The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  I remembered She’s old loathing of Tommy Gin and wondered if this might have played a part in the shootings. But She had vanished for ever, and the question went unanswered. The Swindlers’ violent stupidity was thought to be explanation enough.

  Ormus barely responded to the news of Antoinette Corinth’s death. This woman had in all probability tried to kill him once, had caused a car accident that deprived him of years of his life, but he seemed beyond resentment. He was thinking about the coming cataclysm.

  They had been married in the Rhodopé Building looking out at the glory of the park. They honeymooned in that same private universe and needed nothing more, neither Venice nor the Hatshepsut Temple nor an island in the sun. And on the morning after his marriage Ormus Cama woke up and opened his pale eye and the otherworld was not there. The dark eye saw the world as it was, this joyous new world in which Vina lay beside him in his very own bed, and the other, accident-injured (accident-opened) eye saw nothing, or little more than a blur. The vision of doubleness had faded and he could not summon it back.

  The years passed and the otherworld did not return, Maria no longer came to see him, and with the passage of time he began to have his doubts about its existence; it began to feel like a trick of the mind, a mistake. It was like waking from a dream; into happiness.

  For a time he was tempted to let it go, to consign it to the realm of fantasy. To settle for joy, for the long-awaited arrival of completeness, of perfection: what a temptation! I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see. But the truth nagged at him, it wouldn’t set him free. It’s real, he told himself. It has turned away from me and hidden its face, but what is so, is so.

  If the lost otherworld be likened to a Whale, then Ormus Cama had become its Ahab. He hunted it as a madman hunts his doom. On plane flights he stared out of the window searching for the slashes in the real. He went on wearing eye patches of various colors and fabrics because to admit that they weren’t necessary was also to surrender to the fantasy that the otherworld didn’t exist.

  His music changed. In the eighties, as well as his VTO work he wrote long abstract pieces called Sounds of the Otherworld, which could not by any stretch be thought of as rock ’n’ roll. He hired Carnegie Hall and a bunch of classically trained musicians and was greeted with derision for his pains, but he persisted, and a few people began to mention these new works with respect.

  The longer the otherworld remained hidden, the more fearful he became.

  Like Ahab, he knew that his whale had sounded, but he was determined to be near the great cetacean at its next rising. When sounding, a whale may plunge down through the waters, fathom after fathom, at bewilderingly high speed. There in the depths of the black water it may bide its time, then shoot upwards and smash through the surface of the sea, bursting upon the empire of the air as if it were the end of the world.

  This was Ormus’s greatest fear. In 1984 he published his thoughts in the international press and was immediately written off as another rock ’n’ roll nut.

  My greatest concern is that I feel the fragility of the fabric of our space and time, he wrote. I feel its growing attenuation. Maybe it’s running out of steam, coming to its predestined close. Perhaps it will fall away like a shell and the great granite truth of the otherworld will stand revealed in its place.

  Maybe the otherworld is the next world, not in a supernatural sense, not in the sense of an afterlife, but just the world that will succeed our own. (I am still convinced that when our scientific knowledge is greater, we will be able to explain such phenomena as these without recourse to superstition. It is simply a new aspect of the real.)

  Maybe our own world is no more than a vision in some other accidental individual’s damaged eye.

  I don’t know what I’m saying. I do know there is a danger of an ending, of a ceasing to be. I do know we can’t trust our damaged earth. There is another cosmos hidden from us, sounding. When it bursts into our presence it may blow us away, as if we had never been.

  We are aboard the whaleboats of the Pequod, awaiting the final coming of the whale. As a man of peace, I am not shouting “Man the harpoons!” But I do say we must brace ourselves for the shock.

  As a matter of fact there was a Parsi aboard Melville’s storied ship, and his rôle was that of the weird sisters in Macbeth: to prophesy Ahab’s doom. Neither hearse nor coffin can be thine, he said. In the story I have to tell, the prophecy does not fit Ormus. But it fits Vina like a glove.

