The Satanic Verses

between his hands. ‘We can’t sort this out for you, nephew,’ he says. ‘Climb the mountain. Go ask Gibreel.’

    Gibreel: the dreamer, whose point of view is sometimes that of the camera and at other moments, spectator. When he’s a camera the pee oh vee is always on the move, he hates static shots, so he’s floating up on a high crane looking down at the foreshortened figures of the actors, or he’s swooping down to stand invisibly between them, turning slowly on his heel to achieve a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree pan, or maybe he’ll try a dolly shot, tracking along beside Baal and Abu Simbel as they walk, or handheld with the help of a steadicam he’ll probe the secrets of the Grandee’s bedchamber. But mostly he sits up on Mount Cone like a paying customer in the dress circle, and Jahilia is his silver screen. He watches and weighs up the action like any movie fan, enjoys the fights infidelities moral crises, but there aren’t enough girls for a real hit, man, and where are the goddamn songs? They should have built up that fairground scene, maybe a cameo role for Pimple Billimoria in a show-tent, wiggling her famous bazooms.
    And then, without warning, Hamza says to Mahound: ‘Go ask Gibreel,’ and he, the dreamer, feels his heart leaping in alarm, who, me?
I
’
m
supposed to know the answers here? I’m sitting here watching this picture and now this actor points his finger out at me, who ever heard the like, who asks the bloody audience of a ‘theological’ to solve the bloody plot? – But as the dream shifts, it’s always changing form, he, Gibreel, is no longer a mere spectator but the central player, the star. With his old weakness fortaking too many roles: yes, yes, he’s not just playing the archangel but also him, the businessman, the Messenger, Mahound, coming up the mountain when he comes. Nifty cutting is required to pull off this double role, the two of them can never be seen in the same shot, each must speak to empty air, to the imagined incarnation of the other, and trust to technology to create the missing vision, with scissors and Scotch tape or, more exotically, with the help of a travelling mat. Not to be confused ha ha with any magic carpet.
    He has understood: that he is afraid of the other, the businessman, isn’t it crazy? The archangel quaking before the mortal man. It’s true, but: the kind of fear you feel when you’re on a film set for the very first time and there, about to make his entrance, is one of the living legends of the cinema; you think, I’ll disgrace myself, I’ll dry, I’ll corpse, you want like mad to be
worthy
. You will be sucked along in the slipstream of his genius, he can make you look good, like a high flier, but you will know if you aren’t pulling your weight and even worse so will he … Gibreel’s fear, the fear of the self his dream creates, makes him struggle against Mahound’s arrival, to try and put it off, but he’s coming now, no quesch, and the archangel holds his breath.
    Those dreams of being pushed out on stage when you’ve no business being there, you don’t know the story haven’t learned any lines, but there’s a full house watching, watching: feels like that. Or the true story of the white actress playing a black woman in Shakespeare. She went on stage and then realized she still had her glasses on, eek, but she had forgotten to blacken her hands so she couldn’t reach up to take the specs off, double eek: like that also.
Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose between monotheist and henotheist alternatives, and I’m just some idiot actor having a bhaenchud nightmare, what the fuck do I know, yaar, what to tell you, help. Help
.

    To reach Mount Cone from Jahilia one must walk into dark ravines where the sand is not white, not the pure sand filteredlong ago through the bodies of sea-cucumbers, but black and dour, sucking light from the sun. Coney crouches over you like an imaginary beast. You ascend along its spine. Leaving behind the last trees, white-flowered with thick, milky leaves, you climb among the boulders, which get larger as you get higher, until they resemble huge walls and start blotting out the sun. The lizards are blue as shadows. Then you are on the peak, Jahilia behind you, the featureless desert ahead. You descend on the desert side, and about five hundred feet down you reach the cave, which is high enough to stand upright in, and whose floor is covered in miraculous albino