Shalimar the Clown

by Salman Rushdie

  Men were playing cards at the two card tables. Other men were going one on one under a basketball hoop. He went to the chin-up bar and when he had completed one hundred chin-ups the basketball players stopped playing. When he had completed two hundred the poker school broke up. When he had completed three hundred he had everyone’s attention. He dropped to the floor and went back to lean against the wall. People noticed he wasn’t sweating. One of the most important Bloods came up to him. He was a big three-hundred-pounder and he was holding a sharpened plastic blade that had fooled the metal detector. The gang lord leaned toward Shalimar the clown and said, “No strongman stunt gonna save yo’ terroris’ ass now.” Shalimar the clown’s movements seemed unhurried but as a result of them the Blood King was in a painful armlock and Shalimar the clown had the plastic blade at his throat and before the guards could shoot he had pushed the Blood King away and tossed the blade into the yard toilet. After that he was left alone for a year. Then six men jumped him in a coordinated attack and he was badly beaten and fractured two ribs but he broke three men’s legs and blinded a fourth. The guards held their fire. Wallace, the officer who had taunted him four years earlier, told him, “Only reason we didn’t gun you down was, we waitin’ to see you choke in that ol’ gas cooker over there.”

  He had found a lawyer, a man named Isidore “Zizzy” Brown who was handling the cases of several of the poorest A/C inmates, and was one of the hundreds of death-row attorneys resident in the San Quentin area. There were meetings from time to time in the visitors’ cage. At these meetings Shalimar the clown did not appear to be especially interested in the appeals process. One of the other inmates warned him during yard that his lawyer had a bad reputation. Apparently he had acquired his nickname by falling asleep several times in court. On one such occasion the judge had remarked, “The Constitution says everyone’s entitled to the attorney of their choice. The Constitution doesn’t say the lawyer has to be awake.” Shalimar shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter,” he said. Five years passed and finally Brown told him an appeal date had been set. “Let it pass,” said Shalimar the clown. “You don’t want to appeal?” the attorney asked. Shalimar the clown turned away from him. “It’s enough now,” he said. That night when he closed his eyes he realized he couldn’t see Pachigam clearly anymore, his memories of the valley of Kashmir had grown imprecise, broken beneath the weight of life in the A/C. He could no longer clearly see his family’s faces. He saw only Kashmira; all the rest was blood.

  A man was executed at San Quentin that year. His name was Floyd Grammar and he was a diagnosed schizophrenic who talked to his food and believed that the beans on his plate talked back to him. He was on death row for the double murder of a business executive and his secretary in Corte Madera; after shooting them dead he had gone home and taken off all his clothes except for his socks and then stood out in the street until the police came. Nobody ever knew why he did it. He didn’t know himself. Martians might have been involved. On the night before his lethal injection he believed that he had been granted an amnesty and so refused to fill out the last-meal request form. The guards gave him cookies and sandwiches and took him away. One hour later Shalimar the clown stood naked at his cell door while the guard named Wallace searched him before letting him go out to the yard. Wallace was in a good mood, a comical mood. Interest in the execution had been high. A media center had been set up on the prison grounds and one hundred accredited persons had been given passes. “We on national TV, man,” Wallace said, holding Shalimar the clown’s testicles in his gloved hand. “But we just rehearsin’. The main attraction is when we do you. Today we just terminated some dummy. Call it a dummy run.” Something broke inside Shalimar the clown at that moment, and naked as he was with his balls in the other man’s hand he brought up his knee as fast as he could and hammered downward with both hands joined together and he pounded at Wallace for a spell until two other guards shot at him with wooden bullets and knocked him out. The guards gathered round him and kicked his unconscious body for several minutes, breaking his ribs all over again and damaging his back and injuring his groin so severely that he was unable to walk for a week and smashing his nose in two places and that was the end of his pretty-boy looks.

  When he made it out to the yard again the Blood King beckoned him over. “You okay?” he asked. Shalimar the clown was limping slightly and his right shoulder hung lower than his left. “Yes,” he replied. The Blood King offered him a cigarette. “You got some devil in you, terroris’,” he said. “You need somethin’, you ask me.”

  A sixth year went by.

