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

We, looking back on these events, see them through the perspective of our hard-won knowledge, and understand that the practice of extreme violence, known by the catch-all and often inexact term terrorism, was always of particular attraction to male individuals who were either virgins or unable to find sexual partners. Mind-altering frustration, and the damage to the male ego which accompanied it, found its release in rage and assaults. When lonely, hopeless young men were provided with loving, or at least desirous, or at the very least willing sexual partners, they lost interest in suicide belts, bombs, and the virgins of heaven, and preferred to live. In the absence of the favorite pastime of every jinni, human males turned their thoughts to orgasmic endings. Death, being readily available everywhere, was often an alternative pursuit to unavailable sex.

So it was with human beings. The dark jinn, however, did not consider self-immolation. Their response to the sex boycott was not surrender to the wishes of their erstwhile jinnia partners, but rather an increase in violent activity of the nonsexual kind. Ra’im Blood-Drinker and Shining Ruby, inflamed by the denial of physical pleasure, embarked in the lower world on a savage rampage of subjugation by force, displaying an intemperate abandon which at first alarmed even Zumurrud and Zabardast; then, after a time, the same red mist rose in the eyes of the two senior jinn, and the human race paid the penalty for the jinnias’ punishment of the Grand Ifrits. The war entered a new phase. It was time for Dunia and Geronimo Manezes to return to earth.

She made him swear a solemn oath, the mirror of her own. “Now that I have opened your eyes to your true nature and given you power over it, you must promise to fight at my side until what has to be done is done, or we perish in the attempt.” Her eyes blazed. Her will was too great to be resisted. “Yes,” he said. “I swear.”

She kissed his cheek to show him her approval. “There’s a boy you need to meet,” she told him. “Jimmy Kapoor, who also goes by the name of Natraj Hero. A brave boy, and your cousin. Speaking of cousins, there’s also a bad girl.”

Her name, Teresa Saca, was unusable. She had killed a man, and that used up all the credit in her name. She cut it in half like dead plastic and tossed it in the trash, she spat it out like gum. Fuck her name. She was on the run and went now by many names, the names on stolen debit cards and fake IDs bought from street corner hustlers, the names in the smudged registers of one-night cheap hotels. She was not good at this, the low life. She needed service industries. In the good times a day away from the wellness spa or yoga shala was a day wasted. But those days were gone and she had to live by her wits, fuck that, Jack, and her a college dropout. Luckily for her everything was in a mess, law enforcement wasn’t what it used to be, and the chaos of the times allowed her to slip through the cracks. So far, anyway. Or maybe she had been forgotten. The people’s attention was elsewhere and she was yesterday’s news.

So Teresa or Mercedes or Silvia or Patrizia or whatever she went by that evening: sitting solo in a sports bar in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, spurning the advances of well-muscled men with military haircuts, doing tequila shots, watching the latest school killings on outsize flat-screen HDTV. Ag god, she mumbled in a voice made imprecise by alcohol, it is an age of killing and you know what that’s all right with me. It’s slaughterhouse time out there and you look to be getting in on the act yourself god whatever your name is you got more aliases than me. Yeah you god I’m talking to you. You with this name that name in that country this country, always big on the killing thing, you okay with people getting killed for a Facebook post, or not being circumcised, or fucking the wrong guy. I have no problem with that because guess what god I’m a killer too. Little me. I got me some action too.

In those times when suspicion fell on lightning-strike survivors some of them gathered furtively here and there to bemoan their fate. She sought them out wanting to listen to their tales, in case any of them turned out to be like her, masters of the thunderbolt and not just victims. When you’re a freak it’s good to know you’re not alone. But here in the Center of Fun in the Smoky Mountains the survivors’ gathering was a cluster of sad sacks. They huddled in a small room behind the sports bar, a poorly lit room situated in a small street off the main drag where tourists formerly did what tourists liked to do, eating tourist food and driving tourist bumper cars and posing for tourist pictures with a picture of Dolly Parton and mining in a tourist mine for tourist gold. For those with more ghoulish tastes, there had been a Titanic Museum Attraction where you could see the violin that had belonged to the ship’s bandleader, Wallace Hartley, and enjoy the tributes to the 133 children who went down with the ship, the “littlest heroes.” All that was shut down now that the world had changed, now that everywhere was the Titanic and everyone was going down. The sports bar stayed in business because men will drink in hard times, that doesn’t change, only the games on the screens were reruns, all the famous initials had shut down operations, MLB NBA NFL, all gone. Their ghosts moved on the big screens between the occasional news broadcasts when such items were flickeringly able to come online thanks to those brave journalists in the field who knew how to uplink to the satellites.

The survivors of thunderbolt attacks were of two types. The first type had a lot to say. This one had been hit by lightning four times, but that one held the record with seven strikes. Many said they felt confused, they had headaches and panic attacks. They sweated too much, they couldn’t sleep, one leg mysteriously began to shrink. They wept when there was nothing to cry about, they walked into doors and bumped into furniture. They remembered that the strike had literally blown them out of their shoes and their clothes had exploded off their bodies, leaving them naked as well as stunned. The absence of burn marks meant that people accused them of protesting too much, or for too long. They spoke with awe of the bolts from the blue. Many of them called it a religious experience. They had witnessed, at first hand, the devil’s work.

The second type was silent. These survivors sat alone in corners, locked into their secret worlds. The lightning had sent them somewhere far away and they either could not or chose not to share their own mysteries. When Teresa or Mercedes or whoever she was now tried to talk to them, they looked frightened and moved away or responded with sudden, extreme hostility, baring their teeth and clawing at their questioner.

This was of no use to her. These people were weak and broken. She left the gathering and hit the tequila and near the bottom of the bottle a voice spoke to her inside her head, and she thought she should probably stop doing shots. It was a woman’s voice, quiet and measured, and she could hear it very clearly, even though nobody was talking to her. I’m your mother, the voice said, and before she could open her mouth to say No you’re not because my mother never calls me not even on my fuckin’ birthday not unless she gets cancer, then I probably get a fuckin’ text asking for help with medical expenses, before she could say any of that, the voice said, No, not that mother, your mother from nine hundred years ago, give or take, the mother who put the magic in your body, and now you’re going to put it to good use. That was good tequila, she said aloud admiringly, but the so-called mother in her head was undeterred, I’ll show myself to you when I’m ready, she said, but if it helps to establish my credibility I can tell you the name and number on your stolen card and the location and combination number of the pathetic deposit box where you stored your so-called valuables. If you want me to do it I can tell the story of what your dad said when you told him you wanted to study English, what are you going to do with that, he said, be a paralegal or a secretary, or maybe you want to hear how you took that old used red convertible you stole when you were seventeen and drove it as fast as you could west and south from Aventura to Flamingo not caring if you lived or died. You have no secrets from me but fortunately I love you as a daughter whatever you did, even though you killed that gentleman, that doesn’t matter now because now there’s a war and I want you as a soldier and you already showed me you’re good at what I need you to do.