The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  So that, too, ends up being an assault.

  And there’s portraiture, though I’m not always as lucky as I was with the erection guy. And there’s advertising. And there is more private, essayistic work, but maybe I’ll save that for another day. I’m tired. The pictures are coming. The pictures you haven’t seen, the ones that come at night.

  In the beginning was the tribe, clustering around the fire, a single multi-bodied collective entity standing back-to-back against the enemy, which was the rest of everything-that-was. Then for a little while we broke away, we got names and individuality and privacy and big ideas, and that started a wider fracturing, because if we could do it—us, the planet kings, the gobblers with the lock on the food chain, the guys in the catbird seat—if we could cut ourselves loose, then so could everything else, so could event and space and time and description and fact, so could reality itself. Well, we weren’t expecting to be followed, we didn’t realize we were starting anything, and it looks like it’s scared us so profoundly, this fracturing, this tumbling of walls, this forgodsake freedom, that at top speed we’re rushing back into our skins and war paint, postmodern into premodern, back to the future. That’s what I see when I’m a camera: the battle lines, the corrals, the stockades, the pales, the secret handshakes, the insignia, the uniforms, the lingo, the closing in, the shallow graves, the high priests, the non-negotiable currencies, the junk, the booze, the fifty-year-old ten-year-olds, the blood-dimm’d tide, the slouching towards Bethlehem, the suspicion, the loathing, the closed shutters, the pre-judgements, the scorn, the hunger, the thirst, the cheap lives, the cheap shots, the anathemas, the minefields, the demons, the demonized, the fuhrers, the warriors, the veils, the mutilations, the no-man’s-land, the paranoias, the dead, the dead.

  Professor Vina’s rhetoric: here’s where it leads.

  Can you hear in my voice that I’m angry? Good. I’ve been reading a book about anger. It says that anger is evidence of our idealism. Something has gone wrong, but we “know,” in our rage, that things could be different. It shouldn’t be this way. Anger as an inarticulate theory of justice, which, when you act it out, is called revenge. (Alternatively of course I’m just another choleric snappeur, warped by life, by endlessly playing second fiddle to the main event. This is the clickista’s indispensable but somehow low-grade work: second-fiddling while Rome burns.… And here, in bed, with Vina? No difference. Ormus Cama is in the seat reserved for the first violin.)

  When Vina is angry with me, she remembers the rage of my mother, Ameer Merchant, which drove her away from us, away from love. This is why I forgive her the vindictive remarks. I know I’m standing in for Ameer when Vina lets fly, and I can’t help thinking she’s sort of entitled.

  When I’m angry with her, I remember my mother too. I remember Ameer taking Vina under her wing, teaching her, oiling and brushing her, kohling and hennaing her, pouring herself into that brilliant damaged girl. I remember my own unresolved quarrel with my mother, my broken-home anger, my accusations, the pain I heaped on her own bitter unhappiness. I look at Vina and see Ameer in her. Once, I showed her the pictures I’d taken of my mother on the day of her death. I wanted to see if Vina saw it: the likeness.

  She saw it right away. Hat Cheap Suit, she said. But she wasn’t thinking of the female pharaoh, and nor was I. She was thinking, this is me. This is a picture of the future, an image of my own death.

  And as things turned out she was almost right; because when she died, there were no deathbed photos. There wasn’t a deathbed, or a body to take a picture of.

  My mother’s photograph was almost all we had.

  Vina’s still talking, and all at once she’s uncertain, now that she’s arriving at the point of the story she wants my full attention, but my consciousness is slipping away, I’m all in, done for, crashing.

  Rai?

  Mmhm?

  It’s as if we were both watching—for something, you know—in each other, that is—it’s like what you do?, when you’re taking a photograph?, and sometimes you wait and wait and it doesn’t come, but when it comes, you’ve got it?, bang?, one shot and it’s yours? What’s that called? Rai? What’s that called?

  Unhnh.

  So that’s what happened. All the pretence just slipped away?, all the injury?, all the past?, and we just, just. Clicked. The decisive moment. That’s it. Click.

  Hynhnyhnm.

  By the way, his bruise vanished, she’s saying, but her voice is fading out. The birthmark on his eyelid. Did you know that? He hasn’t got it any more.