  Once the trial of Shalimar the clown had ended, Kashmira Ophuls became herself again. She telephoned her friends and apologized to them for her behavior, she threw a party on Mulholland Drive to prove she wasn’t crazy anymore, she called up her old film crew and said, “Let’s go to work.” In the course of the next six years she completed Camino Real, took it to the major festivals, found a good home for it on television, and followed it with Art and Adventure, a dramatized re-creation of her grandparents’ lost, prewar Strasbourg and its eventual destruction. At home, she revised the security agreement with the Jerome company, scaling down the level of protection to more conventional antiburglary levels. She also fell in love. Yuvraj Singh had followed her to America as he had promised he would, showing up on her doorstep looking a little ludicrous, carrying a bunch of flowers in a papier-mâché vase, a portrait of her face carved out of walnut, a selection of embroidered shawls and a yellow-and-gold chain-stitch rug, You look like a walking flea market, she said into her video entry-phone, then buzzed him in, and in her new, post-trial mood of euphoria lowered her defenses and allowed herself to be happy and eased off on her weapons work and ring time and martial arts.

  The relationship had its difficulties. She returned to Kashmir, to his enchanted garden, to be with him when she could, but he mostly needed to be there in the winter because the work of the craftsmen and craftswomen was winter work, the slow embroidery, the carving, and in that Himalayan winter the cold gnawed at her face and made her miss the Californian warmth about which she had always complained. Also there was the political situation; which did not improve, which deteriorated. War was often close, and he advised her to stay away. He was finding a growing market for his goods in the United States but still needed to be away for extended periods of time, and the fact that his absences seemed fine by her, that she matter-of-factly got on with her work and was happy to see him whenever he showed up, this was upsetting to him, he wanted her to mind his absences more, he wanted her to be more afraid for him, and especially to pine, because when they were apart he couldn’t sleep, he said, the loneliness was overpowering, he thought about her every minute of every day, it was driving him crazy, no woman had ever made him feel this way. “That’s because in this relationship I’m the guy,” she told him sweetly, “and you, my dear, are the girl.” This remark did not improve matters. However, in spite of the problems of an intercontinental love affair, and in spite of the fact that she seemed to dodge the subject of marriage whenever he tried to raise it, in spite of her gently pushing aside the box with the ring inside that he put on the table when he took her out for dinner on her thirtieth birthday, they were for the most part content with each other, so that when the letter from Shalimar the clown arrived it seemed anachronistic, like a punch thrown long after the final bell.

  Everything I am your mother makes me, the letter began. Every blow I suffer your father deals. There followed more along these lines, and then it ended with the sentence that Shalimar the clown had carried within him all his life. Your father deserves to die, and your mother is a whore. She showed the letter to Yuvraj. “Too bad he hasn’t improved his English in San Quentin,” he said, trying to dismiss the ugly words, to rob them of their power. “He puts the past into the present tense.”

  Night in the A/C was a little quieter than the day. There was a certain amount of screaming but after the one a.m. inspection it quieted down. Th
ree in the morning was almost peaceful. Shalimar the clown lay on his steel cot and tried to conjure up the sound of the running of the Muskadoon, tried to taste the gushtaba and roghan josh and firni of Pandit Pyarelal Kaul, tried to remember his father. I wish I was still held in the palm of your hand. Abdullah had promised he would return from the grave in the form of a winged creature, but Shalimar the clown never looked to see if a tone-deaf hoopoe was hopping about somewhere, because it was his human lion of a father that he had loved and not some lousy orange bird. He summoned up the memory of his father finding birds under his skin, but Abdullah’s face kept changing, becoming the contorted face of another bird-finder. Maximilian Ophuls. Shalimar the clown looked away. His brothers came into the cell to say hello. They were out of focus, like amateur photographs, and they soon disappeared again. Abdullah went too. The Muskadoon died away and the taste of the dishes of the wazwaan turned back into the usual bitter blood-flecked shit taste he’d grown used to over the years. Then there was a loud hissing noise and the cell door sprang open. He moved quickly onto his feet and crouched slightly, ready for whatever was coming. Nobody entered but there was a noise of running feet. Men in prison fatigues were running in the corridors. It’s a jailbreak, he realized. There was no gunfire yet but it would start soon. He stood staring at the open cell door, transfixed by the empty space. Then the bulk of the Blood King filled the doorway. “You fixin’ to reside on in this ’stablishment?” the Blood King asked. “Because in case you in’rested, we jus’ arranged a early checkout time.” Shalimar the clown did not ask how the doors had been sprung. The prison was crumbling and maybe some of the guards were for sale. It did not interest him. He ran.

