It wasn’t such a bad apartment. The ceilings were high and the neighbors were quiet and he could work there contentedly enough. On the night in question, however, it almost became his tomb. He had a nightmare that night in which he had awoken, in this his own bedroom, to see a shadowy figure standing at the foot of his bed, looking down at him, saying nothing. He understood, in the dream, that the intruder was both himself, or his shadow, and also Death. He woke up in fear. It was 3 A.M. He sat up in bed and turned on the lamp on his nightstand, his heart beating hard. There was nobody in the room, of course, and to calm himself he drank a glass of water and got out of bed to go to the toilet. That was when the Interior Event happened. There was a sort of explosion between his ears. He lost his balance, fell forward onto the floor, and blacked out. When consciousness returned—a moment or an age later, he couldn’t tell—it occurred to him that he was not dead. At some point after that realization, he also understood that he could not move. His cellphone was on the nightstand and so was the landline phone he was old-fashioned enough to have kept, but he was on the floor facing away from them. So he was helpless.
It took him two days to turn around and drag himself to the nightstand. For another whole day and night he tried to strike the table in such a way that one of phones fell off within his reach. On the fourth day he got hold of his cellphone and began to try to make a call.
“Who did he call?” Sancho wanted to know.
“He called me,” the Trampoline said. “Who else would he call?”
The call finally went through and she answered it but he was unable to speak. He lay there on the bedroom floor with the phone by his ear while her voice shouted Hello.
Understanding that something was wrong, she had come quickly to his building, found the super, had the front door opened, found him on the floor, called the emergency services. He survived. He was a lucky man. This was America, and a stroke required long and careful treatment, and he was covered, because he had recently applied for and won a teaching position at a journalism school downtown, a tenure-track professorship that came with excellent health insurance. He endured a long period of rehabilitation, and after perhaps two years he was back in something like full working order, though his speech had slowed and he dragged his right leg. But the man who emerged from the Interior Event was not the same person as before. For a time he suffered some expected aftereffects. He cried at random moments, without apparent cause. He suffered from stress, depression, anxiety. But beneath these alterations lay a deeper change. There were deep gashes in his memory and those did not mend. He became less gregarious, more silent, much more withdrawn. Also, the journalist, the professor: he was gone.
Physically, he had clearly made a miraculous recovery. The lasting damage was not to his body but to his character. He did not return to the teaching position that had given him the insurance coverage he had needed. He distanced himself from old and new colleagues, new and old friends, and withdrew into himself, retreating so far, so deep, that nobody could follow him. For a long time he hardly spoke, and watched TV all day, sitting upright on the edge of his bed at home with his hands folded in his lap. This was when he began to speak in TV references, and his grasp on reality loosened. It also became clear that he no longer felt at home in the big city. The multiplicity, the everything of everything, the roar of narratives, the endless transformation, the myth factory lost in the myth of itself: it unsettled him. The absences in his mind needed to be soothed by absenting himself from his previous life, and by television, being absorbed by which was another kind of absenting. The day he told the Trampoline that he needed to leave town—that he had reached out to their cousin Dr. Smile in the pharma world and asked if he could work for him as a traveling salesman somewhere far from New York—was also the day on which he first made the money accusation. The third unforgivable thing.
That he accused her of stealing his money was bad enough. That he did it after her solicitude during the past two years was worse. That he ignored the fact that throughout this period she had actually been managing his money for him, making sure it was well cared for, was worse still. And the allegation about forging their father’s will, or falsifying it in her favor, was the last straw. “He was always the wrong half of a half brother,” the Trampoline told Sancho, “but at that point I understood I needed to withdraw from him, just as he needed to withdraw from almost everything. He was damaged, I saw that, he wasn’t himself, I had compassion for that, but he had become unbearable. If we had been married we would have had to get divorced. In a way we did get divorced. When he left the city to begin his strange journeyings in the heartland, selling pills to doctors, I thought, okay, that’s that, and let him be, let him do what he has to do, and maybe find his way. But guess what? His money is still in good shape. And there’s certainly enough of it to mean you guys don’t have to stay in the Blue Yorker motel. If he wants to stay in the city he can rent a place. You can both stay here until he does. I have a parking place in the basement garage, but I don’t have a car, so he can put his wheels down there.”
She turned to face him. “Does that work?”
Quichotte rose to his feet and cleared his throat. “There is something I first need to say,” he stated, formally. “I wish to apologize to you, my sister, for all offenses both remembered and forgotten, both those for which I feel guilt and responsibility and those which were the responsibility of a person who has faded from memory. In my small way I am what your Mr. Cent says the universe has become: a cosmos with holes torn out of it, where nothing remains. I am fraying at the edges and may not survive. Therefore I ask that both kinds of fault, the known and the unknown, be forgiven before we reach our ends, and I am willing to perform whatever deeds you ask for by way of a penalty, in expiation of my misdeeds, both those which I own and those which I can no longer own, as they have left me and gone far away. This is what I have crossed America to set right, for until there is harmony the path to the Beloved, who lies beyond the world and its grief, will not open.” At this point, he moved slowly toward the Trampoline, his leg dragging heavily tonight, and when he reached her he fell, shockingly, to his knees and took hold, between his thumb and forefinger, of the hem of her garment.
