Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

I’m a teenager imagined by a seventy-year-old man. I guess I have to call him Dad . But here’s the thing. How am I supposed to feel properly what’s the word. Filial. When we just met. I didn’t grow up with him, we didn’t play ball in any park or whatever dads and sons do in real life. I’m just here, boom, one minute I wasn’t and the next minute I was, and what am I supposed to feel? Love at first sight? I don’t think so.

This is a problem.

I’m bounded by the limits of him. Tied to him. I’m guessing this is a thing other kids don’t feel about their dads . That when I move away from the person who made me, when I get some distance away, I feel, how to say this. Out of range. Like, the signal drops, or it threatens to drop. If I try to walk away from him, if I need my own space for a moment?, without him always breathing down my neck?, if I get too far, I start—I don’t know how to put it—breaking up. Parts of me become just static. I look like a bad TV picture. Like, wobbly. It’s scary. I have to go back to wherever he is to regain full definition. I have to move back in and stay close, or otherwise maybe I’d stop being here at all. This is something I don’t like to feel. To be chained to another human being, like a possession. For this I know what’s the word.

Slavery.

Also, not to sound sorry for myself, but I’m a motherless child. I think a lot about mother-love, how that would be, a mother, mom, stroking my hair, her bosom for my pillow.

I KNOW THINGS. EDUCATED THINGS. But how do I know so much, being the teenage son of a seventy-year-old, and born just the other day? I guess the answer is, I know what he knows. If I listen inside myself I hear his book learning and all his favorite TV shows also—I know them all as if I watched them myself. And if I look I can see his memories as if they were mine, memories of falling out of a tree as a little boy and needing stitches in his head, memories of kissing an Australian girl when he was nine years old and cutting his tongue on the braces on her teeth, memories of bicycle accidents and school detentions and his mother’s cooking. All his memories planted in my head.

There’s something else. It’s the strangest thing. Sometimes, when I’m in here, rummaging around in my own head, using the words he gave me and the knowledge he passed down, uncovering my memories which are his memories, his life story which I could claim as my own if I wasn’t smart enough to know better…just sometimes, not every time…I get the weirdest sense that there’s someone else in here . Crazy, right? I’m as crazy as he is, the old guy. But who or what is this third person? I’m just going to say this the way it comes to me to say it, even though it makes no sense and makes me sound… unreliable . It feels to me, at those moments when I have this sense of a stranger, as if there’s somebody under slash behind slash above the old man. Somebody—yes—making him the way he made me. Somebody putting his life, his thoughts, his feelings, his memories into the old man the way the old man put that stuff inside me. In which case whose life am I remembering here? The old man’s or the phantom’s?

This is driving me nuts. Who is that under there slash over there slash in there? Who are you? If you’re his Creator, are you mine as well?

There’s a name for this. For the person behind the story . The old guy, Dad, he has a lot of material on this. He doesn’t seem to believe in such an entity, doesn’t seem to sense his presence the way I’m doing, but his head is full of thoughts about the entity all the same. His head and therefore my head too. I have to think about this now. I’ll just come right out and say it: God. Maybe he and I, God and I, could understand each other, maybe we could have a good discussion, because, you know, both imaginary.

If you get imagined into being, does that mean that after that you can just be? If I knew how to reach him, God, I’d ask him that. And also, does he really feel seen? I understand that plenty of people say they talk to him every day, they walk with him, etc., but does he really truly do that? I mean step out beside them on the sidewalk, looking out for oncoming pedestrian traffic. I doubt it. I’m the one out here trying not to let people bump into me, because I’m imperceptible. See above.

Even God had a mother. That’s a difference between us. I’ll put that in the plural. Even gods had moms. Holy Mary mother of etc. Also Aditi mother of Indra. Also Rhea mother of Zeus. If I knew how to reach them, I’d ask them about the benefits of mother-love. Were they close? Was it wonderful? Did they talk? Was maternal guidance given and gratefully received? Did they use those bosoms for their pillows?

Also, a question regarding beginnings: Did the mothers have mothers? I’m confused. Is there nothing before the mother, no space or time for there to be anything in, until the Birth and after that, everything? I ask because I have only him, Dad, but before him presumably another father and another, begat begat begat. But me, he made me all by himself using what’s the word. Parthenogenesis. Water fleas, scorpions, parasitic wasps, and me. Gods could do this also. Dionysus born from the thigh of Zeus. But he, Dad, he’s not godlike. I say this not to be rude but because it’s obvious. This is no Olympian being.

TIME TO BE STRICT with myself. Get real, Sancho. There’s probably nothing slash nobody behind the story . It’s just some kind of illusion. Double vision. Echo chamber. Déjà vu. I don’t know what to call it. It’s just him, Dad, becoming an echo of himself. That’s it. I’m going with that. Beyond that, there’s only madness, a.k.a. getting religion. I have no intention of going crazy or getting religion. One nutty old coot is more than enough in this car.

However: I’m reserving the right to think about this some more.

SOMETHING MUST HAVE HAPPENED to him sometime. Something went wrong with him somewhere along the line. It’s buried deep but I’m looking. I’m looking under Roseanne and Ellen and Whoopi and Carpool Karaoke and all the rest. He’s got so much book learning in his head under the TV stuff, it even comes out of my mouth, and I never looked at a book that didn’t have a gorgeous lady on the cover, preferably deficient in the wardrobe department. Maxim, Sports Illustrated swimwear edition, these are my idea of books. This is what I check to keep in touch with what’s going on. Even those I haven’t checked so many of, my period on the planet being so far of brief duration. But he has the whole big-word library in his head—and what does he do with it? Watches reruns of old sci-fi movies about close encounters and the end of the world. And Special Victims Unit, he would be in love with Mariska Hargitay a.k.a. Olivia Benson if he wasn’t already crazy smitten with Miss Salma R, America’s Oprah 2.0, specially tooled for the younger demographic.

Regarding Mariska, I see here a gateway to the dark material. On that Pinterest page of his memory there’s a comment pinned. His mother passed when he was three years old, just like Mariska when her mom Jayne Mansfield died. But not in a horrible car accident. Cancer is all. I can say things like that, it was only cancer, because being a figment such as I am I assume I’m immune to sickness. Therefore I snap my fingers at cancer. I bite my thumb at it. Still, tough for Mariska age three and Jayne age thirty-four. On U.S. Highway 90 just west of the Rigolets Bridge, and future-Olivia was even in the fucking car. That’s tough. I see that. And for him too. He was in the hospital room just like future-Olivia in the back seat of the car. Or not just like. But similar. When his mother died he was holding her hand. Three years old and the moment she passed he dropped that hand and ran out of the room crying, That’s not her.