Fury

by Salman Rushdie

  “The rest doesn’t matter,” he said, the confession over. “The rest is ordinary—getting on with it, growing up, getting away from them, having my life.” A huge burden had fallen from him. “I don’t have to carry them around anymore,” he added, full of wonder. Neela put her arms around him and moved in even closer. “Now it’s I who have imprisoned you,” she said. “I’m the one asking you to go here, do that. But this time it’s what we both want. In this prison, you’re finally free.” He relaxed against her, even though he knew there was one last gate he had not unlocked: the gate of full disclosure, of absolute, brutal truth, behind which lay the strange thing that had happened between Mila Milo and himself. But that, he persuaded himself catastrophically, was for another day.

  Everywhere on earth—in Britain, in India, in distant Lilliputpeople were obsessed by the subject of success in America. Neela was a celebrity back home simply because she had gotten herself a good job – “made it big”—in the American media. In India, great pride was taken in the achievements of U.S.-based Indians in music, publishing (though not writing), Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. British levels of hysteria were even higher. British journalist gets work in U.S.A.! Incredible! British actor to play second lead in American movie! Wow, what a superstar! Cross-dressing British comic wins two Emmys! Amazing. Wwe always knew British transvestism was best! American success had become the only real validation of one’s worth. Ah, genuflection, Malik Solanka thought. Nobody knew how to argue with money these days, and all the money was here in the Promised Land.

  Such reflections had become germane because in his middle fifties he was experiencing the superlative force of a real American hit, a force that blew open all the doors of the city, unlocked its secrets, and invited you to feast until you burst. The Galileo launch, an unprecedented interdisciplinary business enterprise, had gone intergalactic from day one. It turned out to be that happy accident: a necessary myth. LET THE FITTEST SURVIVE T-shirts covered some of the finest chests in the city, becoming a triumphalist slogan for the gym generation that acquired mass public currency overnight. It was proudly worn, too, over some of the flabbiest bellies around, as proof of the wearers’ sense of irony and fun. Demand for the Playstation video game accelerated past all predictions, leaving even Lara Croft floundering in its wake. At the height of the Star Wars phenomenon, spin-off merchandising had accounted for a quarter of the toy industry’s worldwide turnover; since those days, only the Little Brain phenomenon had come close. Now the saga of Galileo-1 was setting new records, and this time the global mania was being driven not by films or television but by website. The new communications medium was finally paying off. After a summer of skepticism about the potential of many massively unprofitable Internet companies, here at last was the prophesied brave new world. Professor Solanka’s surprisingly smooth beast, its hour come around at last, was slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. (There were rough edges, though: in the early days the site often crashed under the sheer weight of hits, which seemed to grow faster than the webspyders’ ability to increase access by replication and mirroring, the spinning of new threads of the shining web.)

  Once again, Solanka’s fictional characters began to burst out of their cages and take to the streets. From around the world came news of their images, grown gigantic, standing many stories high on city walls. They made celebrity public appearances, singing the national anthem at ball games, publishing cookbooks, guest-hosting the Letterman show. The leading young actresses of the day vied publicly for the coveted leading role of Zameen of Rijk and her double, the cyborg Goddess of Victory. And this time Solanka felt none of the old Little Brain frustration, because, as Mila Milo had promised, it really was his show. He marveled at his own excitement. Creative and corporate meetings filled his days. The e-mail standoff with the webspyders was over. Regular “face time” had become essential. The continuing, possibly even growing, anger of sexually spurned, father-fixated Mila was the single fly in this rich, even Croesus-worthy, ointment. Mila and Eddie arrived stone-faced at the crucial meetings and left without offering Solanka a friendly word. However, her hair and eyes spoke volumes. They changed color frequently, burned like a flame one day and glowered blackly the next. Often the contact lenses clashed violently with the hair, suggesting that Mila was in an exceptionally bad mood on that particular day.

  Solanka had no time to deal with the Mila problem. The Galileo project’s ground-floor partners were bursting with ideas about diversification: a restaurant chain! A theme park! A giant Las Vegas hotel, entertainment center and casino in the shape of the two islands of Baburia, to be set in an artificially created “ocean” at the desert’s heart! The number of businesses hammering on the door, pleading to be let in, was almost as hard to set down as the full decimal expression of Tr. The webspyders created and received new proposals for the future of the property almost every day, and Malik Solanka lost himself in the ecstasy, the furia, of the work.

