Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

The Strangenesses

Natraj Hero naaching down the avenue like dancing god Lord Shiva, lord of dance, bringing world into being as he prance. Natraj young&beautiful, scorns old dudes, laughs at all the painfoot-limpy-with-heavy/bhaari-body-types. Girls, but, don’t give him a second look. Not knowing his superpowers, Creator and Destroyer of Universe, they are ignoring. That’s okay: theek thaak. He is in disguise. Just now he is being tax accountant Jinendra going for grocery to Subzi Mandi store, Jackson Heights, Quveens. Jinendra Kapoor a.k.a. Brown Clark Cunt. Wait till he rips off his outer garment yaar. Then they’ll dekho him all right, they’ll be checking him proper. Until dat time, hinting only at secret mightiness, he is prancing Thirty-Seventh Avenue like king from Desh, the old country, shahenshah or maharana or wat. Natraj dance to the bulbul tune. He is like dis only. He is Dil-ka-Shehzada. A.k.a. Jack of Hearts.

Natraj Hero did not exist. He was the fictional alter ego of a young would-be graphic novelist, Jimmy Kapoor. Natraj’s superpower was dancing. When he “ripped off his outer garment” his two arms turned into four, he had four faces too, front, back and sides, and a third eye in the middle of his forehead, and when he began to dance the bhangra or bust out his best disco moves — he was from Queens, after all — he was able literally to shape reality, to create or destroy. He could make a tree grow in the street or make himself a Mercedes convertible or feed the hungry, but he could also knock down houses and blow bad guys to bits. It was a mystery to Jimmy why Natraj hadn’t leapt up into the divine pantheon with Sandman and Watchmen and the Dark Knight and Tank Girl and the Punisher and the Invisibles and Dredd and all the other Marvel, Titan and DC greats. Sadly, Natraj had remained obstinately earthbound, and tax accountancy in Jimmy’s cousin’s practice on Roosevelt Avenue was beginning, at his low points, to feel like the young artist’s fate.

He had begun to post episodes from the career of Natraj Hero online but the big boys had notably failed to call. Then, one hot night — one hundred and one nights after the storm, though he hadn’t worked that out — up there in his third-floor bedroom with a red moon shining through his window, he woke up with a start of terror. There was somebody in the room. Somebody … big. As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness he observed that the far wall of his bedroom had disappeared completely and been replaced by a swirl of black smoke at whose heart was what looked like a black tunnel leading into the depths of the unknown. It was hard to see the tunnel clearly because a gigantic many-headed multi-limbed individual was in the way, trying to fold those limbs into the cramped space of Jimmy’s room, looking like it — he — was about to knock down the other bedroom walls, and complaining loudly.

The individual did not look as if he — it — was made of flesh and blood. It — he — looked drawn, illustrated, and Jimmy Kapoor recognized, with a shock, his own graphic style, Frank Milleresque (he hoped), sub-Stan-Lee-ite (he conceded), post-Lichtensteinian (this when in the company of snobs, himself included). “You’ve come to life?” he asked, being incapable at that moment of depth or wit. Natraj Hero’s voice, when he — it — spoke, sounded familiar, a voice he’d heard somewhere before, a snarling multi-mouthed echo-chamber voice of divine authority, ruthlessness and wrath, the very antithesis of Jimmy’s own voice, a poor thing filled with fears, insecurities and uncertainty. The correct response to this voice was to quail before it. Jimmy Kapoor made the correct response.

Fuck yaar no space in here sala having to make self smaller, chhota like fucking ant, or I will take roof off your pathetic ghar. Okay, better. See me? Check me? One two three four arm, four three two one face, third eye looking straight into your piddling soul. No, no, please to excuse, respect must be shown, because you are my creator, isn’t it? HA HA HA HA HA. As if great Natraj was dreamed up by tax accountant in Quveens and hasn’t been around and dancing since Start of Time. Since, to be precise, I personally have danced Time and Space into being. HA HA HA HA HA. You think you have summoned me maybe. You think you are a wizard maybe. HA HA HA HA HA. Or you think it’s a dream? No, baba. You just woke the fuck up. Also me. Returning after absence of eight-nine hundred years, featuring many long snoozes.

Jimmy Kapoor shook with terror. “How didid you get hehere?” he stammered. “Ininto my bebedrooroom?” You have seen Ghostbusters fillum? responded Natraj Hero. This is like that only. That was it, Jimmy understood. It was one of his favorite films, and Natraj’s voice was like the voice of the Sumerian destruction-god, Gozer the Gozerian, speaking through the lips of Sigourney Weaver. Gozer with kind of an Indian accent. Portaal is busted open. Border between what imagineers are imagining and what imaginees are desiring is leaky now like Mexico-USA, and we-all, who before were caged in Phantom Zone, can go fast now through wormholes and land up here like General Zod with superpowers. So many wanting to come. Soon we will be taking over. Hundred and one percent. Forget about it.

Natraj began to flicker and dim. This was not to his liking. Portaal not functioning just now at full efficiency. Okay. Tata for now. But please be assured, I will return. Then he was gone and Jimmy Kapoor alone wide-eyed in bed watched the black clouds spiral inward until the dark tunnel was gone. After that his bedroom wall reappeared, with the photos of Don Van Vliet a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, Scott Pilgrim, Lou Reed, the Brooklyn hip-hop group Das Racist, and the Faustian comic-book hero Spawn pinned to the corkboard unaltered, as if they hadn’t just voyaged to the fifth dimension and back, and only Rebecca Romijn, in the large pin-up poster of the blue-skinned shapeshifter Raven Darkhölme a.k.a. Mystique, looked a little put out, as if to say, Who was that who shifted my shape out of the way, fucking nerve of some people, I’m the only one who decides when I change form.

“Now sabkuch changes, Mystique,” Jimmy told the blue creature in the poster. “Meaning to say, everything. Now the world itself is shape-shifting, looks like. Vow.”

Jimmy Kapoor was the first to discover the wormhole, and after that, as he correctly intuited, everything shifted form. But in those last days of the old world, the world as we all knew it before the strangenesses, people were reluctant to admit that the new phenomena were truly occurring. Jimmy’s mother pooh-poohed her son’s account of his transformative night. Mrs. Kapoor was stricken with lupus, and rose only to feed the exotic birds, the peahens, the toucans, the ducks. These she obstinately reared for sale and profit in the concrete-and-dirt wasteland behind their building, an empty plot where something had fallen down long ago and nothing had risen in its place. She had been doing this for fourteen years and nobody had objected, but there were thefts, and in the winter some birds froze to death. Rare breeds of duck were pilfered and ended up on somebody’s dinner table. An emu fell over shivering and was gone. Mrs. Kapoor accepted these events uncomplainingly, as manifestations of the world’s unkindness and her personal karma. Holding a newly laid ostrich egg, she scolded her son for confusing dreams and reality, as he always did.

“Unusual thing is never the true thing,” she told him, while a toucan on her shoulder nuzzled her neck. “Those flying saucers always turn out to be fakes, na, or ordinary lights, isn’t it. And if people are coming here from another world, why only show themselves to crazy hippies in the desert? Why they are not landing at JFK like all others? You think a god with so-many arms legs and what-all would come to you in your bedroom before visiting president in Oval Office? Don’t be mad.” By the time she had finished Jimmy had begun to doubt his own memory. Maybe it really had been a nightmare. Maybe he was such a loser that he had started swallowing his own shit. In the morning there had been no trace of Natraj Hero, right? No disarranged furniture or fallen coffee mug. No torn photographs. The bedroom wall felt solid and real. As always, his ailing mother was right.

Jimmy’s father had flown the coop with a secretary bird some years back and Jimmy did not as yet possess the funds to get a place of his own. There was no girlfriend. His sick mother wanted him to marry a thin-thin girl with a big nose that was always stuck in a book, college girl, nice manner on surface nasty behavior underneath, the way those girls were, No thank you, he thought, better off on my own until I hit the big time and then look out major babeland. The tall pretty girls lived in New York and the short pretty girls lived in LA; Jimmy was glad he lived on the glamazon coast. He aspired to be worthy of a personal glamazon. But right now there was no girlfriend. Fuck. Never mind. Right now he was at the office quarreling as usual with his cousin Normal, boss of accountancy firm.

He hated that his cousin Nirmal wanted to be normal so badly that he changed his name to Normal. He hated even more that Nirmal — Normal — spoke such bad normal Amreekan that he thought the word for name was Monica. Jimmy told his cousin that nowadays moniker meant a graffiti artist’s drawing on a freight train. Normal ignored him. Look at Gautama Chopra son of famous Deepak, Normal said, he changed his Monica to Gotham because he wanted so bad to be New Yorker. Also basketball players: Mr. Johnson wanted to be Magic, isn’t it, and Mr. Ron or Wrong Artist, don’t correct me, please — okay — Mr. Artest preferred to be Mr. World Peace. And don’t forget those actresses so famous in before-time, Dimple and sister Simple, if those Monicas are acceptable then what you talking. Me, I just want to be Normal, and so what’s wrong with it, Normal by name, normal by nature. Gotham Chopra. Simple Kapadia. Magic Johnson. Normal Kapoor. Same to bloody same. You should focus on the figures and keep your head out of the dreams, isn’t it. Your good mother told me your dream. Shiva Natraj in your bedroom as drawn by Jinendra K. Keep going on that way, why not? Keep going on and you will come to a grief. You want a life? Wife? No strife? Focus on figures. Take care of your mother. Stop dreaming. Wake up to reality. That is Normal practice. You will do well to follow suit.

Outside, when he left work, it was Halloween. Children, marching bands et cetera, parading. He had always been kind of a Halloween party-pooper, never got into the whole dressing-up Baron-Samedi thing, and half admitted to himself that the killjoy attitude was related to the absence of a girlfriend, was both an effect of said absence and also the partial cause of it. Tonight, with his thoughts full of last night’s manifestation, Halloween had completely slipped his mind. He walked down streets filled with dead people and tits-out prostitutes, readying himself for his mother’s infirmity, her guilt-trip monologues and her doddering birdseed duties, I’ll do, it Ma, he told her, but she shook her head weakly, No, son, what am I good for now except to keep my birds alive and wait for death, her usual speech, a little more macabre given the context, the dead rising from their tombs to perform their danses macabres, the night of skeleton-masked figures in hooded monks’ habits carrying the Sickles of the Reaper and drinking vodka from the bottle through the gaping mouths of their skulls. He passed a woman with astonishing face makeup, a zipper running down the middle of her face, “unzipped” around her mouth to reveal bloody skinless flesh all the way down her chin and neck, You really went all out, darling, he thought, that’s really full on, but I don’t think anybody will want to kiss you tonight. Nobody wanted to kiss him either but he had a superhero-slash-god to meet. Tonight, he told himself, filled with both dread and joy. Tonight we’ll see who’s dreaming and who’s awake.

And sure enough, at midnight, the pictures of Captain Beefheart, Rebecca /Mystique and the rest were swallowed up by the swirling dark cloud, which slowly spiraled open to reveal the tunnel to somewhere infinitely strange. For some reason — Jimmy supposed that supernatural beings weren’t required to abide by the laws of reason, that reason was one of the things they defied, held in contempt, and sought to overthrow — Natraj Hero didn’t bother on this occasion to visit the bedroom in Queens. And, again for some reason — though Jimmy himself would have admitted afterwards that rational thought had very little to do with his decision — the young would-be graphic novelist moved slowly towards the cloud spiral and gingerly, as if testing the temperature of bathwater, put his arm into the black hole at its heart.

