Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

Did he have a good heart or was he shriveled inside?

Even great Bellow, he saw in the Times, had been unclear on the question of the heart, and had asked on his deathbed: “Was I a man, or was I a jerk?”

ON THE NIGHT HE FINALLY felt strong enough to face his book again, he went back into his office, and there in his Aeron chair waiting for him was the large Japanese-American gentleman with many names.

“What are you doing here?” the Author cried, feeling his heart thump. “Has something happened to my son?”

“Your son is fine,” the gentleman said. “And doing excellent work. He has proved himself to be a great American patriot, as I always believed he was. Thanks to him and others like him, we are winning the cyberwar.”

“Is that right.”

“Affirmative, sir. That’s our position.”

“You scared me, showing up this way. You have to stop doing this. In the first place it’s a crime and in the second place I’m a heart patient now.”

“I have good news. I have to give you props. You’ve been officially approved.” The agent rose to shake hands and offered the Author his card. Agent Clint Oshima, it read.

“Good name.”

“Thank you. Anyway, great job.”

“What job would that be?”

“Anthill,” Agent Oshima replied. “You didn’t leak. Not a word. We waited, and you did nothing. First class.”

“Oh, yeah,” the Author remembered. “I wanted to ask you. There was an article in the Times a few months ago describing an operation pretty much like Anthill. I thought, if it’s so hush-hush, how is it in the paper? But it wasn’t called Anthill. It was called Hivemind.”

“So let me explain,” said Agent Oshima. “When we are obliged to allow outside personnel to be brought into the covert operation—a parent, for example, like yourself—we give them certain information, but we don’t give any two people the same information. Then if the information enters the public domain we know who put it there.”

“You mean it isn’t called Anthill, you just told me that?”

“It’s called Anthill. Between ourselves.”

“What happened to whoever you told it was called Hivemind?”

“There were consequences.”

“Grave consequences?”

“A good way to express it.”

“And you’re here to do what? To congratulate me or warn me or both?”

“I’m here to congratulate you because as you have passed a certain set standard, we are prepared to permit certain access privileges.”

“To Anthill?”

“To your son.”

When he heard those three words—when Son’s name was spoken—he felt, as he had never imagined he would feel, like Quichotte when Dr. Smile told him he would meet his Beloved. He wasn’t, by temperament, a great believer in radiance opening up in the heavens and flowing down over him in a cascade of joy, but something of the sort befell him at that moment. He no longer had any hope of encountering a great romance. That ship had sailed. Son was all he had to love, but he had been kept at a distance, first by Son’s own design and then by the intelligence community. If he was now to be allowed to spend time with his child—if his child wanted to spend time with him—that would make possible a renewal of his own belief in life. Or, in simpler words: it would make him happy.

“In our evaluation,” Agent Oshima continued, “if we wish to maximize the effectiveness of our team of digital warriors, a degree of outside human contact is a benefit. A young man can go stir-crazy out there in cyberspace, in the max-security bubble. It’s good to come down to earth. What we propose is, one weekend every six weeks, and once a year a two-week vacation. I have recommended in your case that we begin with the two-week stretch and take it from there. How does that sound to you?”

“What does he think?” the Author asked. “Does he want to do this?”

“A young man needs his father,” said Agent Oshima. “He has expressed that need.”

“Agent Oshima, Agent Kagemusha, Agent Mizoguchi, Agent Makioka,” the Author replied, “I think I love you. All of you.”

The Japanese-American gentleman looked embarrassed. “That’s inadvisable, sir,” he said.

HIS HAIR HAD BEEN long the last time, falling in waves almost to his shoulders. Now it was brutally short, cut close to the scalp, like Sister’s. The Author winced when he saw it.

“What?” Son wanted to know.

“Nothing,” his father replied. “The hair.”

“You don’t like it?”

“I think I preferred it longer.”

“Everyone likes it,” Son said, neutrally. “I’ve had a lot of compliments.”

The first hours were awkward in this way. They sat across the breakfast table nursing their coffees and had to find out how to talk to each other.

“What do you want to do, these two weeks?”

A shrug. “I don’t know. Nothing. Anything. What do you want to do?”

“I’d like to do stuff we’d both enjoy.”

“I don’t know what that is. I’m fine with whatever you decide.”

A long pause. Then:

“You want to go on a road trip?”

“Where?”

“A bunch of places I’ve been writing about. Going there will help me to get them right. And, eventually, California.”

“You sure you can still drive?”

“I can drive.”

“No, I’m not sure you can still drive.”

“Then you drive.”

“You’ll let me do the driving?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then. Road trip.”

“We have to go rent a Chevy Cruze.”

HE HAD NOT TOLD Son about the heart trouble. He had decided there was no need. He felt stronger by the day, and the murmurs he heard in his sleepless nights were just an old man’s fears running wild. He was a little grayer, a little thinner, but children barely noticed such variations in their parents. And he felt more energetic than he had for a long time. Anyway, telling Son about the surgery would ruin the adventure, putting the child in the caring slash parenting role. Let the chips fall where they may, he thought. He wanted to find a better ending for himself and Son than he had been able to make for Sancho and Quichotte. In his case the Question of Sancho was inverted. The question was not, who was Son without him, but who was he without his son, and the answer was, really not very much.

Son was the stranger behind the wheel whose father he had to become again. In the town he had reimagined as Berenger, New Jersey, he told the young man about the mastodons, and his indebtedness to Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. “So many great writers have guided me along the way,” he said, and mentioned, further, Cervantes and Arthur C. Clarke. “Is that okay to do?” Son asked. “That kind of borrowing?” He had replied by quoting Newton, who said he had been able to see further because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. Son looked doubtful. “Yeah, but Newton wound up discovering gravity,” he said, unkindly. “You haven’t gotten anywhere close to that.”

He tried to explain the picaresque tradition, its episodic nature, and how the episodes of such a work could encompass many manners, high and low, fabulist and commonplace, how it could be at once parodic and original, and so through its metamorphic roguery it could demonstrate and seek to encompass the multiplicity of human life. He stood on the high street of this ur-Berenger which felt less real to him than the township in his pages, and said, of the Absurd in general, that it both mocked and celebrated our inability to give life a truly coherent meaning, and of his mastodons in particular that maybe they said something about our growing dehumanization, about how as a species we, or some of us, might be losing our moral compass and becoming, simultaneously, creatures out of a barbaric, prehuman, long-toothed past, and also monsters tormenting the human present.