Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

He said: I lost my son my only child the blessing of my old age. She said: I want to go home I dream of Juhu Beach and instead of my wicked grandfather there could be you. I could have my family again with a good grandfather instead of bad. What am I saying. You pulled a gun on me. You talk to guns. You’re crazy. He said: I wash my hands of him. I renounce him. He turned out wrong. I don’t take responsibility for that. He caused me shame. She said: Edvard Munch and Van Gogh were bipolar, too, did you know that. I miss my electricity. The voltage keeps me earthed. Is there somewhere I can get ECT treatment en route. Also I need a hit of the spray. You’re not listening to me. I have problems. I need the ECT. I need the fucking spray. He said: If you want to die we can stop for those things. You’re in recovery. Let me remind you. Nausea, vomiting, heart pounding, difficulty in breathing, confusion, hallucinations, weakness, sweating, itchy skin, difficulty swallowing, dizziness, then a seizure. Is this what you want. Can we get to California and pass through the portal into the promised land if you insist on this. We cannot. She said: You’re supposed to give it to me. You’re selling I’m buying. He said: I have been in love with you for a long time. I will not cause your death. You’re crazy too. She said: Fuck off. He said: Drive the car.

Cleveland, Toledo, Chicago, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Omaha. She said: Omaha, that’s a Peyton Manning play in a football game. He said: It’s a beach in France. Grand Island, North Platte, Cheyenne. He said: I saw a cowboy movie on TV. At one point the old chief explains his people’s inevitable defeat. He says, “There is an endless supply of white men, but there has always been a limited number of human beings.” Maybe Cheyenne means “human beings” in Cheyenne. She said: And maybe Indian means “human beings” in Indian. There’s no such language as Indian. I know that. Nevertheless. It’s us. We are the human beings. He said: We’re in Indian country.

Outside the car didn’t exist. Only inside the car existed. The Nothing roared in the sky and made them mad. They babbled as they drove. Salt Lake City, Battle Mountain, Reno. She said: Hey, let’s get a quickie divorce. He said: We can’t. We’re not married. They laughed hysterically and drove on.

WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA.

He was asleep. She shook him awake to show him the sign. He woke up very quickly and sat up very straight. And in that instant when he gazed upon the California sign a lifetime of delusion fell away from him, and he saw clearly at last, no longer foolish or mad. Perhaps what they said was true: that only at the end of the quest did the seeker understand how deeply rooted in error his journey had been, only at the end of the narrow road to the deep north did the Japanese poet perceive that there was nothing to be learned in the deep north, only at the summit of Mount Qaf which they had climbed in search of their winged god did the thirty bird-pilgrims see that they themselves were the god they were looking for, and only when one saw the sign saying WELCOME did one comprehend the impossibility of the welcome one had sought, and with that comprehension came a new clarity, a return to sanity, and even a kind of wisdom.

So, now that Quichotte was in full possession of his senses, there were things he needed to say. “My quest for you,” he told Miss Salma R, “has not been for you alone, but also for my own compromised goodness and virtue. I see it now. By attaining you—the impossible!—I thought I might validate my life. By becoming worthy of you I might feel worthy of being myself.”

“That’s quite a speech,” she said.

“What I hoped for is indeed beyond hope,” he said. “I was out of my mind, looking for this year’s birds in last year’s nests. And all around me America—and not only America, the whole human race!—yes, even our India!—was also losing its reason, its capacity for ethics, its goodness, its soul. And it may be, I can’t say, that this deep failure brought down upon us the deeper failure of the cosmos. But I at least have woken up. I am sane again, and if the story of the world is coming to an end, and maybe our stories will end with it, then let us make that a happy ending, a peaceful coming to rest in a good place. But I still hope we may save ourselves. At least I hope that we may try.”

“Why would we have driven like lunatics across America,” she asked him, “if not to try?”

“Then,” he said, “call him.”

“Call whom?”

“You have his number, I’m sure. The genius. You need to talk to him.”

“Yes. I’ll pull over,” she said.

“We can’t go in the front door,” Quichotte said. “There’s a security ring and a crowd of hysterical people. You need to ask him about access. There must be another way.”

“Why would he tell me?”

“You are Salma,” he said. “Of course he will invite you in.”

There was no time to lose. The great voids roared in the sky, eating the stars.

IS IT YOU? YOU’RE REALLY HERE?

Yes, Dr. Evel, it’s really me.

“Dr. Evel.” Now I know it’s you.

Dr. Awwal Sant. I’m with a desi friend. Can we come in? Three of us is a party.

The place is surrounded. You know that.

Tell me what to do.

Don’t come anywhere near CentCorp. Follow the highway to Boyes Hot Springs. I’ll send a car to meet you at the Cochon Volant BBQ.

There’s a back way in?

There’s a tunnel. Go down the tunnel toward the light.

EVEN BEFORE HE HAD completed his journey through the tunnel, Quichotte, now, at the last, the clearest minded and sanest of men, had understood that this was an earthly version of the same tunnel of which people speak, which appears at the end of life, and in which at a certain point one may have the choice of turning back toward the beautiful temporariness of the world, or of going forward into the purity of the Eternal. He understood, furthermore, that when the entire fabric, the warp and weft of everything, was unraveling, when the stars were dying and history itself was coming to an end, then the possibility of taking one magic step through a gateway and starting over in a new, Edenic location was a fairy tale, not to be taken seriously. In other words, there was no escape from Death, not even if one hurtled across a continent in search of Life, for there at the end of the journey was the hooded figure waiting for you with open arms.

Nevertheless, he thought, it was better to play the game to the end, not to knock the black king over and resign but to wait for the checkmate move, to fight against the advancing white pieces until they could no longer be held back, because there was an endless supply of white chess pieces, but a strictly limited number of black kings. So at the end of the tunnel he got out of his old car, knowing he would never drive it again, silently thanked it for its years of unostentatious reliability, and went around to open the door for Miss Salma R, as a gentleman should. The liveried chauffeur who had driven the lead vehicle guided them toward a small railway car, in which they were carried through the interior organs of CentCorp to the room containing the brain.

CentCorp was all light, its interior space composed, or so it appeared to Quichotte, of great illuminated canyons pockmarked with small areas of relative darkness where, he guessed, actual human beings sat and did their work. He felt as if he were entering the sun itself, or at least the almost-as-radiant palace of the Sun King. Half blinded by the grandeur of the blazing white light, he failed to observe a single person until, at their journey’s end, their carriage door opened automatically and there to greet them was the Sun King himself, Dr. Evel, the scholar-entrepreneur and master of the NEXT gateway, Evel Cent.