Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

Oh, one more thing. I hope he doesn’t plan to purify me. I’m okay with staying impure. Can you understand that? I’m no angel, don’t want to be one. You know what I want to be. Human. I don’t really care about good.

Let him drive. I’m digging deeper, below all the stories. Something must have happened to him sometime.

I SEE HIM. He worked hard at school, took refuge in studies as well as fictions, got his scholarship to the dreaming spires, and then, out there in Flatland/Waterland, while feather-footed through the plashy fen passed the questing vole, came a crisis. Here’s the scene as it presents itself. His father the painter blew into town. Invite half a dozen of your friends, he said. I’m buying lunch. And at lunch, the studious son and his friends duly assembled, the two prettiest girls (the future eminent oncologist and the future professor of fine arts) were seated on either side of the parent, who proceeded, under the table, shamelessly, to fondle them, knee and thigh. At first they bore it in silence, not wishing to humiliate their friend by calling out his father. But in the end his hands traveled too far and too freely and they rose to their feet and admonished him, Proto-Cancer-Doc and Proto-Art-Prof, gorgeous, reddening, angry, formidable, sad. And he, the humiliated son, jumped up a moment later and began to shout. He remembers every word he said, I can hear them echoing in my ears now, deafening me, breaking forever what remained of the tie between father and son. I see him. As a son he broke the relationship with his father and so now as a father he wants to build a relationship with his son. Thus, I turn out to be the after-effect of that long-gone day, the consequence of his father’s lechery. After which his father never spoke to him again, nor did he, Daddy Q, try to mend fences. He graduated with a fine degree but his father did not attend his graduation. And at some point after that he put his feet on the road and went a-wandering and so began his long decline and in the end there was the job with Smile Pharmaceuticals and then the loss of that job and the arrival of myself and bingo, we’re up to date.

Almost, but not quite. There’s a whole area of his memory I can’t access. I feel pain there, both received and inflicted. There’s a lot in there, maybe everything that matters, maybe the whole point of him is locked away in that space. It makes him, what’s the word. An enigma. In here is where the darkness has been cornered, where the codes that break the code are located. I want to get inside there. No I don’t. Yes I do.

At some point the painter father had died. There was no deathbed reconciliation. Sad story. Lost his mother, his home, his dignity, his father, his sense of having a goal in life. But now he has goals once more, insane as they are. Myself and Miss Salma R. One of us nonexistent and the other beyond his reach. This will be his final act.

I see him. He’s still hiding in fantasy and science fiction. F&SF… great old magazine. Found that memory in here, as well as the other old magazines, Astounding, that was one, and Amazing, that was the other one. And the writers of the Golden Age. Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth. James Blish. Clifford D. Simak. L. Sprague de Camp. But now also the movies slash TV. Therefore that nonsense about the Doctor and the TARDIS. He sees himself in the footage. While he drives he’s Lemmy Caution in his Ford Galaxie entering les environs d’Alphaville. Or: he’s on a spaceship doing battle with a rogue computer. Or: OMG he’s like thirty years old, walking into the alien mother ship at OMG OMG Moorcroft, Wyoming, Devils Tower…exactly where the Perseid meteor shower granted the old guy’s wish and I faded in, in black-and-white, on the passenger seat of his car.

Even my birth, my personal origin story, had its roots in fantasy. Is that who I am? A close encounter of the what is it kind? Yeah. I know. Third.

Where’s my mother ship?

HIS MANY GRIEFS, his few joys, his few highs, his many lows, are second nature to me now. And now we’re riding in his car and he wants this to be a father-son bonding experience. But really I’m something like his clone, his younger clone, and if he wants to bond with me it’s a kind of narcissism, right? It’s like a sound wanting to bond with its echo. It’s like wanting to get closer to your fucking reflection, which is what the whole Narcissus story was about in the first place. You see how I knew that? I know everything he knows.

So: Geppetto. I’m thinking Geppetto slash Pinocchio. The puppet maker wanted a son, so he carved one out of a block of wood. The old guy—“Dad” is still difficult to say—wanted a son, so he went one better than the puppet maker and carved me out of meteors and thin air. And guess what? Like little long-nose Pinoke, I’m going to turn myself into a real live boy. I don’t even need a blue fairy, but if I find one, I’ll use her, sure. I’ll use whatever is available, whatever comes to hand. This whole only-he-can-see-me shit is going to have to stop. I have big plans. I’m going to, really soon, what’s the word. Materialize. Visible to one and all, pinch me and I bruise, if you prick me do I not bleed. I will liberate myself by the force of my own will. A pull-myself-up-by-my-own-bootstraps kinda operation. A sling-my-airhook-into-the-sky-and-yank sorta job. There are no strings on me.

There’s this story in his head I like. A man’s shadow comes loose from the man somewhere, maybe in Africa?, and goes off by itself, traveling the world. Yeah, another traveler, right, another road movie. When the shadow comes back the man is about to marry his princess but the shadow, who is exactly like him, his spitting image, his shadow, right?, has seen the world and become super sophisticated and cosmopolitan and looks like a man now, and persuades the stupid princess that he, the shadow, is in fact the real man and the real man is the shadow. The real man has lost his mind, the shadow tells her, and thinks he’s a human being. And the princess and the shadow have the original man thrown in jail and executed and the princess marries the shadow instead. That may not be exactly the way the story goes but it’s the memory-version I have. Wow. Some story. And so here we are: I’m the dark shadow and the old guy’s chasing his princess. And maybe that’s my fate, to become a man and steal his girl. Maybe that’s his fate, to be discarded and die.

I like that. It’s a possibility. I’m going to store that away and think about it and if I get a chance, guess what? We all have to grab our chances when they come our way.

I know what you’re thinking. Maybe I’m not so nice. But you know? I didn’t ask to be here. I was imported. I got put on a ship and sailed away and crossed the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay. But slavery’s over, right? I once had strings but now I’m free.

You know when his birthday is? Juneteenth. The nineteenth of June. Freedom Day in the Confederacy. It’s a sign. This shadow’s going to break free. And if I get a shot at a princess, watch me. That’s all I’m saying right now. Just watch me go.

“When considering the matter of wooing a great lady,” Quichotte said, “I ponder, naturally, the classics. And by the classics I mean, first of all, the show that broke the ground and pointed the way, The Dating Game, ABC-TV, 1965, ‘from Hollywood, the dating capital of the world.’ We must ask ourselves when we summon up the memory of a masterpiece: what is the wisdom it offers us?”