“Forgive me,” he said, bowing his head, “and set me free, and yourself as well.”
Time stood still inside the room. Outside, or so it seemed to Sancho, a week passed, a month, a year, a decade, maybe a century. The sun rose and set, the moon waxed and waned, the seasons fled by. Mighty men and women rose and fell, the world changed, the future enveloped them, and they were leftovers from an ancient past, unknown to all, lost in their own labyrinth of love and pain. Then the Trampoline stirred, very slightly, and very slowly lifted her hand and placed her palm upon Quichotte’s humbled head.
“Yes,” she said, and the clocks moved once again.
“The time ahead of us,” the Trampoline said, “is much shorter than the time already past. You’re right about that. There are new concerns about my health. We don’t have to talk about those now. Let’s just say it’s a good time to set down burdens. Oh, and as regards Evel Cent, these days he’s well known to be a womanizer, so you were right, I didn’t need him in my life. Which doesn’t mean he’s wrong about the end of the world. Or, by the way, right about it.”
“Now that there is harmony,” Quichotte said, “we have entered the sixth valley, which is the Valley of Wonderment, in which the perfect love will come into being, and that will bring about the happy ending we all want.”
“Oh, that’s right,” the Trampoline said. “You’re now a doomsday merchant too. Well, then, I forgive you because of the approaching end of the world.”
“Hallelujah!” cried Quichotte. “And now that I am forgiven it merely remains to rescue the woman I love and lead her through wonderment into the seventh valley, which lies beyond space and time, and where, whatever happens to this world, the Wayfarer who re
aches its meadows can live happily for all eternity.”
“The Elysian Fields! That is indeed a noble goal,” the Trampoline said, keeping a straight face, “but the word ‘merely’ seems to undervalue the level of difficulty involved.”
“You will see,” Quichotte cried, a tide of happiness rising in his breast. “The obstacles are about to dissolve, and the time of joy is about to begin.”
And promptly the next morning at 8 A.M., Quichotte received a text from his cousin and erstwhile employer, Dr. R. K. Smile, sent from a burner phone, requesting a meeting. The path to the Beloved opened.
“A city was a door, and it was either open or shut. London got slammed in his face and tried to keep him out. New York swung open easily and let him come in.” The hard-boiled opening lines of Brother’s novel Reverse Rendition returned to him on the day flight from JFK to Heathrow. On reflection, he didn’t agree, or not anymore, or not to the New York part, not in this racially charged and confrontational time. His secret agent protagonist needed to rethink his position. The idea of London (pop. 8,136,000) as a clubby, members-only, keep-out zone was probably out of date too. He hadn’t been there for many years. These days the clubs were mostly owned by foreigners and it was the English who had to apply for membership. But the new flag-waving go-back-where-you-came-from England-for-the-English white populism was there, too, had risen from its grave in the dead imperial past to haunt the fractured, second-class-nation present. So, then, a plague on both your houses, Brother thought, and asked for another vodka and soda, his third, one over his limit, but he needed it today.
(He had not been in an airplane for quite some time. He had given his Quichotte a nightmare which he had had himself, a dream of first falling out of the sky and then drowning, and Quichotte’s consequent fear of flying was also Brother’s own. On the rare occasions when he had no choice but to fly, he knocked himself out with Xanax and got through the journey that way. This time he had chosen vodka instead of Xanax. So far, it was working well.)
Ever since his reunion with his lost child he had been thinking of broken families—of his own broken family—as allegories of larger-scale fragmentations, and of the search for love and healing as a quest in which everyone, not just his mad Quichotte, was involved.
He made a note on his phone. Don’t forget to resolve Sancho’s love interest too. This was the latest addition to a list he had been making since the plane took off. Don’t forget Sancho’s visions—reality begins to be more phantasmagoric. Don’t forget Quichotte’s key. What does it open, and what’s inside? And one more: Quichotte (sounds like) key shot. A key shot was a tiny bump of cocaine or heroin scooped up on a key. He didn’t know how this fitted into Quichotte’s story. Maybe there was no place for it. It would remain just a note, to be deleted later.