Now that we know about the War of the Worlds, the main event to which the strangenesses were the prologue, the bizarre cataclysm which many of our ancestors did not live through, we can only marvel at the courage of young Jinendra Kapoor in the face of the terrifying unknown. When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, it was an accident, but when she stepped through the looking glass, it was of her own free will, and a braver deed by far. So it was with Jimmy K. He had no control over the wormhole’s first appearance, or the entry into his bedroom of the giant Ifrit, the dark jinn, disguised as Natraj Hero. But on this second night, he made a choice. Men like Jimmy were needed in the war that followed.

When Jimmy Kapoor plunged his arm into the wormhole, as he afterwards told his mother and his cousin Normal, a number of things happened at mind-blowing speed. In the first place, he was instantly sucked into that space where the laws of the universe ceased to operate, and in the second place, he at once lost his sense of where the first place might be. In the place where he found himself the idea of place ceased to have meaning and was replaced by velocity. The universe of pure and extreme velocity required no point of origin, no big bang, no creation myth. The only force at work here was the so-called g-force, under whose influence acceleration is felt as weight. If time had existed here he would have been crushed to nothing in a millisecond. In that timeless time he had time to perceive that he had entered the transportation system of the world behind the veil of the real, the subcutaneous subway network operating just below the skin of the world he knew, which allowed such beings as the dark jinn and he had no idea who or what else besides to move at FTL speeds — speeds faster than light — around their lawless land for which the word land seemed inappropriate. He had time to hypothesize that for whatever reasonless reason this, the underground railroad of Fairyland, had been sequestered from terra firma for a long time, but had now begun to burst through into the dimension of the actual to wreak miracles or havoc amongst human beings.

Or it may be that he did not have time for these thoughts and that they actually formed in his mind after he was rescued, because what he felt there in the tunnel of swirling black smoke was a rushing towards him of something or someone he could not see or hear much less name, and then he was tumbling backwards into his bedroom with his pajamas ripped off his body so that he was obliged to shield his nakedness with his bare hands from the woman standing before him, a beautiful young woman dressed in the casual uniform of young women her age, skinny black jeans, a black tank top and lace-up ankle boots, a person even more thin-thin than the girl his mother wanted him to marry but with a far more attractive nose, the kind of girl he would have loved to date obviously, except that she was not glamazon shaped, but he found he didn’t care so much about that, but in spite of or because of her stick-thin beauty he knew she was far out of his league, forget about it, Jimmy, don’t make a fool of yourself, stay loose, play it cool. And this was the girl who had saved him from the vortex of velocity and who apparently was a being from the other world, a fairy or peri from Peristan, and she was talking to him. This stuff that was happening to him now: it did his head in. Vow, yaar. No words. Just … vowee.

The jinn are not noted for their family lives. (But they do have sex. They have it all the time.) There are jinn mothers or fathers, but the generations of the jinn are so long that the ties between the generations often erode. Jinn fathers and daughters, as will be seen, are rarely on good terms. Love is rare in the jinn world. (But sex is incessant.) The jinn, we believe, are capable of the lower emotions — anger, resentment, vindictiveness, possessiveness, lust (especially lust) — and even, perhaps, some forms of affection; but the high noble sentiments, selflessness, devotion, and so on, these elude them. In this, as in so much else, Dunia proved herself exceptional.

Nor do the jinn alter greatly with the passage of the years. For them existence is purely the business of being, never becoming. For this reason, life in the jinn world can be tedious. (Except for the sex.) Being, by its nature, is an inactive state, changeless, timeless, eternal, and dull. (Except for the nonstop sex.) This is why the human world was always so attractive to the jinn. The human way was doing, the human reality was alteration, human beings were always growing and shriveling and striving and failing and yearning and envying, acquiring and losing and loving and hating, and being, in sum, interesting, and when the jinn were able to move through the slits between the worlds and meddle in all this human activity, when they could tangle or untangle the human web and accelerate or hold back the endless metamorphosis of human lives, human relations, and human societies, they felt, paradoxically, more like themselves than they ever did in the static world of Fairyland. It was human beings who allowed the jinn to express themselves, to create immense wealth for lucky fishermen, to imprison heroes in magic webs, to thwart history or enable it, to take sides in wars, between the Kurus and Pandavas, for example, or the Greeks and Trojans, to play Cupid or to make it impossible for a lover ever to reach his beloved, so that she grew old and sad and died alone at her window waiting for him to arrive.

We now believe that the long age in which the jinn were unable to interfere in human affairs contributed to the ferocity with which they reentered it when the seals between the worlds were broken. All that pent-up creative and destructive power, all that good and bad mischief, burst upon us like a storm. And between the jinn of white magic and the jinn of black magic, the bright jinn and the dark, an enmity had grown in their Peristan exile, and human beings became the surrogates upon whom that hostility played itself out. With the return of the jinn the rules of life on earth had changed, had become capricious where they should have been stable, intrusive where privacy would have been better, malicious to a fault, preferential with scant regard for fairness, secret according to their occult origins, amoral for that was the nature of the dark jinn, opaque with no care for transparency, and accountable to no citizenry on the planet. And the jinn, being jinn, had no intention of teaching mere humans what the new rules might be.

In the matter of sex, it is true that the jinn have on occasion had intercourse with human beings, adopting whatever form they chose, making themselves pleasing to their mate, even altering gender on occasion, and having little regard for propriety. However, there are very few cases in which a jinnia bore human children. That would be as if the breeze were to be impregnated by the hair it ruffled and gave birth to more hair. That would be as if a story mated with its reader to produce another reader. The jinnias have been for the most part infertile and uninterested in such human problems as motherhood and family responsibility. It will readily be apparent, then, that Dunia, the matriarch of the Duniazát, was, or became, very unlike the vast majority of her kind. Not only had she produced offspring the way Henry Ford learned to produce motor cars, the way Georges Simenon wrote novels, which is to say, like a factory, or industriously; she also continued to care for them all, her love for Ibn Rushd transferring itself naturally, maternally, towards their descendants. She was perhaps the only true mother of all the jinnias that existed, and as she embarked on the task the great philosopher had given her, she also became protective of what remained of her dispersed brood after the cruelty of the centuries, missed them bitterly during the long separation of the Two Worlds, and yearned to have them back under her wing.

Do you understand why you are still alive, she asked Jimmy Kapoor, as, blushing, he pulled a bedsheet around himself. “Yes,” he replied, his eyes filled with wonder. “Because you saved my life.” That is so, she conceded, inclining her head. But you would have been dead before I reached you, crushed to bits in the great Urn, if it wasn’t for the other reason.

She saw his fear, his disorientation, his inability to process what was happening to him. She couldn’t help it. She was about to make his life even harder for him to grasp. I am going to tell you some things you will find hard to believe, she said. Unlike almost any other human being you have entered the Urn, the pathway between the worlds, and survived, so you already know that another world exists. I am a person from that world, a jinnia, a princess of the tribe of the bright jinn. I am also your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, though I may have omitted a great or two. Never mind. In the twelfth century I loved your great-great-et-cetera-grandfather, your illustrious ancestor the philosopher Ibn Rushd, and you, Jinendra Kapoor, who can’t trace your family history back further than three generations, are a product of that great love, maybe the greatest love there ever was between the tribes of men and jinn. This means that you, like all the descendants of Ibn Rushd, Muslim, Christian, atheist or Jew, are also partly of the jinn. The jinni part, being far more powerful than the human part, is very strong in you all, and that is what made it possible for you to survive the otherness in there; for you are Other too.

“Vow,” he cried, reeling. “It isn’t bad enough being a brown dude in America, you’re telling me I’m half fucking goblin too.”

How young he was, she thought, and stronger than he knew. Many men, seeing what he had seen in the last two nights, would have lost their minds, but he, for all his panic, was holding himself together. It was the resilience in human beings that represented their best chance of survival, their ability to look the unimaginable, the unconscionable, the unprecedented in the eye. This was the kind of thing young Jinendra confronted regularly in his art, through his somewhat derivative (and therefore unsuccessful) Hindu-deity-transplanted-to-Queens superhero: the monster rising from the deep, the destruction of your home village and the rape of your mothers, the arrival of a second sun in the sky and the consequent abolition of the night, and in the voice of his Natraj Hero he answered horror with scorn, Is that all you’ve got, is that your best shot, because guess what, we can deal with you, motherfucker, we can take you down. Now, having practiced courage in fiction, he was discovering it in his real life. And his own comic-book creation was the first monster he had to confront.

She spoke gently, maternally, to this brave young man. Be calm, your world is changing, she told him. At times of great upheaval when the wind blows and the tide of history surges, cool heads are needed to navigate a path to calmer waters. I will be here with you. Find the jinni within yourself and you may be a bigger hero than your Natraj. It’s in there. You will find it.

The wormhole closed. He was sitting on his bed holding his head in his hands. “This is what happens to me now,” he muttered. “They build a transworld railway station three feet from my bed. No construction permit, yo? There’s no, like, zoning laws in hyperspace? I’m a complain ’bout that. I’m a call 3-1-1 right now.” His hysteria was talking. She let it play itself out. It was his way of dealing with the situation. She waited. He flung himself down on his bed and his shoulders shook. He was trying to hide his tears from her. She pretended she did not see them. She was there to tell him he was not alone, to introduce him to his cousins. Quietly, she planted the information in his mind. The jinn part of him absorbed, understood, knew. You know where they are now, she told him. You can help one another in the time that is to come.

He sat up, clutched his head again. “I don’t need all this contact info at present,” he said. “I need Vicodin.”

She waited. He would come back to her soon. He looked up at her and attempted a smile. “It’s a lot,” he said. “Whatever that was … whatever you are … whatever you’re saying I am. I’m going to need some time.”

You don’t have time, she told him. I don’t know why the portal opened in your room. I know that what appeared last night was not your Natraj Hero. Somebody took that form, to frighten you, or just because it was funny. Somebody you should hope never to meet again. Move out. Take your mother to a safe place. She won’t understand. She won’t see the swirling black smoke because she is not of the Duniazát. That comes from your father’s side.

“That bastard,” Jimmy said. “He sure disappeared like a jinni or wat. Didn’t grant us wishes, but. Just, went off in a puff of smoke with Secretary Bird.”

Take your mother away, Dunia told him. It isn’t safe for either of you here anymore.

“Vow,” Jimmy Kapoor marveled. “Worst. Halloween. Ever.”

The discovery of a girl baby in the office of the recently elected mayor Rosa Fast, swaddled in the national flag of India and gurgling contentedly in a bassinet on the mayoral desk, was thought by our superstitious and sentimental citizenry to be, on the whole, a good thing, especially when it was announced that the baby was approximately four months old and must have been born at the time of the great storm, and survived it. Storm Baby, the media called her, and the name stuck. She became Storm Doe, conjuring up the image of a Bambi-like fawn bravely facing down the tempest on unsteady legs: an instant short-term heroine for our instant and forgetful times. It won’t be long, many of us surmised, considering her apparent South Asian ethnicity, before she’s old enough to become the national spelling bee champion. She made the cover of India Abroad and was the subject of an exhibition of “imaginary portraits” of her future, adult self, commissioned from prominent New York artists by an Indo-American arts organization and auctioned off as a fund-raising ploy. But the mystery of her arrival enraged those who were already outraged by the election of a second consecutive woman mayor of progressive inclinations. It would never have happened, these nostalgists cried, back in the tough-guy days. Whether the rest of us agreed with that or not, it was true that in the age of maximum security her arrival on Mayor Fast’s desk felt like a small miracle.

