“I think I can say without fear of inaccuracy that I have never worn a turban in my life,” Quichotte replied, with a degree of puzzlement that displeased his interrogator.
“You got a bad foreign look to you,” the white lady said. “Sound foreign too.”
“I suspect few of the campers at Lake Capote are from around here,” Quichotte said, still smiling his increasingly inappropriate smile. “It’s a destination for visitors, is it not? You yourself must have driven some distance to get here?”
“That’s something. You asking me where I’m from? Imma tell you where I’m from. I’m from America. Who knows how you got here. This ain’t a place for you. You shouldn’t be allowed past the border controls. How’d you get in? You look like you come from a country on that no-entry list. You hitch a ride with a Mexican? What you lookin’ for in America? What’s your purpose? That map. I’m not loving the map.”
At this point Sancho, in his youthful, hotheaded way, intervened. “Ma’am,” he said (that part at least was polite). “Why don’t you do yourself a favor and don’t be in our business.”
That was fuel on the flame. She rounded on Sancho and stabbed her finger in his direction. “Imma tell you the word on you,” she said. “Seems you keep showing up and vanishing but that car there, it don’t move. Where do you come from? Where do you go? Are there more of you holed up somewhere close, appearing, disappearing, hidin’ out, who the hell knows? You look shifty to me. You up to something. You can dress yourself out of J.Crew but you don’t fool me.”
A small crowd had gathered and it was getting bigger as the woman’s voice got louder. Two camp security guards came up. Uniforms, holstered guns, a judge-and-jury way with them. “You two are disturbing the peace,” one said. He wasn’t looking at the white lady. “You need to pack up and get gone,” the second guard said.
“What’s your religion?” the white lady asked.
“It is my good fortune,” Quichotte replied, no longer so courteously, “that having passed through the first valley, my son and I are both blessedly freed from doctrines of all sorts.”
“Say what?” said the white lady.
“I have cast aside all dogma, both of belief and unbelief,” Quichotte said. “I am embarked on a high spiritual quest for purification to be worthy of my Beloved.”
A man’s voice from the crowd: “He’s saying he’s godless scum.”
“He’s planning something for sure,” the white lady said. “He’s got a map. He could be ISIS.”
“He can’t be ISIS and godless scum at the same time,” the first security guard pointed out, displaying an admirable capacity for logical thinking, and trying to maintain order. “Let’s not get carried away, ladies and gents.”
“In ancient times,” Quichotte said, in a last appeal to reason, “when a woman was accused of witchcraft, the proofs were that she had a ‘familiar,’ usually a cat, plus a broomstick and a third nipple for the Devil to suck on. But almost all homes had cats and brooms and in those days many people’s bodies had warts. Thus the mere accusation, witch!, was all that was required. The proof was in every home and on every woman’s body and therefore all women so accused were automatically guilty.”
“You need to quit talking trash and leave,” the second security guard said. “These folks here are pretty uncomfortable about your presence at Capote and you talking that way is no help. We can’t guarantee your safety much longer and I’m not so sure we’re even inclined to do so.”
Sancho looked as if he wanted the fight. But in the end he and Quichotte packed their possessions into the Cruze. The crowd grumbled but slowly dispersed. The white lady, encouraged to back off by the security guards, stood a little way off, shaking her head.
“In the old days,” the white lady yelled as they drove away, “there’d have been some frontier justice done today.”
She was wearing some strange type of choker around her neck. It looked almost like a collar you’d put on your dog.
* * *
—
SANCHO, A SOMEWHAT LESS IMAGINARY being than before, considers his new situation.
After the business with the white lady everything changed. And FYI, if I accidentally said a little prayer a while ago it’s not because I suddenly got religion, it’s because it’s pretty scary being driven by him. “Daddy.” He drives the way he does everything, the way he sees it done on TV. He drove out of that camp at Lake Capote like he was Al or Bobby Unser at Indianapolis, and he hasn’t slowed down since. I sit in the back seat because it feels safer there, but he twists his head around and talks to me while he’s doing maybe fifty-five or sixty down a two-lane blacktop, because that happens all the time on the shows, only when that happens on the shows the car is attached to a truck offscreen that’s doing the real driving. Half a dozen times a day I think, I’m about to find out if there’s an afterlife five minutes after I got myself a life. If I’m real, I can really die, right? I’m leaning now against the side of the Cruze in a gas station drinking a Coke, wiping the cold sweat of passenger terror off of my forehead, and thinking about this Real thing, i.e., the question of being real, and I’m getting the uncomfortable feeling that the question’s about to be answered thanks to an imminent fatal smashup on the road. I have to add that if, after I turn into roadkill and float up through the twisted metal, I find a God up there on the judgment seat, if that turns out to be what’s real, clouds, pearly gates, flights of angels, all that jazz, it’s going to be a shock. But I’m not wanting to get into a discussion about Paradise today. For now I just want to feel safe in the back seat of the car. That’s the only seat on my mind. Slow down, I tell him, watch the road. I even yell at him, but he just waves a hand in the air. I’ve been driving for a living, he tells me. I’ve been doing this since before you were born. Yeah, I tell him, but that wasn’t so long ago, was it.