  Call me Ishmael.

  For all her fearsome competence, Vina didn’t know how to deal with Ormus’s deepening obsessions. I was her safety valve, her light relief. If you believe, she despaired, he wants me to get the mayor to agree to give us an acre of the park, a field for cows to graze in. That way, he says, when the earthquakes come, we’ll get an early warning. He says everybody has to play music non-stop and there should be daily love festivals in major city centers everywhere because all we have to fall back on is harmony, all we have to protect us is the power of music and love.

  That, and Ermintrude the cow, I observed.

  I don’t know what to do, she said. I don’t know what to fucking think.

  I remember her despair. I remember promising myself at that moment, I will break this crazy marriage if it’s the last thing I do. If it’s the last fucking thing, I will set this lovely woman free.

  She still fought her daily bout against self-doubt and existential uncertainty, the universal bogeys of the age. Once when she was young, she told me, her mother took her to the state fair. There was a special kind of Ferris wheel with cages around the seats and a lever you could pull that would permit your little capsule to spin right over, turning you head over heels while the wheel took you up and around. Of course you could lock it off if you wanted and have the normal ride, but the bored little rat-toothed runt of an attendant didn’t bother to tell them a damn thing about that, so when they started tumbling they both thought something had gone dreadfully wrong and they were about to die. Those five screaming minutes in the moving cage still returned to Vina in dreams. Now I know what it’s like to be inside a laundromat appliance, she joked, but what she was talking about wasn’t funny. She was talking about being out of control of your little bit of world, of being betrayed by what you counted on. She was talking about panic and the fragility of being and the skull beneath the skin. She was saying she was married to a lunatic and she loved him and couldn’t handle it and didn’t know what was going to happen, how it would end. She was afraid of death: his, her own. It’s always there, death, in a Ferris wheel, in a loafing shed for goats. In a bedroom where something heavy swings from a slowly rotating ceiling fan. It’s like a paparazzo waiting in the shadow. Smile, honey. Smile for the Reaper. Say Die.

  In 1987, if you recall, Democratic presidential candidate Gary Stanton withdrew from the race for the nomination after the re-emergence of an old girlie scandal involving sex and death on Wasque Beach, Martha’s Vineyard. Several of the smaller countries of Western Europe—Illyria, Arcadia, Midgard, Gramarye—voted against economic and political union, fearing it would result in a diminution of particularity, of idiosyncrasy, of national character. The Olympic 100-meter sprint was won by a Canadian man who was afterwards disgraced and erased from history. All official photographs of the event were retouched and videotapes were computer-doctored to show only the runners who finished second, third and fourth. There were bursts of unusually bad weather—blamed by the more meteorologically challenged Californians on a Hispanic handyman named Elvis Niño, who got beaten up in the street by irate Orange County residents—and there was also big trouble on the world’s money markets, where the great fictionists behind the long-running Currency sitcom were having trouble with their creative processes.

  But for millions of music-lovers 1987 would be remembered as the last great year of VTO. (Even the new leader of Angkor, the composer of over eighty songs, all of which dutifully topped the local charts, named Ormus and Vina as hi
s “#1 Inspirational Lights” and invited them to play in Phnom Penh, an invitation which they were unable for pressure-of-work reasons to accept.) The year culminated in the huge free Concert in the Park at the end of the summer. After that they gave up performing in public—that is, Ormus retreated from view, he went home to bake bread, and the others had no choice but to accept his decision.

  Goodbye, VTO, wrote Madonna Sangria. Once you made the city lights burn brighter, cars go faster, love taste sweeter. Once you lit the violence of our alleys like a Vermeer and turned the metropolis into our lyric dream. Then, guys, you turned into a pile of garbage I wouldn’t throw at a f *cking cat.

