Fury by Salman Rushdie

worse. But the only war Professor Solanka had been in was life itself, and life had been kind to him. He had money and what most people thought of as an ideal family. Both his wife and child were exceptional. Yet he had sat in his kitchen in the middle of the night with murder on the brain; actual murder, not the metaphorical kind. He’d even brought a carving knife upstairs and stood for a terrible, dumb minute over the body of his sleeping wife. Then he turned away, slept in the spare bedroom, and in the morning packed his bags and caught the first plane to New York without giving a reason. What had happened was beyond reason. He needed to put an ocean, at least an ocean, between himself and what he had almost done. So Ms. Mila, the empress of West Seventieth Street, had been closer to the truth than she knew. Than she must ever know.
    He was waiting in line at the cinema, lost inside himself. Then a young man’s voice started up behind his right ear, disgracefully loud, not caring who listened, telling its story to a companion but also to the whole line, to the city; as if the city cared. To Eve in Metropolis was to know that the exceptional was as commonplace as diet soda, that abnormality was the popcorn norm: “So finally I called her, and I’m like, hi, Mom, wassup, and she goes, You wanna know who’s sitting down to dinner here in Nowheresville, who’s right here eating your mother’s meatloaf, we’ve got Santa Claus, that’s all. Santa Claus sitting right there at the head of the table where your snake skunk weasel father used to set his motherfuckin’ dumb-fuck ass. I swear to God. I mean it’s three P.m. and she’s already losing it. That’s what she said, word for fuckin’ word. Santa Claus. And I go, Sure, Mom, and where’s Jesus at. And she comes back with, That’s Mister Jesus Christ to you, young man, and I’ll have you know that Mister Jesus H. Christ is takin’ care of the fish course. So, that was all I could handle, so I’m like, So long, Mom, give the gentlemen my best, have a happy.” And alongside the male voice there was a woman’s hard, horrified laughter. HA-haha-HA.
    At this point in a Woody Allen movie (a part of Husbands and Wives had actually been filmed in Solanka’s rented apartment) the cinemagoers would have joined in the conversation, taking sides, offering personal anecdotes to rival or surpass the one they had just heard, and finding precedents for the monologue of the angry, crazy mother in late Bergman, in Ozu, in Sirk. In a Woody Allen movie Noam Chomsky or Marshall McLuhan, or maybe nowadays it would be Gurumayi or Deepak Chopra, would have stepped out from behind a potted palm and offered a few words of unctuous, polished commentary. The mother’s plight would briefly be the subject of an agonized Woody meditation-was she delusional all day or only at mealtimes? What medication was she on and were its side effects properly labeled on the bottle? What did it mean that she was possibly planning to fool around with not one but two major icons? What would Freud say about this unusual sex triangle? What did this woman’s equal need for gift-wrapped possessions and the salvation of her immortal soul tell us about her? What did it tell us about America?
    Also, if those were real men in the room with her, who were they? Maybe killers on the run, holing up in this poor bourbon-soaked lady’s kitchen? Was she actually in danger? Alternatively, as open-minded thinkers, should we not allow the possibility, at least theoretically, of a genuine double miracle having occurred? In which case, what kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for? And, okay, so the Son of God was in charge of the tuna, but would there be enough meatloaf to go around?
    To all of this Mariel Hemingway would pay careful but vapid attention; then, equally swiftly, it would be forgotten forever. In a Woody Allen movie the scene would have been shot in black-and-white, that most unreal of