Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (3 page)

One day, she murmured to the absent philosopher, one day long after you are dead you will reach the moment at which you want to claim your family, and at that moment, I, your spirit wife, will grant your wish, even though you have broken my heart.

It is believed that she remained among human beings for a time, perhaps hoping against hope for his return, and that he continued to send her money, that maybe he visited her from time to time, and that she gave up on the horse business but went on with the
tinajas,
but now that the sun and moon of history had set forever on her house, her story became a thing of shadows and mysteries, so maybe it’s true, as people said, that after Ibn Rushd died his spirit returned to her and fathered even more children. People also said that Ibn Rushd brought her a lamp with a jinni in it and the jinni was the father of the children born after he left her—so we see how easily rumor gets things upside down! And they also said, less kindly, that the abandoned woman took in any man who would pay her rent, and every man she took in left her with another brood, so that the Duniazát, the brood of Dunia, were no longer bastard Rushdis, or some of them were not, or many of them were not, or most; for in most people’s eyes the story of her life had become a stuttering line, its letters dissolving into meaningless forms, incapable of revealing how long she lived, or how, or where, or with whom, or when and how—or if—she died.

Nobody noticed or cared that one day she turned sideways and slipped through a slit in the world and returned to Peristan, the other reality, the world of dreams whence the jinn periodically emerge to trouble and bless mankind. To the villagers of Lucena she seemed to have dissolved, perhaps into fireless smoke. After Dunia left our world the voyagers from the world of the jinn to ours became fewer in number, and then for a long time they stopped coming completely, and the slits in the world became overgrown by the unimaginative weeds of convention and the thornbushes of the dully material, until they finally closed up completely and our ancestors were left to do the best they could without the benefits or curses of magic.

But Dunia’s children thrived. That much can be said. And almost three hundred years later, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, even the Jews who could not say they were Jews, the children of Dunia’s children climbed into ships in Cádiz and Palos de Moguer, or walked across the Pyrenees, or flew on magic carpets or in giant urns like the jinni kin they were, they traversed continents and sailed the seven seas and climbed high mountains and swam mighty rivers and slid into deep valleys and found shelter and safety wherever they could, and they forgot one another quickly, or remembered as long as they could and then forgot, or never forgot, becoming a family that was no longer exactly a family, a tribe that was no longer exactly a tribe; adopting every religion and no religion, many of them, after the centuries of conversion, ignorant of their supernatural origins, forgetting the story of the forcible conversion of the Jews, some of them becoming manically devout while others were contemptuously disbelieving; a family without a place but with family in every place, a village without a location, but winding in and out of every location on the globe, like rootless plants, mosses or lichens or creeping orchids, who must lean upon others, being unable to stand alone.

History is unkind to those it abandons, and can be equally unkind to those who make it. Ibn Rushd died (conventionally, of old age, or so we believe) while traveling in Marrakesh barely a year after his rehabilitation, and never saw his fame grow, never saw it spread beyond the borders of his own world into the infidel world beyond, where his commentaries on Aristotle became the foundations of his mighty forebear’s popularity, the cornerstones of the infidels’ godless philosophy, called
saecularis,
meaning the kind of idea that only came once in a
saeculum,
an age of the world, or maybe an idea for the ages, and which was the very image and echo of the ideas he had only spoken in dreams. Perhaps, as a godly man, he would not have been delighted by the place history gave him, for it is a strange fate for a believer to become the inspiration of ideas that have no need for belief, and a stranger fate still for a man’s philosophy to be victorious beyond the frontiers of his own world but vanquished within those borders, because in the world he knew it was the children of his dead adversary Ghazali who multiplied and inherited the kingdom, while his own bastard brood spread out, leaving his forbidden name behind them, to populate the earth. A high proportion of the survivors ended up in the great North American continent, and many others in the great South Asian subcontinent, thanks to the phenomenon of “clumping” that is a part of the mysterious illogic of random distribution; and many of those afterwards spread out west and south across the Americas, and north and west from that great diamond at the foot of Asia, into all the countries of the world, for of the Duniazát it can fairly be said that, as well as peculiar ears, they all have itchy feet. And Ibn Rushd was dead, but, as will be seen, he and his adversary continued their dispute beyond the grave, for to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, the idea of argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, philosophy.

E
ight hundred and more years later, more than three and a half thousand miles away, and now more than one thousand years ago, a storm fell upon our ancestors’ city like a bomb. Their childhoods slipped into the water and were lost, the piers built of memories on which they once ate candy and pizza, the boardwalks of desire under which they hid from the summer sun and kissed their first lips. The roofs of houses flew through the night sky like disoriented bats, and the attics where they stored their past stood exposed to the elements until it seemed that everything they once were had been devoured by the predatory sky. Their secrets drowned in flooded basements and they could no longer remember them. Their power failed them. Darkness fell.

Before the power died the TV showed images taken from the sky of an immense white spiral wheeling overhead like an invading alien spaceship. Then the river poured into the power stations and trees fell on the power cables and crushed the sheds where the emergency generators were housed and the apocalypse began. Some rope that moored our ancestors to reality snapped, and as the elements screamed in their ears it was easy for them to believe that the slits in the world had reopened, the seals had been broken and there were laughing sorcerers in the sky, satanic horsemen riding the galloping clouds.

