Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

She started calling her bipolar friends to recommend the treatment. “You should hundred percent get it,” she said. “It’s like spring cleaning. Call me afterwards to tell me how you feel. But include in your message your full name and how we know each other, or I won’t know who you are.” She had quite a few bipolar friends. “We’re like magnets,” she told everyone who would listen. “Depends which poles are up against each other. Attract and cling tight, or repel and flee.” She told her non-bipolar friends to get it too. “It’s the new juicing,” she said. “My double-detox juice. Super super detox detox. The best cleanse there is. Completely allergy-free. No vegetables were harmed in the making of this product.” She started recommending it on the show. “I’m hoping to be the ECT brand ambassador,” she told her studio audience. “I’m auditioning right now, and if I could just remember why I’m standing in front of a crowd of strangers, I could put my hand on my heart—if I could remember where my heart is—and tell you the results are perfect, and I could remember what the results are.”

Privately, she knew that her condition wasn’t particularly funny. She had begun to suffer from acute levels of anxiety and at such times she took refuge in a suite at the Mandarin Oriental hotel on Columbus Circle and made a phone call to Anderson Thayer. “Come here, Rumpelstiltskin,” she said, and he came, and she lay in his arms, wondering if this was the right time to fire him, or maybe she’d wait until tomorrow. If she fired him now he’d get angry, and when he got angry he might take hold of his left foot and rip himself in two, right up the middle.

He was the man who knew too much. He had helped her cover up a scandal that could have derailed her career. There had been a third man after the two husbands. This man—she never used his real name, not even in the most private moments, agreeing always to call him by the fake name he told her he preferred, “Gary Reynolds”—was a political lobbyist and covert operator, an improbable partner for her, a man who claimed to have undertaken black ops projects for successive Republican administrations and to have destabilized and even overthrown three separate governments in Africa. “Gary Reynolds” was like the world of her old TV series come to life. Maybe that was why she fell for him, in spite of his politics. He was a glamorous, dangerous, exciting fiction become fact. She didn’t even care that he told her he “identified as promiscuous.” She didn’t need him around every day, but when he showed up, he was real fun. The Mandarin Oriental suite was their pleasure dome. Yosemite Sam knew about his rival, and Salma could see it irked him, but he said nothing and did his job. Then one night she went to the hotel to meet “Gary,” who had texted her to say he was already there waiting for her, and when she got there he was in bed, naked, and really very dead, indisputably dead, the most dead a dead person could be. On this occasion the suite was booked in his fake name, as it always was for their assignations, backed up by a “Gary Reynolds” credit card, but there were members of staff who recognized her, who knew she was the one who came to see him there. She stayed calm, held it together, just about, and called Anderson Thayer. Rumpelstiltskin, I need you. He came over and she kissed him, once, properly. I need you to fix this, she said. Don’t tell me how, just fix it so it stays fixed. I don’t want to know about it. I just want it done. Do this for me.

He fixed it. Nothing connecting Salma to the death at the Mandarin ever became public. “Gary Reynolds” was buried at Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens beneath a stone bearing his real name, which there is no need to record here, and at once it was as if he had been erased from history. She began to feel a great sense of relief. The scandal had passed her by, like the thunderstorms that skirted Manhattan and did their worst to New Jersey. This was when she first thought of firing Anderson Thayer. The fact that he literally knew where the body was buried, so that firing him from her bed as well as his job could have catastrophic consequences, made it necessary to find a way to do it. Nobody was allowed to have that kind of power over her. She would not permit it. She thought of Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith’s memory-eraser sticks, their neuralyzers, in the Men in Black movies . She needed one of those. Or some real-life equivalent. She looked into the subject and found that researchers at UC Davis had successfully erased memories from the brains of mice by using beams of light, just as the neuralyzers had in the movies. But mice were not human beings. There wasn’t a human version available as yet.

Maybe Anderson Thayer needed ECT. A lot of ECT. Maybe that was the actually existing way to have his memory erased.

When the show was on hiatus she often didn’t get out of bed. She was a recluse in these weeks, and the only way to see her was to ascend into her sanctum, if she permitted you to do so. Her friends, male and female, were invited over to sit on the bed while she ranted about whatever had gotten her goat that day, usually one of her two ex-husbands. These soliloquies could last an hour or more, and it was necessary simply to hear them out. They were the price of admission to her private world, which she had populated with kitsch collectibles of all sorts, the collection of kitsch being her way of disguising her profound uninterest in serious art. She was a secret bidder on auctions of memorabilia from the collections of other talk-show hosts, living and dead, and at these auctions she had acquired one of Babe Ruth’s gloves as well as hats worn by Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, John Wayne, and Mae West. Her vintage jukebox was full of singles by one-hit wonders, “Sugar, Sugar,” “Macarena,” “Spirit in the Sky,” “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” “Mambo No. 5,” “Ice Ice Baby,” “99 Red Balloons,” “Who Let the Dogs Out?” “Video Killed the Radio Star,” “I’m Too Sexy,” “Play That Funky Music,” and “Sea Cruise.” On her walls was her prized collection of Indian street and store signs, Restricted Area for Dead Bodies, Hand Job Nails & Spa, Avoid Victims of Spurious Drinks, Don’t Touch Yourself—Ask the Staff, Do Not Stand on Zoo Fences—If You Fall, Animals Might Eat You And That Might Make Them Sick, Caution Extremely Horny, Beware Ferocious Dogs and Ghosts, Tailor Specialist in Alteration of Ladies & Gents, Go Slow—Accident Porn Area, Drive Like Hell And You Will Get There, and Vagina Tandoori. There was also her Emmy, which she positioned on a bedroom shelf that you couldn’t see if the bedroom door was open.

She was a woman who concealed her secrets behind bedroom doors and comedy masks. Beneath the surface she worried about finding happiness. She was aware that after her two failed marriages and one dead body, she had put up high fences around her heart, and she didn’t know if she would ever meet a man who would persuade her to lower them, or who would be strong enough to demolish her defense system and take her heart by storm. She thought a lot about loneliness, about growing old feeling isolated and alone. On New Year’s Eve she rented a boat to watch the fireworks from the water, and just before the midnight hour, when the display was about to start, she realized that everybody aboard the vessel—the captain, the crew, the assistants, and so on—was in her employ. It’s New Year’s and I have no friends, she thought. I have to pay for people to come and have fun with me.

She had no child. That was another thing. She couldn’t even allow herself to think about that because it would plunge her down a rabbit hole toward grief.