The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  What, now Mexico wants to know if United States or European Union agents were involved in their great quake? Was this some sort of dummy run, some Little Boy-Fat Man demonstration of extreme force? Jeez, there’s always a killjoy. Read our lips. Of course not. Would we let Vina Apsara die in some sort of military-industrial megacon-spiracy? That’s just crazy. We loved that woman. What wouldn’t we give to have her here, alive, and singing, right now. The Mexican earthquake was a natural phenomenon which we are doing our darnedest to understand. We have our best people on this. Mother Nature has her own bad moods, and we need to be in touch with those, to live well with the earth, our home. We need to build our knowledge so that we can work on setting in place systems and technologies that will minimize the risk of another such disaster. Our hearts go out to the Mexican people for their sad loss.

  Okay? Are we okay on this? Okay, then. Okay.

  The end of the Soviet Union was a good thing. The victory of the free world is a good thing. We are the good guys. The black hats lost. The new business of the world is business. Rejoice.

  Peace.

  Me? Don’t ask me. As I’ve been telling you, my head’s been in a spin ever since Vina died. If you ask me (don’t ask me) the Vina phenomenon inspired people and they stood up and changed their lives. If you ask me, all you need is love. The quaking earth, don’t ask. Maybe it’s down to Mother Nature or NATO or the Pentagon. Me, I’m seeing ghosts. After a lifetime of refusing to accept the irrational it’s here, in my work. The miracle of unreason: a woman’s ghost-image in my photographs. Worlds in collision. I’m thinking wild thoughts; hypothesizing that—in spite of all the boasting and chest-beating, all the end-of-history rhetoric—the current cycle of catastrophes may have little to do with victory or defeat, the earthquakes may not be in our control, they may be little warning signs hinting at the proximity of the main event: which is, the end of the world. Or the end of one world. Ours, somebody else’s, don’t ask me which.

  I repeat: Darius Cama’s library of myths is as close as I have ever needed to get to fantasy. The old religions’ legacy of living stories—the Ash Yggdrasil, the Cow Audumla, Ouranos-Varuna, Dionysus’s Indian jaunt, the vain Olympians, the fabulous monsters, the legion of ruined, sacrificed women, the metamorphoses—continues to hold my attention; whereas Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Marxism, the Market, utterly fail to enthrall. These are faiths for the front pages, for CNN, not for me. Let them struggle over their old and new Jerusalems! It’s Prometheus and the Nibelungs, Indra and Cadmus, who bring me my kind of news.

  Additionally, ever since my youngest days, Ormus and Vina have added to my plate two goodly extra dollops of living myth. These have been more than enough for me.

  Falling in love with Vina, I knew I was stepping out of my league. Nevertheless, I took the step and did not fall flat on my face. This is human heroism. Of this, as of little else, I am proud. Male love is a kind of self-assessment. We allow ourselves to love only those women to whom we feel we have a right to pay court, to whom we dare aspire. The young Ormus, a handsome devil, could legitimately dream of goddesses. He gave himself permission to imagine himself with them, to pursue, and (in his case) usually to attain his dreams. Then Vina, his true deity, came and went. The first time she left him he sought her in other women’s bodies, her kiss on other lips. Now that won’t do. It’s Vina herself or no one.—But she’s no longer of this world.—Then find her, wherever she is.

  Which is, I confess, presently my attitude too. For, with less reason than Ormus Cama, I, too, dared to aspire to Vina; and she smiled on me also; and left me with an empty heart.

  A word more about Ormus: his early gift of precognition, of hearing the future’s music playing in his head, gave my anti-fantastic instincts their first severe test. In that instance I took refuge in the reasonable man’s partial-knowledge defense: to admit we do not understand a phenomenon is not to admit the presence of the miraculous but merely, reasonably, to accept the limitations of human knowledge. God was invented to explain what our ancestors couldn’t comprehend: the radiant mystery of being. The existence of the incomprehensible, however, is not a proof of god.… Listen, if I’m reheating yesterday’s cold soup, it’s because I’m about to set down matters strange to me; strange because they belong to the realm of the “magical,” the inexplicable. I have to speak of “Maria,” and her “teacher,” and in my adulthood concede what is hardest for full-grown men to grant, the same truth which Hamlet, also upon seeing a ghost, obliges scholarly Horatio to accept: that there may be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his—in my—philosophy.

