Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“Is that what you believe,” Son asked him, “that life is meaningless and we are turning into animals without morality?”

“I think it’s legitimate for a work of art made in the present time to say, we are being crippled by the culture we have made, by its most popular elements above all,” he replied. “And by stupidity and ignorance and bigotry, yes.”

“So what have you done about it?” Son demanded. “What’s your contribution? What sort of mark do you think you’re leaving on the world?”

“I did my work, and then there’s you,” he said, hearing as he spoke the weakness of his reply.

Son shrugged and headed for the car. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s move on.”

Your son, your grand inquisitor.

THEY HEADED INTO THE WEST to the places of his fancy whose streets he most wanted to walk, and Son was happy driving long hours, listening to the radio, snoozing for an hour in a mall parking lot, then arrowing on into the night, watching the roadside nowheres spool by. As it unfurled, America—with its calm green signage, its garish billboards featuring men with large, excellent teeth who were trying to sell him their legal services, its Howard Johnsons and Days Inns—began to feel progressively less real to the Author than the versions he had invented and lived in and with for a year and more. The imagined took precedence over the actual. Quichotte and Sancho were traveling with them, in the car which was also their car, and his and his son’s journey felt more and more like theirs, run backwards, like a film, in the days when there was film. Ghost-Quichotte sat with him in his seat, ghost-Sancho helped Son to drive the car, and gradually their phantom forms merged with and were absorbed by his own and his child’s. He genuinely felt as if he had entered the world of his fiction and began to look nervously up at the sky as they drove through the cold night to arrive by daylight in the Kansas town he had renamed Beautiful, and he half expected—more than half expected—to see ruptures in reality up there, holes in space-time, and panic in the streets below.

But all was peaceful. And here was a quiet street, and here just as he had imagined it, shocking in its exact mirroring of his make-believe, was a cream-colored two-story house with the word WELCOME sprayed in white paint on a red ground in the small forecourt, below a small OM sign. She’s in there, he thought, mourning her murdered relative, and just maybe pining for the strange boy who once came to her door and called her Beautiful like the town and promised to return. Time running backwards. Any moment Sancho would walk backwards to the front door and make himself known. The Author sat watching the door with his heart in his mouth.

Nothing happened. The ghosts did not walk by day.

On East 151st Street they walked into the Powers Bar & Grill, not called Powers, not (or not yet) destroyed by a space-time hole. They used the restroom and sat together at the bar and ordered a little food. This was when the streams merged and fiction became fact, as if they had stepped onto a theater stage during the intermission and then the second act had begun, its characters swirling in around them and treating them as members of the cast. A drunk man started shouting at them, calling them “fucking Iranians,” and “terrorists,” asking them if their status was legal, and screaming, “Get out of my country.” Quichotte and Sancho had reacted by backing away and standing in the shadows, allowing other (white) men to bring the drunk under control. The Author, to his surprise, reacted differently, standing up to the drunk and defying him— control yourself, back off, the only person terrorizing anyone around here is you— until the abusive individual was escorted off the premises to general relief.

They were unharmed, and went ahead and finished their meal, but Son still had his guard up. “I don’t think that’s the end of it,” he said, watching the door, and the Author realized he was right, the drunk would come back with a gun to kill them. He found himself saying, “He’s coming for us,” said it a couple of moments before the man did come back with the gun, and what then followed happened so fast, and at the same time so slowly, that it intensified the Author’s feeling of being in a waking dream. When the man entered the Bar & Grill, Son was right there to meet him, and the Author heard his own voice slowed down to a growl, begging no, no, and then Son made a series of moves, leaning his head and upper body out of the line of fire and at the same instant grasping and twisting the gunman’s gun hand with his own left hand while, with his right hand, striking the gunman’s wrist with a violent karate chop, and then Son was holding the gun and the gunman was facing him, wetting his pants. Literally wetting his pants, no longer killer but just a maudlin drunk, begging don’t shoot me, I got kids, as time speeded up again and the noise of the room returned to normal and then the hee-haw of law enforcement vehicles and the drunk man being cuffed and taken away.

“I need a drink,” Son said, and sat back down at the bar.

“Where’d you learn to do that?” his father asked him.

“Out at Anthill,” Son replied, “there isn’t a whole lot to do. There’s a gym, and there’s TV, and there are YouTube videos. I watched like ten videos on how to disarm a man with a gun—if it’s a handgun, if he’s holding it with one hand, if he’s holding it with two hands, if it’s a rifle, whatever—and then I got my gym instructor to work with me on it, just for kicks.”

“You could have been killed.”

“Not really. I knew I could take him. He was so inebriated his reaction times were way down. It wasn’t even that hard.”

The Author let it go. “Thank you,” he said.

“I’m curious about one thing,” Son said. “When you said ‘He’s coming for us,’ nobody had seen him coming. That really helped me be in position, ready and waiting, but how did you know?”

“It’s in my story,” the Author said, and saw his son’s eyes widen. That was maybe the first time the young man had looked impressed.

“What happened to us in your story?” he asked.

“We got killed,” the Author replied. “That’s the part where having you here really made quite a difference.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

They drank in silence for a moment, then the Author had to ask, “Do you watch a lot of TV out there?”

“I told you. TV, YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, that’s about what there is to do. That and the gym. So, yeah. I like to watch things on TV. Why?”

“Nothing,” the Author said. “I guess there are some good things about TV as well as bad.”

“Videos just saved your life,” Son pointed out. “So you could say that, yes.”

Another time of silent drinking.

“In your story,” Son asked, “when the guy started with his racist abuse, how did we react?”

“I’m ashamed to say that we backed away from him,” the Author answered. “Maybe I should rewrite that part.”

“Yeah,” Son said. “Because you didn’t back away. You totally confronted that asshole and you had everyone on your side.”

“Maybe that was a dumb thing to do.”

“No,” said Son. “It was fucking heroic.”

IN THE CRUZE AGAIN. “Is there any more stuff like that in your story?” Son wanted to know.

“There’s a diner in Tulsa.”

“Let’s go there,” he said.

“No need to go looking for trouble,” the Author said. “You could have been killed.”

“Not really,” Son said.

“On the whole it’s better to walk away from violence. Plus for people like us…”

“I’m not buying it,” Son said. “I’m done with meek and mild. If someone comes at me, Imma go at him, double.”