Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

by Salman Rushdie

  “Just is,” Zumurrud repeated doubtfully.

  “Yes,” Ghazali confirmed.

  “So God is a sort of time traveler,” Zumurrud proposed. “He moves from his kind of time to ours, and by doing so becomes infinitely powerful.”

  “If you like,” Ghazali agreed. “Except that he doesn’t become. He still just is. You have to be careful how you use words.”

  “Okay,” Zumurrud said, confused again.

  “Think about it,” Ghazali urged him.

  “This god, Just-Is,” Zumurrud said on a third occasion, after thinking about it, “he doesn’t like being argued with, right?”

  “He is essential, that is to say, pure essence, and as such, he is also inarguable,” Ghazali told him. “The second proposition unavoidably follows the first. To deny his essence would be to call him inessential, which would be to argue with him, who is, by definition, inarguable. Thus to argue with his inarguability is self-evidently to misuse language, and, as I told you, you have to be careful what words you use and how you use them. Bad language can blow up in your face.”

  “Like explosives,” Zumurrud said.

  “Worse,” Ghazali said. “This is why wrong words are not to be tolerated.”

  “I have the feeling,” Zumurrud mused, “that these wretched mortals of the lower world are even more confused about language than I was.”

  “Teach them,” Ghazali said. “Teach them the tongue of the divine Just-Is. The instruction should be intensive, severe, even, one could say, fearsome. Remember what I told you about fear. Fear is man’s fate. Man is born afraid, of the dark, of the unknown, of strangers, of failure, and of women. Fear leads him towards faith, not as a cure for fear, but as an acceptance that the fear of God is the natural and proper condition of man’s lot. Teach them to fear the improper use of words. There is no crime the Almighty finds more unforgivable.”

  “I can do that,” said Zumurrud the Great. “They’ll be speaking my way soon enough.”

  “Not yours,” Ghazali corrected him, but only mildly. When one was dealing with a Grand Ifrit one had to make certain allowances for his vast egotism.

  “I understand,” said Zumurrud the Great. “Rest now. No more words are necessary.”

  There ended the lesson. As Ghazali would soon discover, sending the most potent of the dark jinn down the path of extreme violence could have results that alarmed the sender. The student soon surpassed the master.

  Dunia awakened Ibn Rushd in his grave for the last time. I’ve come to say goodbye, she told him. I won’t be back to see you after today.

  What has taken my place in your affections? he asked, his voice heavy with sarcasm. A pile of dust knows its limitations.

  She told him about the war. The enemy is strong, she said.

  The enemy is stupid, he replied. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate.

  I don’t know if I can do that, she said, for now I too am full of hatred. I look at the jinn world and see my dead father there, yes, but beyond that I see its shallowness: its obsession with shiny baubles, its amorality, its widespread contempt for human beings, which I must call by its true name, racism. I see the narcissistic malice of the Ifrits and I know that a little of that is in me too, there is always darkness as well as light. I don’t see any light in the dark jinn now but I sense the darkness in myself. It’s the place from which the hate comes. So I question myself as well as my world but I also know that this is no time for discussions. This is war. In wartime one must not ask, but do. So our discussions too must end, and what has to be done must be done.

  That is a sad speech, he said. Reconsider. You need my guidance now.

  Goodbye, she answered.

  You’re abandoning me.

  You abandoned me once.

  Then this is your revenge. To leave me conscious and impotent in my grave for all eternity.

  No, she said, kindly. No revenge. Only farewell. Sleep.

  Natraj Hero dancing the destruction dance. Find the jinni within yourself, the hot girl told him, the skinny little chick who said she was his great-great-great-great-and-more-greats-granny. His home was gone his mother didn’t last much longer his mother who so far in life was the only woman he had truly loved. The shock of the night of the giant and the burning house did her in. He buried her and then was stuck on his cousin Normal’s couch missing her more every minute of every day. His cousin who he fuckin’ hated more every minute of every day. When I get in charge of my inner goblin, Normal, you jus might be the first a-hole I blast. Jus waitonly, waitansee.

