Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

  “I’m sorry,” Anderson replied, taking care not to sound sorry. “I wanted to get a look at you, to know who I’m dealing with.”

  “And you concluded what?” Dr. Smile’s tone was both aggrieved and a little insecure.

  “That you are somebody I can do business with.”

  “The first delivery will be a courtesy.” Now Dr. Smile’s voice became stony and businesslike. “There will be no charge. You will receive a small package which will also contain instructions for use, to which you must adhere closely.”

  “Understood.”

  “La Reina del Taco on the Buford Highway. Go to the men’s room at 10 P.M. precisely and you will find the package waiting behind the cistern.”

  The taqueria at night was not a quiet place. The lighting was neon and lurid, the walls were noisy (some pink, some lime green), the ceiling was overly jazzed up by little dangling objects (throbbing red hearts, big yellow hearts, blue broken hearts), the music was very loud, and the volume on the flat-screen TV on one wall was turned up high to do battle with the music. The tables were full of students, from Emory, Morehouse, Spelman, and they generated such noise as only students en masse were capable of producing. It was an excellent choice, Anderson thought, nobody was paying attention to anything except themselves and their food. He checked out the men’s room at five minutes to ten. There was an OUT OF ORDER sign on the door. He walked away and came back five minutes later. The sign was gone, the men’s room was empty, there was a brown paper parcel waiting in the specified place. He took it and headed out to his rented Camry.

  It was too late to catch a plane. He would have to spend the night at an airport hotel and fly back to New York in the morning. He hated Hartsfield-Jackson Airport for its immense size and frequent logistical problems. When he’d flown in he’d heard a fellow passenger wearing a Braves baseball cap telling what he assumed to be a local joke. “If you die and go to Hell,” the Braves fan said, “you have to change planes in Atlanta.”

  This is the life I could have had, he thought. He had studied Russian at Davidson, taking one course entitled “Russia and Ukraine—War and Peace,” and another studying the use of the metaphor of the vampire in Russian culture, and in his senior year he had been approached by representatives of both American and Russian intelligence and asked if he wanted a job. He had thanked them equally graciously for their interest and declined both their invitations. The American representative had returned to tell him that if he attempted to visit Russia at any time in the future it was probable that his passport would be confiscated and other actions against him might follow. He abandoned Russian, dropped out, did not graduate, and became, instead, a humble (or maybe not-so-humble) personal assistant to the stars. But he could have been a spy if he had said yes. He could have led a secret agent’s life.

  What are you talking about, he told himself. This is the life you do have. You’re living it right now.

  * * *

  —

  THIS TIME THE MAN who called himself Quichotte had sent Salma a photograph of himself along with a new note. A clumsy selfie, printed out, no doubt, at some FedEx Print & Ship Center somewhere along his road, and mailed, so it seemed, in Pennsylvania. So he was close. This was a little alarming, but also, she had to admit to herself, interesting. She had not expected him to be handsome, but he was, in his crazy-old-guy way. He reminded her of the actor Frank Langella. His face was long and thin with prominent cheekbones. His white hair was short and he sported three-day-old white grizzle around his chops. He stood erect; no stooper he. He possessed an attractive formality, a nice smile, a melancholy air. As do his letters, she thought, weakening momentarily. They, too, have charm.

  Then all of a sudden she began to tremble, because memory burst upon her with the force of a flood, with the terror of a haunting, and she understood that he reminded her of someone else as well as Mr. Langella, and that someone was the man about whom she never spoke, the missing piece in the explanation of her choices, and her life. Quichotte was the spitting image of her maternal grandfather, the long-ostracized and now-deceased Babajan.

  “Give this to security,” she told the staffer who had brought her the envelope with the photograph in it. “If this guy ever shows up at the door, call the fucking cops.”

  In the car on the way home, her chauffeur was genuinely concerned.

  “If I may say so, Miss Daisy,” he said, “you look like you just saw a ghost.”

  “None of that Miss Daisy crap tonight, Hoke,” she replied. “I’m not in the fucking mood.”

