Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

  “People called him paranoiac and he accepted the label. He had a whole theory of paranoia. I don’t think he remembers that now. He said paranoia was to be understood as essentially optimistic, because the paranoid believed that there was a meaning to events, that the world made sense, even though that sense was concealed. Did he ever talk to you about that? No, he has lost that part of himself along with the rest. The opposite of paranoia, he said, was entropy, which was tragic, because it indicated that the universe was absurd. It was good talk. It didn’t work so well in print. He had to go on living in that small apartment in Kips Bay. I had already made my money and so there was between us the question of envy. He didn’t come here much because he envied me for living here. How ridiculous that was! There was nothing to envy about me at that time. The mutilation, the chemo, the transformation of a woman into an undead entity, a trickster who had somehow gotten away with cheating death. I guess you could envy me for my luck, but he envied me for my apartment. This is the kind of brother he was. Half brother. He wasn’t even half a brother to me.

  “I lifted him up whenever the women left. They always left him, that was a fact. When the gaudy patter ran out they found there wasn’t enough of a man there and they excused themselves and exited. He never found anybody to build something real with. But he seemed content in those days just to find the next temporary connection. The next unreal thing. And when they dumped him, he came around. He came to his Trampoline in search of some bounce and that was my fault, I always cheered him up, I didn’t say, you asshole, can’t you see which of us is more in need of being lifted up right now? I should have said it but I just didn’t. Lifting people up, that’s my thing. So, I didn’t complain.

  “The year of my illness was also the year of the song. The one that gave me my name.

  “It builds up, the resentment. It piles up like New York garbage. Then something comes along and gives it a shove and after that, get out of the way of the avalanche if you can.”

  The sun sank behind the Hudson and in a moment of silence the three of them stood on the apartment’s terrace and watched it go, the light of the fire dying in the water like a dream being forgotten. The Trampoline, however, was unquenched and on fire, had forgotten nothing, and what had been pent up in her during the long years of estrangement was blazing out of her like the flame of a second sun that had no intention of setting, not until its hot work had been done.

  “Betrayal blindness,” she said, and it wasn’t clear if she was addressing Quichotte or Sancho or planet Venus glinting in the darkening sky. “Victims of treachery find ways of deluding themselves that they are not being betrayed. Sexually, for example, but I assume in other areas too. Business, politics, friendship. We are good at fooling ourselves in order to preserve our trust. But it isn’t only the victims who do it. The traitors, too, convince themselves that they are not committing treason. At the very moment of their deepest betrayals they assure themselves that they are acting well, even that their deeds are in the best interest of the betrayed person, or of some higher cause. They save us from ourselves, or, like Brutus and his gang, they save Rome from Caesar. They are the innocent ones, the good guys, or, at the very least, not so bad.”

  “What did he do?” Sancho asked. “Dad, I mean, not Brutus.”

  The Trampoline crossed her arms and clutched at her shoulders, and breathed deeply, gathering herself, like a storm.

  It was necessary, she said, by way of a preamble, to tell Sancho something about the problem of South Asian men. She presumed Sancho was not fully briefed on this topic?

  No, she hadn’t thought so.

  She would not bore him with statistics. But she would ask him to believe that in her field, the microfinancing of poor women to enable them to become economically self-sufficient, she could not count on the backing of the men in their lives. In her work she and her teams in the field subscribed to the so-called sixteen decisions of the Grameen Bank movement, and decision eleven, for example, “We shall not take any dowry at our sons’ weddings, nor shall we give away any dowry at our daughters’ weddings,” was not popular with the patriarchy. Sexual violence against South Asian women was present wherever and whenever women tried to establish independent lives and expand the zone of their personal freedoms.

  The microcredit movement lent money without asking for any guarantees. It operated entirely on the basis of trust between the lender and the borrower. He could appreciate, could he not, that in any field where trust was as important a currency as banknotes, the issue of betrayal was a hot-button topic.

  Here Sancho interrupted her to say that Quichotte had told him something about her operation; quite a lot, in fact. This information came to her as a surprise.

  “He remembered that,” she said. “I didn’t think he would remember.”

  “Because of the Interior Event?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was the Interior Event?”

  “I will tell you in due course. Everything in its proper place.”

  * * *

  —

  “I WROTE AN ARTICLE,” she said. “In The New York Times. About my work. It was at a time when I was feeling worn down by the battle, I admit that, and I expressed my frustration about the many ways, big and small, in which South Asian men held women back, the many obstacles of old-fashioned attitudes that had to be negotiated and overcome. The article was well received at first and was reprinted in many countries, including the South Asian countries. For a moment I was happy about the article’s reception. Then the craziness began. People—South Asian men—began to send me messages of abuse. ‘Man hater,’ ‘lesbian,’ et cetera. Death threats were also received, and descriptions of the terrible things that would be done to my body before and after I died, and promises of hellfire, and, worst of all, threats against the women who used our organization. What shocked me was that respected, senior male members of the community in this country condemned me too. Religious leaders, but also business leaders, the same ones who had previously encouraged me and supported my initiatives. There was a demand that I make a public apology to all Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Sri Lankan men, the ones living in those countries and the ones in the diaspora too. For a moment it looked as if everything I had tried to build would be destroyed overnight. As if I had beaten one life-threatening disease only to be overwhelmed by a different kind of killer sickness. The name of the sickness was a word we were all just learning.

