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

When he was a child he often had a flying dream. In the dream he was lying in his own bed in his own bedroom and was able to rise lightly up towards the ceiling, his bedsheet dropping from him as he rose. Then in his pajamas he floated about, carefully avoiding the slowly rotating blades of the ceiling fan. He could even turn the room upside down and sit on the ceiling giggling at the furniture down there on the inverted floor and wondering why it didn’t fall down, that is to say up, towards the ceiling, which was now the floor. As long as he stayed in his room the flying was effortless. But his room had long high windows which stayed open at night to let in the breeze and if he was foolish enough to fly out through them he found that his house was on top of a hill (it wasn’t, in his waking hours) and that he immediately began to lose height — slowly, not frighteningly, but inexorably — and he knew that if he didn’t fly back inside the moment would come when his bedroom would be lost to him and he’d descend slowly to the bottom of the hill, where there were what his mother called “strangers and dangers.” He always managed to make it back through the bedroom windows but sometimes it was a close-run thing. This memory too he turned upside down. Maybe now groundedness depended on him staying in his room, while every foray into the outdoors led to his becoming more detached.

He turned on the television. The magic baby was on the news. He noticed that the magic baby and he both had the same ears. And both of them now lived in the universe of magic, having become detached from the old, familiar, grounded continuum. He took comfort from the magic baby. Its existence meant that he was not alone in departing from what he was beginning to understand was no longer the norm.

The car accident hadn’t been his fault, but driving was awkward and uncomfortable now and his reflexes were not what they should be. He was lucky to have escaped without serious injury. After the accident the other driver, a playboy type called Giacomo Donizetti, had regained consciousness in a kind of delirium and had shouted at him like a man possessed, “What are you doing up there? You think you’re better than the rest of us? Is that why you hold yourself apart? The earth isn’t good enough for you, you have to be higher than everyone else? What are you, some kind of fucking radical ? Look what you did to my beautiful car with your pathetic truck. I hate people like you. Fucking elitist. ” After delivering these words Signor Donizetti passed out again and the paramedics arrived and took care of him.

Shock made people behave strangely, Mr. Geronimo knew, but he was beginning to be aware of a certain budding hostility in the eyes of at least some people who observed his condition. Perhaps he was more alarming at night. Perhaps he should just bite the bullet and walk around in the daylight hours. But then the objections to his condition would multiply. Yes, the familiar indifference of the citizenry had protected him thus far, but it might not guard him against the accusation of a bizarre type of snobbery, and the further he rose, the greater the antagonism might be. This idea, that he was setting himself apart, that his levitation was a judgment on the earthbound, that in his extraordinary state he was looking down on ordinary people, was beginning to be visible in the eyes of strangers, or he was beginning to think he saw it there. Why do you imagine I consider my condition an improvement? he wanted to cry out. Why, when it has ruined my life and I fear it may bring about my early death?

He longed for a way “down.” Could any branch of science help him? If not quantum theory, maybe something else? He had read about “gravity boots” that allowed their wearers to hang down from the ceiling. Could they be adjusted to allow their wearers to cling to the floor? Could anything be done, or was he beyond the reach of medicine and science? Had real life simply become irrelevant? Had he been captured by the surreal, and would he soon be devoured by it? Was there any way of thinking about his plight that made any ordinary kind of sense? And was he in fact infectious or contagious or capable in some other way of transmitting his condition to others?

How long did he have?

Levitation was not an entirely unknown phenomenon. Small living creatures, frogs for example, had been levitated in laboratory conditions by electromagnets that used superconductors and produced something he did not understand, the diamagnetic repulsion of body water. Human beings were mostly made up of water, so might this be a clue to what was happening to him? But in that case where were the giant electromagnets, the huge superconductors that were creating the effect? Had the earth itself become a gigantic electromagnet/superconductor? And if so why was he the only living creature to be affected? Or was he for some biochemical or supernatural reason preternaturally sensitive to the changes in the planet — in which case, would everyone else soon be in the same boat as he was? Was he the guinea pig for what would eventually be the earth’s rejection of the entire human race?

