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

You mean you don’t care if I kill people, Teresa Saca said without speaking. What am I doing, she asked herself, I’m talking to a voice in my head, I’m hearing voices now? What am I, Joan of Arc? I saw the TV show. They burned her.

No, said the voice in her head. You’re no saint and neither am I.

You want me to kill people, she asked again, silently, inside her head, knowing it was beyond drunk, it was insane.

Not people, the voice said. We’re hunting bigger game.

When Mr. Geronimo found himself standing once again at the entrance to The Bagdad, he was armed with the new knowledge that until that day he had known nothing, not only about the world but about himself, and his place in it. But now he knew something; not everything, but it was a start. He had to begin again and he knew where he wanted to do it, and had asked Dunia to return him to this place, to attempt his first cure. She left him there and went about her own business, but he had access, now, to the communications system of the jinn, and could locate her precisely at any moment on that extraordinary internal positioning system, so her physical absence was a mere detail. He rang the doorbell and waited. Then he remembered that he still had the key. It still worked, turning in the lock as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn’t been expelled from this place for being the bringer of a terrifying disease.

How long had he spent in Peristan? A day, a day and a half? But here in the lower world eighteen months had passed, or perhaps more. Much changes in eighteen months on earth, in the age of acceleration that began around the turn of the millennium and still continues to this day. All our stories are told more quickly now, we are addicted to the acceleration, we have forgotten the pleasures of the old slownesses, of the dawdles, the browses, the three-volume novels, the four-hour motion pictures, the thirteen-episode drama series, the pleasures of duration, of lingering. Do what you have to do, tell your story, live your life, get out quickly, spit spot. Standing on the doorstep of The Bagdad, he seemed to see a year and a half of his hometown rush before his eyes, the screaming terror as the risings multiplied, and alongside their opposites, the crushings, people squashed flat by a local increase in gravitational force, just like the story in the Chinese box, Mr. Geronimo thought, and there were swooping random attacks on groups of citizens by the Grand Ifrits astride their flying urns, the Grand Ifrits offering rewards, great chests of jewels, to anyone who could point at a finger at men or women without earlobes. Martial law had been declared and the emergency services had done an astonishing job, the fire department ladder crews ministering to the floating people, the police keeping some semblance of order in the streets, helped by the National Guard.

Religious gangs had been roaming the city, looking for people to blame. Some of these mobs had targeted the mayor, whose adopted child Storm, the miraculous arbiter of honesty, was slandered as demon seed. A crowd of the faithful, for whom hostility seemed to be the necessary sidekick of fidelity, Hardy to its Laurel, gathered around the mayoral residence — converging on it from three directions, the ferry terminal, East End Avenue and the FDR — and then, shockingly, succeeded in storming the historic building and setting it ablaze. The successful attack on Gracie Mansion was news even in those disorderly times, because the frontline group of assailants, faced with troopers firing heavy-duty assault weapons, did not fall even when shot multiple times, in the head as well as the torso, or so the story went, and in spite of the decay of communications it was a story that spread rapidly. An unusual detail of some accounts added that several vehicles were assaulted, among them a fishmonger’s van, and when its back doors were pulled open and the dead fish on ice — albacore, sockeye, chinook, coho and pink salmon, pollock, haddock, sole, whiting — were able to stare glassily at the bloodied demonstrators, several of the fish commenced, in spite of being dead, to laugh uproariously. The story of the parasite fanatics immediately reminded Mr. Geronimo of Blue Yasmeen’s folktale of a laughing fish and he understood once again that many things formerly believed to be fantastic were now commonplace.

He had not known about the parasite-jinn until Dunia whispered to him and opened his eyes to the reality of his jinn inheritance. One of the Grand Ifrits, Shining Ruby, was the lord of the parasite-jinn, a master of possessing bodies for a time and then releasing them alive, as he had shown by his sensational occupation of the financial titan Daniel Aroni, and all the lesser parasites were foot soldiers serving under General Ruby’s command. But whereas Shining Ruby was able to function without a living being to occupy, his parasite followers were both less potent and clumsier. When on earth they needed hosts — dogs, snakes, vampire bats, human beings — and destroyed their temporary homes when they moved on.

The Zumurrud gang was evidently waging war on many fronts, Mr. Geronimo thought. It would not be easy to defeat.

The mayor and her little daughter Storm had fled the burning building unharmed. Again, the stories that circulated about their escape preferred a supernatural explanation. According to this version (and there is no other, more plausible account that has come down to us) the unknown mother of the storm baby was a jinnia who, unwilling to raise her half-human love child, had abandoned her at the mayor’s door, but had kept a watchful eye on her child from a distance, and, seeing that child’s life threatened, had entered the burning mansion and thrown a protective shield around Rosa Fast and young Storm and given them safe passage out of the house. Faute de mieux, this is the story we have.

How treacherous history is! Half-truths, ignorance, deceptions, false trails, errors, and lies, and buried somewhere in between all of that, the truth, in which it is easy to lose faith, of which it is consequently easy to say, it’s a chimera, there’s no such thing, everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale; but about which we insist, we insist most emphatically, that it is too important an idea to give up to the relativity merchants. Truth exists, and Toddler Storm’s magic powers provided, in those days, the visible proof of it. In her illustrious memory we refuse to allow truth to become “truth.” We may not know what it is, but it’s out there. We can’t be sure how Rosa Fast and Storm escaped the burning mayoral mansion, but we can accept our zone of unknowing and hold fast to what is known: they did escape. And after that the mayor, accepting the recommendation of the security services, went into a secret facility and governed the city from an undisclosed location. That location is unknown; her heroic governance is known. She marshaled the fight against the chaos inflicted by the Grand Ifrits; she made broadcasts to the citizenry to reassure them that everything possible was being done to help them and more would be done soon. She became the face and voice of the resistance and kept her invisible finger on the city’s pulse. This is known, and what is not known does not undermine it. This is the scientific way. To be open about the limits of one’s knowledge increases public confidence in what one says is known.

The city was a war zone and the war had spilled into The Bagdad. Graffiti tags, obscene writings, fecal matter, a broken place outside and in. The windows boarded up and many panes of glass long gone. He entered the darkened foyer and at once felt metal pressed to the side of his head and heard a high, wired voice threatening death, this house be occupy, muthafucka, open your shirt, open your goddam shirt, he had to show them he wasn’t wearing a grenade belt, he wasn’t a bomb somebody told to walk in here and spring-clean the building, who sent you, muthafucka, who you from . It was interesting, he thought, that he was moving at his normal leisurely rate but everything around him could be slowed right down, the voice of the man with the gun could be stretched out, becoming slo-mo-low, and he could slow things down further just by wanting to, just like this, and now the tough guys in the dark of the foyer were like statues, and he could reach up to the muzzle of the gun and pinch it, so, and squash it shut like a Plasticine toy, this was almost fun. He could do this, and now all the weapons in the possession of the occupiers had been turned into carrots and cucumbers. Oh, and he could do this, and now they were all naked. He allowed them to speed up — or himself to decelerate — and had the satisfaction of watching another transformation, from gang lords into frightened kids, who the what the let’s get outta here. As they backed away from him clutching at their manhood, he had a question for them: Sister Allbee, Blue Yasmeen, those names mean anything to you? And the man who had held a gun to his head now delivered a dagger to his heart. Those be the floatin’ bitches? The balloons ? He removed his hands from his private parts and made a spreading gesture. Kapow, man. It was a mess. What do you mean, Mr. Geronimo asked, even though he knew what the man meant. Like a fuckin’ piñata, the naked man said. Boom. Dat some wack shit.