Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

No, that was plainly too vain and self-regarding. He stopped, crumpled this absurd effort into a ball, and tossed it away. He tried again:

Dear H.T.,

For a long time, in my younger days, my favorite book was Mr. R. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (I wish they would make a limited drama series out of ZAAMM, but that’s by the by.) Now that I myself have embarked on a journey across America toward you—yes! I deeply hope that it will not prove to be in vain!—and accompanied by my son—yes! Another thing to tell you about when we meet!—I have been thinking about Mr. R. Pirsig again, and, through Mr. R. Pirsig, about Mr. A. Einstein, whom he quotes as follows: “Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world. He then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it….He makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and serenity which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience….The supreme task…is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them….” I must confess that my personal cosmos no longer brings me serenity or peace, yet I long for them, I long to be in harmony with the whole multitudinous world, and I have understood—very late!—but I hope and pray not too late!—that I can only find the peace for which I long by making peace with you. I am learning that everything is connected, and that includes us.

This, too, he crumpled up and discarded. What a nincompoop he was! What did Einstein have to do with anything happening between the Trampoline and himself? Why could he not speak simply, and from the heart, without wrapping his plea in such highbrow fol-de-rol? He made a third attempt:

Dear H.T.,

It may amuse you to learn that in my antiquity I have become a seeker after wisdom, and beyond wisdom, love,

…he began, but then stopped, and leapt to his feet, because Sancho tumbled into the room, his face bloodied and his clothes torn, having been badly beaten.

AS HE WALKED AROUND the city wearing his father’s cashmere coat, Sancho remembered the white lady at Lake Capote and the unusual leather choker she was wearing around her neck, with a brass buckle at the side, and what looked like a few dangling inches of broken leash. He had thought then it looked like a dog collar, and it wasn’t at all the kind of fashion item a lady like that would wear. At the time, he had dismissed it from his thoughts. Maybe, in their haste to leave the campsite and the heightened tensions of that moment, he had been mistaken.

Now, however, he began to see that there had been no mistake. Or, to put it another way: he began to realize that he was seeing things that other people couldn’t see. One day on Tenth Avenue, a dozen blocks down from the Blue Yorker motel, he saw a drunk woman stamping on a rainbow. This was outside a store selling crystals and incense. A ray of light from the store passed through a prism dangling in the storefront window and created this fortuitous spectrum on the sidewalk. The drunk woman, a big woman dressed all in black and missing several teeth, was trying to smash the rainbow with her feet and swearing profusely as she did so, unleashing a torrent, a drool, of homophobic abuse. Okay, that didn’t have to be a vision, but then there was a change in the light, maybe someone moved a lamp in the store, and the rainbow disappeared, but so did the cursing woman. As if the one engendered the other. The rainbow engendered the hatred. Yeah, he thought. That’s fucked up. Another day, on Madison Avenue among all the clothing stores, he saw three figures dressed all in white including white pointed hoods. That was impossible. This was New York. The Klan wasn’t here at all, let alone wearing couture hoods on Madison. He crossed the avenue to get a closer look but the well-dressed crowd merged briefly ahead of him and then parted again and they were gone. This was insane, Sancho thought. It created in him a kind of ontological dread. There were days—it was just about every day, in point of fact—when the issue of his own reality came back at him and haunted him. His coming into being had been so exceptional, his transition from being a dependent sub-clause of the long sentence that was Quichotte into an independent existence continued to feel so improbable, that he had nightmares about having it all come apart, about his very being flickering like a faulty image on TV, then disintegrating and vanishing; about, in short, death. The arrival of these sightings—he resisted the word visions, which increased his sense of his own unreality—and the increase in their frequency was alarming. He did not tell Quichotte what he was seeing. Some things were better kept to oneself.

Then while he was walking across the park, kicking at the fallen leaves, as darkness fell—not the smartest of moves, he afterwards allowed—he saw, coming toward him, a group of three middle-aged men in suits, white men, carrying briefcases, ordinary and inoffensive in every way—except that around their necks were the same collars he had seen on the white lady of Lake Capote, the same buckles, the same lengths of dangling leash. Who were these dog-collared people? Was this some sort of nationwide cult he had stumbled across?

“You’re staring at us. Why are you staring at us?” The men had stopped, facing Sancho, blocking his path.

Sancho was placatory. “No, sir, not staring. Just walking. Going that way,” he said, pointing.

“He was definitely staring,” said the second man. “That was impolite. But these people, they don’t know manners.”

“They come over here and we pay for their health care,” said the third man.

“We worry about the safety of our womenfolk,” said the first man.

“We don’t know when one of them will go rogue and attack everything we hold dear. We do know they worship alien gods,” said the second man.

“Speak up,” said the third man. “Why are you even looking at us? You people shouldn’t do that. You should not have done that.”

This was impossible, Sancho thought. These were the three least likely-looking thugs in America. These people couldn’t possibly be dangerous. These people were gray, harmless, dull. He took a deep breath and spoke up.

“Your neckwear caught my attention,” he said. Mistake, he immediately realized as he saw their body language change. Moving almost in unison, they set down their briefcases. One of them began to remove his coat.

“Our neckwear,” the first man said.

“Excuse me,” Sancho said. “I understand it’s impolite to stare. I didn’t mean to. But I’ve seen it once before.”

“He has seen our neckwear before,” the second man said. “Can you believe this boy? He’s something. He’s unreal.”

“We’re not wearing any neckwear,” the third man said. “It’s too hot for fucking neckwear. What neckwear is he talking about?”

“I don’t know,” the first man said. “I will ask. What fucking neckwear are you talking about, boy?”

Sancho was bewildered, and now also afraid, and in fear and bewilderment he pointed. “The collars,” he said, “with the broken leashes.”

“Extraordinary,” said the second man. “He compares us to dogs.”

“He thinks we are dogs,” the third man said, “dogs that have broken their leashes.”

“Savage, dangerous dogs that have been unleashed,” the first man said.