Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

On the roof of the old chocolate factory on Lafayette Street there was a high-ceilinged modern penthouse, which could have housed a substantial family, in which Miss Salma R lived alone. The word alone, in this context, should be understood to mean “plus hair and makeup, plus personal assistants (three, including the aforementioned casual lover, a white boy named Anderson Thayer who claimed descent from a Mayflower pilgrim and who was at least a dozen years younger than Salma, a smallish man with long red hair and a Zapata mustache who reminded her at times of Rumpelstiltskin from the Brothers Grimm and at other times of Yosemite Sam from Looney Tunes), personal publicists (three, two for the U.S., one for India), and security (two, one outside the penthouse door and one inside it, plus one more in the lobby downstairs).” At night this number dropped to two: one assistant in a spare bedroom on call to help with nightmares or other forms of nocturnal anguish (this was a female assistant—definitely not Anderson Thayer, with whom Salma’s occasional liaisons were carried out discreetly, away from the eyes of other members of her staff), one security guard (also female) to cope with all other issues. To Salma herself, however, the word alone meant “without a serious man in her life.” She was grateful (mostly grateful) for Anderson Thayer, who was attentive to her when she was down and managed situations well when she was in the grip of her over-bright upswings, but she thought she might have to fire him soon, because he was getting to be a little too bossy, a little too controlling, for her liking. She would have to fire him from her bed as well, obviously, and then “alone” would become even more alone.

We have not, thus far, explored Salma R’s private life in New York City, her dark side, out of respect for her privacy. However, the privacy rights of fictional characters are questionable—to be frank, they are nonexistent—and so we hereby abandon our modesty to reveal that she had had not one but two brief, unsuccessful marriages, the first to a Los Angeles über-agent who left her for a handsome young man, and of whom she always thereafter said that she had turned him gay, the second to a Manhattan-based writer-director whom she left because, she said, “their neuroses were incompatible,” and then she added, “Every female character he ever wrote was me, including all the ones he wrote before we met, and they all left him.” As she said these things in more or less exactly these words on many nationally syndicated television talk shows, including her own, we are not probing very deeply into her personal matters by revealing them.

Beneath the comedy, however, there was sadness, and acute self-doubt. She was proud of being her mother’s daughter and her grandmother’s granddaughter but in spite of all her success found it impossible to feel like their fully fledged inheritor, their peer. This sense of her inferiority may well have been the unstated determining factor in her decision to leave the Indian film industry and reinvent herself in America, where the cruel generational comparisons would not be made, or not nearly so often, and where she herself could escape her own inner voice telling her, you’re just not as good as them. On the whole she preferred her American self, though the past still pulled at her. And then there was the bipolarity, her true inheritance, uniting the three women across time and space.

For all this, there were the proper drugs, and the ECT as well. And for happiness, there was—there had been for a long time, before America, before the black bird of the family condition had landed on her shoulder—kickers. Cotton. OC. Orange County. OxyContin.

Back home it had been easy to get the supplies but even in America there was always a doctor who would bend the rules for a star. She was told she was living dangerously, playing with fire, but the scripts for the time-release drug were written for her nevertheless. To add recreational opioids to the meds she was taking for her mental health was extremely ill-advised, she was advised, but the scripts went on being written. Words like life-threatening, respiratory arrest, and death were used, but the scripts were still written and the pharmacies handed out the painkillers, no problem.

As a cursory glance at the contents of her bathroom cabinet would reveal even to the untutored layperson, Miss Salma R was almost as expert in pharmaceuticals as her compliant pharmacist, so she knew about the dangers of misuse. Crushing, chewing, snorting, or injecting the dissolved product will result in the uncontrolled delivery of oxycodone and can result in overdose and death. She knew that. But oh dear she did misuse it. She did not inject the dissolved product, because she was squeamish about needles, plus the tracks would be bad for business. But the uncontrolled delivery of oxycodone was exactly what she wanted. So, regrettably, she crushed, she chewed! Sometimes, it’s true, she even snorted! How shocked, how disappointed in her her legion of admirers would have been! Or not, of course. As we have noted, she was explicit about many of her vulnerabilities. Not this one; but maybe her fans would just have added it to the list and loved her even more. At any rate, very few people knew about her habit. Rumpelstiltskin knew. Yosemite Sam knew. Another reason to fire him, though he might try to blackmail her. He would be unwise to try that. She was a powerful woman. He would know it was unwise to try that.

He did try, in his newly controlling way, to stop her. She shrugged off his advice. “I’ve been doing this for so long,” she said, “I’m an expert in self-medication.” When she said this he had tossed his long red hair. She had never seen a man toss his hair, so this got her attention.

“Whenever somebody says that,” he told her, as his hair subsided in slow-motion as if he were in a L’Oréal commercial, “I think, there are a lot of dead experts in self-medication. I think, Heath Ledger.”

“Toss your hair again,” she said. “How do you manage to do that slow-motion thing?”

He gave up and grinned. “Because I’m worth it,” he said.

If we must get into the dark details, for some while now it hadn’t actually been OxyContin itself. There had been a change in the formula which made it harder to use. When she tried to crush the new OxyContin OP tablets, they resisted, becoming a gummy mess that was hard to chew and impossible to snort. She tried burning them in her microwave. She tried soaking them in acetone, baking them, freezing them. It was frustrating. She had turned to Perc30s and Roxies, which were thirty milligrams each of pure oxycodone (you could get OxyContin tablets containing up to eighty milligrams, so she needed larger quantities of these lower-dosage painkillers). Lately there had also been Opana and other, similar versions of oxymorphone. As she said, she had become an expert. None of the replacements were as satisfying as the old Oxys. Why did the world have to change? She needed to find a new solution. There were people who had been driven to heroin by the change in the Oxy tablets, but heroin scared her. The word “heroin” scared her. She wouldn’t go there. The things she had now were workable, they would do, but the old stuff was the best. Take me away, she thought when she was alone in her bed at night and the painkillers were easing her spirit’s pain, to those old Cotton fields back home.

When she told her closest people she was having electroconvulsive shock treatment, they reacted badly. You have to stop, they said. Electricity? You can’t do that to yourself, it’s like torture. I’m not conscious when they do it, she explained. This isn’t mad scientist stuff, it’s medicine. But in a way it did feel like the stuff of fantasy. After the sessions she felt clearer, more in control, and kept seeing clear images of tiny evil gremlins in her brain being electrocuted by the voltage, screaming and tossing as they dissolved into puffs of smoke. She saw tiny green goblins and stringlike snakes burning between the spiderwebs of her synapses. She imagined her brain as a clanking malfunctioning machine filled with cogwheels and levers, with, literally, a number of screws loose, and the electricity as a superhero zooming around it, tightening nuts and bolts, adjusting chains, getting everything to pull together. The Incredible Flash, miniaturized and sent in to do the much-needed repair work. It felt like a Christmas visit from Sanity Claus. (She heard Chico Marx laughing, Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! You can’t fool me. There ain’t no Sanity Claus! But there was, there was. He was a voltage-powered elf who cleaned up your sanity.)