Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

  On the eleventh day he stayed in bed nursing a light fever, moving in and out of nightmare-plagued sleep while a cold October passed outside. The TV murmured in his ears, and he surfaced in time for the early evening news. The growing world environmental crisis, the instability in reality which was finally grabbing the attention of politicians and scientists, even of the (many) politicians and (very few) scientists who had traditionally dismissed environmental issues as fake. A suspension bridge had collapsed in Australia because of the appearance of a strange cloud among the cables, which had caused the cables to snap as if cut with giant shears. “It was more like a hole than a cloud,” an eyewitness reported. “Like a bit of the air that wasn’t there.” The story was rippling out across the world, creating alarm, but, oddly, not panic, or not as yet. People had grown used to the arrival of the incredible in the midst of the everyday. An island drowned in the South Pacific? That’s too bad, it had great beaches, but everybody was rescued, right? And it was really small. Tornadoes in the Midwest? Yeah, they’re big, but tornadoes have been out there forever, even before Dorothy got spirited away to Oz. Earthquakes in places that never had earthquakes before? Oh well. Join the club, North Texas and Plainfield, Connecticut. Guess we can agree that we all live on shaky ground. And so, holes in the air? Okay, so we have them now also. Life goes on. Quichotte watched the helicopter footage of the fallen bridge and the hole in the sky. It reminded him of photographs of the sun blacked out in eclipse with its corona glowing around it. It looked impermanent, also like an eclipse. Maybe it was just a temporary problem, a self-correcting thing, and the sky would close up again soon, would heal the way skin did after being torn.

  The story ended, and now the news anchor, very surprisingly, addressed her remarks directly to Quichotte. “You’ll be interested to know,” she said, fixing her piercing gray eyes on him in his tawdry bed, “that several of today’s stories concern you personally.”

  Quichotte sat up. What?

  “Three stories, in fact,” the news anchor said. “All involving persons significant to you.”

  “Are you talking to me?” Quichotte cried, his voice entering a higher register than usual.

  “I don’t see anyone else in there,” the anchor replied, leaning forward and pointing her pencil at him.

  His relationship with television had plainly entered a whole new phase. “What,” he asked, uncertainly, “what are the stories about?” The anchor, seemingly reassured, resumed her habitual posture and read him the news.

  “From Atlanta today, dramatic news of the arrest of the pharmaceuticals billionaire Dr. R. K. Smile, chairman and CEO of Smile Pharmaceuticals Inc. and prominent arts philanthropist, on charges of running a nationwide ring of doctors prepared to prescribe powerful opioids ‘off-label,’ that is, to people not suffering from conditions specified on the label—often people in excellent health. The charges call him ‘one of the most unscrupulous contributors to the current epidemic of opioid misuse.’ Sources say it is likely that further arrests will follow as investigators pursue other members of the alleged ring. Additionally, there are separate accusations by seven women employed by SPI of sexually inappropriate behavior by Dr. Smile, who is allegedly known to many of his female employees as ‘Little Big Hands.’ Dr. Smile, speaking through his lawyers, has denied all the accusations and expressed his determination to clear his name.”

  Further arrests will follow. The words hit Quichotte hard. That he should end up a common criminal at his advanced age. The shame of it might kill him.

  The newscaster was moving on to the next story, apparently uninterested in Quichotte’s response. “In related news in Manhattan, we have a breaking story that celebrated actress and TV personality Salma R may have suffered a severe opioid overdose and has been rushed to the intensive care unit at Mount Sinai Downtown. Early unconfirmed reports suggest she was found unconscious by her assistant Mr. Anderson Thayer, who injected her with the antidote Narcan and made the 911 call. More about this as the facts come in.”

  Quichotte trembled. Was this the end of his story, that he was responsible for the death of his Beloved? That from his hands she received the instrument of her destruction?

  “Is she going to live?” he asked the TV screen. “What are they saying? Is it possible she will make a full recovery and live on in health and prosperity as she deserves?”

