When she told her closest people she was having electroconvulsive shock treatment, they reacted badly. You have to stop, they said. Electricity? You can’t do that to yourself, it’s like torture. I’m not conscious when they do it, she explained. This isn’t mad scientist stuff, it’s medicine. But in a way it did feel like the stuff of fantasy. After the sessions she felt clearer, more in control, and kept seeing clear images of tiny evil gremlins in her brain being electrocuted by the voltage, screaming and tossing as they dissolved into puffs of smoke. She saw tiny green goblins and stringlike snakes burning between the spiderwebs of her synapses. She imagined her brain as a clanking malfunctioning machine filled with cogwheels and levers, with, literally, a number of screws loose, and the electricity as a superhero zooming around it, tightening nuts and bolts, adjusting chains, getting everything to pull together. The Incredible Flash, miniaturized and sent in to do the much-needed repair work. It felt like a Christmas visit from Sanity Claus. (She heard Chico Marx laughing, Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! You can’t fool me. There ain’t no Sanity Claus! But there was, there was. He was a voltage-powered elf who cleaned up your sanity.)
She started calling her bipolar friends to recommend the treatment. “You should hundred percent get it,” she said. “It’s like spring cleaning. Call me afterwards to tell me how you feel. But include in your message your full name and how we know each other, or I won’t know who you are.” She had quite a few bipolar friends. “We’re like magnets,” she told everyone who would listen. “Depends which poles are up against each other. Attract and cling tight, or repel and flee.” She told her non-bipolar friends to get it too. “It’s the new juicing,” she said. “My double-detox juice. Super super detox detox. The best cleanse there is. Completely allergy-free. No vegetables were harmed in the making of this product.” She started recommending it on the show. “I’m hoping to be the ECT brand ambassador,” she told her studio audience. “I’m auditioning right now, and if I could just remember why I’m standing in front of a crowd of strangers, I could put my hand on my heart—if I could remember where my heart is—and tell you the results are perfect, and I could remember what the results are.”
Privately, she knew that her condition wasn’t particularly funny. She had begun to suffer from acute levels of anxiety and at such times she took refuge in a suite at the Mandarin Oriental hotel on Columbus Circle and made a phone call to Anderson Thayer. “Come here, Rumpelstiltskin,” she said, and he came, and she lay in his arms, wondering if this was the right time to fire him, or maybe she’d wait until tomorrow. If she fired him now he’d get angry, and when he got angry he might take hold of his left foot and rip himself in two, right up the middle.
He was the man who knew too much. He had helped her cover up a scandal that could have derailed her career. There had been a third man after the two husbands. This man—she never used his real name, not even in the most private moments, agreeing always to call him by the fake name he told her he preferred, “Gary Reynolds”—was a political lobbyist and covert operator, an improbable partner for her, a man who claimed to have undertaken black ops projects for successive Republican administrations and to have destabilized and even overthrown three separate governments in Africa. “Gary Reynolds” was like the world of her old TV series come to life. Maybe that was why she fell for him, in spite of his politics. He was a glamorous, dangerous, exciting fiction become fact. She didn’t even care that he told her he “identified as promiscuous.” She didn’t need him around every day, but when he showed up, he was real fun. The Mandarin Oriental suite was their pleasure dome. Yosemite Sam knew about his rival, and Salma could see it irked him, but he said nothing and did his job. Then one night she went to the hotel to meet “Gary,” who had texted her to say he was already there waiting for her, and when she got there he was in bed, naked, and really very dead, indisputably dead, the most dead a dead person could be. On this occasion the suite was booked in his fake name, as it always was for their assignations, backed up by a “Gary Reynolds” credit card, but there were members of staff who recognized her, who knew she was the one who came to see him there. She stayed calm, held it together, just about, and called Anderson Thayer. Rumpelstiltskin, I need you. He came over and she kissed him, once, properly. I need you to fix this, she said. Don’t tell me how, just fix it so it stays fixed. I don’t want to know about it. I just want it done. Do this for me.
He fixed it. Nothing connecting Salma to the death at the Mandarin ever became public. “Gary Reynolds” was buried at Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens beneath a stone bearing his real name, which there is no need to record here, and at once it was as if he had been erased from history. She began to feel a great sense of relief. The scandal had passed her by, like the thunderstorms that skirted Manhattan and did their worst to New Jersey. This was when she first thought of firing Anderson Thayer. The fact that he literally knew where the body was buried, so that firing him from her bed as well as his job could have catastrophic consequences, made it necessary to find a way to do it. Nobody was allowed to have that kind of power over her. She would not permit it. She thought of Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith’s memory-eraser sticks, their neuralyzers, in the Men in Black movies. She needed one of those. Or some real-life equivalent. She looked into the subject and found that researchers at UC Davis had successfully erased memories from the brains of mice by using beams of light, just as the neuralyzers had in the movies. But mice were not human beings. There wasn’t a human version available as yet.
Maybe Anderson Thayer needed ECT. A lot of ECT. Maybe that was the actually existing way to have his memory erased.
