Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

And somewhere along the way the adversary himself would be waiting. Shaitan, Iblis, or whatever name he had adopted – and in point of fact that name was on the tip of Gibreel's tongue – just as the face of the adversary, horned and malevolent, was still somewhat out of focus... well, it would take shape soon enough, and the name would come back, Gibreel was sure of it, for were not his powers growing every day, was he not the one who, restored to his glory, would hurl the adversary down, once more, into the Darkest Deeps? – That name: what was it? Tch-something? Tchu Tché Tchin Tchow. No matter. All in good time.

But the city in its corruption refused to submit to the dominion of the cartographers, changing shape at will and without warning, making it impossible for Gibreel to approach his quest in the systematic manner he would have preferred. Some days he would turn a corner at the end of a grand colonnade built of human flesh and covered in skin that bled when scratched, and find himself in an uncharted wasteland, at whose distant rim he could see tall familiar buildings, Wren's dome, the high metallic spark-plug of the Telecom Tower, crumbling in the wind like sandcastles. He would stumble across bewildering and anonymous parks and emerge into the crowded streets of the West End, upon which, to the consternation of the motorists, acid had begun to drip from the sky, burning great holes in the surfaces of the roads. In this pandemonium of mirages he often heard laughter: the city was mocking his impotence, awaiting his surrender, his recognition that what existed here was beyond his powers to comprehend, let alone to change. He shouted curses at his still-faceless adversary, pleaded with the Deity for a further sign, feared that his energies might, in truth, never be equal to the task. In brief, he was becoming the most wretched and bedraggled of archangels, his garments filthy, his hair lank and greasy, his chin sprouting hair in uncontrollable tufts. It was in this sorry condition that he arrived at the Angel Underground.

It must have been early in the morning, because the station staff drifted up as he watched, to unlock and then roll back the metal grille of night. He followed them in, shuffling along, head low, hands deep in pockets (the street atlas had been discarded long ago); and raising his eyes at last, found himself looking into a face on the verge of dissolving into tears.

‘Good morning,’ he ventured, and the young woman in the ticket office responded bitterly, ‘What's good about it, that's what I want to know,’ and now her tears did come, plump, globular and plenteous. ‘There, there, child,’ he said, and she gave him a disbelieving look. ‘You're no priest,’ she opined. He answered, a little tentatively: ‘I am the Angel, Gibreel.’ She began to laugh, as abruptly as she had wept. ‘Only angels roun here hang from the lamp-posts at Christmas. Illuminations. Only the Council swing them by their necks.’ He was not to be put off. ‘I am Gibreel,’ he repeated, fixing her with his eye. ‘Recite.’ And, to her own emphatically expressed astonishment, I cyaan believe I doin this, emptyin my heart to some tramp, I not like this, you know , the ticket clerk began to speak.

Her name was Orphia Phillips, twenty years old, both parents alive and dependent on her, especially now that her fool sister Hyacinth had lost her job as a physiotherapist by ‘gettin up to she nonsense’. The young man's name, for of course there was a young man, was Uriah Moseley. The station had recently installed two gleaming new elevators and Orphia and Uriah were their operators. During rush-hours, when both lifts were working, they had little time for conversation; but for the rest of the day, only one lift was used. Orphia took up her position at the ticket-collection point just along from the elevator-shaft, and Uri managed to spend a good deal of time down there with her, leaning against the door-jamb of his gleaming lift and picking his teeth with the silver toothpick his great-grandfather had liberated from some old-time plantation boss. It was true love. ‘But I jus get carry away,’ Orphia wailed at Gibreel. ‘I always too hasty for sense.’ One afternoon, during a lull, she had deserted her post and stepped up right in front of him as he leaned and picked teeth, and seeing the look in her eye he put away the pick. After that he came to work with a spring in his step; she, too, was in heaven as she descended each day into the bowels of the earth. Their kisses grew longer and more passionate. Sometimes she would not detach himself when the buzzer rang for the lift; Uriah would have to push her back, with a cry of, ‘Cool off, girl, the public.’ Uriah had a vocational attitude to his work. He spoke to her of his pride in his uniform, of his satisfaction at being in the public service, giving his life to society. She thought he sounded a shade pompous, and wanted to say, ‘Uri, man, you jus a elevator boy here,’ but intuiting that such realism would not be well received, she held her troublesome tongue, or, rather, pushed it into his mouth.

Their embraces in the tunnel became wars. Now he was trying to get away, straightening his tunic, while she bit his ear and pushed her hand down inside his trousers. ‘You crazy,’ he said, but she, continuing, inquired: ‘So? You vex?’

They were, inevitably, caught: a complaint was lodged by a kindly lady in headscarf and tweeds. They had been lucky to keep their jobs. Orphia had been ‘grounded’, deprived of elevator-shafts and boxed into the ticket booth. Worse still, her place had been taken by the station beauty, Rochelle Watkins. ‘I know what goin on,’ she cried angrily. ‘I see Rochelle expression when she come up, fixin up her hair an all o’ dat.’ Uriah, nowadays, avoided Orphia's eyes.

‘Can't figure out how you get me to tell you me business,’ she concluded, uncertainly. ‘You not no angel. That is for sure.’ But she was unable, try as she might, to break away from his transfixing gaze. ‘I know,’ he told her, ‘what is in your heart.’

He reached in through the booth's window and took her unresisting hand. – Yes, this was it, the force of her desires filling him up, enabling him to translate them back to her, making action possible, allowing her to say and do what she most profoundly required; this was what he remembered, this quality of being joined to the one to whom he appeared, so that what followed was the product of their joining. At last, he thought, the archangelic functions return. – Inside the ticket booth, the clerk Orphia Phillips had her eyes closed, her body had slumped down in her chair, looking slow and heavy, and her lips were moving. – And his own, in unison with hers. – There. It was done.

At this moment the station manager, a little angry man with nine long hairs, fetched from ear-level, plastered across his baldness, burst like a cuckoo from his little door. ‘What's your game?’ he shouted at Gibreel. ‘Get out of it before I call the police.’ Gibrcel stayed where he was. The station manager saw Orphia emerging from her trance and began to shriek. ‘You, Phillips. Never saw the like. Anything in trousers, but this is ridiculous. All my born days. And nodding off on the job, the idea.’ Orphia stood up, put on her raincoat, picked up her folding umbrella, emerged from ticket booth. ‘Leaving public property unattended. You get back in there this minute, or it's your job, sure as eggsis.’ Orphia headed for the spiral stairs and moved towards the lower depths. Deprived of his employee, the manager swung round to face Gibreel. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Eff off. Go crawl back under your stone.’

‘I am waiting,’ replied Gibreel with dignity, ‘for the lift.’

When she reached the bottom of the stairs, Orphia Phillips turning a corner saw Uriah Moseley leaning against the ticket-collection booth in that way he had, and Rochelle Watkins simpering with delight. But Orphia knew what to do. ‘You let ‘Chelle feel you toothpick yet, Uri?’ she sang out. ‘She'd surely love to hold it.’