Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (23 page)

Go away, he said. This is my home. This is my castle. I’ll defend myself with cannons and boiling oil.

Is that a threat of violence, sir?

It’s a fucking figure of speech.

Then, a mystery. The gathering mob, words of hate, aggression disguised as defensiveness, the threatening claiming to be under threat, the knife pretending to be in danger of being stabbed, the fist accusing the chin of attacking it, all that was familiar, the loud malevolent hypocrisy of the age. Even the preacher from nowhere wasn’t much of a puzzlement. Such unholy holy men cropped up all the time, created by some form of sociological parthenogenesis, some weird bootstrap operation that made authorities out of nonentities. That was stuff to shrug at. Then on the night of the mystery there were reports of a woman seen with the composer, silhouetted against the living room window, an unknown woman who appeared as if from nowhere and then disappeared, leaving the composer alone at the night window, opening it in defiance of the gathered mob, his painful dissonant music clanging behind him like an alarm system, his arms outstretched as if crucified, what was he doing, was he inviting death into his home, and why was the crowd suddenly hushed, as if some giant invisible cat had got its tongue, why wasn’t it moving, it looked like a waxwork tableau of itself, and where were those clouds coming from, the weather in London was clear and mild, but not in Hampstead, in Hampstead that night all of a sudden there was rolling thunder, and then bolts of lightning, wham, crash, and the mob didn’t wait around for another strike, the lightning broke the spell and the mob ran screaming for its life, down Well Walk and on to the Heath, nobody killed thank goodness, except for the idiot who decided the best place to shelter from thunderbolts was under a tree, he got fried. The next day the mob didn’t come back, or the next, or the next.

Quite a coincidence, sir, that oddly localized storm, almost as if you brought it on, you wouldn’t have an interest in meteorology, would you, sir? There wouldn’t be some weather-altering contraption in your attic, now would there? You’ll excuse us if we just take a look?

Inspector, be my guest.

On the way back to Mr. Geronimo from Hugo Casterbridge, flying east not west, for the jinn move so swiftly that there’s no need to take the shortest route, Dunia flew over ruins, hysteria, chaos. Mountains had begun to crumble, snows to melt and oceans to rise, and the dark jinn were everywhere—Zumurrud the Great, Shining Ruby, Ra’im Blood-Drinker, and Zumurrud’s old ally, increasingly his rival for jinn supremacy, the sorcerer-jinni Zabardast. Water reservoirs turned to urine and a baby-faced tyrant, after Zabardast
whispered
in his ear, ordered all his subjects to have the same ridiculous haircut as himself. Human beings did not know how to handle the irruption of the supranormal into their lives, Dunia thought, most of them simply fell apart or had the haircuts and wept with love for the baby-faced tyrant, or under Zumurrud’s spell they prostrated themselves before false gods who asked them to murder the devotees of other false gods, and that too was being done, statues of These gods destroyed by followers of Those gods, lovers of Those gods castrated stoned to death hanged sliced in half by the lovers of These. Human sanity was a poor, fragile thing at best, she thought. Hatred stupidity devotion greed the four horsemen of the new apocalypse. Yet she loved these wrecked people and wanted to save them from the dark jinn who fed, watered and made manifest the darkness within themselves. To love one human being was to begin to love them all. To love two was to be hooked forever, helpless in the grip of love.

Where did you go, he said. You disappeared just when I needed you.

I went to see someone who also needed me. I had to show him what he was capable of.

Another man.

Another man.

Did you look like Ella when you were with him. Are you making my dead wife fuck men she never met is that it.

That isn’t it.

I have my feet on the ground again so you’re done with me this was some sort of jinn therapy is that it.

That isn’t it.

What do you really look like. Show me what you really look like. Ella is dead. She’s dead. She was a beautiful optimist and believed in an afterlife but this wasn’t it, this zombie of my darling wife inhabited by you. Stop. Please stop. I’m being thrown out of this apartment. I’m losing my mind.

I know where you need to go.

