Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“Shall I be mother?” she asked, as if there were any doubt about the matter, and then tea was poured and passed and cakes and cucumber sandwiches consumed, and the flavor of everything was greatly heightened by the mingled pain and pleasure of knowing that something excellent was being done for the last time.

“The thing I’m very pleased about,” she said, “is that just before all this business in my body started up, I took out a very substantial life insurance policy, and now the buggers are going to have to pay up a fortune, which will look after my girl very well.” Then she laughed, high and long. She could not cheat death, but she had put one over on the insurance company, and that felt almost as good to her, she said.

She hadn’t mentioned the judge in her declaration, but he laughed as long and hard as she did. That was strange, Brother thought. Why wasn’t she happy to be providing for his old age too? And why didn’t he care?

“I think,” she declared when tea had been drunk and cakes and sandwiches consumed, “that I may sing a little, as I once did.” But then a great pain struck her and she fell back in her seat with a gasp.

“Jack,” she cried, and he came to her with the painkilling spray and she opened her mouth and raised up her tongue and there was relief. After that she allowed herself to be borne back upstairs to bed.

Family life, Brother thought, one moment of it after a lifetime without it, and that will have to suffice.

FENTANYL WAS ONE HUNDRED times more powerful than morphine. The lethal dose was therefore one hundred times smaller: two milligrams as opposed to two hundred. Sublingual fentanyl spray was even more powerful and worked much faster. Medicinal doses of the spray were measured and delivered in micrograms, so to reach the fatal level it was necessary to spray beneath the tongue repeatedly and rapidly. The product packaging carried prominent and strongly worded warnings about overdosing.

They had made their plans methodically, Sister and the judge, because they were both diligent people. They knew the required dosages, had calculated the effects of their different body weights (she was down to just under one hundred pounds at this point, while he was closer to two hundred), and had destroyed all identifying marks on the two sprays, scratching away the batch numbers and the address of the manufactory, so that Brother could not later be charged with having supplied the fatal drug off-prescription, and they had left careful instructions—in a letter propped up on a cushion at the foot of Sister’s bed—for the disposal of their assets and belongings. They sent their great and apologetic love to Daughter and asked her not to grieve but to rejoice that they left the world as they had lived in it: together. In Sister’s hand at the bottom of the letter (the rest of which had been written out by the judge, though clearly conceived jointly by them both) were a couple of lines from Marvell’s “On a Drop of Dew.” How loose and easy hence to go, / How girt and ready to ascend. She was ready and had chosen when and how to give up her flower. They had both chosen, and they had kept their appointment.

Brother came awake fast in the dead of night, his thoughts filled with sudden, sad understanding. The disembodied voices of the darkness had fallen silent, as if they, too, understood. He got out of bed in his pajamas and went rapidly toward Sister’s room. He stood for a moment listening. Daughter was asleep on the couch downstairs. But the silence behind the closed door of Sister’s bedroom was not the silence of sleep. He opened the door and went in. The judge was in a chair by her bedside, still dressed in the silver gown, his chin upon his chest. Sister had been sitting up in bed but had now slumped sideways so that her head rested upon her husband’s shoulder. On her nightstand lay two chess pieces, the white king and the black queen, both knocked over, resigning their games. They had changed the rules, Jack and Jack. The queen had resigned as well as the king. There was no victor, or else they had both won.

Now Daughter was there, too, opening and reading the letter. When she looked up from the pages Brother saw in her eyes the rage she had inherited from her mother.

“Well, thanks for coming, Uncle, and you should go now,” she said savagely. “Don’t worry. I won’t point a finger. Nobody will come looking for you.”

He moved toward her; she recoiled.

“I brought you here,” she said. “Pawn to King Four. It’s my fault. Big mistake.”

She turned away from him to look at her parents. Her fists were clenched.

“The story you told us about your flight from New York,” she said. “About the death angel. I get it now. It’s you, the hooded skull. You came to collect their lives and you held their deaths in your fist. It’s you, the angel of death.”

O n the plane home, half asleep, under the influence of vodka and grief, Brother saw his reflection speaking to him from the window. “The world no longer has any purpose except that you should finish your book. When you have done so, the stars will begin to go out.”

Quichotte, entering Central Park through Inventor’s Gate, touched the brim of his hat in a gesture of respect toward the statue of Samuel Morse, and asked himself: What encoded dit-dit-dah message, were he offered the opportunity, might he now choose to send? Who would he now say he was, what should he declare that he desired, and what secret did he wish either the whole world or a single precious individual to know? And at once he answered himself: He was a lover, he desired only the love of his Beloved, and would tap out that love on Mr. Morse’s wire telegraph or shout it from the rooftops or whisper it in his Beloved’s ear, his mighty love the fulfillment of which was the onliest remaining purpose and most proper function of the good Earth itself. He thought, too, of another, more contemporary inventor, the scientist-entrepreneur Evel Cent, and his NEXT machines. It might be that these magic portals of Mr. Cent’s, the Mayflower etc., had been brought into being to make possible a perfect ending, in which Quichotte and Salma escaped this dying vale of tears to live in timeless bliss in—what had the Trampoline called them?—the Elysian Fields. Things were coming together nicely.

He felt himself flowing back into himself. He had spent too long in the valley of apology and healing, the dale of restored harmony; too long in the realm of the necessary, which had had to be endured to make possible what was needed. The Trampoline had taken him on a journey back into the past and wrapped him in a self that no longer had any meaning for him, and that past was, anyway, only her version of events and of him as well, a version within which he still sometimes suspected that the truth had somehow become inverted somewhere along the way. There were moments when he was possessed by the idea that in fact she had been the one who had done him wrong, who had accused him of things, who had been unloving, and if only he could remember, if only he could get past the fog in his mind that stopped him remembering, he would be able to see, to know, to say, to face her with the facts, the knowledge that she had the whole story ass backwards (if he could, in the privacy of his own thoughts, permit himself such a vulgarity)—so that the person who needed to be apologized to had ended up doing the apologizing, abasing himself both formally and unreservedly. But he couldn’t remember. There was only confusion, and the fog. And finally it was okay, he didn’t mind, she was probably right, and anyway peace had had to be made, a surrender had had to take place, an offering up of a vanquished sword, a kneeling, even on such unfair terms. She had made him put on, after so many years, a skin that no longer fitted him, and he had had to wear it like a hair shirt, doing penance for what he could not remember having done. No matter. Now that old skin had been shed and he, Quichotte, had reemerged: the gallant knight, the mystical amant, the Galahad quester, the seeker for the grail of love, gathering his strength as he prepared to make, at long last, his tryst.