Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

  “Madam, is it you? I am honored.”

  “I have to see you,” she said. “I need more.”

  His decency struggled against his desire. “But, madam, last time, you came so close to dying. How can I bring you the weapon with which you will kill yourself?”

  “I was stupid,” she said. “I’ll be smarter now.” This was no longer the voice of a powerful, successful woman in full control of her destiny and that of many others. This voice was wheedling, disingenuous, the falsely innocent delivery of a child begging for a treat. I’ll be good, I promise: the first lie we all tell.

  “It’s dangerous to meet,” he said, his better nature still fighting off his own need. “Your Mr. Anderson, your Mr. Thayer, will he permit it? I think he means me harm.”

  “He’s out of the picture,” she said. “They ID’d him from videos from Atlanta, after they arrested your, your relative. ‘Conrad Chekhov.’ That didn’t fool them for long. He is now a person of interest and has gone to ground. I don’t know where he is.”

  “You must have other people around you,” he said. “You are such a big personage.”

  “There’s nobody. There’s madness out there. Nobody came today. I have no security. I have nothing. There’s just me. This is why I need what you have. You understand?”

  “Madam, you need protection.” He had to see her. He had to place his feeble body at her disposal. She had nobody and she needed him.

  “Go to her,” his gun spoke up. “We can decide how this comes out later.”

  “The world situation is bad,” he said. “But I have a plan that can save us.”

  “I don’t want to discuss the world situation,” she said, regaining a degree of her old imperiousness. “What I want from you is one particular thing. Do you have it?”

  “I have maybe two years’ supply,” he said, and heard her long, satisfied exhalation.

  “Tell me where and when and how,” she said. “There’s a problem. My driver has also done a bunk. I guess that movie’s over.”

  Quichotte didn’t understand.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Also, I don’t think the car services are working.”

  “The old red oak tree behind the Hans Christian Andersen statue in the park,” he said.

  “That’s far.”

  “It’s better not to be close to your residence.”

  “How am I supposed to get there?”

  A small irritation flared up in his love-drenched soul. “Madam, like the rest of us. Walk.”

  * * *

  —

  WALKING WAS TERRIFYING. WALKING ALONE without anyone to fend off unwanted attention. She knew how to be invisible. Her shades, the headscarf, the unassuming black clothes, flat shoes, inexpensive pocketbook, no perfume. The body language of the nobody. She made her best effort. The streets were insane. It was the holidays but nobody was in a holiday mood. Crowds spilled everywhere with fear in their eyes. Maybe the last New Year’s. Nobody looked at anyone, everyone was shouting, but these were soliloquies. A city of Hamlets howling their anguish at the traitorous skies. And yes, broken windows, upturned cars. She felt as if she were in one of those Will Smith movies in which Manhattan was destroyed. Hollywood destroyed Manhattan regularly. It was a perverted expression of love. Her thoughts were all over the place. Where was Anderson. How could he leave her now. Where was Hoke. Why in the midst of the apocalypse was she going to meet a fentanyl pusher in the park. Why was she going to meet her stalker without anyone to take care of her in case he, in case he, what? He was a hundred years old and harmless. His face had a certain charm and there was education in his voice. Why was she talking to herself like this, she must have lost her mind like everyone else. He was a person to be careful of. Of whom to be careful. She had taken her bipolarity meds but she could feel the upswing toward hysteria in her blood. Her mother had given her many presents. A one-legged father who vanished. This bipolar disorder which she had to fight every day. And alcoholism which she had sublimated into drugs. One drug in particular. One version of that drug. The spray that went under your tongue, below language and therefore below argument and disorder, and brought you peace.

  Thank you, my mother. My life is your fault. If anything happens to me today, I blame you.

  Things started crumbling for me a while ago. I felt that. Okay, the overdose was stupid. I’m lucky to be here, lucky to be functional, lucky to be walking to Central Park up literally Mad Ave, but the network totally didn’t have my back. If they put their people on it they could have squashed the story, made it much smaller than it was, just a minor health issue, but they let it blow up as big as the sky. I’ve been outspoken on the show, I get that, in these days anyone who gets even a little political has a target on their back, and a brown person, a brown woman? I had enemies I guess. I should have seen it coming. Instead I OD’d and put the knife to stab me with in their hands. Maybe I should go home. I miss Bombay. But the Bombay I miss isn’t there to go home to anymore. This is who we are. We sail away from the place we love and then because we aren’t there to love it people go with axes and burning torches and smash and burn and then we say, Oh, too sad. But we abandoned it, left it to our barbarian successors to destroy. Can I blame my mother for that too? Why not. What’s a dead mother for.

  I can’t look up. Up there, what is that. Like a colossus with a huge blaster blew a hole in the air. You look at it, you want to die. This can’t be fixed. I don’t believe there’s anyone in DC or Canaveral who knows what the fuck to do about this. Is anyone even at their desks or is everyone just running up and down in the street the way people are here, charging around Dupont Circle and up and down the Mall and up and down Pennsylvania Avenue going aaaaaaaaa. And in the Oval Office maybe some oval charging. Aaaaaaaaa. That’s all we’ve got. Oval charging. That’s what the human race comes down to after all these years. Shakespeare Newton Einstein Gandhi Mandela Obama Oprah and in the end it’s just an impotent scream. Aaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaa.

  Yes, Salma, I hear myself, yes I do. I know I sound high and wild and this part isn’t much better, talking to myself as if I’m someone else. My north pole in dialogue with my south.

  Aaaaaaaaa.

  So here I am as commanded. I don’t know when I walked so far except on the treadmill at the gym. There’s the ugly duckling guy and there’s the red oak tree. And there he is in his camel coat and brown fedora with a shawl draped over his right hand and in his left hand his little attaché case of joy. Kwee-cho-tee, Kwy-choat, Key-shot. Grinning all over his foolish face like I just said I do.

  Babajan come back to life. My pedophile grandfather. Heh-heh-heh.

  * * *

  —

  SHE SAID, “I HAVE ENOUGH cash here in my pocketbook to acquire your full supply. I can wait while you count it. After that I won’t need to trouble you anymore.”

  He said, “No can do, madam. That is like asking me to shoot you in the head.”

  She said, “I don’t want to discuss it. You’re selling? I’m buying.”

  He said, “The world is coming to an end. On your show you had the gentleman promising an escape route. He said the portal was open.”

  She said, “Why are we talking about this? I’m here to make a simple cash transaction.”

  He said, “I have been watching this gentleman on the news. Mr. Cent. I know the location of the portal Mayflower. Probably you do, too, because the news story is big. Armed guards all around the facility, crowds demanding to be allowed to pass into the next world. It is necessary to go to California. CentCorp, number 18144 El Camino Real. The newscaster on TV spoke to me personally and told me it was our only chance.”

  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.

  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.