Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“Listen to me,” Sancho whispered urgently. “Eat up and let’s go. They are looking at us like we’re ghosts, by which I don’t mean that we’re invisible, more that we’re spooking them. We’re the kind of ghosts people want to bust. Because we’re here they think the diner is a haunted house. You can see it in their eyes. Where’s Bill Murray when you need him, that’s what they’re thinking. Maybe we need to get out of the red states, you know what I mean? What’s the nearest blue state? Maybe let’s go there.”

There were moments when Quichotte seemed to be living in a dream, oblivious to his surroundings. Sancho, for all his fictionality, at such times felt like he was the real person and Quichotte the figment. “In Europe,” Quichotte airily remarked, “the colors of political affiliation are reversed, and so blue is the color of conservatives, reactionaries, and capitalists, while red stands for communism, socialism, democratic socialism, and social democracy. I ask myself sometimes: what is the color of love? It’s hard to find one that isn’t used up already. Saffron is the color of Hindu nationalism, green is the color of Islam, except for one or two places where they prefer red, and black is the preferred color of Islamic fanatics. Pink is now associated with women’s protests and the whole rainbow is the sign of gay pride. White, I don’t think of as a color, except in the racial context. So maybe brown. Brown, like us. That must be the color of love.”

The mood in the diner was turning decidedly ugly. The frowns were deeper, the eyes were blazing, the ears were burning, and there were fists, Sancho noted, that had begun to clench. “Will you shut up,” he hissed at Quichotte. “You’re going to get us killed.”

Quichotte stood up unsteadily and spread his arms. “I abandon all reason,” he cried, “and open myself to love.”

A gentleman of impressive proportions, both vertical and lateral, now approached. He wore a leather vest without a shirt and upon the graying hair on his chest there rested a gold medallion bearing the diner’s name in bas-relief. “I’m Billy,” said he, “and you two are out of here in sixty seconds or less, otherwise one of these fine folks around you just might remove one of those guns of theirs from their holsters and utilize it, and the consequences would be bad for my décor.”

Quichotte turned toward this Billy, looking blank. “They would shoot us,” he asked, “because of my declaration of universal love?”

Sancho was pulling on Quichotte’s arm, literally dragging him toward the door.

“I’ll have no talk of communism and Islam under my roof,” Billy said. “You’re lucky I don’t shoot you myself.”

“Fuck you,” said one of the mouths that were not, or not overly, full of food. “You look like somebody rubbed shit in your faces so deep you can’t wash it off.”

“Fuck you,” said another of the mouths. “Get out of my country and go back to your broke bigoted America-hating desert shitholes. We’re gonna nuke you all.”

“Fuck you,” said a third mouth whose ears had at least momentarily been listening. “And don’t you fucking talk about love when you so filled up with hate.”

“Fuck you,” a fourth mouth said, and this may have been a relative of the white lady at Lake Capote. “And where did you hide your turbans and fucking beards?”

When they were out on the sidewalk Quichotte said in some bemusement, “I didn’t pay the check.” Sancho guided him carefully away, as one guides a blind man or a fool. “I think,” he said, “breakfast was on the house.”

ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY MILES further north they arrived in the town of Beautiful, Kansas (pop. 135,473), ranked by CNN and Money magazine as the twelfth-best city to live in in the United States. In south Beautiful, on East 151st Street at Rey-Nard Shops, you could find one of the three locations of the popular Powers Bar & Grill chain. Quichotte had not intended to make a stop in Beautiful. After they left Tulsa his plan was to drive north on U.S. 169 and eventually turn toward Lawrence, Kansas (pop. 95,358), a liberal-minded enclave in that conservative state, where he had booked a twin-bedded room at the inexpensive Motel 6. Because of the unpleasantness in Tulsa he drove uninterruptedly and fast, too fast, in spite of Sancho’s repeated requests that he slow down, and by the time they reached the Beautiful town line they were both tired and hungry and needed the bathroom. They pulled into the Powers parking lot just as a ball game was beginning on the TVs in the bar. It looked like a welcoming place, crowded with good-natured baseball fans. Also, “Look,” Sancho said to Quichotte, “brown people.” There were two South Asian men sitting together at the bar, enjoying themselves, deep in conversation. Quichotte and Sancho used the restroom and ordered a little food. They waved at the two Indian men, who smiled and nodded.