  * * *

  —

  IT IS TIME TO shed light on Miss Salma R’s last and darkest family secret.

  When Salma was twelve years old her grandfather Babajan grabbed her by the wrists and kissed her on the mouth. At the instant that it happened all she could think was that he had been aiming for her cheek and missed, but then he did it again and this time his tongue was no accident. She bent backwards away from that searching tongue and it came after her. Then she broke away and ran.

  The Juhu Beach mansion was really two houses with a walled garden in between. There was a smaller, two-story house that gave onto the street, then the garden with its sunken ponds and climbing bougainvillea creeper, then the main, three-story building, looking out to sea. Both buildings were full of paintings by Husain, Raza, Gaitonde, and Khanna, and the garden boasted ancient stone sculptures of the gods Shiva and Krishna and the Buddha too. What were they doing, those great artists both ancient and modern, just hanging there on expensive walls, those deities just standing there on podiums in the sunshine and looking on? What use was genius, what was the point of godliness slash holiness, if it couldn’t protect a twelve-year-old girl in her own home? Shame on you, artists, gods! Climb down off your pedestals, unhang yourselves, and help!—Nobody helped.—The assault happened one weekend when young Salma wandered across the garden from the beach house to the street house, where the main kitchens were, in search of an afternoon snack. This was the house in which Babajan had an upstairs suite in which, for the most part, he kept his own counsel. He was seen in the gardens only at prayer times—he prayed five times a day, as truly religious people do, and also people in serious need of divine forgiveness—when he brought his little prayer mat, rolled up, to the edge of a sunken pond, unrolled it, faced toward Mecca, and got down on his knees. But as must now regretfully be revealed, he preyed almost as often as he prayed. On this weekend afternoon, as Salma headed for the refrigerator, and in a moment when no prying eyes were around, no servants, chauffeurs, or security staff, he emerged from a shadow grinning like a demon, took hold of both her wrists, pulled her toward him, and kissed her with great force, twice, the second time, as has been said, with his tongue. When she ran from him he trotted after her for a few steps, laughing his little laugh, heh-heh-heh, which she had always thought to be his sweet-old-man good-natured giggle but which she now heard as being filled with menace. Then he gave up the chase and, with a shrug and a little dismissive wave of a hand, went upstairs to his quarters.

  Here is a young girl running toward her mother, crying. Before she reaches her mother’s arms, some more must be said about life in that large unhappy home. It should be plain to us, as we look in on these events, that neither Salma’s mother Anisa nor her grandmother Dina could have been unaware of Babajan’s proclivities. If Anisa as a child had been his victim, too, the mother before the daughter, she never explicitly revealed it to anyone, except possibly to her mother, whose lips remained sealed. But both Dina and Anisa had warned little Salma, more than once, “Don’t sit alone in a room with Babajan. Make sure your ayah at least is present. Otherwise it would be improper. You understand.” Little Salma knew, had known all her life, that her grandparents were estranged, that there was a negative electricity in the Juhu house which was upsetting, and which, consequently, she tried her best to ignore. She assumed that the instruction regarding her
own behavior was born of that same electricity, that she was being told to choose sides, that friendship with her grandfather would be seen as disloyalty to her grandmother. However, fear, at her tender age, had not yet entered her life, and because she possessed the same fierce independence of spirit which drove both her mother and grandmother, she sometimes disregarded their orders and formed a personal opinion of Babajan which was, to be frank, fond. In spite of the frowns and admonitions of the older women of the family, she liked sitting beside him in the garden and listening to his deliciously frightening fairy tales about bhoots and jinn, beasts made of smoke and fire who had a fondness for devouring young girls. She liked it that he encouraged her to ask him questions, even dangerous questions. “Babajan,” she once said, alarming herself at her boldness, “what if I told you there is no God?” He roared with laughter. “Who put such a damn fool idea in your head?” he answered without a trace of the anger she feared might be his response. “You should be at least fifteen years old before you take up such a position. Come to me then and I’ll reply.”

