Today, for example. This morning.
Last night I go to sleep in the Drury Inn in Amarillo, Texas (pop. 199,582, if that even means anything anymore), and I dream about yesterday at the Cadillac Ranch art installation out on Route 66, all those fifties Eldorado fins diving into or maybe backing up out of the Texas earth, Cadillac, Cadillac, Long and dark, shiny and black, thank you, Bruce, he’s singing to me in my dream, buddy when I die throw my body in the back, and drive me to the junkyard in my Cadillac. Amarillo’s some kind of a wild dream itself, man, they harvest helium in the fields here and they assemble those nucular weapons over at Pantex, they pack a lot of meat and they eat a lot of beef, they got Emmylou Harris’s lost boyfriend playing the pinball machines, and they all meet down at the Cadillac Ranch. Great dream, I have to say. Fast cars, big sky, hot girls in cutoffs dancing in ten-gallon hats. I’m loving it. And then I wake up and I take a look outside and I almost faint. I’m on a balcony up on maybe the tenth floor, instead of the first floor with the car parked right outside the door of the room. My head spins. Where am I? Where is this exactly? And even more scarily: When is this? Because over there, poking its head up above the transformed streets that don’t look like Amarillo at all, is the old World Trade Center itself. Yeah, the one the planes hit. The Twin Towers, except there’s only one of them. It’s impossible but it’s there. So maybe we somehow time- and space-traveled and we’ve made it to New York, but not New York now. New York then. We’re somehow back on that horrible day and the South Tower fell already which is why I can’t see it.
But.
This doesn’t look like New York City, not at any point in its history. This is a different place. The tower standing over there, it isn’t big enough. Did everything get miniaturized when I wasn’t looking? Honey, I shrunk the world? I call out to him and make him get out of bed and take a look. “Where the hell are we,” I ask him, “and how did we get here?” I’m freaked out, and he hears it in my voice.
“Tulsa, Oklahoma (pop. 403,090),” he says, and he’s using his kind, soothing Dad voice. “Is there a problem?”
I can’t believe what he’s saying. “Yes, there’s a problem,” I say. “What happened to Amarillo? Isn’t this the Amarillo Drury Inn? Isn’t that where we checked in last night? And by the way, how come there’s a Twin Tower over there?”
“There are no Drury locations in Oklahoma,” says he. “This is the Tulsa DoubleTree.”
I lunge past him to grab the notepad by the phone. DoubleTree by Hilton, Tulsa, it reads. I’m losing my mind. Can stuff like this happen now?
* * *
—
HE’S BEHAVING AS IF nothing happened. “Yes, we drove here,” he says, “you were sleeping, you don’t remember? The elevator, you were pleased to be up high for once, you crashed. It’s bizarre that you don’t remember at all.”
I look at him hard. I’m trying to see if he’s gaslighting me. “It’s not the first time,” I say.
“What isn’t?” he asks.
“This location dislocation,” I say.
He just shakes his head. “Have some coffee,” he suggests. “It will clear your thoughts.”
“What’s the date?” I ask him, and he tells me. This is worse. This is not the day after yesterday. How did we get to September 11 already? It’s fucked up.
And of course a part of me is thinking, Maybe I’m not as fully human as I thought. Maybe there are blackouts, moments of nonexistence, bugs in the program. Maybe I just freeze like a FaceTime image when the Wi-Fi’s weak and then eventually unfreeze. Is that what he wants me to think? Because that way I have to defer to him at all times, is that what he wants, a deferential, non-independent-minded kid? Am I getting paranoid? You bet I am. And then I think of something even worse. That insula of mine is working overtime and coming up with nothing but bad news. Maybe, according to my insula, this is the way things are these days in America: that for some of us, the world stopped making sense. Anything can happen. Here can be there, then can be now, up can be down, truth can be lies. Everything’s slip-sliding around and there’s nothing to hold on to. The whole thing has come apart at the seams. For some of us, who have started seeing the stuff the rest of us are too blind to see. Or too determined not to see it. For them, it’s shrug, business as usual, the Earth’s still flat and the climate still isn’t changing. Down there on the street, cars full of the shruggers are driving around, shrugger pedestrians are walking to work, the ghost of Woody Guthrie is walking its ribbon of highway singing this land was made for you and me. Even Woody hasn’t heard the end-of-the-world news.
“Anyway,” I say, “you haven’t explained that.”
I’m pointing at the tower which is the ghost of the other tower, what is that doing in fucking Oklahoma. And of course he has an explanation for that too. It’s well known, it has a name and a street address, it was built by the same architect, Yamasaki, and it’s supposed to be a smaller-scale replica. Move along, kid. Nothing to see here. Calm down. Let’s get some eggs.
