“What about Marian?” Ben asked childishly. “Where is she?”
The woman rolled her eyes. “Sorry, I left my crystal ball in the previous world.”
Ben gave her a look.
“I don’t mean to sound cynical, it’s just that your wife could be anywhere.”
“What about at the HQ? Would they know there?”
“The center gives out info about original residents in their given apartments, that’s all.”
Ben nodded pensively and said, “Can I ask you a favor?”
“You want to leave your fingerprint in my telefinger so that if your wife turns up at my place I’ll let her know that you’re looking for her.”
Ben placed his finger on number 6 in her godget. “Push!” she said. He obeyed, raising an eyebrow as she held out her hand. “Nice to meet you, Ben.” Reading the astonishment on his face, she smiled and touched her ear. “News and telefinger services are fed straight to the ear … as is the name of the person you are about to call, so there’s no mistake in identity.”
Before he had the chance to thank her, she offered some more helpful advice. “Take your godget and push number two four times. You’re sweating like a racehorse coming around the final stretch.”
Ben smiled bashfully. A chilly wind parted the curtain of sticky humidity, and for a brief moment he managed to escape the chaos churning in his mind.
“How can I thank you?” he asked.
She stepped back into the apartment, smiled, and shooed him away playfully. “Go. That’ll do the trick.”
* * *
On his way to the elevator, he remembered he had forgotten the picture of the two of them. He pivoted, made his way back to the front door, raised his hand, was poised to knock, and then heard “Marilyn” say “Leave it for Marian.”
7
The Defect
About a year and a half after the Y2K farce fizzled, Yonatan laughed, remembering the night all four digits changed. As the world toasted the historic date with a rousing symphony of sound and color, Yonatan finished reading Salman Rushdie’s book, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. A surge of adrenaline coursed through him as he read his favorite author’s final words. Unable to sleep, he sat down at the computer and sneezed seven times. Despite the flu, there was much to be thankful for, seeing as the sickness got him out of making the rounds through Tel Aviv with his friends, celebrating the most egocentric birthday party humankind had ever known. Going back into the kitchen, he made himself a cup of tea, splashed in a lug of whiskey, and went back to his seat, heart pounding expectantly, nostrils quivering with germs. He sneezed again, moaned, cursed the fucking virus, and brought the computer to life. It complied, earning him a quick 2,000 shekels. He had bet four friends 500 shekels each that the bug was a sham, spread by twisted minds who enjoyed toying with people as they teetered on the cusp of a new millennium.
Yonatan didn’t believe in the end of the world. He believed in the end of man. He scoffed at the idea that one day a hidden hand would wipe all humans away. He also had nothing but scorn for people that heeded the foolishness of seers, openly wishing that their worst fears materialize posthaste, if only because they were so wrapped up in their own demise they never started to live their lives. His close friends resented the outrageous simplicity with which he lived his life, taking him to task for his dizzying carelessness. Yonatan smoked three packs of Gitanes a day, drank three bottles of Guinness a day, was a regular at Pizza Hut and McDonald’s, slept with strangers without protection, flew once a year to sunbaked beaches and turned his body over to the sun’s rays, had no familiarity with the seat belt, tended to start the week with a few lines and end it with a few light blue pills that sent him straight to the dark side of the moon, put good money down on good-for-nothing soccer teams, and turned his computer on at the stroke of midnight.
Yonatan will get the money the next day and take his friends out to a feast, after which he’ll insist on driving home drunk to the south side of town. Roni will clap him on the back and say you can’t drive like this; Yonatan will ask why not; Daniel will laugh and say what will you do if you run into a cop; Yonatan will shrug and say it’ll be an honor to puke on a man of the law; his friends will say he’s impossible; Yonatan will respond that he’s improbable, and drive home, zigzagging moderately. After parking the car on a diagonal, he’ll stagger inside, hold on to the staircase railing, fight the lock and key, enter his apartment, shut the door, and collapse on the rug into a long, deep sleep.