Where did Storm Doe come from and how did she get into City Hall? The evidence from the battery of security cameras that constantly swept City Hall showed a woman in a purple balaclava strolling through every checkpoint late at night, carrying the bassinet, without attracting a single flicker of attention, as if she had the power to make herself invisible, if not to the cameras, then at least to people in her immediate vicinity; but also, obviously, to the duty officers whose responsibility it was to monitor the security screens. The woman simply walked into the mayor’s office, deposited the baby, and departed. Our ancestors speculated a good deal about this female. Did she somehow catch the system napping or did she possess some sort of invisibility cloak? And if the cloak, would she not also have been invisible to the cameras? Normally down-to-earth people began to have serious dinner-table conversations about superpowers. But why would a woman with superpowers abandon her baby? And if she was the child’s mother, might Storm Doe possess some sort of magic qualities as well? Might she … because it was important not to shy away from unpleasant possibilities in the time of the war on terror … might she be dangerous? When an article appeared under the headline Is Storm Baby a Human Time Bomb? our ancestors realized that many of them had abandoned the laws of realism long ago and felt at home in the more glamorous dimensions of the fantastic. And as things turned out little Storm was indeed a visitor from the country of improbability. But at first everyone was more concerned with finding her a home.

Rosa Fast came from a prosperous Ukrainian-Jewish family based in Brighton Beach, and dressed smartly in Ralph Lauren power suits, “because his people were our neighbors,” she liked to say, “but not in Sheepshead Bay,” meaning that Ralph Lifshitz from the Bronx had ancestors in Belarus, adjacent to “her” Ukraine. Fast’s star rose as Mayor Flora Hill’s fell, and there was no love lost between her and the outgoing mayor. Mayor Hill’s term had been beset by allegations of financial improprieties, of money rerouted into secret slush funds, and two of her closest colleagues had been indicted, but the dirt had stopped short of the mayor’s office, though some of the stench had penetrated it. Rosa Fast’s successful election campaign, which hinged on her promise to clean up City Hall, had not endeared her to her predecessor, while Flora Hill’s suggestion, made after she left office, that her successor was a “closet atheist” had irritated Rosa Fast, who had, in fact, fallen far away from the faith of her ancestors, but felt that what she did in the closet of godlessness was her own business and nobody else’s. Divorced, presently unattached, fifty-three years old and childless, Fast confessed herself deeply touched by the plight of Baby Storm and made it her business to see the little girl safely into a new life, if possible out of the reach of the tabloid press. Storm was fast-tracked for adoption and successfully transferred to her new parents to make a new, anonymous beginning under a new name, or that was the idea, but within weeks the new parents approached reality-TV producers and pitched a show to be called Storm Watch which would follow the star baby as she grew. When Rosa Fast heard the news she exploded with rage and shouted at the adoption services that they had delivered an innocent child into the hands of exhibitionist pornographers who would probably take a dump on television if somebody sponsored them to do it.

“Get her away from those bravoes,” she cried, using the slang term for reality wannabes that had become common usage even though the television network from which the term originated had ceased broadcasting, because programming of mendacious artifice that presented itself as actuality had invaded so much of the cablesphere that the original purveyor of such programming had become redundant. Everyone had learned that it was worth giving up privacy for the merest possibility of fame, and the idea that only a private self was truly autonomous and free had been lost in the static of the airwaves. So Baby Storm was in danger of being bravoed and Mayor Fast was furious; but as it happened the very next day the wannabe reality-star adoptive father brought the baby back to the adoption services, saying, Take her back, she’s diseased, and literally ran out of the room, but not before everyone had seen the sore on his face, the putrescent, decaying area that looked as if a part of his cheek had died and begun to rot. Baby Storm was taken back to hospital for checks but given a clean bill of health. The next day, however, one of the nurses who had held her began to rot as well, patches of malodorous decaying flesh sprang up on both forearms, and as she was rushed weeping hysterically into the emergency room she confessed that she had been stealing prescription meds and fencing them to a dealer in Bushwick to make a little extra money on the side.

It was Mayor Rosa Fast who first understood what was happening, who brought the strangeness into the arena of what could be properly spoken about, of news. “This miracle baby can identify corruption,” she told her closest aides, “and the corrupt, once she has fingered them, literally begin to show the signs of their moral decay on their bodies.” The aides warned her that kind of talk, belonging as it did to the archaic old-Europe world of dybbuks and golems, probably didn’t sit too well in the mouth of a modern politician, but Rosa Fast was undeterred. “We came into office to clean this place up,” she declared, “and chance has given us the human broom with which we can sweep it clean.” She was the kind of atheist who could believe in miracles without conceding their divine provenance, and the next day the foundling, now in the care of the foster care agency, came back to the mayor’s office for a visit.

Baby Storm reentered City Hall like a tiny human minesweeper or drug-sniffing Alsatian. The mayor enfolded her in a big Brooklyn-Ukrainian hug, and whispered, “Let’s go to work, baby of truth.” What followed instantly became the stuff of legend, as in room after room, department after department, marks of corruption and decay appeared on the faces of the corrupt and decaying, the expenses cheats, the receivers of backhand payments in return for civic contracts, the accepters of Rolex watches and private airplane flights and Hermès bags stuffed with banknotes, and all the secret beneficiaries of bureaucratic power. The crooked began to confess before the miracle baby came within range, or fled the building to be hunted down by the law.

Mayor Fast herself was unblemished, which proved something. Her predecessor was on TV deriding the mayor’s “occult mumbo jumbo” and Rosa Fast issued a brief statement inviting Flora Hill to “come on down and meet this little sweetheart,” which invitation Hill did not take up. The entry of Baby Storm into the council chamber induced a panic among the individuals seated therein, and a desperate rush for the exits. Those who remained proved immune to the baby’s powers and were revealed as honest men and women. “I guess we finally know,” said Mayor Fast, “who’s who around these parts.”

Our ancestors were fortunate in such an hour to have a leader like Rosa Fast. “Any community that cannot agree on a description of itself, of how things go in the community, of what is the case, is a community in trouble. It is plain that events of a new kind, events of a type we would have described until very recently as fantastic and improbable, have begun, provably and objectively, to occur. We need to know what this means, and to face the changes that may be taking place with courage and intelligence.” The 311 phone lines, she declared, would for the time being be available to people wishing to report unusual occurrences of any kind. “Let’s get the facts,” she said, “and move forward from there.” As for Baby Storm, the mayor herself adopted her. “Not only is she my pride and joy, she’s also my secret weapon,” she told us. “Don’t try any BS on me or my baby girl here will get medieval on your face.”

There was one disadvantage to being the adoptive mother of the baby of truth, she told her fellow citizens on breakfast television. “If I tell the smallest little white lie in her presence, well! My whole face begins, just dreadfully, to itch.”

Two hundred and one days after the great storm, the British composer Hugo Casterbridge published an article in The New York Times that announced the formation of a new intellectual group whose purpose was to understand the radical shifts in the world conditions and to devise strategies for combating them. This group, widely derided in the days following the article’s publication as a bunch of semi-eminent though undeniably telegenic biologists, mad-professor climatologists, magic-realist novelists, idiot movie actors and renegade theologians, was responsible — in spite of all the jeering — for popularizing the term strangenesses, which caught on quickly, and stuck. Casterbridge had long been a divisive cultural figure on account of his firebrand hostility to American foreign policy, his fondness for certain Latin American dictators, and his aggressive hostility to all forms of religious belief. There was also a never-proven rumor concerning the end of his first marriage, a rumor as persistent and damaging as the notorious gerbil rumor which attached itself to a Hollywood leading man of the 1980s. As a struggling young cellist — with, at the time, a serious dependency on dangerous narcotics — Casterbridge had met and quickly married a beautiful fellow musician, a violinist with star potential, who, soon afterwards, also caught the eye of a certain industrial tycoon, who began to pursue her without regard for her marital status, and, according to the rumor, confronted Casterbridge in his own small Kennington Oval apartment with the blunt question “What would it take to make you disappear from her life?” Whereupon Casterbridge, heavily under the influence of opium or something worse, replied, “One million pounds,” and passed out. When he awoke his wife was gone without leaving a note, and he found, when he checked, that one million pounds had been deposited in his bank account.

His wife refused to have anything to do with him after that, divorced him quickly and went on to marry the industrial tycoon. He never took drugs again and his career blossomed, though he never remarried. “He sold his wife as if she was a Stradivarius, and lived off the cash,” people said of him behind his back. Casterbridge was a capable boxer with a famously short fuse, so nobody repeated the slander to his face.

The strangenesses are multiplying, he wrote in his article, though the world before they began was already a strange place, so often it’s difficult to know if an event falls into the category of the old, ordinary strangenesses or the new, extraordinary variety. Superstorms have devastated Fiji and Malaysia, and as I write giant fires are spreading across Australia and California. Perhaps this extreme weather is just the new normal, giving rise to the usual arguments between the proponents and opponents of climate change. Or perhaps this is evidence of something much worse. Our group takes what I’ll call a Post-Atheist stance. Our position is that god is a creation of human beings, who only exists because of the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle. If enough people were sensible enough not to clap hands, then this Tinker Bell god would die. However, unfortunately, billions of human beings are still prepared to defend their belief in some sort of god-fairy, and, as a result, god exists. What’s worse is that he is now running amok.

On the day that Adam and Eve invented god, the article continued, they at once lost control of him. That is the beginning of the secret history of the world. Man and Woman invented god, who at once eluded their grasp and became more powerful than his creators, and also more malevolent. Like the supercomputer in the film Terminator: “Skynet,” sky-god, same thing. Adam and Eve were filled with fear, because it was plain that for the rest of time god would come after them to punish them for the crime of having created him. They came into being simultaneously in a garden, Eve and Adam, fully grown and naked and enjoying you could say the first Big Bang, and they had no idea how they got there until a snake led them to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and when they ate its fruit they both simultaneously came up with the idea of a creator-god, a good-and-evil decider, a gardener-god who made the garden, otherwise where did the garden come from, and then planted them in it like rootless plants.

And lo, there, immediately, was god, and he was furious, “How did you come up with the idea of me,” he demanded, “who asked you to do that?” and he threw them out of the garden, into, of all places, Iraq. “No good deed goes unpunished,” said Eve to Adam, and that ought to be the motto of the entire human race.

The name “Casterbridge” was an invention. The great composer came from an immigrant family of Iberian Jews, and was a strikingly handsome man with a grand, sonorous voice and the bearing of a king. He also shared the most unusual physical characteristic of his kin: he had no earlobes. He was not a man to be trifled with, though his loyalties were as fierce as his enmities, and he was capable of profound loyalty and friendship. His smile was a thing of menacing, almost feral sweetness, a smile that could bite your head off. His politeness was terrifying. His two most endearing qualities were his Rottweiler obstinacy and his rhinoceros-thick hide. Once he had an idea between his teeth, nothing would induce him to yield it up, and the ridicule with which the new Post-Atheism was received did not deter him in the slightest. He was asked on late-night American TV if he was actually saying that the Supreme Being was fictional, and that this fictional divinity had now decided, for undisclosed reasons, to torment the human race. “Exactly,” he said with great firmness. “That’s exactly right. The triumph of the destructive irrational manifests itself in the form of an irrationally destructive god.” The talk-show host whistled between the famous gap in his central upper incisors. “Whew,” he said. “And here I was thinking the Brits were better educated than us.”

