Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“Forgive me,” he said, bowing his head, “and set me free, and yourself as well.”

Time stood still inside the room. Outside, or so it seemed to Sancho, a week passed, a month, a year, a decade, maybe a century. The sun rose and set, the moon waxed and waned, the seasons fled by. Mighty men and women rose and fell, the world changed, the future enveloped them, and they were leftovers from an ancient past, unknown to all, lost in their own labyrinth of love and pain. Then the Trampoline stirred, very slightly, and very slowly lifted her hand and placed her palm upon Quichotte’s humbled head.

“Yes,” she said, and the clocks moved once again.

“The time ahead of us,” the Trampoline said, “is much shorter than the time already past. You’re right about that. There are new concerns about my health. We don’t have to talk about those now. Let’s just say it’s a good time to set down burdens. Oh, and as regards Evel Cent, these days he’s well known to be a womanizer, so you were right, I didn’t need him in my life. Which doesn’t mean he’s wrong about the end of the world. Or, by the way, right about it.”

“Now that there is harmony,” Quichotte said, “we have entered the sixth valley, which is the Valley of Wonderment, in which the perfect love will come into being, and that will bring about the happy ending we all want.”

“Oh, that’s right,” the Trampoline said. “You’re now a doomsday merchant too. Well, then, I forgive you because of the approaching end of the world.”

“Hallelujah!” cried Quichotte. “And now that I am forgiven it merely remains to rescue the woman I love and lead her through wonderment into the seventh valley, which lies beyond space and time, and where, whatever happens to this world, the Wayfarer who reaches its meadows can live happily for all eternity.”

“The Elysian Fields! That is indeed a noble goal,” the Trampoline said, keeping a straight face, “but the word ‘merely’ seems to undervalue the level of difficulty involved.”

“You will see,” Quichotte cried, a tide of happiness rising in his breast. “The obstacles are about to dissolve, and the time of joy is about to begin.”

And promptly the next morning at 8 A.M., Quichotte received a text from his cousin and erstwhile employer, Dr. R. K. Smile, sent from a burner phone, requesting a meeting. The path to the Beloved opened.

“A city was a door, and it was either open or shut. London got slammed in his face and tried to keep him out. New York swung open easily and let him come in.” The hard-boiled opening lines of Brother’s novel Reverse Rendition returned to him on the day flight from JFK to Heathrow. On reflection, he didn’t agree, or not anymore, or not to the New York part, not in this racially charged and confrontational time. His secret agent protagonist needed to rethink his position. The idea of London (pop. 8,136,000) as a clubby, members-only, keep-out zone was probably out of date too. He hadn’t been there for many years. These days the clubs were mostly owned by foreigners and it was the English who had to apply for membership. But the new flag-waving go-back-where-you-came-from England-for-the-English white populism was there, too, had risen from its grave in the dead imperial past to haunt the fractured, second-class-nation present. So, then, a plague on both your houses, Brother thought, and asked for another vodka and soda, his third, one over his limit, but he needed it today.

(He had not been in an airplane for quite some time. He had given his Quichotte a nightmare which he had had himself, a dream of first falling out of the sky and then drowning, and Quichotte’s consequent fear of flying was also Brother’s own. On the rare occasions when he had no choice but to fly, he knocked himself out with Xanax and got through the journey that way. This time he had chosen vodka instead of Xanax. So far, it was working well.)

Ever since his reunion with his lost child he had been thinking of broken families—of his own broken family—as allegories of larger-scale fragmentations, and of the search for love and healing as a quest in which everyone, not just his mad Quichotte, was involved.

He made a note on his phone. Don’t forget to resolve Sancho’s love interest too. This was the latest addition to a list he had been making since the plane took off. Don’t forget Sancho’s visions—reality begins to be more phantasmagoric. Don’t forget Quichotte’s key. What does it open, and what’s inside? And one more: Quichotte (sounds like) key shot. A key shot was a tiny bump of cocaine or heroin scooped up on a key. He didn’t know how this fitted into Quichotte’s story. Maybe there was no place for it. It would remain just a note, to be deleted later.

The plane lost altitude suddenly and fast, like one of the balls Galileo imagined dropping from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, like an elevator plunging down its shaft, like a falling man. His drink spilled, but he caught the glass before it fell. The orange breathing masks appeared from above. The captain spoke rapidly over the intercom, trying to reassure passengers while also giving emergency instructions. It was not necessary at present to put on the breathing masks. Stay in your seats with the belts fastened. This was more than rough air, but the aircraft was under the pilots’ control, or so the voice insisted, not wholly convincingly . The 747 lurched, bumped, slalomed first one way, then the other. Many of the passengers panicked. There was weeping and shrieking. There was vomiting too. Brother, for whom this was a bad dream come true, who had always known in a part of his mind that airplanes were simultaneously too massive to fly and too flimsy to resist the immense forces of nature, was interested to note that he remained calm. He continued to sip at his drink. Was it possible that his fear of flying had been cured at exactly the moment at which it was perfectly rational to feel afraid? I’ve been writing about the end of the world, he thought, and what I was really doing was imagining death. My own, masquerading as everyone else’s. A private ending redescribed as a universal one. I’ve been thinking about it for so long that this doesn’t come as a surprise. He raised his glass and toasted the giant death angel, a bare skull visible within a black hooded robe, standing on the horizon and holding the aircraft in one hand and shaking it. The death angel bowed in recognition of the gesture, and let the jumbo jet go. With a brief final shudder the aircraft settled back into its course.

After that the flight went smoothly and the passengers entered a mood of near-hysterical camaraderie. The crew handed out champagne for free, even in coach. Brother suspected that some of the passengers were having mile-high sex with strangers in the washrooms. Things were becoming a little rock and roll. He kept his own counsel, finished his drink slowly, and went on thinking about death. Which had been central to his career as a writer until now. He had always felt that a story didn’t come alive for him until at least one character hated someone else, or several someone elses, so much that they were prepared to murder them. Without killing there was no life. He knew that other writers could make masterpieces out of accounts of tea parties (e.g., the Mad Hatter’s) or dinner parties (e.g., Mrs. Dalloway’s) or, if you were Leopold Bloom, out of a day spent walking around a city while your wife was being unfaithful to you back home, but Brother had always needed blood. It was an age of blood, not of tea, he told himself (and others, from time to time).