Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

AT THE MOMENT OF reconciliation there had been a separation. He had understood that a knight pursuing his quest could not accept even one soft night in a palatial residence, even as his own sister’s lodger. Such a knight must remain hard, ascetic, pure. Softness was weakness. “Does that work?” the Trampoline had asked him, generously offering him comfort and a respite from his long wanderings. And to his surprise his answer was “No.” The Blue Yorker, for all its faults, was a better place for him. That was the kind of story he was in, and not the loft-in-Tribeca kind. He found himself anxious to return to his room and watch some comforting TV.

“Thank you,” he told her, “but we will stay where we are, my child, my car, and I.”

Sancho reacted with shock. “You cannot be serious.”

“I am in deadly earnest, I assure you,” he replied sternly. “This has been an important encounter, and I am grateful for it, but we must follow our own path.”

A mutiny followed. “Maybe we don’t have to stay together,” Sancho said. “Maybe it’s time I had a life of my own. ‘Every man has his own Grail,’ isn’t that right? You’re the one who taught me that. You have your beloved, I have mine.”

“In the first place,” Quichotte said, “you are not ready to be a man, and in the second place, that girl, Beautiful from Beautiful, is just a pipe dream.”

“And then what, tell me,” Sancho replied rudely, “is Miss Salma R?”

Here the Trampoline intervened. “It’s been a big evening,” she said. “Everyone’s tired. Let’s just put everything on hold. If the young man wants to stay, let him stay. If you,” she said, turning to her brother, “insist on returning to your fleapit, then so be it. Let’s all take a moment. Tomorrow is another day.”

As he drove back uptown to the unpleasant little hotel, Quichotte felt the emptiness of the seat beside him, felt it like an acute pain, like the severing of a limb. Was this the last and hardest thing required of him, he wondered: the sacrifice of a son? Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter to put the wind in his sails. But Agamemnon ended up dead in his bathtub, murdered by Iphigenia’s vengeful mother, Clytemnestra, his queen. Was the empty passenger seat his death sentence too?

But Sancho had no mother. The ancient stories did not always have modern echoes. And yes: every man had his own Grail.

THREE DAYS PASSED AND there was no further word from Dr. Smile, and none from Sancho or the Trampoline either. Quichotte sat alone in his room, bathed in the light of the screen. A man told him that in two years everyone would believe that the Earth was flat. A woman told him that vaccinations were part of a global conspiracy against children. A man told him that condensation trails left by high-flying jet aircraft were composed of chemical and biological agents that enabled the psychological manipulation of human beings, or sterilized women to control the population explosion, or were proof of the use of biological and/or chemical weapons upon an unsuspecting world. A woman told him that someone known as Q had unearned proof of a conspiracy against the government. A man told him about heavy traffic on the FDR.

He allowed it all to wash over him, the stuff of electronic life, the manifold whatness of the airwaves. He neither accepted nor rejected. He was not a judge. Even the coincidence of the Q of his pseudonym with the handle of the architect of QAnon was only of passing interest. He was passing the time in his preferred way and the time was passing. That was enough. He wasn’t interested in becoming analytical about reality. Reality was this room, this play of shadow and light, this waiting for the call.

On the fourth day the call came.

THERE WAS A TREE he was looking for, an old red oak. It stood a little distance away from the statue of Hans Christian Andersen contemplating (or being contemplated by) a duckling which was present for familiar literary reasons that need not detain us. Quichotte preferred—both preferred and was frightened by—the story about the shadow. Shadows were treacherous and cryptic counter-selves, and needed to be watched. (The shadow of Peter Pan had escaped at one point also, and had had to be caught and reattached to Peter’s feet by Wendy’s deft and careful needle.) He had kept half an eye on his own shadow throughout his quest, but so far, to his relief, it had showed no signs of acquiring an independent spirit, a malicious nature, or competitive romantic inclinations. In the golden shade of the autumnal tree, his shadow was banished, and so, with a flutter, a kaleidoscope of butterflies in his stomach, he waited; and while he waited, thought—of course—about television.

Just as King Arthur had needed his Merlin, so also Quichotte had come to the park today to meet the wizard who would work the magic he needed. He hadn’t enjoyed the TV series about the youth of Merlin a few years ago. He was looking for an adult sorcerer today, not a callow boy who needed to grow up. Everyone wanted youth now. How tedious that was! Young Indiana Jones. Young Han Solo. Young Sherlock Holmes. Young Dumbledore. Any minute now there would be a mini-series about the young Methuselah. As an older person he wanted the trend to be reversed. How about Old Sex in the City ? Old Friends ? Old Girls ? Old Gossip Girl ? Old Housewives ? Old Bachelors ? How about old models on the runway? (Victoria, after all, had lived to be a very old queen, and no doubt still, in her old age, had her secrets.) Sure, The Golden Girls, okay. But that was just one show. How about Old Simpsons ? How about an Old Fonz in Happy Days Got Older ? He’d watch those shows. And America had an aging population, did it not? So, then. Time to stop pandering to empty-headed youth. Start pandering to the addle-brained elderly instead.

The Wizard in the old show from the eighties had been a little person. The conjurer Quichotte was waiting for was scarcely a foot taller than its star, David Rappaport, had been. He kept his eyes peeled for this person, a small man of energetic disposition and a certain ethical vacuity: his cousin, the bearer of his destiny, Dr. R. K. Smile.

Why was Quichotte so certain of what the day would bring? The answer was there for anyone to see who had eyes to see. It was the increasing number of spots dancing in his field of vision. Everyone had started seeing these spots now, but because of the infuriating ability of human beings to fail to understand what was right in front of their faces, explanations were being offered which were much more complicated than the truth.

The eye condition which caused blind spots on the retina had long been known about, and had indeed for some time been the leading cause of blindness in Americans, but it was now—or so all the relevant authorities and respected journals proclaimed—attaining the status of a global epidemic, or even, to use the term beloved of writers, a plague. Plagues were mysterious in origin, random in their victims, and uncontrollable. They caused panic in the streets and required, often, the digging of mass graves in big cities. The Black Spot, as the new eye plague came to be known, did not appear to be fatal, although its consequences included a rising number of motor car accidents, which sometimes did lead to fatalities. There were also railway accidents in many countries, at a rate higher than the norm, most of them minor, but a few that were truly catastrophic. In addition, mistakes made by airline pilots during landing were reported from airports around the world. In countries where the expensive medication that could treat the plague was available, supplies ran short, even though the treatment—regular injections through the white of the eye to clear the retina—was one that many people were frightened to try, even though they knew that blindness was worse than a needle in the eye. The cause of the illness was the deterioration of the macula, the central part of the retina, which controlled human beings’ ability to read, drive, recognize faces and colors, and see objects in fine detail. Often there was also a leakage of blood onto the surface of the retina. However, eye specialists in many countries who were now fully occupied by the treatment of the surge of cases reported strange results. Tests on their patients showed no noticeable deterioration in the macula, nor had blood leaked onto the retinal surface. In fact, the patients’ eyes could in the majority of cases be said to be one hundred percent healthy. Yet the apparent effects of retinal decay were present in their vision. It was a medical mystery to which nobody could offer a plausible solution.