“Cut it out, ‘Dad,’ ” the imaginary young man rejoined. “What’s in all this for me?”
* * *
—
AFTER THE NIGHT of the Perseid miracle Quichotte spent days lost in a haze of joy because of the arrival of the mysterious black-and-white youngster he had named Sancho. He sent a text message to R. K. Smile, M.D., telling him the good news. Dr. Smile did not reply.
Sancho was darker skinned than his father, that was plain even in black-and-white, and in the end it was this that enabled Quichotte to solve—at least to his own satisfaction—the mystery of the boy’s arrival. It seemed that Sancho was of approximately the same hue as the Beloved, Miss Salma R. So perhaps he was a visitor from the future, the child of Quichotte’s forthcoming marriage to the great lady, and had traveled back through time and space to answer his father’s need for a son’s companionship, and end his long solitude. To a person who had gained a deep understanding of time travel from television, this was entirely possible. He remembered the Doctor, the British Time Lord, and guessed that Sancho might have arrived in some sort of TARDIS-like vehicle hidden in the dark sky behind the brilliance of the meteors. And perhaps this color drainage, this black-and-white effect, was nothing but a temporary side effect of time travel. “Welcome, my future son!” he enthused. “Welcome to the present. We will woo your mother together. How can she resist being wooed not only by the future father of her children, but by one of those children too? Our success is certain….What’s in it for you? Young man, if we fail, then you will cease to exist. If she does not consent to becoming your mother, then you will never be born, and so it follows that you wouldn’t be here now. Does that focus your mind?”
“I’m hungry,” Sancho muttered mutinously. “Can we stop talking and eat?”
Quichotte noted his son’s untamed, rebellious, outlawlike character. It pleased him. Heroes, superheroes, and antiheroes, too, were not made of complaisant stock. They were out-of-step, against-the-grain, different-drummer types. He thought of Sherlock Holmes, of Green Arrow, of Negan. He understood, too, that he had missed the boy’s childhood, had not been there for him, wherever there might have been. The lad would very likely be full of resentments and even delinquencies. It would take time to persuade him to open up, to stop scowling, to accept parental love and give filial love in return. The road was the place for that. Men on the road together have three choices. They separate, they kill one another, or they work things out.
“Yes,” Quichotte replied to his son, with his heart full of hope. “By all means, let’s eat.”
* But Dr. Smile was by no means kindly in all matters. As we shall see. As we shall presently see.
The Author of the preceding narrative—we will call him Brother*—was a New York–based writer of Indian origin who had previously written eight modestly (un)successful spy fictions under the pen name of Sam DuChamp. Then in a surprising change of direction he conceived the idea of telling the story of the lunatic Quichotte and his doomed pursuit of the gorgeous Miss Salma R, in a book radically unlike any other he had ever attempted. No sooner had he conceived this idea than he became afraid of it. He could not at first fathom how such an eccentric notion had lodged in his brain, and why it insisted so vehemently on being written that he had no choice but to start work. Then as he thought about it further, he began to understand that in some fashion that he did not as yet fully grasp, Quichotte—the loner in search of love, the loser-nobody who believed himself capable of winning the heart of a queen—had been with him all his life, a shadow-self he had glimpsed from time to time in the corner of his eye, but had not had the courage to confront. Instead he had written his commonplace fictions of the secret world, disguised as someone else. He now saw that this had been a way of avoiding the story that revealed itself to him in the mirror every day, even if only in the corner of his eye.
His next thought was even more alarming: To make sense of the life of the strange man whose latter days he was setting out to chronicle, he would have to reveal himself alongside his subject, for the tale and the teller were yoked together by race, place, generation, and circumstance. Perhaps this bizarre story was a metamorphosed version of his own. Quichotte himself might say, if he were aware of Brother (which was impossible, naturally), that in fact the writer’s tale was the altered version of his history, rather than the other way around, and might have argued that his “imaginary” life added up to the more authentic narrative of the two.