I’m beginning to understand why people get religion. Just to have something solid that doesn’t change into a slippery snake without a word of warning. Something eternal: how comforting when you can’t trust yourself to wake up in the same town you went to sleep in. Metamorphosis is frightening, revolutions end up killing more people than the regimes they overthrew, a change is not as good as a rest. I don’t know how many people there are out there who have started seeing what I’m seeing, experiencing what I’m experiencing, but I bet I’m not the only one. In which case there are a lot of frightened people out there. A lot of terrified visionaries. Even the prophets, when visions started talking to them, at first thought they were going mad.
He’s frightened too. Daddy Q. After Lake Capote, something happened to that innocent trust in people he always had. Maybe things haven’t fully come apart for him, not yet, but I know he’s shaken. Let’s see how he goes forward. If he does. I’m watching him.
Also, I’m going to start looking out for those people. The ones like me with the end time in their eyes.
“In the Valley of Love,” Quichotte said, “one’s goal is the pursuit of Love itself, not the small though often beautiful individual love of one man for one woman, or one man for one man, or one woman for one woman, or whatever more contemporary combination you prefer, and in this category I include my love for my own, destined, inevitable, soon-to-be Beloved; nor the admittedly noble love between parent and child, although I readily express my gratitude that such a love has entered my life; nor the love of country, nor even, for those inclined toward such an emotion, the love of God or of gods; but rather Love itself, the purity of the grand essential phenomenon, the subject unattached to any specific object, the heart of the heart of the heart, the eye of the storm, the driving force of all human and much animal nature, and therefore of life itself. One’s goal is the shedding of mental obstacles that prevent one from being flooded with the glorious universal, Love as Being. It is a goal, therefore, that requires of us the absolute and irreversible abandonment of reason, for love is without reason, above it and beyond it; it comes without a rational explanation and lives on when there is no reason for it to survive.”
It was morning in the Billy Diner, “Tulsa’s go-to for breakfast,” and he had ordered green eggs and ham. Sancho got involved with a big plate of huevos rancheros. They looked ordinary, an older guy and his son or maybe even grandson, eating an unsurprising morning meal, but they were attracting attention. It was as if, Sancho thought, that white lady’s pointing finger had put the mark of Cain on them both, and now wherever they went there would be suspicion and hostility.
Until this point in his brief life he had not thought of himself as Other, as worthy of disapproval simply by virtue of being who he was. Well, of course, in reality, he was totally Other, a supernatural entity plucked out of nowhere by Quichotte’s desire and the grace of the c
osmos, he was as Other as it was possible to be, but that wasn’t the Other these people were disapproving of, the Other toward whom the white lady had pointed that accusing finger. He was trying to imagine himself into being a regular young human guy in a lumberjack shirt and blue jeans and boots, a dude who was discovering that he liked the music of Justin Timberlake, Bon Jovi, John Mellencamp, and Willie Nelson. He did not like hip-hop or bhangra or sitar music or the blues. He liked Lana Del Rey. But he was learning for the first time the potentially lethal otherness of the skin. “Keep your voice down,” he said. “Everyone can hear you.”
When Quichotte adopted his declamatory manner to pontificate on whatever was on his mind, his voice frequently rose to public-meeting levels, a fact of which he was happily unaware. The diner was not crowded but those eyes that were there to see turned in his direction, those ears that were there to hear involuntarily heard what he had to say, those mouths that were not full of food were saying things that weren’t quite loud enough to hear, and those foreheads that were there to frown crumpled into uncomprehending, but nevertheless inimical, folds.
“Listen to me,” Sancho whispered urgently. “Eat up and let’s go. They are looking at us like we’re ghosts, by which I don’t mean that we’re invisible, more that we’re spooking them. We’re the kind of ghosts people want to bust. Because we’re here they think the diner is a haunted house. You can see it in their eyes. Where’s Bill Murray when you need him, that’s what they’re thinking. Maybe we need to get out of the red states, you know what I mean? What’s the nearest blue state? Maybe let’s go there.”
There were moments when Quichotte seemed to be living in a dream, oblivious to his surroundings. Sancho, for all his fictionality, at such times felt like he was the real person and Quichotte the figment. “In Europe,” Quichotte airily remarked, “the colors of political affiliation are reversed, and so blue is the color of conservatives, reactionaries, and capitalists, while red stands for communism, socialism, democratic socialism, and social democracy. I ask myself sometimes: what is the color of love? It’s hard to find one that isn’t used up already. Saffron is the color of Hindu nationalism, green is the color of Islam, except for one or two places where they prefer red, and black is the preferred color of Islamic fanatics. Pink is now associated with women’s protests and the whole rainbow is the sign of gay pride. White, I don’t think of as a color, except in the racial context. So maybe brown. Brown, like us. That must be the color of love.”
