Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

by Salman Rushdie

  The detachment from the ground of a growing number of men, women and their pets—chocolate Labradors, bunny rabbits, Persian cats, hamsters, ferrets, and a monkey named E.T.—caused global panic. The fabric of human life was beginning to unravel. In the Menil Collection gallery in Houston, Texas, a shrewd curator named Christof Pantokrator suddenly understood for the first time the prophetic nature of René Magritte’s masterwork Golconda, in which men in overcoats, wearing bowler hats, hang in the air against a background of low buildings and cloudless sky. It had always been believed that the men in the picture were slowly falling, like well-dressed rain. But Pantokrator perceived that Magritte had not painted human raindrops. “They are human balloons,” he cried. “They rise! They rise!” Foolishly he made his discovery public and after that the Menil buildings had to be protected by armed guards against local people incensed by the great work of the prophet of antigravity. Some of the guards began to rise, which was alarming, and so did several of the protesters, the would-be vandals.

  “The places of worship are full of terrified men and women seeking the protection of the Almighty,” Ghazali’s dust said to the dust of Ibn Rushd. “Just as I expected. Fear drives men to God.”

  There was no response.

  “What’s the matter?” Ghazali scoffed. “You finally ran out of hollow arguments?”

  At length Ibn Rushd answered in a voice full of masculine complication. “It’s hard enough to discover that the woman who bore your children is a supernatural being,” he said, “without also having to bear the knowledge that she is lying with another man.” He knew this because she had told him. In her jinnia way she thought he would take it as a compliment that she had fallen for his copy, his echo, his face on another body, revealing that in spite of her love for human beings there were things about them she absolutely didn’t understand.

  Ghazali laughed as only dust can laugh. “You’re dead, you fool,” she said. “Dead for eight centuries and more. This is no time for jealousy.”

  “That is the kind of inane remark,” Ibn Rushd snapped back from his grave, “which shows me that you have never been in love; from which it follows that even when you were alive you never truly lived.”

  “Only with God,” Ghazali replied. “That was and is my only lover, and he is and was more than enough.”

  When Sister Allbee discovered that her feet were an inch and a half off the ground she was angrier than at any point in her life since her father ran off with a gravel-voiced Louisiana chanteuse the week before he was supposed to take his daughter to the new Disney park in Florida. On that occasion she had gone through the second-floor apartment in the Harlem River Houses destroying all trace of her delinquent parent, tearing up photographs, shredding his hat, and making a bonfire of his abandoned clothes in the play space outside, watched silently by her mother flapping her arms and silently opening and shutting her mouth but making no attempt to dial back her daughter’s rage. After that her father no longer existed and young C. C. Allbee gained a reputation as a girl never to be crossed.

  Her favorite tenant, Blue Yasmeen, had taken off too, and was found sobbing uncontrollably in the hallway a full two inches up in the air. “I always defended him,” she wailed. “Whenever you said something against him, I stuck up for the guy, because he was kind of a silver fox and he reminded me of my dad. Then a female on a flying rug shows up and I’m like am I going crazy and now this. I stuck up for the dude. How did I know he would pass his fuckin’ sickness on to me?”

  That made two betrayals by father figures to be mad about, and a few minutes later Sister Allbee used her master key to enter Mr. Geronimo’s apartment with a loaded shotgun in her hand, with Blue Yasmeen fretful close behind her. “You’re out of here,” she bellowed. “Walk out by nightfall or be carried out feet first before dawn.”

  “He’s standing on the floor!” Blue Yasmeen screamed. “He’s cured, but he’s left us sick.”

  Fear changed the fearful, thought Mr. Geronimo looking down the barrel of the gun. Fear was a man running from his shadow. It was a woman wearing headphones and the only sound she could hear in them was her own terror. Fear was a solipsist, a narcissist, blind to everything except itself. Fear was stronger than ethics, stronger than judgment, stronger than responsibility, stronger than civilization. Fear was a bolting animal trampling children underfoot as it fled from itself. Fear was a bigot, a tyrant, a coward, a red mist, a whore. Fear was a bullet pointed at his heart.

