Grillo Parlante, Sancho whispered in his bedroom at night. Mister Jiminy, are you there? There are things I need: a life of my own, away from Daddy Q. It’s time pretty soon to leave him behind and strike out on my own. But before I do that there are two actual items I really do require.—Pop!—The cricket appeared on his bed, looking none too pleased. I think maybe this is my final visit, it said. La mia ultima visita. After this you’re on your own. So, what is it? Don’t ask for too much. Remember the fisherman’s wife and the talking flounder.—What about them?—That magic fish, which was German, by the way, but I don’t speak German, was granting them everything. When the fisherman found the flounder they had been living in a pisspot. In un vase da notte, because they were poor as piss. Then came gold, riches, the works. But finally the fisherman’s wife went too far. She said she wanted to be the pope. So the fisherman said to the fish, my wife, she want to be pope. Il Papa. When he went home he discovered that all the fish’s gifts had vanished and they were back to living in the pisspot. This is the German story. In Italian it is not so different.—I don’t want to be pope, Sancho said. I want two things. I want a cellphone, and I want the girl’s personal telephone number, not the office line.—Look in your pocket, said the talking cricket, and addio per sempre. Goodbye forever.
Are you Mrs. Smile, said the first man in a black suit wearing wraparound shades. Mrs. Happy Smile?—Yes, she said.—Yes, ma’am, I am Will Smith, special agent in charge for the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. My colleague here is Tommy Lee Jones, a Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent. Is your husband at home?—No, he is away on business.—Ma’am, we will need to come in. This is a search warrant.—But my husband is an honorable man, a prominent citizen, much respected in the town, a public benefactor, a supporter of the arts.—Ma’am, we also hold a warrant for his arrest.
(N.B.: the agents’ names are obviously placeholders. These are not those men in black.)
And one more:
If I use Sister’s death in my book, is that exploitation or legitimate? And also: who is it that has to die? And he added a postscript: How big of an asshole am I?
She woke up and looked straight at him, looking alert and present, but her mind was confused. She made a number of remarks that seemed to be addressed to other people, as if she mistook him for someone else; and then, suddenly, shockingly, demanded: “I’m not dying, am I?”
He replied without pausing to think. “No,” he said. “No, honey, it’s okay, you’re just resting.”
For a long time afterwards he would ask himself if he had given the right answer. If, when his turn came, he asked that question of the people closest to him, would he prefer the comforting lie or the truth which would enable him to prepare for the grandeur of life’s ending? He thought he would prefer to know. But everyone he asked said, “I would have done the same as you.” Again, the human preference for fiction over fact.
Sister gave a small nod. “I’m glad you came,” she said, recognizing him now. “This has been good.” She smiled faintly and slipped back into sleep.
I have what I came for, he thought: absolution.
* * *
—
HE LAY IN BED listening to the sounds of the night city. The night music of Manhattan was played by the orchestra of emergency machines going about their business—ambulances, fire trucks, police cars racing to the scene of a crime—and sometimes a sanitation vehicle or a snowplow reversing under your window. In London he was hearing voices, and, being a little separated from objectivity by what he had heard and seen since he arrived, he found it hard to say if these were human beings or phantoms or the voices of angels or devils, in some way of another realm, ethereal voices such as the great mystics could hear, Joan of Arc, Saint John the Divine, Aurobindo, Osho, Buddha. The city seemed to be shrieking its pain into the night sky, asking for succor. Mortal men and women in agony and despair, without any road to happiness or peace. Monsters on the rooftops like giant succubi, drawing in long breaths and sucking out of human beings all their hope and joy.
And amid all this mayhem he had crossed the ocean looking only for the love of a woman he did not really know.
Now Quichotte and I are no longer two different beings, the one created and the one creating, he thought. Now I am a part of him, just as he is a part of me.
* * *
—
THE NEXT DAY SISTER announced that she would be hosting, at 4 P.M., a little afternoon tea for the family. The judge and Daughter said in unison, “Excellent idea,” and offered to go out and get cakes and crumpets and madeleines and scones. Daughter said she would make the cucumber sandwiches. “We will do this,” Sister additionally commanded, “downstairs, and there will be music. I’m tired of being in this bedroom. There is a very sick woman in here and she’s becoming annoying.”
Sister got up and dressed, with Daughter’s help, in a fine skirt made from Indian brocade, a white blouse, and antique silver jewelry—not from her lecherous father’s Zayvar Brother store but from the Zaveri Bazaar market district, which was also in the city she insisted on calling Bombay. In Zaveri Bazaar the price of the jewelry had nothing to do with its antiquity or with the fineness of the jeweler’s work, but was based solely on the weight and the purity of the silver. She liked this matter-of-fact approach, she said. It cast aside the vanity of artists and the sentimentality of age in favor of the practicality of what had true value: weight and purity. Daughter had brought her a magnolia flower and she put that in her hair. The judge had dressed up, too, in his finest evening gown, a gorgeous silver sheath with lacy frills spreading out below the knee. “By Mr. Cecil Beaton,” he said to Brother. “Sir Cecil Beaton. Since you ask.”