Please do not forget, I was literally born yesterday. Well, literally, a little before yesterday, but you get my point. I’m a lot younger than I look, because I’m growing up fast. Also my head is full of him, his version of everything, so it’s hard for me to stand outside and see him for what he is. Even now, after I Pinocchioed myself into flesh and blood, I can’t see myself as a being that’s totally apart from him. I’m still more a-part-of than apart-from, see. I hate to say it, because it’s easy to observe he’s not the best of captains, but he’s still the one steering the ship. I’m thinking now about the hunt for the great white whale. Obvs the only way I know about this is that he (a) read the book in a motel room sometime when the TV was on the fritz, or, yes, this is the right answer, (b) he watched Gregory Peck, Richard Basehart, and Leo Genn in the old movie on AMC back in the wall-to-wall rerun days before Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead. Anyway, here’s my thought. The mad captain who’s obsessed by the whale dies with the whale along with his crew who are almost as whale-crazy as he is. Ishmael, the one crew member who isn’t obsessed, the one character who’s just along for the ride, it’s just a job to him, he’s the one who lives to tell the tale. From which we learn the lesson that detachment is the key to survival. Obsession destroys the possessed. Something like that. So if the old Cruze is our Pequod then I guess Miss Salma R is the big fish and he, “Daddy,” is my Ahab.
Which leads me to inquire: Did she do something to him sometime? Did she bite off his metaphorical leg? Which is a sex metaphor, right. Leg being obvs a what’s the word. Euphemism. A stand-in word for Some Other Limb. And wooden leg being a term containing the word wood. (Hahaha, laughing-face-with-tears-coming-out-of-the-eyes emoji.) Or: is it just her being in the world and ignoring him that makes him feel, what’s the word, wooden-legged? If the Beloved is oblivious to the lover, might the lover want to hunt her down and harpoon her? Might he want to end up tied to her by harpoon ropes and drown with her ecstatically in the black depths of the sea? From hell’s heart I stab at thee. Interesting, no?, that that’s
the line from the book that stuck in his head (and therefore I have it in mine)? Which leads to the million-dollar question: What does he want to do with her if/when he ever gets close enough to do anything (which is pretty fucking improbable)? Kiss or kill? There are bits of his head I don’t have access to. The answer to my question may lie in those hidden bits.
Follow-up question: Why are there bits of his head that deny me access? How does this being-a-part-of-him thing actually work? Okay, I’m guessing here, but here’s the way I’m looking at it. I see myself as a visitor in his inner world, and I see that world as an actual place, with, like, cities and countryside and lakes and such. With transportation systems. And across a lot of that world I have no obstacles, I can roam about freely and have access to everything he has access to, to episodes in his past, and shows he’s watched, and books he’s read, and people he has known, and the whole what’s the word. Population. Of his memories and knowledge and thoughts and maybe even dreams. But as I see more and more clearly, he isn’t well in the head, and I reckon the parts I can’t see are the crazy parts, the parts that are so messed up that the gateways to them are blocked, so ruined that the houses in there have fallen down, like what you see on TV about bombed-out war zones, in, like, Syria. Those parts are like scrambled jigsaw puzzles, or fogbound, or just destroyed, there aren’t any planes landing there, the roads are fucked, and maybe they’re land-mined also, the whole area is sealed off by, for example, let’s say, UN peacekeeping forces, the blue helmet dudes, what do they call them. Smurfs. Which means there’s no entry. Not unless the Smurfs let you in.