So, in brief: They were both Indian-American men, one real, one fictional, both born long ago in what was then Bombay, in neighboring apartment blocks, both real. Their parents would have known each other (except that one set of parents was imaginary), and would perhaps have played golf and badminton together at the Willingdon Club and sipped sunset cocktails at the Bombay Gym (both real-world locations). They were about the same age, at which almost everyone is an orphan, and their generation, having made a royal mess of the planet, was on its way out. They both suffered from physical complaints: Brother’s aching back, Quichotte’s dragging leg. They met friends (real, fictional) and acquaintances (fictional, real) in the obituary columns with increasing frequency. There would not be less of all this in the days to come. And there were deeper echoes. If Quichotte had been driven mad by his desire for the people behind the TV screen, then he, Brother, had perhaps also been deranged by proximity to another veiled reality, in which nothing was reliable, treachery was everywhere, identities were slippery and mutable, democracy was corruptible, the two-faced double agent and the three-faced triple agent were everyday monsters, love placed the loved one in danger, allies could not be trusted, information was as often fool’s gold as golden, and patriotism was a virtue for which there would never be any recognition or reward.
Brother was agitated about many things. Like Quichotte, he was alone and childless, except that he had once had a son. This child had vanished long ago like a ghost, and must be a young man by now, and Brother thought about him every day and was dismayed by his absence. His wife was also long gone, and his financial situation bordered on the precarious. And—beyond these private matters—he had begun to have a sense of something coming after him, of dark-windowed cars parked on the corner of his block with their motors running, footsteps that stopped when he stopped, then started up again when he walked on, clicking noises on the phone, strange problems with his laptop, telemarketing messages with, he thought, a menace behind the banal words, threats on his Twitter feed, murmurs from his publishing company that mid-list Authors like himself might have difficulty being published in the future. There were issues with his credit cards, and his social media had been hacked too often for it to be a random thing. On one occasion he came home at night and was sure his apartment had been entered even though nothing had been disturbed. If the two guiding principles of the universe were paranoia (the belief that the world had meaning, but that meaning was located at a concealed level, which was very possibly hostile to the overt, absurd level, which meant, in brief, you) and entropy (the belief that life was meaningless, that things fell apart and the heat-death of the universe was inevitable), then he was definitely in the paranoid camp.
If Quichotte’s craziness was leading him to run toward his doom, then Brother’s anxieties were close to triggering a flight response. He wanted to run but didn’t know where or how, which made him more fearful still, because he knew that in his spy fiction he had already told himself the answer. You can run but you can’t hide.
Maybe writing about Quichotte was a way of running away from that truth.
It was difficult for him to speak of personal things because he had never been the confessional type. From his boyhood days he had been drawn toward secrecy. As a small child he wore his father’s sunglasses to conceal his eyes, which revealed too much. He hid things and watched with glee as his parents searched for them—their wallets, their toothbrushes, their car keys. His friends would confi
de in him, understanding that his was a serious silence, the silence of a pharaoh in his pyramid; sometimes an innocent confidence, sometimes a not so innocent. Innocent: that they had a crush on such and such a boy slash girl; that their parents drank too much and fought constantly; that they had discovered the joys of masturbation. Not so innocent: how they poisoned the neighbor’s cat; how they stole comic books from the Reader’s Paradise bookstore; the things they did with the see-above crushed-on girls slash boys. His silence was like a vacuum that sucked the secrets out of their mouths and right into his ears. He made no use of his secret knowledge. It was enough simply to know, to be the one who knew.
He kept his own secrets too. His parents looked upon him with a mixture of puzzlement and concern. “Who are you?” his mother once asked him in annoyed tones. “Are you even my child? Sometimes it’s like you’re an alien from another planet, sent to watch us and gather information, and one day a spaceship will scoop you up and your little green relatives will know all our secrets.” This was how she was: capable of emotional brutality and unable, once a clever conceit came into her head, to stop herself from saying it, no matter how deep the wound it might inflict. His father expressed himself more gently, but made the same point. “Look at your little sister,” he would tell his son. “Try to be like her. She never stops talking. She’s an open book.”