When the show was on hiatus she often didn’t get out of bed. She was a recluse in these weeks, and the only way to see her was to ascend into her sanctum, if she permitted you to do so. Her friends, male and female, were invited over to sit on the bed while she ranted about whatever had gotten her goat that day, usually one of her two ex-husbands. These soliloquies could last an hour or more, and it was necessary simply to hear them out. They were the price of admission to her private world, which she had populated with kitsch collectibles of all sorts, the collection of kitsch being her way of disguising her profound uninterest in serious art. She was a secret bidder on auctions of memorabilia from the collections of other talk-show hosts, living and dead, and at these auctions she had acquired one of Babe Ruth’s gloves as well as hats worn by Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, John Wayne, and Mae West. Her vintage jukebox was full of singles by one-hit wonders, “Sugar, Sugar,” “Macarena,” “Spirit in the Sky,” “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” “Mambo No. 5,” “Ice Ice Baby,” “99 Red Balloons,” “Who Let the Dogs Out?” “Video Killed the Radio Star,” “I’m Too Sexy,” “Play That Funky Music,” and “Sea Cruise.” On her walls was her prized collection of Indian street and store signs, Restricted Area for Dead Bodies, Hand Job Nails & Spa, Avoid Victims of Spurious Drinks, Don’t Touch Yourself—Ask the Staff, Do Not Stand on Zoo Fences—If You Fall, Animals Might Eat You And That Might Make Them Sick, Caution Extremely Horny, Beware Ferocious Dogs and Ghosts, Tailor Specialist in Alteration of Ladies & Gents, Go Slow—Accident Porn Area, Drive Like Hell And You Will Get There, and Vagina Tandoori. There was also her Emmy, which she positioned on a bedroom shelf that you couldn’t see if the bedroom door was open.
She was a woman who concealed her secrets behind bedroom doors and comedy masks. Beneath the surface she worried about finding happiness. She was aware that after her two failed marriages and one dead body, she had put up high fences around her heart, and she didn’t know if she would ever meet a man who would persuade her to lower them, or who would be strong enough to demolish her defense system and take her heart by storm. She thought a lot about loneliness, about growing old feeling isolated and alone. On New Year’s Eve she rented a boat to watch the fireworks from the water, and just before the midnight hour, when the display was about to start, she realized that
everybody aboard the vessel—the captain, the crew, the assistants, and so on—was in her employ. It’s New Year’s and I have no friends, she thought. I have to pay for people to come and have fun with me.
She had no child. That was another thing. She couldn’t even allow herself to think about that because it would plunge her down a rabbit hole toward grief.
While we are uncovering Salma’s dark secrets we should not lose sight of the fact that Salma continued to be the biggest show of its kind. As well as the lighthearted fare that was the show’s stock-in-trade, and the emotional/confessional material, and the debates on women’s issues of the moment, she had recently introduced a segment called “While Black” intended to highlight the problems faced by persons of color in America, and this had generated much comment, inevitable controversy, and even higher Nielsen ratings. “While Black” invited onto the show the men who had been arrested at a coffee shop because a white member of staff called the police when they asked to use the restroom while black and waiting for a white friend, and the men on whom a white golfer called the police because they were golfing too slowly while black, and the men at a gym on whom a white man at the gym called the police because, well, because they were exercising while black, and the women on whom the police were called because they were shopping for prom dresses while black, or napping in their own dorm common room at an Ivy League college while black, or renting an Airbnb property while black, or sitting in their own airplane seats while black and a white passenger found them to be “pungent.” Such was the power of Salma that the show was able to shame the white accusers who had made the calls to the police into coming along to confess, recognize their own prejudices, apologize, seek forgiveness, hug, and so on. The segment made her a shoo-in for a second Emmy, she was assured, and more importantly was a real contribution to the conversation about race in America. She wanted somebody to hug her when the network bosses told her of their appreciation, someone to take her out for a celebration, to send her flowers and tell her she was wonderful. She wanted love. Instead, she had Anderson Thayer.
When she faced the emptiness of her life she knew that the world would have no sympathy for the way she felt. She was a privileged woman complaining about small things. A woman whose life was lived on the surface, who had chosen superficiality, had no right to complain about the absence of depth. Human life was lived between two chasms, a Russian writer had said, the one that preceded our birth, “the cradle rocks above an abyss,” and the one we were all “heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).” She was suffering from some sort of existential panic. She needed to put it away. But on the days after the electricity, as the confusion faded and her memory returned, she felt the presence of gaps. There were missing days, missing pages in the book of life. She reached back for childhood, for her mother, for India, and felt the dear remembrances of things past slipping through her fingers like sand. I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought. I have to go back soon, she told herself, I need to reclaim it or it will be gone, I will be gone from it, and nobody will mourn my loss. She thought about Wile E. Coyote rushing out over the chasm and not falling until he looked down. That’s me, her weak voice thought, and then her strong voice answered, Then don’t look down.
