Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

But.

This doesn’t look like New York City, not at any point in its history. This is a different place. The tower standing over there, it isn’t big enough. Did everything get miniaturized when I wasn’t looking? Honey, I shrunk the world? I call out to him and make him get out of bed and take a look. “Where the hell are we,” I ask him, “and how did we get here?” I’m freaked out, and he hears it in my voice.

“Tulsa, Oklahoma (pop. 403,090),” he says, and he’s using his kind, soothing Dad voice. “Is there a problem?”

I can’t believe what he’s saying. “Yes, there’s a problem,” I say. “What happened to Amarillo? Isn’t this the Amarillo Drury Inn? Isn’t that where we checked in last night? And by the way, how come there’s a Twin Tower over there?”

“There are no Drury locations in Oklahoma,” says he. “This is the Tulsa DoubleTree.”

I lunge past him to grab the notepad by the phone. DoubleTree by Hilton, Tulsa, it reads. I’m losing my mind. Can stuff like this happen now?

HE’S BEHAVING AS IF nothing happened. “Yes, we drove here,” he says, “you were sleeping, you don’t remember? The elevator, you were pleased to be up high for once, you crashed. It’s bizarre that you don’t remember at all.”

I look at him hard. I’m trying to see if he’s gaslighting me. “It’s not the first time,” I say.

“What isn’t?” he asks.

“This location dislocation,” I say.

He just shakes his head. “Have some coffee,” he suggests. “It will clear your thoughts.”

“What’s the date?” I ask him, and he tells me. This is worse. This is not the day after yesterday. How did we get to September 11 already? It’s fucked up.

And of course a part of me is thinking, Maybe I’m not as fully human as I thought. Maybe there are blackouts, moments of nonexistence, bugs in the program. Maybe I just freeze like a FaceTime image when the Wi-Fi’s weak and then eventually unfreeze. Is that what he wants me to think? Because that way I have to defer to him at all times, is that what he wants, a deferential, non-independent-minded kid? Am I getting paranoid? You bet I am. And then I think of something even worse. That insula of mine is working overtime and coming up with nothing but bad news. Maybe, according to my insula, this is the way things are these days in America: that for some of us, the world stopped making sense. Anything can happen. Here can be there, then can be now, up can be down, truth can be lies. Everything’s slip-sliding around and there’s nothing to hold on to. The whole thing has come apart at the seams. For some of us, who have started seeing the stuff the rest of us are too blind to see. Or too determined not to see it. For them, it’s shrug, business as usual, the Earth’s still flat and the climate still isn’t changing. Down there on the street, cars full of the shruggers are driving around, shrugger pedestrians are walking to work, the ghost of Woody Guthrie is walking its ribbon of highway singing this land was made for you and me. Even Woody hasn’t heard the end-of-the-world news.

“Anyway,” I say, “you haven’t explained that .”

I’m pointing at the tower which is the ghost of the other tower, what is that doing in fucking Oklahoma. And of course he has an explanation for that too. It’s well known, it has a name and a street address, it was built by the same architect, Yamasaki, and it’s supposed to be a smaller-scale replica. Move along, kid. Nothing to see here. Calm down. Let’s get some eggs.

I’m beginning to understand why people get religion. Just to have something solid that doesn’t change into a slippery snake without a word of warning. Something eternal: how comforting when you can’t trust yourself to wake up in the same town you went to sleep in. Metamorphosis is frightening, revolutions end up killing more people than the regimes they overthrew, a change is not as good as a rest. I don’t know how many people there are out there who have started seeing what I’m seeing, experiencing what I’m experiencing, but I bet I’m not the only one. In which case there are a lot of frightened people out there. A lot of terrified visionaries. Even the prophets, when visions started talking to them, at first thought they were going mad.

He’s frightened too. Daddy Q. After Lake Capote, something happened to that innocent trust in people he always had. Maybe things haven’t fully come apart for him, not yet, but I know he’s shaken. Let’s see how he goes forward. If he does. I’m watching him.

Also, I’m going to start looking out for those people. The ones like me with the end time in their eyes.

“In the Valley of Love,” Quichotte said, “one’s goal is the pursuit of Love itself, not the small though often beautiful individual love of one man for one woman, or one man for one man, or one woman for one woman, or whatever more contemporary combination you prefer, and in this category I include my love for my own, destined, inevitable, soon-to-be Beloved; nor the admittedly noble love between parent and child, although I readily express my gratitude that such a love has entered my life; nor the love of country, nor even, for those inclined toward such an emotion, the love of God or of gods; but rather Love itself, the purity of the grand essential phenomenon, the subject unattached to any specific object, the heart of the heart of the heart, the eye of the storm, the driving force of all human and much animal nature, and therefore of life itself. One’s goal is the shedding of mental obstacles that prevent one from being flooded with the glorious universal, Love as Being. It is a goal, therefore, that requires of us the absolute and irreversible abandonment of reason, for love is without reason, above it and beyond it; it comes without a rational explanation and lives on when there is no reason for it to survive.”

It was morning in the Billy Diner, “Tulsa’s go-to for breakfast,” and he had ordered green eggs and ham. Sancho got involved with a big plate of huevos rancheros. They looked ordinary, an older guy and his son or maybe even grandson, eating an unsurprising morning meal, but they were attracting attention. It was as if, Sancho thought, that white lady’s pointing finger had put the mark of Cain on them both, and now wherever they went there would be suspicion and hostility.

Until this point in his brief life he had not thought of himself as Other , as worthy of disapproval simply by virtue of being who he was. Well, of course, in reality, he was totally Other, a supernatural entity plucked out of nowhere by Quichotte’s desire and the grace of the cosmos, he was as Other as it was possible to be, but that wasn’t the Other these people were disapproving of, the Other toward whom the white lady had pointed that accusing finger. He was trying to imagine himself into being a regular young human guy in a lumberjack shirt and blue jeans and boots, a dude who was discovering that he liked the music of Justin Timberlake, Bon Jovi, John Mellencamp, and Willie Nelson. He did not like hip-hop or bhangra or sitar music or the blues. He liked Lana Del Rey. But he was learning for the first time the potentially lethal otherness of the skin. “Keep your voice down,” he said. “Everyone can hear you.”

When Quichotte adopted his declamatory manner to pontificate on whatever was on his mind, his voice frequently rose to public-meeting levels, a fact of which he was happily unaware. The diner was not crowded but those eyes that were there to see turned in his direction, those ears that were there to hear involuntarily heard what he had to say, those mouths that were not full of food were saying things that weren’t quite loud enough to hear, and those foreheads that were there to frown crumpled into uncomprehending, but nevertheless inimical, folds.