  Returning to work after a long layoff—this is in the fall of 1991, some time after the Vina show at the Orpheum—I decide to set up a sequence of pictures about the remembered Vina, about memory and the error-strewn, partial manner of its ownership of the past. I’m back at the seaside, in Mack Schnabel’s house near Montauk Point, a sprawling cliff-edge place to which the crashing ocean breakers give an air of perpetual storm, even when the skies are clear. To design the sequence I get hold of two hard, straight-backed chairs, two mirrors, a couple of life-size dolls, a few other props. Here’s how it’s supposed to go. A masked man—the mask is actually two eye patches, whose ties crisscross on his forehead, making an X—is to sit on one of the chairs, against a wall on which hang oval frames containing indistinct images of women from photography’s early days: Niépces, Daguerres. On the man’s lap there’s a circular mirror. In the first picture of the sequence, a rectangular mirror containing the reflected image of a woman’s naked body will itself be seen reflected in the circular mirror, its outline proclaiming its femaleness, the body itself filled with light.

  In subsequent pictures in the sequence, the circular mirror containing the reflected rectangle takes up more of the frame, and the woman’s head gradually becomes distinct and takes up more of the rectangular mirror. At one point it will clearly be Vina’s head. Then it will change and become the head of a woman very like Vina, but not her. (I have to find this woman somehow.) As the sequence unfolds the framing mirrors will be “lost,” one at a time, and the not-Vina will be slowly pushed back into medium and then long shot. She will be seen to be sitting on a hard, straight-backed chair like the one used by the eye-patched man in the opening picture—it’s similar, but it’s not the same chair; she will be holding a rectangular mirror, and in it there will be the reflection of a circular mirror which in turn reflects the image of a man’s naked body, its outline filled with light. The not-Vina will acquire eye patches. The man will be at first myself, then another person, less of a look-alike than the Vina double; just a not-me. Obviously the sequence is capable of infinite extension, but I plan to end it by bleaching the images into white. We change what we remember, then it changes us, and so on, until we both fade together, our memories and ourselves. Something like that.

  To set up the shot, I prop a doll in a chair. Then I put together the zigzag of reflections, doll one into rectangular mirror, rectangular mirror into circular mirror held on the lap of the second seated doll, doll two into my own camera.

  I’m alone at the house. When I’ve set up the shot I pour myself a glass of wine and sit looking at the set-up. I must be tired, because the wine sends me to sleep. Contentedly, I snooze.

  I’m woken by the unmistakable noise of the camera’s shutter clicking. Twice. I jerk upright, woozy with sleep and wine, and call out, but nobody replies. The set-up hasn’t been touched. I check the Leica on its tripod. The first two frames of film have been exposed.

  Vina, I whisper, all reason thrown to the wind. Vina, is it you?

  But when I develop the film, Vina isn’t on it. Somebody else is, though. It’s the young woman who has appeared before, from time to time, as a ghost-image on various rolls of film. The photo-phantom. But this time she’s sitting where the object doll should be—where, in the set-up, the object doll still is—and she’s holding up a card with writing on it.

  In the first fra
me this reads, HELP

  In the second frame, the woman looks exhausted, beyond exhausted, as if the effort she has made has drained her completely. She has slumped back in the chair like a toy doll. The card dangles from her hand.

  HELP OR

  Who are you? I say to the photographs as they hang up to dry. What do you mean? Help how? Help or what?

  But the photographs have said what they have to say.

