Shalimar the Clown

by Salman Rushdie

  It had probably been a mistake to have sex with him but he was undeniably attractive in an average sort of corn-fed white boy way and he had caught her at a susceptible time. He was the average perfected, the ordinary made super-ordinary, the boy next door raised to the Platonic ideal of boy-next-doorness, and as a result you saw him on giant billboards everywhere in that city dedicated to idealization, his flaxen hair and innocent eyes, his face free from history or pain, he wore alligator shirts here and Stetsons there and underpants in a third place and on all of the billboards he was wearing his super-averagely attractive, super-averagely goofy smile, his body glistening like a young god’s, le dieu moyen, the average god of average folks, who had not been born or grown up or suffered life in any way at all, but had sprung like Athena fully formed from the aching head of some middle-of-the-road Zeus.

  To be super-average in America was a gift one could parlay into a fortune, and the boy next door was taking his first steps down that jeweled runway, just preparing to take off and fly. No, she realized, she would not have to move house, after all. He would move out soon, first into the luxury Fountain Avenue apartment of his glorious averageness, then into the Los Feliz mansion, the Bel Air palazzo, the thousand-acre Colorado ranch that all super–boys next door deserved. “What’s your name again?” she asked him after they had sex, and he was amused by the question in his super-average way. “Ha! Ha! That’s a good one!” If Clark Kent had not secretly been Superman this is who he would have been. “Jock Flock,” he reminded her when he stopped laughing. “This name is burned into your memory. This name is repeating in there, over and over, on a loop, like some song you can’t forget. It’s driving you crazy. You’re saying it in the shower. Over and over. Jake Flake, Jake Flake. This thing is stronger than your will. You don’t have a chance. Give in now.”

  He wanted her to marry him right away. “The only sensible way to love is to love conditionally,” she warned him, backed off. “What you’re asking sounds a little too unconditional for me.” When he didn’t understand her he had a way of beaming at her vacuously, patronizingly. This aroused her most violent instincts. “Just think about it, okay?” he requested. “Think, Mrs. Jay Flay. Think how much you like the sound of that. You like it so much. You can’t fight it if you think about it. Just do me a favor. Don’t act without thinking.” This from a prominent practitioner of the unexamined life. She had to work hard to restrain herself from slapping him across his homely, handsome face.

  Ever since Joe Flow’s proposal she had been wandering the corridors of the apartment building in a daze of irritation and confusion. She ran into the great denim-shelled ovoid of the sorceress Olga Simeonovna. “What’s up, beauty,” Olga Volga gruffly inquired, fingering her customary potato. “You look like your cat dies only you don’t got no cat.” India squeezed a smile and in her perplexity blurted out her trouble to the Russian super. “It’s the boy next door,” she confessed. Olga looked contemptuous. “That nancy schmancy what’s-his-name? Rick Flick?” India nodded. Olga Volga prepared to go on the warpath. “He been bothering you honey? You say the word and he’s outa here on his little tushy we have to look at supersized up there on the side of the Beverly Center. I mean, I’m sorry, keep it to yourself, Dickie, nobody wants to see.”

  India shook her head, came out with it. “He proposed.” Olga quivered all over, a low-grade earthquake rippling across her flesh. “You serious? You and Nick? Nick and you? Okay, wow.” India found herself bridling at the disbelief in the super’s voice. “Well, don’t sound that surprised. Why shouldn’t someone want to marry me?” Olga placed a great blue-veined slab of arm on India’s shoulder. “No, of course not because of you, my darling, my gorgeous. It’s just that Mick? Always, until today, I totally thought he was guy.” “Guy?” “Of course guy. Like everyone round here. Big guy neighborhood, just my luck, huh. The Mister Softee van man across the street, calls himself The Emperor of Ice Cream, right there on the side of his van he puts it, who does he think he fooling, you know? Totally guy. Guy dog walkers also, guy waiters in the cafeterias, guy gyms a girl like you goes there and gets no whistles from nobody, guy Hispanic construction teams, guy electricians and plumbers, guy mail carriers, guy girls hand in hand on the sidewalk, guy guys tanning all day on sunbeds by the pool then going upstairs to do shit doggy style and I’m supposed to ignore this. Perverts everyplace only now we must call them happy boys and girls. What is so guy about perversion, explain me? About this crime against God’s plan what is so cheerful, please?”

  India’s head ached. Insomnia was still her most attentive, cruelest lover, demanding and possessing her selfishly whenever it chose to do so. Light-heartedness was beyond her today. A man of middling quality was trying to marry her and there was something wrong with her father’s voice on the phone. There was no time for Olga Simeonovna’s mock-bigotry. The Russian super was as broad of mind as she was of behind, and her ritual fulminations were soaked in European irony. She pretended that in the privacy of her little apartment she was trying to alter her neighbors’ sexual orientation by casting potato spells but in fact she was majestically uninterested in what went on behind closed doors. Sex, doggy or bitchy fashion, missionary or convert style, was no longer a concern of hers. In love, however, she continued to affect an interest. “Say him yes, my gorgeous. Sure, why not. You will be very happy, ten percent probability minimum, and if not, bah. Marriage I remember from when it was God’s great sacrament, the unbreakable promise, but I am extinct Russian dinosaur. Marriage now is what, car rental. Thank you for using our service, we’ll pick you up, when you’re done with the vehicle we’ll take you home again. Get all the insurance you can get up front, loss damage waiver, whatever, and the risk is nothing. You crash the car, you walk away without nothing to pay. Go for it, baby, who you gonna save it for? They don’t make no glass slippers no more. They already closed the factory. They don’t make no princes neither. They shot the Romanovs in a cellar and Anastasia too is dead.”

