Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie Page A

night, carrying the bassinet, without attracting a single flicker of attention, as if she had the power to make herself invisible, if not to the cameras, then at least to people in her immediate vicinity; but also, obviously, to the duty officers whose responsibility it was to monitor the security screens. The woman simply walked into the mayor’s office, deposited the baby, and departed. Our ancestors speculated a good deal about this female. Did she somehow catch the system napping or did she possess some sort of invisibility cloak? And if the cloak, would she not also have been invisible to the cameras? Normally down-to-earth people began to have serious dinner-table conversations about superpowers. But why would a woman with superpowers abandon her baby? And if she was the child’s mother, might Storm Doe possess some sort of magic qualities as well? Might she … because it was important not to shy away from unpleasant possibilities in the time of the war on terror … might she be dangerous? When an article appeared under the headline Is Storm Baby a Human Time Bomb? our ancestors realized that many of them had abandoned the laws of realism long ago and felt at home in the more glamorous dimensions of the fantastic. And as things turned out little Storm was indeed a visitor from the country of improbability. But at first everyone was more concerned with finding her a home.
    Rosa Fast came from a prosperous Ukrainian-Jewish family based in Brighton Beach, and dressed smartly in Ralph Lauren power suits, “because his people were our neighbors,” she liked to say, “but not in Sheepshead Bay,” meaning that Ralph Lifshitz from the Bronx had ancestors in Belarus, adjacent to “her” Ukraine. Fast’s star rose as Mayor Flora Hill’s fell, and there was no love lost between her and the outgoing mayor. Mayor Hill’s term had been beset by allegations of financial improprieties, of money rerouted into secret slush funds, and two of her closest colleagues had been indicted, but the dirt had stopped short of the mayor’s office, though some of the stench had penetrated it. Rosa Fast’s successful election campaign, which hinged on her promise to clean up City Hall, had not endeared her to her predecessor, while Flora Hill’s suggestion, made after she left office, that her successor was a “closet atheist” had irritated Rosa Fast, who had, in fact, fallen far away from the faith of her ancestors, but felt that what she did in the closet of godlessness was her own business and nobody else’s. Divorced, presently unattached, fifty-three years old and childless, Fast confessed herself deeply touched by the plight of Baby Storm and made it her business to see the little girl safely into a new life, if possible out of the reach of the tabloid press. Storm was fast-tracked for adoption and successfully transferred to her new parents to make a new, anonymous beginning under a new name, or that was the idea, but within weeks the new parents approached reality-TV producers and pitched a show to be called Storm Watch which would follow the star baby as she grew. When Rosa Fast heard the news she exploded with rage and shouted at the adoption services that they had delivered an innocent child into the hands of exhibitionist pornographers who would probably take a dump on television if somebody sponsored them to do it.
    “Get her away from those bravoes,” she cried, using the slang term for reality wannabes that had become common usage even though the television network from which the term originated had ceased broadcasting, because programming of mendacious artifice that presented itself as actuality had invaded so much of the cablesphere that the original purveyor of such programming had become redundant. Everyone had learned that it was worth giving up privacy for the merest possibility of fame, and the idea that only a private self was truly autonomous and free had been lost in the static of the airwaves. So Baby