Look, here on his computer screen was something else he didn’t understand. The levitation of ultrasmall objects had been achieved by manipulating the Casimir Force. As he struggled to explore the subatomic world of this force, he understood that at the deeper levels of the essence of matter the English language disintegrated under the immense pressure of the foundational forces of the universe and was replaced by the language of creation itself, isospin doublet, Noether’s theorem, rotation transformation, up and down quarks, Pauli exclusion principle, topological winding number density, De Rham cohomology, hedgehog space, disjoint union, spectral asymmetry, Cheshire Cat principle, all of which was beyond his comprehension. Maybe Lewis Carroll who created the Cheshire Cat knew that its principle was somewhere near the roots of matter. Maybe something Casimirish was at work in his personal circumstances, and then again maybe not. If he saw himself in the eye of the cosmos then he might well be an ultrasmall object upon whom such a Force could work.

He understood that his mind, like his body, was detaching itself from solid ground. This had to stop. He had to concentrate on simple things. And the simple thing on which he had most particularly to concentrate was that he was hovering several inches above all solid planes: the ground, the floor of his apartment, beds, car seats, toilet seats. Once and once only he attempted a handstand and found that when he tried a trick like that his hands instantly developed the same condition as his feet. He fell heavily, and lay flat on his back, winded, hovering an inch above the rug. The empty space barely cushioned the fall. After the fall he moved more carefully. He was, and had to treat himself as, a seriously sick man. He was feeling his age, and there was something even worse to be faced. His condition was not only affecting his health, weakening his muscles, making him old; it was also erasing his character, replacing it with a new self. He was no longer himself, no longer Raffy-’Ronnimus-the-pastor’s-sonnimus, no longer Uncle Charles’s nephew or Bento Elfenbein’s son-in-law or his beloved Ella’s heartbroken husband. He was no longer Mr. Geronimo of the Mr. Geronimo Gardener landscaping firm, nor even his most recent self, the Lady Philosopher’s lover and her manager Oldcastle’s enemy. History had slipped away from him, and in his own eyes as well as others’ he was becoming, he had become, nothing more or less than the man who was three and a half inches off the ground. Three and a half inches, and rising.

He was paying his rent promptly but he worried that Sister would find a pretext to expel him from the building. Sister C. C. Allbee, the super or — her preferred title—“landlady” of The Bagdad, was, at least in her own opinion, a broad-minded woman, but she did not care for what was happening on the news. Storm Doe, the baby of truth, for example — that little child freaked her out just like all the other horror-movie kids, Carrie White, Damien Thorn, all that demon seed. And what came after Baby Storm was just crazy. A woman pursued by a would-be rapist turned into a bird and made her escape. The video was embedded on the kind of news websites Sister followed and was also up on YouTube. A peeping tom spying on one of the city’s favorite “angels,” the Brazilian lingerie goddess Marpessa Sägebrecht, was turned by magic into an antlered stag and pursued down Avenue A by a pack of ravenous phantom hounds. Then things got even worse right in Times Square, where, for a period of time variously described by different witnesses as “a few seconds” and “several minutes,” the clothes worn by every man in the square disappeared, leaving them shockingly naked, while the contents of their pockets — cellphones, pens, keys, credit cards, currency, condoms, sexual insecurities, inflatable egos, women’s underwear, guns, knives, the phone numbers of unhappily married women, hip flasks, masks, cologne, photographs of angry daughters, photographs of sullen teenage boys, breath-freshening strips, plastic baggies containing white powder, spliffs, lies, harmonicas, spectacles, bullets, and broken, forgotten hopes — tumbled down to the ground. A few seconds (or maybe minutes) later the clothes reappeared but the nakedness of the men’s revealed possessions, weaknesses and indiscretions unleashed a storm of contradictory emotions, including shame, anger and fear. Women ran screaming while the men scrambled for their secrets, which could be put back into their revenant pockets but which, having been revealed, could no longer be concealed.