Only the following night, after coming back from the bookstore, will he turn on the computer and see, to his delight, that a woman left him the following message: “Dear Grimus, I was moved by your words. If you feel like it, drop me a line. Vina.” Yonatan will recall the eve of the millennium. He turned on the computer and went to the Salman Rushdie fan site, wrote that he just finished reading The Ground Beneath Her Feet and described how touched he had been by the Indian master’s mythical story of rock and roll:
The ground beneath Vina Apsara’s feet is the only holy ground I know—the ground of love. The only ground worth fighting for. Ormus fought, Rai fought, Vina fought, each in their own way and each simultaneously won and lost. When the ground opened beneath Vina’s feet, she disappeared. Love swallowed her whole. And then she rose again, like a second sunrise, in a different place, on different ground. And disappeared again. And rose again. Vina reinvented herself, the masses reinvented her, her lover invented her and her friend as well. Vina is the quintessential heart that keeps on beating after every crisis, attack, or shock, the heart that refuses to bow before a quake. With her heart Vina Divina drove everyone mad, especially Ormus. The Goddess made the God crazy and their madness made the ground shudder, claiming lives. That’s true love. Demanding, selfish, cruel, larger than life, undaunted by death. Because like the song, it, too, survives the end of life.
Rushdie’s latest work finds me in a sentimental state of mind, at the height of an annoying period—the world blabbing about the end of days, apocalypses, and phobias. The color black rules the roost. The world doesn’t understand that fear of death is as irrational as fear of earthquakes. I don’t fear death. My close friends warn me with the worn cliché “you think it won’t happen to you.” Bullshit. I’m sure it will happen to me. I don’t believe in caution—I have to be impulsive, careless, unencumbered by considerations. They say I’m suicidal. I say at least I’m enjoying the suicide—slow, systematic, pleasurable. They fear the end as though it’s a surprise. I’m not scared, because I’m ready for its arrival at any given moment. I’m not worried that the earth will open wide and swallow me whole. Who ever said you need to die in ripe old age? Between us, most of the elderly are overripe. And if by some miracle I make it to old age, I’ll know I marked my days with inconsequential sins; and if my lifestyle managed to strip away some of the frailer years, so be it. I can puff out my chest and flaunt my accomplishments. It is I who shake the ground beneath his feet, not God, not fate, and not some tired tectonic fault. I, Grimus. And like Vina, dread is foreign to me. I have nothing but envy for her. For the great love. Not the love of the adoring masses, nor that of the photographer who provided human warmth, but for Ormus’s love, which bounded across the borders of logic and emotion. Ormus looked under ground. Ormus, who warned against quakes and becomes addicted to the quaking of his sad soul, finds Vina between the fault lines. Many Vinas. A million. How many of you have experienced love like that? How many of you have experienced love at all? I imagine very few.
I know it’s very few.
And I know that despite the cynicism that controls my life and the lives of those around me, it would only be fair to admit my desire, just once in my life, to be Vina or Ormus. Not out of modesty, but because I don’t believe in the multiplicity of great loves within a single life. Either the ground shakes beneath your feet, or it doesn’t. I’d like to know if all of Literature’s loves are the imagined fruits of feverishly romantic minds, or if they are the rare, authentic, sub
lime variety. I hope it’s the latter.
Grimus.
* * *
“Vina” was a real Midnight Child. Her mastery of Rushdie’s work paved the way to camaraderie and then true friendship. At first they reveled in competitions, testing each other’s knowledge of Rushdie’s tales with riddles, trivia, and anagrams of even the most minor characters’ names (as inspired by the Magister Anagrammari). Beneath the surface of things, the two of them knew that their literary gamesmanship spanned two simple feelings: pride, regarding the depth of knowledge and understanding; and slight resentment, toward the other person, who bored deep into the rich works but also managed to make them part of their own private life. The first sentiment stemmed from the intellect’s need to boast; the second from childish possessiveness. The twin emotions, shared by the two of them, spawned a new one, which excited them no end. A month into their nocturnal chats, it was clear that the two of them were of one mind. They cleared the hurdles of competitive knowledge, successfully passing each other’s tests, and then began picking apart the major issues of their favorite works, two minds wedded at the hands of a mutually admired third. When “Grimus” labeled The Satanic Verses the intellectual status symbol of a society intent on impressing itself, “Vina” knew exactly what he meant. She derided the fact that so many people bought the book because of the ignorance of a few deranged clerics rather than for its brilliant ideas. They agreed that the consumers, who bought the book in order to lay it on the living room table, turning it into a piece of fashionable furniture, and flaunting it in social gatherings were garishly hypocritical. “Grimus,” the manager of a bookstore on Pinsker St., told “Vina” that over the past decade he had met thirty-five people who had bought the book because they “need it at home,” and then when they came back to the store and were asked whether they had read it, responded with a rainbow of excuses, including “I haven’t had the chance,” “I’m waiting for the right time,” “I bought it as a way to show my support for the freedom of speech—isn’t that enough?” “I couldn’t get through the first thirty pages,” “I only read the part about Mahound, because that was the part that really drove the fanatics crazy.” “I only read the Return to Jahilia part, because that’s the part that really pissed off the Iranians,” “it’s a tome,” “it’s fiction,” “it’s too dense,” “it’s too demanding,” “it’s not him, it’s me,” and “I’m not much of a reader.”