  It takes me a day to come up with the idea of the video camera, another day to drive back into the city, pick up the equipment I need and drive all the way back out to the house of perpetual storm. By the time I’ve got everything fixed up it’s the middle of the night, and anyway, I have a notion that nothing will happen while I’m watching. I leave the camera running and go to bed.

  In the morning I come into the room early, quivering with excitement, but the videotape counter reads 0000, it doesn’t seem to have moved. Disappointment hits me hard. I sit down on the floor, and I’m being so sorry for myself that it’s five minutes before it occurs to me that if the tape had been used until it ran out, the auto-rewind mechanism would have taken it all the way back to the beginning. I get up fast and come into a half crouch. This is what it feels like to be in one of those first-contact sci-fi movies. There are aliens on the video. Extraterrestrials who fell to earth. We come in peace, and so on. Surrender Earthlings your planet is surrounded. Don’t panic. For some reason I begin to laugh.

  The video camera has an internal-playback capability. I put my eye to the eyepiece and hit the Play button. The tape begins to run.

  The woman sitting in the chair where the object doll should be is not the young phantom of the day before. This woman is older, in her mid-fifties, worried-looking, with a kind face and graying hair twisted into a bun. She looks and sounds Indian, but I’m sure I have never met her before in my life.

  She coughs, an embarrassed little cough, and talks.

  You see, one of our ancient philosophers says, consider the humble bat. You know what I’m saying, isn’t it? That we should try to experience reality as a bat might. The purpose of the exercise being to explore the idea of otherness, of a radical alienness with which we can have no true contact, let alone rapport. You understand? Is it clear?

  Bats live in the same space and time as we but their world is utterly unlike ours. So also: our world is as unlike yours as a bat’s. And there are many such, believe me. All these bats, all of us, flapping around one another’s heads. I’m not explaining this properly.

  Well, we are one another’s bats, that’s it.

  I’m sorry about Maria. The girl is brilliant but, as you see, not well. Also capricious by nature, vain, a meddler, a little bit nympho, okay?, the family has no control. I think perhaps she has been in your, what would it be, dreams? In your dreams, yes. Forgive her. She is, let me so express it, flimsy. I am afraid she will not survive what is to come. She does not have the strength of character. Perhaps even I do not. None of us knows how she will answer the question until it is asked. I’m talking about the great question, okay? Life or death.

  You’re not following me. Of course not. I’m so stupid.

  (Pause.)

  I don’t know how to tell you so that you would get it. Suppose one day you turn a corner and there’s a video store you never knew existed, and inside it there are whole walls of videos you never heard of before. Okay? Suppose a few of you find this store, quite a few, but not everybody, because many people when you send them to the street they come back saying it isn’t there. The, store. The doorway to the store. It isn’t really like this, but I’m doing my best.

  You haven’t noticed, how could you, but when we visit we don’t age, okay? Like if you watch a video, a hundred years can pass in the story, but for you it’s a hundred minutes, and you can skip about also. Fast-forward, freeze-frame, reverse, whatever you like. Your time is not like that of the people on the tape.

  But this is wrong, because what we found, these few of us—or, not so few but not so many—is that if we, oh goodness, if we passed through the door we could be inside the video, do you see? Plainly my metaphor is not holding up, because I said the door was the door of the store, and the video was in the store, but really there is neither store nor video, just these doors, yes, these apertures, you are a photographer so you understand that word, the aperture opens and light flies in, light like a miracle, staining another reality, leaving its image behind.

  I cannot explain it better. We are light from elsewhere.

  I think some of the rest you have guessed. The accidentally entangled time lines, like the strings of kites. The worlds heading for collision, already it has begun, the earthquakes, you have perceived their meaning, I think. Your friend Ormus feared the worst long ago, it damaged him, I am sorry. He envisioned the end of your line. But the truth is, your line is stronger than we believed, and the damage to our line is terrible, completely terrible. Whole areas are simply devastated, torn and shredded, just no longer there. Where they were is now a non-being that drives people mad. Incomprehensible nothingness. Just think.

