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

Sister wasn’t and had never been a nun but folks called her Sister because of her religious temperament and a supposed resemblance to the actress Whoopi Goldberg. Nobody had called her C.C. since her late husband departed this life with a buxom younger person of the Latina persuasion and ended up in hell, or Albuquerque, which were just two names for the same one place, Sister said. Seemed like ever since his New Mexican “demise” the whole world was going to hell in sympathy with that loser. Sister Allbee had had enough of it. She was familiar with a certain type of American crazy. Gun crazy was normal to her, shooting-kids-at-school or putting-on-a-Joker-mask-and-mowing-people-down-in-a-mall or just plain murdering-your-mom-at-breakfast crazy, Second Amendment crazy, that was just the everyday crazy that kept going down and there was nothing you could do about it if you loved freedom; and she understood knife crazy from her younger days in the Bronx, and the knockout-game type of crazy that persuaded young black kids it was cool to punch Jews in the face. She could comprehend drug crazy and politician crazy and Westboro Baptist Church crazy and Trump crazy because those things, they were the American way, but this new crazy was different. It felt 9/11 crazy: foreign, evil. The devil was on the loose, Sister said, loudly and often. The devil was at work. When one of her tenants started floating several inches off the floor at all times of day and night, then it was plain that the devil had come into her own building, and where was Jesus when you needed him. “Jesus,” she said aloud standing right in the little hallway of The Bagdad, “you got to step down to earth one more time, I got God’s work right here for you to do.”

That was where Blue Yasmeen, the artist (performance, installations, graffiti) living on the top floor of The Bagdad, came in. Mr. Geronimo didn’t know her, hadn’t cared to get to know her, but all of a sudden he had an ally, a friend speaking on his behalf who had the Indian sign on Sister, or so it seemed. “Leave him alone,” Blue Yasmeen said, and Sister made a face and did as she was asked. Sister’s fondness for Yasmeen was as surprising as it was deep, it was one of the myriad improbable liaisons of the great city, the loves that caught the lovers by surprise, and maybe it had its roots in talk, Yasmeen being quite the talker and Sister hypnotized by her words. Baghdad, Iraq, that’s a tragedy, Blue Yasmeen liked to say, but Bagdad-with-no- h, that’s a magic location, that’s the Aladdin-city of stories that winds around actual cities like a creeper, in and out of actual city streets, whispering in our ears, and in that parasite-city stories are the fruit hanging from every tree, tall tales and short ones, thin tales and fat, and nobody who hungers for an anecdote goes unsatisfied. That rich fruit falls from branches to lie bruised in the street and anyone can pick it up. I build that flying-carpet city wherever I can, she said, I grow it in the paved backyards of downtown condominiums and the stairwell graffiti of the projects. That Bagdad is my city and I am both its monarch and its citizen, its shopper and its storekeeper, its drinker and its wine. And you, she told Sister Allbee, you are its caretaker. The landlady of The Bagdad: superintendent of storyland. Here you stand at its very heart. That kind of talk melted Sister’s heart. Mr. Geronimo is turning out to be one hell of a story, Blue Yasmeen told her. Let him be so we can see how he comes out.

Blue Yasmeen’s hair wasn’t blue, it was orange, and her name wasn’t Yasmeen. Never mind. If she said blue was orange that was her right, and Yasmeen was her nom de guerre and yeah, she lived in the city as if it were a war zone because even though she had been born on 116th Street to a Columbia literature professor and his wife she wanted to recognize that originally, before that, which was to say before fucking birth, she came from Beirut. She had shaved off her eyebrows and tattooed new ones in their place, in jagged lightning-bolt shapes. Her body too was a tat zone. All the tattoos except the eyebrows were words, the usual ones, Love Imagine Yeezy Occupy, and she said of herself, unintentionally proving that there was more in her of Riverside Drive than Hamra Street, that she was intratextual as well as intrasexual, she lived between the words as well as the sexes. Blue Yasmeen had made a splash in the art world with her Guantánamo Bay installation, which was impressive if only for the powers of persuasion required to make it happen at all: she somehow got that impenetrable facility to allow her to set a chair in a room with a video camera facing it, and linked that to a dummy sitting in a Chelsea art gallery, so that when inmates sat in the Guantánamo chair room and told their stories their faces were projected onto the head of the Chelsea dummy and it was if she had freed them and given them their voices, and yeah, the issue was freedom, motherfuckers, freedom, she hated terrorism as much as anyone, but she hated miscarriages of justice too, and, FYI, just in case you were wondering, just in case you had her down as a religious-fanatic terrorist in waiting, she had no time for God, plus she was a pacifist and a vegan, so fuck you.

She was something of a downtown celebrity, world famous on twenty blocks, she said, at the story-slam sessions run by the “Day of the Locusts” people, who took their name not from Nathanael West’s novel (which was locust singular) but from the Dylan song ( locusts plural): the locusts sang, and they were singing for me. The Locusts story events were movable feasts, switching locations around the city, and though they were called Days the events took place, obviously, at night, and Blue Yasmeen was a star at the mic, telling her tales of Bagdad-with-no- h.

Once in old Bagdad, Blue Yasmeen said, a merchant was owed money by a local nobleman, really quite a lot of money, and then unexpectedly the nobleman died and the merchant thought, This is bad, I’m not going to get paid. But a god had given him the gift of transmigration, this was in a part of the world in which there were many gods, not just one, so the merchant had the idea of migrating his spirit into the dead lord’s body so that the dead man could get up from his deathbed and pay him what he owed. The merchant left his body in a safe place, or so he thought, and his spirit jumped into the dead man’s skin, but when he was walking the dead man’s body to the bank he had to pass through the fish market and a large dead codfish lying on a slab saw him go past and started to laugh. When people heard the dead fish laughing they knew there was something fishy about the walking dead man and attacked him for being possessed by a demon. The dead nobleman’s body quickly became uninhabitable and the merchant’s spirit had to abandon it and make its way back to its own abandoned shell. But some other people had found the merchant’s abandoned body and, thinking it the body of a dead man, had set it on fire according to the customs of that part of the world. So the merchant had no body and had not been paid what he owed and his spirit is probably still wandering somewhere in the market. Or maybe he ended up migrating into a dead fish and swam away into the ocean of the streams of story. And the moral of the story is, don’t push your fucking luck.

And also:

There was once, in Old Bagdad, a very, very tall house, a house like a vertical boulevard leading upwards to the glass observatory from which its owner, a very, very rich man, looked down upon the tiny swarming human anthills of the low sprawling city far below. It was the tallest house in the city, set upon the highest hill, and it was not made of brick, steel or stone but, rather, of the purest pride. The floors were tiles of highly polished pride that never lost its sheen, the walls were of the noblest hauteur, and the chandeliers dripped with crystal arrogance. Grand gilded mirrors stood everywhere, reflecting the owner not in silver or mercury but in the most flattering of reflective materials, which is amour propre. So great was its owner’s pride in his new home that it mysteriously infected all those who were privileged to visit him there, so that nobody ever said a word against the idea of building such a tall house in such a short city.