In another chat, that spanned eight fascinating nights, they analyzed the matter of rivalries, which are at the root of all Rushdie’s work. The perpetual rivalry between good and evil, the angel and the demon, the divine and the devilish, the sacrifice and the sacrificer, the rooted and the uprooted, the modern and the primitive, the accepted and the rejected, the strong and the weak, the free and the shackled, the terrestrial and the heavenly, the honored and the mortified, the crooked and the straight, the hidden and the seen, the religious and the secular, the constant and the ephemeral, the winner and the loser, the past and the future, the unresolved conflict between the Saleems and the Shivas, the Farishtas and the Chamchas, the Auroras and the Umas of our world, and they sadly surmised that the silk curtain of tranquility would never fall on a world so utterly constrained by self-interest.
But the conversation that clarified how deep-seated their mutual understanding had grown was born of something that was far from a learned discussion and actually came as a surprise to both of them.
GRIMUS: “You know, Vina, we’ve been blabbing about Rushdie for a month already and I just realized I don’t know why you love his books so much.”
VINA: “I can’t believe it. I swear I was about to ask you the same question.”
GRIMUS: “Then why didn’t you ask?”
VINA: “Don’t know. We were so wrapped in analysis and … I really don’t know.”
GRIMUS: “I promise to answer after you do.”
VINA: “Okay. I think that … no, no, Grimus, let’s not do it like this. Let’s make it more interesting. I’ll try to guess why you love his books so much and you try to guess why I do, okay?”
GRIMUS: “Sounds interesting. Let’s give it a whirl. I, Vina, love Rushdie’s books for the writing. I love the fascinating mix of soaring prose and Salmanian jargon, the blend of learnedness and down-home wisdom, the word play, the humor, the metaphors, the breathtaking completeness of his melded Englishness and Indianness that has reached the boundary line of a new language—Rushdish. Something like that, I would say, no?
VINA: “How did you know that his writing is what does it for me?”
GRIMUS: “Because you never quote lines that relate directly to the plot. You always focus on his devastating way with words. You really love Virgil, especially the line about language making concepts and concepts making chains.”
VINA: “I, Grimus, love Rushdie’s work because of the way he spins his wild yarns. I’m crazy about his associations, his unforgettable characters, but more than anything else, I’m a slave to his imagination. He is the one and only!”
GRIMUS: “Insightful, well done, but I think we’re both flatulent fucks.”
VINA: “I don’t smell anything.”
GRIMUS: “But I hear it. Vina, it doesn’t take much to say we love Rushdie for his style or his imagination. What about us? When you love someone, that person probably fills a need deep within you. My question isn’t why do we love him but why do we love him.”
VINA: “Dear Grimus, you’re being a smart ass.”
GRIMUS: “You think?”
VINA: “A lot of people love his books.”
GRIMUS: “We’re not a lot of people.”
VINA: “So what are we?”
GRIMUS: “A guy asking a question and a girl trying to get out of answering.”
VINA: “I’m not trying to get out of answering.”
GRIMUS: “I’ll make it easy for you. This is something I wanted to ask you a long time ago. Vina, in what language did you read his books?”
VINA: “In the original.”
GRIMUS: “Which explains your elegant English.”
VINA: “I could say the same about you.”
GRIMUS: “True. I don’t trust translators and I know you don’t have any issues with them. But you chose to read him in English, even though we both know how lush the language is in the original.”