  I don’t care. I’m asleep.

  12

  TRANSFORMER

  In a pool of light on the red-eye to New York there’s a sleepless Hispanic kid, baleful of eye, wrestling grimly with a new kind of science fiction plaything. It’s some sort of motor car, but he’s not interested in playing vroom-vroom, he’s pulling the car apart. Its fins swivel, its tires swing out until they’re at right angles to the folding table, its body hinges and opens like an anatomy model. Dazzlingly, startling the brain, it unfolds, exfoliates, deconstructs itself and then clicks together in new, unforeseeable configurations. The boy is finding it difficult to grasp the last secrets of this metamorphic riddle. More than once he slams it down on the table, where it lies unfinished, trapped in an unreadable transitional phase. The noise wakes up the masked sleepers around him, and transfers the boy’s own annoyance to these adult others. Finally the dozing man in the aisle seat, his father probably, pushes back his sleep mask and with swift irritable hairy hands shows the boy the gimmick of the toy, and then all at once the car has vanished, and what’s standing there instead, rearing up on metallic hind legs, is a big little monster, a grotesque techno-being, some sort of fierce robot thing brandishing lurid, finny ray guns in outsize gauntleted fists. The twentieth century—the car—has been supplanted by this visitor from a dystopic future.

  The child begins to play. Boom! Boom! The robot annihilates the seat in front, the armrests, many passengers. In a while the boy falls asleep, cradling the monster in his arms, not at all alarmed by the idea that the commonplace machinery of the present contains the secrets of such apocalyptic tomorrows, that we could transform our quotidian roadsters, our unassuming station wagons, our bourgeois sedans, into fearsome war machines if we could but learn the trick.

  Boom! Boom! The boy dreams of destroying the world.

  Ormus Cama, watching from across the aisle, is caught up in a fantastic fiction of his own; except that it’s no fiction. There is a world other than ours and it’s bursting through our own continuum’s flimsy defenses. If things get much worse the entire fabric of reality could collapse. These are the extraordinary thoughts he’s having, trembling intimations of the end of things, and there’s one accompanying puzzle: How come he’s the only one who can see the vision? An event on this cosmic scale? Is everybody sleepwalking? Don’t they even care?

  The northern lights hang around the aircraft, blowing in the solar wind like giant golden curtains—like answers—but Ormus isn’t interested, he’s lost in his questions. What, Vina asks, struck by the hunted look on him. What. She’s bewildered by what he’s doing with his eyes, he’s closing first one, then the other, winking into the night sky over Greenland like an old lecher making a pass.

  Ormus, come on, you’re scaring me.

  You wouldn’t believe me anyway.

  I believed you before, didn’t I? Gayomart, remember? The songs in your head.

  That’s right. That’s right, back then you were the one who did.

  Well then. What.

  So he confesses the truth which he himself finds beyond belief: that ever since she awoke him from his long beauty sleep he’s been living in—or rather with—two worlds at once. He tries to describe to her what he first saw on the flight to London, the gash in the real. Is it like a hole?, like a black or some other color hole?, in the sky?, she struggles to picture it. No, he says, and clutches at the billowing aurora for help. Imagine if this, he says,
waving an arm, this, us, where we are, all of it, if it was all a movie on a screen and we were in it, a huge screen like at a drive-in or just hanging in space like a curtain, and then suppose there were slashes in the screen, a mad knifeman ran into the cinema and hacked at that curtain, so now there are these great rips going right across everything, across you, across the window, across the wing out there, across the stars, and you can see that behind the screen there’s a whole other set of things going on, maybe another whole I don’t know level, or maybe another movie screen with another movie playing, and there are people in that movie looking the other way through the rips and maybe seeing us. And beyond that movie another movie and another and another until who can guess.

  There are things he doesn’t tell her at this time. He doesn’t say, some people seem to have found a slip-sliding method of moving between the worlds. He doesn’t say, there’s this woman, I don’t have any way of stopping her, she shows up whenever she feels like it. He doesn’t speak the name Maria.