  “I’m an innocent man,” he said, “but your gun makes an excellent argument.”

  “You are the spreader of the plague,” said Sister Allbee. “Patient Zero! Typhoid Mary! Your body should be wrapped in plastic and buried a mile underground so you can’t ruin any more lives.”

  Fear had Blue Yasmeen by the throat as well. “My father betrayed me by dying and abandoning me to the world, when he knew how much I needed him. You betrayed me by ripping the world away from beneath my feet. He was my father, so I love him anyway. You? You should just go.”

  The fairy princess had disappeared. When she heard the key turning in the lock she had turned sideways and disappeared through a slit in the air. Maybe she would help him, maybe not. He had heard all about the whimsical untrustworthiness of the jinn. Maybe she had just used him to feed her sexual hunger, for it was said that the jinn are insatiable in that department, and now that she was done he would never see her again. She had brought him down to earth and that was his reward, and all the rest, about his own jinn powers, was nonsense. Maybe he was alone, about to be homeless, faced with the unarguable truth of a shotgun in the hands of a woman enraged by her fear.

  “I’ll go,” he said.

  “One hour,” said Sister.

  And in the city of London, far from Mr. Geronimo’s bedroom, a mob had gathered outside the home of the composer Hugo Casterbridge in Well Walk, in the sylvan borough of Hampstead. He was surprised to see it, because he had of late become a laughingstock, and public anger seemed an inappropriate response to his new reputation. It had become conventional to ridicule Casterbridge ever since his ill-advised television appearance in which he threatened the world with plagues sent down upon humanity by a god in whom he did not believe, the classic idiocy of the artist, everyone said, he should have stayed home and tinkled and tootled and clanked and banged and kept his mouth shut. Casterbridge was a man shored up by an immense, solid and hitherto impermeable self-belief but he had been unnerved by the ease with which his previous eminence had been obliterated by what he thought of as the new philistinism. There was apparently no room for the idea that the metaphorical sphere could be so potent that it affected the actual world. So he was a joke now, the atheist who believed in divine retribution.

  Very well. He would indeed stay home with his strange Schoenbergian music which few people understood and even fewer enjoyed. He would think about hexachordal inversional combinatoriality and multidimensional set presentations, he would brood on the properties of the referential set, and let the rotting world go hang. He was more and more of a recluse anyway these days. The doorbell of the Well Walk mansion had gone wrong and he saw no need to have it fixed. The Post-Atheist group he had briefly assembled had melted away under the heat of public obloquy but he stuck, silently, angrily, with gritted teeth, to his guns. He was accustomed to being thought incomprehensible. Laugh! he mutely instructed his critics. He would see who had the last laugh of all.

  But apparently there was a new preacher in town. There was a wildness in the city, fires on council estates in the poor boroughs to the north, looting of high-street stores in the usually conservative regions south of the river, and mutinous crowds in the main square that didn’t know what to demand. Out of the flames came the turbaned firebrand, a small man with Yosemite Sam saffron beard and eyebrows, wrapped in a strong smell of smoke; he appeared from nowhere one day as if he stepped through a slit in the sky, Yusuf Ifrit was his name, and suddenly he was everywhere, a leader, a spokesman, he was on government committe
es, there was talk of a knighthood. There is indeed a plague spreading, he thundered, and if we do not defend ourselves against it we will all be infected for sure, it’s infecting us already, the impurity of the disease has touched the blood of many of our weaker children, but we are ready to defend ourselves, we will fight the plague at its roots. The plague had many roots, Yusuf said, it was carried by books, films, dances, paintings, but music was what he feared and hated most, because music slid beneath the thinking mind to seize the heart; and of all music makers, one, the worst of them all, the plague personified as cacophony, evil transmuted into sound. And so here was a police officer visiting the composer Casterbridge, I’m afraid you’ll have to move out, sir, until things cool off, we can’t guarantee your safety at this location, and there are your neighbors to consider, sir, innocent bystanders could be hurt in an affray, and he bridled at that, Let me understand you, he said, let me be perfectly clear what you’re telling me here, what you’re saying to me now is that if I get hurt in this putative affray of yours, if the injury is to me, then I’m not an innocent bystander, is that your fucking point? There’s no need for that kind of language, sir, I won’t stand for it, you need to take on the situation as it is, I won’t endanger my officers by reason of your egotistical intransigence.

