Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing . He riffled on through the book, and replaced Elena Cone next to the image of the Regenerated Man, sitting naked and splay-legged on a hill with the sun shining out of his rear end. I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise . Allie put her hands up and covered her face. Gibreel tried to cheer her up. ‘You have written in the flyleaf: “Creation of world ace. Archbish. Usher, 4004 bc. Estim'd date of apocalypse, .·., 1996.” So time for improvement of sensual enjoyment still remains.’ She shook her head: stop. He stopped. ‘Tell me,’ he said, putting away the book.

Elena at twenty had taken London by storm. Her feral six-foot body winking through a golden chain-mail Rabanne. She had always carried herself with uncanny assurance, proclaiming her ownership of the earth. The city was her medium, she could swim in it like a fish. She was dead at twenty-one, drowned in a bathtub of cold water, her body full of psychotropic drugs. Can one drown in one's element, Allie had wondered long ago. If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air? In those days Allie, eighteen-nineteen, had envied Elena her certainties. What was her element? In what periodic table of the spirit could it be found? – Now, flat-footed, Himalayan veteran, she mourned its loss. When you have earned the high horizon it isn't easy to go back into your box, into a narrow island, an eternity of anticlimax. But her feet were traitors and the mountain would kill.

Mythological Elena, the cover girl, wrapped in couture plastics, had been sure of her immortality. Allie, visiting her in her World's End crashpad , refused a proffered sugar-lump, mumbled something about brain damage, feeling inadequate, as usual in Elena's company. Her sister's face, the eyes too wide apart, the chin too sharp, the effect overwhelming, stared mockingly back. ‘No shortage of brain cells,’ Elena said. ‘You can spare a few.’ The spare capacity of the brain was Elena's capital. She spent her cells like money, searching for her own heights; trying, in the idiom of the day, to fly. Death, like life, came to her coated in sugar.

She had tried to ‘improve’ the younger Alleluia. ‘Hey, you're a great looking kid, why hide it in those dungarees? I mean, God, darling, you've got all the equipment in there.’ One night she dressed Allie up, in an olive-green item composed of frills and absences that barely covered her body-stockinged groin: sugaring me like candy , was Allie's puritanical thought, my own sister putting me on display in the shop-window, thanks a lot . They went to a gaming club full of ecstatic lordlings, and Allie had left fast when Elena's attention was elsewhere. A week later, ashamed of herself for being such a coward, for rejecting her sister's attempt at intimacy, she sat on a beanbag at World's End and confessed to Elena that she was no longer a virgin. Whereupon her elder sister slapped her in the mouth and called her ancient names: tramp, slut, tart. ‘Elena Cone never allows a man to lay a finger ,’ she yelled, revealing her ability to think of herself as a third person, ‘not a goddamn finger nail . I know what I'm worth, darling, I know how the mystery dies the moment they put their willies in, I should have known you'd turn out to be a whore. Some fucking communist, I suppose,’ she wound down. She had inherited her father's prejudices in such matters. Allie, as Elena knew, had not.

They hadn't met much after that, Elena remaining until her death the virgin queen of the city – the post-mortem confirmed her as virgo intacta – while Allie gave up wearing underwear, took odd jobs on small, angry magazines, and because her sister was untouchable she became the other thing, every sexual act a slap in her sibling's glowering, whitelipped face. Three abortions in two years and the belated knowledge that her days on the contraceptive pill had put her, as far as cancer was concerned, in one of the highest-risk categories of all.

She heard about her sister's end from a newsstand billboard, MODEL'S ‘ACID BATH’ DEATH. You're not even safe from puns when you die, was her first reaction. Then she found she was unable to weep.

‘I kept seeing her in magazines for months,’ she told Gibreel. ‘On account of the glossies’ long lead times.’ Elena's corpse danced across Moroccan deserts, clad only in diaphanous veils; or it was sighted in the Sea of Shadows on the moon, naked except for spaceman's helmet and half a dozen silk ties knotted around breasts and groin. Allie took to drawing moustaches on the pictures, to the outrage of newsagents; she ripped her late sister out of the journals of her zombie-like undeath and crumpled her up. Haunted by Elena's periodical ghost, Allie reflected on the dangers of attempting to fly ; what flaming falls, what macabre hells were reserved for such Icarus types! She came to think of Elena as a soul in torment, to believe that this captivity in an immobile world of girlie calendars in which she wore black breasts of moulded plastic, three sizes larger than her own; of pseudo-erotic snarls; of advertising messages printed across her navel, was no less than Elena's personal hell. Allie began to see the scream in her sister's eyes, the anguish of being trapped forever in those fashion spreads. Elena was being tortured by demons, consumed in fires, and she couldn't even move... after a time Allie had to avoid the shops in which her sister could be found staring from the racks. She lost the ability to open magazines, and hid all the pictures of Elena she owned. ‘Goodbye, Yel,’ she told her sister's memory, using her old nursery name. ‘I've got to look away from you.’

‘But I turned out to be like her, after all.’ Mountains had begun to sing to her; whereupon she, too, had risked brain cells in search of exaltation. Eminent physicians expert in the problems facing mountaineers had frequently proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that human beings could not survive without breathing apparatus much above eight thousand metres. The eyes would haemorrhage beyond hope of repair, and the brain, too, would start to explode, losing cells by the billion, too many and too fast, resulting in the permanent damage known as High Altitude Deterioration, followed in quick time by death. Blind corpses would remain preserved in the permafrost of those highest slopes. But Allie and Sherpa Pemba went up and came down to tell the tale. Cells from the brain's deposit boxes replaced the current-account casualties. Nor did her eyes blow out. Why had the scientists been wrong? ‘Prejudice, mostly,’ Allie said, lying curled around Gibreel beneath parachute silk. ‘They can't quantify the will, so they leave it out of their calculations. But it's will that gets you up Everest, will and anger, and it can bend any law of nature you care to mention, at least in the short term, gravity not excluded. If you don't push your luck, anyway.’

There had been some damage. She had been suffering unaccountable lapses of memory: small, unpredictable things. Once at the fishmonger's she had forgotten the word fish . Another morning she found herself in her bathroom picking up a toothbrush blankly, quite unable to work out its purpose. And one morning, waking up beside the sleeping Gibreel, she had been on the verge of shaking him awake to demand, ‘Who the hell are you? How did you get in my bed?’ – when, just in time, the memory returned. ‘I'm hoping it's temporary,’ she told him. But kept to herself, even now, the appearances of Maurice Wilson's ghost on the rooftops surrounding the Fields, waving his inviting arm.