Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

Words to that effect.

And after the tirade, she was spent. “I have to go,” she said faintly, and hung up. Brother had the impression that she had used up every ounce of her strength—her remaining strength—and had been brought to the point of collapse. He sat quietly with his thoughts for a long time after the end of the phone call. He tried not to allow the Shadow to become real. But he was becoming more and more certain that she was very sick.

There were no calls for a few days following the explosion. When she finally did call him she was calmer and quieter. She asked him more questions about his writing and he found himself willingly doing what he never did, which was, to talk about a work in progress. He was not a particularly superstitious man, but he did have this one superstition: don’t let the work come out of your mouth or it will never come out through your fingers. But he answered Sister’s questions willingly enough, and was encouraged by her interest in what he had to say. He talked about wanting to take on the destructive, mind-numbing junk culture of his time just as Cervantes had gone to war with the junk culture of his own age. He said he was trying also to write about impossible, obsessional love, father-son relationships, sibling quarrels, and yes, unforgivable things; about Indian immigrants, racism toward them, crooks among them; about cyber-spies, science fiction, the intertwining of fictional and “real” realities, the death of the author, the end of the world. He told her he wanted to incorporate elements of the parodic, and of satire and pastiche.

Nothing very ambitious, then, she said.

And it’s about opioid addiction, too, he added.

That was when her defenses dropped. When he described to her his research into the American opioid epidemic and the scams associated with it, he felt her attention intensify, and when he talked about his character Dr. Smile, the devious fentanyl spray entrepreneur, and his unscrupulous willingness to allow his product to get into the hands of people who didn’t need it, or not for medical reasons, he had her full attention. By the time he finished, she had made a decision.

“I have something to tell you about my condition,” she said, and in a flash of clarity he remembered his encounter with the man who had called himself Lance Makioka, among other names. “Your estranged lady overseas,” Makioka had said. “How much do you know about her present condition?” And when Brother had asked him what he meant, he had backed away from the usage. “I should have said ‘situation.’ Her current situation.” And here it was again, the menacing word.

“Your condition,” he repeated, and then she told him.

She had contacted the doctor in America, the brown person, the top man, but had told him frankly that she wasn’t keen on flying over to spend, what?, six months?, the rest of her life?, all her money?, receiving treatment in the United States. He had studied her case, been thoughtful, kind, and understanding, and had referred her to a “very good man” in London. The illness was unpredictable. In some cases, with the right treatment, life could be prolonged by many years. In other cases, regrettably, things moved quickly. “I’m in the latter category,” she said flatly. “The prognosis is bad.”

“How bad?”

“Bad.”

“I see.”

“What I’m most afraid of,” she told him, “is pain. They say women have a much higher pain threshold than men. They say it’s because we are the ones who have to go through childbirth. I say it’s because most women have a much higher everything than most men. But now that I’ve waved that flag, I immediately have to admit that I’m not one of those heroines. I dread pain. The final pain, what did you call it just now? Breakthrough pain.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“Not your fault,” she told him. “And as it happens, there may actually be something you can do to help.”

“Anything,” he said.

“Your fictional character, Dr. Smile,” she said. “And his fictional spray, InSmile™. Do they have real-life models? I’m wondering if there may be an actual doctor or doctors you read about, or better still, with whom you may be acquainted? And a product or products that actually exists or exist?”

Brother didn’t answer her for a long moment.

“So, not ‘anything’ after all, then,” Sister said.

“Sublingual fentanyl sprays are available on the market now,” he replied carefully. “And breakthrough pain”—he restrained himself from saying in terminal cancer patients—“ is exactly what they are intended for. I’m sure your British physician knows what’s available in the UK and can prescribe the right thing.”

“Haven’t you heard about British doctors?” she said. “They don’t like giving their patients medicines for what ails them. They think medicine is bad for sick people.”

“But I’m sure that in your case, if the prognosis is—”

“Yes or no,” she said. “Can you get hold of it for me? Do you know a man?”

Again, Brother took a moment before answering.

Then, “Yes,” he said. “I do know a man.”

“Do this for me,” she said, “and then get on a plane as quickly as you can.”

“I just want to say that you are a respected attorney and your husband is a judge, and this would be borderline against the law. Or, not even borderline, in fact.”

“Do this for me,” she said again.

“Okay,” he said.

“And then get here soon.”

“How soon?”

“Just get on a plane and come.”

ALL AIRPORT CUSTOMS HALLS were designed to make even the innocent feel guilty. NOTHING TO DECLARE: the sign might as well have read DEAD MAN WALKING. He was convinced he would be stopped and found to be in possession of a highly restricted substance, without any proof of his right to carry it—which was to say, doomed, as surely as if he was on his way to the gallows. But in the drama in which he had agreed to participate, he was for the moment a player of secondary importance, so he passed uneventfully into the unrestricted liberty of Arrivals.

Brother asked the cab driver to turn on the air. This was not understood. He had to say “air-conditioning.” The cabbie said it wasn’t working, sorry, mate, open a window. What came through the opened window was a blast of hot air. London was enduring what the cabbie called a scorcher. A heat wave in London, Brother thought, felt like an oxymoron, like nonstop drizzle in L.A. Here it was nevertheless, the temperature at 9 P.M. still in the high eighties, whatever that was in Celsius, thirty? Thirty-five? Who knew. There was no understanding the British and their systems. Road signs gave distances in miles but bathroom scales used kilograms. You could buy a pint of milk in a supermarket or a pint of beer in a pub, but at the gas station fuel was measured in liters. Athletes ran the “metric mile,” fifteen hundred meters, but a cricket pitch was twenty-two yards long. The money was decimal but everything else was a muddle, and even the European Union had long ago given up the attempt to make the Brits standardize their weights and measures, one of many early signs that the country resisted the idea of being fully European.

It was almost a relief to arrive in the middle of other people’s crises and leave the crisis of America behind. At home he had stopped listening to the news and avoided social media to shut out the daily nonsense as much as he could. He had his book to write, and this private crisis to deal with, the crisis of Sister, and that was all he could handle right now. The apocalypse of the West would just have to wait in line.

He looked out at the night sky and experienced once again the illusion of a void. There were holes in his field of vision, spots of nothingness. These seemed different in kind from the floaters he was used to. So either he had begun to experience some sort of degeneration of the retina, or, alternatively, the crumbling of the cosmos as prophesied by his character Evel Cent had begun to occur in the real world as well as the fictional. That was absurd, he scolded himself. That is absolutely not what is happening. That’s a thing I made up. He made a note to visit an eye specialist on his return from London.