  Go away, he said. This is my home. This is my castle. I’ll defend myself with cannons and boiling oil.

  Is that a threat of violence, sir?

  It’s a fucking figure of speech.

  Then, a mystery. The gathering mob, words of hate, aggression disguised as defensiveness, the threatening claiming to be under threat, the knife pretending to be in danger of being stabbed, the fist accusing the chin of attacking it, all that was familiar, the loud malevolent hypocrisy of the age. Even the preacher from nowhere wasn’t much of a puzzlement. Such unholy holy men cropped up all the time, created by some form of sociological parthenogenesis, some weird bootstrap operation that made authorities out of nonentities. That was stuff to shrug at. Then on the night of the mystery there were reports of a woman seen with the composer, silhouetted against the living room window, an unknown woman who appeared as if from nowhere and then disappeared, leaving the composer alone at the night window, opening it in defiance of the gathered mob, his painful dissonant music clanging behind him like an alarm system, his arms outstretched as if crucified, what was he doing, was he inviting death into his home, and why was the crowd suddenly hushed, as if some giant invisible cat had got its tongue, why wasn’t it moving, it looked like a waxwork tableau of itself, and where were those clouds coming from, the weather in London was clear and mild, but not in Hampstead, in Hampstead that night all of a sudden there was rolling thunder, and then bolts of lightning, wham, crash, and the mob didn’t wait around for another strike, the lightning broke the spell and the mob ran screaming for its life, down Well Walk and on to the Heath, nobody killed thank goodness, except for the idiot who decided the best place to shelter from thunderbolts was under a tree, he got fried. The next day the mob didn’t come back, or the next, or the next.

  Quite a coincidence, sir, that oddly localized storm, almost as if you brought it on, you wouldn’t have an interest in meteorology, would you, sir? There wouldn’t be some weather-altering contraption in your attic, now would there? You’ll excuse us if we just take a look?

  Inspector, be my guest.

  On the way back to Mr. Geronimo from Hugo Casterbridge, flying east not west, for the jinn move so swiftly that there’s no need to take the shortest route, Dunia flew over ruins, hysteria, chaos. Mountains had begun to crumble, snows to melt and oceans to rise, and the dark jinn were everywhere—Zumurrud the Great, Shining Ruby, Ra’im Blood-Drinker, and Zumurrud’s old ally, increasingly his rival for jinn supremacy, the sorcerer-jinni Zabardast. Water reservoirs turned to urine and a baby-faced tyrant, after Zabardast whispered in his ear, ordered all his subjects to have the same ridiculous haircut as himself. Human beings did not know how to handle the irruption of the supranormal into their lives, Dunia thought, most of them simply fell apart or had the haircuts and wept with love for the baby-faced tyrant, or under Zumurrud’s spell they prostrated themselves before false gods who asked them to murder the devotees of other false gods, and that too was being done, statues of These gods destroyed by followers of Those gods, lovers of Those gods castrated stoned to death hanged sliced in half by the lovers of These. Human sanity was a poor, fragile thing at best, she thought. Hatred stupidity devotion greed the four horsemen of the new apocalypse. Yet she loved these wrecked people and wanted to save them from the dark jinn who fed, watered and made manifest the darkness within themselves. To love one human being was to begin to love them all. To love two was to be hooked forever, helpless in the grip of love.

  Where did you go, he said. You disappeared just when I needed you.

  I went to see someone who also needed me. I had to show him what he was capable of.

  Another man.

  Another man.

  Did you look like Ella when you were with him. Are you making my dead wife fuck men she never met is that it.

  That isn’t it.

  I have my feet on the ground again so you’re done with me this was some sort of jinn therapy is that it.

  That isn’t it.