In spite of his parents’ urgings, he went on as he was, reticent about himself and gathering other people’s whispers whenever he could. As for open books, the books he opened in his youth were usually mysteries. As a boy he much preferred the Secret Seven to the Famous Five, the Secret Garden to Wonderland. And then as he grew, it was Ellery and Erle Stanley and Agatha, it was Sam Spade and Marlowe, mean-streeted and tight-lipped! His secret worlds multiplied with the passing years. The Secret Agent, The Man Who Was Thursday, tales of espionage and secret societies, these were his guides. In his teens he studied books about black magic and the tarot—the arcana of hidden knowledge, major or minor, drew him irresistibly toward them—and he learned how to hypnotize his friends, though the target of his new skill, an attractive girl whom he desired, resisted his advances even when under his spell. He grew up wanting to know the secret ingredient in Coca-Cola, he remembered the secret identities of all superheroes, and what was Victoria’s secret, anyway? That ladies in her era wore badly made underwear? SIS, ISI, OSS, CIA, these were his initials of choice.
This was how he came to be a writer of pseudonymous spy novels. He wasn’t widely known, a situation that was unlikely to be altered by the Quichotte book, if he ever managed to get it written and published. Sam DuChamp, Author of the Five Eyes series, unacclaimed, un-famous, un-rich: when people did ask for a title of his in a store, they pronounced the pen name wrongly, calling him Sam the Sham, like the “Wooly Bully” guy, who drove to his gigs in a Packard hearse. This was a little insulting.
Yes, the name on the books veiled his ethnic identity, just as Freddie Mercury veiled the Parsi Indian singer Farrokh Bulsara. This was not because the Queen front man was ashamed of his race but because he did not want to be prejudged, did not want to be ghettoed inside an ethnic-music pigeonhole surrounded by the bars of white attitudes. Brother felt the same way. And after all it was the age of the invented name. Social media had made sure of that. Everyone was someone else now.
Pseudonyms have never been uncommon in the world of books. Women had often deemed them necessary. Brother believed (without daring to compare his poor talent to their genius) that Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, George Eliot, and even J. K. Rowling (who preferred the gender-neutrality of J.K. to Jo) would have understood.
Brown people of South Asian ethnicity had a confusing history in America. In the early part of the twentieth century Quichotte and Dr. R. K. Smile’s alleged common ancestor (not fictional), supposedly the first of their clan to live and work in the USA, had been denied American citizenship on the basis of the nation’s first immigration act, that of 1790, which decreed that only a “free white person” was eligible for citizenship. And when the Immigration Act of 1917 was signed into law, South Asians, known as hindoos, were officially barred altogether from immigrating to the United States. In United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) the Supreme Court argued that the racial difference between Indians and whites was so great that the “great body of our people” would reject assimilation with Indians. Twenty-three years later the Luce-Celler Act permitted just one hundred Indians a year to come to America and gain citizenship (thanks a lot). Then in 1965 a new Immigration and Nationality Act opened the doors. After which, an unexpectedness. It turned out that hindoos were not to be a major target of American racism after all. That honor continued to be reserved for the African-American community, and Indian immigrants—many of them familiar with white British racism in South Africa and East Africa, as well as India and Britain themselves—were almost embarrassed to find themselves excused, in many parts of the USA, from racial abuse and attacks, and embarked on the path of becoming model citizens.
Not excused entirely, however. In 1987 the Dotbuster gang terrorized Indian-American families in Jersey City. A letter from the gang published in The Jersey Journal threatened violence. “We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out of Jersey City. If I’m walking down the street and I see a Hindu and the setting is right, I will hit him or her. We plan some of our most extreme attacks such as breaking windows, breaking car windows, and crashing family parties.” The threats were carried out. One Indian man was attacked and died four days later. Another was put into a coma. There were further nighttime attacks, and burglaries too.