  “Blowback.

  “What saved me was the date. Let’s just say, B.G., which is to say, Before Google. The world before the birth of the monster the Internet became, before the age of electronically propagated hysteria, in which words have become bombs that blow up their users, and to make any public utterance is to set off a series of such explosions. Our age, A.G., in which the mob rules, and the smartphone rules the mob. Back then the most advanced technology available was the fax machine. Old technology saved my business and my life. It was too slow to kill. The howls of outrage spread, but they spread slowly. My character was assassinated, but it was a slow assassination, which allowed time for a defense to be assembled, for resistance to be organized. And, best of all, the women we had trusted, to whom we had given money without any guarantee of its return, those women now trusted us. Trust saved me as it had saved them. The organization did not break. I did not break. Instead, the storm broke, and we survived.

  “Your father, the only half of a brother I’ve got, I hoped I could trust, but he betrayed that trust. And at the time that felt like an unforgivable thing.”

  “He wasn’t on your side,” Sancho said. It wasn’t really a question.

  “I don’t know which half of the available brother material he got,” Trampoline said, keeping her emotions at bay. “But I think it was defective. He said I should have known. He said, what did I expect. He said, did I do it to provoke, to get attention, whatever. He said it was my own f
ault. Somebody sent a flayed pig’s head in the mail to me at the New York Times address, and they called me and asked if I wanted it messengered over. For all of this I was to blame.”

  “I don’t remember the pig’s head,” Quichotte interjected, mournfully. “These accusations should be leveled at another person, who disappeared long ago.”

  * * *

  —

  THIS WAS WHEN THE Trampoline began to tell Sancho how the end of her relationship with Quichotte was linked to a larger ending: the end of the world.

  Sancho sat up when this larger subject was introduced. “Wait a minute. We were just talking about a pig’s head. How did we get from there to doomsday?”

  “I changed the subject,” the Trampoline said. “It’s time to mention Evel Cent.”

  “Did you say Evel Cent?” Sancho asked.

  “I did.”

  “That Evel Cent? The science billionaire?”

  “I believe there’s only one.”

  “Wow.”

  The apartment was in darkness but nobody turned on a light. The three of them sat some distance from one another, wrapped in their separate obscurities. Then out of the darkness Quichotte spoke.

  “I saw him,” he said.

  “When?” the Trampoline asked, very surprised. “Where? How?”

  “On TV,” Quichotte said simply. “He was saying that science was in the process of confirming what I already knew. He said he would provide the scientific evidence at the proper time.”

  “You know the world is going to end?”

  “He read something in a science fiction story,” Sancho explained, “and decided it explained his quest. When he attains the Beloved, the universe will have achieved its purpose, and will therefore conclude.”

  “And he feels okay about that,” the Trampoline said.

  “You know how he is,” said Sancho. “Who knows how he feels?”

  * * *

  —

  “I MET THIS STRANGE beautiful boy, Evel,” the Trampoline said. “It was at a money people’s party at one of those clubs there were then, Lotus or Moomba or Bungalow or Sway, I don’t recall. I didn’t like those parties, men in red suspenders ordering Cristal and waving cash at women as if it was an irresistible sexual organ, but sometimes I had to go, because of what was then my new microcredit project. A friend told me I should meet this physicist on his way to becoming a billionaire and led me across the crowded room. I expected a cliché, some sort of small, skinny, dark-skinned, bespectacled, nerdy person, the classic Indian in America making it big in the new technologies, and was surprised to find a guy with movie-star good looks, slicked down and shiny faced in a bespoke suit, a geek in dude’s clothing. He had a booth all to himself, which was his way of saying he was somebody. He said, ‘I’d be glad if you sat down and had a drink with me.’ His name made an impression on me. Evil Scent. ‘You’ve got the right name for this world,’ I thought, but managed not to say. He probably heard variations on that theme all the time anyway. But he chose that name. Awwal Sant, his real Indian name, would have been just fine but he had rejected it. That was a clue that there was something off about him. I should have paid better attention.

  “He was several years younger than me, and acted even younger than that, sulky, awkward, but cocky, sure of his genius. We had nothing in common except our attitude to the money, I thought. I had been on one side of the money and now I was switching to the other side: first I had made it and now I was giving it away. He was still very interested in making a lot of it but he had his eyes on something much bigger. Money was a tool, not a goal, we agreed on that.