“Suppose,” said Hugo Casterbridge, “that one day god sent a storm, such a storm as could shake loose the moorings of the world, a storm which told us to take nothing for granted, not our power, not our civilization, not our laws, because if nature could rewrite its laws, break its bounds, change its nature, then our constructs, so puny in comparison, stood no chance. And this is the great test we face — our world, its ideas, its culture, its knowledge and laws, is under attack by the illusion we collectively created, the supernatural monster we ourselves unleashed. Plagues will be sent, like those sent to Egypt. But this time, there will be no request to let my people go. This god is not a liberator but a destroyer. He has no commandments. He’s over all that. He’s sick of us, the way he was in Noah’s time. He wants to make an example. He wants to do us in.”

“And we’ll be right back,” said the talk-show host, “after these messages.”

In certain quarters the quest for scapegoats had begun. It was important to know whose fault all this was. It was important to know if things were going to get worse. Maybe there were identifiable persons, destabilizing persons, who were somehow responsible for the destabilized world. Maybe these were persons carrying within themselves some sort of genetic mutation that gave them the power to induce paranormal happenings, persons who posed a threat to the rest of the normal human race. It was interesting that the so-called storm baby had been wrapped in the Indian flag. It might be necessary to look at the South Asian immigrant community to see if answers could be found. Maybe the disease—the strangeness was a social disease now, it seemed — had been brought to America by some of these persons, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, just as the devastating AIDS epidemic had originated somewhere in Central Africa and arrived in the United States in the early 1980s. A public murmuring began, and Americans of South Asian origins began to fear for their safety. Many taxi drivers put up stickers in their cabs reading I’m not that strange or Normalness not strangeness is the American way. There were a few, worrying reports of physical attacks. Then another scapegoat group was identified, and the laser beam of public attention swung away from brown-skinned folks. This new group was harder to identify. They were lightning-strike survivors.

During the great storm the lightning strikes multiplied in frequency and ferocity. It seemed like a new kind of lightning, not just electrical but eschatological. And when the machines told our ancestors that there had been over four thousand strikes per square mile, they began to understand how much danger they had been in, how much danger they might still be in. In an average year in the city there were fewer than four lightning strikes per square mile, just about all of which were absorbed by the lightning rods and radio masts on the tall buildings. Four-thousand-plus strikes per square mile meant almost ninety-five thousand strikes on the island of Manhattan alone. It was impossible to understand what the long-term consequences of such an assault might be. Approximately three thousand dead bodies were found in the wreckage of the streets. Nobody had any idea how many survivors of the strikes were still walking around, or how the voltage might have changed them on the inside. They didn’t look any different, they looked exactly like everyone else, but they were no longer like everyone else, or so everyone else feared. Perhaps they were everyone else’s enemies. Perhaps, if they were angry, they could stretch out their arms and unleash the thunderbolts they had absorbed, sending tens of thousands of amperes at our ancestors, frying them to a crisp. They could murder our ancestors’ children, or the president. Who were these people? Why were they still alive?

People were close to panicking. But nobody, at that time, was looking for men and women with unusual ears. Everyone was listening to lightning tales.

The word that the hedge fund nabob and self-styled “shareholder activist” Seth Oldville had taken up with a notorious libertine and fisher-for-rich-men named Teresa Saca Cuartos came as a shock and disappointment to his wide circle of friends. A fellow like Oldville, a big clubbable guy who knew what he wanted, what he expected the world to make available to him, and how he expected the universe to adjust to the shape he chose to impose upon it, had the edge over most of his peers, and even after successive presidential elections emphatically rejected his preferred conservative ticket, which was incomprehensible to him, running counter to his understanding of the country he loved, he remained undeflected from the aggressive pursuit of his political and economic goals. In business you could ask the folks at Time Warner, Clorox, Sony, Yahoo or Dell about his methods and you’d get an earful, some of it unprintable. As to politics, like his late friend and mentor the great, if a little crooked, Bento Elfenbein, he dismissed the sequence of presidential routs as errors by the electorate, “turkeys voting for Thanksgiving,” and set about picking candidates for the future, a governor to back here, a mayoral race to fund there, a young congressman on the rise to bankroll, backing his horses, preparing for the next battle. He called himself an atheist Jew who would have preferred to have been an opera singer or a great surfer, and in his early fifties he was still physically fit enough to go each summer in search of the big wave. Also after dinner in his townhouse he might treat the guests to an aria sung in his fine Joycean tenor, “E lucevan le stelle,” perhaps, or “Ecco ridente in cielo,” and everybody agreed he could give an excellent account of the music.

But Teresa Saca! Nobody had gone near that girl for years, not since she snared AdVenture Capital’s iconic chief Elián Cuartos. She latched onto him in his senior years when all he wanted to do was leave AVC to his protégés and have a little overdue fun; got the ring; had his baby thanks to the miracle of in vitro; and waited him out. Now old Elián was gone and she had his cash, sure, but she had the bad rep to go with it also. For a brief moment the financial titan Daniel “Mac” Aroni tried her out “just to see what all the fuss was about” but he ran from her after a couple of weeks, complaining that she was the most bad-tempered, foulmouthed bitch he’d ever laid hands on. “She called me words I’d never heard, and I have a pretty good personal thesaurus in that area,” he told everyone. “She’ll try to tear your heart out and eat it raw, right on the sidewalk, and me, I was brought up right, I don’t talk to women that way no matter the provocation, but that woman, in five minutes you’re over the body and the sex, which they’re both something, this is undeniable, but nothing’s good enough to make up for her bad character, you just want to throw her out the car door on the Turnpike and go home to eat meatloaf with your wife.”

Oldville as it happened had a perfectly good wife at home, Cindy Sachs as was, a wife widely admired for her beauty, taste, charitable work, and great goodness of heart. She could have been a dancer, she had the gift, but when he asked for her hand she made him her career instead, “Like Esther Williams,” she told their friends, “giving up her Hollywood career for the Latino man she loved, who wanted her at home.” Big mistake, Elián used to joke, settling for me, but lately there was no humor in her answering little smile. They had married young, had a string of children quickly, and remained, it must be said, each other’s closest friends. But he was a man of a certain standing and type for whom the taking of a mistress was par for the course. Teresa Saca must have seemed like perfect mistress material, she had her money now so she wouldn’t be after his, she had lived in the world of discretion for long enough to understand the consequences of kissing and telling, and she was lonely, so a little companionship from a big man would please her and encourage her to do a lot of pleasing in return. But Oldville soon learned what his friend Aroni already knew. Teresa was a raven-haired Floridian firecracker with an anger in her towards men whose origins didn’t bear examining, and her gift for verbal abuse was tiring. In addition there were, as he told her in their break-up conversation, just too many things she disliked. She would only eat in five restaurants. She disliked clothes in any color other than black. She was unimpressed by his friends. Modern art, modern dance, movies with subtitles, contemporary literature, all types of philosophy, these she abhorred, but the mediocre neoclassicist nineteenth-century American pictures at the Met, those she much admired. She loved Disney World but when he wanted to take her to Mexico for a romantic getaway at Las Alamandas she said, “It’s not my kind of place. Plus, Mexico is dangerous, it would be like vacationing in Iraq.” This, with zero self-irony, from the daughter of Spanish immigrants living just one step up from the trailer park in Aventura, Florida.

Six weeks after he took up with her he kissed her goodbye on the lawn of his place on Meadow Lane, Southampton (Cindy Oldville loathed the seaside and stayed firmly planted in the city). There was a man mowing the lawn riding a garden tractor wearing a windbreaker with the words Mr. Geronimo on the back but he didn’t exist for the fragmenting couple. “You think I’m sorry? I have options,” Teresa told him. “I won’t be shedding a tear over you. If you knew who wanted to date me right now you would die.” Seth Oldville began to shake with repressed laughter. “So we’re fourteen years old again?” he asked her but she was burning with injured pride. “I’m getting lipo next week,” she said. “My doctor says I’m a great candidate, he doesn’t have to do much and after that my body will be insane. This I was doing for you, to perfect myself, but my new boyfriend, he says he can. Not. Wait.” Oldville began to walk away. “I’ll send you photographs of what you can’t have,” she shouted after him. “You will die.” That wasn’t the end of it. In the weeks that followed a vengeful Teresa called Seth’s wife repeatedly and even though Cindy Oldville hung up on her right away she left voicemail messages so sexually explicit and detailed that they pushed the Oldvilles towards divorce. Super-lawyers geared up for the fight. Wildenstein-divorce-settlement-type numbers were bruited about. People settled down to watch. For this bout you wanted a ringside seat. Seth Oldville looked crushed in those days. It wasn’t about the money. The guy was genuinely sorry to have hurt his wife, who had done nothing but good things for him. He didn’t want the war; but now, she did. She had spent a lifetime turning a blind eye, she told girlfriends, but now she had new glasses and saw everything in sharp focus, and enough, really, with her husband’s entitled alpha-male crap. “Go get him,” the girlfriend chorus sang.

On the weekend before the storm Seth was out at the beach place by himself and fell asleep in a reclining chair on the lawn. While he was asleep somebody came up to him and drew a red bull’s-eye target on his forehead. It was the gardener fellow, Mr. Geronimo, who pointed it out to him when he woke up. In the mirror it looked like somebody was trying to simulate a Lyme disease tick bite but no, that wasn’t it, it was plainly a threat. The security personnel were embarrassed. Yes, Miss Teresa had talked her way past them. She was a persuasive lady. It was a judgment call and they had gone the wrong way on this one. It wouldn’t happen again.

Then the hurricane struck, and there followed the falling trees, the thunderbolt overload, the outages, all of it. “All of us were distracted by our own affairs in those days,” Daniel Aroni said at the memorial service at the Society for Ethical Culture, “and none of us thought she was truly capable of fulfilling her threat, and in the middle of the storm at that, when the whole city was trying to survive, it was, let me confess, unexpected. As his friend I am ashamed that I wasn’t more alert to the danger, that I didn’t warn him to raise his guard.” After the eulogies the same image was in everyone’s mind’s eye as they spilled out onto Central Park West: the rain-bedraggled woman at the door of the townhouse, the first security man blown away, a second coming at her and sent toppling backwards, the woman running through the house, up towards his sanctum, screaming Where are you, motherfucker, until he just walked out in front of her, sacrificing himself to save his wife and children, and she murdered him right there and he toppled down the red-carpet stairs like an oak. For a moment she knelt by his body soaked to the skin as she was and weeping uncontrollably and then she ran from the house; nobody stopped her, nobody dared approach.

But the question nobody could answer, not at the time, not at the memorial, was the question of the nature of the weapon. No bullet holes were found in any of the three dead bodies. All the bodies, when the police and the emergency medical teams arrived, smelled strongly of burning flesh, and their garments too had been burned. Cindy Oldville’s testimony was scarcely credible, and many people discounted it as the forgivable error of a woman in a state of extreme terror, but she was the only eyewitness and what she said her eyes witnessed was what the less reputable parts of the news media seized upon and magnified into two-inch headlines, the lightning bolts streaming from Teresa Saca’s fingertips, the white forking voltage pouring out of her, doing her deadly work. One tabloid called her Madame Magneto. Another preferred a Star Wars reference: The Empress Strikes Back. Things had reached a point at which only science fiction gave us a way of getting a handle on what the formerly real world’s non-CGI mundanity seemed incapable of making comprehensible.

