Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

One of Dr. R. K. Smile’s favorite doctors, Dr. Arthur Steiger, an experienced pain specialist from Bisbee, Arizona (pop. 5,200), was ordered to stop prescribing painkillers completely while serious allegations against him were investigated. At that time he had received more speakers’ fees from SPEIK than any other medical practitioner, even though unfortunately all the much-anticipated events at which he had been billed to speak had had to be canceled owing to unforeseeable factors. Dr. Steiger fought back when he was indicted. “There is a vendetta against doctors who prescribe opioids regularly,” he said. “But me, I’m the aggressive type. I aggressively help my patients. I’m the caring type also. I care aggressively. That’s just who I am.”

“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” Dr. R. K. Smile said to Happy when he read this statement.

She nodded lovingly. “You also are a fighter like this Dr. Arizona,” she said. “Look how you have fought for your family. So so many achievements, so so much success. And when I have done my work and your name is everywhere, museums, concert halls, fish tanks, parks, then you will be too too respected by so so many people and all this noise will go. It is the Age of Anything-Can-Happen,” she explained. “This I heard on TV. And I will make Everything happen for you.” Her support warmed his heart. He loved his wife. He wondered if it would upset her if he asked her to lose a little weight.

THE FLICKED-UP WINGTIPS OF the G650ER reminded Dr. R. K. Smile of his wife’s hairdo. If Happy Smile’s hair were an executive jet, he thought, it would fly him nonstop to Dubai. The aircraft was his favorite toy. Sometimes on a still and sunny day he took it up from Hartsfield-Jackson just to potter about in the sky for a few hours, over Stone Mountain and Athens (pop. 115,452), Eatonton (pop. 6,555), and Milledgeville (pop. 18,933), the Chattahoochee and Talladega forests, or the route of Sherman’s march. Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Brer Rabbit, the Tree That Owns Itself, and the War between the States were all down there and he was above them, feeling at such moments like a true son of the South, which of course he was not. He had tried to read Gone with the Wind and to learn the words of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” and “Old Folks at Home,” but fiction and music weren’t his thing. Also, like all cultural artifacts, they reminded him of his wife; and when he went up in the sky he didn’t bring Happy along. Instead he invited a half dozen of the most attractive SPI sales reps, former colleagues of Dawn Ho’s at Jennifer’s strip club in West Palm Beach, and what happened up in the air stayed up in the air. Dr. R. K. Smile was not a perfect husband, he conceded that in his rare moments of inwardness and reflection, but in his opinion these episodes (a) did not take place on earth and so didn’t count on earth and (b) in fact made him a better husband by satisfying his secret recreational urges, his off-label desires.

Flying home from Flagstaff after his encounter with old Quichotte, he was sad, and not even the ministrations of all six salesladies simultaneously could blow away his blues. His poor relation Ismail Smile had always been an anomaly in the ranks of SPI employees, old among the young, emaciated among the luscious, a lonely figure, permanently out of step, everyone’s crazy grandpa. And yet he carried himself with a certain dignity, kept himself immaculately dressed and groomed, was well mannered, well spoken, and possessed an enviably large vocabulary, was almost always cheerful, and could unleash, at any moment, his one weapon of beauty, which was his smile. Dr. R. K. Smile feared the worst now that he had let Quichotte go. The old fellow would deteriorate into some sort of dharma bum, moving aimlessly from nowhere to nowhere, dreaming his impossible dream of love. And one of these days Dr. R. K. Smile would receive a call from a motel in the middle of nowhere and then he would have to climb into the G650ER and bring the old man’s body back with him to Atlanta and lay him to rest in Cobb County or Lovejoy. That day would probably not be far away.

In his final exchanges with Quichotte he had hinted at asking him to perform some small private services, some discreet deliveries, but he hadn’t meant it. It had been a way of getting out of the room while leaving Quichotte with a scrap of self-respect and the sense of still being needed. The private services, or VIP, division of Smile Pharmaceuticals did not officially exist, and its unofficial existence was known only to a very small group, which did not include Dr. R. K. Smile’s loyal wife. The discreet servicing of the desires of the very famous was a subsection of the American economy which it was important not to ignore, but the key word there was discreet. Dr. Smile was discreet, and was willing to make house calls to the right people. Lately the demand for InSmile™ among these special, house-call-worthy customers had increased significantly, owing to a change in the OxyContin formula that decreased its appeal to recreational users, and to the special customers’ growing awareness that the sublingual spray offered instant gratification in a way that the other popular products did not. More and more gated properties from Minneapolis to Beverly Hills opened themselves to his unpretentious rental cars. He himself, small, physically unimpressive, was the forgettable type, and being forgettable was an asset in this kind of work, it assisted discretion. Like everyone in America, Dr. Smile was in thrall to celebrity, and when he entered the boudoirs and man caves of magazine-cover faces and bodies, he experienced a profoundly American joy, deepened by his secret knowledge that his net worth was probably greater than that of most of the owners of those immensely celebrated, those erotically well-known eyes, mouths, breasts, and legs, those prime manifestations of what Dr. Smile—a doctor, after all—thought of as professionally assisted perfection. He, too, was a professional. In his own way he, too, could assist.

When, some time later, a whisper reached him, the faintest murmur from one of his top, inner-circle speakers’ bureau doctors, that a certain Indian movie actress turned American daytime TV superstar might appreciate a house call, Dr. R. K. Smile actually laughed out loud and clapped his hands. “Arré, kya baat!” he cried out in the privacy of his home office. “Whoa, what a thing!” Because now, if it all worked out as he hoped, he just might be able to make possible his poor relation’s impossible dream, at least once before the tragic inevitable occurred. He might find it in his power, and in his heart, to bring fantasy-besotted old Quichotte face-to-face with his lady love.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The secret approach from Miss Salma R still lay a little way ahead, in the shrinking future of the world.

Sancho Smile. That’s my name. Got that. But there’s a whole lot else I’m kind of blank about. I don’t know if I’m even really here, to tell the truth. For one thing I’m black-and-white in a full-color universe. I look at my face in a mirror and it looks like not a face but a photograph of a face. How do I feel about that? Second class. Minor league. That’s how. Also, I don’t seem to be visible right now to anyone except him . My “father.” Only he sees me. I know I’m not perceived, because when we go into the Subway in Moorcroft, Wyoming, where I was born, and he asks me if I want something, a soda, a sandwich, people look at him. That look people use on crazy people. Like he’s talking to himself, and I want to yell out, See me. I’m standing right here. But to other people I’m apparently impossible to sense. I’m what’s the word. Imperceptible.