Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“Narcan, good,” he said. But his mind was still mostly elsewhere, and Dr. Smile grew irritated.

“What’s the matter with you?” he snapped. “Maybe you’re not the person for this very simple job. Maybe you’ve just become too loony and old dufferish. Maybe you’re not to be trusted and I need to find someone else.”

You know those films of an explosion in reverse? How ffwwwappp everything comes flying back together and the world is in one piece again? The effect of these words on Quichotte was like that. He was alert and present and he would not let this opportunity slip. He would do what the Beloved asked of him and que sera sera. He straightened up and spoke clearly and firmly. “I’m your man,” he said. Destiny was pushing him over a moral boundary, and he suffered himself to be pushed. Lancelot, too, had forsaken morals for the love of Guinevere. He was not Galahad, but he might yet be Lancelot, and spirit the Beloved away—as he had once promised himself—to Joyous Gard.

“Very well,” said Dr. Smile, in a hurry now. He took a paper out of his coat pocket and passed it to Quichotte. “There is everything you need. Contact information, how when where, and amount to be collected. You have the locker. You have the key. Stash the cash. I’ll be in touch.” Dr. Smile’s cellphone buzzed. “My good wife,” he said. Now he was the distracted one. “I have to run. Yes, literally, I must run. A man like me. It is disgraceful. I have lawyers. This will be fought. I will return. Like Zorro, isn’t it? I shall return.”

Poof! He was gone, and Quichotte was alone in the ordinariness of the park, with the magic attaché case in his hand, tiny, crumbly black spots dancing in his field of vision, and a head full of unanswered questions. What would my son think of what I have agreed to do—my newly estranged son? he asked himself, and answered himself, Sancho may react with the puritan condemnations beloved of the very young.

He made his way back toward the gate, but paused by the Andersen statue and gazed at the immortal storyteller like a second duckling. As the end of a journey approached, it was natural for the traveler’s mind to circle back to the beginning. “An old fool gazed upon the image of a high princess,” Quichotte said to Hans Christian Andersen, “and dreamed that one day he would sit beside her on her throne.”

“A good enough start,” said Hans Christian Andersen, “but how do you go forward?”

“How do I go forward?”

“Do you have, for example, a potion that will make her love you?”

Quichotte considered the contents of the attaché case. “I have a thing like a potion that I think she loves, but will it make her love me?”

“That’s up to you,” Hans Andersen answered. “What do you know that can help you?”

“I know that I love her,” Quichotte replied. “I know that I am in the sixth valley, and I know that the purpose of all existence is to unite us.”

“But what are you prepared to do?” the great author asked.

“Anything and everything,” Quichotte said.

“And if she protests your advances, what then?”

“I will advance until she does not protest.”

“And if she resists, what then?”

“I will overcome her resistance.”

“And if she doesn’t love you, what then?”

“But she must. We must love each other absolutely and completely and then the world, having achieved its purpose, must end.”

“And if the world doesn’t end, what then?”

“It must end.”

“The question is, do you mean to do right by her? Do you mean well by her? Or is your desire so great that it overwhelms your sense of the right and the good?”

“I am no longer sure that I am good,” Quichotte confessed. “I have things in my bag that are bad, potions that she wants, that may help her to love me, but that are also dangerous. I have to collect her money, go to my locker, use my key, and stash the cash. I don’t know if any of this is good. I may be doing her harm.”

“What’s in the locker? You talk about the locker and the key to the locker. When you open the locker, what do you see?”

“There’s a gun in the locker.”

“A gun? In the locker?”

“It’s locked there. I have the key.”

“And why is it there?”

“In case of need.”

“Will you take the gun out of the locker?”

“I need the locker to stash the cash. It’s not such a big locker.”

“Will you take the gun?”

“To make room. To stash the cash.”

“So then you’ll have a gun, and if she doesn’t love you, what then? And if the world doesn’t end, what then?”

“What then? What then? You tell me how it ends.”

“It’s not my story, and a bronze statue tells no tales. But ask yourself this: are you—you, Quichotte, after your long journey!—are you the angel of love?”

“I want to be,” Quichotte said. “I want to be the angel of our love.”

“Or,” Hans Christian Andersen said, “with the dangerous potions in your case, and the gun in your locker, the gun you’ll take out to stash the cash…”

“Yes?”

“Are you perhaps the angel of death?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is the gun loaded?”

“Yes,” said Quichotte, “it’s a loaded gun.”

“So I ask the question again.”

“Which question?”

“Are you the angel of death?”

THAT NIGHT AS HE SAT in his motel room filled with self-doubt with her phone number in his hand, she was on TV, on the attack, her introductory monologue given the title “Errorism in America,” allowing her and her comedy-writing team to take on all the enemies of contemporary reality: the anti-vaxxers, the climate loonies, the news paranoiacs, the UFOlogists, the president, the religious nuts, the birthers, the flat-earthers, the censorious young, the greedy old, the trolls, the dharma bums, the Holocaust deniers, the weed-banners, the dog lovers (she hated the domestication of animals), and Fox. “The truth,” she declaimed. “It’s still out there, still breathing, buried under the rubble of the bullshit bombs. We’re the emergency rescue squad. We’re going to get it out alive. We have to, or the errorists win.”

Am I an errorist too? he asked himself. Is everything I believe a lie?

The program must have been recorded earlier that day, “as live.” She was probably home by now, relaxing. He called the phone number. When her voice answered he panicked and said, “Wrong number,” and hung up.

Of all the movies Quichotte had seen on TV dealing with the phenomenon of “first contact,” the first encounter between human beings and an alien species, two had stayed with him: the famous film whose climax took place at the Devils Tower, Wyoming—by a happy coincidence, the place where his son Sancho had been born!—and a much less well known TV show, a black-and-white piece from the 1960s, “Pictures Don’t Lie,” an episode of the series Out of this World, which he had caught by chance on an old reruns network, maybe Sci-Fi before it became Syfy. An alien spaceship contacts Earth. They look like us, we can translate their language, and they are coming in to land. But they can’t understand why our atmosphere is so thick, thick as glue, and when they say they have landed, they are invisible, and then afraid, because, they say, they are drowning. But on the landing field which fits their coordinates, there’s no lake or river, just a bit of a drizzle. Too late, one of the Earth team understands the problem. The aliens are so incredibly small it would take a magnifying glass to see them. They are drowning in a puddle of rain.

That’s me, Quichotte thought. I’m about to make first contact, but I’m so insignificant compared to her great significance, such a common little ant beside her giant majesty, that I might drown in one of her tears.