At least I was still, or would soon be again, a writer who had written a book.

  * * *

  Eliza asked me to talk to her camera about The Satanic Verses.

  When I started writing that book, it never occurred to me that I wasn’t allowed to do it. I had these stories I wanted to tell and I was trying to work out how to tell them. That was all I was doing.

  (Sometimes I think I belong to another age. I can remember being in the garden of our house as a child in the 1950s, listening to my parents and their friends laughing and joking as they discussed everything under the sun, from contemporary politics to the existence of God, without feeling any pressure to censor or dilute their opinions. I also remember being at the apartment of my favorite uncle, Hameed Butt, who sometimes wrote for the movies, and his dancer-actress wife, Uzra, who sometimes acted in them. I watched them playing cards with their artsy-filmi crowd, speaking in even more outrageous language about everything and nothing, and laughing even more uproariously than my parents’ friends. These settings were where I learned the first lesson of free expression—that you must take it for granted. If you are afraid of the consequences of what you say, then you are not free. When I was making The Satanic Verses, it never occurred to me to be afraid.)

  In fact, for a while I thought it might not be one book, but three. One book about the village that walked into the sea, a second about the birth-of-a-religion stuff, and a third, longer book about South Asian immigrants in contemporary London. Then I was on a plane to go, I think, to a literary festival in Australia, and I understood that all the stories were episodes from the life of the Archangel Gabriel, and I saw that it was one book. And the main character would be named Gibreel Farishta. Gibreel, Gabriel, and Farishta, angel. That was it. I wasn’t trying to offend or insult anyone. I was trying to write a novel.

  Truthfully, I would be happy never to speak about The Satanic Verses again. My poor maligned book. Maybe one day it, and its maligned author, will both be free again.

  I was much happier to think about my new book. My dear friend Martin Amis liked to say, “When you publish a book, you either get away with it, or you don’t get away with it.”

  I hoped that on this occasion I might get away with it.

  * * *

  There were unconfirmed rumors that I had been transported to Manhattan from Erie by unknown means, and was now a patient at Rusk. For several days after I arrived, there was a media presence in the street outside the hospital. After Milan’s third visit to me, as he was leaving, a car crawled along beside him and a man called his name. “Milan!” He kept walking, the car kept pace with him, and again the man called out, “Milan!” Milan had the presence of mind to make a right turn against the flow of traffic, which prevented the car from following him any farther. The man was never there again, but Milan was worried. However, he remained calm. He was in New York to help care for his dad, and that was all that mattered.

  On the day of the attack there had been extremely aggressive photographers on the sidewalk outside our home, and Eliza had been held, jostled, and pushed as she tried to get to the car service, already distraught at the thought that she was racing to see her dying husband. After that experience she was unable to do as I suggested and simply ignore the paparazzi. The way she saw it, unknown strangers were stalking her. How could she be sure they had only cameras in their hands?

  She was sleeping at home, but the shutterbugs weren’t there at night. If she left early in the morning she could avoid them, but she had work to do, she was in the final stages of edits of Promise. Given what had happened in our lives, this wasn’t easy work, to say the least. But she is a strong-willed woman, and she got it done. When she had to walk her dog, an elderly border terrier named Hero, she saw the photographers lurking. Sometimes they stayed in their cars (she knew their cars by now); sometimes they rolled down the windows and the snouts of their long lenses pointed at her. Sometimes they got out and took pictures. This intrusive ritual was repeated when she left home in the afternoon to go to Rusk. None of these photographs were ever published. She wasn’t the person whose picture they wanted, but they harassed her for weeks anyway. There are aspects of press freedom that aren’t easy to defend.

  * * *

  Milan wanted to talk about Trump. I didn’t, really. But I did say, “If he is re-elected this country may become impossible to live in.”

  I saw his eyes light up. “You mean you might come back to England?” I saw, not for the first time, how much he wanted that, and that in the aftermath of the attack, and in the light of his very real fear of flying, he wanted it even more.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Brexit Britain is pretty awful too.” But, I added, before the attack Eliza and I had been talking about spending more time in London because, after all, almost all my close family members lived there. However, now was not the time to discuss that, I told him. I just needed to get back on my feet. “Let’s put that conversation on hold.”

  I am torn between London and New York. The fact is, I prefer living in New York, but the pull of family and of most of my oldest friends is very strong. I still can’t answer Milan’s question. Let’s put that conversation on hold.

  * * *

  As the days lengthened into weeks, I was recovering. But it wasn’t over yet. For one thing, there was the issue of my other eye, my one remaining eye.

  In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, when people are taken into Room 101 in the basement of the Ministry of Love, what they encounter in that fearsome torture chamber is—according to the evil O’Brien, agent of the Thought Police—“the worst thing in the world.” The worst thing in the world is different for every individual. For Winston Smith, the novel’s protagonist, the worst thing in the world is rats.

  For me, it always was, and still is, blindness.