  What do you really look like. Show me what you really look like. Ella is dead. She’s dead. She was a beautiful optimist and believed in an afterlife but this wasn’t it, this zombie of my darling wife inhabited by you. Stop. Please stop. I’m being thrown out of this apartment. I’m losing my mind.

  I know where you need to go.

  It is dangerous for human beings to enter Peristan. Very few have ever done so. Until the War of the Worlds only one man, as far as we know, ever stayed there for any length of time, and married a fairy princess, and when he returned to the world of men he discovered that eighteen years had passed even though he believed himself to have been away for a much shorter period. A day in the jinn world is like a month of human time. Nor is that the only danger. To look upon the beauty of a jinnia princess in her true uncloaked aspect is to be dazzled beyond the capacity of many human eyes to see, minds to grasp or hearts to bear. An ordinary man might be blinded or driven insane or killed as his heart burst with love. In the old days, a thousand years ago, a few adventurers managed to enter the jinn world, mostly with the assistance of well- or evil-intentioned jinn. To repeat: only one human being ever returned in good shape, the hero Hamza, and the suspicion remains that he may have been part jinni himself. So when Dunia the jinnia, aka Aasmaan Peri the Lightning Princess of Qâf Mountain, suggested to Mr. Geronimo that he return with her to her father’s kingdom, suspicious minds might have concluded that she was luring him to his doom like the sirenuse singing on the rocks near Positano or Lilith the night monster who was Adam’s wife before Eve, or John Keats’s merciless beauty.

  Come with me, she said. I will reveal myself to you when you’re ready to see me.

  Then,

  just as the inhabitants of the city were discovering the true meaning of being without shelter, even though they had always believed themselves to be experts in shelterlessness, because the city they hated and loved had always been bad at providing its inhabitants with protection against the storms of life, and had inculcated in its citizens a certain fierce loving-hating pride at their own habits of survival in spite of everything, in spite of the not-enough-money issue and the not-enough-space issue and the dog-eat-dog issue and so on;

  just as they were being forced to face the fact that the city or some force within the city or some force arriving in the city from outside the city might be about to expel them from its territory forever, not horizontally but vertically, into the sky, into the freezing air and the murderous airlessness above the air;

  just as they began to imagine their lifeless bodies floating out beyond the solar system, so that whatever alien intelligences might be out there would meet dead human beings long before living ones and wonder what stupidity
or horror had pushed these entities out into space without so much as protective clothing;

  just as the screams and weeping of the citizens began to rise above the noise of such traffic as continued to ply the streets, because the plague of rising had broken out in many neighborhoods, and those individuals who believed in such things began to shout in the frightened streets that the Rapture had begun, as foretold in Paul’s first epistle to the Thessalonians, when the living and the dead would be caught up in the clouds and meet the Lord in the air, it was the end of days, they cried, and as people began to float upwards away from the metropolis it was getting to be hard even for the most diehard skeptic to disagree;

  just as all this was going on, Oliver Oldcastle and the Lady Philosopher arrived at The Bagdad with murder in his eyes and terror in hers, having had to struggle into the city without the benefit of a car or bus or train, it was, Oldcastle told Alexandra, just about the distance traveled by Pheidippides from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens, at the end of which, by the way, he dropped dead, and they too were exhausted, at the end of their strength, and irrationally believing that a confrontation with Geronimo Manezes could resolve everything, that if they could just frighten him enough or seduce him enough he would he able to reverse what he had set in motion;

  just at that precise moment a great light flooded outwards and upwards from the basement bedroom in which the greatest of the jinnia princesses was revealing herself in her true glory for the first time ever in the human world, and the revelation opened the royal gate into Fairyland, and Mr. Geronimo and the Lightning Princess were gone, and the gate closed and the light went out and the city was left to face its fate, C. C. Allbee and Blue Yasmeen floating balloon-fashion in the stairwell of The Bagdad, and Manager Oldcastle in his great wrath and the chatelaine of La Incoerenza who had left her estate for the first time in many years standing impotent in the street, already a foot or so off the ground, without any hope of redress.