Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

by Salman Rushdie

  He was frightening his audience. His employees began drifting away from him, mushroom clouds in their eyes, mourning the destruction of their hopes of country club memberships and good marriages. They were seeing the deaths of their children and the annihilation of their homes, and even before any of that came to pass, the collapse of this great institution as the inevitable hurricane of umbrage burst upon it, and the consequent termination of their wealth. But before they could leave the scene of Daniel Aroni’s meltdown they saw the dark jinni Shining Ruby emerge from his crumpling body crowing in triumph as the kingpin fell. The sight of a supernatural being stopped many of them in their tracks while others ran screaming for the stairs. Shining Ruby laughing in their faces induced seizures in some traders and there were two terminal heart failures and for all who survived it was a sign—just as Seth Oldville’s death had been for his friend “Mac” Aroni—that everything they had worked for had just come to an end and they were living, now, on somebody else’s dread unspeakable terms. And had Aroni been uttering the devil-words this possessor-devil had put in his mouth, or did the real devilry of the creature lie in the fact that he had made the great man reveal his insane secrets? In which case … was the end of the world actually nigh? Shining Ruby certainly wanted them to think so. “Ba-boom ka-boom!” he cried joyfully, turning sideways and vanishing. “Prepare to meet thy doom doo-doom!”

  For a long time the sorcerer Zabardast had looked the way a sorcerer should look: the long beard, the high hat, the staff. The sorcerer to whom Mickey Mouse was apprenticed, Gandalf the Grey, and Zabardast would all have recognized kindred spirits in one another. However, Zabardast was conscious of his image and, now that the seals were broken and the slits between the worlds had reopened, now that the jump gate to a wormhole to Peristan stood open day and night in Jackson Heights, he studied films and magazines to keep his look relevant. Above all others he liked the edginess of Jet Li falling in love with a thousand-year-old white snake. He wished briefly that he looked like Jet Li, and for a time he considered a radical modernization of his look, and putting on the Buddhist monk’s white robe and necklace of beads and shaving his head like a chopsocky movie hero. In the end he rejected this change. Act your age, he told himself. He didn’t want to look like a kung fu star after all. He wanted to look like a god.

  Levitation—antigravity—was Zabardast’s specialty. The creator of the famous flying urns which served many jinn as their personal private aircraft, he had also provided enchanted brooms, magicked slippers, and even self-raising hats to witches who wanted to fly, and had amassed a considerable fortune in gold and jewels by providing these services. The well-known and much-documented fascination of the jinn for rare metals and precious stones has its origins, according to the greatest scholars, in the wild and incessant orgies conducted in Fairyland, and the love of many jinnias for all that glitters and gleams. Lying on beds of gold, heavily ornamented, their hair, ankles, necks and waists bedecked with gemstones, the jinnia voluptuaries saw no need for other clothing, and gratified their jinni counterparts with an inexhaustible will. Zabardast, one of the wealthiest of the jinn, was also one of the most sexually active. His flying magic funded his often extreme needs.

  In that first phase of the War of the Worlds, Zabardast set out to spread fear by a spate of poltergeist activity, sending sectional settees flying across the chic, fragile interiors of high-design showrooms, encouraging yellow taxis to fly over the roofs of other vehicles instead of swerving dangerously into their paths, lifting up manhole covers and sending them skidding at head height along the city’s sidewalks, turning them into flying giant discuses looking to decapitate the ungodly. It was the ungodly who had been specified as the targets but, Zabardast complained to Zumurrud, this place was not at all ungodly. In point of fact it was excessively godly. Atheists were few and far between and gods of all types were being adored and worshipped constantly in every neck of the woods. “Never mind,” Zumurrud retorted. “They come from this benighted place or have chosen to live here. That will suffice.”

