Free Fury by Salman Rushdie Page B

most valuable object was the six-burner Viking range. Rhinehart these days was a turbocharged gastronome, his freezer full of the carcasses of dead birds awaiting their reduction-their elevation!-to jus. In his refrigerator the delicacies of the earth jostled for space: larks’ tongues, emus’ testicles, dinosaurs’ eggs. Yet when, at his friend’s wedding, Solanka had spoken to Rhinehart’s mother and sister of the exquisite pleasures of dining at Jack’s table, he had bewildered and amazed them both. “Jack, cook? This Jack?” asked his mother, disbelievingly pointing at her son. “Jack I know couldn’t open a can of beans less’n I showed him how to hold the can opener.” “Jack 1 know,” his sister added, “couldn’t boil a pan of water without burnin’ it up.” “Jack I know,” his mother concluded, definitively, “couldn’t find the kitcben without a seein’-eye dog leadin’ the way.”
    This same Jack could now hold his own with the great chefs of the world, and Solanka marveled, once again, at the human capacity for automorphosis, the transformation of the self, which Americans claimed as their own special, defining characteristic. It wasn’t. Americans were always labeling things with the America logo: American Dream, American Buffalo, American Graffiti, American Psycho, American Tune. But everyone else had such things too, and in the rest of the world the addition of a nationalist prefix didn’t seem to add much meaning. English Psycho, Indian Graffiti, Australian Buffalo, Egyptian Dream, Chilean Tune. America’s need to make things American, to own them, thought Solanka, was the mark of an odd insecurity. Also, of course, and more prosaically, capitalist.
    Bronislawa’s threat to Rhinehart’s booze hoard found its mark. He gave up visiting war zones and began to write, instead, lucrative profiles of the super-powerful, super-famous, and super-rich for their weekly and monthly magazines of choice: chronicling their loves, their deals, their wild children, their personal tragedies, their tell-all maids, their murders, their surgeries, their good works, their evil secrets, their games, their feuds, their sexual practices, their meanness, their generosity, their groomers, their walkers, their cars. Then he gave up writing poetry and turned his hand, instead, to novels set in the same world, the unreal world that ruled the real one. He often compared his subject to that of the Roman Suetonius. “These are the lives of today’s Caesars in their Palaces,” he’d taken to telling Malik Solanka and anyone else who was prepared to listen. “They sleep with their sisters, murder their mothers, make their horses into senators. It’s mayhem in there, in the Palaces. But guess what? If you’re outside, if you’re the mob in the street, if, that is, you’re us, all you see is that the Palaces are the Palaces, all the money and power is in there, an’ when dey snaps dey fingers, boy, de planet it start jumpin’.” (It was Rhinehart’s habit from time to time to slip into an Eddie Murphy-meets-Br er Rabbit manner, for emphasis or fun.) “Now that I’m writing about this billionairess in a coma or those moneyed kids who iced their parents, now that I’m on this diamond beat, I’m seeing more of the truth of things than I did in fucking Desert Storm or some Sniper’s Alley doorway in Sarajevo, and believe me it’s just as easy, easier even, to step on a fucking land mine and get yourself blown to bits.”
    These days, whenever Professor Solanka heard his friend deliver a version of this not infrequent speech, he detected a strengthening note of insincerity. Jack had gone to war-as a noted young radical journalist of color with a distinguished record of investigating American racism and a consequent string of powerful enemies-nursing many of the same fears expressed a generation earlier by the young Cassius Clay: most afraid, that is, of the bullet in the back, of death by what was not