  Everywhere was now a part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete. This unsettled people. There were collisions and explosions. The world was no longer calm. She thought of Housman in Shropshire. That is the land of lost content. For the poet, happiness was the past. It was that other country where they did things differently. England, England. An air that kills. She had had an English childhood too, but she did not remember it as a golden place, she had no sense of a better before. For her that disenchanted after-land was where she had lived all her life. It was all there was. Contentment, contentedness, content, these variant forms were the names of dreams. If he could offer her such a dream, her suitor, maybe it would be a greater gift than love. She went back to her apartment to consider his proposal, damn it, what was his fucking name. Judd Flood.

  Another beautiful day. The road where she lived, leafy, bohemian, moved through the indolent light, dawdling, taking its time. The city’s greatest illusion was of sufficiency, of space, of time, of possibility. Across the hall from her apartment Mr. Khadaffy Andang’s door was open as usual, standing about two feet ajar, affording a glimpse into a darkened vestibule. The silver-haired Filipino gentleman had lived in the building longer than anyone else. India had once surprised him at the washing machines when she returned from a rare late night out, and had herself been surprised to see how nattily turned out he was in that predawn hour: the silk dressing-gown, the cigarette holder, the perfume, the slicked-back hair. After that, on occasion, they talked while the laundry was being done. He told her about the Philippines, about his home province of Basilan, a word that meant “iron trail.” Once there had been a legendary ruler there, he said, Sultan Kudarat, but then the Spanish came and overthrew him, and the Jesuits came too, just like the discovery of California. He told her about Yakan weddings and Samal fisherfolk’s stilt-houses and the wild ducks of Malamawi. He said that it had been a peaceful place but now there was
trouble between Muslims and Christians and he had come away from that, he and his wife wanted only to make their life good, but unfortunately that had not been his fate. Still, in America, life was la dolce vita, wasn’t it, even for the people for whom it wasn’t. He accepted his fate, he said, and then the laundry was ready. She was touched by this sweet, shuffling gentleman and looked forward to their talks, even telling him something of her own life, overcoming her natural reserve.

  Sometimes in the lobby there were fashionable mail-order catalogs waiting for him. Yet, as Olga Simeonovna confirmed, he rarely left the building except to buy essential groceries and supplies. His wife, the wife he had brought to America in search of a good life, had left him some years ago for a loan company repo man. India imagined the music of the Filipino language, of its insults. She thought of it as a softer, more flowing Japanese. A language of rolling, curvaceous obloquies, like woodwinds. “He keeps himself ready,” Olga confided, “in case Mrs. Andang returns. That’s why the open door policy. But she won’t be coming back.” The repo man had pals in the insurance game. “They fixed her up good. She’s covered from dollar one all the way up the wazoo. Health, teeth, accidents. She has now her comfort zone. This Mr. Andang was unable to provide. At her age such things signify.” In spite of which Mr. Andang left his door ajar. The city sang its love songs, deluding him, making him hope.

  The ambassador’s Bentley was turning in to the street. There were parking restrictions in force on India’s side of the street because it was the day the garbage trucks came to collect the trash. The sidewalk was broad. India’s building had an entry-phone system. All this slowed things down, increased his window of vulnerability. There were procedures Max Ophuls knew intimately from his days in the secret job, the job whose name could not be spoken, the job that didn’t exist except that it did, but the ambassador was not thinking about those procedures. He was thinking about his daughter and how strongly she would disapprove of his just-terminated liaison with the woman who looked like her, who looked like her mother as well as her. The procedures required advance men to precede him, to block off a parking space right in front of the venue, to pre-enter the address and secure it, to hold the door open. Any professional in this area knew that the so-called principal was easiest to attack in the space between the door of his vehicle and the door of the location he planned to enter. But the threat assessment against Max Ophuls was not high nowadays and the risk assessment was lower. Threat and risk were not the same. Threat was a general level of presumed danger, while the level of risk was particular to any given activity. It was possible for the threat level to be high while at the same time the risk attached to a given decision, for example a last-minute whim to go see your daughter, could be negligibly low. These things had once been important. Now he was just an old man investigating a cock-and-bull story about underground lizard people, a sexually inactive individual, recently rejected by his lover, a father paying an unpremeditated house call on his child. This was within established safety parameters.