It is dangerous for human beings to enter Peristan. Very few have ever done so. Until the War of the Worlds only one man, as far as we know, ever stayed there for any length of time, and married a fairy princess, and when he returned to the world of men he discovered that eighteen years had passed even though he believed himself to have been away for a much shorter period. A day in the jinn world is like a month of human time. Nor is that the only danger. To look upon the beauty of a jinnia princess in her true uncloaked aspect is to be dazzled beyond the capacity of many human eyes to see, minds to grasp or hearts to bear. An ordinary man might be blinded or driven insane or killed as his heart burst with love. In the old days, a thousand years ago, a few adventurers managed to enter the jinn world, mostly with the assistance of well- or evil-intentioned jinn. To repeat: only one human being ever returned in good shape, the hero Hamza, and the suspicion remains that he may have been part jinni himself. So when Dunia the jinnia, aka Aasmaan Peri the Lightning Princess of Qâf Mountain, suggested to Mr. Geronimo that he return with her to her father’s kingdom, suspicious minds might have concluded that she was luring him to his doom like the
sirenuse
singing on the rocks near Positano or Lilith the night monster who was Adam’s wife before Eve, or John Keats’s merciless beauty.

Come with me, she said. I will reveal myself to you when you’re ready to see me.

Then,

just as the inhabitants of the city were discovering the true meaning of being without shelter, even though they had always believed themselves to be experts in shelterlessness, because the city they hated and loved had always been bad at providing its inhabitants with protection against the storms of life, and had inculcated in its citizens a certain fierce loving-hating pride at their own habits of survival in spite of everything, in spite of the not-enough-money issue and the not-enough-space issue and the dog-eat-dog issue and so on;

just as they were being forced to face the fact that the city or some force within the city or some force arriving in the city from outside the city might be about to expel them from its territory forever, not horizontally but vertically, into the sky, into the freezing air and the murderous airlessness above the air;

just as they began to imagine their lifeless bodies floating out beyond the solar system, so that whatever alien intelligences might be out there would meet dead human beings long before living ones and wonder what stupidity or horror had pushed these entities out into space without so much as protective clothing;

just as the screams and weeping of the citizens began to rise above the noise of such traffic as continued to ply the streets, because the plague of rising had broken out in many neighborhoods, and those individuals who believed in such things began to shout in the frightened streets that the Rapture had begun, as foretold in Paul’s first epistle to the Thessalonians, when the living and the dead would be caught up in the clouds and meet the Lord in the air, it was the end of days, they cried, and as people began to float upwards away from the metropolis it was getting to be hard even for the most diehard skeptic to disagree;

just as all this was going on, Oliver Oldcastle and the Lady Philosopher arrived at The Bagdad with murder in his eyes and terror in hers, having had to struggle into the city without the benefit of a car or bus or train, it was, Oldcastle told Alexandra, just about the distance traveled by Pheidippides from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens, at the end of which, by the way, he dropped dead, and they too were exhausted, at the end of their strength, and irrationally believing that a confrontation with Geronimo Manezes could resolve everything, that if they could just frighten him enough or seduce him enough he would he able to reverse what he had set in motion;

just at that precise moment a great light flooded outwards and upwards from the basement bedroom in which the greatest of the jinnia princesses was revealing herself in her true glory for the first time ever in the human world, and the revelation opened the royal gate into Fairyland, and Mr. Geronimo and the Lightning Princess were gone, and the gate closed and the light went out and the city was left to face its fate, C. C. Allbee and Blue Yasmeen floating balloon-fashion in the stairwell of The Bagdad, and Manager Oldcastle in his great wrath and the chatelaine of La Incoerenza who had left her estate for the first time in many years standing impotent in the street, already a foot or so off the ground, without any hope of redress.

