Salman Rushdie - Fury

Yet another story was being half told behind his back; another stranger’s fairy tale of the city poured into his defenseless ear. “Yeah, it went great, honey. No, no problems, I’m en route to the trustees’ meeting, that’s why I’m calling you on my cell. Conscious all the time, but doped-up, sure. So, semiconscious. Yeah, the knife comes right at your eyeball, but the chemical assistance makes you think it’s a feather. No, no bruising, and let me tell you it’s amazing what my visual world now contains. Amazing grace, yeah, good one. Was blind but now I see. Really. Look at all this stuff out here. I’ve been missing so much. Well, think about it. He really is the laser king. I asked around a lot as you know and the same name kept coming up. A little dryness is all, but that goes away in a few weeks, he says. Okay, love ya. I’ll be home late. What can you do. Don’t wait up.” And of course he turned around, of course he saw that the young woman was not alone, a man was nuzzling at her even as she flipped her cell phone shut. She, gladly allowing herself to be nuzzled, met Solanka’s eye; and, seeing herself caught in her lie, beamed guiltily, and shrugged. What can you do, as she had said on the phone. The heart has its reasons, and we are all the servants of love.

Twenty minutes to ten in London. Asmaan would be asleep. Five and a half hours later in India. Turn the watch upside down in London and you got the time in the town of Malik Solanka’s birth, the Forbidden City by the Arabian Sea. That, too, was coming back. The thought filled him with dread: of what, driven by his long-sealed-away fury, he might become. Even after all these years it defined him, had not lost any of its power over him. And if he finished the sentences of that untold tale?… That question must be for another day. He shook his head. Neela was late. Solanka put down his newspaper, pulled a piece of wood and a Swiss Army knife out of an overcoat pocket, and began, with complete absorption, to whittle.

“Who is he?” Neela Mahendra’s shadow fell across him. The sun was behind her, and in silhouette she looked even taller than he remembered. “He’s an artist,” Solanka replied. “The most dangerous man in the world.” She dusted off a spot on the museum steps and sat down beside him. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “I know a lot of dangerous men, and none of them ever created a credible work of art. Also, trust me, not a single one of them was made of wood.” They sat there in silence for a while, he whittling, she simply still, offering the world the gift of her being in it. Afterward Malik Solanka, remembering their first moments alone together, would dwell particularly on the silence and stillness, on how easy that had been. “I fell in love with you when you weren’t saying a word,” he told her. “How was I to know you were the most talkative woman on earth? I know a lot of talkative women and, trust me, compared to you, every single one of them was made of wood.”

After a few minutes he put the half-finished figure away and apologized for being so distracted. “No apology required,” she said. “Work is work.” They got up to make their way down the great flight of steps toward the park, and as she rose, a man slipped on the step above her and rolled heavily and painfully down a dozen or more steps, narrowly missing Neela on his way down; his fall was broken by a group of schoolgirls sitting screaming in his way. Professor Solanka recognized the man as the one who had been necking so enthusiastically with the mobile-phone prevaricator. He looked around for Ms. Cell Phone, and after a moment spotted her storming off uptown on foot, hailing off-duty cabs that ignored her angry arm.

Neela was wearing a knee-length mustard-colored scarf dress in silk. Her black hair was twisted up into a tight chignon and her long arms were bare. A cab stopped and expelled its passenger just in case she needed a ride. A hot dog vendor offered her anything she wanted, free of charge: “Just eat it here, lady, so I can watch you do it.” Experiencing for the first time the effect about which Jack Rhinehart had been so vulgarly effusive, Solanka felt as if he were escorting one of the Met’s more important possessions down an awestruck Fifth Avenue. No: the masterpiece he was thinking of was at the Louvre. With a light breeze blowing the dress against her body, she looked like the Winged Victory of Samothraki, only with the head on. “Nike,” he said aloud, puzzling her. “It’s who you remind me of,” he clarified. She frowned. “I make you think of sportswear?”

Sportswear was certainly thinking of her. As they turned into the park, a young man in running clothes approached them, rendered positively humble by the force of Neela’s beauty. Unable to speak directly to her at first, he addressed himself to Solanka instead. “Sir,” he said, “please don’t think I’m trying to hit on your daughter, that is, I’m not asking for a date or anything, it’s just that she is the most, I had to tell her”—and here at last he did turn toward Neela — “to tell you, you’re the most…” A great roaring rose in Malik Solanka’s breast. It would be good now to tear this young man’s tongue out from that vile fleshy mouth. It would be good to see how those muscled arms might look when detached from that highly defined torso. Cut? Ripped? How about if he was cut and ripped into about a million pieces? How about if I ate his fucking heart?

He felt Neela Mahendra’s hand come to rest lightly on his arm. The fury abated as quickly as it had risen. The phenomenon, his unpredictable temper’s rise and fall, had been so rapid that Malik Solanka was left feeling giddy and confused. Had it really happened? Had he really been on the verge of tearing this super-fit fellow limb from limb? And if so, then how had Neela dissipated his anger—the anger to combat which Solanka sometimes had to lie in darkened rooms for hours, doing breathing exercises and visualizing red triangles—by the merest touch? Could a woman’s hand really possess such power? And if so (the thought offered itself to him and would not be denied), was this not a woman to keep by his side and cherish for the rest of his haunted life?

He shook his head to clear it of such notions and returned his attention to the unfolding scene. Neela was giving the young runner her most dazzling smile, a smile after receiving which it would be best to die, for the rest of life was sure to be a big letdown. “He isn’t my father,” she told the smile-blinded wearer of sportswear. “He’s my live-in lover.” This information struck the poor fellow like a hammer blow; whereupon, to underscore the point, Neela Mahendra planted on the still-befuddled Solanka’s unprepared but nevertheless grateful mouth a long, explicit kiss. “And, guess what?” she panted, coming up for air to deliver the coup de grace. “He’s absolutely fantastic in bed.”

“What was that?” a flattered, more than somewhat overcome Professor Solanka asked her dizzily after the runner had departed, looking as if he were off to disembowel himself with a blunt bamboo stick. She laughed, a great wicked cackle of a noise that made even Mila’s raucous laughter seem refined. “I could see you were on the edge of losing it,” she said. “And I need you here right now, paying attention, and not in a hospital or jail.” Which explained about eighty percent of it, Solanka thought as his head stopped whirling, but didn’t fully translate the meaning of everything she had been doing with her tongue.

Jack! Jack! he reproved himself The subject for this afternoon wa Rhinehart, his pal, his best buddy, and not his friend’s girlfriend tongue, no matter how long and gymnastic it was. They sat on a bench near the pond, and all around them dog walkers were colliding wit trees, Tai Chi practitioners lost their balance, roller-bladers smashed into one another, and people out strolling just walked right into th pond as if they’d forgotten it was there. Neela Mahendra gave no sign o noticing any of this. A man walked past with an ice cream cone, which owing to his sudden but comprehensive loss of hand-to-mouth coordination, completely missed his tongue and instead made contact, messily, with his ear. Another young fellow began, with every appearance of genuine emotion, to weep copiously as he jogged by. Only the middle-aged African-American woman sitting on the next bench (who am I calling middle-aged? She’s probably younger than I am, Solanka thought disappointedly) seemed impervious to the Neela factor as she ate her way through a long egg salad hero, advertising her enjoyment of every mouthful with loud mmms and uh-huhs. Neela, meanwhile, had eyes only for Professor Malik Solanka. “Surprisingly good kiss, by the way,” she said. “Really. First class.”