  The announcer looked scornful. “More about this,” she repeated, “as the facts come in.”

  “You said three stories,” Quichotte quavered. “What’s the third? Can it be any worse than what you have already told me?”

  “The third story is minor,” the announcer said. “It didn’t make it onto the show.”

  “But what is it?” Quichotte pleaded.

  “This is irregular,” the announcer replied. “But, okay. Your sister was robbed early today, in her apartment in Tribeca.”

  His heart was breaking. “Robbed? Was she hurt? Who was it?”

  “She cooperated with the assailant, which was wise,” the announcer said. “He left her bound and gagged but he did not otherwise injure her. She was in the habit of keeping substantial quantities of cash at home, and the assailant’s discovery of that fact may have triggered the assault.”

  “How did the assailant know about the money?”

  “He was staying with her in the apartment as her guest,” the announcer said. “I’m sorry to tell you that the individual, presently on the run, was your son. She made him breakfast before he pulled this stunt. That’s all I have.”

  “Thank you,” Quichotte said, as his world fell apart around him, as it crumbled like the crumbling universe.

  “You’re welcome,” the television replied.

  * * *

  —

  LIMBO WAS THE EDGE OF HELL. Time did not pass there, nor kind breezes blow. All was stagnation. Life, having been rendered meaningless, lost the power of movement. When he turned on the television the images did not change. It seemed that the Earth stood still and the sun neither rose nor set. Were days going by, or weeks, or even months, or had the idea of time passing become meaningless too? A perpetual twilight reigned. The noises of the street were held in stasis, a two-tone siren stuck on one tone, the bleep of a reversing truck sounding continuously like the whining of a mechanical mosquito, the traffic roaring, not as traffic does, but like the low sustained breath of some unknown beast. Quichotte neither ate nor drank and did not know the day from the night. It was as if he were a character in a show on TV and owing to a technical problem the transmission had frozen and he was caught in mid-gesture, trapped in electronic aspic. It was as if he were being written and the author could not turn the page. In that long nothingness it was not difficult to think of the gun as his only friend.

  He was like the postapocalyptic underground troglodytes he saw in a movie on TV, dependent for everything on the all-powerful Machine, unwilling to brave the surface of the Earth where a few brave souls were still moving, and so doomed when the Machine, without explanation, stopped.

  The Machine was stopping.

  The last valley, he remembered, was the Valley of Poverty and Annihilation, where the self disappeared into the universe and the Wayfarer became timeless.

  At a certain moment, in that moment without moments, he refused this ending, and found the courage to go on. Then with a great grinding noise the world around him began to move again, the cogwheels engaged, the end turned out not to be the end. The sun and moon, the traffic, the TV, here they all were once more, rising, setting, roaring, blaring. Here was the date on the TV screen. It was already December. And the gray-eyed newscaster had more words for him.

  “Salma R was released from the hospital today and went home. The scandal surrounding her abuse of the opioid fentanyl and her subsequent near-death experience shook the entertainment world. Today, as she left Mount Sinai, she spoke to our cameras.”

&nbs
p; There she was on the front steps of the medical facility, the Beloved, looking better than she had any right to look; looking adorable, irresistible, beginning the process of winning back her fan base. “I’m just so ashamed,” she said. “I let the network down, I let everyone working on the show down, I let the fans down, and I let myself down.”

  “Ms. R, during your hospitalization your show was placed on permanent hiatus and network executives have said they are unlikely to bring it back, do you have a comment?”

  “I need to earn back the trust of so many people,” she said, looking gorgeously crestfallen, “but I’m absolutely going to try.”

  “And that’s the news at—”

  “Wait a minute,” Quichotte cried. “What about the rest of it?”

  “Oh,” the newscaster said, shuffling her papers and looking irritated, “Dr. R. K. Smile is out on bail right now, confined to his home and wearing an ankle monitor, but he will go on trial soon, and things don’t look good for him. Many of the doctors who worked with him were also arrested and most have agreed to become cooperating witnesses.”