  Vina was upset about Ormus’s unilateral fiat—at forty-three she was nowhere near ready to quit—but for external consumption she maintained full solidarity with her husband. In spite of all my urgings to run away with me, she stood by her man, declaring to anyone who would listen that their love was as strong as ever, that she looked forward to the exciting new phase of their careers which would shortly dawn.

  The three other band members broke off all relations with the Camas and announced the formation of a breakaway shadow band called OTV, which failed to make any impression on the record-buying public, especially after Vina cruelly revealed that on Doctor Love and the Whole Catastrophe and other albums, including “live” albums, the entire rhythm guitar part played by the breakaway band’s new frontperson, a stone-faced blonde named Simone Bath, had been replaced in the studio by jobbing axemen, because poor Simone’s performance just hadn’t been up to the mark.

  Meanwhile, forty was proving as difficult a hurdle for me as fifty was for Ormus. Without success, I’d tried everything I could think of to prise Vina away from her increasingly cryptic partner. Don’t start with me, Rai, she’d say. I don’t come to you for a hard time. I can get plenty of that without leaving home. So much for the perfect love match, I thought, but I buttoned my lip and turned to lighter pleasures. Which failed these days to induce in me the old delirious joy. I had committed the back-door man’s cardinal sin of hoping for more than was my right or due. I wanted the front-door key.

  To console myself, and of course to provoke Vina, I turned to other women. I even got in touch with Anita Dharkar in Bombay, because I thought it might usefully provoke Vina if I took her tip and rekindled this old flame; but television had captured Anita as I never could. The Indian videocassette information and music services that were the forerunners of the imminent satellite invasion had made her a star. She had a weekly “Lite News” hour and a music show and, reborn as “Neata Darker,” had become an icon of the Westernized—and the rapidly Westernizing—urban Indian young. She sent me promo shots of herself got up à la rock chick and I found myself mourning the serious, patriotic journalist I used to know.

  There was no continuity in human lives any more, I thought. Nineteen eighty-seven was the year of The Last Emperor, the Bertolucci movie that proposed that a human being—Pu Yi, the eponymous Emperor—could genuinely and sincerely change his nature so completely that, having been born the god-king of China, he could end up happily accepting his lot as a humble Chauncey of a gardener, and be a better person for it. A case of communist brainwashing, perhaps, dryly wondered Pauline Kael, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe we just jump tracks more easily than we think. And (I’m back on the subject of Anita now) maybe rock ’n’ roll helps you do it better.

  That year, to put distance between myself and Vina, I went back to Indochina to take the pictures which were afterwards published in my book The Trojan Horse. My idea was that the war in Indochina hadn’t ended at the time of the ignominious U.S. withdrawal. They’d left a wooden horse standing at the gates, and when the Indochinese accepted the gift, the real warriors of America—the big corporations, the sports culture of basketball and baseball, and of course rock ’n’ roll—came swarming out of its belly and overran the place. Now, in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, too, America stood revealed as the real victor. Indochina became just another consumer-serf of (and supplier of cheap labor to) Americana International. Almost every young Indochinese person wanted to eat, dress, bop and profit in the good old American way. MTV, Nike, McWorld. Where soldiers had failed, U.S. values—that is, greenbacks, set to music—had triumphed. This, I photographed. I do not need to say that the pictures went down big. This (with the exception of the sweatshop material) was news that many Americans wanted to hear. Even the old-time anti-war demonstrators were pleased. To my eye, the pictures contained large dollops of ambiguity, of tension. They were, I suppose, ironic. The irony, however, was largely lost on many who praised them. What’s irony when you can celebrate this new Cultural Revolution? Let the music play. Let freedom ring. Hail, hail, rock ’n’ roll.

  Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. Discontinuity, the forgetting of the past: this is the wooden horse at the gates of Troy. Whose occupants burned, are burning, will surely burn the topless towers of Ilium. Yet I myself am a discontinuous being, not what I was meant to be, no longer what I was. So I must believe—and in this I have truly become an American, inventing myself anew to make a new world in the company of other altered lives—that there is thrilling gain in this metamorphic destiny, as well as aching loss.