The mood in the diner was turning decidedly ugly. The frowns were deeper, the eyes were blazing, the ears were burning, and there were fists, Sancho noted, that had begun to clench. “Will you shut up,” he hissed at Quichotte. “You’re going to get us killed.”
Quichotte stood up unsteadily and spread his arms. “I abandon all reason,” he cried, “and open myself to love.”
A gentleman of impressive proportions, both vertical and lateral, now approached. He wore a leather vest without a shirt and upon the graying hair on his chest there rested a gold medallion bearing the diner’s name in bas-relief. “I’m Billy,” said he, “and you two are out of here in sixty seconds or less, otherwise one of these fine folks around you just might remove one of those guns of theirs from their holsters and utilize it, and the consequences would be bad for my décor.”
Quichotte turned toward this Billy, looking blank. “They would shoot us,” he asked, “because of my declaration of universal love?”
Sancho was pulling on Quichotte’s arm, literally dragging him toward the door.
“I’ll have no talk of communism and Islam under my roof,” Billy said. “You’re lucky I don’t shoot you myself.”
“Fuck you,” said one of the mouths that were not, or not overly, full of food. “You look like somebody rubbed shit in your faces so deep you can’t wash it off.”
“Fuck you,” said another of the mouths. “Get out of my country and go back to your broke bigoted America-hating desert shitholes. We’re gonna nuke you all.”
“Fuck you,” said a third mouth whose ears had at least momentarily been listening. “And don’t you fucking talk about love when you so filled up with hate.”
“Fuck you,” a fourth mouth said, and this may have been a relative of the white lady at Lake Capote. “And where did you hide your turbans and fucking beards?”
When they were out on the sidewalk Quichotte said in some bemusement, “I didn’t pay the check.” Sancho guided him carefully away, as one guides a blind man or a fool. “I think,” he said, “breakfast was on the house.”
* * *
—
ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY MILES further north they arrived in the town of Beautiful, Kansas (pop. 135,473), ranked by CNN and Money magazine as the twelfth-best city to live in in the United States. In south Beautiful, on East 151st Street at Rey-Nard Shops, you could find one of the three locations of the popular Powers Bar & Grill chain. Quichotte had not intended to make a stop in Beautiful. After they left Tulsa his plan was to drive north on U.S. 169 and eventually turn toward Lawrence, Kansas (pop. 95,358), a liberal-minded enclave in that conservative state, where he had booked a twin-bedded room at the inexpensive Motel 6. Because of the unpleasantness in Tulsa he drove uninterruptedly and fast, too fast, in spite of Sancho’s repeated requests that he slow down, and by the time they reached the Beautiful town line they were both tired and hungry and needed the bathroom. They pulled into the Powers parking lot just as a ball game was beginning on the TVs in the bar. It looked like a welcoming place, crowded with good-natured baseball fans. Also, “Look,” Sancho said to Quichotte, “brown people.” There were two South Asian men sitting together at the bar, enjoying themselves, deep in conversation. Quichotte and Sancho used the restroom and ordered a little food. They waved at the two Indian men, who smiled and nodded.
“Salaam aleikum,” Quichotte called across the room.
“Namaskar,” the two Indian men replied.
Quichotte preferred not to intrude on their privacy any further. Soon after that a drunk man started shouting at the Indian men a good deal less cordially, calling them “fucking Iranians,” and “terrorists,” asking them if their status was legal, and screaming, “Get out of my country.” It was less than twelve hours since Quichotte and Sancho had been screamed at in the same words, and so, to their shame, they retreated into a corner and stood in the shadows. The drunk man was escorted off the premises and everyone was relieved. However, before Quichotte and Sancho had finished their meal, the man returned with a gun and shot the two Indian men and also a white man who tried to intervene. Quichotte and Sancho were unharmed, but for a long time they sat there trembling and unsteady and unable to continue on their way.
Much later that night, when they were safely settled into their room in Lawrence, the TV told them that one of the Indian men had died but the other two men were expected to survive their wounds, and that the killer had been captured drinking in a bar in Carter, Missouri (pop. 8,844), which was around forty miles away from Beautiful. He had become a heavy drinker after his father died a year and a half earlier. He worked as a dishwasher in a pizza parlor, a badly fallen state for a man who was a Navy vet and had once been an air traffic controller. Quichotte watched the news in a distracted, closed-off state, pushed by shock into numbness. The only thing that got a response out of him was the news that the murdered man had worked at the Greene company, the tech multinational whose HQ was in Beautiful. “That’s the GPS system we use,” Quichotte said, standing up suddenly. “Greene. We use their GPS.” As if this coincidence was what bonded him to the dead man, what allowed him to feel his death, more deeply than their common ethnicity or the sight of the dead man’s widow on TV asking piteously, “Do we belong here?”
Quichotte Page 15
