Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“I don’t like to hear you talk that way.”

“Dad, please. Don’t start with your peace and love. Back there in that Bar & Grill, that was the truth.”

They went to the place in Tulsa he had renamed the Billy Diner, Tulsa’s go-to . Nothing happened. They ate green eggs and ham and huevos rancheros and left. Nobody looked, nobody cared. It felt to the Author like reclaiming a space from which Quichotte and Sancho had been expelled; another kind of victory.

“Two more stops,” he said to Son. “Then we drop the car at Hertz at SFO and go home.”

There was news on the radio. The Chevy Cruze was being discontinued along with the Impala and Volt as part of General Motors’ cost-cutting drive. There were endings all around him, the Author thought. He wasn’t the only one on his last lap.

SNAPSHOT ONE, TAKEN AFTER a fifteen-hour drive: Devils Tower, Wyoming, at night, massive and powerful and overwhelming. They sat and looked at its ominous silhouette. They couldn’t even get out of the car.

“I saw that movie,” Son said finally, in a small voice.

“We’re not here because of the movie,” the Author said.

“Why are we here then? Is it in your story?”

“Yes. But it’s in your story too.”

“My story?”

“I’ve been here once before,” the Author said. “Long ago. With your mother.”

“Oh.”

“There was a meteor shower that night, and we prayed for a child. We hadn’t found it easy to have kids.”

“Oh.”

“And then we got you. You were our star child. You were our answered prayer.”

With that confession, withheld for so long, the Author finally made the story of Sancho and Quichotte his own story, and his child’s. He took Son’s hand, and they sat in the car, and looked. There was no meteor shower that night, but it was a clear sky, the great misty highway of the galaxy blazed across it, and they saw a couple of bright shooting stars.

Snapshot two, twenty-something driving hours later, with three nights at motels en route, after they left Devils Tower and drove west and south, through Rock Springs, Purple Sage, and Little America (pops. 23,036, 535, and 68), past Lake Tahoe into California, through Sacramento (pop. 501,901) and San Jose (pop. 1,035,000). They were at last in Sonoma (pop. 11,108), in a parking lot at the corner of Broadway and Napa Road. Along one side of the parking lot ran a low white building bearing the sign SALSA TRADING COMPANY .

“There’s nothing here,” said Son. “This is what we drove halfway across America to see?”

“This is where, in the future, they will build Cyberdyne,” the Author said, reverentially.

“Cyberdyne, like in the movies?”

“Cyberdyne the corporation that built Skynet which built the Terminators. This is the correct address. They tell you it’s in Sunnyvale, but I reckon that’s wrong, or, in other words, it’s fictional. This is the precise location right here.”

“You’ve lost your mind.”

“Anyway, in my story,” the Author said, “this is where I’m building CentCorp.”

“And that is?”

“The place where Evel Cent builds the NEXT portal Mayflower that will connect our world to neighbor Earths and allow my Quichotte and his Salma to escape this dying planet to make a new life in a newfound land.”

“How does that work? I guess you’d better tell me the whole story now.”

“I’m not sure about this part,” the Author said. “I haven’t written it yet.”

“Dad,” said Son, “let’s go home.”

HE LOOKED OUT OF the airplane window in the awkward darkness of a redeye flight and saw the Northern Lights hanging there, rippling, a majestic green curtain in the sky. It was rare for the aurora to be visible in these latitudes, only a handful of such manifestations in a decade, so it felt like a privilege to be granted such a vision. He wanted Beethoven on his headphones to accompany such grandeur, the Choral Symphony thundering in his ears while the aurora thundered in his sight. The ripples raced across the sky, there and back again, their beauty bringing tears to his eyes. Deine Zauber binden wieder / Was die Mode streng geteilt. “Thy enchantments bind together / what custom sternly did divide.” He saw the vision of the aurora as the final proof that the worlds were conjoined, bound together, that the world within him, the world he dreamed up, was now forever merged with the world outside himself, and he imagined that the Lights were themselves the portals that might transport men and women to a brave new world.

It was the time of miracles. A miracle was sleeping beside him: his son restored to him, their broken love remade. If that could be true then everything was possible. It was, as Quichotte reminded him, the Age of Anything-Can-Happen. And his heart? It was very full, but it had not burst. He would have time to finish his story.

He closed his eyes, and slept.

The growing catastrophe was not limited to the damaged and disintegrating physical fabric of everything that was. The laws of science themselves appeared to be bending and breaking, like steel girders melting under the pressure of an unimaginable force. Events preceded their causes, so that a large hole appeared at the intersection of Forty-Second Street and Lexington Avenue, a hole into which cars tumbled, some time before the explosion of the gas main that was the reason for the hole’s appearance. In the city, time passed more rapidly down the avenues than on the cross streets, where it often seemed to be permanently jammed. It was possible that the great second law of thermodynamics had fallen, and entropy had in fact begun to decrease. People who knew nothing of science nevertheless felt themselves possessed by dread. When the sun shone the day grew colder and the moon exuded a tropical heat. The rain, when it fell, burned your skin, and the snow, too, sizzled when it hit the ground.

The seventh valley, Quichotte reminded himself, is the Valley of Annihilation, where the self disappears into the universe.

His room at the Blue Yorker was a monk’s cell at the heart of a whorehouse, and in the little microcosm of the motel nothing had changed. Human needs were being amply and vocally fulfilled by night and day on the far sides of his thin walls. In that dark time the continuity of desire brought Quichotte a measure of comfort. Human nature at least was unchanged, and remained the great constant at the root of things. He himself had no desire to participate. Nor in the solitude of his room did he use television for pornographic arousal. Pornography embarrassed him. In fact, all sexual behavior on television embarrassed him. He averted his eyes from the screen even when people kissed. He had no need for such proxy gratifications.

He was waiting with folded hands for love to find a way.

IN THE END THE ADDICT will always call the dealer. Even if the dealer is in love with the addict, obsessed by the addict, consumed by the need to be with the addict and to keep her safe from all the world’s dangers, the addict’s need for what he has is still greater than his need for her. So in the end she called him. Time had passed, it was hard to know how much time, because time was strange now, stretching, compressing, unreliable. A week could be a month long. A lifetime could pass in a day. The world was falling apart, a great roaring maw of nothingness had appeared in midair near the storied secular spire of the Empire State Building, and the city was full of screaming mouths and running feet and fallen figures being trampled in the stampede. And in the midst of chaos a calm man in a sleazy motel waited for the phone to ring, and it rang, and all she wanted was him. At the heart of a nightmare, a dream come true.