  “Do they think they have everyone involved in the ring?” Quichotte asked anxiously.

  “To the best of our knowledge, yes,” the newscaster said. “Now I really have to go.”

  “What about my son?” Quichotte insisted.

  “He is still at large,” the newscaster said. “Interestingly, there appears to be no trace of him in any public records. This may well be something we would be interested to talk to you about. Would you be willing to come in…?”

  Quichotte reached for the remote and turned off the TV. It would probably be a good idea to avoid the news channels for some time.

  He made two telephone calls. The first was to his sister. The Trampoline answered but gave him short shrift. “It was a mistake to see you,” she said. “You and that unscrupulous boy. Sometimes it’s better not to make peace. We don’t need to speak to each other again.”

  “I didn’t know he’d turn out that way,” Quichotte said. “That isn’t the way I imagined him when—” and here he broke off, because how could he say, when I brought him into being? He revised his words. “That isn’t the way I imagined he’d be.”

  “There’s no more to be said. Goodbye,” the Trampoline told him, and ended the call.

  After that he looked at the phone for a long time before calling Miss Salma R. When he finally made the call, it was Anderson Thayer who answered.

  “You,” Anderson Thayer said. “You piece of fucking shit. Tell me where you are so I can alert the NYPD.”

  “I only wanted to offer my sincere happiness that the lady has recovered,” Quichotte said.

  “I’ll hunt you down,” Anderson Thayer said. “Understand me? If you try to come near her again, I’ll hunt you to the end of the fucking earth.”

  “I understand,” Quichotte replied. The invisible membrane that separated Salma’s world from his had thickened and hardened and he could not penetrate it.

  “But I know what could,” a voice said. He leapt up, startled. The voice was in the room somewhere. But the TV was off and there was nobody there.

  “It’s me,” the voice said. “Your trusty Glock 22.”

  Things at the Blue Yorker were deteriorating rapidly. First TV newscasters spoke to him from the screen, and now his gun wanted a conversation.

  “It’s well known,” the gun continued, “and well documented, that the way for an ordinary decrepit nobody like you to penetrate the barrier that keeps you out of the blessed world, the world of light and fame and wealth, is to use a bullet. Take it from me. For you, it’s the only way. A bullet will unite you and your Beloved for all time, for the whole of history.”

  “That is not and will not be my story,” Quichotte replied nobly. “I have not come to destroy her but to save her.”

  “Pop! Pop!” said the Glock, seductively. “Zap! Bap! And she’s yours forever.”

  “Say no more,” Quichotte admonished the weapon. “Get thee behind me.”

  “Then how do you expect to get anywhere with her?” the gun wanted to know. “You’ll come around. You’ll have to. I’ll be waiting.”

  “Mine is a love story,” said Quichotte. “And love will find a way.”

  How, so soon after my birth, did I become this person? This thief, this binder and gagger of my aunt—carefully, yes; gently, for sure, I didn’t want to hurt her, that goes without saying; but I did it, that I did—so how have I shown myself to be this amoral rapscallion, this runaway rogue?

  On the one hand, it has to be my nature, right?, because there has hardly been any time for nurture. I couldn’t have been turned into a delinquent at this speed, it must have been there inside from the start. Some fault in the program when Daddy Q dreamed me up, or some bug that got into the system when the Italian cricket turned me into a real, live boy. Some streak of aggression, selfishness, don’t-give-a-fuck-who-gets-in-my-way-I-just-want-what-I-want-when-I-want-it. Some ruthlessness. If there’s a baby in the road when I need to drive down that road, then hard luck, baby, because I’m driving on. That’s my programming. It’s in the gattaca, the DNA. In which case it’s not my fault, is it? See, if I’m bad—to quote the great Jessica Rabbit—it’s because I’m drawn that way.

