Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“We will see,” Quichotte told him.

“Anyhow, that’s right about the universe, I get that part,” Sancho said. “The universe doesn’t have positions or theories or rebuttals or any of that. The universe is just up there, out there, all around, and it doesn’t give a fuck.”

“And now we too must seek to be just there, ” Quichotte replied.

“And not give a fuck?”

“There is no need to give a fuck,” Quichotte answered gravely, “about anything except the goal of our journey.”

“Namely the lady.”

“Exactly. All else is vanity and must fall away.”

“Cool,” Sancho said. “I can focus on the lady too. That’s no problem at all.”

“I will write to her,” Quichotte declared. “I will say, I am in the first valley of the quest, and am casting aside all dogma, no longer believing anything nor disbelieving. Consequently I am becoming open to the possibility of the impossible, in which category…”

“Yes, yes,” Sancho said. “There’s no need to say everything twice.”

“I will say, I am a sleepwalker, walking as if through a dream, until I awake into the reality of our love. It will be a magnificent letter,” Quichotte said, “and will do much good work on my behalf.”

“I guess,” Sancho replied. “Sounds kind of off-putting to me.”

“You know nothing,” Quichotte reproved him. “Until an hour ago you were just a figment of my fancy. I don’t think your opinion carries much weight at present.”

“Whatever you say,” Sancho shrugged. “Right now, in my life, you’re the one holding all the important cards.”

At that exact moment, an osprey flying directly overhead sent them a communication. The communication landed splat on the map of the United States and obscured the city of New York; after which the osprey, having nothing further to communicate, had completed its role in our story and flew away.

“Ugh,” expostulated Sancho. “Fucking bird.”

But Quichotte was clapping his hands. “This is it!” he cried.

“This is what?”

“The sign. The hunter has guided us, and the hunt is on! We must go immediately where we have been told to go.”

“ This is the sign?” Sancho demanded with some indignation. “My transformation from a figment into a flesh-and-blood person, that’s not the sign? Birdshit is the sign?”

“On the road to New York we will find the second valley, and, I now believe, all the others as well,” Quichotte told him. “In the concrete canyons, where the Beloved awaits me.”

“I could have told you that without the help of some crappy bird,” Sancho said. “And what’s the second valley, anyway?”

“The second valley,” Quichotte solemnly pronounced, “is the Valley of Love.”

The second letter from Quichotte unexpectedly touched the heart of Salma R—or even Salma—we have gotten to know her well enough by now to drop the formality of “Miss.” I am a sleepwalker, walking as if through a dream, until I awake into the reality of our love, it began, and continued through several pages of increasingly purple expressions of adoration . And again, at the end, the oddly ungrammatical sign-off, a peculiarity at the end of a linguistically competent, if overly baroque, piece of writing. Sent by a smile, Quichotte. “I’m still worried about him,” she told her security chief, “because it goes without saying that stalkers, like groupies, are one hundred percent always and absolutely out of their minds. But the man has a turn of phrase.” And the metaphysical aspect of the letter, the surrender of all vestiges of belief, but also of the processes of un- or disbelief, so that one might simply face reality with an open heart and receive its messages, was not without interest.

She made a copy of the letter and read it in the Maybach on the way home, too many times. Her driver asked, just to have some fun with her, “Miss Daisy, is that the light of love in your eyes?”

She snorted at him. “Hoke, just drive the car. There are driverless limos now, don’t forget.”

“Yes, Miss Daisy,” the driver said, and hummed under his breath, “But will you still love him tomorrow?”

It may be that one reason why Salma responded as emotionally as she did to the second letter from Quichotte is that she was herself all too familiar with the battle against mental illness, being a third-generation sufferer herself. For a long time after the family plague manifested itself in her, it was strong medication that kept her going, so much so that she made up a rhyme about it, and even recited the rhyme on her show, where she was open about the ecstatic disorder of her brain. “It’s lithium and Haldol and Haldol and lithium,” she chanted in front of her laughing studio audience, and then got them all to sing along. “Can’t do without those pals, doll, and so I just live withium.” She had had to get used to the word bipolarity, because both her mother and grandmother had called it manic depression and so manic depression felt like the right term for what she had inherited from them, the dangerous darkness sitting every day and every night in the corner of one eye and the blinding brightness in the corner of the other one. The meds had controlled the monster within, just about, but there were bad moments, such as when, during a trip to San Francisco, the elevated mood, the hypomania, seized hold of her and she started running around town buying a slew of expensive artworks—an ancient wooden mask from Cameroon, a set of rare pornographic ukiyo-e drawings from Japan, and a small late Cézanne—which her young assistant, also occasionally her lover, had to return to the galleries later that evening, after explaining her condition to them delicately when she wasn’t listening. After this episode her attending health professionals had expressed concern that her condition might be becoming treatment-resistant, and suggested the possibility of electroconvulsive therapy: ECT.

“Shock treatment? You want me to have therapy by voltage?” she demanded. “But my dears, don’t you know by now that I’m unshockable?”

Nevertheless, she acquiesced. She had to come off the lithium, the health professionals said, because it could be toxic in combination with the juice. (“Well, that ruins a good song,” she told them.) When she awoke from the first treatment her first words were, “So, that felt exceptionally good. And I suppose I should have asked this before, but are there any side effects I should worry about?”

“You may experience some temporary confusion,” her senior health professional replied.

“Darling,” she said, “how will anyone be able to tell the difference?”

“And there may be some temporary, or in some cases permanent, memory loss.”

“Ah,” she said. “So I suppose I should have asked this before, but are there any side effects I should worry about?”

SHE HAD TO BE “on” from the moment she walked into the studio until the moment she sank into the car with her dirty martini (up, with olives), and she got through it perfectly every day. Well, most days. There was a Latina woman, a rival who wanted her job, who “sat in” for her on the few occasions when her condition did not allow her to appear. She did not care to recall this woman’s name. She had also forgotten the driver’s real name. She called him Hoke after the character Hoke Colburn because he might as well have been Morgan Freeman in that movie, he looked and sounded so damn much like him. He saw the moments of collapse and said nothing, not so much because of admiration or loyalty as because to say something would have meant he’d be out on his ear and never get a dime from Miss Daisy again. The most daring thing he had ever said to her was this: “There’s sure a lot of different folks in there inside your skin, Miss Daisy. I reckon I’ve seen twenty or thirty of them and I’m not positive I’ve seen them all.” She hadn’t liked that. After that he kept most of his opinions to himself.