Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

Had he deserved his father’s despairing rejection, if that was what had happened? And could it be that his creator could uncreate him after all, that without his father’s love he would simply cease to be? Was paternal love the lifeblood he lacked, without which even romantic love could not save him? Had he loved his father? If he was truthful with himself, the answer was, he had not. So, then, these were his just desserts.

His deterioration accelerated. He went from high definition to early analog and now his only hope, all his hope, was that the woman he loved would open her arms and heart and love—love itself!—would burst through his body and make him whole. A woman’s love could do that. A good woman’s love. It could save your life, even if you had not loved your father as you should have, even if you were lost to him, so far away; even then, her love could let you live. Right? Right? he asked, but there was nobody to answer him. All he could do was run.

He passed an SUV abandoned with its motor running and the radio playing, Sinatra, “Taking a Chance on Love.” “That’s a good omen,” he shouted to himself, and his voice crackled and broke, his body popped and broke and became pixelated and then recovered its form, and he ran, or something did, and he repeated, over and over, love will find a way.

He rounded a corner and then he was at the door of that modest home, that cream-colored two-story building, with the word WELCOME, in English, sprayed in white paint on a red ground in the small forecourt, below a small OM sign. There was no doorbell. He took hold of the brass knocker—his hand sizzling and shifting and hissing with static like the rest of him—and he knocked. And there she was, there she was!, Beautiful from Beautiful, Khoobsoorat sé Khoobsoorat, which also meant “more beautiful than beautiful,” the girl of his dreams, and this was his one chance, and he knew what he had to say.

“I love you, and I know that’s insane, but I also know that love takes courage, and I take my courage in my hands and say, I love you, and God, I hope you remember who I am.”

“Hello?” she said, looking left and right. “Is anybody there?”

“Take my hand,” he pleaded, hardly able to hear his own voice now, “say you love me and I’ll be able to live. I throw myself at your feet and beg.”

“No,” she said, answering someone behind her in the depths of the house, “there’s nobody. Someone definitely knocked but there’s nobody here now.”

And then there was nobody there.

When he returned to New York the Author was not the same man. The tragic events in London had hit him hard, and his niece’s last accusation had been a spear in the heart. I could die right now, he had thought when she hurled those words at him. Angel of death. But the exterminating angel isn’t supposed to die, is he. Everyone else dies at his hands. And here he was back at his desk writing about the end of the world, in the process of wiping out everything he had invented to go along with the erasure of everything that mattered in his real life. His own world felt like it had just ended. Without a Sister, he was no longer a Brother. He was just a pseudonym, Sam DuChamp, writing the last bars of the music of his book. All that remained was the last of Quichotte.

He was beset by his characters. They flew about his ears like bats, knowing that their stories were ending, insisting on his attention. Me, me, me, as Dr. Smile had taunted Quichotte, but now they were all doing it. Save me, save me. Quichotte alone found a little scrap of dignity, even nobility. He did not ask to be saved, but there was someone he wanted to save. The character was teaching the Author about the nature of true love.

When his heart trouble began—he thought at once of Quichotte’s youthful arrhythmia—he understood that his book had known about it all along, even before he had any symptoms. Everything he had written about the malfunction of time began to make sense. He had sketched out scenes in which time accelerated or decelerated, in which it became staccato, a series of pounding moments, or in which it seemed to skip a beat. As the laws of nature lost their authority, time would lose its rhythm. He already had that worked out. And now in his own body his fiction was coming to life.

The world no longer has any purpose except that you should finish your book. When you have done so, the stars will begin to go out.

There had been a moment in the writing when a character assumed a more important role than his author had originally envisaged for him. The scientist-entrepreneur Evel Cent had moved to center stage and taken command of the book’s larger narrative, and plainly would play an important part in its conclusion. When a character developed so dramatically on the page, in the act of making, one had to say to oneself, okay, but is this right? Is this helpful, should I hold on to his coattails and go along for the ride, or is it taking me down a blind alley I don’t want to end up in? He had decided to allow Evel Cent’s enlarged presence to remain in the text. CentCorp and NEXT portals would have their place. The decay of the Earth in the novel would be a parallel to the decay—the environmental, political, social, moral decay—of the planet on which he lived.

In the week after his return, his health continued to deteriorate. This was a shock to him. He had been blessed with good health most of his life, with only minor complaints to report. He remembered Sister’s words. Your good health is the thing you have until the day your doctor tells you you don’t have it anymore.

Then he was in the clutches of the medical profession and there wasn’t much to say about that except that it was so. Tests and examinations bombarded him as if he were a Syrian refugee enclave. There was a schedule of meds and then there was bypass surgery. He was warned that even this might not entirely solve the problem of his wayward heartbeat but it would help. After the surgery he felt better fast. They had told him the recovery took between six and twelve weeks, but it seemed he was one of the fortunate quick recoverers. He felt so much better so soon that he started calling people up and recommending the procedure. “Don’t hold back. Have the whole quintuple. It’s great.” (Again, he heard the echo of one of his characters, Miss Salma R, recommending electroconvulsive therapy to her crazy friends.) He was told to take it easy. But the return of energy, of functionality, was exciting. His only problem was insomnia, and in the insomniac nights his optimism waned, and his heart sent him a secret message. I’m not done with you, it said. You know it. There’s an endgame up ahead.

Just let me finish my book, he replied.

And it was true. The book had known better than he did from the start. He had not contemplated his own mortality until now, but his book had been talking about death all the way. So was that what he’d been up to, without being fully conscious of it? This whole performance about the end of the world had really been a way of talking about the imminent end of the Author? And could there be anything more narcissistic than that, to equate one’s own departure with the end of everything, to say that if he was no longer around, nothing else would endure either? The battle would be over and all of humanity would lie sprawled on the battlefield alongside him? Let’s not talk about race or class or history or multiplicity or any damn thing in the beautiful broken world, let’s not argue or love or try to make a good world for our children, because all of that goes down the toilet along with me! L’univers, c’est moi? Was that the kind of megalomaniac he had shown himself to be?