Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

by Salman Rushdie

  And lo, there, immediately, was god, and he was furious, “How did you come up with the idea of me,” he demanded, “who asked you to do that?” and he threw them out of the garden, into, of all places, Iraq. “No good deed goes unpunished,” said Eve to Adam, and that ought to be the motto of the entire human race.

  The name “Casterbridge” was an invention. The great composer came from an immigrant family of Iberian Jews, and was a strikingly handsome man with a grand, sonorous voice and the bearing of a king. He also shared the most unusual physical characteristic of his kin: he had no earlobes. He was not a man to be trifled with, though his loyalties were as fierce as his enmities, and he was capable of profound loyalty and friendship. His smile was a thing of menacing, almost feral sweetness, a smile that could bite your head off. His politeness was terrifying. His two most endearing qualities were his Rottweiler obstinacy and his rhinoceros-thick hide. Once he had an idea between his teeth, nothing would induce him to yield it up, and the ridicule with which the new Post-Atheism was received did not deter him in the slightest. He was asked on late-night American TV if he was actually saying that the Supreme Being was fictional, and that this fictional divinity had now decided, for undisclosed reasons, to torment the human race. “Exactly,” he said with great firmness. “That’s exactly right. The triumph of the destructive irrational manifests itself in the form of an irrationally destructive god.” The talk-show host whistled between the famous gap in his central upper incisors. “Whew,” he said. “And here I was thinking the Brits were better educated than us.”

  “Suppose,” said Hugo Casterbridge, “that one day god sent a storm, such a storm as could shake loose the moorings of the world, a storm which told us to take nothing for granted, not our power, not our civilization, not our laws, because if nature could rewrite its laws, break its bounds, change its nature, then our constructs, so puny in comparison, stood no chance. And this is the great test we face—our world, its ideas, its culture, its knowledge and laws, is under attack by the illusion we collectively created, the supernatural monster we ourselves unleashed. Plagues will be sent, like those sent to Egypt. But this time, there will be no request to let my people go. This god is not a liberator but a destroyer. He has no commandments. He’s over all that. He’s sick of us, the way he was in Noah’s time. He wants to make an example. He wants to do us in.”

  “And we’ll be right back,” said the talk-show host, “after these messages.”

  In certain quarters the quest for scapegoats had begun. It was important to know whose fault all this was. It was important to know if things were going to get worse. Maybe there were identifiable persons, destabilizing persons, who were somehow responsible for the destabilized world. Maybe these were persons carrying within themselves some sort of genetic mutation that gave them the power to induce paranormal happenings, persons who posed a threat to the rest of the normal human race. It was interesting that the so-called storm baby had been wrapped in the Indian flag. It might be necessary to look at the South Asian immigrant community to see if answers could be found. Maybe the disease—the strangeness was a social disease now, it seemed—had been brought to America by some of these persons, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, just as the devastating AIDS epidemic had originated somewhere in Central Africa and arrived in the United States in the early 1980s. A public murmuring began, and Americans of South Asian origins began to fear for their safety. Many taxi drivers put up stickers in their cabs reading I’m not that strange or Normalness not strangeness is the American way. There were a few, worrying reports of physical attacks. Then another scapegoat group was identified, and the laser beam of public attention swung away from brown-skinned folks. This new group was harder to identify. They were lightning-strike survivors.

  During the great storm the lightning strikes multiplied in frequency and ferocity. It seemed like a new kind of lightning, not just electrical but eschatological. And when the machines told our ancestors that there had been over four thousand strikes per square mile, they began to understand how much danger they had been in, how much danger they might still be in. In an average year in the city there were fewer than four lightning strikes per square mile, just about all of which were absorbed by the lightning rods and radio masts on the tall buildings. Four-thousand-plus strikes per square mile meant almost ninety-five thousand strikes on the island of Manhattan alone. It was impossible to understand what the long-term consequences of such an assault might be. Approximately three thousand dead bodies were found in the wreckage of the streets. Nobody had any idea how many survivors of the strikes were still walking around, or how the voltage might have changed them on the inside. They didn’t look any different, they looked exactly like everyone else, but they were no longer like everyone else, or so everyone else feared. Perhaps they were everyone else’s enemies. Perhaps, if they were angry, they could stretch out their arms and unleash the thunderbolts they had absorbed, sending tens of thousands of amperes at our ancestors, frying them to a crisp. They could murder our ancestors’ children, or the president. Who were these people? Why were they still alive?