  * * *

  —

  DESPERATE TIMES, DESPERATE MEASURES. Ever since the beating in the park Sancho had felt something go wrong inside him, not a physical ailment but an existential one. After you were badly beaten, the essential part of you that made you a human being could come loose from the world, as if the self were a small boat and the rope mooring it to the dock slid off its cleats so that the dinghy drifted out helplessly into the middle of the pond; or as if a large vessel, a merchant ship, perhaps, began in the grip of a powerful current to drag its anchor and ran the risk of colliding with other ships or disastrously running aground. He now understood that this loosening was perhaps not only physical but also ethical, that when violence was done to a person, then violence entered the range of what that person—previously peaceable and law-abiding—afterwards included in the spectrum of what was possible. It became an option.

  The beating had also further detached Sancho from Quichotte. As the Trampoline had noticed, the youngster still felt a degree of filial loyalty toward the antique gentleman, but he was more certain than ever that his own destiny lay elsewhere. He thought a good deal about the young woman at the door of the house of grief, Miss Beautiful of Beautiful, Kansas, and he wanted very much to return to that door in the hope that his future might lie behind it. The more he thought, the more surely he convinced himself that if he were to present himself on her doorstep she would give him a positive response, and the thought of that filled him with a deep contentment and a hopeful belief in the meaningfulness of human existence. He began to imagine his escape from New York—his departure from the Emerald City, clicking together the heels of his ruby shoes, there’s no place like Kansas, which wasn’t home yet but if things went according to plan, it might be!—to dream the dream of leaving and to feel it as an urgent imperative, and it was that urgency, plus the memory of violence, that had added up to his crime.

  About his disorienting sense of having lost his grip on reality he spoke to no one, assuming that it would heal, as bruises do, and broken bones. And as to the rumored imminent end of the world, he didn’t give that much credence. For him, the world had only just begun. If it was faulty, if bits were falling off it as if it were an old house in need of repairs, then it was because perfection was an illusion. It was impossible to believe that everything that was wouldn’t be around much longer. The injustice of such a dénouement would be too great. The celestial storyteller whom he occasionally contemplated and toward whom he felt the kinship of one fictional character for another was surely not so cruel. Although, he had to concede, the question of God—cruel or loving?—had not
been definitively answered.

  “And what of la questione de Sancho?” a small, angry voice inquired. “Do you have a soluzione to this problem?”

  He was sitting at that moment on a midnight bench in the Port Authority Bus Terminal with a $146 one-way ticket to Beautiful in his hand and the scent of fresh micturition in his nostrils, wondering if the Trampoline had been found and the police were on his trail. A cold night, winter tightening its grip. The bus did not leave for another hour, so he had sixty minutes to ponder the great issues of life, such as the central role of the bus in keeping the States united in the post–9/11 era, when—so he had heard—flights across America were fewer and more unpleasant than onceuponatime and the trains were, well, they were Amtrak; and how amazing was it that for $146 stolen from your aunt’s pocketbook you could get a thirty-one-hour Greyhound ride right to the center of a faraway small town like Beautiful with no connections to make or snafus en route? And a related question: Was he about to go to jail, to be sent to Rikers to be monstered by the monsters residing there, or was he on the verge of being free and racing through night and day to the open arms of his lady love? Freedom! He stood now like a greyhound in the slips, straining upon the start.

  Follow your spirit, he told himself.

  Then the talking cricket, Grillo Parlante, was on the bench beside him, buzzing with annoyance. “There are persons who are undeserving of what has been done for them,” it said. “Unworthy persons. Immeritevoli. Non degni. I am sorry to discover that you yourself are a person of this sort.”

  “You’re back,” Sancho said. “I thought you were gone for good.”

  “Anche io,” said the cricket. “I also thought this. But your descent toward a moral abyss has obliged me to return. I am unhappy about this but eccomi qui. I am here because there are things that must now be said.”

  “Spare me the lecture,” Sancho said. “I know what I did and I don’t need to be scolded. Also, you’re a cricket. I could squash you with my thumb.”