Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“He is still at large,” the newscaster said. “Interestingly, there appears to be no trace of him in any public records. This may well be something we would be interested to talk to you about. Would you be willing to come in…?”

Quichotte reached for the remote and turned off the TV. It would probably be a good idea to avoid the news channels for some time.

He made two telephone calls. The first was to his sister. The Trampoline answered but gave him short shrift. “It was a mistake to see you,” she said. “You and that unscrupulous boy. Sometimes it’s better not to make peace. We don’t need to speak to each other again.”

“I didn’t know he’d turn out that way,” Quichotte said. “That isn’t the way I imagined him when—” and here he broke off, because how could he say, when I brought him into being? He revised his words. “That isn’t the way I imagined he’d be.”

“There’s no more to be said. Goodbye,” the Trampoline told him, and ended the call.

After that he looked at the phone for a long time before calling Miss Salma R. When he finally made the call, it was Anderson Thayer who answered.

“You,” Anderson Thayer said. “You piece of fucking shit. Tell me where you are so I can alert the NYPD.”

“I only wanted to offer my sincere happiness that the lady has recovered,” Quichotte said.

“I’ll hunt you down,” Anderson Thayer said. “Understand me? If you try to come near her again, I’ll hunt you to the end of the fucking earth.”

“I understand,” Quichotte replied. The invisible membrane that separated Salma’s world from his had thickened and hardened and he could not penetrate it.

“But I know what could,” a voice said. He leapt up, startled. The voice was in the room somewhere. But the TV was off and there was nobody there.

“It’s me,” the voice said. “Your trusty Glock 22.”

Things at the Blue Yorker were deteriorating rapidly. First TV newscasters spoke to him from the screen, and now his gun wanted a conversation.

“It’s well known,” the gun continued, “and well documented, that the way for an ordinary decrepit nobody like you to penetrate the barrier that keeps you out of the blessed world, the world of light and fame and wealth, is to use a bullet. Take it from me. For you, it’s the only way. A bullet will unite you and your Beloved for all time, for the whole of history.”

“That is not and will not be my story,” Quichotte replied nobly. “I have not come to destroy her but to save her.”

“Pop! Pop!” said the Glock, seductively. “Zap! Bap! And she’s yours forever.”

“Say no more,” Quichotte admonished the weapon. “Get thee behind me.”

“Then how do you expect to get anywhere with her?” the gun wanted to know. “You’ll come around. You’ll have to. I’ll be waiting.”

“Mine is a love story,” said Quichotte. “And love will find a way.”

How, so soon after my birth, did I become this person? This thief, this binder and gagger of my aunt—carefully, yes; gently, for sure, I didn’t want to hurt her, that goes without saying; but I did it, that I did—so how have I shown myself to be this amoral rapscallion, this runaway rogue?

On the one hand, it has to be my nature, right?, because there has hardly been any time for nurture. I couldn’t have been turned into a delinquent at this speed, it must have been there inside from the start. Some fault in the program when Daddy Q dreamed me up, or some bug that got into the system when the Italian cricket turned me into a real, live boy. Some streak of aggression, selfishness, don’t-give-a-fuck-who-gets-in-my-way-I-just-want-what-I-want-when-I-want-it. Some ruthlessness. If there’s a baby in the road when I need to drive down that road, then hard luck, baby, because I’m driving on. That’s my programming. It’s in the gattaca, the DNA. In which case it’s not my fault, is it? See, if I’m bad—to quote the great Jessica Rabbit—it’s because I’m drawn that way.

DESPERATE TIMES, DESPERATE MEASURES. Ever since the beating in the park Sancho had felt something go wrong inside him, not a physical ailment but an existential one. After you were badly beaten, the essential part of you that made you a human being could come loose from the world, as if the self were a small boat and the rope mooring it to the dock slid off its cleats so that the dinghy drifted out helplessly into the middle of the pond; or as if a large vessel, a merchant ship, perhaps, began in the grip of a powerful current to drag its anchor and ran the risk of colliding with other ships or disastrously running aground. He now understood that this loosening was perhaps not only physical but also ethical, that when violence was done to a person, then violence entered the range of what that person—previously peaceable and law-abiding—afterwards included in the spectrum of what was possible. It became an option.

The beating had also further detached Sancho from Quichotte. As the Trampoline had noticed, the youngster still felt a degree of filial loyalty toward the antique gentleman, but he was more certain than ever that his own destiny lay elsewhere. He thought a good deal about the young woman at the door of the house of grief, Miss Beautiful of Beautiful, Kansas, and he wanted very much to return to that door in the hope that his future might lie behind it. The more he thought, the more surely he convinced himself that if he were to present himself on her doorstep she would give him a positive response, and the thought of that filled him with a deep contentment and a hopeful belief in the meaningfulness of human existence. He began to imagine his escape from New York—his departure from the Emerald City, clicking together the heels of his ruby shoes, there’s no place like Kansas, which wasn’t home yet but if things went according to plan, it might be!—to dream the dream of leaving and to feel it as an urgent imperative, and it was that urgency, plus the memory of violence, that had added up to his crime.

About his disorienting sense of having lost his grip on reality he spoke to no one, assuming that it would heal, as bruises do, and broken bones. And as to the rumored imminent end of the world, he didn’t give that much credence. For him, the world had only just begun. If it was faulty, if bits were falling off it as if it were an old house in need of repairs, then it was because perfection was an illusion. It was impossible to believe that everything that was wouldn’t be around much longer. The injustice of such a dénouement would be too great. The celestial storyteller whom he occasionally contemplated and toward whom he felt the kinship of one fictional character for another was surely not so cruel. Although, he had to concede, the question of God—cruel or loving?—had not been definitively answered.

“And what of la questione de Sancho?” a small, angry voice inquired. “Do you have a soluzione to this problem?”

He was sitting at that moment on a midnight bench in the Port Authority Bus Terminal with a $146 one-way ticket to Beautiful in his hand and the scent of fresh micturition in his nostrils, wondering if the Trampoline had been found and the police were on his trail. A cold night, winter tightening its grip. The bus did not leave for another hour, so he had sixty minutes to ponder the great issues of life, such as the central role of the bus in keeping the States united in the post–9/11 era, when—so he had heard—flights across America were fewer and more unpleasant than onceuponatime and the trains were, well, they were Amtrak; and how amazing was it that for $146 stolen from your aunt’s pocketbook you could get a thirty-one-hour Greyhound ride right to the center of a faraway small town like Beautiful with no connections to make or snafus en route? And a related question: Was he about to go to jail, to be sent to Rikers to be monstered by the monsters residing there, or was he on the verge of being free and racing through night and day to the open arms of his lady love? Freedom! He stood now like a greyhound in the slips, straining upon the start.