  The whole world gone to hell in a handcart and he, Jimmy Kapoor, spending his nights hittin’ the graveyards with, because he’s a funny guy, a lightning bolt painted on his matha like Harry P. He uses St. Michael’s mostly, cradled in the outstretched arms of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway or the way he really thinks of it the fuck-you V-sign of the BQE, all those headstones with lady angels perched on top looking down sad-faced at the stiffs. He’s different now, ever since his hot granny whispered against his body, first his temples then his heart, bleeve it bruh she put her lips against my chest and worked her Hogwarts magic. Bam his head blew open like in that Kubrick flick like a rushing towards somewhere very cool and he’s seeing shit he never dreamed, the grid of jinn knowledge and capability. It’s actually mind-blowing, fuck, his mind is literally blown, but hey, interestingly, it hasn’t made him crazy. Guess why. Guess that inner goblin is awake inside him and can handle this stuff. This must be what it feels like when people say, I feel like another person, or, I feel like a new man.

  So now he’s another person who has no other name, just his own. And that other person is him.

  First there was the wormhole and the giant pretending to be his cartoon character just to fuck with his head but now his hot granny really fucked with his head and whaddya know it’s like he’s the superhero. The magic dancing king. Having the time of your life.

  And oh yeah he’s getting it. He can move really fast, slow the world down and speed himself up, that is sick. He can turn this into that. A handful of pebbles, hey presto, jewelry. A fallen branch when he squeezes it becomes a block of gold, who needs you Normal with your lousy couch I’m rich. But then Dunia’s voice in his head, as if she hears every thought, if you don’t concentrate on the fighting you’ll be dead sooner than you think. He thinks about his mother and that gives him the anger. That puts the rage in him. Dunia says she’s putting together an army. In different cities different Jimmys. He looks into his new brain and sees the network spreading. He reaches out his arm and the juice flows down it and wham, the thunderbolt, and one less sad-face angel. This he can’t believe. It’s his dream.

  Somebody left pumpkins over there at that last resting place, well, thas jus askin’ for it dude I’m sorry. Boom. Pumpkin soup.

  When he got into it, it wasn’t lightning with him. It was metamorphosis. Sure he blew the heads off a few stone angels, that was fun, he was exercising his Second Amendment right to bear arms, though probably the Founding Fathers didn’t mean actual arms—but he discovered soon enough that he was better at the transformation thing. It didn’t have to be jewelry, that was the key. Not just pebble into ruby. It has to be admitted that he tried his powers out on living things. Birds. Stray cats. Mangy curs. Rats. Well, nobody minds if you turn rats into rat turds or rat sausages, but birds, cats, dogs, there are people who care about those entities, starting with his late mother the bird-keeper, so, sorry, people, sorry, Mom.

  The best bit was when he found out he could turn his targets into, for example, sounds. Whoa. He could turn a bird into birdsong, no bird, just the song hanging there, he could turn a cat into a meow. Once he got the hang of that he started gettin
g playful, he zapped a headstone and then there was just a kind of sobbing sound hanging in that space, yeah, he was discovering kind of a sick streak, maybe inside every tax accountant there was a sicko superhero trying to get out, and hey, he thought, what about colors, can I turn roaches or flags or cheeseburgers into just colors hanging in space and then, yeah, dissipating. He needed to practice on larger animals. Any sheep around here? Nobody’s gonna miss a few sheep, right? Maybe the metamorphoses were reversible, in which case, hey, no sheep were harmed in the making of this superpower. But the sheep were upstate on farms, unless the farms had broken down and the animals were just wandering about loose up there, who could he get to bring him where he needed to be, Asia had a car, she probably even knew where to get gas, gorgeous Ah-see-ah not Ay-sha, Italian signorina, not a brown girl, a dancer, no, bitch, not a stripper, she was pure class, ballet; probably had a line of men a mile long waiting for her with full gas cans in each hand. Now if he only had the really useful superpower of talking slick to girls.

