The Satanic Verses

the German star Klaus Maria Brandauer – was dressed up as Mephistophilis, face white, body cloaked in black, arms upraised. Lines from
Faust
stood above his head:
    – Who art thou, then
?
    – Part of that Power, not understood
,
    Which always wills the Bad, and always works the Good
.

    At the sports centre: he could scarcely bring himself to glance in Mishal’s direction. (She too had left the Simba meeting in time to make the class.) – Although she was all over him,
you came back, I bet it was to see me, isn’t that nice
, he could hardly speak a civil word, much less ask
were you wearing a luminous something in the middle of your
, because she wasn’t how, kicking her legs and flexing her long body, resplendent in its black leotard. – Until, sensing the coldness in him, she backed off, all confusion and injured pride.
    ‘Our other star hasn’t turned up today,’ Jumpy mentioned to Saladin during a break in the exercises. ‘Miss Alleluia Cone, the one who climbed Everest. I was meaning to introduce you two. She knows, I mean, she’s apparently with, Gibreel. Gibreel Farishta, the actor, your fellow-survivor of the crash.’
    Things are closing in on me
. Gibreel was drifting towards him, like India when, having come unstuck from the Gondwanaland protocontinent, it floated towards Laurasia. (His processes of mind, he recognized absently, were coming up with some pretty strange associations.) When they collided, the force would hurl up Himalayas. – What is a mountain? An obstacle; a transcendence; above all, an
effect
.
    ‘Where are you going?’ Jumpy was calling. ‘I thought I was giving you a lift. Are you okay?’
    I’m fine. I need to walk, that’s all
.
    ‘Okay, but only if you’re sure.’
    Sure
. Walk away fast, without catching Mishal’s aggrieved eye.… In the street. Walk quickly, out of this wrong place, this underworld. – God: no escape. Here’s a shop-front, a store selling musical instruments, trumpets saxophones oboes, what’s the name? –
Fair Winds
, and here in the window is a cheaply printed handbill. Announcing the imminent return of, that’s right, the Archangel Gibreel. His return and the salvation of the earth.
Walk. Walk away fast
.
    … Hail this taxi. (His clothes inspire deference in the driver.) Climb in squire do you mind the radio. Some scientist who got caught in that hijacking and lost the half of his tongue. American. They rebuilt it, he says, with flesh taken from his posterior, excuse my French. Wouldn’t fancy a mouthful of my own buttock meat myself but the poor bugger had no option did he. Funny bastard. Got some funny ideas.
    Eugene Dumsday on the radio discussed the gaps in the fossil record with his new, buttocky tongue.
The Devil tried to silence me but the good Lord and American surgical techniques knew better
. These gaps were the creationist’s main selling-point: if natural selection was the truth, where were all the random mutations that got deselected? Where were the monster-children, the deformed babies of evolution? The fossils were silent. No three-legged horses there.
No point arguing with these geezers
, the cabbie said.
I don’t hold with God myself
. No point, one small part of Chamcha’s consciousness agreed. No point suggesting that ‘the fossil record’ wasn’t some sort of perfect filing cabinet. And evolution theory had come a long way since Darwin. It was now being argued that major changes in species happened not in the stumbling, hit-and-miss manner first envisaged, but in great, radical leaps. The history of life was not the bumbling progress – the very English, middle-class progress – Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation,more revolution than evolution. – I’ve heard enough, the cabbie said. Eugene Dumsday vanished from the ether, to be replaced by disco music.
Ave atque vale
.
    What Saladin Chamcha understood that day was that he had been living in a state of phoney peace, that the change in him was irreversible. A new, dark world had opened up for him (or: within him) when he fell from the sky; no matter how assiduously he attempted to re-create his old existence, this was, he now saw, a fact that could not be unmade. He seemed to see a road before him, forking to left and right. Closing his eyes, settling back against taxicab upholstery, he chose the left-hand path.

2

    T he temperature continued to rise; and when the