  This picture of a kindly, giggling, tolerant, broad-minded grandfather became important to her. She hid it away in her head because she knew her grandmother and mother would disapprove, but it was an important secret, and she often thought she might try to bring about a reconciliation between her elders, and made grand plans to that effect, as children will. But the ferocity with which her grandmother reacted to all her attempts to discuss Babajan dissuaded her from putting any of her schemes into operation. And now, twelve years old, running, and afraid, she understood that ferocity, she understood everything, as if she had never known anything before.

  As she ran, her whole world fell apart around her, its entire architecture of love, trust, and believed comprehension. The whole story of her family, what she thought she knew about it, who and how they had been in the world, had to be torn up and rewritten. To lose one’s picture of the world, to feel its gilded frame snap and crumble, to see the museum glass beneath which you kept it safe crack from side to side and fall in jagged peaks to earth, and the images themselves slide and dissolve and explode: another term for this experience is going insane. To have this happen when you are twelve years old and utterly devoid of the psychological equipment you need to handle it is even worse. Salma running saw her vision fragment, saw the whole house slip and slide and the sky break over her head and fall like blue missiles bombing the earth, and the sea ahead of her tear off its mask of calm and rise up to engulf the universe. Then her mother was holding her and she was trying to tell her what had happened and her grandmother stood behind them, awful in her rage. A light came into the eyes of the two older women which could have burned a hole in the fabric of time. The ayah came into the room. “Stay with her,” Anisa commanded and then she and Dina left and walked toward the street house like an army going to war.

  What they said to Babajan is not recorded but all the staff in the house and even some passersby in the street outside felt the foundations shake and by the time they were done all the artwork was hanging crooked on the walls. After that he was rarely seen by anyone. His food was sent up to him and he lived out his remaining days and said his prayers—perhaps hoping for redemption—in private. When the two women emerged from his suite they had the air of swords unsheathed, of bloody swords after a killing, whose blades they chose not to cleanse, to allow all to see the work that had been done.

  When they came back into the place where they had left Salma and the ayah, the twelve-year-old girl was dry eyed and alone. “You both knew,” she said to them. “You always knew.”

  “We hide these things,” Dr. R. K. Smile told his audience in Atlanta. “There is grave danger to family member or members, but we hide them. We think of them as our shame, and we conceal.”

  Very few of the ills that befall us can be said to have one single cause, and so it would be oversimplifying things to ascribe Dina R’s mental instability, or Anisa’s drinking and depression, or their deaths by suicide, to the hidden shame of Babajan’s fondness for young girls. How much did they know? How many did he molest? What was the scale of his evil? These things can’t be known for sure. A movie star’s fortune and publicists are capable of silencing many tongues and suppressing many truths. How much of such dirty work did they do or cause to have done, and how deep was their guilt at becoming complicit in his crimes by cleaning up after him? Was this the narrative underlying Miss Salma R’s decision to leave a successful career in Bollywood and seek her fortune on the other side of the world? Did it lie at the root of her own travails and addictions? The answer is: probably. But human biochemistry, as also human willfulness, has its own aberrations, and these, too, no doubt were part of the story.

  * * *

  —

  “AFTER THAT FOR A TIME I became a prude. Miss Goody Two-Shoes, that was me. I locked my feelings away, worked hard, stood up straight, did nothing naughty, teacher’s pet. If I was correct enough, punctual enough, did my homework well enough, obeyed instructions, behaved, then maybe the world wouldn’t explode again the way it did that day. And then my mother died and I thought, enough. But I carried one memory with me: of the day I learned that the world was not a safe place. That was the lesson my grandfather taught me. It’s a lesson worth learning.”

  Anderson Thayer was back from Atlanta, listening without interruption while she talked it all out. She had had a copy of Quichotte’s photograph made and stuck it on her refrigerator. “Now that I’ve had time to look at it,” she said, “he really isn’t like my grandfather at all. He actually has a nicer smile. Babajan had that evil little heh-heh-heh.”

  “Be careful,” Anderson said. “I know you. I know what you’re thinking. Everything is material, am I right? You want this nutcase on your show.”

