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

Moral exemption was an unfamiliar state to be in, the condition of having permission to kill, to destroy without feeling guilt at the destruction, there was something here that went against the human grain. When she killed Seth Oldville she had been full of rage but that didn’t make it right, she understood that, rage was a reason but it was not an excuse. He might have been an asshole, but she was still a murderer. The criminal was guilty of the crime, and that criminal would be her, and maybe justice had to be done, but, whatever, she added silently, they need to catch me first. And now all of a sudden her jinnia ancestor whispered into her and set her inner warrior free and tasked her with helping to save the world. It was like those movies where they took guys off death row and gave them a shot at redemption, and if they died, hey, they were going to get fried anyway. Fair enough, she thought, but I’m going to take a lot of bastards down with me when I go.

Closing the eyes revealed the grid system of the jinn, and her mistress Dunia had sent her the coordinates she needed. Turning sideways and leaning just so slipped her through a crack in the air into the travel dimension and then she was going wherever the grid decreed. When she emerged from the tunnel between the dimensions, she barely knew which country she was in — yes, the information Dunia had planted in her mind told her its name, A. or P. or I., but that alphabet soup didn’t help much; one of the characteristics of her new reality, of this new way of getting around and of the alternate reality that had created it, was this loss of connection to the material world — she could have been anywhere, any brown barren space, any lush green park, any mountain, any valley, any city, any street, any earth. Then after a time she understood that it didn’t matter, whichever country she was in it was always the same country, the country of attacks on women, and she was the assassin who came to avenge them. Here was a “man” possessed by a jinni — possessed, enchanted, bribed by jewels, it didn’t matter. What he had done condemned him, and here was the lightning in her fingertips that carried out the sentence. No, there was no need for moral introspection. She was neither judge nor jury. She was the executioner. Call me Mother, she told her targets. These were the last words they heard on earth.

Floating through the impossible corridors between time and space, the tunnels bored through the spiraling Magellanic clouds of nonexistence, possessed by the melancholy solitude of the wandering murderer, Teresa Saca contemplated her youth, its desperation, the nights when she floored the accelerator and drove her first car (her first actual car of her own, not the stolen red convertible of her first wild ride), a convertible, ancient, electric blue, as fast as she could go down country roads and through the swamps, really not caring if she lived or died. Always self-destructive then, there were drugs and unsuitable men, but she learned in school the only lesson worth learning, beauty is currency, and as soon as the breasts showed up she straightened her long black hair and headed for the big city to spend it, the only currency she had, and hey, she didn’t do so badly, look at her now, she was a mass murderer with superpowers, that was quite a career path for a girl from nowhere.

That girl didn’t matter anymore anyway. The past dropped away from her like snakeskin. She discovered she was good at this, the sudden appearance, the startled horror on the face of the target, the thunderbolt like a bright lance through his chest, or sometimes, just for fun, his genitalia, or his eye, they all worked. And then back into the nothingness towards the next rapist the next abuser the next subhuman creature the next piece of primordial slime the next thing that deserved to die, whom she was happy to kill, whom she killed without remorse. And with each act she became stronger, she felt strength filling her, she became, and this seemed to her a good thing, less human. More jinnia than flesh and blood. Soon she would be Dunia’s equal. Soon she would be able to look the Queen of Qâf in the eye and stare her down. Soon she would be invincible.

It was a strange war, haphazard, wayward, as the jinn are. It was here today and gone tomorrow, then back again without warning. It was colossal, all-consuming, and then distant, absent. One day a monster rising from the sea, the next, nothing, and then, on the seventh day, acid rain from the skies. There was chaos and fear and attacks by supernatural giants from their cloud eyries and then lazy hiatuses during which the fear and chaos continued. There were parasites and explosions and possessions and everywhere there was rage. The rage of the jinn was part of what they were, amplified, in the case of Zumurrud and Zabardast, by their long captivity, and it found an answering rage in many human hearts, like a bell chiming in a Gothic tower and being answered by its echo from the bottom of a well, and maybe this was what war was now, maybe this was the last war, this descent into random raging chaos, a war in which the conquerors were as viciously at war with one another as with the wretched earth. Because this war was formless it was hard to fight, harder still to win. It felt like a war against an abstraction, a war against war itself. Did Dunia have the skill to win such a war? Or was some greater ruthlessness required, a ruthlessness which Dunia did not possess, but of which she, Teresa Saca, was becoming more capable with every thunderbolt poured into the heart of a guilty man? At some point it would not be enough to defend the earth. It would be necessary to attack the upper world.

I’m too old to be in an army, thought Mr. Geronimo in the cloud tunnels. How many of us are there in Dunia’s raggle-taggle brigade, gardeners and accountants and murderesses, how many members of her bloodline has the fairy queen whispered to and drafted to face the most fearsome enemies in the known worlds, and what chance do we really have against the unleashed savagery of the dark jinn. Can even Dunia in her wrath bring all four of them down and their minions too. Or is the fate of the world to surrender to the darkness descending by finding the answering darkness within ourselves. No, not if I can help it, an inner voice replied. So he was a soldier in this war in spite of all his doubts. The aches and groans in his much-used body. Never mind. It was hard to know what a just war looked like anymore but this one, this oddest of conflicts, was one in which he was prepared to play his part.

“Anyway,” he told himself, “it’s not as if I’ve been given a frontline role. I’m more like the medical team than the vanguard. I’m the MASH.”

To bring down those rising and to raise up those in the grip of the crushing curse. This was his appointed task: the adjustment of faults in gravity. In his mind’s eye the global grid system located the victims, the ones most in need flashing brightest on his retina. What a way to see the world, he thought. The plagues of rising and falling were everywhere, sprinkled over the world by Zabardast the Sorcerer, the random terror of their arrival exceeding what would have been caused by a “normal” plague; and so everywhere was where he had to go. Here was a ferry approaching the gambling dens of Macao, a crowd shrinking back from him in wondering fear as he appeared from nowhere to save a traveler whose cries of pain they had all ignored, Mr. Geronimo bending over him whispering and the man rising to his feet, raised from the dead, or near-dead, and Mr. Geronimo turning sideways and gone, leaving his Chinese Lazarus to his fate, the poor man’s fellow travelers still eyeing him as if he bore an infectious disease, maybe he would go and gamble his savings away that night just to celebrate being alive, but that was someone else’s story to tell, and here was Mr. Geronimo on a mountainside in the Pir Panjal fishing a railway tunnel worker out of the sky, and then here, and here, and here.