Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

He called again. Voicemail. “Darling, I’m having the voltage today, I’m drinking that special juice of mine, so I don’t remember who you are. Leave your full name and tell me how we know each other. Mwah.” He understood that the show must be on hiatus, and the “Errorism” episode he had seen was a tape from a while ago. He didn’t leave a message. The next day he called again and she answered.

“Who?” she said when he began with the code word on Dr. Smile’s sheet of paper. “Here, talk to Anderson.”

First contact, Quichotte thought. One single word from her lips had entered his ear. He was filled with an immense happiness that washed away all his doubts and qualms.

“Where do you want to meet?” Anderson Thayer asked, and the question was like cold water thrown in Quichotte’s face.

“No, no, no,” he replied.

“What do you mean, no, no, no?”

Quichotte strengthened his resolve. “I mean, sir, and meaning no disrespect, but my instructions were clear. I must deliver into the lady’s hands. My hands to her hands. My instructions are clear.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Anderson Thayer said.

Quichotte made the great gamble of his life, putting everything he had, so to speak, on a single number. “Then, I regret,” he told Anderson Thayer.

There was muffled conversation at the other end of the line. Then a different voice; her voice, which so far had poured the single syllable who into his adoring ear.

“Don’t be cross with poor Anderson, darling,” she said. “I’m the one who drank the juice, but he appears to be suffering from short-term memory loss on my behalf.”

BETWEEN THE GODS AND MORTAL MEN and women there hung a veil, and its name was maya. The truth was that the fabled world of the gods was the real one, while the supposedly actual world inhabited by human beings was an illusion, and maya, the veil of illusion, was the magic by which the gods persuaded men and women that their illusory world was real. When Quichotte saw Miss Salma R walking toward him through the park, in her invisible mode, attracting not a single glance from the earthbound beings she passed, he understood that her power over the actual was very great, and also that he was about to have an experience granted to very few creatures of flesh and blood: he would pass through the veil and enter the realm of the blessed, where divinities made their sport.

He had dressed for the occasion in his few remaining pieces of sartorial finery: the still-soiled camel cashmere coat which he had cleaned as best he could, a brown hat, scarf, and leather gloves. He wore, too, his finest sunglasses. First impressions counted. The attaché case had been placed in his locker, which he had emptied in order to fit it in, removing its contents and placing them in his pocket along with the envelope containing the first month’s supply of goods. He had rehearsed many times the words he wanted to say. He would hand her the envelope with a little bow of the head and say, “This is sent with all respects by Dr. R. K. Smile, and comes also with two brief stories with great admiration from myself.” If his powers of charm had not entirely faded she would allow him to tell the stories. The first story was the tale of what they had in common: a common city in the past, and the decision to leave it. The looking back and remembering, the decision not to look back, not to remember, and the ability of the past to insist, in spite of everything, on its right to return to haunt the present. This was their shared truth. The second story was an American story. Before the Mayflower became the first CentCorp portal into an unknowable future in an alternative reality, it was a ship, and among the travelers on the ship there was a love story. John Alden asked by Miles Standish to press his case to Miss Priscilla, who replied, Speak for yourself, John. And he, Quichotte, would say, I am here on another man’s behalf, but given permission I would speak for myself.

She was standing in front of him. He had passed through the veil. He stood before her like a fool and stammered.

“Make it quick, darling,” she said. “Eyes everywhere.”

“This is sent with all respects by Dr. R. K. Smile,” he began, and then saw her eyes widen in fear and alarm. Her hand flew up to cover her mouth and she looked from side to side, planning her escape.

“Sent by a smile,” she said. “Oh my God, I know who you are. You sent your photograph. I know who you are.”

“It comes also,” he continued desperately, “with two brief stories with great—”

“Kwee-cho-tay,” she whispered. “The letter writer. Key-choat.”

“Key- shot, ” he corrected her.

She made a lunge at the envelope in his gloved right hand. He held it away from her. “No, no, no,” he said, wretchedly. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. It wasn’t supposed to go this way at all. “Your envelope for mine. Cash on delivery.”

She stepped back from him, gasping. Then, from the depths of her Moncler coat, an envelope emerged. She dropped it on the ground. “It’s all there,” she said. “Now throw yours to me.”

He could not know if the required sum was in the envelope on the ground. But she was his Beloved and he would trust her. “Madam, catch,” he said, and threw her what she wanted. Which she grabbed; and ran. Leaving him standing there with a gun in his pocket and money in his hand.

“…with great admiration from myself,” he said hopelessly, with tears in his eyes.

AFTER THAT THE BLUE YORKER became most of his world, the TV set his only companion. He emerged occasionally to eat, unhealthily and at erratic times, wandering the city for ten days and nights in search of the junk food of America, finding it at IHOP, Denny’s, Applebee’s, TGI Fridays, Olive Garden; and at KFC, Ruby Tuesday, Five Guys, Dunkin’, Chipotle. Some nights, some days, he drank in bars with TV screens floating above the alcohol, and watched the sportsmen strive and vie, and heard the American stories of mass killings in various states and the slaughter of lovers by lovers, and the accidental deaths by shooting of parents at the hands of very small children. He spoke little and made no calls. At night he kept his loaded gun, a Gen4 Glock 22, on the nightstand by his bed, with the barrel pointing at his head.

On the eleventh day he stayed in bed nursing a light fever, moving in and out of nightmare-plagued sleep while a cold October passed outside. The TV murmured in his ears, and he surfaced in time for the early evening news. The growing world environmental crisis, the instability in reality which was finally grabbing the attention of politicians and scientists, even of the (many) politicians and (very few) scientists who had traditionally dismissed environmental issues as fake. A suspension bridge had collapsed in Australia because of the appearance of a strange cloud among the cables, which had caused the cables to snap as if cut with giant shears. “It was more like a hole than a cloud,” an eyewitness reported. “Like a bit of the air that wasn’t there.” The story was rippling out across the world, creating alarm, but, oddly, not panic, or not as yet. People had grown used to the arrival of the incredible in the midst of the everyday. An island drowned in the South Pacific? That’s too bad, it had great beaches, but everybody was rescued, right? And it was really small. Tornadoes in the Midwest? Yeah, they’re big, but tornadoes have been out there forever, even before Dorothy got spirited away to Oz. Earthquakes in places that never had earthquakes before? Oh well. Join the club, North Texas and Plainfield, Connecticut. Guess we can agree that we all live on shaky ground. And so, holes in the air? Okay, so we have them now also. Life goes on. Quichotte watched the helicopter footage of the fallen bridge and the hole in the sky. It reminded him of photographs of the sun blacked out in eclipse with its corona glowing around it. It looked impermanent, also like an eclipse. Maybe it was just a temporary problem, a self-correcting thing, and the sky would close up again soon, would heal the way skin did after being torn.