  “No I don’t.”

  He looked at her.

  “Okay. Maybe. But I know it’s stupid. He’s completely bananas, of course. But bananas can be good TV.”

  “He’s a stalker. You can’t put your stalker on TV.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  “Did you send the photo to the cops?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You should do that. I should do that. I’ll get it done.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Obviously. You know nothing about this individual.”

  “Okay, fine, send it. But he’s probably just some sweet crazy fan.”

  He took a bottle of white wine out of the refrigerator.

  “Hey,” he said, “who’s the other person in this photo? The young guy trying to look cool?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s something strange about him, right? He almost doesn’t look real.”

  “What do you mean, not real?”

  “Like CG. You know how in CGI they can’t ever get human facial expressions exactly right? Like that.”

  “Yeah,” Anderson Thayer said, judiciously. “That is kind of a Pixar smile.”

  They raised their wineglasses. “It’s good to be back,” he said.

  “And here I am waiting for you, and do you have something for me?”

  “It’s dangerous,” he said.

  “I know it’s dangerous. Everything interesting is dangerous.”

  “No, but this is really dangerous. You could die. You have to be very careful.”

  “I’ll be careful. Give it to me.”

  “There are instructions.”

  “You know I don’t follow instructions anymore.”

  “Follow these. Okay? I’m serious. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Also, when you’re ready, and if this is a long-term relationship you want to pursue, he’d like to meet you. The supplier. Dr. Smile. He likes to meet his VIP clients at least once. I think it’s kind of a starfucking thing. After that he will set up a regular errand boy, a trusted carrier, and make delivery
arrangements. It’s all pretty professional.”

  “What is he like?”

  “What can I tell you? He’s a crook. Or, as Michael Corleone would say: first and foremost, he’s a businessman.”

  “Thank you,” she said, taking Anderson’s hand. “You do so much for me, really. You do everything. Maybe I’ll keep you for a while.”

  * * *

  —

  C22H28N2O. CHINA GIRL, CHINA White, Apache, Dance Fever. Goodfella, Murder 8, TNT, Jackpot. The drug had many names. Fentanyl, monarch of opioid country, little king of the hill, top of the heap, A Number One. Dr. Smile had been generous. His free introductory package contained six-packs of six strengths of ACTIQ brand lollipops, which he didn’t even manufacture himself: two hundred, four hundred, six hundred, eight hundred, twelve hundred, and sixteen hundred micrograms per popsicle. Also included was a small gift-wrapped box containing the main event: a single dispenser of SPI’s own InSmile™ sublingual spray. The sheet of instructions for use “strongly recommended” what it called “acclimatization.” Start with small doses, work your way up. Users not accustomed to opioids might find even a low-dosage lollipop life-threatening, inducing respiratory depression, a state of mind which made you feel like not breathing. Also, by the way, frequent lollipop sucking, as every child knows, could give you mouth ulcers and make your teeth fall out. The lollipops are addictive. Do not have more than one hundred and twenty lollipops a month. Enjoy.

  After Anderson Thayer had left for the night (no room for him in her bed that evening, honey, she had a sweeter lover to entertain), she prepared for her first encounter with one of the juiced popsicles as if Casanova himself were about to enter her boudoir. She bathed, she shaved, she perfumed herself, she used lotion that her skin might not be ashy, she wove a single braid into her hair and let the rest flow down over her shoulders, and lying, robed in snowy white / That loosely flew to left and right, she took it in her hands, and, taking it, remembered whence those words came that had lollipopped unbidden into her thoughts. “The curse is come upon me,” cried / The Lady of Shalott. Was she preparing to die, then? To succumb to the curse of her family and follow her forebears to a self-willed end? No, she told herself firmly, she most certainly was not. She could handle this. She was by no means a user-not-accustomed etc. But she would take it slow. Start at the bottom of the ladder. Sixteen hundred micrograms of fentanyl were equivalent to 160 milligrams of morphine. That was a big hit and the sublingual version would hit even harder. Start with two hundred micrograms. Walk before you can run, run before you can fly.