  People were close to panicking. But nobody, at that time, was looking for men and women with unusual ears. Everyone was listening to lightning tales.

  The word that the hedge fund nabob and self-styled “shareholder activist” Seth Oldville had taken up with a notorious libertine and fisher-for-rich-men named Teresa Saca Cuartos came as a shock and disappointment to his wide circle of friends. A fellow like Oldville, a big clubbable guy who knew what he wanted, what he expected the world to make available to him, and how he expected the universe to adjust to the shape he chose to impose upon it, had the edge over most of his peers, and even after successive presidential elections emphatically rejected his preferred conservative ticket, which was incomprehensible to him, running counter to his understanding of the country he loved, he remained undeflected from the aggressive pursuit of his political and economic goals. In business you could ask the folks at Time Warner, Clorox, Sony, Yahoo or Dell about his methods and you’d get an earful, some of it unprintable. As to politics, like his late friend and mentor the great, if a little crooked, Bento Elfenbein, he dismissed the sequence of presidential routs as errors by the electorate, “turkeys voting for Thanksgiving,” and set about picking candidates for the future, a governor to back here, a mayoral race to fund there, a young congressman on the rise to bankroll, backing his horses, preparing for the next battle. He called himself an atheist Jew who would have preferred to have been an opera singer or a great surfer, and in his early fifties he was still physically fit enough to go each summer in search of the big wave. Also after dinner in his townhouse he might treat the guests to an aria sung in his fine Joycean tenor, “E lucevan le stelle,” perhaps, or “Ecco ridente in cielo,” and everybody agreed he could give an excellent account of the music.

  But Teresa Saca! Nobody had gone near that girl for years, not since she snared AdVenture Capital’s iconic chief Elián Cuartos. She latched onto him in his senior years when all he wanted to do was leave AVC to his protégés and have a little overdue fun; got the ring; had his baby thanks to the miracle of in vitro; and waited him out. Now old Elián was gone and she had his cash, sure, but she had the bad rep to go with it also. For a brief moment the financial titan Daniel “Mac” Aroni tried her out “just to see what all the fuss was about” but he ran from her after a couple of weeks, complaining that she was the most bad-tempered, foulmouthed bitch he’d ever laid hands on. “She called me words I’d never heard, and I have a pretty good personal thesaurus in that area,” he told everyone. “She’ll try to tear your heart out and eat it raw, right on the sidewalk, and me, I was brought up right, I don’t talk to women that way no matter the provocation, but that woman, in five minutes you’re over the body and the sex, which they’re both something, this is undeniable, but nothing’s good enough to make up for her bad character, you just want to throw her out the car door on the Turnpike and go home to e
at meatloaf with your wife.”

  Oldville as it happened had a perfectly good wife at home, Cindy Sachs as was, a wife widely admired for her beauty, taste, charitable work, and great goodness of heart. She could have been a dancer, she had the gift, but when he asked for her hand she made him her career instead, “Like Esther Williams,” she told their friends, “giving up her Hollywood career for the Latino man she loved, who wanted her at home.” Big mistake, Elián used to joke, settling for me, but lately there was no humor in her answering little smile. They had married young, had a string of children quickly, and remained, it must be said, each other’s closest friends. But he was a man of a certain standing and type for whom the taking of a mistress was par for the course. Teresa Saca must have seemed like perfect mistress material, she had her money now so she wouldn’t be after his, she had lived in the world of discretion for long enough to understand the consequences of kissing and telling, and she was lonely, so a little companionship from a big man would please her and encourage her to do a lot of pleasing in return. But Oldville soon learned what his friend Aroni already knew. Teresa was a raven-haired Floridian firecracker with an anger in her towards men whose origins didn’t bear examining, and her gift for verbal abuse was tiring. In addition there were, as he told her in their break-up conversation, just too many things she disliked. She would only eat in five restaurants. She disliked clothes in any color other than black. She was unimpressed by his friends. Modern art, modern dance, movies with subtitles, contemporary literature, all types of philosophy, these she abhorred, but the mediocre neoclassicist nineteenth-century American pictures at the Met, those she much admired. She loved Disney World but when he wanted to take her to Mexico for a romantic getaway at Las Alamandas she said, “It’s not my kind of place. Plus, Mexico is dangerous, it would be like vacationing in Iraq.” This, with zero self-irony, from the daughter of Spanish immigrants living just one step up from the trailer park in Aventura, Florida.

