Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

Please do not forget, I was literally born yesterday. Well, literally, a little before yesterday, but you get my point. I’m a lot younger than I look, because I’m growing up fast. Also my head is full of him, his version of everything, so it’s hard for me to stand outside and see him for what he is. Even now, after I Pinocchioed myself into flesh and blood, I can’t see myself as a being that’s totally apart from him. I’m still more a-part-of than apart-from, see. I hate to say it, because it’s easy to observe he’s not the best of captains, but he’s still the one steering the ship. I’m thinking now about the hunt for the great white whale. Obvs the only way I know about this is that he (a) read the book in a motel room sometime when the TV was on the fritz, or, yes, this is the right answer, (b) he watched Gregory Peck, Richard Basehart, and Leo Genn in the old movie on AMC back in the wall-to-wall rerun days before Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead . Anyway, here’s my thought. The mad captain who’s obsessed by the whale dies with the whale along with his crew who are almost as whale-crazy as he is. Ishmael, the one crew member who isn’t obsessed, the one character who’s just along for the ride, it’s just a job to him, he’s the one who lives to tell the tale. From which we learn the lesson that detachment is the key to survival. Obsession destroys the possessed. Something like that. So if the old Cruze is our Pequod then I guess Miss Salma R is the big fish and he, “Daddy,” is my Ahab.

Which leads me to inquire: Did she do something to him sometime? Did she bite off his metaphorical leg? Which is a sex metaphor, right. Leg being obvs a what’s the word. Euphemism. A stand-in word for Some Other Limb. And wooden leg being a term containing the word wood. (Hahaha, laughing-face-with-tears-coming-out-of-the-eyes emoji.) Or: is it just her being in the world and ignoring him that makes him feel, what’s the word, wooden-legged? If the Beloved is oblivious to the lover, might the lover want to hunt her down and harpoon her? Might he want to end up tied to her by harpoon ropes and drown with her ecstatically in the black depths of the sea? From hell’s heart I stab at thee. Interesting, no?, that that’s the line from the book that stuck in his head (and therefore I have it in mine)? Which leads to the million-dollar question: What does he want to do with her if/when he ever gets close enough to do anything (which is pretty fucking improbable)? Kiss or kill? There are bits of his head I don’t have access to. The answer to my question may lie in those hidden bits.

Follow-up question: Why are there bits of his head that deny me access? How does this being-a-part-of-him thing actually work? Okay, I’m guessing here, but here’s the way I’m looking at it. I see myself as a visitor in his inner world, and I see that world as an actual place, with, like, cities and countryside and lakes and such. With transportation systems. And across a lot of that world I have no obstacles, I can roam about freely and have access to everything he has access to, to episodes in his past, and shows he’s watched, and books he’s read, and people he has known, and the whole what’s the word. Population. Of his memories and knowledge and thoughts and maybe even dreams. But as I see more and more clearly, he isn’t well in the head, and I reckon the parts I can’t see are the crazy parts, the parts that are so messed up that the gateways to them are blocked, so ruined that the houses in there have fallen down, like what you see on TV about bombed-out war zones, in, like, Syria. Those parts are like scrambled jigsaw puzzles, or fogbound, or just destroyed, there aren’t any planes landing there, the roads are fucked, and maybe they’re land-mined also, the whole area is sealed off by, for example, let’s say, UN peacekeeping forces, the blue helmet dudes, what do they call them. Smurfs. Which means there’s no entry. Not unless the Smurfs let you in.

I think we’re both disturbed by what happened at Lake Capote. Daddy Q looks like his thoughts are whirling around him like windmills. Right now he just seems lost. After the bird splat at the lake I thought, fine, at least now we’re going somewhere. New York or bust. Start spreading the news. We’re heading there like everyone does, to be loved or broken, to be born again or to die. What else is there to do that’s worth doing? Nothing. There’s a woman waiting there for him. She doesn’t know she’s waiting but she is. Or she does know but she isn’t waiting, she doesn’t care, and when he learns that lesson then that will be the end of him. And meanwhile, if I may what’s the word, interject: What about me? Maybe this adventure could have someone in it for me? That’s what I’m interested in. I have an imaginary girlfriend in my head and I need to turn her into a real one. She’s walking the New York streets and she’s lonely just like me, and wait, what do I see? Is she walking back to me?…That’s my pretty-woman dream-balloon right there but his behavior is bursting it.

After the confrontation at Lake Capote it’s like the balance of his mind got disturbed. If he was at least partly clear-minded before, he’s all unclear now. “New York” seems to have become a vague concept. “Sure, sure,” he mutters when I ask him. “We’ll get there. It’s like the valleys,” he says, “it’s a state of mind.” Most days, now, all he wants is a motel and a TV—that’s the world that’s real to him, and this world, the one with unfriendly white ladies in it, is what he wants to shut out—and sometimes I think that’s all there’s going to be, this endless drifting and watching and no arriving, an Odyssey without an Ithaca, without a Penelope, and myself a displaced Telemachus doomed to wander with him, far from any idea of destination or home, far, I have to repeat this, from girls.

I’m new here. I’m trying to understand how the world works, his world, the only one available to me. The world according to Quichotte. I’m trying to get a sense of the normal, but it keeps dissolving around me. On TV, because (having no option) I’m watching a lot of TV myself now, everybody seems to know what normal is, and at the same time nobody agrees. I’m using the remote to find out.

“Is this what’s normal?” I ask him. “A couch in a living room with a staircase behind it and an armchair to the side, and a father in the armchair and a mom in the kitchen and teenage children rushing in and out wanting sandwiches and quarreling but every thirty minutes minus commercials there’s a group hug?”

“Yes,” he says. “Life is like this for normal people.”

“Or,” I say, “is normal a couch in a living room with a staircase behind it and an armchair to the side and a loud woman’s big comeback killed by a tweet referencing Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes ?”

“That’s a less normal normal,” he says.

Zap. Sports channel. Normal is nine innings, four balls, three strikes, somebody wins, somebody loses, there’s no such thing as a tie. Zap. Normal is unreal people, mostly rich unreal people, having sex with rappers and basketball players and thinking of their unreal family as a real-world brand, like Pepsi or Drano or Ford. Zap. News channels. Normal is guns and the normal America that really wants to be great again. Then there’s another normal if your skin color is the wrong color and another if you’re educated and another if you think education is brainwashing and there’s an America that believes in vaccines for kids and another that says that’s a con trick and everything one normal believes is a lie to another normal and they’re all on TV depending where you look, so, yeah, it’s confusing. I’m really trying to understand which this is America now. Zap zap zap. A man with his head in a bag being shot by a man without a shirt on. A fat man in a red hat screaming at men and women also fat also in red hats about victory, We’re undereducated and overfed. We’re full of pride over who the f*ck knows. We drive to the emergency room and send Granny to get our guns and cigarettes. We don’t need no stinkin’ allies cause we’re stupid and you can suck our dicks. We are Beavis and Butt-Head on ’roids. We drink Roundup from the can. Our president looks like a Christmas ham and talks like Chucky. We’re America, bitch. Zap. Immigrants raping our women every day. We need Space Force because Space ISIS. Zap. Normal is Upside-Down Land. Our old friends are our enemies now and our old enemy is our pal. Zap, zap. Men and men, women and women in love. The purple mountains’ majesty. A man with an oil painting of himself with Jesus hanging in his living room. Dead schoolkids. Hurricanes. Beauty. Lies. Zap, zap, zap.