  Like any other professional in this field, Max knew that there was no such thing as complete security. The videotape of the shooting of President Reagan was the illustrative tool that best demonstrated this. Here was the president moving from building to car. These were the positions of the members of the security detail. All of the positions were ideal. Here came the assailant. These were the reaction times of the officers in the team. The times were extraordinary, the officers’ responses exceeding what was expected of them. The president was not shot because of a mistake. There had been no mistake. But the president had been shot. POTUS was down. The most powerful man in the world, surrounded by the planet’s security elite, was not secure between the door of the secure building and the door of the armored car. Security was percentages. Nothing was ever one hundred percent.

  And nothing on earth could protect you against the inside job, the loyal traitor, the protector turned assassin. Ambassador Max Ophuls allowed Shalimar the driver to open the car door for him, crossed the sidewalk and dialed his daughter’s code. Upstairs in her apartment the entry-phone rang. India picked it up and heard a voice she had only heard once before in her life, on the tape recorder she had left running by her bedside to capture her sleep-talk night-language. When she heard that gurgling, incoherent, choking noise she recognized it as the voice of death and began to run. Everything around her became very slow while she ran, the motion of the trees outside the windows, the noises of people and birds, even her own movements seemed to be in slow motion as she hurled her body down the sluggish stairs. When she arrived at the glass double doors to the outside world she saw what she knew she would see, the huge splash of blood across the glass, the thick drag of blood down toward the ground, and the body of her father, Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, war hero and holder of the Légion d’Honneur, lying motionless and soaked in a darkening crimson lake. His throat had been slashed so violently that the weapon, one of his own Sabatier kitchen knives, which had been dropped beside his corpse, had all but severed his head.

  She didn’t open the door. Her father wasn’t there, just a mess that needed cleaning up. Where was Olga? Somebody needed to inform the janitor. There was work for a janitor to do. Moving steadily, her back straight and her head held high, India called and entered the elevator. In the elevator she stood with her hands clasped in front of her like a child reciting a poem. When she was back in her apartment she shut and locked the front door. In the little vestibule beneath a round mirror there stood a wooden Shaker chair, and she sat down on it, her hands still clasped and resting now on her lap.

  She wanted the noise to stop, the shouting, the braying sirens. This was a quiet neighborhood. She closed her eyes. The telephone was ringing which didn’t matter. There was a knocking, then a louder knocking at her door which didn’t matter either. A kitchen knife belonged in a kitchen and had no business on the sidewalk. An investigation was called for. This was not a matter for her. She was just the daughter. She was just the illegitimate but only child. She didn’t even know if there was a will. It was important to go on sitting down. If she could keep sitting here for a year or two it would be all right. Sometimes the joy takes a long time to come around again.

  It was a big day. A man had proposed marriage. The poster boy had proposed. Soon there would be a ring and all the customary et cetera. Right now he had climbed across from his balcony to hers and was outside her sliding glass doors yelling honey honey. Honey open up it’s me it’s Jim. This was a matter for the police. She had work to do. When your work went well it gave you perspective, you could see things as they were, the distortions were minimized, the otherness went away. The driver with blood on his hands and great spreading scarlet stains on his clothes. She remembered seeing that, had made herself un-see it. She could have saved her father and had not done so. There had been portents. She had seen flowers at Shalimar’s feet, flowers growing from the sidewalk where he stood, also on his chest, bursting through his shirt. It was not her business to believe these things, the things she saw when her eyes betrayed her. It was not her place to save her father. It was her place to sit perfectly still until the joy came around.

  Alouette, gentille alouette,

  Alouette, je te plumerai.

  She sat straddling her father’s shoulders, facing him, and they sang. Et le cou! Et le cou! Et la tête! Et la tête! Alouette! Alouette! Ohhhh . . . and she somersaulted backward away from him, somersaulted away, her hands in his hands, her hands in his hands, her hands forever and nevermore in his.

  There was the earth and there were the planets. The earth was not a planet. The planets were the grabbers. They were called this because they could seize hold of the earth and bend its destiny to their will. The earth was never of their kind. The earth was the subject. The earth was the grabbee.

  There were nine grabbers in the cosmos, Surya the Sun, Soma the Moon, Budha the Mercury, Mangal the Mars, Shukra the Venus, Brihaspati the Jupiter, Shani the Saturn, and Rahu and Ketu,
the two shadow planets. The shadow planets actually existed without actually existing. They were heavenly bodies without bodies. They were out there but they lacked physical form. They were also the dragon planets: two halves of a single bisected dragon. Rahu was the dragon’s head and Ketu was the dragon’s tail. A dragon, too, was a creature that actually existed without actually existing. It was, because our thinking made it be.

  Until he found out about the shadow planets Noman Sher Noman had never understood how to think about love, how to give names to its effects of moral illumination and tidal fluctuation and gravitational pull. The moment he heard about the cloven dragon many things became clear. Love and hate were shadow planets too, noncorporeal but out there, pulling at his heart and soul. He was fourteen years old and had fallen in love for the first time in the village of Pachigam where the traveling players lived. It was his time of glory. His apprenticeship was over and he had taken his professional name. He wanted to set Noman the child aside and be his new adult self. He wanted to make his father proud of Shalimar the clown, his son. His great father, Abdullah, the headman, the sarpanch, who held them all in the palm of his hand.