Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“Dogs frothing at the mouth,” the second man said. “Beware of the dogs, am I right?”

“Beware of the fucking dogs,” the third and first men said in unison.

“Because we have been fucking unleashed,” said the second man.

Sancho understood that he had done everything wrong. He had stared when he shouldn’t have stared. He had spoken when he shouldn’t have spoken. Worst of all, he hadn’t run when he should have run. And now they were around him and there was nowhere to run.

And the moral of the story is, he thought, as the punches and kicks began, don’t underestimate gray, dull, middle-aged white men in suits, ever again.

They could easily have killed him, but they didn’t. Maybe he wasn’t worth it. Maybe it was because he was unreal. Maybe it was because they were men who until recently had been tamed and under control and this unleashing, whatever caused it, was something new for them. Maybe they were still getting used to their power. Whatever the reason, they left him on the ground, beaten but alive; they picked up their briefcases, put on their coats, and strolled off into the dusk. “Chimaats!” he called after them. “Khajvuas!” But his voice was too weak for them to hear it. Which was probably just as well.

THE DEMANDS OF PARENTHOOD awoke Quichotte at least partially from the reverie in which he spent the larger portion of his life. He scurried to and fro between the Blue Yorker motel and the local pharmacies and food counters to find hot soup, chicken bowls, cheeseburgers, liniments, Aleve, and bandages, and consequently missed several episodes of The Real Housewives of Atlanta, in spite of his passionate interest in the overly full lips of Kim Zolciak and the firing—alleged! The alleged firing!—of Kenya Moore as a warning to the rest of the cast that they should learn how to keep secrets. Sancho had been lucky. His body was covered in an archipelago of black-and-blues but there didn’t appear to be any bones broken or anything serious damaged inside him. The cashmere coat was dirty, but it, too, had survived. What the boy needed was rest, sympathy, painkillers, and cheeseburgers.

In the trunk of the Chevy Cruze there was a small case containing what remained of the opioid samples Quichotte had carried on behalf of SPI. These he doled out to Sancho in the first few days, but was very careful about quantities. And the sealed container at the bottom of the bag, the one containing the InSmile™ sublingual fentanyl spray, he left sealed and in its place. Sancho recovered quickly, as the young do, but his mood remained dark.

During these days of Sancho’s convalescence, in which they both spent much time in their darkened room, listening to the noises of sexual pleasure filtering through the walls, and, to obscure these noises, turning up the volume while watching (non-pornographic) TV, only to be told by the management that their neighbors were complaining that the high-volume voices of reality stars on the Bravo channel were putting them off, so to speak, their stroke…during these stressful days they didn’t speak much, except when Sancho wanted to express a need, and Quichotte did his best to satisfy it. They were both preoccupied by their thoughts.

Sancho’s thoughts were all of escape. Get me out of here. I don’t care if he’s my father, and loves me, and would be devastated etc., I need to strike out on my own. Way back when we were on the road I thought I might betray him by stealing his beloved Salma from him. I don’t care about that now. The betrayal I need is my freedom. He said none of this aloud, but it bubbled in him like a stew.

Quichotte, by contrast, was full of self-reproach. Sancho’s injuries had plunged the older man into a condition of profound doubt, in which he questioned everything—how he had led his life, and even the hunger for a child that had brought Sancho into being. He had been something close to homeless for a very long time, living out of the trunk of his car with pit stops in cheap motels…what business did such a person have bringing a child into the world? He felt he should apologize to Sancho, but knew that if he did so Sancho would hear it wrongly, would think his father was wishing that he had never been born.

In this way, father caring for son, son receiving his father’s ministrations, they grew further and further apart, and the great quest upon which Quichotte had embarked seemed to recede into the distance. Then, in the middle of the night, while the sex shrieks of his neighbors kept him awake, Quichotte arrived at a moment of complete clarity. Enough of these orgasmic motels! His first and only duty was to provide a better life for his child. He would approach his sister, heal that rift, and together they could provide Sancho with the stable family environment he needed. This was how everything was connected. This was the only way the harmony and peace of the fifth valley could be achieved. And yes, perhaps, once this had been done, the path to the Beloved would be seen. He could not be worthy of the Beloved—how could he be? How could he not have seen that it was ridiculous to think he might be?—until he had proved his ability to do right by his own flesh and blood.

He called her. He didn’t even know if she still had the same number, but he called the one he had, and she replied. A lump rose in his throat and for a moment he couldn’t speak.

“Who is this?” said his sister’s voice.

He didn’t speak.

“I’m hanging up,” said his sister’s voice.

“H.T.?” he said, his own voice trembling.

Now she was silent. Then, “Smile-Smile,” she said. “Is it really you?”

“Yes,” he said. “What’s left of me.”

“Where are you?” she said. “Are you here in the city?”

“I’m in a flophouse near the Lincoln Tunnel. With my son.”

“Your son. Oh my God. So much time.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “For everything. I’m just sorry.”

“Come here at once. Can you come now? And bring your, your. Your son .”

When he hung up Sancho said, “That’s it? That’s all it took? You both missed out on most of your lives and it would have been so easy not to? Really? That’s all you had to say?”

“That seems to be so,” he said.

“Wow,” Sancho said. “That’s fucked up.”

Brother, the Author, had lost touch with his only son several years ago. The young man, tall, skinny, nerdy, bespectacled, had never seemed like a potential runaway, but after he dropped out of college, which he described as “worse than useless,” adding “nobody will ever need me to write an essay in the whole rest of my life,” he began to act strangely, to lock the door of his room and spend all day and all night lost somewhere inside his laptop, listening to music videos, playing online chess, watching pornography, who knew what. Son was living with his American mother, Ex-Wife (she was another story Brother didn’t care to revisit, another story whose new chapters he knew nothing about) up in the high nosebleed latitudes of the Upper East Side. She was happily remarried, that was a fact, and another fact was that he was the one who had introduced her to her Chinese-American husband, who had originally been Brother’s friend but was his friend no longer, and that was quite a fact, and the new Chinese-American husband was rich and successful and kind of a big man in the city, and that also was quite something. Son developed a bad case of divided loyalties. To see his real father doing, it had to be admitted, not so well, while his new stepfather went in for expensive automobiles and owned a horse farm upstate, this made the boy feel ashamed, and from shame to anger was a short step. So Son was angry with both Brother and Ex-Wife and retreated from them both into his secret world.