Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“Yes,” Sancho said. “You’re saying I’m dying.”

“Let’s not jump that far,” the blue fairy said. “I’m just saying there’s a problem.”

“Can you save me?” Sancho pleaded. “I want to live.”

“You been talking a whole lot about love,” the blue fairy said. “Seems to me you’ve got it ass backward and upside down. Let me tell you what I mean by that fine sentiment. I understand it to be, first of all, selfless. Love makes the other more important than you. And the other isn’t necessarily an individual. It can be a town, a community, a country. It can be a football team or a car. If times were normal here’s what I’d say to you: Forget about this girl at the end of the road. Go back where you came from and set things right for yourself. Your aunt? You owe her a big apology just like your daddy did. Funny how you’re like his echo. You owe her an apology and money also. She’s not pressing charges, told the cops it was a domestic dispute. That’s pretty nice of her. Go, apologize, get a job, work until you’ve paid her back, and cling to the love of being alive and living a decent life. That’s the love that makes you real. This girl? She’s just one of your ghosts.”

“Okay,” Sancho said, recovering a measure of defiance, “so this is advice I’m definitely not going to take. This I can find on an Internet meme or in a fortune cookie.”

A hubbub had arisen. Passengers on long-distance bus rides habitually fell into a transitional state, a kind of in-between torpor, half asleep, listening to music on their headphones, watching sitcoms on small seat-back screens, eating mini-pretzels or cinnamon grahams, dreaming of the possibility of happiness. The country rolled by outside the windows, unobserved. But now some passengers at least had noticed the disturbance, the feedback loop which had fed them back to where they had been several hours ago, and people were panicking, not helped by the driver, who threw up his hands and said, “Beats me. I just drive the bus, I don’t make the roads.”

“One moment,” the sandwich lady said to Sancho. “Let me see what I can do.”

She stood up in the aisle amid the shrieking of her fellow passengers and closed her eyes. There followed a series of heavy bumps, the kind one might feel on a railway train changing tracks across multiple points, and then she sagged down into her seat, exhausted.

“Okay, we’re back where we should be,” she said to Sancho, “but that was pretty much above my pay grade. I’m going to need to recover before we discuss the second crisis.”

The noise in the bus subsided as the street signs began to make sense once more. Beautiful wasn’t far away now. Some passengers accused others of having mistakenly raised an alarm for which there was no need. The driver shrugged his seen-it-all-before shrug and drove on. The sandwich lady snored gently in her seat. Sancho alone was fully alert. It seemed plain to him that the second crisis might be worse than the first.

As he waited he became aware of certain disturbing changes in himself. Like there’s bad reception, a bad signal, and you aren’t always coming through clearly. That had been the sandwich lady a.k.a. blue fairy’s unsentimental diagnosis. Now he was beginning to feel it too. He was experiencing fuzzy spells, when his thoughts became clouded and unclear, the kind of grogginess one might feel if one had a bad case of the flu. There was also a kind of intermittency, a series of very short interruptions during which the stream of consciousness apparently vanished and then returned. Most worrying of all were the visual and aural symptoms. He looked down at his hand and saw it break up before his eyes like a bad TV image, and then re-form. That was impossible. He used the hand to rub his eyes and it worked just like a hand ought to work, which was partially reassuring. Then a few moments later he saw the phenomenon again. He wanted to ask the sandwich lady for help but she was out cold, snoring. He called out to her and to his horror heard his voice crackle and pop like a radio station that wasn’t properly tuned in.

He was, he reminded himself, misbegotten: born out of the irresistible need and imperishable desire of an old fool whose brain had been addled by television. Therefore, he himself was a by-blow of the junk culture that was addling the brains of many fools old and young, maybe even of America. Maybe this was what the symptoms of illness looked like in such an irregular creation as himself, born in the wrong way, motherless, only putatively real, like something from Syfy that stepped through the screen, and so possibly doomed to die a quasi-electronic death, death by a failure of the signal.

I’m too young to die. The fallacy of youth. Death had never cared about the ages of those it claimed.

He stiffened his resolve. If he had been created by an act of will, it followed that he must have inherited a strong will of his own. Didn’t it? Very well then. If his father had imposed his will upon the angel of life, then he in his turn would set his will against the death angel. And how would he do it?

“Mine is a love story,” he said aloud, “and love will find a way.” The echo does not know it is an echo. It resounds, until it fades.

THE SANDWICH LADY’S EYES popped open and at once she was wide awake and speaking rapidly. “The second crisis,” she said, “is the crisis of everything.”

“Everything sounds like a lot,” Sancho said.

“All of us are in two stories at the same time,” said the sandwich lady. “Life and Times. There is our own personal story, and the bigger story of what’s happening around us. When both are in trouble simultaneously, when the crisis inside you intersects with the crisis outside you, things get a little crazy.”

“How crazy are we talking about?” Sancho wanted to know.

“Bad Times,” she answered. “The worst ever. Things are falling apart. People have begun to notice. It’s going to be a wild ride and I’m not sure how we can get through it and come out on the other side. I’m not sure that we will.”

“Seems like wherever I go people are talking about the end of the world,” Sancho said. “I think I’ll bet on the world not ending, as per usual.”

“What I want to say to you is this,” the sandwich lady said. “The larger crisis changes my views regarding your personal ambitions. Regarding, that is to say, the lady at the end of the bus ride. This is not to say I’m willing to hand out the love potions, no, sir. But I’m thinking, if time is short for all of us, then go for it, kid. Go see her, be polite, but make your pitch. If she slams the door in your face, then damn, okay, you’re going to have to respect that, but you tried. Maybe she will, maybe she won’t. Go give it your best shot.” And with that, she disappeared.

“Thank you,” Sancho said, and felt simultaneously uplifted and afraid. “Thank you, I will.”

But when he got off the bus in Beautiful, at the depot that was just down the road from the Rey-Nard mall, it was already too late. There were snowflakes gusting in the air, it was six degrees below, and the wind chill made it feel much colder. People were running wild in the streets, screaming The sky is falling. There were cars on fire and broken Best Buy windows, revealing that the desire for meaningless destruction and free TVs survived even at the end of days. This was the twelfth-best city to live in in the United States and its citizens, the twelfth-best citizens in America, were losing their minds. They’ll never make the top ten now, Sancho thought, trying to hold it together, trying to keep a hold on sanity, as he began to run. The absences, the holes in time and space which he had seen in the sky, had multiplied rapidly and come down lower, and one of them yawned terrifyingly in the space where the Powers Bar & Grill used to be. Just to look at that thing—that no-thing which was the negation of all things—was to be filled with an incurable dread. Sancho ran from it as one might from the jaws of a man-eating dragon. As he ran he felt himself beginning to splinter too. He looked down at his arms, his hands, his torso, his legs. They were crackling and distorted. The picture quality had become really bad. Was there no Wi-Fi around here? He ran as hard as he could and as he neared the street where she lived he felt a kind of hammer blow fall, and the thought arrived unbidden that his father, Quichotte, who had fashioned him from falling stars, had despaired of him and unwished his mighty wish. Who is Sancho without Quichotte? The answer appeared to be, nobody. A fiction that could not endure.