There was too much light and when it diminished so that he could see again, Mr. Geronimo to his consternation found himself a child in a long-forgotten but familiar street playing French cricket with chanting boys, Raffy ’Ronnimus once more, and all of a sudden and quite inexplicably and there winking at him looking like any other Sandra from Bandra was a young girl in whose wicked delighted eyes he saw the jinnia princess. And his mother Magda Manezes and Father Jerry himself also watching him at play, hand in hand and happy, as they never did and rarely were in life. And a warm evening, but not too hot, and the shadows lengthening away from the cricketing boys, showing them in silhouette pictures of the men they might grow up to be. His heart filled with something that might have been happiness, but poured out of his eyes as grief. The tears were uncontrollable and his whole body shook with the sadness of what was,
there are tears in things,
said pious Aeneas in Virgil’s words long ago,
and mortal things touch the mind.
His feet were on the ground now but where was this ground, in Fairyland or Bombay or an illusion, it was just another way of being adrift, or in the clutches of the jinnia princess. As he looked around at the dream of an old street scene, this occult hologram, he was in the grip of everything sad that ever happened to him, he wished he had never become detached from the place he was born, wished his feet had remained planted on that beloved ground, wished he could have been happy all his life in those childhood streets, and grown into an old man there and known every paving stone, every betel-nut vendor’s story, every boy selling pirated novels at traffic lights, every rich man’s car rudely parked up on the sidewalk, every girl at the bandstand aging into a grandmother and remembering when they kissed furtively at night in the churchyard, he wished he could have roots spreading under every inch of his lost soil, his beloved lost home, that he could have been a part of something, that he could have been himself, walking down the road not taken, living a life
in context
and not the migrant’s hollow journey that had been his fate; ah, but then he would never have met his wife, he argued with himself, and that deepened his grief, how could he bear the idea that by remaining joined to the line of the past he might never had his one true passage of joy, maybe he could dream her into his Indian life, maybe she would have loved him there as well, she would have walked down this street and found him here and loved him just the same, even though he would have been the self he never became, maybe she would have loved that self too, Raphael Hieronymus Manezes, that lost boy, that boy which the man had lost.

I thought you’d like it, said the little girl with the jinnia’s eyes, puzzled. I
listened
to your heart and
heard
your sorrow at what you had left behind and I thought this would be a welcome gift.

Take it away, he said, choking on his tears.

Bombay vanished and Peristan appeared, or rather Mount Qâf the circular mountain that encloses the fairy world. He was in a white marble courtyard of the curved palace of the Lightning Princess, its red stone walls and marble cupolas around and above, its soft tapestries rippled by a breeze, and the curtain of sheet lightning that guarded it hanging like the aurora in the sky. He did not want to be here. Anger replaced grief in him. Until a few hundred days ago, he reminded himself, he had had no interest whatsoever in the supranormal or fabulous. Chimeras or angels, heaven or hell, metamorphoses or transfigurations, a pox on them all, he had always thought. Solid ground beneath his feet, dirt under his fingernails, the husbandry of growing things, bulbs and roots, seeds and shoots, this had been his world. Then all of a sudden, levitation, the arrival of an absurd universe, strangenesses, cataclysm. And just as mysteriously as he rose, so he had descended, and all he wanted now was to resume. He didn’t want to know what it meant. He wanted not to be a part of the place, the
thing,
he didn’t have the word for it, in which all that existed, he wanted to re-create the real world around himself, even if the real world was an illusion and this continuum of the irrational was the truth, he wanted the fiction of the real back. To walk, jog, run and jump, to dig and grow. To be earth’s creature and not, like some devil, a creature of the powers of the air. That was his only desire. Yet here was Fairyland. And a goddess of smoke before him who was obviously not his dead wife exhumed from the grave by his memory of her. Comprehension failed him. He had no more tears to cry.

Why have you brought me here, he asked. Couldn’t you have just left me alone.

She dissolved into a whirl of white with a shining light at its heart. Then she took shape again, no longer skinny Dunia the love of Ibn Rushd but Aasmaan Peri, Skyfairy, splendid with lightning crackling like a victor’s wreath at her brow, adorned with jewels and gold and clad in wisps of smoke with a gaggle of handmaidens behind her in half-moon formation, awaiting her command. Don’t ask a jinnia princess for reasons, she said, her turn to be angry now, maybe I brought you here to be my slave, to pour my wine or oil my feet, or perhaps even, if I so please, you could be my lunch, fricasseed on a platter with a little wilted kale, these ladies will cook you if I decide to crook my little finger against you, do not imagine they won’t. You fail to praise a princess’s beauty and then ask her for reasons! Reasons are human follies. We have only pleasures and what we will.