And at once there was more electricity news: at the terminus of the 6 train at Pelham Bay Park, an eight-year-old girl fell onto the tracks and the steel melted like ice cream, allowing the girl to be rescued unharmed. At a safe deposit facility near Wall Street burglars succeeded in using an unidentified weapon to “burn open” the doors of safes, vaults and boxes, and made off with an unspecified sum in the “multiple millions of dollars,” according to a spokesman for the facility. Mayor Rosa Fast, under political pressure to act, called a joint press conference with the police commissioner and grimly declared all recent lightning-strike survivors to be “persons of interest,” which was, in her own ashamed opinion, clearly written across her face, a betrayal of her progressive liberalism. Her statement was predictably condemned by civil liberties groups, political rivals and many newspaper columnists. But the old liberal-conservative opposition lost its meaning when reality gave up being rational, or at least dialectic, and became willful, inconsistent, and absurd. If a boy rubbing a lamp had summoned a genie to do his bidding, that would have been a credible event in the new world our ancestors had begun to inhabit. But their senses had been dulled by long exposure to the everydayness of the everyday and it was hard for them even to accept that they had entered an age of wonders, much less to know how to live in such a time.

They had so much to learn. They had to learn to stop saying genie and associating the word with pantomime, or with Barbara Eden in pink harem pants on TV, blonde “Jeannie” in love with Larry Hagman, an astronaut who became her “master.” It was extremely unwise to believe that such potent, slippery beings could have masters. The name of the immense force that had entered the world was jinn.

She, Dunia, had also loved a mortal man — never her “master”—and many lobeless children were the consequence of that love. Dunia searched out her earmarked descendants wherever they were. Teresa Saca, Jinendra Kapoor, Baby Storm, Hugo Casterbridge, many more. All she could do was plant in their minds the knowledge of who they were and of their scattered tribe. All she could do was awaken the bright jinn within them and guide them towards the light. Not all of them were good people. In many of them human weakness proved more potent than jinni strength. This was a problem. As the slits between the worlds broke open the mischief of the dark jinn began to spread. At first, before they began to dream of conquest, the jinn had no grand design. They created havoc because it was in their nature. Mischief and its senior sibling, real harm, they foisted without compunction upon the world; for just as the jinn were not real to most human beings, so also human beings were not real to the jinn, who cared nothing for their pain, any more than a child cares for the pain of a stuffed animal she bangs against a wall.

The influence of the jinn was everywhere, but in those early days, before they fully revealed themselves, many of our ancestors did not see their hidden hands at work, in the collapse of a nuclear reactor, the gang rape of a young woman, or an avalanche. In a Romanian village a woman began laying eggs. In a French town the citizenry began turning into rhinoceroses. Old Irish people took to living in trash cans. A Belgian man looked into a mirror and saw the back of his head reflected in it. A Russian official lost his nose and then saw it walking around St. Petersburg by itself. A narrow cloud sliced across a full moon and a Spanish lady gazing up at it felt a sharp pain as a razor blade cut her eyeball in half and the vitreous humor, the gelatinous matter filling the space between the lens and the retina, flowed out. Ants crawled out of a hole in a man’s palm.

How were such things to be understood? It was easier to believe that Chance, always the hidden principle of the universe, was joining forces with allegory, symbolism, surrealism and chaos, and taking charge of human affairs, than it was to accept the truth, namely the growing interference of the jinn in the daily life of the world.

When the rake, restaurateur and man-about-town Giacomo Donizetti first left his hometown of Venice, Italy, as a young fellow of thirteen and set out on his travels, his mother, a Black Jew of Cochin who had married his Italian Catholic father at the Sri Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry when they were both spiritual and young — with the Mother herself, Mirra Alfassa, performing the ceremony at the age of ninety-three! — gave him a parting gift: a square of chamois leather folded into the shape of an envelope and tied with a scarlet bow. “Here is your city,” she told him. “Never open this package. Your home will always be with you, safe inside, wherever you may roam.” So he carried Venice with him across the world until news reached him of his mother’s death. That night he got the folded leather down from its place of safekeeping and undid the scarlet bow, which fell to pieces in his fingers. He opened the chamois envelope and found nothing inside, because love has no visible form. At that moment love, shapeless invisible love, fluttered up and away from him and he couldn’t have it anymore. The idea of home too, of feeling at home in the world wherever he was, that illusion vanished as well. After that he seemed to live as other men did but he could not fall in love or settle down and in the end he began to think of those losses as advantages, because in their stead came the conquest of many women in many places.

He developed a specialty: the love of unhappily married ladies. Almost every married woman he met was to some degree unhappy in her marriage, though the majority of them were unprepared to end it. For his own part, he was determined never to be caught in any woman’s matrimonial web. So they had the right things in common, Signor Donizetti and the Malmaritate, as he privately called them, the borderless nation of the gloomily espoused. The ladies felt gratitude for his attentions and he in his turn was unfailingly grateful to them. “Gratitude is the secret of success with women,” he wrote in his secret journal. He kept a record of his conquests in this oddly ledger-like book, and if his claims were to be believed they numbered many thousands. Then one day his luck changed.

After a night of strenuous lovemaking, Donizetti liked to seek out a well-run Turkish bathhouse, or hammam, and allow himself to be heated, steamed and scrubbed. It is probable that it was in one such establishment in Nolita that a jinn whispered to him.

The dark jinn were whisperers. Becoming invisible, they placed their lips against the chests of human beings and murmured softly into their hearts, overpowering their victims’ will. On occasion the act of possession was so profound that the individual self dissolved and the jinn actually inhabited the body of his victim. But even in cases of less-than-full possession, good people, when whispered to, became capable of bad deeds, bad folk of worse. The bright jinn whispered too, steering humanity towards acts of nobility, generosity, humility, kindness and grace, but their whispers were less effective, which may suggest that the human race falls more naturally towards the dark, or, alternatively, that the dark jinn, especially the handful of Grand Ifrits, are the most powerful of all the members of the jinn world. That is a matter for philosophers to argue about. We can only record what happened when the jinn, after a long absence, returned to the lower of the Two Worlds — our world — and declared war upon it, or rather within it. The so-called War of the Worlds which wrought such havoc upon the earth was not only a battle between the jinn world and our own but became, in addition, a civil war among the jinn fought out on our territory, not theirs. The human race became the battleground for the struggle between the bright and the dark. And, it must be said, on account of the essentially anarchic nature of the jinn, between brightness and brightness, and the dark and the dark.

Our ancestors learned, during those two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights, to be constantly on their guard against the dangers of the jinn. The safety of their children became a deep concern. They began to leave lights on in their children’s bedrooms and locked their windows even if the boys and girls complained that the rooms were airless and stuffy. Some of the jinn were child snatchers and no one could say what became of the children they seized. Also: it was a good idea, when entering an empty room, to go in right foot first while muttering excuse me under one’s breath. And above all: it was wise not to bathe in the dark because the jinn were attracted to darkness and moisture. The hammam, with its low light levels and high humidity, was a place of considerable danger. All this our ancestors came to know gradually during those years. But when Giacomo Donizetti entered the well-appointed Turkish baths on Elizabeth Street, he did not know the risk he was taking. A mischievous jinn must have been waiting for him, because when he left the hammam he was a changed man.

In short: women no longer fell in love with him, no matter how gratefully he wooed them; whereas he had only to glance at a woman to tumble helplessly, hopelessly into a horrible puppyish love. Wherever he went, at work or play or in the street, he dressed with his familiar sharpness, in a three-thousand-dollar bespoke suit, Charvet shirt and Hermès tie, yet no woman swooned, while every female who crossed his path set his heart pounding, turned his legs to jelly and inspired in him an overwhelming desire to send her a large bouquet of pink roses. He wept in the street as three-hundred-pound pedicurists and ninety-pound anorexics rushed past him ignoring his protestations as if he were a drunk or panhandler and not one of the most sought-after bachelors on at least four continents. His business colleagues asked him to stay away from work because he was embarrassing the hatcheck girls, waitresses and maîtresses d’ at his various nightlife hotspots. Within a few days his life became a torment to him. He sought medical help, willing to be declared a sex addict if necessary, though fearing the cure. However, in the doctor’s waiting room he felt obliged to fall to one knee and ask the homely Korean American receptionist if she would consider doing him the honor of becoming his wife. She showed him her wedding band and pointed to the photograph of her children on her desk and he burst into tears and had to be asked to leave.

He began to fear both the randomness of the sidewalk and the erotic thrum of enclosed spaces. In the city streets the overload of women to fall in love with was so great that he genuinely feared a heart seizure. All interiors were dangerous because so few of them were single-sex. Elevators were particularly humiliating because he was trapped with ladies who spurned him with expressions of faint, or not so faint, disgust. He sought out all-male clubs where he could sleep fitfully in a leather armchair, and he seriously considered the monastic life. Alcohol and narcotics offered an easier and less taxing escape, and he spiraled downwards towards self-destruction.

One night as he staggered towards his Ferrari he understood with the true clarity of the drunk that he was friendless, that nobody loved him, that everything on which he had based his life was tawdry and as cheap as fool’s gold, and that he almost certainly ought not to be driving a motor vehicle. He remembered being taken by one of his amours, back in the day when he was the one in the driving seat, to see the only Bollywood movie of his life, in which a man and a woman contemplating suicide on the Brooklyn Bridge see each other, like what they see, decide not to jump, and go to Las Vegas instead. He wondered if he should drive to the bridge and prepare to jump and hope to be rescued by a beautiful movie star who would love him forever as deeply as he loved her. But then he remembered that thanks to the occult consequences of the new strangeness that gripped him, he would continue to fall in love with every woman who crossed his path on the bridge or in Vegas or wherever they ended up, so that the movie goddess would undoubtedly dump him and he would be even more miserable than before.

He was no longer a man. He had become a beast in the thrall of the monster Love, la belle dame sans merci herself, multiplying herself and inhabiting the bodies of all the world’s dames whether belles or not, and he needed to go home and lock the door and hope that he was suffering from a curable illness that would eventually run its course and allow him to resume his normal life, although at that moment the word normal seemed to have lost its meaning. Yes, home, he urged himself, accelerating towards his Lower Manhattan penthouse, the Ferrari adding its own dose of recklessness to the driver’s, and at a certain moment on a certain intersection in the least fashionable part of the island there was a pickup truck with on its sides the words Mr. Geronimo Gardener and a phone number and website URL blocked out in yellow and drop-shadowed in scarlet and the Ferrari jumping the light was clearly in the wrong and then there were frantic turnings of driving wheels and screechings of brakes and it was okay, nobody died, the Ferrari took some heavy damage to a fender and there was gardening equipment spilling onto the roadway from the back of the pickup, but both drivers were ambulatory, they got out without assistance to examine the damage, and that was when Giacomo Donizetti, dizzy and trembling, finally knew he had lost his mind, and fainted right there in the street, because the physically imposing older man coming towards him was walking on air, several inches off the ground.

More than a year had passed since Mr. Geronimo lost contact with the earth. During that time the gap between the soles of his feet and solid horizontal surfaces had increased and was now three and a half, perhaps even four inches wide. In spite of the obviously alarming aspects of his condition, as he had begun to call it, he found it impossible to think of it as permanent. He envisaged his condition as an illness, the product of a previously unknown virus: a gravity bug. The infection would pass, he told himself. Something inexplicable had happened to him, whose effects would surely fade. Normality would reassert itself. The laws of nature could not be defied for long, even by a sickness unknown to the Centers for Disease Control. In the end he would certainly descend. This was how he sought to reassure himself every day. Consequently the inescapable signs of the worsening of his condition hit him hard and it took much of his remaining willpower to suppress feelings of panic. Frequently, without any warning, his thoughts began to swim wildly about, even though he prided himself on being for the most part a stoical individual. What was happening to him was impossible, but it was happening, so it was possible. The meanings of words—possible, impossible—were changing. Could science explain it to him? Could religion? The idea that there might be no explanation and no cure was a notion he was not willing to entertain. He began to delve into the literature. Gravitons were elementary particles with no mass that somewhere transmitted gravitational pull. Maybe they could be created or destroyed and if so that could account for an increase or decrease in gravitational force. That was the news according to quantum physics. But, PS, there was no proof that gravitons actually existed. Quantum physics, thanks a lot, he thought. You’ve been a great help.