  Many readers of Victory City have wondered if the scene in which the heroine is blinded was written, or rewritten, after the August 12 attack. Some have even found it hard to believe that it wasn’t. But it wasn’t. When I wrote that scene I was writing about a lifelong fear: “the worst thing in the world.” And now my right eye was gone and the left suffered from macular degeneration, a condition of the retina which can lead to an almost complete loss of vision. And that was the only eye I had left.

  The treatment I had been receiving, for several years, took the form of an injection directly into the white of the eye, every month or so. I received one such injection during my time at Rusk; after my release I would return to my regular eye specialist, who told me that I was responding exceptionally well to the medication, and so the condition was stable.

  I can only hope that that continues to be the case. If not, I’ll be locked into Room 101 for as long as I have left.

  * * *

  Also: My blood pressure was a worry. It was low, and when I stood up it often dropped lower, and there was dizziness, and I had to sit down. I said to one of the nurses who came to check my vital signs that I was surprised because I had never previously had any problems with blood pressure. She replied kindly, “You lost a lot of blood, you know.”

  I was asked to wear a corset, tightly held together by Velcro, to help prevent the sudden drops in pressure. That helped. On two occasions I was given blood transfusions. They helped, too. I was also put on a medication designed to boost my blood pressure, and that began to work. The readings were still low, but they were at the low end of the acceptable range. That didn’t feel so bad.

  * * *

  As the weeks inched by at Rusk, I was running a little low on gumption. I was beginning to be irritated by little things—for instance, the time it took for a nurse to show up after I rang the bell for attention, which could be a real problem if I needed to go to the bathroom and couldn’t get out of the bed by myself because it would begin to scream. (By this time, I felt stronger on my legs and was perfectly capable of walking to the toilet, but I was a prisoner of my bed.) I had been, I think, a good patient, but now I was impatient. I told Eliza, “We need to start talking about a release date.”

  We were given a tentative release date—Friday, September 23—which was exactly three weeks after I arrived at Rusk, exactly six weeks after the attack. But as the date approached, I was told they would rather delay it by a few days at least.

  The head man—I’ll call him Dr. O.—came to see me on his rounds to tell me this. The team had met to discuss my condition, and this delay was its collective view. But I had set my heart on the date, and the delay felt unbearable. I had an emotional explosion. I needed to go home, I said. This place was becoming bad for me. Everything was in pretty good order. My physical therapist, Faye, said I had passed the tests that allowed her to declare me fit to be released. My occupational therapist, Rose, also declared herself happy with my progress. The injuries seemed to have healed. The blood pressure was under control. Let me go.

  “If you leave,” Dr. O. said, gently, “it will be against medical advice.”

  “All right,” I said, with much too much feeling in my voice. “I accept that.”

  That was, if memory serves, on Wednesday. On Thursday, I got out of bed (it had been silenced) and felt suddenly very dizzy indeed. I sat down fast. The doctors had been right and I had been wrong. I needed to stay until the blood pressure was really under control.

  Meanwhile: Eliza and Sameen had been talking. They were worried about my returning home. If the paparazzi were watching the address, other people might also be watching, and those other people might be carrying things other than long-lensed cameras. It was Sameen who first told me that Eliza had another plan. Good friends had offered us the use of their loft in SoHo. They were in Los Angeles and wouldn’t be back in New York until Thanksgiving and would love to be able to help. They would tell the doorman we would be there and give him a pseudonym which we would set with them. This would be totally private and therefore a better, safer way of re-entering the world. When Sameen told me this I reacted negatively. I just wanted to go home. I didn’t want another way station. I wanted to sleep in my own bed, and to have my books around me. But when I saw that Eliza and Milan were united in their preference for the SoHo option, I relented. “Okay,” I said, “let’s go there.”

  Eliza had been meeting with professional security outfits. She told me which one she preferred, and we entered into a relationship with them. This would not be cheap, but, for the foreseeable future at least, it felt necessary. Our security would send a team to bring me away from Rusk when the time came, and they would liaise with the NYPD as well. I felt a little like a package being scheduled for delivery, but I accepted the rules.

  On Monday, September 26, I was given the all-clear by the Rusk medical team. Rehab was over. After more than six weeks in two hospitals, I could return to the world.

  The plan was to leave Rusk at 3 a.m., as quietly as possible, and get down to Mercer Street through the empty night-city to avoid any watching eyes. I was packed and ready by 1:00 and Eliza arrived an hour later, accompanied, for moral support, by our dear friend Suphala, tabla player extraordinaire. We embraced happily. Eliza was very stressed but trying not to show it, because I was highly excited. (I saw her tension anyway.) We were given an envelope containing my discharge papers, a timetable of medications, a few bottles of pills (painkillers if needed, Lipitor, and something to boost my blood pressure), an asthma inhaler, and some antibiotic eye ointment. I put on my Velcro corset to make sure I could walk without feeling light-headed. Then one of our security team was outside the door along with an NYPD officer, and the exit began. On the day before, I had been taken downstairs to see the side door we would be using, to familiarize myself with the route and make sure I could manage the few steps down to the street level. I came in here on a stretcher and I’m leaving on my own two feet, I thought, allowing myself a moment of self-congratulation. A large black Escalade SUV was waiting with its motor running. It wasn’t easy to climb up into it, because of my one-handedness, but I managed to do it unaided. Eliza and Suphala got in too, and we were off.