  Turned out he had the chops after all. He made the call, found a few words and told ballet girl what had happened to him, all of it, the hot granny, the whispering, bam, Stanley Kubrick space-odyssey FX, the works, and she didn’t believe-believe him but believed him enough to go to the graveyard with him and, man, he showed her. Having her to perform for, he was, truth, amazing. The sound transformations the color changes the lightning.

  And right there in St. Michael’s after he performed for her she danced for him. Oh yes. So guess what. He didn’t just have a driver to go up the Hudson in search of sheep. He had a girlfriend, girlfriend. Oh yes.

  And so it went on for maybe a year and a half. During the long months of self-rediscovery, of learning to walk as a jinni before he could run as a jinni and then fly, during the time of accelerated second childhood which Geronimo Manezes had also experienced, Jimmy Kapoor realized that some part of him had been waiting for this, that there were people, of whom he was one, who yearned for the world of dreams and imagination to become a part of their waking lives, who hoped for themselves and believed of themselves that they were capable of becoming a part of the wonderful, of kicking away the dust of banality and rising, reborn, into their true miraculous natures. Secretly he had always known that his creation, Natraj Hero, wasn’t up to the mark, wouldn’t lift him out of the rut of nothingness, which increased his delight at discovering that he could step into the light not through the medium of a fiction but as himself; himself made fictional, he thought, or better than fictional—actual, but finally, against all hope, extraordinary. Maybe this was why he took so easily, so naturally, to his newly revealed jinn self. Its existence in him was a thing he had always known, but he had not trusted the knowledge; not until Dunia whispered to his heart.

  He was waiting for the word from the Lightning Princess. Sometimes for a change he headed south to Calvary or Mount Zion cemeteries and blew the heads off stone lions in those locations also, and performed new changes, he could turn solid objects into smells now, one minute it was a bench, the next it was a fart, it was the accumulation of all the farts farted by old farts male and female sitting on that bench thinking about other old farts, now deceased, Macfart shall fart no more.

  He thought about his collection of vintage comic books, gone now in the fireball of his old home, and remembered in those old DC issues the real-life Superman, Mr. Charles Atlas in his leopard-skin briefs with his Dynamic Tension technique that transformed him into The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man. Weren’t no girls snickering behind his back now. This wasn’t Old Jimmy anymore, meaning ninety-seven-pound-weakling Young Jimmy. This was a real He-Man, as Mr. Atlas would say. He-Me, with long tall Ah-see-ah on his arm. Nobody was kicking sand in his face now.

  Here, finally, came Dunia, between the headstones of St. Michael’s, looking for him: not the princess anymore but the queen. In the graveyard at midnight she commiserated with him for the loss of his mother. She lost a father too. Are you ready, she asked. Oh, was he ready.

  She murmured in his ear, giving him some bad guys to kill.

  The parasite-jinn, as they manifested themselves here on earth during the War of the Worlds, were unimpressive creatures, their capacity for thought extremely limited. When pointed by their jinn overlords they went in the direction indicated to wreak stipulated havoc, as in the attack on the mayor’s residence. Afterwards, they spent their time seeking bodies to inhabit, for without human hosts they could not survive in the lower world. Once they latched on to a man or woman they sucked the body dry of life until it was an empty husk, and then they had only a short time in which to find a new host. Some now say that these creatures should not be numbered among the true jinn because they were barely sentient, a slave class, or a lower form of life. That argument has much merit, but still our tradition accords them a place in the taxonomy of the jinn, if only because, as the story has come down to us, they were the first of the jinn ever to be slain by a human being: or, to be precise, by a hybrid being—mostly human, with a strong dash of jinni in him, which had been set free by the fairy queen.