Like many older persons, Mr. Geronimo led a relatively isolated life. There were no children or grandchildren to fret about his condition. This was a relief to him. He felt relieved also that he had not remarried, so that there was no woman to whom he was a cause of grief or concern. Over the long years of his widowerhood his few friends had responded to his taciturn ways by withdrawing from him, becoming mere acquaintances. After his wife died he sold their home and moved into modest rental accommodation in Kips Bay, the last forgotten neighborhood in Manhattan, whose anonymity suited him perfectly. Once he had had a friendly relationship with his barber on Second Avenue but nowadays he cut his hair himself, becoming, as he preferred to put it, the gardener of his own head.

The Koreans at the corner store were professionally cordial, though lately, as a younger generation took over from its parents, he was sometimes received with blank stares that revealed the ignorance of youth, instead of the faint smiles and small acknowledging nods with which the bespectacled elders had greeted a longtime customer. The many medical institutions along First Avenue had infected the neighborhood with a plague of doctors but he was contemptuous of the medical profession. He no longer went to see his own doctor and the admonitory texts from that gentleman’s assistant, We need to see you at least once a year if you want to continue the relationship with Dr. — , had stopped coming. What use did he have for doctors? Could a pill cure his condition? No, it could not. American medical care invariably failed those who needed it most. He wanted nothing to do with it. Your health was what you had until the day you didn’t have it and after that day you were screwed and it was better not to let doctors screw you before that day came.

On the rare occasions that his phone rang, it was invariably a gardening matter, and the longer his condition continued, the harder it was for him to work. He had handed off his clientele to other gardeners and was living now off his savings. There was the nest egg he had accumulated over the years, which was not insubstantial, on account of his thrifty lifestyle and the proceeds from the sale of the marital home, but, on the other hand, nobody ever went into the gardening business to accumulate a fortune. There was Ella’s inheritance too, which she had described as “next to nothing,” but that was because she had grown up rich. It was in fact quite a tidy sum and had passed to him after her death and he had never touched it. So he had time, but a moment would inevitably come, if things remained as they were, when the money would be gone and he would be at fortune’s mercy — Fortune, that merciless hag. So yes, he worried about money, but, again, he was happy he was not inflicting those worries on anyone else.

It was no longer possible to conceal what was happening from his neighbors, from people on the sidewalk, or in the stores he had to enter from time to time to buy provisions, though he had his hoarded supplies of soups and cereals, and he raided that larder to minimize his excursions. When he needed to restock he shopped online, often ordered for delivery when he was hungry, and went out less and less, except, occasionally, under cover of darkness. In spite of all his precautions, however, his condition was known to the neighborhood. He was lucky to live amongst people with a low boredom threshold, famous for their jaundiced, seen-it-all uninterest in their fellow citizens’ eccentricities. Hearing of his levitation, the neighborhood was largely unimpressed, assuming, with minimal discussion, that it must be some kind of trick. The fact that he continued to perform the same trick day after day made him tiresome, a stilt walker who never got off his stilts, an exhibitionist whose “wow” factor had long since evaporated. Or, if he was in some way damaged, if something had gone wrong, it was probably his fault. Probably he had been meddling in stuff that was best not meddled with. Or, the world was sick of him and was kicking him out. Whatever. The bottom line was, his shtick had gotten old, like him.

So for a time he was ignored, which made things a little easier, because he had no desire to explain himself to strangers. He stayed home and made calculations. Three and a half inches in one year meant that in three years’ time, if he was still alive, he would still be less than a foot off the ground. At that rate, he comforted himself, he should be able to work out survival techniques that would give him a livable life — not a conventional or easy existence, but one that should be workable. There were practical problems to be solved, however, some of them very awkward. Taking a bath was out of the question. Fortunately there was a shower cubicle in the bathroom. Performing his natural functions was trickier. When he tried to sit down on the toilet his behind obstinately hovered above the seat, maintaining exactly the same distance from it as his feet insisted on keeping from the ground. The higher he got, the harder it would be to shit. This needed to be considered.

Travel was already a problem, and would become a much bigger one. He had already ruled out air travel. He might strike a TSA officer as constituting some sort of threat. Only aircraft were permitted to take off at airports. A passenger trying to do so without boarding a plane could very easily be seen as acting improperly and needing to be restrained. Other forms of public transportation were also problematic. In the subway his levitation might be mistaken for an illegal effort to vault the turnstiles. Nor could he drive safely anymore. The accident had made that clear. That left walking, but even nocturnal walking was too visible and vulnerable, no matter how indifferent people acted. Perhaps it would be best to stay put in his apartment. An enforced retirement until the condition eased and he could go back to what remained of everyday life. But that was difficult to contemplate. After all, he was a man accustomed to life in the outdoors, doing hard physical work for many hours a day, in sunshine and in rain, in heat and cold, adding his own small sense of beauty to the natural beauty of the earth. If he could not work, he would still have to exercise. To walk. Yes. To walk at night.

Mr. Geronimo lived on the lowest two floors of The Bagdad, a narrow apartment building on a narrow block which might have been the least fashionable block in that least fashionable of neighborhoods, his narrow living room at the level of the narrow street and his narrow bedroom in the narrow basement below. During the great storm The Bagdad had been inside the evacuation zone but the floodwaters had not quite reached his basement. It had been a narrow escape; the adjacent streets, broader, opening their arms to the elements, had been battered. Perhaps there was a lesson to be learned, Mr. Geronimo thought. Perhaps narrowness survived attacks better than breadth. But that was an unattractive lesson and he didn’t want to learn it. Capaciousness, inclusiveness, everything-at-once-ness, breadth, width, depth, bigness: these were the values to which a tall, long-striding, broad-shouldered man like himself should cleave. And if the world wanted to preserve the narrow and to destroy the expansive, favoring the pinched mouth over wide fleshy lips, the emaciated body over the ample frame, the tight over the loose, the whine over the roar, he would prefer to go down with that big ship.

His own narrow home might have withstood the storm, but it had not protected him. For unknown reasons the storm had affected him uniquely — if indeed the storm was responsible — separating him to his growing alarm from the home soil of his species. It was hard not to ask why me, but he had begun to grasp the difficult truth that a thing could have a cause but that was not the same as having a purpose. Even if you could work out how a certain thing had come about — even if you answered the how question — you would be no closer to solving the why. Anomalies of nature, like diseases, did not respond to inquiries about their motivation. Still, he thought, the how bothered him. He tried to present a brave face to the mirror — he had to stoop uncomfortably, now, to see himself while he shaved — but the fear mounted daily.

The apartment in The Bagdad was a kind of absence, not only narrow but minimally furnished. He had always been a man of few needs and after his wife’s death he needed nothing except what he could not have: her presence in his life. He had discarded possessions, shedding burdens, keeping nothing but what was essential, lightening his load. It did not occur to him that this process of divesting himself of the physical aspects of his past, of letting go, might be related to his condition. Now, as he rose, he began to clutch at scraps of memory, as though their cumulative weight might bring him back down to earth. He remembered himself and Ella with microwaved popcorn in a bowl and a blanket across their laps, watching a movie on TV, an epic in which a Chinese boy-king was raised in the Forbidden City in Beijing believing himself to be God but, after many changes, ended up as a gardener working in the very palace in which he had formerly been a deity. The god/gardener said he was happy with his new life, which may have been true. Maybe, thought Mr. Geronimo, it’s the other way around with me. Maybe I am slowly ascending towards the divine. Or maybe this city, and all cities, will soon be forbidden to me.

When he was a child he often had a flying dream. In the dream he was lying in his own bed in his own bedroom and was able to rise lightly up towards the ceiling, his bedsheet dropping from him as he rose. Then in his pajamas he floated about, carefully avoiding the slowly rotating blades of the ceiling fan. He could even turn the room upside down and sit on the ceiling giggling at the furniture down there on the inverted floor and wondering why it didn’t fall down, that is to say up, towards the ceiling, which was now the floor. As long as he stayed in his room the flying was effortless. But his room had long high windows which stayed open at night to let in the breeze and if he was foolish enough to fly out through them he found that his house was on top of a hill (it wasn’t, in his waking hours) and that he immediately began to lose height — slowly, not frighteningly, but inexorably — and he knew that if he didn’t fly back inside the moment would come when his bedroom would be lost to him and he’d descend slowly to the bottom of the hill, where there were what his mother called “strangers and dangers.” He always managed to make it back through the bedroom windows but sometimes it was a close-run thing. This memory too he turned upside down. Maybe now groundedness depended on him staying in his room, while every foray into the outdoors led to his becoming more detached.

He turned on the television. The magic baby was on the news. He noticed that the magic baby and he both had the same ears. And both of them now lived in the universe of magic, having become detached from the old, familiar, grounded continuum. He took comfort from the magic baby. Its existence meant that he was not alone in departing from what he was beginning to understand was no longer the norm.

The car accident hadn’t been his fault, but driving was awkward and uncomfortable now and his reflexes were not what they should be. He was lucky to have escaped without serious injury. After the accident the other driver, a playboy type called Giacomo Donizetti, had regained consciousness in a kind of delirium and had shouted at him like a man possessed, “What are you doing up there? You think you’re better than the rest of us? Is that why you hold yourself apart? The earth isn’t good enough for you, you have to be higher than everyone else? What are you, some kind of fucking radical? Look what you did to my beautiful car with your pathetic truck. I hate people like you. Fucking elitist.” After delivering these words Signor Donizetti passed out again and the paramedics arrived and took care of him.

Shock made people behave strangely, Mr. Geronimo knew, but he was beginning to be aware of a certain budding hostility in the eyes of at least some people who observed his condition. Perhaps he was more alarming at night. Perhaps he should just bite the bullet and walk around in the daylight hours. But then the objections to his condition would multiply. Yes, the familiar indifference of the citizenry had protected him thus far, but it might not guard him against the accusation of a bizarre type of snobbery, and the further he rose, the greater the antagonism might be. This idea, that he was setting himself apart, that his levitation was a judgment on the earthbound, that in his extraordinary state he was looking down on ordinary people, was beginning to be visible in the eyes of strangers, or he was beginning to think he saw it there. Why do you imagine I consider my condition an improvement? he wanted to cry out. Why, when it has ruined my life and I fear it may bring about my early death?

He longed for a way “down.” Could any branch of science help him? If not quantum theory, maybe something else? He had read about “gravity boots” that allowed their wearers to hang down from the ceiling. Could they be adjusted to allow their wearers to cling to the floor? Could anything be done, or was he beyond the reach of medicine and science? Had real life simply become irrelevant? Had he been captured by the surreal, and would he soon be devoured by it? Was there any way of thinking about his plight that made any ordinary kind of sense? And was he in fact infectious or contagious or capable in some other way of transmitting his condition to others?

How long did he have?

