Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

It had been months since India had seen him but she had made no reproach. These hiatuses were not unusual. Max Ophuls had saved her life once but these days his sense of family was weak and his need for contact with his own blood was intermittent and easily satisfied. He was happiest when immersed in worlds of his own making or discovery, busying himself in these years of his retirement with the revised version of his classic book on the nature of power which India had received in the form of bedtime stories, and lately on a bizarre quest-one that his daughter at first dismissed as the obsession of an old fellow with too much time on his hands-for the rumored tunnel complexes of those apocryphal lizard people of Los Angeles whose subterranean lives he had once conjured up at dinner with the famous talk-show host, and which led him in his expensive chauffeur-driven vehicles into some unsavory neighborhoods whose armed gangs he and Shalimar had at least once been obliged to flee at high speed. The ambassador had always been insatiably curious, and also possessed a dangerous, abiding belief in his own indestructibility, so that in the course of his lizard odyssey around South Central Los Angeles and the City of Industry he commanded Shalimar to stop the car outside the gates of an embattled high school past which even police cars would fearfully accelerate at certain times of day, and using field glasses through a wound-down window he commenced in his penetrating voice to forecast who amongst the emerging youngsters would end up in jail and who would go to college, until the driver, seeing the weapons emerging from their hiding places, the unsheathed knives like sharks, the unholstered snouts of the handguns, decided without waiting to be told to floor it and get out of there before the bad guys could start up their motorbikes and hunt them down.

When India heard her father’s voice on the telephone, however, she understood that it was not the usual, confident Max Ophuls, dipped at birth like Achilles in the magic waters of invulnerability, who was coming to pay her a visit. Her father’s voice sounded hoarse and weak, as if it were finally buckling under the weight of all Max’s eight decades, and there was a new note in it, a note so unexpected that it took India a moment to realize that it was fear. She herself was in a preoccupied frame of mind that morning. Love of all things was pursuing her and she had an aversion to being hunted in general and to love in particular. Love was coming after her in the form of the young man in the neighboring apartment, literally the boy next door, an idea so comical that it would have been endearing had she not erected steel walls of plate armor against the very concept of being endeared. She had begun to think she would have to move house to escape this inescapably claustrophobic assault. She could not remember his name even though he told her repeatedly that it was easy because it rhymed. “Jack Flack,” he said. “See? You’ll never forget it. You’ll never get me out of your mind. You’ll think of my name in bed, in the bathtub, driving the freeways, at the grocery store. You might as well marry me. It’s inevitable. I love you. Face the facts.”

It had probably been a mistake to have sex with him but he was undeniably attractive in an average sort of corn-fed white boy way and he had caught her at a susceptible time. He was the average perfected, the ordinary made super-ordinary, the boy next door raised to the Platonic ideal of boy-next-doorness, and as a result you saw him on giant billboards everywhere in that city dedicated to idealization, his flaxen hair and innocent eyes, his face free from history or pain, he wore alligator shirts here and Stetsons there and underpants in a third place and on all of the billboards he was wearing his super-averagely attractive, super-averagely goofy smile, his body glistening like a young god’s, le dieu moyen, the average god of average folks, who had not been born or grown up or suffered life in any way at all, but had sprung like Athena fully formed from the aching head of some middle-of-the-road Zeus.

To be super-average in America was a gift one could parlay into a fortune, and the boy next door was taking his first steps down that jeweled runway, just preparing to take off and fly. No, she realized, she would not have to move house, after all. He would move out soon, first into the luxury Fountain Avenue apartment of his glorious averageness, then into the Los Feliz mansion, the Bel Air palazzo, the thousand-acre Colorado ranch that all super-boys next door deserved. “What’s your name again?” she asked him after they had sex, and he was amused by the question in his super-average way. “Ha! Ha! That’s a good one!” If Clark Kent had not secretly been Superman this is who he would have been. “Jock Flock,” he reminded her when he stopped laughing. “This name is burned into your memory. This name is repeating in there, over and over, on a loop, like some song you can’t forget. It’s driving you crazy. You’re saying it in the shower. Over and over. Jake Flake, Jake Flake. This thing is stronger than your will. You don’t have a chance. Give in now.”

He wanted her to marry him right away. “The only sensible way to love is to love conditionally,” she warned him, backed off. “What you’re asking sounds a little too unconditional for me.” When he didn’t understand her he had a way of beaming at her vacuously, patronizingly. This aroused her most violent instincts. “Just think about it, okay?” he requested. “Think, Mrs. Jay Flay. Think how much you like the sound of that. You like it so much. You can’t fight it if you think about it. Just do me a favor. Don’t act without thinking.” This from a prominent practitioner of the unexamined life. She had to work hard to restrain herself from slapping him across his homely, handsome face.

Ever since Joe Flow’s proposal she had been wandering the corridors of the apartment building in a daze of irritation and confusion. She ran into the great denim-shelled ovoid of the sorceress Olga Simeonovna. “What’s up, beauty,” Olga Volga gruffly inquired, fingering her customary potato. “You look like your cat dies only you don’t got no cat.” India squeezed a smile and in her perplexity blurted out her trouble to the Russian super. “It’s the boy next door,” she confessed. Olga looked contemptuous. “That nancy schmancy what’s-his-name? Rick Flick?” India nodded. Olga Volga prepared to go on the warpath. “He been bothering you honey? You say the word and he’s outa here on his little tushy we have to look at supersized up there on the side of the Beverly Center. I mean, I’m sorry, keep it to yourself, Dickie, nobody wants to see.”

India shook her head, came out with it. “He proposed.” Olga quivered all over, a low-grade earthquake rippling across her flesh. “You serious? You and Nick? Nick and you? Okay, wow.” India found herself bridling at the disbelief in the super’s voice. “Well, don’t sound that surprised. Why shouldn’t someone want to marry me?” Olga placed a great blue-veined slab of arm on India’s shoulder. “No, of course not because of you, my darling, my gorgeous. It’s just that Mick? Always, until today, I totally thought he was guy.” “Guy?” “Of course guy. Like everyone round here. Big guy neighborhood, just my luck, huh. The Mister Softee van man across the street, calls himself The Emperor of Ice Cream, right there on the side of his van he puts it, who does he think he fooling, you know? Totally guy. Guy dog walkers also, guy waiters in the cafeterias, guy gyms a girl like you goes there and gets no whistles from nobody, guy Hispanic construction teams, guy electricians and plumbers, guy mail carriers, guy girls hand in hand on the sidewalk, guy guys tanning all day on sunbeds by the pool then going upstairs to do shit doggy style and I’m supposed to ignore this. Perverts everyplace only now we must call them happy boys and girls. What is so guy about perversion, explain me? About this crime against God’s plan what is so cheerful, please?”