Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“Or,” said Sancho, “maybe the wisdom to be gained from a show like that is that you can’t trust anybody to be true, not even the woman you’re after.”

“Already so cynical,” Quichotte said mournfully. “No great quest, my boy, was ever achieved except by those with faith.”

“But if faith is all you’ve got,” the other answered, “you’re going to lose out to the guy with the moves and the looks.”

“The stories of the suitors and bachelorettes teach us this,” Quichotte said, ignoring Sancho’s remark, “that an apparent victory may in reality be a defeat, and that the defeated may yet, long after their apparent failure, triumph. At the end of season two, Meredith Phillips agreed to marry Ian McKee; but they separated a year later, and six years after that, her lovelorn high school sweetheart won her hand. At the end of season four, DeAnna Pappas was engaged to Jesse Csincsak, but they called it off six months before their wedding date, and, if we leap into the future, we see that Jesse actually married Ann Lueders, who was a contestant in season thirteen of the parallel show, The Bachelor. Jillian Harris and Ed Swiderski (season five), Ali Fedotowsky and Roberto Martinez (season six), Emily Maynard and Jef Holm (season eight), are all exemplars of the proposition that a ring on a ring finger guarantees nothing; whereas Ashley Hebert and J. P. Rosenbaum (season seven) and Desiree Hartsock and Chris Siegfried (season nine) reassure us that victory can lead to happily-ever-after. The record warns us of the frailty of even the greatest endeavors, and the consequent need to be resolute in the pursuit of love, as strong as a lion in his prime, and as unbreakable as a holy vow; and never to give up hope.”

“You know your stuff,” Sancho conceded in a grumbling voice. “I guess I’ll grant you that.”

A little later Sancho spoke up again. “I have one more question for you,” he said, and this time he spoke with some caution. “If, in the unlikely event that, in spite of everything, and not questioning your worthiness, and all you’re doing and will do, but, just suppose, by some freak of bad luck, some wild, off-the-wall, million-to-one chance, the lady doesn’t love you back? If you end up not being the bachelor chosen by this pretty frigging hot and desirable and also super famous bachelorette?”

“What kind of question is that?” Quichotte said, coloring, and he was suddenly shouting. “It’s the question of an ignoramus. It’s the inquiry of a baboon trying to speak English. It’s the splutter of a fish out of water. It’s the twitch of an amoeba that thinks it’s a human being. It’s an insult to the greatness of my quest, and to your father also, by the way. Withdraw the question. I, your parent, demand it.”

“It’s a totally reasonable thing to ask,” his son answered. “You yourself just talked about, what did you say, the frailty of even the greatest whatevers. And every guy knows that rejection is a normal thing. Many men are rejected by many women for many reasons and we just have to learn to accept it and feel grateful when a woman assents. And how would I know this, by the way, if not for your thoughts inside me?”

“What do you mean?” Quichotte shouted, really angry, enraged to such a shocking degree that Sancho was disconcerted, more than disconcerted, actually afraid. “Where have you been sticking your nose? Don’t you dare go where you are forbidden to enter. You are a child. You are not me. There are things about me that are not for you to know.”

“Okay,” Sancho said, and it took some courage for him to say it. “I see that under your old-goof act, beneath your sweet nutty disguise, you’re maybe someone else entirely, and that part of you is locked away right now. It’s like you’ve caged the beast.”

BY THE BANKS OF LAKE CAPOTE, in the aftermath of this confrontation, Sancho realized that his dream might have begun to come true. At first the nights had been difficult for him, because as Quichotte slipped toward sleep he, Sancho, lost consciousness too. The approach of this involuntary dreamless nonexistence terrified him, felt like a nightly execution. He struggled against it but it overpowered him. Until, suddenly, it didn’t. Quichotte slept, and Sancho remained awake. A great firework of joy burst in him, erasing the memory of the quarrel. He was on his way to being alive.

That night after the argument, Quichotte had limped off into his tent and had immediately fallen asleep. Now he was snoring his vroom-vroom NASCAR racetrack snores while Sancho lay up on the roof of the Chevy, listening to the crickets and looking up at the humbling wheel of the galaxy. There was a sign if you wanted one, he thought, a gigantic starlight finger flipping the bird at the Earth, pointing out that all human aspiration was meaningless and all human achievement absurd when measured against the everything of everything. Up there was the immensity of the immensity, the endless distance of the distance, the impossible scale, the thunderous silence of all that light, the million million million blazing suns out there where nobody could hear you scream. And down here the human race, dirty ants crawling across a small rock circling a minor star in the outlying provinces of a lesser galaxy in the inconsequential boondocks of the universe, narcissistic ants mad with egotism, insisting in the face of the fiery night-sky evidence to the contrary that their puny anthills stood at the heart of it all. He might still be half a ghost, Sancho thought, but he was a ghost who saw clearly, without illusions, and had his head screwed on the right way around.

And yet he wanted to be one of those ants, that was the paradox of it. He wanted flesh and blood and bones, and a bisonburger from Ted’s Montana Grill that he could touch and taste and swallow. He wanted life.

“He wants it for you too,” a voice said.

Sancho, startled, sat up fast. There was nobody to be seen. “Who’s there?” he cried.

“Down here,” said the voice.

He looked down. There was a cricket sitting on the car roof beside him, unafraid, not making its cricket noise, speaking English with an Italian accent.

“Grillo Parlante at your service,” said the cricket. “It’s true, I’m Italian originally. But you can call me Jiminy if you want.”

“This isn’t really happening,” he said.

“That is correct,” said the cricket. “È proprio vero. I’m a projection of your brain, just in the way that you started out as a projection of his. It seems you may be getting an insula.”

“A what?”

“As I was saying,” said the cricket, “he wants you to be fully human as badly as you do. He imagines it all the time. And to get you there, he will need to give you an insula.”

“I’m talking to an Italian cricket,” Sancho said to the stars, “whose vocabulary is bigger than mine, and who apparently wants to discuss insulation.”

“Insul- ah, not insul- ate, ” the cricket corrected him. “This is the Latin of science. It means an island in the mind.”

“He’s giving me an island?” Sancho was confused.

“A part of the brain,” the cricket clarified. “In Gray’s Anatomy it is called the Island of Reil after the German scientist who first described it. But you can call it, if you wish, the Island of the Real. It is the part of the corteccia cerebrale that gets involved in most of what it is to be a human person. Essere umano, si. It is folded within the solco laterale. This is a fissure that separates the lobo temporale and the lobo frontale of the brain. From the insula comes consciousness, emotion, perception, self-awareness, and being able to connect to other people. È molto multi-funzionale, this insula, yes. It is where empathy comes from, it controls your blood pressure, and when you get hit, it tells you how badly it hurts. You want to feel hungry? Taste that Ted’s bisonburger? The insula gives you feeling and tasting. It is sex you’re after? It processes your orgasms. It helps your concentration. It has to do with ecstasy. Oh yes, it’s a hard worker all right! It gives you happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, disbelief, trust, faith, beauty, and love. Also, hallucinations, which is where I come in. Eccomi qua!”