Levitation was not an entirely unknown phenomenon. Small living creatures, frogs for example, had been levitated in laboratory conditions by electromagnets that used superconductors and produced something he did not understand, the diamagnetic repulsion of body water. Human beings were mostly made up of water, so might this be a clue to what was happening to him? But in that case where were the giant electromagnets, the huge superconductors that were creating the effect? Had the earth itself become a gigantic electromagnet/superconductor? And if so why was he the only living creature to be affected? Or was he for some biochemical or supernatural reason preternaturally sensitive to the changes in the planet — in which case, would everyone else soon be in the same boat as he was? Was he the guinea pig for what would eventually be the earth’s rejection of the entire human race?

Look, here on his computer screen was something else he didn’t understand. The levitation of ultrasmall objects had been achieved by manipulating the Casimir Force. As he struggled to explore the subatomic world of this force, he understood that at the deeper levels of the essence of matter the English language disintegrated under the immense pressure of the foundational forces of the universe and was replaced by the language of creation itself, isospin doublet, Noether’s theorem, rotation transformation, up and down quarks, Pauli exclusion principle, topological winding number density, De Rham cohomology, hedgehog space, disjoint union, spectral asymmetry, Cheshire Cat principle, all of which was beyond his comprehension. Maybe Lewis Carroll who created the Cheshire Cat knew that its principle was somewhere near the roots of matter. Maybe something Casimirish was at work in his personal circumstances, and then again maybe not. If he saw himself in the eye of the cosmos then he might well be an ultrasmall object upon whom such a Force could work.

He understood that his mind, like his body, was detaching itself from solid ground. This had to stop. He had to concentrate on simple things. And the simple thing on which he had most particularly to concentrate was that he was hovering several inches above all solid planes: the ground, the floor of his apartment, beds, car seats, toilet seats. Once and once only he attempted a handstand and found that when he tried a trick like that his hands instantly developed the same condition as his feet. He fell heavily, and lay flat on his back, winded, hovering an inch above the rug. The empty space barely cushioned the fall. After the fall he moved more carefully. He was, and had to treat himself as, a seriously sick man. He was feeling his age, and there was something even worse to be faced. His condition was not only affecting his health, weakening his muscles, making him old; it was also erasing his character, replacing it with a new self. He was no longer himself, no longer Raffy-’Ronnimus-the-pastor’s-sonnimus, no longer Uncle Charles’s nephew or Bento Elfenbein’s son-in-law or his beloved Ella’s heartbroken husband. He was no longer Mr. Geronimo of the Mr. Geronimo Gardener landscaping firm, nor even his most recent self, the Lady Philosopher’s lover and her manager Oldcastle’s enemy. History had slipped away from him, and in his own eyes as well as others’ he was becoming, he had become, nothing more or less than the man who was three and a half inches off the ground. Three and a half inches, and rising.

He was paying his rent promptly but he worried that Sister would find a pretext to expel him from the building. Sister C. C. Allbee, the super or — her preferred title—“landlady” of The Bagdad, was, at least in her own opinion, a broad-minded woman, but she did not care for what was happening on the news. Storm Doe, the baby of truth, for example — that little child freaked her out just like all the other horror-movie kids, Carrie White, Damien Thorn, all that demon seed. And what came after Baby Storm was just crazy. A woman pursued by a would-be rapist turned into a bird and made her escape. The video was embedded on the kind of news websites Sister followed and was also up on YouTube. A peeping tom spying on one of the city’s favorite “angels,” the Brazilian lingerie goddess Marpessa Sägebrecht, was turned by magic into an antlered stag and pursued down Avenue A by a pack of ravenous phantom hounds. Then things got even worse right in Times Square, where, for a period of time variously described by different witnesses as “a few seconds” and “several minutes,” the clothes worn by every man in the square disappeared, leaving them shockingly naked, while the contents of their pockets — cellphones, pens, keys, credit cards, currency, condoms, sexual insecurities, inflatable egos, women’s underwear, guns, knives, the phone numbers of unhappily married women, hip flasks, masks, cologne, photographs of angry daughters, photographs of sullen teenage boys, breath-freshening strips, plastic baggies containing white powder, spliffs, lies, harmonicas, spectacles, bullets, and broken, forgotten hopes — tumbled down to the ground. A few seconds (or maybe minutes) later the clothes reappeared but the nakedness of the men’s revealed possessions, weaknesses and indiscretions unleashed a storm of contradictory emotions, including shame, anger and fear. Women ran screaming while the men scrambled for their secrets, which could be put back into their revenant pockets but which, having been revealed, could no longer be concealed.

Sister wasn’t and had never been a nun but folks called her Sister because of her religious temperament and a supposed resemblance to the actress Whoopi Goldberg. Nobody had called her C.C. since her late husband departed this life with a buxom younger person of the Latina persuasion and ended up in hell, or Albuquerque, which were just two names for the same one place, Sister said. Seemed like ever since his New Mexican “demise” the whole world was going to hell in sympathy with that loser. Sister Allbee had had enough of it. She was familiar with a certain type of American crazy. Gun crazy was normal to her, shooting-kids-at-school or putting-on-a-Joker-mask-and-mowing-people-down-in-a-mall or just plain murdering-your-mom-at-breakfast crazy, Second Amendment crazy, that was just the everyday crazy that kept going down and there was nothing you could do about it if you loved freedom; and she understood knife crazy from her younger days in the Bronx, and the knockout-game type of crazy that persuaded young black kids it was cool to punch Jews in the face. She could comprehend drug crazy and politician crazy and Westboro Baptist Church crazy and Trump crazy because those things, they were the American way, but this new crazy was different. It felt 9/11 crazy: foreign, evil. The devil was on the loose, Sister said, loudly and often. The devil was at work. When one of her tenants started floating several inches off the floor at all times of day and night, then it was plain that the devil had come into her own building, and where was Jesus when you needed him. “Jesus,” she said aloud standing right in the little hallway of The Bagdad, “you got to step down to earth one more time, I got God’s work right here for you to do.”

That was where Blue Yasmeen, the artist (performance, installations, graffiti) living on the top floor of The Bagdad, came in. Mr. Geronimo didn’t know her, hadn’t cared to get to know her, but all of a sudden he had an ally, a friend speaking on his behalf who had the Indian sign on Sister, or so it seemed. “Leave him alone,” Blue Yasmeen said, and Sister made a face and did as she was asked. Sister’s fondness for Yasmeen was as surprising as it was deep, it was one of the myriad improbable liaisons of the great city, the loves that caught the lovers by surprise, and maybe it had its roots in talk, Yasmeen being quite the talker and Sister hypnotized by her words. Baghdad, Iraq, that’s a tragedy, Blue Yasmeen liked to say, but Bagdad-with-no-h, that’s a magic location, that’s the Aladdin-city of stories that winds around actual cities like a creeper, in and out of actual city streets, whispering in our ears, and in that parasite-city stories are the fruit hanging from every tree, tall tales and short ones, thin tales and fat, and nobody who hungers for an anecdote goes unsatisfied. That rich fruit falls from branches to lie bruised in the street and anyone can pick it up. I build that flying-carpet city wherever I can, she said, I grow it in the paved backyards of downtown condominiums and the stairwell graffiti of the projects. That Bagdad is my city and I am both its monarch and its citizen, its shopper and its storekeeper, its drinker and its wine. And you, she told Sister Allbee, you are its caretaker. The landlady of The Bagdad: superintendent of storyland. Here you stand at its very heart. That kind of talk melted Sister’s heart. Mr. Geronimo is turning out to be one hell of a story, Blue Yasmeen told her. Let him be so we can see how he comes out.

Blue Yasmeen’s hair wasn’t blue, it was orange, and her name wasn’t Yasmeen. Never mind. If she said blue was orange that was her right, and Yasmeen was her nom de guerre and yeah, she lived in the city as if it were a war zone because even though she had been born on 116th Street to a Columbia literature professor and his wife she wanted to recognize that originally, before that, which was to say before fucking birth, she came from Beirut. She had shaved off her eyebrows and tattooed new ones in their place, in jagged lightning-bolt shapes. Her body too was a tat zone. All the tattoos except the eyebrows were words, the usual ones, Love Imagine Yeezy Occupy, and she said of herself, unintentionally proving that there was more in her of Riverside Drive than Hamra Street, that she was intratextual as well as intrasexual, she lived between the words as well as the sexes. Blue Yasmeen had made a splash in the art world with her Guantánamo Bay installation, which was impressive if only for the powers of persuasion required to make it happen at all: she somehow got that impenetrable facility to allow her to set a chair in a room with a video camera facing it, and linked that to a dummy sitting in a Chelsea art gallery, so that when inmates sat in the Guantánamo chair room and told their stories their faces were projected onto the head of the Chelsea dummy and it was if she had freed them and given them their voices, and yeah, the issue was freedom, motherfuckers, freedom, she hated terrorism as much as anyone, but she hated miscarriages of justice too, and, FYI, just in case you were wondering, just in case you had her down as a religious-fanatic terrorist in waiting, she had no time for God, plus she was a pacifist and a vegan, so fuck you.

She was something of a downtown celebrity, world famous on twenty blocks, she said, at the story-slam sessions run by the “Day of the Locusts” people, who took their name not from Nathanael West’s novel (which was locust singular) but from the Dylan song (locusts plural): the locusts sang, and they were singing for me. The Locusts story events were movable feasts, switching locations around the city, and though they were called Days the events took place, obviously, at night, and Blue Yasmeen was a star at the mic, telling her tales of Bagdad-with-no-h.

Once in old Bagdad, Blue Yasmeen said, a merchant was owed money by a local nobleman, really quite a lot of money, and then unexpectedly the nobleman died and the merchant thought, This is bad, I’m not going to get paid. But a god had given him the gift of transmigration, this was in a part of the world in which there were many gods, not just one, so the merchant had the idea of migrating his spirit into the dead lord’s body so that the dead man could get up from his deathbed and pay him what he owed. The merchant left his body in a safe place, or so he thought, and his spirit jumped into the dead man’s skin, but when he was walking the dead man’s body to the bank he had to pass through the fish market and a large dead codfish lying on a slab saw him go past and started to laugh. When people heard the dead fish laughing they knew there was something fishy about the walking dead man and attacked him for being possessed by a demon. The dead nobleman’s body quickly became uninhabitable and the merchant’s spirit had to abandon it and make its way back to its own abandoned shell. But some other people had found the merchant’s abandoned body and, thinking it the body of a dead man, had set it on fire according to the customs of that part of the world. So the merchant had no body and had not been paid what he owed and his spirit is probably still wandering somewhere in the market. Or maybe he ended up migrating into a dead fish and swam away into the ocean of the streams of story. And the moral of the story is, don’t push your fucking luck.

And also:

There was once, in Old Bagdad, a very, very tall house, a house like a vertical boulevard leading upwards to the glass observatory from which its owner, a very, very rich man, looked down upon the tiny swarming human anthills of the low sprawling city far below. It was the tallest house in the city, set upon the highest hill, and it was not made of brick, steel or stone but, rather, of the purest pride. The floors were tiles of highly polished pride that never lost its sheen, the walls were of the noblest hauteur, and the chandeliers dripped with crystal arrogance. Grand gilded mirrors stood everywhere, reflecting the owner not in silver or mercury but in the most flattering of reflective materials, which is amour propre. So great was its owner’s pride in his new home that it mysteriously infected all those who were privileged to visit him there, so that nobody ever said a word against the idea of building such a tall house in such a short city.

