Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

While we are uncovering Salma’s dark secrets we should not lose sight of the fact that Salma continued to be the biggest show of its kind. As well as the lighthearted fare that was the show’s stock-in-trade, and the emotional/confessional material, and the debates on women’s issues of the moment, she had recently introduced a segment called “While Black” intended to highlight the problems faced by persons of color in America, and this had generated much comment, inevitable controversy, and even higher Nielsen ratings. “While Black” invited onto the show the men who had been arrested at a coffee shop because a white member of staff called the police when they asked to use the restroom while black and waiting for a white friend, and the men on whom a white golfer called the police because they were golfing too slowly while black, and the men at a gym on whom a white man at the gym called the police because, well, because they were exercising while black, and the women on whom the police were called because they were shopping for prom dresses while black, or napping in their own dorm common room at an Ivy League college while black, or renting an Airbnb property while black, or sitting in their own airplane seats while black and a white passenger found them to be “pungent.” Such was the power of Salma that the show was able to shame the white accusers who had made the calls to the police into coming along to confess, recognize their own prejudices, apologize, seek forgiveness, hug, and so on. The segment made her a shoo-in for a second Emmy, she was assured, and more importantly was a real contribution to the conversation about race in America. She wanted somebody to hug her when the network bosses told her of their appreciation, someone to take her out for a celebration, to send her flowers and tell her she was wonderful. She wanted love. Instead, she had Anderson Thayer.

When she faced the emptiness of her life she knew that the world would have no sympathy for the way she felt. She was a privileged woman complaining about small things. A woman whose life was lived on the surface, who had chosen superficiality, had no right to complain about the absence of depth. Human life was lived between two chasms, a Russian writer had said, the one that preceded our birth, “the cradle rocks above an abyss,” and the one we were all “heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).” She was suffering from some sort of existential panic. She needed to put it away. But on the days after the electricity, as the confusion faded and her memory returned, she felt the presence of gaps. There were missing days, missing pages in the book of life. She reached back for childhood, for her mother, for India, and felt the dear remembrances of things past slipping through her fingers like sand. I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought. I have to go back soon, she told herself, I need to reclaim it or it will be gone, I will be gone from it, and nobody will mourn my loss. She thought about Wile E. Coyote rushing out over the chasm and not falling until he looked down. That’s me, her weak voice thought, and then her strong voice answered, Then don’t look down.

She went to work. She made herself available to the Indian media and said she would return soon and was looking out for a suitable vehicle, and within hours of the story running she had a dozen movie scripts to choose from, and expressions of delight from all the top leading men. She initiated a conversation with a major movie studio about making a big-budget Five Eyes movie which she would co-produce and in which she would lead the American defense against a ruthless foreign cyber-attack. The movie executives said, fabulous, and this would be an attack by a mysterious secret organization, right?, like SPECTRE or Kingsman or Hydra or ICE or SWORD. She laughed. “Why should we play it so coy?” she demanded. “Can’t we just call it Russia?” She did cover shoots for half a dozen women’s magazines and sat in on editorial conferences of her own glossy monthly, named S. She took part in amfAR fundraisers and emceed the Robin Hood gala. And back at the Salma offices she told her team, “I want to take myself out of the studio. I want to look out into the reddest parts of red-state America and be the person to whom the bigotry happens.”

“You’re too famous,” they told her, “your recognizability will get in the way.”

“My grandmother the movie legend always told me she had two different ways of walking out of her front door,” she said. “She showed me. First she walked out as the great movie star and everybody went insane, cars crashed into one another, so did people. Then later she walked out ‘as nobody,’ that’s how she put it. And this time nobody looked and she walked down the street unnoticed. My mother learned the trick from her and I learned from them both. I can do this. I can be anonymous and you’ll have hidden cameras and we’ll see what flyover America has to say to a brown woman out there on her own.”

And there was one more new segment. Salma had been deeply affected by a letter from Dr. Fred’s Place in Bloomington, Indiana (pop. 84,465), one of a very small group of freestanding inpatient pediatric hospice facilities in the United States. “There are thirty such houses in the UK,” the letter read, “but if you counted the American locations on the fingers of one hand, you’d have a finger or a thumb to spare.” Palliative care for children with terminal cancer was a difficult area. Many dying children, and their parents, didn’t want the end to come in the sterile atmosphere of a hospital ward, and yet in many cases home care presented problems, and could be prohibitively expensive. Dr. Fred’s created a homelike environment in which families could feel like families, and be given emotional support as well as the necessary medical attention, as they faced what had to be faced. “It would be fantastic,” Dr. Fred wrote, “if you could give the American hospice movement a boost by putting it on your show, and beyond wonderful for the kids if you felt like coming to see them, or sending us one or two of your famous friends.” Two weeks later the whole Salma team arrived in Bloomington and Miss Salma R hosted the show from Dr. Fred’s, accompanied by her good buddies Priyanka Chopra, Kerry Washington, and, yes, Ms. Winfrey too, Oprah!, her very own divine self, in a special guest appearance. They played with the children, they hugged the children’s mothers, and their brothers and sisters. They hugged the fathers too. It was a good day. The cameras got it all.

Near the end of the day, Dr. Fred led Salma to a room set apart from the other rooms. They didn’t go in, looking, instead, through the window inset in the closed door, at a tableau of sorrow, a Chinese family, father, mother, two sisters, gathered around an unconscious teenage boy on his deathbed wearing an Indiana University sweatshirt. There were some patients, Dr. Fred told Salma in a whisper, for whom the pain was so intense that their families wanted them sedated and for the most part unconscious. If they were conscious for brief periods there was a risk that they might suffer breakthrough pain, and so, for these moments, Dr. Fred reluctantly okayed the use of a powerful opioid spray.

“What is that?” Salma asked.

“It’s a version of fentanyl,” Dr. Fred told her, “but because it’s in spray form we can apply it sublingually and it has an immediate effect.”

Miss Salma R grew thoughtful. “That’s one powerful painkiller,” she said after some reflection. “What’s it called?”

“TIRF. Transmucosal immediate-release fentanyl. It comes from SPI.”

“Spy?”

“Ess pee eye,” Dr. Fred explained. “Smile Pharmaceuticals Inc., over in Atlanta. The brand name is InSmile.”