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

It is necessary to speak briefly of the extreme laziness of the great jinn. If you wish to understand how it can be that so many of these extremely powerful spirits have been so frequently captured in bottles, lamps and so on, the answer lies in the immense indolence that comes over a jinni after he has performed more or less any action. Their periods of sleep greatly exceed their waking hours and, during these times, so deeply do they slumber that they can be shoved and pushed into any enchanted receptacle without waking them up. So, for example, after the great feat of swallowing and digesting the ferry, Ra’im Blood-Drinker, still in the guise of a mighty sea-dragon, fell asleep on the harbor bed and did not awaken for several weeks; and the possession and manipulation of the financial titan Daniel Aroni similarly exhausted Shining Ruby for a couple of months. Zabardast and Zumurrud were less easily exhausted but after a while they too were ready to doze. A sleepy jinni is an irritable spirit and it was in this condition that Zumurrud and Zabardast, sitting on clouds over Manhattan, quarreled about who had done what to whom, who had been the standout performer and who the also-ran, which of them should henceforth defer to which, and who had come closest to fulfilling the promise made by Zumurrud the Great to the philosopher Ghazali centuries ago. When Zumurrud bombastically claimed responsibility for the cruel winter that had the city in its grip, Zabardast issued a peal of malicious laughter. “The fact that you take credit for bad weather,” he said, “only serves to show how desperate you are to prove your potency. I myself argue only from cause and effect. I do this, the result is that. Perhaps tomorrow you will take responsibility for the sunset, and claim to have plunged the world into darkness.”

This must be said again: the competitiveness of even the mightiest of the jinn is often petty and childish, and leads to childish feuds. These are usually, as is the way with childishness, quarrels of short duration, but they can be bitter and spiteful while they last. When the jinn fight the results can be spectacular to the human eye. They throw things which are not things as we understand them, but the products of enchantment. Looking up at the sky from the earth, human beings would read these enchanted not-things as comets, meteors, shooting stars. The more powerful the jinni, the hotter and more fearsome the “meteor.” Zabardast and Zumurrud were the strongest of all the dark jinn, so their magic fire was dangerous, even to each other. And the slaying of the jinn by the jinn is a crucial part of our story.

At the height of the quarrel, up there in the white clouds over the city, Zabardast pummeled his old friend in Zumurrud’s weakest spot: his immense amour propre, his pride. “If I so chose,” Zabardast cried, “I could make myself a larger giant than you, but I am unimpressed by size. If I so chose, I could be a more dazzling metamorph than Ra’im Blood-Drinker, but I prefer to retain my own shape. When I want, I am a more potent whisperer than Shining Ruby, and my whispering has more lasting and dramatic results.” Zumurrud, never the most verbal of the jinn, roared his anger and hurled a large fireball, which Zabardast turned into a harmless snowball and threw back at his rival like a boy in a winter park. “What’s more,” Zabardast shouted, “let me tell you, who are so puffed up about the creation of your wormhole, that after the long separation of the worlds, when the first seals broke and the first slits reopened, I came back to earth long before you dreamed of doing so. And what I did then sowed a seed that will soon bear fruit and inflict a wound upon humanity deeper than any injury you could manage. You hate the human race because it is not like us. I hate it for its possession of the earth, the beautiful, damaged earth. I have gone far beyond the tiny fanatical vengeance of your dead philosopher. There is a gardener from whom a whole garden of horrors will grow. What I have begun with a whisper will become a roar that will expel the human race from the planet forever. Then Fairyland will seem dull and plain, and the whole blessed earth, purified of Man, will be the province of the jinn. This is what I can do. I am Awesome. I am Zabardast .”

“Unreason defeats itself,” Ibn Rushd said to Ghazali, dust to dust, “by reason of its unreasonableness. Reason may catnap for a time, but the irrational is more often comatose. In the end it will be the irrational that is forever caged in dreams, while reason gains the day.”

“The world men dream of,” replied Ghazali, “is the world they try to make.”

There followed a period of calm, during which Zabardast, Shining Ruby and Ra’im Blood-Drinker returned to Fairyland. The jumpgate to the wormhole in Queens closed and only the ruined house remained. Our ancestors allowed themselves to believe the worst was over. The clocks went forward. Spring sprang. Everywhere men went they stood in the shadow of young girls in flower, and they were glad. We were in those days a people with no memory, especially the young, and there was so much to divert the young. They permitted themselves to be happily diverted.

Zumurrud the Great did not return to Peristan. He went to sit at the feet of Ghazali’s grave, to ask questions. After all his protests against philosophy and theology, he decided to listen. Maybe he was sick of jinn chatter and malice. Perhaps the purposeless anarchy of jinn behavior, the making of mayhem for its own sake, was finally too empty and he understood that he needed a flag to fight under. Maybe, in the end, he grew, not physically but inwardly; and, having grown, felt that for him to respect a cause, it had to be bigger than himself, and he was a giant, so it would have to be very large indeed; and the only outsize cause on the market was the one Ghazali was trying to sell him. At this distance in time, we cannot fully know his mind. We only know that he bought it.

Beware the man (or jinni) of action when he finally seeks to better himself with thought. A little thinking is a dangerous thing.

When Dunia first saw Geronimo Manezes he was floating on his side in his bedroom in the almost-dark, wearing a sleep mask, in the exhausted, heavily drowsy condition that was as close to sleep as he got these days, with the light from a single still-illuminated lamp on a nightstand flowing up towards him, casting horror-movie shadows across his long, bony face. A blanket hung down from both sides of his body, making him look like a magician’s assistant, levitated while hypnotized by some top-hatted trickster, and about to be sawn in half. Where have I seen that face before, she thought, and immediately answered herself, even though the memory was more than eight hundred years old. The face of her one true human love, even though there was no cloth wound around his head, and the gray beard was less carefully managed, rougher, wilder than in her remembering of it, not the beard of a man who has chosen to have a beard, but the unkempt growth on the face of one who has simply given up shaving. Eight centuries and more since she had seen that face, yet here it was, as if it were yesterday, as if he had not abandoned her, as if he were not reduced to dust, dust to which she had spoken, animate dust, but dust nevertheless, disembodied, dead. As if he had been waiting for her here all this time, in the dark, for eight hundred years and more, waiting for her to find him and renew their ancient love.