VINA: “I like the language. And anyway I’ve always advocated reading in the original.”
GRIMUS: “I agree and would like to tie that commendable position to what interests Rushdie the most—roots, belonging, home, and the lack thereof. Is it possible, Vina, that you feel like you don’t belong?”
VINA: “To what? People often mistakenly believe that belonging relates only to a place. One can’t fall into that popular trap. There’s belonging to a place, to a time, to a language, to a people, and probably a few more I forgot. I don’t feel any belonging to the country in which I live, and the fact that I am comfortable with computers does not mean I’m interested in the modern period. I prefer English to my native French, I have no idea why, and as for people … let’s just leave that be.”
GRIMUS: “Is there a historical period you’d like to return to?”
VINA: “History is too dark for me.”
GRIMUS: “And the future?”
VINA: “Too bright.”
GRIMUS: “Where does that leave you?”
VINA: “Waiting for Rushdie’s next book.”
GRIMUS: “I’m happy to learn new things about you…”
VINA: “What about you? Where do you belong?”
GRIMUS: “Nowhere. The fact that I was born forces me to belong to this world, other than that, it’s all nonsense. And let’s not get started on politics.…so I was born in this godforsaken place, so what?”
VINA: “And time?”
GRIMUS: “I wouldn’t mind being a Caesar in ancient Rome. But without all of the diplomatic shenanigans, the wars, the religious rites, and the silly senate.”
VINA: “Hedonist
!”
GRIMUS: “What else can we do? Cry about how life is too short? Complain all the time?”
VINA: “You never thought about moving?”
GRIMUS: “A million times. But my short trips abroad taught me the secret.”
VINA: “Every new place is Eden for a week.”
GRIMUS: “Exactly. I never could stand that feeling, you know, when after a week you start to feel like less of a tourist and begin to mimic the locals. Seems to make much more sense to come back to this cursed land and cultivate my familiar and treasured lack of belonging.”
VINA: “I agree. I think. I’m a bit tired, but I’d just like to ask you one last question.”
GRIMUS: “???”
VINA: “You don’t have to answer right away. Just think about it. Grimus, if someone offered you the opportunity to board a spaceship and fly to a populated planet far away, but you knew you could never come back to this one, would you do it?”
GRIMUS: “You know the answer.”
VINA: “You think?”
GRIMUS: “I’m sure, about both of us.”
VINA: “I guess you’re right.”
* * *
Yonatan didn’t tell “Vina” that the spaceship question had crossed his mind dozens of times since he’d been a kid and that he couldn’t believe he’d finally “bumped into” someone who wasn’t critical of his reckless lifestyle. Yonatan liked the Frenchwoman’s warm indifference when he told her about the bad trip he’d been on last Sunday. He liked the equanimity of the art and culture reporter who’d seen it all and had long ago stopped being impressed by passing trends, fly-by-night fads, and pseudo-cultural gimmicks. More than anything else, though, he liked the fact that “Vina,” like him, wasn’t enamored of her own existence and that she had no fear of death, or, for that matter, an absolute departure from the known world in the belly of a spaceship.
Maybe she shared his birth defect, Yonatan thought. One day he’d tell her his most guarded secret. But not now. She might think he was an idiot. No, not Vina. She’d understand. She’d understand that his life philosophy stemmed from the dark shadow he’d been born into. He had a heart defect. He hadn’t even had a chance to live and already the partitions between the right and left chambers of his heart had been breached. The hole, however, was small and the operation was successful. The doctors inserted a small plastic stent that enabled his heart to function at a normal capacity. The surgeons eased his parents’ minds and told them that the defect would not influence their child’s life, but Yonatan didn’t believe them and continued to treat his heart like a weak and untrustworthy organ. Certain his heart could betray him at any moment, he preferred to stop it on his own terms. At age twenty, he began waging a full scale war on his heart, pushing it, testing its outer limits. Twenty years later, he was surprised to find that the little bastard wasn’t showing any signs of submission or quit. He was sure that that blemished organ was directly responsible for the romantic moonscape that was his love life. What sane woman would ever fall in love with a guy who lived like there was no tomorrow? The only woman that had ever deigned to conduct a love affair with him left in a fury after a month of passion as soon as she realized that her self-destructive drive was peaking and that two self hatreds don’t equal love.
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