Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“At the end of the discussion his eyes were sparkling and there was an exhilaration in him which I hadn’t seen before. He’s a street fighter, I thought, this surprising mixture of a man, Rock-Hudson-meets-Shah-Rukh-Khan on the outside, with Stephen Hawking hidden inside that shell. He actually likes going up against men like the men in the gray suits and messing with their heads. He enjoys debating men who think they’re at the cutting edge of the future and telling them they’re out of date. I liked to see that.

“After the debate, we had lunch and in one of his no-small-talk outpourings of words he made a sort of declaration of love. A crucial aspect of NEXT technology, he said, was accepting that the body and whatever you wanted to call it, the self, the spirit, das Ich, the ghost in the machine, were yoked together but not the same, inseparable but not identical, and so if a way had to be found of transporting the body across a very complex existential divide, it could not be automatically assumed that the Thing within the body (the Hawking inside the movie star, I thought) would be transported too. NEXT technology, in other words, had to be cognizant of the needs of the soul.

“Then he said, ‘It is the intangible thing that attracts me, not the outward thing. The thing that sees, not the eye that does the seeing. The unseen pilot in the driving seat, not the housing assembly or the engine. It is the intangible thing that draws me so close to you.’

“I said, ‘So what you’re saying is that my body repels you but you like my soul? Because I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in the soul.’ And he replied, ‘You are receiving an insult when only a compliment was sent. And as regards the Thing, you will come to see that I am right, and it certainly exists.’ Then he took my hand, but not in the way in which, on that first night, he had grabbed my wrist. Now, in his emotionally strangled way, he was telling me what I had thought I’d never hear again.”

Quichotte appeared to lose interest in the Trampoline’s story, moved away from them toward the large TV set in the wall at the far end of the living room, and picked up the remote. “ Salma will be on soon,” he said, vaguely, as if talking to himself.

The Trampoline moved swiftly toward him and took the zapper out of his hands. “We’re just coming to the good part,” she said. “The part you’re in.”

Sancho heard the note of fury under her calm voice. There was a volcano down there, he thought. Maybe it would explode before the night was done.

“After that we were together, Evel and I,” the Trampoline went on, still addressing her remarks to Sancho. “He was arrogant and full of himself and he worked around the clock, sometimes for many days running, and when I saw him all he could do was sleep, but there he was, and I liked it, or I liked it more than I didn’t like it, and if I’m going to be completely honest, I was, just a little bit, grateful.”

“Then he did something,” Sancho guessed, jerking his head in his father’s direction.

“They finally met,” the Trampoline said. “My brother the intelligence guy and my lover the genius. I even cooked dinner.”

“He’s on Salma, ” Quichotte said suddenly.

“Who is?” the Trampoline wanted to know.

“Your guy,” Quichotte replied. “Mr. Evel Cent. In fifteen minutes.”

“How do you know?”

“I pay attention to programming,” said Quichotte. “Especially for the show of the wonderful woman I love.”

“Then fifteen minutes will have to do,” the Trampoline said.

“DINNER WAS FILET MIGNON and roasted brussels sprouts and he, my half brother of the wrong half, drank too much red wine too fast and really, really wanted to know all about what my genius boyfriend was up to. He was out of his depth but that didn’t stop him; he became belligerent and even condescending.

“ ‘You think there are other dimensions and we can slip into them like going through a crack in an open door? Is that a real thing?’

“So of course my genius boyfriend became pompous.

“ ‘The science can’t be argued with, we already have third-generation detector probes that have begun to find echoes of the neighbor Earths, the way our radio sensors are beginning to hear the echoes of the Big Bang. We have fourth-generation probes in development that will sharpen our data and provide a clearer path through the Instability and into the folds of the Multiplicity.’ Blah blah blah.

“Naturally this was too technical for your father, so he changed tack.

“ ‘And you believe in the end of the world?’ Said with an open, undisguised scorn. ‘Even though crackpots have been giving us the end-of-the-world news at regular intervals since forever, and it hasn’t ended yet, has it?’

“If there’s one thing that’s a red rag to a physicist billionaire it’s a journalist doubting the science, so…

“ ‘ Crackpot is a harsh word, sir, particularly coming from a man who wouldn’t recognize a tear in the deteriorating fabric of space-time if it was pointed out to him with a stick.’

“That was a declaration of war. I needed to calm things down. ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘why not tell Evel what you’re working on right now?’

“ ‘Hackers,’ he said. ‘Computer hackers. They’re going to be a big problem. They already are.’

“This was when the trouble really began. You could argue that Evel started it by boasting.

“ ‘We have the most advanced encryption systems in the world,’ he said. ‘Our defenses are so high that these pygmies you’re talking about would burst into tears at the sight.’

“Now, any brother of mine, even a half brother who got the wrong half of brother-ness, should at this point have thought, this is my half sister’s boyfriend, back off, don’t goad him, don’t get into a who-has-the-bigger-dick contest, but that’s exactly what happened.

“ ‘I know people who could hack into your systems in fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, and then all those secrets of yours, your what-do-you-call-’em NEXT systems that will save the world by taking us to live in Narnia or Middle-earth or some other fairy tale, will be sold on every street corner for anyone crazy enough to compete with you to buy.’

“He shouldn’t have said ‘crazy.’ He shouldn’t have said ‘fairy tale.’ He shouldn’t have made it sound like a threat. He shouldn’t have said one damn thing. He should have kept his big mouth shut and let me have my relationship with my genius. There were one hundred things he shouldn’t have done but he did them all. And the genius took the bait.

“ ‘Threatening me is never a good idea,’ Evel said. Voice like ice. ‘It doesn’t work out well for the people who do it. Let me just say that.’

“And to me he said. ‘This is your brother. This is how he is with me. It’s a problem.’

“ ‘Half brother,’ I said, laughing it off, but he was on his feet and heading for the door. “ ‘Don’t be childish,’ I said. ‘Sit down and let’s get past this.’

Maybe I shouldn’t have said ‘childish.’ Definitely I shouldn’t have. But he was walking out the door and I panicked. It wasn’t my best moment. I admit that. And Mr. Cent, he never called again.

“ ‘Let him go,’ he said, your dad. ‘He’s a bully and a narcissist and he lives in crazytown. You don’t want to spend your life with that. You don’t want to spend another five minutes with that.’

“He thought he was doing me a favor. He thought he was the good guy. But I was the one left with the broken heart. Evel disappeared from my life, and that, my dear boy, was that for me as far as romance was concerned. And now we are back to where I started: betrayal blindness. Your father betrayed me and was blind to what he did. Until I told him. And I did tell him, in pretty colorful language. That was where we left it.”