  In between his feats of levitation, just for pleasure, the sorcerer Zabardast liked to watch the effect of releasing large numbers of venomous serpents upon an unsuspecting public. The snakes were jinn too, but jinn of a lower order; more like his servants, or even his pets. The sorcerer Zabardast’s love of the snakes he unleashed was genuine, but superficial. He was not a jinni of profound emotions. Profound emotions do not interest the jinn. In this, as in so much else, the jinnia Dunia was an exception.

  One of Zabardast’s snakes coiled itself around the Chrysler building from top to bottom like a helter-skelter slide. One distraught or possibly drug-addled and certainly bespectacled office worker was seen leaping from a window on the sixty-seventh floor, the middle floor of the three occupied by the reborn Cloud Club. Round and round the snake he slid until he hit the back of its head and fell to the sidewalk, in excellent physical condition, with his spectacles, if not his dignity, intact. He fled towards the railway station and was lost to history. His descent was filmed by at least seven different camera phones but it proved impossible to identify him. We are happy to leave him to his privacy. We have what we need of him, the digital images, much enhanced, on which, for ever and a day, he reenacts, a thousand and one times, whenever we desire him to do so, his great helix of a slide.

  The snake’s flickering tongue was twenty feet long and whipped at the ankles of fleeing pedestrians, causing falls and injuries. Another great worm, patterned in diamond-shaped lozenges colored yellow black and green like the Jamaican flag come to life, was simultaneously seen in Union Square, dancing on its tail, scattering the chess players and skateboarders, the dealers and the protesters, the teenagers in their new sneakers, the mothers and children heading down to the chocolate store. Three oldsters fled slowly uptown on Segways, past the second and third locations of the Warhol Factory, and in quavering voices they wondered what Andy would have made of the dancing snake, a silver silkscreen Double Ouroboros, perhaps, or a twelve-hour film. It had been a hard winter and there was still snow piled at the edges of the square but when the snake danced people forgot about the weather and ran. The people of the city did a lot of running that winter, but whatever horror they fled from, they were also fleeing towards a different terror, rushing from frying pan to fire.

  Emergency supplies were running out. Bug Out Bags, also known as GOODbags or INCHbags—acronyms for Get Out of Dodge bags and I’m Never Coming Home bags—became de rigueur that season. There was much argument about what your go-bag needed. Did it, for example, need a gun to repel crackheads who didn’t have go-bags? The exits to the city were jammed with honking cars full of INCHbag-bearing adults and children, heading for the hills. Lane closures were ignored and this led to accidents and even longer traffic jams. Panic was the order of the day.

  As for Zumurrud the Great himself, if the truth be told, he was feeling a little upstaged by his illustrious companions. He did his best, appearing in full panoply in the plaza at Lincoln Center bellowing You are all my slaves but even in those days of hysteria there were some innocents who thought he was promoting a new opera at the Met. He flew one night to the top of One World Trade Center and balanced on one foot on its high pinnacle, unleashing his finest ear-splitting yodel; but in spite of the horror that filled many New Yorkers’ hearts there were still puzzled citizens down below by the sad rectangular waterfalls who assumed his lofty presence was an advertising stunt for a bad-taste remake of the famous old gorilla movie. He smashed a hole in the celebrated façade of the old post office building but such destruction could be seen every summer in the movie theaters, and lost its effect by being portrayed too frequently. So it was also with extreme weather conditions: snow, ice and so on. This was a species with an exceptional ability to ignore its approaching doom. If one sought to be the embodiment of the doom that was approaching, this was a little frustrating. All the more so when the jinn he had brought along as his supporting cast seemed to have cast
themselves, somewhat ungratefully, in leading roles. It was enough to make the great Zumurrud wonder if he might be losing his touch.