The plane lost altitude suddenly and fast, like one of the balls Galileo imagined dropping from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, like an elevator plunging down its shaft, like a falling man. His drink spilled, but he caught the glass before it fell. The orange breathing masks appeared from above. The captain spoke rapidly over the intercom, trying to reassure passengers while also giving emergency instructions. It was not necessary at present to put on the breathing masks. Stay in your seats with the belts fastened. This was more than rough air, but the aircraft was under the pilots’ control, or so the voice insisted, not wholly convincingly. The 747 lurched, bumped, slalomed first one way, then the other. Many of the passengers panicked. There was weeping and shrieking. There was vomiting too. Brother, for whom this was a bad dream come true, who had always known in a part of his mind that airplanes were simultaneously too massive to fly and too flimsy to resist the immense forces of nature, was interested to note that he remained calm. He continued to sip at his drink. Was it possible that his fear of flying had been cured at exactly the moment at which it was perfectly rational to feel afraid? I’ve been writing about the end of the world, he thought, and what I was really doing was imagining death. My own, masquerading as everyone else’s. A private ending redescribed as a universal one. I’ve been thinking about it for so long that this doesn’t come as a surprise. He raised his glass and toasted the giant death angel, a bare skull visible within a black hooded robe, standing on the horizon and holding the aircraft in one hand and shaking it. The death angel bowed in recognition of the gesture, and let the jumbo jet go. With a brief final shudder the aircraft settled back into its course.
After that the flight went smoothly and the passengers entered a mood of near-hysterical camaraderie. The crew handed out champagne for free, even in coach. Brother suspected that some of the passengers were having mile-high sex with strangers in the washrooms. Things were becoming a little rock and roll. He kept his own counsel, finished his drink slowly, and went on thinking about death. Which had been central to his career as a writer until now. He had always felt that a story didn’t come alive for him until at least one character hated someone else, or several someone elses, so much that they were prepared to murder them. Without killing there was no life. He knew that other writers could make masterpieces out of accounts of tea parties (e.g., the Mad Hatter’s) or dinner parties (e.g., Mrs. Dalloway’s) or, if you were Leopold Bloom, out of a day spent walking around a city while your wife was being unfaithful to you back home, but Brother had always needed blood. It was an age of blood, not of tea, he told himself (and others, from time to time).
He was flying toward a deathbed now—or somewhere very close to a deathbed—hoping there would be time for a final scene of reconciliation. Sister was in the angel’s fist and he didn’t seem inclined to let her go. At the end of most lives, he reminded himself, death did not arrive as a crime, but as the great mystery, which everyone had to solve alone.
Mysteries were the perfect analogue of human life as well as human death. Human beings were mysteries to others and to themselves as well. Some chance occurrence jolted them from their sleep and they began to act in ways of which they would not have believed themselves capable. We know nothing about ourselves or our neighbors, he thought. The nice lady next door turns out to be an ax murderer, giving her mother forty whacks. The silent, smiling, bearded gentleman upstairs is revealed as a terrorist when he drives a truck into innocent people in the town center. Death offers us clarification, it shines a harsh shadowless light on life, and then we see.
The death of Don Quixote felt like the extinction in all of us of a special kind of beautiful foolishness, an innocent grandeur, a thing for which the world had no place, but which one might call humanity. The marginal man, the man laughably out of touch and doggedly out of step and also unarguably out of mind, revealed in his last moment as the one to care most about and mourn most deeply for. Remember this. Have this above all in mind.
He raised his window blind to look out at the no-longer-dangerous sky. There were black dots dancing in his field of vision. He suffered from floaters, had done so for a long time, but they seemed to be getting worse. Sometimes a group of floaters seemed to come together near the corner of his eye and then it looked as if the universe itself might be fraying. As if empty spaces had appeared in the fabric of what-there-was.
He pulled the window blind down again. We are lost wanderers, he thought. We have eaten the cattle of the sun god, and incurred the wrath of Olympus. He closed his eyes. Sister was waiting in London. That was what mattered right now. Death, and Quichotte, and everything else, could wait. A fourth vodka, however, would be a good idea.
* * *
—
(EARLIER.)
“Hello.”
“Hello, Brother.”
“This is a good idea, right? To have these getting-to-know-you talks before we meet in real life? It’s been a long—”
“Yes, it’s a good idea.”
“We can do it on Skype or FaceTime or WhatsApp video if you prefer. Or Signal if for any reason you want the conversations encrypted.”
“No.”
“No, not encrypted?”
“No, not Skype or FaceTime or WhatsApp video or Signal.”
“Why not? Just a question.”
“I don’t want to have to dress up for you. When I’m ready I can send you a recent photograph. I’m not ready yet.”
He didn’t tell her about Googling her. “You don’t have to dress up.”
“The phone is fine.”
“Do you want to see a photograph of me?”
“Not today.” That meant she had already Googled him.
“Okay. So who goes first? If you’d—”
“You go first.”
“I hoped you wouldn’t say that.”
“You go first.”
“Then I’ll begin by making my apology.”
“As is only right and proper.”
The first thing he had to do was to get over the accent. She had lived in Britain forever, he got that, so it was natural she would sound British, but did she have to talk like the fucking queen? Ay’m so heppy to heah from you. The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain. In Hahtf’d Heref’d and Hempshah, hurricanes hahdly evah heppen. Rule Britennia, Britennia rules the waves. Ez is only raight and proppah. Half Lizzie Two, half My Fair Lady. That was some white shit.
There was, however, something else about her voice on the phone, something which even the plummy vowels could not disguise: a small shakiness, a trembling, which (or so it seemed to Brother) she was making a powerful effort of will to disguise.
Quichotte Page 29