“Salaam aleikum,” Quichotte called across the room.

“Namaskar,” the two Indian men replied.

Quichotte preferred not to intrude on their privacy any further. Soon after that a drunk man started shouting at the Indian men a good deal less cordially, calling them “fucking Iranians,” and “terrorists,” asking them if their status was legal, and screaming, “Get out of my country.” It was less than twelve hours since Quichotte and Sancho had been screamed at in the same words, and so, to their shame, they retreated into a corner and stood in the shadows. The drunk man was escorted off the premises and everyone was relieved. However, before Quichotte and Sancho had finished their meal, the man returned with a gun and shot the two Indian men and also a white man who tried to intervene. Quichotte and Sancho were unharmed, but for a long time they sat there trembling and unsteady and unable to continue on their way.

Much later that night, when they were safely settled into their room in Lawrence, the TV told them that one of the Indian men had died but the other two men were expected to survive their wounds, and that the killer had been captured drinking in a bar in Carter, Missouri (pop. 8,844), which was around forty miles away from Beautiful. He had become a heavy drinker after his father died a year and a half earlier. He worked as a dishwasher in a pizza parlor, a badly fallen state for a man who was a Navy vet and had once been an air traffic controller. Quichotte watched the news in a distracted, closed-off state, pushed by shock into numbness. The only thing that got a response out of him was the news that the murdered man had worked at the Greene company, the tech multinational whose HQ was in Beautiful. “That’s the GPS system we use,” Quichotte said, standing up suddenly. “Greene. We use their GPS.” As if this coincidence was what bonded him to the dead man, what allowed him to feel his death, more deeply than their common ethnicity or the sight of the dead man’s widow on TV asking piteously, “Do we belong here?”

It was Sancho—Sancho, who had not stopped shaking for several hours, and remained on the edge of tears—who made Quichotte face that question. “What do you think?” he said. “Is there a place for us in this America?”

“We have entered the third valley,” Quichotte replied. “This is the Valley of Knowledge, in which all worldly knowledge ceases to be of use and must be discarded.”

“Is there some other sort of knowledge that helps?”

“Only knowledge of the Beloved can save us now,” he replied.

When Quichotte talked this way it showed Sancho that the old fellow was truly cuckoo, and that the route by which he, Sancho, might find his way toward his own goal of full humanity did not lie through his strange progenitor. Quichotte was too lost in the deranged logic of his private universe of antiquated words, mystical thoughts, and TV addictions to be able to function properly, or even grasp what was really going on in the actually existing world around him. Even his improbable beloved, Miss Salma R, was by this point also a creation of words, thoughts, and TV images, no longer real to Quichotte in the way that real things are real: a fantasy, passionately believed in but essentially unattainable, no matter how obsessively pursued. Once you have cast aside belief/unbelief, reason, and knowledge, you’re pretty handicapped in the real world, Sancho reckoned. Who knew what insanity the next “four valleys” might bring? He tried to think, not for the first time, about how he might break away and strike out on his own. He could just walk off, of course—stick out a thumb, hitch a ride, and take whatever came his way, whatever work, and, if he was lucky, whatever girls. The plan always foundered, however, on practicalities. Being an imaginary creature who had crossed the boundary into the real, he had no legal existence. Without (a) a driving license it was hard to get very far on your own. Without (b) a bank account or a debit card, ditto. And there was no way to get (b) without (a), and (a) was quite an obstacle, not least because he had never been behind the wheel of a car. There were two possibilities, as far as he could see: (a) a life of crime, and (b) a miracle. Of the two, (b) seemed the most likely to work. He was, after all, quite a miracle himself. Maybe he still had access to the sphere of the miraculous.