Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

But whoa, this is what I said to him. Inheritance? You have an actual inheritance?

Yes.

All this time, you’ve actually had—what—a lot of money in the bank?

Some money, yes.

But we still end up sharing a room in the Blue Yorker motel? That’s fucked up.

This was our dialogue. He tells me for the one millionth time that he’s going through these valleys of purification so that he can “merit the love of the Beloved,” and that extravagance and love of material things is the opposite of the Way. And I say, would it be too much of a fucking extravagance for me to get my own fucking room?

He says, don’t use language like that when you’re talking to me. So now we’re on bad terms too.

And so here’s what I need help with. Are there unforgivable things? Unforgivable acts, unforgivable words, unforgivable bits of behavior? As the new kid on the block I have my share of moodiness and maybe brattishness, but is there anything I could say that he, “Dad,” couldn’t forgive? Or this girl I dream about. Have I already been unforgivable with her, hitting on her when she was grieving? Is it already too late and thirty years from now, forty years from now, we’ll maybe run into each other somewhere and she’ll say, you know, I liked you, and if only you hadn’t done that thing then maybe we could have had something together, but you did that thing and I couldn’t forgive it. I’m looking at Daddy Q filled with uncertainty about calling his sister, staring at his phone, not calling the number, trying to decide if he should write first, or go the other way and just show up at her door and fall on his knees and ask to be forgiven. I don’t see it. Half a lifetime or more away from your own flesh and blood because of what? Some bad words that didn’t even have any bad effects? Surely that can’t be right?

Suppose there’s a God. Is he an unforgiving God? And if we ought to try to be like him, as we’re told we should, should we be unforgiving too?

QUICHOTTE, A MAN UNUSED to intimate human interactions, but convinced in his heart that until he had faced his sister he would be unready to face his Beloved, did what he always did at moments of confusion or crisis. He stayed in his room and watched TV. The images on the screen calmed and comforted him, and felt true in a way that New York City never had. The city had always struck him as being chaotic, formless, overcrowded, harsh, and possessed of no dominant narrative line. On TV the sitcoms, the soaps, the reality shows, were in sharp contrast to the hurly-burly outside the Blue Yorker motel. They moved as if on tramlines through their well-established moves, twists, and cliffhangers, and arrived at satisfying resolutions. This was what Quichotte wanted of life, shapeliness and firm conclusions. What else was his quest but an effort to extract hidden meaning from the world and by doing so earn himself the happy ending for which he so desperately yearned? He didn’t spend much time on the news and information channels, but as he surfed by them he saw that they, too, sought to impose meaning on the maelstrom of events, and that comforted him. A couple of days sitting there quietly being reassured by the dark metropolitan plot lines of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (which he had failed to give up; nobody’s perfect) might give him some New York rhythm and the strength to do what he had to get done. He put twenty-dollar bills in Sancho’s pocket and sent him to walk the streets alone. “It’s not so warm anymore,” he told his son. “Here. Take my coat.”

Once the youth had left, Quichotte began channel hopping. What caught his attention on this occasion was not his typically favored fare, but an interview with the celebrated American scientist, entrepreneur, and billionaire of Indian origin Evel Cent. The name Evel Cent was itself an invention, perhaps derived, Quichotte surmised, from the more Indian-sounding Awwal Sant, or something similar. Slick-haired, slender, and underslept, this reinvented man looked every inch like a Bollywood movie star moving from handsome youth into a slightly ragged middle age, and spoke in fast spiky riffs as if hopped up on methedrine, unapologetically using a mixture of the difficult modern vocabulary of high technology and the lingo of modern dystopian fantasy, as if to say, I don’t care if you understand me or not, but I know how to get your attention if I choose to do so. Evel perhaps came from the great daredevil Knievel, and Cent was money, and there was the meaning of his name staring everyone in the face. Although the sound of the name gave off a different odor. Evel Cent, a bad stink. To some people that was what he was, an unpleasant self-promoting capitalist fart, but to others, mostly young others, he seemed like a kind of prophet, and here he was on television, doing a prophet’s work while also justifying the opinions of those who thought him a phony egotist skunk.

What he was talking about today was nothing less than the end of the world, what he described as the growing instability of the continuum or gestalt, which, if the trend continued, he declared, would lead to the crumbling into nothing of the whole of space-time. He would, he said, bring forward the science to support this claim at the proper time. For the moment all he would say was that his admittedly alarming claim was backed by teams of astrophysicists working at the leading universities, including several Nobel laureates. The evidence of disintegration was still inadequate, but it was there. There was much work to do to establish the causes, the extent, and the likely rate of expansion of the Instability. But of its existence he had no doubt at all. The question was, would the human race take this lying down and go meekly into oblivion, or would we, could we, do something about it?

Quichotte thought, The man himself looks like a once beautiful entity that is beginning to fray at the edges.

Evel Cent moved smoothly from eschatology to sales pitch. He and his teams were working on an astonishing project which he called NEXT. NEXT stood for Neighbor Earth Xchange Technology. The concept of parallel space-time continuums, parallel universes and therefore parallel Earths, was no longer disputed by any serious physicists. The question was, where were they, and how could we get there from here? If our universe crumbled into space dust, might we not rescue ourselves by traveling in new kinds of vessels that could jump toward an alternative universe that was still stable? This! he said, now speaking in a series of exclamations accompanied by a jabbing forefinger, is! My dream! A new! Home! For Humanity!

Quichotte was electrified by Evel Cent’s performance. Had he not himself recently written to his Beloved and predicted the end of things? His own inspiration had been love, love as the perfect culmination and therefore conclusion of all things, and perhaps what Evel Cent and his teams of geniuses had perceived was that he, Quichotte, was nearing his goal, and the universe was preparing its last rites in response! Science was confirming what love had driven him intuitively to understand.

This was big. He needed to think about this. He switched off the television set. Something else nagged at his broken memory, something about this man, this Evel Cent. Had they met?

THIS WAS THE DAY on which he began to draft letters to his sister.

Dear H.T. (his first attempt began),

This after a long silence comes from your airhead brother, in the hope that blood may prove thicker than air, and that we may meet again in loving fashion. Socrates, too, was considered an airhead, by the way. In Aristophanes’ play The Clouds, Socrates floats overhead in a balloon basket, getting high so he can elevate his thoughts. At first this seems to mean his wisdom is not down-to-earth. On the other hand, it is only from Socrates’ ivory tower (or basket) that he can put the earth into perspective. Having his head in the clouds grounds him. I do not compare myself to the great philosopher except to say that I, too, have been Johnny Head-in-Air. I, too, have tried to elevate my thoughts.