Then came September 11, 2001, and young Indian men started wearing T-shirts reading DON’T BLAME ME, I’M HINDU, and Sikh men were attacked because their turbans made them look Islamic, and cab drivers put flag decals on their windshields and stickers on the glass partitions between themselves and their passengers reading GOD BLESS AMERICA, and suddenly it seemed to Brother that maybe the mask of a pen name was worth continuing to wear. There were too many hostile eyes looking at people like him now. Better to be Sam the Sham. The spy guy.
* * *
—
THE FIVE EYES, OR FVEY, were the intelligence services of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States who, in the period after World War II, began sharing the results of the immense ECHELON surveillance system and its successors and now also shared information gained from monitoring the Internet. In the books written by Sam DuChamp the mutual distrust of the five principals was a central theme. Nobody trusted the Americans because they couldn’t keep secrets, and that endangered the Five Eyes’ most important assets, the undercover agents in the field. Nobody trusted the British, even though they were the best at running moles—in Russia, in Iran, in the Arab world—because of the frequent penetrations of SIS itself by moles from elsewhere. Nobody trusted the Canadians because they acted so goddamn holier-than-thou, nobody trusted the Australians because they were Australian, and nobody trusted the New Zealanders because they had never come up with a single useful surveillance program. (The major post-ECHELON programs, PRISM, XKeyscore, Tempora, MUSCULAR, and STATEROOM, were run mostly by the British Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, and the American National Security Agency, the NSA, with contributions from the Australians and the Canadians.) This network of hostile allies was presently being tested further by British little-Englander separatism and American populist bullying, both of which assisted the enemy in general and Russia in particular. Brother had always been proud of the authenticity of the secret world he had created, but now he was becoming afraid of it. Maybe he had come too close to certain uncomfortable truths. Maybe the people who read the Five Eyes books most carefully were the Five Eyes themselves. Maybe they thought it was time to close the “sixth eye,” which was watching them a little too well.
To attract such unwelcome attention from the Phantoms just as he was averting his gaze
from Spookworld was an irony he could do without. He was old, and truth had become far stranger than his fictions, and he no longer had the energy to try to outstrip the news. Hence Quichotte, picaresque and crazy and dangerous, a knight’s move out of a deteriorating position on the board. Hence, also, his newly inward gaze, his returned yearning for his lost home in the East. He had stepped away from the past long ago and later it stepped away from him. For a long time he pretended, even to himself, that he had accepted his fate. He was a man of the West now, he was Sam DuChamp, and that was fine. This is what he said when he was questioned: that he was not rootless, not uprooted but transplanted. Or, even better, multiply rooted, like an old banyan tree putting down “prop roots” as it spread, which thickened and in time became indistinguishable from the original trunk. Too many roots! It meant his stories had a broader canopy beneath which to shelter from the scorching, hostile sun. It meant they could be planted in many different locations, in different kinds of soil. This is a gift, he said, but he knew that such optimism was a lie. Now, well past the Psalmist’s days of our years, trying by reason of strength to move past threescore and ten toward fourscore, his was often the sad heart of Keats’s Ruth, when, sick for home, she stood in tears amid the alien corn.
He was coming to the end of the line, and had moved into the general vicinity of the cowled reaper. The borough, the neighborhood, maybe even the zip code. He wasn’t quite foot-in-the-ground yet. But it was sobering that the road ahead was so much shorter than the road already traveled. Before Quichotte drove up in his Chevy Cruze with his imaginary son by his side, Brother had almost come to believe that the work had left him, even if life, for the moment, went on. Here was this thing, however mediocre, to which he had given his life, his best self, his optimism; but even the richest seam in the end runs out of gold. When you were your own quarry, when the material you were dredging up lay buried in the caverns of the self, a time came when there was only an emptiness left.
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