  There’s an in-flight movie playing in the next sector of the plane, where the insomniacs are seated. Vina can see the small screen hanging in the darkness a way off. A Scottish doctor keeps turning into a twisted monster and back again. It’s that remake, she recognizes it, of the old horror picture, Dr. whatever and Mr. right. Looks like a dud. Even the insomniacs haven’t lasted the course. The film’s images float silently over the airborne cargo of sleepers, dreaming towards America. Vina is on the edge of her seat. She feels elated, panicky, confused all at once, and flounders for the right thing to say. Where’s your bruise, she eventually asks, touching his left eyelid gently. What happened to that, your magic bruise. You had an accident and lost a contusion?, that’s what?, illogical.

  He’s gone, Ormus says. His expression is terrible to behold. Gayomart. He burst out of my head and vanished. I’m alone in here now. He’s free.

  No bruise but his eyes are different colors.

  There’s more, he says. The bruise has faded, but now the blind eye’s the one that’s seeing things. If I close it, the manifestation goes away. At least it goes away most of the time. Sometimes it’s so powerful I can even see it with both eyes shut. But shutting the eye is maybe ninety-five percent effective. Then if I close my right eye and it’s just the left one that’s open it’s like dying. Everything disappears and only the otherness is left. As if I’m standing in a snowstorm and looking through windows into another place and in that place, I don’t know how to explain this, I’m not even sure if I exist.

  He does not add, but then there is Maria.

  He sounds wired, screechy. He is saying things that cannot be. I’ve been thinking, he offers shakily. I was wondering, maybe an eye patch.

  Voices, she asks, do you hear voices. What are they saying to you, is there any message. Maybe you should be listening for that, a communication, something important for you to pass on.

  This would be a good moment to mention the nocturnal visitor, but Ormus sidesteps it. You aren’t freaking out, he notes with admiration. There are those who would run screaming. I’m crazy, raving, don’t you think so, most people would. I was in a coma for more than a thousand and one nights, maybe I came out doolally which in case you aren’t aware is madness from India. Homegrown, the local brand. Deolali. The heat there drove the British soldiers off their heads. But what, you don’t think I’m boiling mad, you think it’s possible.

  I always knew there was something beyond, she says, letting him rest his head on her bosom in the pressurized dark. I always knew it even when you or Rai made fun. What, this dump was all we got?, no higher-rent accommodations to aspire to?, impossible. But I don’t know. You took some pretty hard hits in that crash, so it could be—and I’m not a doctor, okay—double vision, some neural hallucination, the brain can do that?, or maybe it’s true, you’re looking into another whole thing. I always was the open-minded one. I’m expecting aliens to vacuum me up any day now. Or again, yeah, maybe you’re nuts. Which also makes no difference. Have you noticed how many people are nuts? I’m beginning to think it’s everyone?, only most of them haven’t noticed. In which case sanity isn’t the crucial issue. The crucial issue is what do I think of you, and I already answered that by taking an earlier plane, the one from Bombay. You called, I answered. And then I called to you and you opened your eyes. Two-way radio. What do you want, a neon sign? I feel the earth move under my feet. This can’t be love I get no dizzy spell. Read my lips. I already made my choice.

  There’s no message, he says.

  It’s not paradise, he says. It’s not so very unlike here. What I catch glimpses of through the shredding—and I’m starting to see more clearly—I’d call them variations, moving like shadows behind the stories we know. This doesn’t have to be supernature, it doesn’t have to be god. It could be just—don’t ask me—physics, okay? It could be some physics beyond our present capacity to comprehend. It could just be I found a way of stepping outside the picture. There’s a Pop Art dance pattern piece by Amos Voight, he says. An Arthur Murray School affair with outlines and arrows, left foot right foot, you get up on to it and follow the steps. Except in this case at a certain moment all your weight’s on the foot you’re supposed to move. So the pattern doesn’t work, it’s a joke, a trap. Unless you take a foot off it, change your weight and continue. You have to break the rules, deny the frame story, smash the frame. There’s this Russian word, he says. Vnenakhodimost. Outsideness. It could be I found the outsideness of what we’re inside. The way out from the carnival grounds, the secret turnstile. The route through the looking glass. The technique for jumping the points, from one track to the other. Universes like parallel bars, or tv channels. Maybe there are people who can swing from bar to bar, people who can if you understand me channel-hop. Zappers. Maybe I’m a zapper myself, he says. Exercising a kind of remote control.