  Certain images that have reached us from the conflicts of the past, both still and moving, now seem pornographic. We keep these images in sealed containers in restricted rooms for the consideration of genuine scholars: historians, students of defunct technologies (photography, film), psychologists. We see no need to distress ourselves unduly by putting such objects on public display.

  We have not in these pages lingered unduly, and we will continue not to dwell, on the details of killings. We pride ourselves that we have evolved since those distant times; and that violence, which for so long lay upon humanity like a jinni’s curse, has become a thing of the past. Sometimes, like any addict, we still feel it in our blood, we become aware of its scent in our nostrils; some of us go so far as to clench our fists, curl our upper lips into aggressive sneers, and even, for a brief instant, raise our voices. But we resist, we uncurl, lower our lips, lower our voices. We do not succumb. We are aware, however, that any account of our past, and in particular the time of the strangenesses and the Two Worlds’ War, would be sorely lacking if it turned its face entirely away from unappetizing matters of injury and death.

  The parasite-jinn came and went from city to city, country to country, continent to continent. They had more than one place, one people to scare, and utilized the high-speed jinn transportation systems—the wormholes, the slow-them-down-speed-me-up time-shifts, even, at times, the flying urns—to move hither and yon. In the sealed containers in our restricted rooms we have preserved disturbing images of cannibal jinn parasites eating people’s faces in Miami, Florida; and executioner jinn parasites stoning women to death in desert places; and suicide bomber jinn parasites allowing their host bodies to explode on army bases and then immediately possessing the nearest soldier and murdering more of his fellows in what was called an insider attack, which it was, but not in the conventional sense of the term; and crazed paramilitary jinn parasites in charge of tanks in eastern Europe, shooting passenger aircraft out of the sky—but let these few images suffice. There is no need to make a comprehensive catalogue of horrors. Let us say: they hunted in packs, like feral dogs, and were wilder than anything on four legs. And it was Jimmy Kapoor’s appointed task, given him by the newly crowned Lightning Queen, to hunt down the hunters.

  The men and women occupied by the parasite-jinn were beyond saving, dead the moment the parasites entered their bodies. But how to attack the parasites, who were disembodied until they seized (which is to say, killed) a living person, in such a way that they ceased to be able to do it? It was Jimmy Kapoor who solved the riddle: if solid objects could be turned into colors or smells or sounds, then perhaps, by reversing the technique, vaporous entities could be solidified. Thus began the Medusa operation, so called because the cloudy parasites, when Jimmy made them visible permanences, looked like stone monsters that people inaccurately called gorgons, even though of course, according to the ancient G
reeks, Medusa the Gorgon was the petrifier, not the petrified—it was her gaze that turned living men to stone. (So it was also with Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. It is the nameless golem, the artificial man, that has come to be known by its creator’s name.)

  It is also perhaps inaccurate to call these petrified things “monsters.” They were non-anthropomorphic, sinuous, complex shapes, twisting in and out of themselves, sometimes forming thickets of spikes, at other times extruding hinged “arms” that ended in blades. They could be many faceted, like crystals, or as fluid as fountains. Jimmy fought them wherever he found them, wherever his newly accessible jinn information system sent him in pursuit of these lesser demons, on the banks of the Tiber in Rome or on the shining metal heights of a Manhattan skyscraper, and he left them where he changed them, their dead bodies decorating the world’s cities like new works of art, sculptural and, yes, it has to be said, beautiful. This was a thing men and women discussed even then, at the height of the war. The beauty of the gorgons gave pause, even in those distracted times, and the link between art and death, the fact that by dying the parasite-jinn had metamorphosed from lethal adversaries into aesthetically pleasing objects of contemplation, gave rise to a kind of relieved surprise. The making of solidity out of evanescence: that was one of the newest arts of war, and one that had the greatest claim, of all such arts, to be included in the catalogue of Art itself, high art, in which beauty and meaning combined in revelatory forms.

  Their pursuer and nemesis did not see himself as an artist. He was Jimmy Natraj, god of destruction, dancing his destruction dance.