  Between the main building of the adjustment center and the walled yard known as Bloods Alley there was a short outdoor passage enclosed by steel chain-link fencing and a solid steel roof. When the Blood King reached this passageway he produced from inside his overalls a gigantic metal cutter that impressed Shalimar the clown. The gang lord saw the how? on Shalimar the clown’s face and grinned broadly. “My mama smuggled it in to me,” he said. “Jus’ baked it inside a cake.” Now there were guards firing wooden bullets and the thirty or so men involved in the jailbreak began to fall. There were only three guards for the moment. They would have pushed their panic buttons to summon sixty or more armed men but these were scattered around the prison buildings and it would take them a few minutes to arrive. Some of the prisoners attacked the guards. Shalimar the clown did not wait to see the outcome of the battle. He followed the Blood King through the opened fence and they ran. There was a wall to scale. They scaled it. Then they were moving along the top of the wall and a hundred yards ahead they could see a double row of fences ten feet apart and beyond the fences was open ground ending in water: the mouth of the San Pablo Bay. The sight of the dark water was intoxicating, the silent bay and the moon lying in it like treasure. Shalimar the clown began to move quickly toward the vision. The Blood King, wobbling desperately on the wall, called to him, sounding suddenly like a child being abandoned by his parent. “Where you think you goin’?” he yelled. “Wait up, brutha. Don’t let me fall now. Don’t you be lettin’ me fall.” The noise of gunfire was getting louder: more guns, much closer. “Those ain’t no wooden bullets,” the Blood King said. Then the front of his overalls exploded and his blood poured out and, looking irritated and young, he fell. Shalimar the clown turned away and ran faster. He was thinking about his father. He needed his father to be here with him, in sharp focus, Abdullah Noman in his prime. He needed to trust his father now. As long as he was held in his father’s hand he could not fall. The top of the wall was the same as a rope. It was not a safety line through space. It was a line of gathered air. The wall and the air were the same. If he knew this he would be ready to fly. The wall would melt away and he would step out onto the air knowing that it would bear his weight and take him wherever he wanted to go. He was running along the wall as fast as he could run these days. It was fast enough. His father was with him. His father was running with him along the wall. It was not possible to fall. The wall did not exist. There was no wall.

  There was no night at San Quentin. At night the state prison looked like an oil refinery. Banks of floodlights banished the darkness, illuminating the cell blocks, the exercise yards and Point San Quentin Village, outside the prison’s main gate, where many correctional facility employees made their homes. It was on account of the brightly illuminated night that many guards and villagers afterward swore that they had seen the impossible, they swore to their friends and the police and the information media, and refused to budge from their story in spite of the universal skepticism, that a man had run flat-out off the corner of a walled area near the adjustment center on death row and had simply taken off, had continued on his way as if the wall stretched out into the sky like the wall of China or such, had gone scooting up into the air just as if he were running up a hill, his arms stretched out, not like wings, really, more to balance him, or so it seemed. He ran higher and higher until the lights of the prison couldn’t pick him out anymore, and maybe he ran all the way to Paradise, because if he did fall to earth someplace in the neighborhood then nobody in the San Quentin community ever heard a thing about it.

  The coyotes had been busy. In many of the canyons there were reports of missing pets. Kashmira was happy that she had never wanted a lapdog or a canary, had never liked the idea of looking after a creature too stupid to fend for itself. She had always had a liking for solitude and with a dumb animal around you were never alone. Yuvraj was away and she was in bed watching the Lakers game with a glass of chardonnay in her hand and a bowl of freshly made popcorn on her lap. The century was ending, badly, of course, and she did worry about him, of course she did, though she wasn’t good at showing it, there had been eleven weeks of Indo-Pak fighting around the Line of Control and people kept mentioning the nuclear option, of course she worried, but fear ate the soul, that was her way of thinking, the soul needed its owner to behave as if there wasn’t anything to worry about, as if everything would be fine. She told Yuvraj this but he thought it was a failure of emotion on her part, sometimes she thought she couldn’t live up to his love, she kept failing him, and how could he go on loving her if he thought of her as a failure, so this, too, would end badly, like the century, like the whole goddamn millennium. Too much chardonnay, she thought, stopping the downward spiral. Things were good. He was a good man. She loved him. There were Japanese lanterns hanging in the trees outside her window. Beyond and below them the city burned upward from the Valley. All that electricity used just to please her, just to provide her with this nightly bedtime extravaganza. She should shut up and eat her popcorn and watch Kobe’s butt and then Leno’s chin and then the new boy, Kilborn, the tall guy with the moue. Everything would be fine.