  On the subject of forgetting: after my return I briefly became involved with Ifredis Wing, who was now trying to be a photographer herself and arrived at the Orpheum as Johnny Chow’s assistant. Chow lived on the first floor and Ifredis gradually worked her way up, via Schnabel and Basquiat, to the penthouse, and me. She still had the sexual appetite of a nympho rabbit—Vina, who else, had given me a detailed account of the shenanigans at Tempe Harbor—and her looks had, if anything, improved. Her blond hair now worn boyishly, spikily short, her body still womanly and long. But as a photographic assistant she was a total bust, on account of her terrible memory, which led to a number of film-processing disasters that none of us found funny. It’s one thing to laugh about living in an amnesiac culture and quite another to have an amnesiac labeling your rolls of exposed film.

  I’m sorry, I no remembrance have, she apologized when I screamed infra-red murder at her in the developing room. But this also means, she added, brightening, that I will not your discourteous words tomorrow morning remember, after I have slept on your arm.

  Otto, by the way, had moved on from Buddhism to super-capitalism, had married a billionairess fifteen years his senior and was now a prominent figure both in Hollywood and on the Eurotrash party circuit. He no longer made art movies, having turned his attention to seventy-million-dollar action flicks instead. He had become the unquestioned master of what were known in the biz as whammies: the climactic set pieces, full of explosions and derring-do, on which such films thrived. (I once saw him on tv, being interviewed at the Cannes festival and shrugging off critical drubbings to explain his new cinematic philosophy: First act, lots of whammies. Second act, better whammies. Third act, nothing—but—whammies!)

  For a time, I found myself strongly attracted to memoryless Ifredis Wing, who bore no mortal person any malice, reserving her wrath entirely for god. In the aftermath of her desertion by Otto she had entirely lost her faith. Once the god-squaddie supreme, she was now possessed of the zeal of the apostate and came on like an atheistic stormtrooper. Devotees of Indian mahagurus, Scientologist movie stars, Japanese cultists, British sports reporters repackaged as the Risen Christ, American gun-lobby crazies bunkered down in the desert with charismatic prophet-leaders telling them who to make babies with and how often: Ifredis spent a lot of her non-fucking time soliloquizing on the follies of such as these. The great world religions took a trouncing too, and I have to say I found all this pretty enjoyable. It wasn’t often I met someone more thoroughly disenchanted with the world’s credulity than myself. Plus, she really was wonderful in bed. Sometimes she lazily played at adolescent sex, all finger-fucks and blow-jobs; more often she just came at you like Octopussy, all arms and legs and whoops-a-daisy. Either way was fine with me.

  It fizzled; she drifted aw
ay, as I knew she would. Nothing really went wrong between us, but then there really was nothing between us to go wrong. We were both filling in dead time, and one day she woke up and looked at me and had forgotten who I was. I went to take a shower and didn’t hear her go.

  After my return from Indochina, I began to rethink my work. Journalism and its sneering sidekick, cynicism, no longer seemed enough. In a way I envied Ormus Cama his madness. That vision of a literally disintegrating world held together, saved and redeemed by the twin powers of music and love, was perhaps not to be so easily derided. I envied its off-the-wall coherence, its controlling overview. Also, I confess, I was in the market for redemption myself. Something had to stop me dreaming about a dead man’s shoe, about a heel that twisted sideways to reveal a roll of film that would change its finder’s life. I had left so much behind, but that memory never seemed surplus to requirements. No matter how light I traveled, it was always there, in the pockets of my dreams.

  These were days of guilty uncertainty. Ormus had found his way of dealing with the Zeitgeist. Even that dreadful junk band, what did they call themselves, the Mall: they had a plan. My way seemed to have fizzled out in a dead end. With Vina, with myself, I was getting nowhere.