  The intervention of the living dolls from the imaginary planet Galileo-1 in the public affairs of actually existing Earth had not, however, been foreseen. It was Neela who brought Solanka the news. She arrived at West Seventieth Street in a state of high excitement. Her eyes shone as she spoke. There had been a countercoup in Lilliput. It had begun as a burglary: masked men raided Mildendo’s biggest toy store and made off with its entire, just-imported supply of Kronosian Cyborg masks and costumes. Interestingly-given the name of Neela’s shiny-chested flag-bearing pal-no Baburian outfits were taken. The FRM radicals, the revolutionary Indo-Lilly “Fremen” who had orchestrated the raid, as was afterward revealed, identified strongly with the Puppet Kings, whose inalienable right to being treated as equals—as fully moral and sentient beings—was denied by Mogol the Baburian, their deadly foe, of whom Skyresh Bolgolam was accused of being an avatar.

  So far, the news sounded merely quaint, an exotic, unimportant aberration in the faraway, and therefore easily dismissed, South Pacific. But what followed was not so readily ignored. Thousands of welldisciplined “Filbistani” revolutionaries had made coordinated armed assaults on Lilliput-Blefuscu’s key installations, taking the very largely ceremonial Elbee army by surprise, and engaging the Bolgolamites occupying the Parliament, the radio and TV stations, the telephone company, and the offices of the Lillicon Internet server, as well as the aerodrome and seaport, in fierce and prolonged fighting. The foot soldiers wore the usual hats, shades and kerchiefs to hide their faces, but some officers were more grandly attired. The cyborgs of Akasz Kronos led the way in what, Malik Solanka realized, was no less than a third “revolt of the living dolls.” Many “Dollmakers” and “Zameens” were seen, confidently directing operations. “Let the fittest survive!” the Fremen were heard to shout as they charged the Bolgolamite positions. At the end of this bloody day, the FRM had gained the victory, but the price was high: hundreds dead, hundreds more seriously injured or classified as walking wounded. The medical facilities of Lilliput-Blefuscu were having great difficulty in caring for the casualties with the urgency that their injuries made necessary. Some of the wounded died while waiting to be treated. The noise of pain and fear filled the little nation’s hospital corridors throughout the night.

  As Lilliput-Blefuscu resumed contact with the outside world, it emerged that both President Golbasto Gue and the leader of the original and now failed coup, Skyresh Bolgolam, had been taken alive. The leader of the FRM uprising, who was dressed from head to foot in a Kronos/Dollmaker costume and who referred to himself only as Commander Akasz, went briefly on LBTV to announce his operation’s success, to praise the martyrs, and to announce, with clenched fist, “The fittest have survived!” Then he announced his demands: the restitution of the ditched Golbasto constitution and the trial of the Bolgolam gang for high treason, which, under Elbee law, was punishable by death, although no executions had occurred in living memory and none would be expected in this case. He further stated that he, “Commander Akasz of the Fremen,” demanded the right to be consul
ted about LilliputBlefuscu’s next government and had his own slate of candidates for inclusion in that administration. He specified no post for himself, a piece of false modesty that fooled nobody. Bal Thackeray in Bombay and JBrg Haider in Austria had proved that a man didn’t have to hold public office to run the show. A genuine strongman had emerged. Until his demands were met, “Commander Akasz” concluded, he would “invite the respected president and the traitor Bolgolam to remain in the Parliament building as his personal guests.”