  I had never felt such exhilaration while driving through Manhattan. I remembered a similar feeling when I was taking a yellow cab home on June 29, 2016, just after I had been sworn in as an American citizen. That afternoon the city had suddenly felt different, as if it now belonged to me, or I to it. That had been a powerful feeling. This was even bigger, and I made myself a promise while we floated through the New York night: I’m going to take back as much of my life here as possible, as soon as I possibly can.

  We entered the building on Mercer, and the night doorman gave us a nod of welcome with no sign of recognition. Up we went, and as we entered our friends’ beautiful apartment I thought, I’m free. I’m alive, and I’m free. It was 3:30 a.m., and I found my way to a large, comfortable, and definitely non-screaming bed. I got into it and Eliza lay down next to me and then, suddenly, she was sobbing uncontrollably as all the stress poured out of her.

  “My husband’s home,” she sobbed. “My husband’s home.”

  * * *

  There are moments, such as this, when these events are painful to set down.

  * * *

  We had been able to sleep luxuriously late, uninterrupted by 4 a.m. bloodletters or 5 a.m. nurses or 6 a.m. doctors. During hospital nights, darkness is an intermittent grace, and your bed is not your friend, so the comfort of the Mercer Street bed and the curtained darkness of the room were soothing novelties. We didn’t want to start the day. When we finally did get up and draw back the curtains, the city stretched out before us like a gift. The loft had windows on three sides, so we could look downtown toward the soaring One World Trade building, or westward across the Village to the Hudson River, or north past the New York University faculty residential towers on Bleecker Street all the way to the Empire State Building. There was a roof terrace on which our hosts had planted a gorgeous garden in the sky. If this wasn’t home, it was the next best thing. It felt like a vacation.

  We weren’t entirely alone for the first few days. Eliza had wanted some trained support in case things didn’t go smoothly with me, and she hired a twenty-four-hour nursing service, a night nurse and a day nurse, to be with us. Happily, we soon agreed that this wasn’t necessary. Just being out of the hospital felt like a cure. I was stronger every day.

  Peace and quiet and the illusion of a return to private life lasted two days. Then the medical world reached out and grabbed me, and told me I still had a long way to go. More precisely: my hand therapist, Monica, visited for the first time. She was small, Chinese American, smiling, friendly, a book lover and big reader, and utterly ruthless when it came to getting my hand moving again.

  “This is going to hurt.”

  “Ow!”

  “This is going to hurt even more.”

  She was scheduled to visit three times a week. The first thing she did, on that first visit, was cut off the splint. “You don’t need this anymore.” My left hand immediately felt unshackled, even though, as Milan afterward told me, “you really couldn’t move your fingers at all, Dad.” Monica told me the tendons had healed. I was past the six-week mark, and now, she told me, it was time to exercise and use the hand as much as possible; which was easy to say but not easy to do when it was all but immobile.

  The tendons run in channels inside the hand, and now that they were in one piece again, they needed to relearn how to move up and down in those channels. I had thought, innocently, that physical therapy would do the trick in a few months. I now learned that it wasn’t necessarily as straightforward as that. There was a real chance that, instead of the tendons’ beginning to glide smoothly in their channels and allowing my hand to resume business as usual, clenching and unclenching and so forth, there was another, unpleasant possibility: instead of loosening up, they might adhere to their channels and be stuck in one position, in which case more major surgery would be required to try and unstick them. Hearing that made my heart sink, but it also provided very strong motivation to put everything into the repair work. If it was going to hurt, so be it. I wanted my hand back.

  Monica’s first business was to attend to the dried blood which was disfiguring my palm, and also making it harder for things to start moving. She chipped away at it every time she came. She had a variety of tools that she used during her visits. They looked like strange bluish-green, translucent sea monsters and acted like instruments of torture. She also gave me exercises to do in her absence and a whirring tool to apply to the scar tissue.

  “I can’t do it as hard as you can,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “It’s hard to cause yourself pain.”

  The story of my hand would stretch over the next six months. As well as my sessions with Monica, I had appointments, every six weeks or so, with a hand surgeon at NYU Langone, Dr. Y. At our first meeting he wasn’t exactly cheering. He told me plainly, “In the case of an injury as severe as yours we usually don’t have a very optimistic prognosis.”

  There was the question of movement, and then there was the question of feeling. As to movement, at the beginning there was very little. As to feeling, I had some in my thumb and index finger, none in the middle finger and ring finger, a small amount in the little finger. The palm of my hand between the scar and the wrist had feeling; above the scar, there was none. Dr. Y. could not tell me how much feeling, if any, might return. He hoped Monica’s work would restore a degree of movement at least. “For the rest, we can hope.”