For three days and nights nobody spoke because only the language of the storm existed and our ancestors did not know how to speak that awful tongue. Then at last it passed, and like children refusing to believe in childhood’s end they wanted everything to be as it was. But when the light returned it felt different. This was a white light they had not seen before, harsh as an interrogator’s lamp, casting no shadows, merciless, leaving no place to hide. Beware, the light seemed to say, for I come to burn and judge.

Then the strangenesses began. They would continue for two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights.

This is how it has come down to us, a millennium later, as history infused with and perhaps overwhelmed by legend. This is how we think of it now, as if it were a fallible memory, or a dream of the remote past. If it’s untrue, or partly untrue, if made-up stories have been introduced into the record, it’s too late to do anything about it. This is the story of our ancestors as we choose to tell it, and so, of course, it’s our story too.

It was on the Wednesday after the great storm that Mr. Geronimo first noticed that his feet no longer touched the ground. He had awoken an hour before dawn as usual, half-remembering a strange dream in which a woman’s lips were pressed against his chest, murmuring inaudibly. His nose was blocked, his mouth dry because he’d been breathing through it in his sleep, his neck stiff thanks to his habit of putting too many pillows beneath it; the eczema on his left ankle needed to be scratched. The body in general was giving him the familiar amount of morning grief: nothing to moan about, in other words. The feet, in fact, felt fine. Mr. Geronimo had had trouble with his feet for much of his life, but they were being kind today. From time to time he suffered the pain of his fallen arches, even though he meticulously did his toe-clenching exercises last thing at night before going to sleep and first thing after waking up, and he wore insoles, and went up and down stairs on his toes. Then there was the battle with gout, and the medication that brought on diarrhea. The pain came periodically and he accepted it, consoling himself with what he had learned as a young man: that flat feet allowed you to dodge the military draft. Mr. Geronimo was long past the soldiering age but this scrap of information still comforted him. And gout after all was the disease of kings.

Lately his heels had been forming thick, cracked calluses that needed attention, but he had been too busy to visit a podiatrist. He needed his feet, was on them all day. Also, they had had a couple of days of rest, no gardening to be done during a storm like this one, so perhaps they were rewarding him, this morning, by choosing not to make a fuss. He swung his legs out of bed and stood up. Something did feel different then. He was familiar with the texture of the polished wooden floorboards in his bedroom but for some reason he didn’t feel them that Wednesday morning. There was a new softness underfoot, a kind of soothing nothingness. Maybe his feet had become numb, deadened by the thickening calluses. A man of his type, an older man with a day of hard physical work ahead of him, did not bother with such trifles. A man of his type, big, fit, strong, shrugged off niggles and got on with his day.

There was still no power and very little water, though the return of both was promised for the next day. Mr. Geronimo was a fastidious person and it pained him not to clean his teeth thoroughly, not to shower. He used some of the water that remained in his bathtub to flush the toilet. (He had filled it as a precaution before the storm began.) He climbed into his work overalls and boots and, ignoring the stalled elevator, ventured down into the ruined streets. At sixty-plus, he told himself, having reached an age at which most men would be putting their feet up, he was as fit and active as he’d ever been. The life he chose long ago had seen to that. It had taken him away from his father’s church of miracle cures, of screaming women rising from wheelchairs because possessed by the power of Christ, and away too from his uncle’s architectural practice where he might have spent long invisible sedentary years drafting that kindly gentleman’s unrecognized visions, his floor plans of disappointments and frustrations and things that might have been. Mr. Geronimo had left Jesus and drafting tables behind and moved into the open air.

In the green pickup truck, on whose sides the words
Mr. Geronimo Gardener
and a phone number and website URL were blocked out in yellow and drop-shadowed in scarlet, he couldn’t feel the seat under him; the cracked green leather that usually poked comfortingly into the right cheek of his behind wasn’t doing its thing today. He was definitely not himself. There was a general lessening of sensation. This was a worry. At his age, and given his chosen field of work, he had to be concerned about the small betrayals of the body, had to deal with them, to stave off the larger betrayals that awaited. He would have to get himself checked out, but not now; right now, in the aftermath of the storm, the doctors and hospitals had bigger problems to worry about. The accelerator and brake felt oddly cushioned beneath his booted feet, as if they needed a little extra pressure from him this morning. The storm had evidently messed with the psyches of motor vehicles as well as human beings. Cars lay abandoned, despondent, at odd angles beneath broken windows, and there was a melancholy yellow bus on its side. The main roads had been cleared, however, and the George Washington Bridge had reopened for traffic. There was a gas shortage but he had hoarded his own supply and reckoned he would be able to cope. Mr. Geronimo was a hoarder of fuel, gas masks, flashlights, blankets, medical supplies, canned food, water in lightweight packets; a man who expected emergencies, who counted on the fabric of society to tear and disintegrate, who knew that superglue could be used to hold cuts together, who did not trust human nature to build solidly or well. A man who expected the worst. Also a superstitious man, a crosser of fingers, who knew, for example, that in America wicked spirits lived in trees so it was necessary to knock on wood to drive them out, whereas British tree-spirits (he was an admirer of the British countryside) were friendly creatures so one touched wood to get the benefit of their benevolence. These things were important to know. One couldn’t be too careful. If you walk away from God you should probably try to stay in the good books of Luck.