I think we’re both disturbed by what happened at Lake Capote. Daddy Q looks like his thoughts are whirling around him like windmills. Right now he just seems lost. After the bird splat at the lake I thought, fine, at least now we’re going somewhere. New York or bust. Start spreading the news. We’re heading there like everyone does, to be loved or broken, to be born again or to die. What else is there to do that’s worth doing? Nothing. There’s a woman waiting there for him. She doesn’t know she’s waiting but she is. Or she does know but she isn’t waiting, she doesn’t care, and when he learns that lesson then that will be the end of him. And meanwhile, if I may what’s the word, interject: What about me? Maybe this adventure could have someone in it for me? That’s what I’m interested in. I have an imaginary girlfriend in my head and I need to turn her into a real one. She’s walking the New York streets and she’s lonely just like me, and wait, what do I see? Is she walking back to me?…That’s my pretty-woman dream-balloon right there but his behavior is bursting it.
After the confrontation at Lake Capote it’s like the balance of his mind got disturbed. If he was at least partly clear-minded before, he’s all unclear now. “New York” seems to have become a vague concept. “Sure, sure,” he mutters when I ask him. “We’ll get there. It’s like the valleys,” he says, “it’s a state of mind.” Most days, now, all he wants is a motel and a TV—that’s the world that’s real to him, and this world, the one with unfriendly white ladies in it, is what he wants to shut out—and sometimes I think that’s all there’s going to be, this endless drifting and watching and no arriving, an Odyssey without an Ithaca, without a Penelope, and myself a displaced Telemachus doomed to wander with him, far from any idea of destination or home, far, I have to repeat this, from girls.
I’m new here. I’m trying to understand how the world works, his world, the only one available to me. The world according to Quichotte. I’m trying to get a sense of the normal, but it keeps dissolving around me. On TV, because (having no option) I’m watching a lot of TV myself now, everybody seems to know what normal is, and at the same time nobody agrees. I’m using the remote to find out.
“Is this what’s normal?” I ask him. “A couch in a living room with a staircase behind it and an armchair to the side, and a father in the armchair and a mom in the kitchen and teenage children rushing in and out wanting sandwiches and quarreling but every thirty minutes minus commercials there’s a group hug?”
“Yes,” he says. “Life is like this for normal people.”
“Or,” I say, “is normal a couch in a living room with a staircase behind it and an armchair to the side and a loud woman’s big comeback killed by a tweet referencing Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes?”
“That’s a less normal normal,” he says.
Zap. Sports channel. Normal is nine innings, four balls, three strikes, somebody wins, somebody loses, there’s no such thing as a tie. Zap. Normal is unreal people, mostly rich unreal people, having sex with rappers and basketball players and thinking of their unreal family as a real-world brand, like Pepsi or Drano or Ford. Zap. News channels. Normal is guns and the normal America that really wants to be great again. Then there’s another normal if your skin color is the wrong color and another if you’re educated and another if you think education is brainwashing and there’s an America that believes in vaccines for kids and another that says that’s a con trick and everything one normal believes is a lie to another normal and they’re all on TV depending where you look, so, yeah, it’s confusing. I’m really trying to understand which this is America now. Zap zap zap. A man with his head in a bag being shot by a man without a shirt on. A fat man in a red hat screaming at men and women also fat also in red hats about victory, We’re undereducated and overfed. We’re full of pride over who the f*ck knows. We drive to the emergency room and send Granny to get our guns and cigarettes. We don’t need no stinkin’ allies cause we’re stupid and you can suck our dicks. We are Beavis and Butt-Head on ’roids. We drink Roundup from the can. Our president looks like a Christmas ham and talks like Chucky. We’re America, bitch. Zap. Immigrants raping our women every day. We need Space Force because Space ISIS. Zap. Normal is Upside-Down Land. Our old friends are our enemies now and our old enemy is our pal. Zap, zap. Men and men, women and women in love. The purple mountains’ majesty. A man with an oil painting of himself with Jesus hanging in his living room. Dead schoolkids. Hurricanes. Beauty. Lies. Zap, zap, zap.
“Normal doesn’t feel so normal to me,” I tell him.
“It’s normal to feel that way,” he replies.
This is what I get instead of fatherly wisdom.
Meanwhile, things fall apart as well as people. Countries fall apart as well as their citizens. A zillion channels and nothing to hold them together. Garbage out there, and great stuff out there, too, and they both coexist at the same level of reality, both give off the same air of authority. How’s a young person supposed to tell them apart? How to discriminate? Every show on every network tells you the same thing: based upon a true story. But that’s not true either. The true story is there’s no true story anymore. There’s no true anymore that anyone can agree on. There’s a headache beginning in here. Boom! Here it is.
Ow.
What a time for me to arrive.