  If the dark jinn have a fault, it is—but no! One should rather, less sloppily, more accurately, say Among the many faults of the dark jinn is—well then, a certain purposelessness about their behavior. They live in the moment, have no grand designs, and are easily distracted. Do not go to a jinni for strategy, for there are no jinni Clausewitzes, no Sun Tzu jinn among their ranks. Genghis Khan, conquering all he saw, based his strategy on maintaining herds of horses that accompanied his army. His archers on horseback were a dreaded cavalry. His soldiers lived on a diet of horse milk, blood and meat, so that even a dead horse was useful. The jinn do not think in this way, are not accustomed to collective action, being arch individualists. Zumurrud Shah, who enjoyed mayhem as much as any jinni, was, to be absolutely frank, disenchanted. How many cars could one transform into giant porcupines prickling down the West Side Highway, how much real estate could one damage with the swipe of an arm, before one’s thoughts turned to the superior delights of the infinitely extended sexual activity plentifully awaiting one back in Fairyland? In the absence of a worthy adversary, was the game worth the candle?

  Humanity had never been an enemy worth fighting for long, Zumurrud Shah grumbled to himself. It was enjoyable to mess around with these puny entities for a while—so pompous they were! So self-important! So unwilling to recognize their irrelevance to the universe!—and to upset their much-prized applecarts, but after a while, three-wish promise to a dead philosopher or not, prolonged engagement was unappealing. The opening of the wormhole which linked his world to theirs had been his most impressive feat, and to underline its significance he appeared on the jumbotron in Times Square to reveal himself as the leader of a mighty invasion which would shortly subjugate the entire human race, You are all my slaves now, he cried again, forget your history, a new time begins today. But a true student of the jinn would have noted that even though the wormhole in Queens stood scarily open, there was no invading army pouring through it. The jinn in Peristan were just too busy having sex.

  It is necessary to speak briefly of the extreme laziness of the great jinn. If you wish to understand how it can be that so many of these extremely powerful spirits have been so frequently captured in bottles, lamps and so on, the answer lies in the immense indolence that comes over a jinni after he has performed more or less any action. Their periods of sleep greatly exceed their waking hours and, during these times, so deeply do they slumber that they can be shoved and pushed into any enchanted receptacle without waking them up. So, for example, after the great feat of swallowing and digesting the ferry, Ra’im Blood-Drinker, still in the guise of a mighty sea-dragon, fell asleep on the harbor bed and did not awaken for several weeks; and the possession and manipulation of the financial titan Daniel Aroni similarly exhausted Shining Ruby for a couple of months. Zabardast and Zumurrud were less easily exhausted but after a while they too were ready to doze. A sleepy jinni is an irritable spirit and it was in this condition that Zumurrud and Zabardast, sitting on clouds over Manhattan, quarreled about who had done what to whom, who had been the standout performer and who the also-ran, which of them should henceforth defer to which, and who had come closest to fulfilling the promise made by Zumurrud the Great to the philosopher Ghazali centuries ago. When Zumurrud bombastically claimed responsibility for the cruel winter that had the city in its grip, Zabardast issued a peal of malicious laughter. “The fact that you take credit for bad weather,” he said, “only serves to show how desperate you are to prove your potency. I myself argue only from cause and effect. I do this, the result is that. Perhaps tomorrow you will take responsibility for the sunset, and claim to have plunged the world into darkness.”

  This must be said again: the competitiveness of even the mightiest of the jinn is often petty and childish, and leads to childish feuds. These are usually, as is the way with childishness, quarrels of short duration, but they can be bitter and spiteful while they last. When the jinn fight the results can be spectacular to the human eye. They throw things which are not things as we understand them, but the products of enchantment. Looking up at the sky from the earth, human beings would read these enchanted not-things as comets, meteors, shooting stars. The more powerful the jinni, the hotter and more fearsome the “meteor.” Zabardast and Zumurrud were the strongest of all the dark jinn, so their magic fire was dangerous, even to each other. And the slaying of the jinn by the jinn is a crucial part of our story.