  Six weeks after he took up with her he kissed her goodbye on the lawn of his place on Meadow Lane, Southampton (Cindy Oldville loathed the seaside and stayed firmly planted in the city). There was a man mowing the lawn riding a garden tractor wearing a windbreaker with the words Mr. Geronimo on the back but he didn’t exist for the fragmenting couple. “You think I’m sorry? I have options,” Teresa told him. “I won’t be shedding a tear over you. If you knew who wanted to date me right now you would die.” Seth Oldville began to shake with repressed laughter. “So we’re fourteen years old again?” he asked her but she was burning with injured pride. “I’m getting lipo next week,” she said. “My doctor says I’m a great candidate, he doesn’t have to do much and after that my body will be insane. This I was doing for you, to perfect myself, but my new boyfriend, he says he can. Not. Wait.” Oldville began to walk away. “I’ll send you photographs of what you can’t have,” she shouted after him. “You will die.” That wasn’t the end of it. In the weeks that followed a vengeful Teresa called Seth’s wife repeatedly and even though Cindy Oldville hung up on her right away she left voicemail messages so sexually explicit and detailed that they pushed the Oldvilles towards divorce. Super-lawyers geared up for the fight. Wildenstein-divorce-settlement-type numbers were bruited about. People settled down to watch. For this bout you wanted a ringside seat. Seth Oldville looked crushed in those days. It wasn’t about the money. The guy was genuinely sorry to have hurt his wife, who had done nothing but good things for him. He didn’t want the war; but now, she did. She had spent a lifetime turning a blind eye, she told girlfriends, but now she had new glasses and saw everything in sharp focus, and enough, really, with her husband’s entitled alpha-male crap. “Go get him,” the girlfriend chorus sang.

  On the weekend before the storm Seth was out at the beach place by himself and fell asleep in a reclining chair on the lawn. While he was asleep somebody came up to him and drew a red bull’s-eye target on his forehead. It was the gardener fellow, Mr. Geronimo, who pointed it out to him when he woke up. In the mirror it looked like somebody was trying to simulate a Lyme disease tick bite but no, that wasn’t it, it was plainly a threat. The security personnel were embarrassed. Yes, Miss Teresa had talked her way past them. She was a persuasive lady. It was a judgment call and they had gone the wrong way on this one. It wouldn’t happen again.

  Then the hurricane struck, and there followed the falling trees, the thunderbolt overload, the outages, all of it. “All of us were distracted by our own affairs in those days,” Daniel Aroni said at the memorial service at the Society for Ethical Culture, “and none of us thought she was truly capable of fulfilling her threat, and in the middle of the storm at that, when the whole city was trying to survive, it was, let me confess, unexpected. As his friend I am ashamed that I wasn’t more alert to the danger, that I didn’t warn him to raise his guard.” After the eulogies the same image was in everyone’s mind’s eye as they spilled out onto Central Park West: the rain-bedraggled woman at the door of the townhouse, the first security man blown away, a second coming at her and sent toppling backwards, the woman running through the house, up towards his sanctum, screaming Where are you, motherfucker, until he just walked out in front of her, sacrificing himself to save his wife and children, and she murdered him right there and he toppled down the red-carpet stairs like an oak. For a moment she knelt by his body soaked to the skin as she was and weeping uncontrollably and then she ran from the house; nobody stopped her, nobody dared approach.

