The Satanic Verses

stare at the equally extraordinary sight sitting next to him, an improbable American in baseball cap, metal-rim spectacles and a neon-green bush-shirt across which there writhed the intertwined and luminous golden forms of a pair of Chinese dragons. Chamcha had edited this entity out of his field of vision in an attempt to wrap himself in a cocoon of privacy, but privacy was no longer possible.
    ‘Eugene Dumsday at your service,’ the dragon man stuck out a huge red hand. ‘At yours, and at that of the Christian guard.’
    Sleep-fuddled Chamcha shook his head. ‘You are a military man?’
    ‘Ha! Ha! Yes, sir, you could say. A humble foot soldier, sir, in the army of Guard Almighty.’ Oh,
almighty
guard, why didn’t you say. ‘I am a man of science, sir, and it has been my mission, my mission and let me add my privilege, to visit your great nation to do battle with the most pernicious devilment ever got folks’ brains by the balls.’
    ‘I don’t follow.’
    Dumsday lowered his voice. ‘I’m talking monkey-crap here, sir. Darwinism. The evolutionary heresy of Mr Charles Darwin.’ His tones made it plain that the name of anguished, God-ridden Darwin was as distasteful as that of any other forktail fiend, Beelzebub, Asmodeus or Lucifer himself. ‘I have been warning your fellow-men,’ Dumsday confided, ‘against Mr Darwin and his works. With the assistance of my personal fifty-seven-slide presentation. I spoke most recently, sir, at the World Understanding Day banquet of the Rotary Club, Cochin, Kerala. I spoke of my own country, of its young people. I see them lost, sir. The young people of America: I see them in their despair, turning to narcotics, even, for I’m a plain-speaking man, to pre-marital sexual relations. And I said this then and I say it now to you. If I believed my great-granddaddy was a chimpanzee, why, I’d be pretty depressed myself.’
    Gibreel Farishta was seated across the way, staring out of the window. The inflight movie was starting up, and the aircraft lights were being dimmed. The woman with the baby was still on her feet, walking up and down, perhaps to keep the baby quiet. ‘How did it go down?’ Chamcha asked, sensing that some contribution from him was being required.
    A hesitancy came over his neighbour. ‘I believe there was a glitch in the sound system,’ he said finally. ‘That would be my best guess. I can’t see how those good people would’ve set to talking amongst themselves if they hadn’t’ve thought I was through.’
    Chamcha felt a little abashed. He had been thinking that in acountry of fervent believers the notion that science was the enemy of God would have an easy appeal; but the boredom of the Rotarians of Cochin had shown him up. In the flickering light of the inflight movie, Dumsday continued, in his voice of an innocent ox, to tell stories against himself without the faintest indication of knowing what he was doing. He had been accosted, at the end of a cruise around the magnificent natural harbour of Cochin, to which Vasco da Gama had come in search of spices and so set in motion the whole ambiguous history of east-and-west, by an urchin full of pssts and hey-mister-okays. ‘Hi there, yes! You want hashish, sahib? Hey, misteramerica. Yes, unclesam, you want opium, best quality, top price? Okay, you want
cocaine
?’
    Saladin began, helplessly, to giggle. The incident struck him as Darwin’s revenge: if Dumsday held poor, Victorian, starchy Charles responsible for American drug culture, how delicious that he should himself be seen, across the globe, as representing the very ethic he battled so fervently against. Dumsday fixed him with a look of pained reproof. It was a hard fate to be an American abroad, and not to suspect why you were so disliked.
    After the involuntary giggle had escaped Saladin’s lips, Dumsday sank into a sullen, injured drowse, leaving Chamcha to his own thoughts. Should the inflight movie be thought of as a particularly vile, random mutation of the form, one that would eventually be extinguished by natural selection, or were they the future of the cinema? A future of screwball caper movies eternally starring Shelley Long and Chevy Chase was too hideous to contemplate; it was a vision of Hell … Chamcha was drifting back into sleep when the cabin lights came on; the movie stopped; and the illusion of the cinema was replaced by one of watching the television news, as four armed, shouting figures came running down the