  At the height of the quarrel, up there in the white clouds over the city, Zabardast pummeled his old friend in Zumurrud’s weakest spot: his immense amour propre, his pride. “If I so chose,” Zabardast cried, “I could make myself a larger giant than you, but I am unimpressed by size. If I so chose, I could be a more dazzling metamorph than Ra’im Blood-Drinker, but I prefer to retain my own shape. When I want, I am a more potent whisperer than Shining Ruby, and my whispering has more lasting and dramatic results.” Zumurrud, never the most verbal of the jinn, roared his anger and hurled a large fireball, which Zabardast turned into a harmless snowball and threw back at his rival like a boy in a winter park. “What’s more,” Zabardast shouted, “let me tell you, who are so puffed up about the creation of your wormhole, that after the long separation of the worlds, when the first seals broke and the first slits reopened, I came back to earth long before you dreamed of doing so. And what I did then sowed a seed that will soon bear fruit and inflict a wound upon humanity deeper than any injury you could manage. You hate the human race because it is not like us. I hate it for its possession of the earth, the beautiful, damaged earth. I have gone far beyond the tiny fanatical vengeance of your dead philosopher. There is a gardener from whom a whole garden of horrors will grow. What I have begun with a whisper will become a roar that will expel the human race from the planet forever. Then Fairyland will seem dull and plain, and the whole blessed earth, purified of Man, will be the province of the jinn. This is what I can do. I am Awesome. I am Zabardast.”

  “Unreason defeats itself,” Ibn Rushd said to Ghazali, dust to dust, “by reason of its unreasonableness. Reason may catnap for a time, but the irrational is more often comatose. In the end it will be the irrational that is forever caged in dreams, while reason gains the day.”

  “The world men dream of,” replied Ghazali, “is the world they try to make.”

  There followed a period of calm, during which Zabardast, Shining Ruby and Ra’im Blood-Drinker returned to Fairyland. The jumpgate to the wormhole in Queens closed and only the ruined house remained. Our ancestors allowed themselves to believe the worst was over. The clocks went forward. Spring sprang. Everywhere men went they stood in the shadow of young girls in flower, and they were glad. We were in those days a people with no memory, especially the young, and there was so much to divert the young. They permitted themselves to be happily diverted.

  Zumurrud the Great did not return to Peristan. He went to sit at the feet of Ghazali’s grave, to ask questions. After all his protests against philosophy and theology, he decided to listen. Maybe he was sick of jinn chatter and malice. Perhaps the purposeless anarchy of jinn behavior, the making of mayhem for its own sake, was finally too empty and he understood that he needed a flag to fight under. Maybe, in the end, he grew, not physically but inwardly; and, having grown, felt that for him to respect a cause, it had to be bigger than himself, and he was a giant, so it would have to be very large indeed; and the only outsize cause on the market was the one Ghazali was trying to sell him. At this distance in time, we cannot fully know his mind. We only know that he bought it.

  Beware the man (or jinni) of action when he finally seeks to better himself with thought. A little thinking is a dangerous thing.

  When Dunia first saw Geronimo Manezes he was floating on his side in his bedroom in the almost-dark, wearing a sleep mask, in the exhausted, heavily drowsy condition that was as close to sleep as he got these days, with the light from a
single still-illuminated lamp on a nightstand flowing up towards him, casting horror-movie shadows across his long, bony face. A blanket hung down from both sides of his body, making him look like a magician’s assistant, levitated while hypnotized by some top-hatted trickster, and about to be sawn in half. Where have I seen that face before, she thought, and immediately answered herself, even though the memory was more than eight hundred years old. The face of her one true human love, even though there was no cloth wound around his head, and the gray beard was less carefully managed, rougher, wilder than in her remembering of it, not the beard of a man who has chosen to have a beard, but the unkempt growth on the face of one who has simply given up shaving. Eight centuries and more since she had seen that face, yet here it was, as if it were yesterday, as if he had not abandoned her, as if he were not reduced to dust, dust to which she had spoken, animate dust, but dust nevertheless, disembodied, dead. As if he had been waiting for her here all this time, in the dark, for eight hundred years and more, waiting for her to find him and renew their ancient love.