  But the question nobody could answer, not at the time, not at the memorial, was the question of the nature of the weapon. No bullet holes were found in any of the three dead bodies. All the bodies, when the police and the emergency medical teams arrived, smelled strongly of burning flesh, and their garments too had been burned. Cindy Oldville’s testimony was scarcely credible, and many people discounted it as the forgivable error of a woman in a state of extreme terror, but she was the only eyewitness and what she said her eyes witnessed was what the less reputable parts of the news media seized upon and magnified into two-inch headlines, the lightning bolts streaming from Teresa Saca’s fingertips, the white forking voltage pouring out of her, doing her deadly work. One tabloid called her Madame Magneto. Another preferred a Star Wars reference: The Empress Strikes Back. Things had reached a point at which only science fiction gave us a way of getting a handle on what the formerly real world’s non-CGI mundanity seemed incapable of making comprehensible.

  And at once there was more electricity news: at the terminus of the 6 train at Pelham Bay Park, an eight-year-old girl fell onto the tracks and the steel melted like ice cream, allowing the girl to be rescued unharmed. At a safe deposit facility near Wall Street burglars succeeded in using an unidentified weapon to “burn open” the doors of safes, vaults and boxes, and made off with an unspecified sum in the “multiple millions of dollars,” according to a spokesman for the facility. Mayor Rosa Fast, under political pressure to act, called a joint press conference with the police commissioner and grimly declared all recent lightning-strike survivors to be “persons of interest,” which was, in her own ashamed opinion, clearly written across her face, a betrayal of her progressive liberalism. Her statement was predictably condemned by civil liberties groups, political rivals and many newspaper columnists. But the old liberal-conservative opposition lost its meaning when reality gave up being rational, or at least dialectic, and became willful, inconsistent, and absurd. If a boy rubbing a lamp had summoned a genie to do his bidding, that would have been a credible event in the new world our ancestors had begun to inhabit. But their senses had been dulled by long exposure to the everydayness of the everyday and it was hard for them even to accept that they had entered an age of wonders, much less to know how to live in such a time.

  They had so much to learn. They had to learn to stop saying genie and associating the word with pantomime, or with Barbara Eden in pink harem pants on TV, blonde “Jeannie” in love with Larry Hagman, an astronaut who became her “master.” It was extreme
ly unwise to believe that such potent, slippery beings could have masters. The name of the immense force that had entered the world was jinn.

  She, Dunia, had also loved a mortal man—never her “master”—and many lobeless children were the consequence of that love. Dunia searched out her earmarked descendants wherever they were. Teresa Saca, Jinendra Kapoor, Baby Storm, Hugo Casterbridge, many more. All she could do was plant in their minds the knowledge of who they were and of their scattered tribe. All she could do was awaken the bright jinn within them and guide them towards the light. Not all of them were good people. In many of them human weakness proved more potent than jinni strength. This was a problem. As the slits between the worlds broke open the mischief of the dark jinn began to spread. At first, before they began to dream of conquest, the jinn had no grand design. They created havoc because it was in their nature. Mischief and its senior sibling, real harm, they foisted without compunction upon the world; for just as the jinn were not real to most human beings, so also human beings were not real to the jinn, who cared nothing for their pain, any more than a child cares for the pain of a stuffed animal she bangs against a wall.

  The influence of the jinn was everywhere, but in those early days, before they fully revealed themselves, many of our ancestors did not see their hidden hands at work, in the collapse of a nuclear reactor, the gang rape of a young woman, or an avalanche. In a Romanian village a woman began laying eggs. In a French town the citizenry began turning into rhinoceroses. Old Irish people took to living in trash cans. A Belgian man looked into a mirror and saw the back of his head reflected in it. A Russian official lost his nose and then saw it walking around St. Petersburg by itself. A narrow cloud sliced across a full moon and a Spanish lady gazing up at it felt a sharp pain as a razor blade cut her eyeball in half and the vitreous humor, the gelatinous matter filling the space between the lens and the retina, flowed out. Ants crawled out of a hole in a man’s palm.