  Solanka was troubled; the old problem of ends and means again. “Commander Akasz” didn’t sound to him like the servant of a just cause, and while, Solanka granted, Mandela and Gandhi weren’t the only models for revolutionaries to consider, bully-boy tactics needed always to be called by their right name. Neela, though, was elated. “The incredible thing is that it’s so unlike Indo-Lillys to be like this: militarized, disciplined, taking action in their own defense instead of just weeping and wringing their hands. What a miracle he’s worked, don’t you think?” She was leaving for Mildendo in the morning, she said. “Be happy for me. This coup makes my film really sexy. The phone’s been ringing off the hook all day.” Malik Solanka, standing at one of the high peaks of his life, feeling, like Gulliver or Alice, like a giant among pygmies, invincible, invulnerable, suddenly felt tiny invisible fingers tugging at his garments, as if a horde of little goblins were trying to drag him down to Hell. “It is him, you know,” Neela added. “‘Commander Akasz,’ I mean. I’ve seen the tape and there’s no doubt. That body: I’d know it again anywhere. He really is quite a guy.”

  The speed of contemporary life, thought Malik Solanka, outstripped the heart’s ability to respond. Jack’s death, Neela’s love, the defeat of fury, Asmaan’s elephant, Eleanor’s grief, Mila’s hurt, the contemptuous triumphalism of the plumber Schlink, summer’s end, the Bolgolam coup in Lilliput-Blefuscu, Solanka’s own jealousy of the FRM radical Babur, his quarrel with Neela, the shrieks in the night, the telling of his back-story, the high-speed development of the Galileo-Puppet Kings project and its gigantic success, the countercoup of “Commander Akasz,” Neela’s imminent departure: such an acceleration of the temporal flow was almost comically overpowering. Neela herself felt none of this; a creature of speed and motion, a child of her hopped-up age, she accepted the current rate of change as normal. “You sound so old when you talk that way,” she chided him. “Stop it and come here at once.” Their farewell lovemaking was unhurriedly, deliriously prolonged. No problems there of excessive postmodern rapidity. There were evidently still a few areas in which slowness was valued by the young.

  He slipped into dreamless sleep but awoke, two hours later, into a nightmare. Neela was still there—she was often happy to sleep over at Solanka’s place, although she continued to dislike waking up beside him in her own bed, a double standard that he’d accepted without demur, but there was a stranger in the room, there actually was a large, no, a very large man standing by Solanka’s side of the bed, holding up—oh, awful mirror of Solanka’s own misdeed!—an ugly-looking knife. Coming fully awake at once, Solanka sat bolt upright in bed. The intruder greeted him, vaguely waving the blade in his direction. “Professor,” Eddie Ford said, not without courtesy. “Glad you could be with us tonight.”

  Once before, some years ago in London, Solanka had had a knife pulled on him by a flash young black kid, who leapt out of a convertible and insisted on using a phone booth that Solanka was just entering. “It’s a woman, man,” he reasoned. “It’s urgent, right?” When Solanka said that his own call was important, too, the youth freaked out. “I’ll cut you, you bastard, don’t think I won’t. I don’t give a fuck, me.” Solanka had worked hard on his body language. The thing was not to act too scared or too confident. A fine line had to be walked. He also fought to keep his voice level. “That would be bad for me,” he’d said, “but also bad for you.” Then came a staring match, which Solanka was not stupid enough to win. “Okay, fuck you, you cunt, okay?” the knife man said, and went in to make his call. “Hey, baby, forget him, baby, let me show you what that sad sack could never know.” He began crooning into the telephone receiver lines that Solanka recognized as Bruce Springsteen’s. “Tell me now, baby, is your daddy home, did be go and leave you all alone, uh-huh, I got a bad desire; oh, oh, oh, I’m on fire.” Solanka walked quickly away, rounded a corner, and fell back, trembling, against a wall.

  So here it was again, but this time it was personal, and body Language and voice skills might not suffice. This time there was a woman sleeping beside him in his bed. Eddie Ford had begun to walk slowly back and forth at the foot of the bed. “I know what’s in your head, man,” he said. “Big fuckin’ movie buff like you. Lincoln Plaza, et cetera, sure, sure. Knife in the Dark, yougot it right off, second Pink Panther movie, featurin’ the lovely Elke Sommer, am I right.” The film had been called A Shot in the Dark, but Solanka decided not to correct Eddie for the moment. “Fuckin’ knife movies,” Eddie mused. “Mila liked Bruno Ganz in Knife in the Head, but for me it has to be the old classic, Polanski’s first feature, Knife in the Water. A man starts playin’ with a knife to impress his wife. She fancied that fuckin’ blond hitchhiker. That was a bad fuckin’ mistake, lady. That was grievous.”