Something is going wrong, even I can tell that. Something’s badly off, not only with him, but also with the world outside the motel room. Some error in space and time. The motel room itself is unchanging wherever we are, whatever the name on the illuminated sign above the forecourt. Inside the room things are pretty constant. Twin beds, TV, pizza delivery, floral-print curtains. In the bathroom plastic cups wrapped in plastic bags. Small refrigerator, empty. Nightstand lamps, one bulb working (by his bedside), one not (by mine). Paper-thin walls, so there’s other entertainment if we don’t want to watch TV. (But we do, we always do.) There’s a lot of shouting. People drink in motel rooms from bottles in brown paper bags, and then they shout, they yell their lonely sadness into the empty night, but they also yell at each other (if they aren’t traveling alone), or down the phone, or at the motel staff. (These are few in number, shoulder-shrugging in attitude, just sometimes rapid-silence-inducing large and menacing, but more frequently Tony Perkins-y. Black, white, Hispanic, South Asian Bates Motel Tony Perkinses with small mysterious psycho smiles. I’d b
e scared of them. I am scared of them. I keep my voice down.) There’s less sex than you’d think. There is some, mostly perfunctory, mostly paid for, the price probably not high. I say probably because at this point sex remains beyond my personal experience. If I had a credit card I might try to rectify that. He has not as yet provided me with usable plastic. Therefore I remain, tragically, angrily, a virgin.
What there mostly is, is snoring. The music of the American nose is a thing to be awestruck by. The machine gun, the woodpecker, the MGM lion, the drum solo, the dog bark, the dog yap, the whistle, the idling car engine, the racing-car turbo booster, the hiccup, the SOS snorts—three short, three long, three short—the long growl of the ocean wave, the more menacing rumble of rolling thunder, the short splash of the sleeping sneeze, the two-tone tennis player’s grunt, the simple breathe-in breathe-out common or garden snore, the constantly surprising erratic snore with unpredictable, randomized intervals, the motorcycle, the lawnmower, the hammer drill, the sizzling frying pan, the log fire, the shooting range, the war zone, the morning cockerel, the nightingale, the fireworks display, the tunnel at rush hour, the traffic jam, the Alban Berg, the Schoenberg, the Webern, the Philip Glass, the Steve Reich, the feedback loop, the static of the untuned radio, the rattlesnake, the death rattle, the castanets, the washboard, the hum. These and others are my nightly friends. Fortunately I am blessed with the gift of sleep. I close my eyes and I’m off. I never remember my dreams. I think that I do not as yet possess the capacity for dreams. I suspect I have no imagination. I reckon I’m a pretty WYSIWYG type.
Which makes it even more unnerving that the world outside the motel room has totally ceased to be straightforward. I’m just going to say this straight out even though it makes me sound like Daddy Q’s not the only one with a screw loose. Here it is: When I wake up in the morning and open the door of the motel room I can’t be sure of which town I’ll find outside, or what day of the week or what month of the year. I can’t even be sure of which state we’ll be in, although I’m in a great state about it, thank you very much. It’s as if we’re standing still and the world is traveling past us. Or maybe the world is TV and I don’t know who’s in charge of the zapper. So maybe there is a God? Is that the third person in here? A God who’s fucking with me and with everybody else for that matter, arbitrarily changing the rules? I thought there were rules about changing the rules. I thought, even if I buy the idea that somebody slash something created all this, isn’t that something slash somebody bound by the laws of creation once it’s slash he’s done creating? Or can he slash it just shrug shoulders and say, no more gravity, and goodbye, we all float off into space? And if this entity—let’s call it God because why not, it’s traditional—can in fact change the rules just because it feels in the mood, let’s understand what exactly is the rule that’s being changed here. There’s a rule that goes, places must remain in the same physical relationship to other places, and if you want to get from one place to the other you’ve got to travel the same distance, full stop, always and forever. You’d think that was a pretty goddamn immutable rule, otherwise what happens to all the roads and trains and planes? How would it be if, for example, you decided to live as far away from your mother-in-law as possible, and then boom, you wake up and open your door and she’s standing on your doorstep with a cake because her house just moved in across the road? How do we even begin to understand what a town is or a city if motels can slide across space and time from one to the other? What happens to population counts and electoral rolls? The whole system collapses, doesn’t it? Is that what You’re after? You’re like the deranged worker with a sledgehammer in the old plumber joke, smashing up company toilets and railway station washrooms and writing up that slogan, how does it go again, if the cistern cannot be changed it must be destroyed. Jesus Christ. It’s the end of the fucking world happening right outside my motel door.
Quichotte Page 14
