Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

We are scary as shit.

DAYLIGHT DID NOT BRING an end to strangeness. They came off I-70 for a restroom stop at a gas station outside Pocahontas, Illinois (pop. 784, temp. 30 degrees F), and when Sancho returned to his seat after relieving himself a man wearing a straw hat and red suspenders was sitting there, dozing, with an old-fashioned transistor radio on his lap.

“Excuse me,” Sancho said, “but that’s my place.”

The sandwich lady looked at him with a puzzled expression. “Son, you talking to someone?” she asked. “Because I can’t see who you might be addressing.”

“You don’t see this gentleman right here?” Sancho demanded, and at that point the sleeper awoke, looking embarrassed, and stood up.

“Beg pardon,” he said. “Sometimes I forgit. I use to ride this Greyhound all the way—all the way!—but that was before and this is after. No offense.” As he vacated the seat he passed right through Sancho’s body and moved off down the aisle and out through the open door of the bus.

“You okay?” the sandwich lady asked. “You lookin’ kinda green, like you saw a ghost.”

So there were ghosts now and maybe the sandwich lady knew that, maybe everyone on the bus knew that, had known it all the time. Maybe this Greyhound was a ghost bus and it was taking him not toward Beautiful but to the ghost town at the end of the road. Maybe this wasn’t the I-70 but the ghost road to Hell. Maybe he had completely lost his fucking mind.

He was a kind of ghost himself, he reminded himself. He was a parthenogenetically created, unrecorded person, no birth certificate or other trace of him on any file. He was here, but he wasn’t meant to be. He was the deluded one. Of course he wasn’t real. Reality was a cloak he had put on. He felt it crumbling off his shoulders as if made of ancient Egyptian papyrus. Maybe he would soon start crumbling, too, dust to dust. Maybe a child born under a meteor shower had only a meteor’s life: short, dazzling for a moment, but then burned out. A small pile of ashes blown away by the first uncaring breeze.

Serves me right for telling the cricket he was past it, he thought. The one with the low life expectancy is me. He leaned back in his seat, losing his grip on the world. He felt in that instant that he would not make it to Beautiful and would never see the woman of his dreams again. He felt that he would dissolve right here in this window seat and that would be the end of his story.

“There is someone you say you love that you’re on your way to see, and you’ve convinced yourself there’s a good chance she returns your feelings,” said the sandwich lady. “You’re thinking, hold on to her. You’re telling yourself, you need love to keep things real.”

Sancho sat up. “How do you know about me?” he asked, too loud. Heads turned. The sandwich lady shrugged, took a long sub out of her bag, and prepared to bite it. “Oh, darlin’,” she answered him, “let’s say, you’ve got that love light in your eye.”

“Let’s say a whole lot more than that,” Sancho retorted. “Let’s start with, who are you?”

“Let’s say, I’m friendly with someone better disposed toward you than you deserve.”

She took a large bite of bread, salami, and provolone. Sancho waited.

“He’s Italian,” the sandwich lady said, speaking with her mouth full. “And he’s pretty small. He asked me to keep my eye on you.”

Sancho suddenly understood. “You’re the blue fairy,” he said, awestruck.

“Call me what you like. I’m a woman in a plus-size blue outfit on a bus to nowhere,” she replied. “But you need to listen to me.”

“Okay,” he said, “I’m listening.”

“You and that parent of yours are cut from the same cloth,” the blue fairy said. “You’re chasing a stranger and so is he.”

“Yes,” Sancho replied, “but he’s nuts.”

“Once upon a time,” the blue fairy continued, ignoring that, “if you had two guardian angels—let’s say a cricket and a fairy—your path to true love would be pretty smooth. Between the two of us, we could spirit you to her door, and cast a magic spell on that girl, maybe give you a potion to drop in her drink, and—presto change-o!—she would love you to bits, and for evermore.”

“Sounds good to me,” Sancho said.

“Things have changed,” said the blue fairy. “Do you know what they call a gallant lover who shows up unannounced with a bunch of flowers at the door of a lady he does not know and drops a love potion in her tea?”

“Smart?” Sancho hazarded.

“They call him a rapist,” said the blue fairy. “Back in the day, Jupiter could disguise himself as a bull and carry Europa away, but this is frowned on at the present time.”

“Then what am I to do?” Sancho cried sadly. “I am crossing America in the name of love, and yes, I believe this love may be my only salvation, my only chance of a true and long human existence, but if things are as you say, then I despair. Give me the potion, I beg you. If you were sent by the cricket to care for me, then this is the thing you can most tenderly do for me. I ask for nothing else.”

“Have you heard of Bill Cosby?” the blue fairy asked.

“I think my father liked his show,” Sancho said, tapping his temple. “I have his memories of the Huxtables in my head.”

“Dig deeper,” the blue fairy advised. “Look for the ’ludes.”

Some hours later the bus pulled in for a second time at the gas station near Pocahontas, Illinois, and the man with the straw hat and the red suspenders holding up his blue jeans climbed aboard again holding his transistor radio on his shoulder while it played songs from an oldies channel. Sancho felt suddenly dizzy. This wasn’t right. They shouldn’t be back here. They did this already. This ghost was hours ago. So was this gas station. Something was terribly wrong.

The man with the straw hat and red suspenders tried once again to sit down in the seat in which Sancho was sitting, and once again Sancho protested, more forcefully this time.

“Hey!”

“Beg pardon,” the man said. “Sometimes I forgit. I use to ride this Greyhound all the way—all the way!—but that was before and this is after. No offense.”

And off he went.

“You okay?” the sandwich lady asked. “You lookin’ kinda green, like you saw a ghost.”

“I’m scared,” Sancho admitted. “Why aren’t we there yet? Why are we here again?”

“In the situation in which we find ourselves,” the sandwich lady said, “it’s hard for me to give you good advice, or even an answer that you could accept.”

“Try,” Sancho said. “Because I’m freaking out here.”

“The road is always unreliable,” the sandwich lady said. “It’ll twist and turn on you. It’ll duck and swerve and land you where you don’t expect and you got no business being. You need your wits about you if you want to ride the road.”

“That’s BS,” Sancho said. “That’s what you’re saying so’s you don’t have to say what you don’t want to say. Give me the real thing now.”

“The real thing is deep,” the sandwich lady said. “It might drown you.”

“I’ll take that chance.”

The sandwich lady who was also the blue fairy made a heavy sighing sound and then she told Sancho the things that were hard to hear. There were two crises unfolding simultaneously, she said, and it wasn’t easy to see how either could come out well. The first was the crisis of Sancho himself. “You’re seeing things I can’t see myself,” she said. “Ghosts, zombies, crazy shit. What this tells me is, you’re in danger of slipping into a ghost world from which I won’t be able to get you back and nor will anyone else. It says to me, our little Italian friend did a great job, he got you most of the way to bein’ a real live boy, but maybe he didn’t finish the job. And now that you’ve broken away from your daddy things are getting worse. I look at you and it’s like your presence isn’t strong. Like there’s bad reception, a bad signal, and you aren’t always coming through clearly. Am I making myself understood?”