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

But after the rich man and his family moved in they were plagued by bad luck. Feet were accidentally broken, precious vases dropped, and somebody was always sick. Nobody slept well. The rich man’s business was unaffected, because he never conducted it at home, but the jinx on the house’s occupants led the rich man’s wife to call in an expert on the spiritual aspects of homes, and when she heard that the house had been permanently cursed with ill fortune, probably by a jinni friendly to the ant people, she made the rich man and their family and their one thousand and one minions and their one hundred and sixty motor cars leave the tall house and move into one of their many shorter residences, houses built of the ordinary sort of materials, and they lived happily thereafter, even the rich man, although injured pride is the hardest of all injuries to recover from, a fracture to a man’s dignity and self-regard is much worse than a broken foot, and takes much longer to heal.

After the rich family moved out of the tall house the ants of the city began to swarm up its walls, the ants and the lizards and the snakes, and the wilderness of the city invaded the living spaces, creepers twined around the four-poster beds, and spiky grass grew up through the priceless silk Bukhari rugs. Ants everywhere, making the place their own, and gradually the fabric of the place was worn down by the marching the grasping the sheer presence of the ants, a billion ants, more than a billion, the arrogance of the chandeliers splintered and broke under their collective weight, shattered shards of arrogance plummeted to the floors whose pride had grown dim and dirty, the fabric of pride of which the carpets and tapestries were made had been eroded by those billion tiny feet, marching, marching, grasping, grasping, and simply being present, existing, ruining the whole point of the pride of the tall building, which could no longer deny their existence, which crumbled under the fact of their being, of their billion tiny feet, of their ant-ness. The hauteur of the walls gave way, fell away like cheap plaster, and revealed the flimsiness of the building’s frame; and the mirrors of amour propre cracked from side to side, and all was ruin, that glorious edifice had become a wormhole, an insectarium, an anthillia. And of course in the end it fell, it crumbled like dust and was blown away by the end, but the ants lived, and the lizards and mosquitoes and snakes, and the rich family lived too, everybody lived, everyone remained the same, and soon enough everyone forgot the house, even the man who built it, and it was as if it had never been, and nothing changed, nothing had changed, nothing could change, nothing would ever change.

Her father the professor, so handsome, so smart, a little vain, was dead but she tried every day to bring his ideas to life. We were all trapped in stories, she said, just as he had, his wavy hair, his naughty smile, his beautiful mind, each of us the prisoner of our own solipsistic narrative, each family the captive of the family story, each community locked within its own tale of itself, each people the victims of their own versions of history, and there were parts of the world where the narratives collided and went to war, where there were two or more incompatible stories fighting for space on, to speak, the same page. She came from one such place, his place, from which he had been forever displaced, they exiled his body, but his spirit, never. And maybe now every place was becoming that place, maybe Lebanon was everywhere and nowhere, so that we were all exiles, even if our hair wasn’t so wavy, our smiles not so naughty, our minds less beautiful, even the name Lebanon wasn’t necessary, the name of every place or any place would do just as well, maybe that’s why she felt nameless, unnamed, unnameable, Lebanonymous. That was the nameless name of the one-woman show she was developing, which might (she hoped) also become a book, and (she really hoped) a movie and (if everything went really, really well) a musical (though in that case she would probably have to write parts for a few other people). The thing I’m thinking is that all these stories are fictions, she said, even the ones that insist on being facts, like who was where first and whose God had precedence over whose, they’re all make-believe, fantasies, the realist fantasies and the fantastic fantasies are both made up, and the first thing to know about made-up stories is that they are all untrue in the same way, Madame Bovary and the quarreling Lebanonymous histories are fictional in the same way as flying carpets and genies are, she was quoting him there, nobody ever said things better than he could, and she was his daughter, so his words belonged to her now, this is our tragedy, she said in his words, our fictions are killing us, but if we didn’t have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.

According to the Unyaza people of the Lâm mountain range which almost encircles Old Bagdad, Blue Yasmeen said at The Locusts, the story parasite entered human babies through the ear within hours of their birth, and caused the growing children to demand much that was harmful to them: fairy tales, pipe dreams, chimeras, delusions, lies. The need for the presentation of things that were not, as if they were things that were, was dangerous to a people for whom survival was a constant battle, requiring the maintenance of an undimmed focus on the actual. Yet the story parasite proved hard to eradicate. It adapted itself perfectly to its host, to the contours of human biology and the human genetic code, becoming a second skin upon human skin, a second nature to human nature. It seemed impossible to destroy it without also destroying the host. Those who suffered excessively from its effects, becoming obsessed with the manufacture and dissemination of the things that were not, were sometimes executed, and that was a wise precaution, but the story parasite continued to plague the tribe.

The Unyaza were a small, dwindling mountain people. Their environment was harsh, their mountainous terrain rocky and infertile, their enemies brutal and plentiful, and they were prone to wasting sicknesses that made their bones disintegrate into powder, and to fevers that rotted the brain. They worshipped no gods, even though the story parasite infected them with dreams of rain-deities who brought them water, meat-deities who gave them cows, and war-deities who struck their foes down with diarrhea and made them easier to kill. This delusion — that their triumphs, such as the finding of water, the rearing of livestock and the poisoning of their enemies’ food, were not their own doing, but gifts from invisible supernatural entities — was the last straw. The headman of the Unyaza ordered that the ears of babies be stopped with mud to prevent the story parasite from entering.

After that the story disease began to die out and the young Unyaza learned sadly as they grew older that the world was all too real. A spirit of deep pessimism began to spread, as the new generation understood that comfort, ease, gentleness and happiness were words that had no meaning in the world as it was. Having considered the profound dreadfulness of reality, they concluded that there was, additionally, no place in their lives for such debilitating weaknesses as emotion, love, friendship, loyalty, fellowship or trust. After that the last insanity of the tribe began. It is believed that after a period of bitter quarrels and violent dissension, the Unyaza youths, in the grip of the mutinous pessimism which had replaced the story infection, murdered their elders and then fell upon one another until the tribe was lost to Man.

In the absence of sufficient field data it is not possible to say for certain whether or not the story parasite ever truly existed, or if it was itself a story, a parasitical invention that attached itself to the consciousness of the Unyaza: a thing that was not, which, on account of its insidious persuasiveness, created the consequences that such a fictional parasite might have created had it been a thing that was; in which case the Unyaza, who loathed paradoxes almost as much as fictions, may, paradoxically, have been exterminated by their certainty that an illusion which they had collectively created was the truth.