  Remote controls for tv sets were new then. They were just beginning to be used as similes and metaphors.

  What’s it like, she wants to know. The other world.

  I told you, he answers, feeling the onset of the weary blues. The same only different. John Kennedy got shot eight years ago. Don’t laugh, Nixon’s President. East Pakistan recently seceded from the union. Refugees, guerrillas, genocide, all of that. And the British aren’t in Indochina, imagine that; but the war’s there all right, even if the places have different names. I don’t know how many universes there are but probably that damn war’s in every one. And Dow Chemicals and napalm bombs. Two, four, six, eight, no more naphthene palmitate—they’ve got another name for that too, but it burns little girls’ skins the same way. Naptate.

  He says, there’s a ton of singers in sequins and eyeliner, but no trace of Zoo Harrison or Jerry Apple or Icon or The Clouds, and Lou Reed’s a man. There’s Hollywood but they never heard of Elrond Hubbard or Norma Desmond, and Charles Manson’s a mass murderer, and Allen Konigsberg never directed a picture and Guido Anselmi doesn’t exist. Nor do Dedalus or Caulfield or Jim Dixon, by the way, they never wrote any books, and the classics are different too.

  Vina’s eyes have been growing wider, she’s been emitting suppressed little giggles of disbelief, she can’t help it.

  The Garden of Forking Paths, he says, naming her favorite nineteenth-century novel, the interminable masterwork of the Chinese genius, the former governor of Yunnan province, Ts’ui Pen.

  What about it? Don’t tell me they don’t …

  (She’s actually angry: this is the last straw, her face says.)

  No such book, he says, and she slams fist into palm.

  Damn it, Ormus, and then she controls herself, doesn’t let her thoughts slip past her lips: This is a joke, right. Or else you’re really mad.

  He reads her mind anyway. All my life, he says—and there’s despair dragging at his voice, distorting the way it sounds—it’s been the empire of the senses for me. What you can touch and taste and smell and hear and see. All my speeches in praise of the actual, of what is and persists, and n
o time for the airy-fairy. And now here in spite of it all are fairies from the fucking ether. All that is solid melts into fucking air. What am I supposed to do?

  Make it sing, she says. Write it with all your heart and gift and hold on to the hooks, the catchy lyrics, the tunes. Fly me to that moon.

  He sings other men’s soft, muffled odes into her consoling breast. You are my sunshine. I’m a king bee. Hold me tight.

  Music will save us, she comforts him. That, and, and.

  Love, he says. The word you want is love.

  Yeah that was it, she grins, caressing his cheek. I knew that.

  Will you marry me?

  No.

  Why the fuck not?

  Because you’re an insane person, asshole. Go to sleep.

  The world is irreconcilable, it doesn’t add up, but if we cannot agree with ourselves that it does, we can’t make judgements or choices. We can’t live.

  When Ormus Cama saw his vision, he revealed himself to be a true prophet, and I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool unbeliever. I mean: he was genuinely ahead of his time. We’ve all caught up now. He isn’t here to see them, but the contradictions in the real have become so glaring, so inescapable, that we’re all learning to take them in our stride. We go to bed thinking—just a random example—that Mr. N— M— or Mr. G— A— is a notorious terrorist, and wake up hailing him as the savior of his people. One day the islanders inhabiting a particular cold wet lump of godforsaken rock are vile devil worshippers swigging blood and sacrificing babies, the next day it’s as if nothing of the sort ever occurred. The leaders of whole countries vanish as if they never were, they’re miraculously erased from the record, and then they pop up again as talk show hosts or pizza pluggers, and lo!, they’re back in the history books again.

  Certain illnesses sweep across large communities, and then we learn that no such illnesses ever existed. Men and women recover memories of having been sexually abused as children. Whoosh, no they don’t, their parents are reinstated as the most loving and laudable people you could imagine. Genocide occurs; no it doesn’t. Nuclear waste contaminates large swathes of entire continents, and we all learn words like “half-life.” But in a flash all the contamination has gone, the sheep aren’t ticking, you can happily eat your lamb chops.