increase or decrease in gravitational force. That was the news according to quantum physics. But, PS, there was no proof that gravitons actually existed. Quantum physics, thanks a lot, he thought. You’ve been a great help.

Like many older persons, Mr. Geronimo led a relatively isolated life. There were no children or grandchildren to fret about his condition. This was a relief to him. He felt relieved also that he had not remarried, so that there was no woman to whom he was a cause of grief or concern. Over the long years of his widowerhood his few friends had responded to his taciturn ways by withdrawing from him, becoming mere acquaintances. After his wife died he sold their home and moved into modest rental accommodation in Kips Bay, the last forgotten neighborhood in Manhattan, whose anonymity suited him perfectly. Once he had had a friendly relationship with his barber on Second Avenue but nowadays he cut his hair himself, becoming, as he preferred to put it, the gardener of his own head.