  She had heard the news about the jailbreak of course. Everyone had heard the news. Yuvraj had called her from Kashmir, full of concern. She should call the Jerome people and restore the earlier, higher level of protection immediately, he said. The man Noman was ruthless and one guard at the gate and another patrolling the grounds with a single Alsatian might not suffice. Not even an Alsatian called Achilles, she asked, not even if it’s the greatest warrior in history patrolling my lawn in canine form? He didn’t laugh. I’m serious, he said. She did not make the call. Shalimar the clown was yesterday’s man. She had already killed him and she wasn’t afraid of ghosts. Nor was she anxious to ensnare herself again in the webs of maximum security. Nobody lasted long on the run after six years on death row. Let him run. He was hundreds of miles away and they would hunt him down soon enough.

  Two hours later she woke up and the television was still on and the uneaten popcorn had spilled across her comforter. She tidied it up, put the bowl on the floor and used her master remote to turn off the TV and the lights. Damn it, she thought, now it will be difficult to get back to sleep. Maybe she should read. Maybe she should get up and go for a walk and say hi to Frank the risk c
onsultant who was spending the night in the garden with the dog. It was already afternoon in Kashmir. Maybe she should call Yuvraj. She didn’t know what she wanted. Tomorrow as usual a beautiful day would dawn, here in Paradise, in the city of the badass angels. She wanted to be asleep.

  When the intruder alarm went off she looked at the zone monitor built into the wall beside her bed. That wasn’t the gate or the perimeter wall. Somebody had tripped a beam inside the main house. The household had shut down for the night. The live-in staff were in their quarters at the far end of the lawn. They knew she valued her privacy and would not have reentered her wing without informing her. She had issued strong standing instructions regarding this. She was moving quickly now, grabbing her discarded jeans and sweatshirt and heading for the dressing room. A second alarm went off, also inside the house, closer to her bedroom. How could this be happening, she asked herself, the beams along the perimeter wall were unavoidable so whoever it was must have come in the main gate, and how could that have happened, unless the guard at the gate had been incapacitated, unless he had been knocked unconscious or killed so fast he hadn’t been able to sound the alarm and then the intruder had just opened the gates and strolled in; and the Alsatian too, Achilles the Alsatian in the garden for whom she had a soft spot in spite of her personal no-pets clause because after all she was half-Alsacienne herself, was mighty Achilles also slain? Mighty Achilles and his buddy Frank? Were they lying on the lawn with arrows through their throats, because she had never bought that stuff about the heel, the throat was a better way to go, the throat was making sure. She was being a little hysterical, she knew that, and the memory of chardonnay was banging at her temples. Here was the key to the drawer where she kept the gun. Here were arrows and a golden bow. She should lock the dressing-room door, the armored door, and push this button here that summoned the police. There was a monitor in the wall here too. A third zonal alarm had been tripped. He wanted her to know he was coming. He had come silently past her guardians but now that they were silenced he wanted her to know. There were always police cars cruising Mulholland Drive but they would not get here in time. She pushed the panic button anyway. Then she opened the box containing the circuit breakers for this part of the building and turned off the master switch. Here on this shelf were her night-vision goggles. She put them on. It was a while since she had gone regularly to archery class and her visits to Saltzman’s shooting range had fallen off as well. Her shooting had always been a little wild. The arrow was her weapon of choice. She should lock the door of the safe room and wait for the cops, she knew that, but something got into her at her mother’s grave and that was the thing in charge now and she wasn’t going to argue with it. She drew an arrow from her quiver and took up her stance. The door of the night-black room was opening, and her stepfather was coming in, knife in hand, neither the knife that had killed her mother nor the knife that killed her father but a third, virginal blade, its silent steel intended just for her. She was ready for him. She thought about her mother’s end by a Gujar hutment with hot food on the stove, and about her father’s bloody slide down a glass door. She was ice not fire, and she too had a silent weapon. She would get one shot and no more, he would not allow her a second, and he was in the bedroom now, she felt him enter and then the night-vision goggles picked him out as he passed the open dressing-room door. He stopped moving suddenly, and she knew he had sensed a wrongness in the dark and was moving from attack to defense, switching modes from the inexorability of the hunter to the self-preserving wariness of the hunted. He turned his head, screwing up his eyes to try and make her out, to see where the black air gathered into a different sort of blackness. The cacophony of the alarm bells filled the air and was joined by the loud, approaching sirens of the police cars. He came toward the dressing room. She was ready for him. She was not fire but ice. The golden bow was drawn back as far as it would go. She felt the taut bowstring pressing against her parted lips, felt the foot of the arrow’s shaft against her gritted teeth, allowed the last seconds to tick away, exhaled and let fly. There was no possibility that she would miss. There was no second chance. There was no India. There was only Kashmira, and Shalimar the clown.