Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“Come back soon,” Salma said, wrapping things up, “and next time, bring along Schrödinger the dog. That dog has things to tell us, I’m sure of that.”

“She doesn’t look good,” Quichotte opined. “But the Path will become clear very soon, and then we will be together.”

“He’s just like this,” Sancho said to the Trampoline. “He talks this way.”

“It’s time to talk about the Interior Event,” the Trampoline replied.

KIPS BAY WAS NO longer a bay, land reclamation had taken care of that, and nobody there any longer remembered old Jacobus Hendrickson Kip, whose farmhouse once stood at what was now the intersection of Thirty-Fifth and Second. If you had talked to the moviegoers frequenting the multiplex a few blocks south, you would have found their heads full of fictional battles between human beings and their guardian superheroes on the one hand and various space monsters and supervillains, Balrogs and orcs, on the other, but very few of them could have told you anything about the real-life Landing at Kip’s Bay in 1776, one of the first skirmishes of the War of Independence, when the American militia fled from the British and Washington in disgust cried, “Are these the men with whom I am to defend America?” The story of how Mary Lindley Murray, at the Grange on the Inclenberg property that is now Murray Hill, delayed the advancing British by inviting their general, Howe, to stop for cake and wine, allowing Putnam’s ragged rebel forces to make their escape…that will have to wait for another day. We walk unknowing amid the shadows of our past and, forgetting our history, are ignorant of ourselves.

As also now Quichotte. Quester for love, supplicant for forgiveness, seated in the nightgloom of his half sister’s home, while his ghosts, exhumed by her sorcery, walked all about him, including the phantom of himself as he once was. Chinese food was delivered and set upon a table, but Quichotte could not eat, feeling himself lost in darkness, encircled by the sadness of days gone by. Why had he been as he was, consumed by envy, ungenerous, competitive, harsh? He could not say. He had no access to that self. The reason for that was what happened that night in the Kips Bay of the past.

It wasn’t such a bad apartment. The ceilings were high and the neighbors were quiet and he could work there contentedly enough. On the night in question, however, it almost became his tomb. He had a nightmare that night in which he had awoken, in this his own bedroom, to see a shadowy figure standing at the foot of his bed, looking down at him, saying nothing. He understood, in the dream, that the intruder was both himself, or his shadow, and also Death. He woke up in fear. It was 3 A.M. He sat up in bed and turned on the lamp on his nightstand, his heart beating hard. There was nobody in the room, of course, and to calm himself he drank a glass of water and got out of bed to go to the toilet. That was when the Interior Event happened. There was a sort of explosion between his ears. He lost his balance, fell forward onto the floor, and blacked out. When consciousness returned—a moment or an age later, he couldn’t tell—it occurred to him that he was not dead. At some point after that realization, he also understood that he could not move. His cellphone was on the nightstand and so was the landline phone he was old-fashioned enough to have kept, but he was on the floor facing away from them. So he was helpless.

It took him two days to turn around and drag himself to the nightstand. For another whole day and night he tried to strike the table in such a way that one of phones fell off within his reach. On the fourth day he got hold of his cellphone and began to try to make a call.

“Who did he call?” Sancho wanted to know.

“He called me,” the Trampoline said. “Who else would he call?”

The call finally went through and she answered it but he was unable to speak. He lay there on the bedroom floor with the phone by his ear while her voice shouted Hello .

Understanding that something was wrong, she had come quickly to his building, found the super, had the front door opened, found him on the floor, called the emergency services. He survived. He was a lucky man. This was America, and a stroke required long and careful treatment, and he was covered, because he had recently applied for and won a teaching position at a journalism school downtown, a tenure-track professorship that came with excellent health insurance. He endured a long period of rehabilitation, and after perhaps two years he was back in something like full working order, though his speech had slowed and he dragged his right leg. But the man who emerged from the Interior Event was not the same person as before. For a time he suffered some expected aftereffects. He cried at random moments, without apparent cause. He suffered from stress, depression, anxiety. But beneath these alterations lay a deeper change. There were deep gashes in his memory and those did not mend. He became less gregarious, more silent, much more withdrawn. Also, the journalist, the professor: he was gone.

Physically, he had clearly made a miraculous recovery. The lasting damage was not to his body but to his character. He did not return to the teaching position that had given him the insurance coverage he had needed. He distanced himself from old and new colleagues, new and old friends, and withdrew into himself, retreating so far, so deep, that nobody could follow him. For a long time he hardly spoke, and watched TV all day, sitting upright on the edge of his bed at home with his hands folded in his lap. This was when he began to speak in TV references, and his grasp on reality loosened. It also became clear that he no longer felt at home in the big city. The multiplicity, the everything of everything, the roar of narratives, the endless transformation, the myth factory lost in the myth of itself: it unsettled him. The absences in his mind needed to be soothed by absenting himself from his previous life, and by television, being absorbed by which was another kind of absenting. The day he told the Trampoline that he needed to leave town—that he had reached out to their cousin Dr. Smile in the pharma world and asked if he could work for him as a traveling salesman somewhere far from New York—was also the day on which he first made the money accusation. The third unforgivable thing.

That he accused her of stealing his money was bad enough. That he did it after her solicitude during the past two years was worse. That he ignored the fact that throughout this period she had actually been managing his money for him, making sure it was well cared for, was worse still. And the allegation about forging their father’s will, or falsifying it in her favor, was the last straw. “He was always the wrong half of a half brother,” the Trampoline told Sancho, “but at that point I understood I needed to withdraw from him, just as he needed to withdraw from almost everything. He was damaged, I saw that, he wasn’t himself, I had compassion for that, but he had become unbearable. If we had been married we would have had to get divorced. In a way we did get divorced. When he left the city to begin his strange journeyings in the heartland, selling pills to doctors, I thought, okay, that’s that, and let him be, let him do what he has to do, and maybe find his way. But guess what? His money is still in good shape. And there’s certainly enough of it to mean you guys don’t have to stay in the Blue Yorker motel. If he wants to stay in the city he can rent a place. You can both stay here until he does. I have a parking place in the basement garage, but I don’t have a car, so he can put his wheels down there.”

She turned to face him. “Does that work?”

Quichotte rose to his feet and cleared his throat. “There is something I first need to say,” he stated, formally. “I wish to apologize to you, my sister, for all offenses both remembered and forgotten, both those for which I feel guilt and responsibility and those which were the responsibility of a person who has faded from memory. In my small way I am what your Mr. Cent says the universe has become: a cosmos with holes torn out of it, where nothing remains. I am fraying at the edges and may not survive. Therefore I ask that both kinds of fault, the known and the unknown, be forgiven before we reach our ends, and I am willing to perform whatever deeds you ask for by way of a penalty, in expiation of my misdeeds, both those which I own and those which I can no longer own, as they have left me and gone far away. This is what I have crossed America to set right, for until there is harmony the path to the Beloved, who lies beyond the world and its grief, will not open.” At this point, he moved slowly toward the Trampoline, his leg dragging heavily tonight, and when he reached her he fell, shockingly, to his knees and took hold, between his thumb and forefinger, of the hem of her garment.