But after the rich man and his family moved in they were plagued by bad luck. Feet were accidentally broken, precious vases dropped, and somebody was always sick. Nobody slept well. The rich man’s business was unaffected, because he never conducted it at home, but the jinx on the house’s occupants led the rich man’s wife to call in an expert on the spiritual aspects of homes, and when she heard that the house had been permanently cursed with ill fortune, probably by a jinni friendly to the ant people, she made the rich man and their family and their one thousand and one minions and their one hundred and sixty motor cars leave the tall house and move into one of their many shorter residences, houses built of the ordinary sort of materials, and they lived happily thereafter, even the rich man, although injured pride is the hardest of all injuries to recover from, a fracture to a man’s dignity and self-regard is much worse than a broken foot, and takes much longer to heal.

After the rich family moved out of the tall house the ants of the city began to swarm up its walls, the ants and the lizards and the snakes, and the wilderness of the city invaded the living spaces, creepers twined around the four-poster beds, and spiky grass grew up through the priceless silk Bukhari rugs. Ants everywhere, making the place their own, and gradually the fabric of the place was worn down by the marching the grasping the sheer presence of the ants, a billion ants, more than a billion, the arrogance of the chandeliers splintered and broke under their collective weight, shattered shards of arrogance plummeted to the floors whose pride had grown dim and dirty, the fabric of pride of which the carpets and tapestries were made had been eroded by those billion tiny feet, marching, marching, grasping, grasping, and simply being present, existing, ruining the whole point of the pride of the tall building, which could no longer deny their existence, which crumbled under the fact of their being, of their billion tiny feet, of their ant-ness. The hauteur of the walls gave way, fell away like cheap plaster, and revealed the flimsiness of the building’s frame; and the mirrors of amour propre cracked from side to side, and all was ruin, that glorious edifice had become a wormhole, an insectarium, an anthillia. And of course in the end it fell, it crumbled like dust and was blown away by the end, but the ants lived, and the lizards and mosquitoes and snakes, and the rich family lived too, everybody lived, everyone remained the same, and soon enough everyone forgot the house, even the man who built it, and it was as if it had never been, and nothing changed, nothing had changed, nothing could change, nothing would ever change.

Her father the professor, so handsome, so smart, a little vain, was dead but she tried every day to bring his ideas to life. We were all trapped in stories, she said, just as he had, his wavy hair, his naughty smile, his beautiful mind, each of us the prisoner of our own solipsistic narrative, each family the captive of the family story, each community locked within its own tale of itself, each people the victims of their own versions of history, and there were parts of the world where the narratives collided and went to war, where there were two or more incompatible stories fighting for space on, to speak, the same page. She came from one such place, his place, from which he had been forever displaced, they exiled his body, but his spirit, never. And maybe now every place was becoming that place, maybe Lebanon was everywhere and nowhere, so that we were all exiles, even if our hair wasn’t so wavy, our smiles not so naughty, our minds less beautiful, even the name Lebanon wasn’t necessary, the name of every place or any place would do just as well, maybe that’s why she felt nameless, unnamed, unnameable, Lebanonymous. That was the nameless name of the one-woman show she was developing, which might (she hoped) also become a book, and (she really hoped) a movie and (if everything went really, really well) a musical (though in that case she would probably have to write parts for a few other people). The thing I’m thinking is that all these stories are fictions, she said, even the ones that insist on being facts, like who was where first and whose God had precedence over whose, they’re all make-believe, fantasies, the realist fantasies and the fantastic fantasies are both made up, and the first thing to know about made-up stories is that they are all untrue in the same way, Madame Bovary and the quarreling Lebanonymous histories are fictional in the same way as flying carpets and genies are, she was quoting him there, nobody ever said things better than he could, and she was his daughter, so his words belonged to her now, this is our tragedy, she said in his words, our fictions are killing us, but if we didn’t have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.

According to the Unyaza people of the Lâm mountain range which almost encircles Old Bagdad, Blue Yasmeen said at The Locusts, the story parasite entered human babies through the ear within hours of their birth, and caused the growing children to demand much that was harmful to them: fairy tales, pipe dreams, chimeras, delusions, lies. The need for the presentation of things that were not, as if they were things that were, was dangerous to a people for whom survival was a constant battle, requiring the maintenance of an undimmed focus on the actual. Yet the story parasite proved hard to eradicate. It adapted itself perfectly to its host, to the contours of human biology and the human genetic code, becoming a second skin upon human skin, a second nature to human nature. It seemed impossible to destroy it without also destroying the host. Those who suffered excessively from its effects, becoming obsessed with the manufacture and dissemination of the things that were not, were sometimes executed, and that was a wise precaution, but the story parasite continued to plague the tribe.

The Unyaza were a small, dwindling mountain people. Their environment was harsh, their mountainous terrain rocky and infertile, their enemies brutal and plentiful, and they were prone to wasting sicknesses that made their bones disintegrate into powder, and to fevers that rotted the brain. They worshipped no gods, even though the story parasite infected them with dreams of rain-deities who brought them water, meat-deities who gave them cows, and war-deities who struck their foes down with diarrhea and made them easier to kill. This delusion — that their triumphs, such as the finding of water, the rearing of livestock and the poisoning of their enemies’ food, were not their own doing, but gifts from invisible supernatural entities — was the last straw. The headman of the Unyaza ordered that the ears of babies be stopped with mud to prevent the story parasite from entering.

After that the story disease began to die out and the young Unyaza learned sadly as they grew older that the world was all too real. A spirit of deep pessimism began to spread, as the new generation understood that comfort, ease, gentleness and happiness were words that had no meaning in the world as it was. Having considered the profound dreadfulness of reality, they concluded that there was, additionally, no place in their lives for such debilitating weaknesses as emotion, love, friendship, loyalty, fellowship or trust. After that the last insanity of the tribe began. It is believed that after a period of bitter quarrels and violent dissension, the Unyaza youths, in the grip of the mutinous pessimism which had replaced the story infection, murdered their elders and then fell upon one another until the tribe was lost to Man.

In the absence of sufficient field data it is not possible to say for certain whether or not the story parasite ever truly existed, or if it was itself a story, a parasitical invention that attached itself to the consciousness of the Unyaza: a thing that was not, which, on account of its insidious persuasiveness, created the consequences that such a fictional parasite might have created had it been a thing that was; in which case the Unyaza, who loathed paradoxes almost as much as fictions, may, paradoxically, have been exterminated by their certainty that an illusion which they had collectively created was the truth.

And why did she care about mysterious Mr. Geronimo, Yasmeen asked her mirror at night, that silent old man who made no attempt to be cordial, was it because he was tall and handsome and stood up straight the way her father used to and was the age her father would have been if he had lived? Yes, probably, she conceded, her daddy issues were at work again, and maybe she would have been annoyed with herself for indulging in a form of transferred nostalgia if she had not been severely distracted at that moment by the appearance behind her, clearly reflected in her bedroom mirror, of a beautiful, skinny young-looking woman dressed all in black and seated cross-legged upon a flying carpet, which was hovering, like the gardener downstairs, approximately four inches above the floor.

Even though the normality of the city had been disrupted, most people hadn’t been able to get their heads around it, and were still dumbfounded by the irruption of the fantastic into the quotidian, even people like Blue Yasmeen, who had, after all, just encouraged Sister Allbee to be tolerant of the levitation going on month after month in the basement. Yasmeen unleashed an almost canine yelp and turned to face Dunia, who, it must be said, looked as startled as the orange-haired human female before her.

“In the first place,” Dunia said, tetchily, “you ought to be a person with whom I have important business, Mr. Raphael Manezes known as Geronimo, and you plainly are not. And in the second place, you have perfectly ordinary ears.”

Blue Yasmeen opened her mouth but was unable to produce a sound from it. “Geronimo Manezes?” the woman on the flying carpet repeated, still sounding irritable. It had been a long day. “Which is his apartment?” Yasmeen jabbed a finger at the floor. “One,” she managed to say. The woman on the flying carpet looked disgusted.

“This is why I prefer not to use carpets,” she said. “Their blasted positioning system is always going wrong.”

Ma, we have to move, we have to leave this house immediately, tonight if possible.

Why, my son, because a monster is in your bedroom? Normal, tell him to be normal.

What, even you are calling him Normal now?

Why not, Jinendra, this is America, everyone’s name gets shifted. You also are Jimmy now so get off your high horse.

Okay, never mind. Nirmal, tell Ma we have to leave here, it isn’t safe to stay.

Call me Normal. I’m serious.

Then I’ll call you Serious.

Jinendra, stop upsetting your cousin who gives you good job, good money. Why you don’t give him respect?

Ma. We have to get out of here before it’s too late.

And I should just leave my birds? What about the birds?

Forget the birds, Ma. He will return in full force and if we are here it will be a bad business.

I checked your bedroom. Your ma asked me to check so I checked. Nothing is out of ordinary. All is normal. No hole in the wall, no bhoot, everything A-1 tip-top.

Ma. Please.

My boy. Where to go? There is nowhere to go. Your mother is sick. Gallivanting god-knows-where is out of the question.

There’s Nirmal’s place.

What, you want to move in with me now? For how long? One night? Ten years? And what about this house?

This house is a danger zone.

Enough. Too much bakvaas. We will stay here only. Subject is closed.

And so on for many months, until he began to believe his mother was right, what he feared would never happen, the wormhole and Dunia and Natraj Hero had been hallucinations of the sort that, in ancient times, were caused by psychotropic wine, or mushrooms, or moldy bread, and he needed psychiatric help, maybe, medication, maybe, he was crazy. Until finally the night arrived, in the winter, in the snow, the deep unnatural snow, more snow than had fallen in living memory, the snow which people had started treating as a judgment or a curse, because lately everyone was treating all the weather that way, when it rained in California everyone started building arks, when an ice storm hit Georgia people abandoned their cars on the interstate and fled as if pursued by a gigantic ice-monster, and in Queens where people whose origins and dreams were all located in hot countries, people to whom snow still felt like a fantasy, no matter how many years they had lived here, no matter how often and how hard it fell, snow was surrealist, it was like black magic disguised as white, and so, yeah, on the night the black magic became real, the night when the monster actually showed up, it had snowed pretty hard, and that made it harder to run.

That was the night he had to run, he ran home from Normal’s office as fast — slipping, falling, rising again to run — as he could, with Normal puffing, wheezing, holding his ribs some distance behind, because of the fire, there it was, the fire instead of the house, the flames where the house used to be, the birds roasted or flown, and on a hard chair on the opposite sidewalk, with the feathers of her incinerated birds floating in the air above her head, facing the flames that were consuming her old life, the flames melting the snow so that her chair stood in a small pool of water, there was his mother, charred and soot-stained but alive, surrounded by a few of her possessions, a floor lamp standing by the chair, a peacock-feather fan, three framed photographs lapped by the melting slush, his mother immobile and wordless, red flames behind her, red flames that were somehow smokeless, why isn’t there any smoke, he asked himself, and as he raced up to her there were firemen saying, Poor lady, turn the chair around so she doesn’t have to watch, poor madam, she looks so cold, move her closer to the fire.

And no argument now about the cause, everybody saw the giant jinni who emerged from the fireball, born like all male jinn from smokeless fire, toothy, pockmarked, wearing his long flame-red battle shirt decorated with its ornate golden motifs, with his great black beard tied around his waist like a belt, his sword in its green and gold scabbard tucked into that hairy waistband on the left side, Zumurrud Shah no longer bothering to take the shape of Natraj Hero just to mess with little Jimmy’s head, but appearing in his full terrible glory: Zumurrud the Great, grandest of the Grand Ifrits astride his flying urn, whose explosion into the world, followed by three of his closest cohorts, signaled the end of the time of random strangenesses. This was the beginning of the so-called War.