She went to work. She made herself available to the Indian media and said she would return soon and was looking out for a suitable vehicle, and within hours of the story running she had a dozen movie scripts to choose from, and expressions of delight from all the top leading men. She initiated a conversation with a major movie studio about making a big-budget Five Eyes movie which she would co-produce and in which she would lead the American defense against a ruthless foreign cyber-attack. The movie executives said, fabulous, and this would be an attack by a mysterious secret organization, right?, like SPECTRE or Kingsman or Hydra or ICE or SWORD. She laughed. “Why should we play it so coy?” she demanded. “Can’t we just call it Russia?” She did cover shoots for half a dozen women’s magazines and sat in on editorial conferences of her own glossy monthly, named S. She took part in amfAR fundraisers and emceed the Robin Hood gala. And back at the Salma offices she told her team, “I want to take myself out of the studio. I want to look out into the reddest parts of red-state America and be the person to whom the bigotry happens.”
“You’re too famous,” they told her, “your recognizability will get in the way.”
“My grandmother the movie legend always told me she had two different ways of walking out of her front door,” she said. “She showed me. First she walked out as the great movie star and everybody went insane, cars crashed into one another, so did people. Then later she walked out ‘as nobody,’ that’s how she put it. And this time nobody looked and she walked down the street unnoticed. My mother learned the trick from her and I learned from them both. I can do this. I can be anonymous and you’ll have hidden cameras and we’ll see what flyover America has to say to a brown woman out there on her own.”
And there was one more new segment. Salma had been deeply affected by a letter from Dr. Fred’s Place in Bloomington, Indiana (pop. 84,465), one of a very small group of freestanding inpatient pediatric hospice facilities in the United States. “There are thirty such houses in the UK,” the letter read, “but if you counted the American locations on the fingers of one hand, you’d have a finger or a thumb to spare.” Palliative care for children with terminal cancer was a difficult area. Many dying children, and their parents, didn’t want the end to come in the sterile atmosphere of a hospital ward, and yet in many cases home care presented problems, and could be prohibitively expensive. Dr. Fred’s created a homelike environment in which families could feel like families, and be given emotional support as well as the necessary medical attention, as they faced what had to be faced. “It would be fantastic,” Dr. Fred wrote, “if you could give the American hospice movement a boost by putting it on your show, and beyond wonderful for the kids if you felt like coming to see them, or sending us one or two of your famous friends.” Two weeks later the whole Salma team arrived in Bloomington and Miss Salma R hosted the show from Dr. Fred’s, accompanied by her good buddies Priyanka Chopra, Kerry Washington, and, yes, Ms. Winfrey too, Oprah!, her very own divine self, in a special guest appearance. They played with the children, they hugged the children’s mothers, and their brothers and sisters. They hugged the fathers too. It was a good day. The cameras got it all.
Near the end of the day, Dr. Fred led Salma to a room set apart from the other rooms. They didn’t go in, looking, instead, through the window inset in the closed door, at a tableau of sorrow, a Chinese family, father, mother, two sisters, gathered around an unconscious teenage boy on his deathbed wearing an Indiana University sweatshirt. There were some patients, Dr. Fred told Salma in a whisper, for whom the pain was so intense that their families wanted them sedated and for the most part unconscious. If they were conscious for brief periods there was a risk that they might suffer breakthrough pain, and so, for these moments, Dr. Fred reluctantly okayed the use of a powerful opioid spray.
“What is that?” Salma asked.
“It’s a version of fentanyl,” Dr. Fred told her, “but because it’s in spray form we can apply it sublingually and it has an immediate effect.”
Miss Salma R grew thoughtful. “That’s one powerful painkiller,” she said after some reflection. “What’s it called?”
“TIRF. Transmucosal immediate-release fentanyl. It comes from SPI.”
“Spy?”
“Ess pee eye,” Dr. Fred explained. “Smile Pharmaceuticals Inc., over in Atlanta. The brand name is InSmile.”
“Sent by a smile,” Miss Salma R murmured.
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing,” she replied.
Labor Day. The journey to the Valley of Love had to wait, because first there was trouble to overcome at the camp. It was in Quichotte’s nature to assume that everyone who approached him came in friendship
, and he greeted all strangers with his delightful and (usually) disarming smile; so when the wide-bodied young white lady in denim dungarees, her fair hair gathered behind her head in a loose bun, came bustling toward the trestle table at Lake Capote where he and Sancho were poring over the map of America just recently anointed by the osprey’s sign, Quichotte stood up courteously and even bowed slightly. In his formal way he was about to launch into a little speech of greeting when the lady went on the attack.
“What is that?” the white lady said, jerking a thumb in the direction of the map. “You hatching some kind of scheme?”
“We are travelers like yourself,” Quichotte replied mildly, “so it is not unreasonable that we should map out our route.”
“Where are your turbans and beards?” the white lady asked, her arm extended toward him, an angry finger pointing right at him. “You people wear beards and turbans, right? You shave your faces and take the headgear off to fool us? T u r b a n s,” she repeated slowly, making a swirling turban gesture around her head.
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