Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“Normal doesn’t feel so normal to me,” I tell him.

“It’s normal to feel that way,” he replies.

This is what I get instead of fatherly wisdom.

Meanwhile, things fall apart as well as people. Countries fall apart as well as their citizens. A zillion channels and nothing to hold them together. Garbage out there, and great stuff out there, too, and they both coexist at the same level of reality, both give off the same air of authority. How’s a young person supposed to tell them apart? How to discriminate? Every show on every network tells you the same thing: based upon a true story. But that’s not true either. The true story is there’s no true story anymore. There’s no true anymore that anyone can agree on. There’s a headache beginning in here. Boom! Here it is.

Ow.

What a time for me to arrive.

Something is going wrong, even I can tell that. Something’s badly off, not only with him, but also with the world outside the motel room. Some error in space and time. The motel room itself is unchanging wherever we are, whatever the name on the illuminated sign above the forecourt. Inside the room things are pretty constant. Twin beds, TV, pizza delivery, floral-print curtains. In the bathroom plastic cups wrapped in plastic bags. Small refrigerator, empty. Nightstand lamps, one bulb working (by his bedside), one not (by mine). Paper-thin walls, so there’s other entertainment if we don’t want to watch TV. (But we do, we always do.) There’s a lot of shouting. People drink in motel rooms from bottles in brown paper bags, and then they shout, they yell their lonely sadness into the empty night, but they also yell at each other (if they aren’t traveling alone), or down the phone, or at the motel staff. (These are few in number, shoulder-shrugging in attitude, just sometimes rapid-silence-inducing large and menacing, but more frequently Tony Perkins-y. Black, white, Hispanic, South Asian Bates Motel Tony Perkinses with small mysterious psycho smiles. I’d be scared of them. I am scared of them. I keep my voice down.) There’s less sex than you’d think. There is some, mostly perfunctory, mostly paid for, the price probably not high. I say probably because at this point sex remains beyond my personal experience. If I had a credit card I might try to rectify that. He has not as yet provided me with usable plastic. Therefore I remain, tragically, angrily, a virgin.

What there mostly is, is snoring. The music of the American nose is a thing to be awestruck by. The machine gun, the woodpecker, the MGM lion, the drum solo, the dog bark, the dog yap, the whistle, the idling car engine, the racing-car turbo booster, the hiccup, the SOS snorts—three short, three long, three short—the long growl of the ocean wave, the more menacing rumble of rolling thunder, the short splash of the sleeping sneeze, the two-tone tennis player’s grunt, the simple breathe-in breathe-out common or garden snore, the constantly surprising erratic snore with unpredictable, randomized intervals, the motorcycle, the lawnmower, the hammer drill, the sizzling frying pan, the log fire, the shooting range, the war zone, the morning cockerel, the nightingale, the fireworks display, the tunnel at rush hour, the traffic jam, the Alban Berg, the Schoenberg, the Webern, the Philip Glass, the Steve Reich, the feedback loop, the static of the untuned radio, the rattlesnake, the death rattle, the castanets, the washboard, the hum. These and others are my nightly friends. Fortunately I am blessed with the gift of sleep. I close my eyes and I’m off. I never remember my dreams. I think that I do not as yet possess the capacity for dreams. I suspect I have no imagination. I reckon I’m a pretty WYSIWYG type.

Which makes it even more unnerving that the world outside the motel room has totally ceased to be straightforward. I’m just going to say this straight out even though it makes me sound like Daddy Q’s not the only one with a screw loose. Here it is: When I wake up in the morning and open the door of the motel room I can’t be sure of which town I’ll find outside, or what day of the week or what month of the year. I can’t even be sure of which state we’ll be in, although I’m in a great state about it, thank you very much. It’s as if we’re standing still and the world is traveling past us. Or maybe the world is TV and I don’t know who’s in charge of the zapper. So maybe there is a God? Is that the third person in here? A God who’s fucking with me and with everybody else for that matter, arbitrarily changing the rules? I thought there were rules about changing the rules. I thought, even if I buy the idea that somebody slash something created all this, isn’t that something slash somebody bound by the laws of creation once it’s slash he’s done creating? Or can he slash it just shrug shoulders and say, no more gravity, and goodbye, we all float off into space? And if this entity—let’s call it God because why not, it’s traditional—can in fact change the rules just because it feels in the mood, let’s understand what exactly is the rule that’s being changed here. There’s a rule that goes, places must remain in the same physical relationship to other places, and if you want to get from one place to the other you’ve got to travel the same distance, full stop, always and forever. You’d think that was a pretty goddamn immutable rule, otherwise what happens to all the roads and trains and planes? How would it be if, for example, you decided to live as far away from your mother-in-law as possible, and then boom, you wake up and open your door and she’s standing on your doorstep with a cake because her house just moved in across the road? How do we even begin to understand what a town is or a city if motels can slide across space and time from one to the other? What happens to population counts and electoral rolls? The whole system collapses, doesn’t it? Is that what You’re after? You’re like the deranged worker with a sledgehammer in the old plumber joke, smashing up company toilets and railway station washrooms and writing up that slogan, how does it go again, if the cistern cannot be changed it must be destroyed. Jesus Christ. It’s the end of the fucking world happening right outside my motel door.

Today, for example. This morning.

Last night I go to sleep in the Drury Inn in Amarillo, Texas (pop. 199,582, if that even means anything anymore), and I dream about yesterday at the Cadillac Ranch art installation out on Route 66, all those fifties Eldorado fins diving into or maybe backing up out of the Texas earth, Cadillac, Cadillac, Long and dark, shiny and black, thank you, Bruce, he’s singing to me in my dream, buddy when I die throw my body in the back, and drive me to the junkyard in my Cadillac. Amarillo’s some kind of a wild dream itself, man, they harvest helium in the fields here and they assemble those nucular weapons over at Pantex, they pack a lot of meat and they eat a lot of beef, they got Emmylou Harris’s lost boyfriend playing the pinball machines, and they all meet down at the Cadillac Ranch. Great dream, I have to say. Fast cars, big sky, hot girls in cutoffs dancing in ten-gallon hats. I’m loving it. And then I wake up and I take a look outside and I almost faint. I’m on a balcony up on maybe the tenth floor, instead of the first floor with the car parked right outside the door of the room. My head spins. Where am I? Where is this exactly? And even more scarily: When is this? Because over there, poking its head up above the transformed streets that don’t look like Amarillo at all, is the old World Trade Center itself. Yeah, the one the planes hit. The Twin Towers, except there’s only one of them. It’s impossible but it’s there. So maybe we somehow time- and space-traveled and we’ve made it to New York, but not New York now. New York then . We’re somehow back on that horrible day and the South Tower fell already which is why I can’t see it.