  “I liked the first thing he said after I sat down: ‘I’m sorry, but I have no small talk.’ It was a funny line, but he said it with absolute solemnity and a kind of piercing, sincere energy, which made it funnier, and made him interesting. He began to talk about himself, which was normal with money guys. But most of them talked about their assets, their planes, their boats, their blah blah blah, which to me was an instant turnoff. This Evel talked about his obsession with the nature of reality, its fragility and mutability, and that was interesting too. He was thinking about parallel universes even then. When he started in about his love for science fiction, naming obscure-to-me writers of the old school—I remember the names Simak and Blish and Kornbluth and Sprague de Camp—I glazed over and was about to excuse myself but then he did something actually unpleasant. He grabbed me by my wrist and glared at me with what looked like anger and said, ‘You can’t leave.’ I detached his hand. My secret anger was bigger than his, and I showed him just a flash of it. ‘You need to learn how to behave,’ I said. ‘Let me know if you ever do.’ Then I left. I looked back toward him from the doorway. He seemed lost in thought, wrapped up in himself. But he was watching. Afterwards he said to me, ‘If you hadn’t looked back I would never have spoken to you again. But you did look back. That was very important.’ It was, I thought, the remark of a very vain individual. But, again, it was interesting.

  “I never believed any man would find me attractive after my mutilation, and I had reconciled myself to that. There was, yes, the secret anger. I had a lot of anger about what had happened to me. But I had also learned how to bury it so deep that it didn’t know how to get out unless I chose to let it escape. It worked for me now, I told myself. I told myself a lot of things: that I was doing the work I wanted to do, I had loyal friends, a full and comfortable life, and I had cheated death. There was nothing wrong with that picture, nothing that required the presence of a man to put right. These good thoughts prevented the rage from rising up out of its burial ground. But it was there if I needed it. It still is.

  “This was the china shop in which I lived, into which Evel Cent charged, without a thought for the damage he might cause, talking about the end of the world. The morning after he grabbed my wrist he was standing on the sidewalk down there holding flowers, calling my cell number. I hadn’t given it to him, or told him my address, but there he was. Resourceful. Determined. Apologetic. Urgent. I told him to come up and what followed, followed. No, that isn’t correct. It was slow. The idea of undressing for a man was horrifying. The idea of being touched. He said, ‘I’m in no hurry. The end isn’t coming for a while yet.’ What? I said. What? Out came his pet theory, the one to which he would devote his billions. The cosmos disintegrating like an oil painting on a fraying canvas, like the ruins of Egypt. The appearance of holes in space-time, the coming victory of Nothing over Everything. And then his grand design. He was already working on it, had built the research corporation, and had hired the top-drawer scientists needed to solve the problems of the science, and he already had the name for it.

  “This was how I first heard about NEXT. ‘Neighbor Earth Xchange Technology.’ He said: ‘Once I’ve built the transfer machines, we can escape to safety. I don’t even know what the machines will look like right now. People always think, spaceships, but maybe the gateways to the neighbor Earths will actually turn out to be like gates. Portals, to use the word they like in sci-fi. You step into something like a phone booth and step out somewhere else. I’m thinking of the wardrobe that opens up into Narnia. My guess is that the Xchange Tech will be of that kind. We all step through the wardrobe and there’s the lamppost and somewhere a benevolent lion waiting to welcome us. You, me, the human race. We can all go. We will be the NEXT people.’ Sometimes he sounded like a cult leader in Guyana or Pune. Sometimes he sounded insane. But he was always passionate, convinced, and the brilliance was not in doubt. And he had no small talk. When he finally turned to the subject of us, he was suddenly and unexpectedly direct.

  “To make his pitch he took me, where else, to the planetarium, where he was a panelist in a debate called ‘Buying Space.’ Four white men in gray suits were on the panel with him. He was wearing a golden vest embroidered with images of all the planets in the solar system, a star in the house of the stars. The four wh
ite men were talking about the exploitation of aerospace by business. They would build vessels to satisfy NASA’s cargo requirements, they would send robots to asteroids to set up profitable mining operations, they would devise space vacations for rich tourists. They said without shame that they hoped to become the first trillionaires in history. When it was Evel’s turn to speak he told them that their focus on space had made them blind to the crisis in space-time. He spoke of the coming disintegration of the universe and the need to survive by escaping into one or more neighbor Earths. The only technological advances that mattered, he said fervently, were explorations into this kind of trans-dimensional travel. ‘Mars is so twentieth century,’ he said. ‘Neighbor Earths are the only destinations worth thinking about.’ The white men in the gray suits looked at the brown man in the golden vest with all the condescension of their tribe, and humored him. ‘How long have we got,’ one of them asked Evel, ‘and can you develop our escape routes in time?’ Evel replied with great seriousness, ‘I see that you don’t believe me, but signs of the Great Instability will change your minds pretty soon. We don’t have long, that’s a fact, but we probably have long enough. I’m working on this day and night, both on identifying the neighbor Earths and on the means of getting there. I’d say we aren’t too far from a breakthrough in the science.’

  “At the end of the discussion his eyes were sparkling and there was an exhilaration in him which I hadn’t seen before. He’s a street fighter, I thought, this surprising mixture of a man, Rock-Hudson-meets-Shah-Rukh-Khan on the outside, with Stephen Hawking hidden inside that shell. He actually likes going up against men like the men in the gray suits and messing with their heads. He enjoys debating men who think they’re at the cutting edge of the future and telling them they’re out of date. I liked to see that.