Read Online Fury by Salman Rushdie - Free Book Online

of life,” a phrase variously used to describe the Bible and the Novel; even though this new brightness was not a book at all but an electronic message posted on the Internet, a code written in four amino acids, and Professor Solanka wasn’t good with codes, had never even managed to learn elementary pig Latin, let alone semaphore or the now defunct Morse, apart from what everybody knew. Dit dit dit dab dah dab dit dit dit. Help. Or, in Iglatinpay, elp-hay. Everyone was speculating about the miracles that would follow the genome triumph, for example the extra limbs we could decide to grow for ourselves to solve the problem of how at a buffet dinner to hold a plate and a wineglass and eat at the same time; but to Malik the only two certainties were, first, that whatever discoveries were made would come too late to be of any use to him and, second, that this book-which changed everything, which transformed the philosophical nature of our being, which contained a quantitative change in our self-knowledge so immense as to be a qualitative change as well - was one he would never be able to read.
    While human beings had been excluded from this degree of understanding, they could console themselves that they were all in the same bog of ignorance together. Now that Solanka knew that someone some where knew what he would never know, and was additionally quite aware that what was known was vitally important to know, he felt the dull irritation, the slow anger, of the fool. He felt like a drone, or a worker ant. He felt like one of the shuffling thousands in the old movies of Chaplin and Fritz Lang, the faceless ones doomed to break their bodies on society’s wheel while knowledge exercised power over them from on high. The new age had new emperors and he would be their slave.
    “Sir. Sir” A young woman was standing over him, uncomfortably close, wearing a pencil-thin knee-length navy blue skirt and a smart white blouse. Her fair hair was pulled back severely. “I’m going to ask you to leave, sir.” The Hispanic counter staff were tensed, ready to intervene. Professor Solanka was truly perplexed: “What appears to be the trouble, Miss?”
    “What is the trouble, sir, not what ‘appears,’ is that you have been using bad language, obscene terms, and so loudly. Speaking the unspeakable, I should say. You have been shouting it out. And now amazingly you ask what is the trouble. Sir, you are the trouble. You will go now, please.” At last, he thought even as he was receiving this verbal bum’s rush, a moment of genuineness. One Austrian is here, at least. He rose, pulled his lumpy coat around him, and left, tipping his hat, though not her. There was no explanation for the woman’s extraordinary speech. When he was still sleeping with Eleanor, she would accuse him of snoring. He would be halfway between wakefulness and sleep and she would push at him and say, Turn on your side. But he was conscious, he wanted to say, he could hear her speak, and therefore, had he been making any sort of noise himself, he would have heard that, too. After a while she gave up persecuting him and he slept soundly. Until the time when once again he didn’t. No, not that again, not right now. Right now when, once again, he was conscious, and all manner of noise was in his ears.
    As he approached his apartment he saw a workman hanging in a cradle outside his window, doing repairs to the exterior of the building and, in loud, rolling Punjabi, shouting instructions and dirty jokes to his partner smoking a beedi on the sidewalk below. Malik Solanka at once telephoned his landlords the Jays, wealthy organic farmers who spent summers upstate with their fruits and vegetables, and made emphatic complaints. This brutish din was intolerable. The lease stated clearly that the work would be not only external but quiet. Furthermore, the toilet didn’t work properly; small pieces of fecal matter bobbed back up after he flushed. In the mood he was in, this