Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

She said, “So you want to go to California. Good luck to you. You’ll certainly have plenty of cash. Maybe you can buy passage for yourself.”

He said, “You must also come.”

Now Miss Salma saw the gun under the blanket, pointing at her heart. I deserve this, she thought, for being such a bloody fool.

“You see, madam,” Quichotte said, “this gun talks to me, and wants me to fire. But me, I don’t want to shoot, I want to rescue you, and to rescue you, I must ask you to come with me to Sonoma, CA. Please.”

Control your body language, she told herself. Control how you speak. How you conduct yourself in the next few minutes will determine whether you live or die. “Do you really think,” she asked, speaking kindly and evenly, and allowing an old accent to creep back into her voice “that our two Bombay stories should end with a bullet in New York? Remember where we are from. Prima in Indis, gateway to India, star of the East with its face to the West! Queen’s Necklace, Hornby Vellard, Pali Hill, Juhu. Remember our bhel puri, our pomfret fish, our Bambaiyya slang, our movies. Did you like my mother’s pictures? My grandmama’s? Of course! Everybody your age loved those flicks. Zara hat ké, zara bach ké, yé hai Bombay meri jaan. Remember who we are, bhai . We don’t belong on opposite sides of a gun. You are not my enemy, I am not yours. The enemy is elsewhere, with a different skin tone. We are a couple of hometown kids. Bombay, men! Totally majboot city. Great god Ganesh, Ganpati bappa, watches over us all—Hindu, Muslim, Christian, all. Put the bleddy gun away.”

“I am not trying to kill you,” Quichotte said. “I am trying to save your life.”

“Allow me,” she said, in the same gentle voice, “to point out some practical difficulties. You are trying to kidnap a very famous woman in broad daylight in the middle of Central Park, and you’re all by yourself. You’re relying on me not to scream or run because I don’t want you to shoot. But even if I agreed with your proposition, what then? We have to drive across America? You’re going to have to sleep. I’m going to need changes of clothes and to use the restroom. Can you really keep me prisoner through all that? You know that when people find out I’m missing they are going to raise the alert. There’s going to be an APB and my face all over the news. You think you can drive me to the West Coast and they won’t stop you five miles from here? It’s impossible. Why don’t you just put the gun down, take my money, give me the attaché case, and we’ll call it even. Nobody has to get shot, nobody has to go to jail. How does that sound?”

“It sounds,” Quichotte said, “as if you still think everything’s normal all around us. But the situation is very far from normal. Most of the TV networks are down. There is almost no news being broadcast. The NYPD, who knows what condition it’s in. I don’t think anyone will be hunting for you, the terror has everyone in its grip. The country is running wild. Maybe the whole world. There may not be much time left. This is why I make my request.”

This was the moment when the ruptures in the fabric, the voids, came down to ground level. Behind Quichotte and Salma, where the Metropolitan Museum stood, the nothingness burst through the somethingness of the world, roaring like a fire, and then the increasingly familiar giant-bullet-hole shape was all that was left, the awe-inspiring black void of nonexistence, and around its edges the broken edges of the actual, and the long-gathered and carefully curated history of the human race was gone, and with it a part of the meaning of life on earth. Miss Salma R began to weep.

“We have to go and help,” she said.

“There’s nobody left alive to be helped,” Quichotte replied.

She dried her eyes. “Put your gun away,” she said with new resolve. “Let’s go.”

“Don’t listen to her,” said the gun. “She can’t be trusted. I’m the one you can trust. This is your chance of immortality. Don’t be tricked. Shoot her now.”

“Immortality no longer exists,” Quichotte said. “The future, posterity, fame. Those words need to be removed from the dictionaries. There are no dictionaries. There’s only now.”

“Are you talking to yourself?” Salma demanded. “I’m supposed to trust my life to someone who talks to himself?”

“I was talking to the gun,” Quichotte said. “Explaining why it won’t be needed.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Miss Salma R.

THEY BEGAN TO WORK in concert. “I’ll need clothes,” she said, and they got into the Cruze and drove to the Gap at Fifty-Ninth and Lex. There were no staff on duty and people were looting the place. They took what they needed and left. A few blocks downtown they did the same at a Duane Reade and then they were set. The looters were like automata, grim-faced, empty-eyed. Nobody looked at anybody.

“So I’m a thief now,” Salma said.

“Possessions no longer exist,” Quichotte said. “I don’t even think there’s money anymore. There’s only go west or die.”

“Can you still drive?” she asked. “Long distances, at your age, fast?”

“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. Change places. Road trip.”

Forty-five hours’ drive time, three thousand miles, give or take. That was in normal driving conditions, but you had to add to that the weather conditions, the abandoned vehicles, the burned-out wrecks, the trucks skewed sideways on the freeways, the broken bridges, the fallen debris, the marauding long-haired armed gangs roving the highway shoulders, the feral dogs, the madmen on bicycles, the maimed survivors of the void’s irruptions, the blind, the limbless, the starving, the deranged children, the angels on their way to hell, the walking dead, the crawling dead, the dead. Watching them from flagpoles the tattered banners of fallen America. And up above roaring in the sky the monstrous evidences of the great Nothing, the bullet holes, the absences, the star eaters, the galaxy swallowers, sucking the Earth’s terror up like food, preying on our deaths. The voids.

The interior of the Cruze was a capsule hurtling through space, hoping to land with pinpoint accuracy upon the distant heavenly body of their salvation. CentCorp. On the road that name didn’t feel real. It was just a word. Only the broken maddened road was real. The two of them strapped inside, wide-eyed, watching the horror of outside, rendered dumb by exhaustion and shock. They stopped for gas and Quichotte and his gun patrolled the vehicle while Salma filled her up.

“Well, well,” said the gun, sulking. “Guess I’m still useful for something, huh.”

From the gas station store they took toilet paper, soap, the last gallon jugs of water. When they needed to perform their natural functions they turned off the freeway and found a side road where danger looked, for the moment, to be absent. They cleaned and washed themselves and went on. Civilization was a skin they were in the process of shedding. Apart from gas and bowel movements, nothing made them stop. She drove for eight hours and slept for four. While she slept, he took over and drove for four hours, then slept for four while she took the wheel again. Then they were awake together for four hours and then she slept and he drove again. They were awake together for four hours in every twenty-four and in those hours they said whatever came into their heads, or nothing, with increasing hysteria. Theirs was the intimacy of outlaws on the run. Hollow-eyed, numb-brained, the bandits of the apocalypse, running for their lives. Running toward their last hope of life.