  Can you conceive of such damage to the real? What was true yesterday—an anthrax attack by terrorists in the New York subway—is no longer true today: it seems there was no anthrax attack. Yesterday’s safe is today’s dangerous. There is nothing to hold on to. Nothing is any longer, with any certainty, so.

  Do you understand? Your line is strong, like kala manja kite-gut. It seems you may cut us off and not we you. You will continue and we will come to an ending, to the edge, to grief. We will be your fading, what’s the word, dream.

  Already the damage is too great; we can’t escape. The door, you see, the aperture, it is jammed. We can see through the glass, for a little while yet we can shout messages, like this, but we can no longer slip through and be there by your side. How mad we were to think that our time of free exploration, of blissful travel between universes, would not end! Perhaps we could have come to you as refugees, some of us say that now, but others say that when the line ends so do all the moments in it. All must be lost. We are lost.

  This is all that will remain of us: our light in your eye. Our shadows in your images. Our floating forms, falling through nothingness, after the ground vanishes, the solid ground beneath our feet.

  (The video-image begins to deteriorate. Sound and picture quality both become fuzzier. The image jumps and distorts, the audio crackles and beeps. The woman raises her voice.)

  Long ago—on a plane—I spoke to your friend—I’m talking about Mr. Cama!—Ormus!—When she, Maria, approached him I at first thought maybe he was also one of us.—You can hear me? I thought he came from our side!—But he didn’t—he did not—it was just her craziness—I’m saying she lives in a world of make-believe—fantasy! pretence!—poor girl.

  Snap. Crackle. Pop.

  Oh Lord!—Oh dear Lord!—It’s tearing, it’s shredding!—So thin, so flimsy!—It isn’t strong enough.—Soon we will all be simply your make-believe world.

  (It is becoming difficult to see the woman through the video “snowstorm,” or to hear her through the mounting background noise. She is shouting; fading in and out and shouting as loud as she can. Her voice cuts out, returns, cuts out again, reminding me of poor cell-phone reception.)

  Listen!—she fell for him!,—she truly did—she’s not a bad girl, okay?—we are not bad people—our world is as beautiful as yours—but his love—Ormus’s!—-for that woman, I’m saying!—this was hard for Maria to handle.—Can you hear me?—This is what Maria wanted to say to you.—This is her last request.—My last also.—Care for him.—We are ending.—Can you hear me?—Do not let him die.

  … HELP ORMUS …

  Here the transmission cuts out for the last time. The snowstorm obliterates the image. I imagine that I am watching the end of a world. In the dancing video blobs I seem to see towers crash and oceans rise to swallow the alien land. In the hiss and roar of the white noise it is easy to hear the dying screams of an entire speci
es, the death rattle of another Earth.

  There is a change on the tape. The video snowstorm vanishes. In its place is the image of a doll in a chair, holding a circular mirror, in which is reflected a rectangular mirror, which in turn contains the reflection of another doll.

  I stay there most of the day, alone with my dolls and their video images, thinking about Maria and her teacher and their story and everything that has melted into air. What comes to mind, absurdly, or not so absurdly, is a scene from a movie: Superman in his private polar ice palace, fitting crystals together and conjuring up his long-dead parents, a serene doomed couple offering wisdom from a vanished world beyond the arch of time. Flighty, deranged Maria with her scribbled messages, and my other lady visitor, nameless, composed, facing oblivion with high dignity: I barely knew them—they were aliens, after all, visitors from a familiar-sounding elsewhere, slipping into our awareness by an unimaginable route—and yet I’m profoundly stirred by their loss. I’m trying to work out why that is. In the end I decide it’s because although I, we, didn’t really know them, they knew us, and whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter’s tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.

  Which notion turns my thoughts back to Vina, to whom all my mental pathways still lead. Her knowledge of me was so deep, her version so compelling, that it held together my miscellany of identities. To be sane, we choose between the diverse warring descriptions of our selves; I chose hers. I took the name she gave me, and the criticism, and the love, and I called that discourse me.