  Neela was stirring, crying softly in her sleep, as she so often did. “Shh,” Solanka caressed her back. “It’s okay. Shh.” Eddie nodded sagely. “I expect she’ll be joinin’ us soon, man. I fuckin’ eagerly anticipate it.” Then he resumed his ruminations. “We often rank movies, Mila an’ me. Scary, scarier, scariest, like that. For her, it’s The Exorcist, man, soon to be re-released with previously unseen material, uh-huh, but I retort, no. You have to go all the way back to the classical period to my man Roman Polanski. Rosemary’s Baby, man. That’s the fuckin’ baby for me. Now, babies are somethin’ you’d know about, am I right, Professor? Babies sittin’ for instance on your fuckin’ lap day after fuckin’ day. You didn’t answer me, Professor. Allow me to rephrase. You’ve been foolin’ with what wasn’t yours to touch, and the way I see it the fuckin wrongdoer shall be punished. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Vengeance is Eddie’s, ain’t that so, Professor, wouldn’t you concede that as we face each other here, that is totally the fuckin’ reality of the case? As we face each other here, you defenseless with your lady there and me with this enormous murderin’ motherfucker of a blade in my hand waiting to cut off your balls, wouldn’t you fuckin’ accept that the Day of Judgment is fuckin’ nigh?”

  The movies were infantilizing their audience, Solanka thought, or perhaps the easily infantilizable were drawn to movies of a certain simplified kind. Perhaps daily life, its rush, its overloadedness, just numbed and anesthetized people and they went into the movies’ simpler worlds to remember how to feel. As a result, in the minds of many adults, the experience on offer in the movie theaters now felt more real than what was available in the world outside. For Eddie, his movie-hoodlum riffs possessed more authenticity than any more “natural” pattern of speech, even of threatening speech, at his disposal. In his mind’s eye he was Samuel L. Jackson, about to waste some punk. He was a man in a black suit, a man named after a color, slicing up a trussed-up victim to the tune of “Stuck in the Middle with You.” None of which meant that a knife was not a knife. Pain was still pain, death still came as the end, and there was unquestionably a crazy young man waving a knife at them in the dark. Neela was awake now, sitting up beside Solanka, pulling the sheet around her nakedness, just the way people did in the movies. “You know him?” she whispered. Eddie laughed. “Oh sure, pretty lady,” he cried. “We have time for a little Qand-A. The professor and me, we’re colleagues.”

  “Eddie,” a disconcertingly scarlet-eyeballed, blue-haired Mila said reprovingly from the open doorway. “You stole my keys. He stole my keys,” she said, turning to Solanka in the bed. “Sorry about that. He has, like, strong feelings. I love that in a man. He in particular entertains strong feelings about you. Understandably enough. But the knife?
Wrong, Eddie.” She turned back to her fiance. “W-r-o-n-g. How are we supposed to get married if you end up behind bars?” Eddie looked crestfallen, and like a scolded schoolboy stood shifting his weight from foot to foot, diminishing in an instant from mad-dog killer to yelping pet. “Wait outside,” she ordered him, and he shambled dumbly off. “He’ll wait outside,” she said to Solanka, completely ignoring the other woman in the room. “We have to talk.”

  The other woman, however, was not accustomed to being erased from any scene of which she was a part. “What does she mean he stole her keys?” Neela demanded. “Why did she have your keys? What did he mean you’re colleagues? What does she mean, ‘understandably enough’? Why does she have to talk?”

  She has to talk, Professor Solanka answered silently, because she thinks I think she fucked her father, whereas in fact I know her father fucked her, this being an area of inquiry in which I have done much fieldwork of my own. He fucked her every day like a goat-like a man—and then he left her. And because she loved him as well as loathing him, she has looked ever since for cover versions, imitations of life. She is an expert in the ways of her age, this age of simulacra and counterfeits, in which you can find any pleasure known to woman or man rendered synthetic, made safe from disease or guilt—a lo-cal, to-fi, brilliantly false version of the awkward world of real blood and guts. Phony experience that feels so good that you actually prefer it to the real thing. That was me: her fake.