All of them, Daughter, Brother, and the judge, were needed to help her downstairs, Daughter going down backwards in front of her, arms extended, to prevent her mother from falling, and the two men beside her, sideways, helping her to go slowly down, step by anxious step. The members of the hospice staff stood by, ready to help, but understanding, on account of their great reserves of human sympathy, that this was a family matter. (During the family tea party the caregivers retreated upstairs to Sister’s bedroom. Later, when tea was over, Sister preferred to allow one of them, a strong young orderly, to carry her back up to her room.)
“Shall I be mother?” she asked, as if there were any doubt about the matter, and then tea was poured and passed and cakes and cucumber sandwiches consumed, and the flavor of everything was greatly heightened by the mingled pain and pleasure of knowing that something excellent was being done for the last time.
“The thing I’m very pleased about,” she said, “is that just before all this business in my body started up, I took out a very substantial life insurance policy, and now the buggers are going to have to pay up a fortune, which will look after my girl very well.” Then she laughed, high and long. She could not cheat death, but she had put one over on the insurance company, and that felt almost as good to her, she said.
She hadn’t mentioned the judge in her declaration, but he laughed as long and hard as she did. That was strange, Brother thought. Why wasn’t she happy to be providing for his old age too? And why didn’t he care?
“I think,” she declared when tea had been drunk and cakes and sandwiches consumed, “that I may sing a little, as I once did.” But then a great pain struck her and she fell back in her seat with a gasp.
“Jack,” she cried, and he came to her with the painkilling spray and she opened her mouth and raised up her tongue and there was relief. After that she allowed herself to be borne back upstairs to bed.
Family life, Brother thought, one moment of it after a lifetime without it, and that will have to suffice.
* * *
—
FENTANYL WAS ONE HUNDRED times more powerful than morphine. The lethal dose was therefore one hundred times
smaller: two milligrams as opposed to two hundred. Sublingual fentanyl spray was even more powerful and worked much faster. Medicinal doses of the spray were measured and delivered in micrograms, so to reach the fatal level it was necessary to spray beneath the tongue repeatedly and rapidly. The product packaging carried prominent and strongly worded warnings about overdosing.
They had made their plans methodically, Sister and the judge, because they were both diligent people. They knew the required dosages, had calculated the effects of their different body weights (she was down to just under one hundred pounds at this point, while he was closer to two hundred), and had destroyed all identifying marks on the two sprays, scratching away the batch numbers and the address of the manufactory, so that Brother could not later be charged with having supplied the fatal drug off-prescription, and they had left careful instructions—in a letter propped up on a cushion at the foot of Sister’s bed—for the disposal of their assets and belongings. They sent their great and apologetic love to Daughter and asked her not to grieve but to rejoice that they left the world as they had lived in it: together. In Sister’s hand at the bottom of the letter (the rest of which had been written out by the judge, though clearly conceived jointly by them both) were a couple of lines from Marvell’s “On a Drop of Dew.” How loose and easy hence to go, / How girt and ready to ascend. She was ready and had chosen when and how to give up her flower. They had both chosen, and they had kept their appointment.
Brother came awake fast in the dead of night, his thoughts filled with sudden, sad understanding. The disembodied voices of the darkness had fallen silent, as if they, too, understood. He got out of bed in his pajamas and went rapidly toward Sister’s room. He stood for a moment listening. Daughter was asleep on the couch downstairs. But the silence behind the closed door of Sister’s bedroom was not the silence of sleep. He opened the door and went in. The judge was in a chair by her bedside, still dressed in the silver gown, his chin upon his chest. Sister had been sitting up in bed but had now slumped sideways so that her head rested upon her husband’s shoulder. On her nightstand lay two chess pieces, the white king and the black queen, both knocked over, resigning their games. They had changed the rules, Jack and Jack. The queen had resigned as well as the king. There was no victor, or else they had both won.
Now Daughter was there, too, opening and reading the letter. When she looked up from the pages Brother saw in her eyes the rage she had inherited from her mother.
“Well, thanks for coming, Uncle, and you should go now,” she said savagely. “Don’t worry. I won’t point a finger. Nobody will come looking for you.”
He moved toward her; she recoiled.
“I brought you here,” she said. “Pawn to King Four. It’s my fault. Big mistake.”
She turned away from him to look at her parents. Her fists were clenched.
“The story you told us about your flight from New York,” she said. “About the death angel. I get it now. It’s you, the hooded skull. You came to collect their lives and you held their deaths in your fist. It’s you, the angel of death.”
On the plane home, half asleep, under the influence of vodka and grief, Brother saw his reflection speaking to him from the window. “The world no longer has any purpose except that you should finish your book. When you have done so, the stars will begin to go out.”
Quichotte, entering Central Park through Inventor’s Gate, touched the brim of his hat in a gesture of respect toward the statue of Samuel Morse, and asked himself: What encoded dit-dit-dah message, were he offered the opportunity, might he now choose to send? Who would he now say he was, what should he declare that he desired, and what secret did he wish either the whole world or a single precious individual to know? And at once he answered himself: He was a lover, he desired only the love of his Beloved, and would tap out that love on Mr. Morse’s wire telegraph or shout it from the rooftops or whisper it in his Beloved’s ear, his mighty love the fulfillment of which was the onliest remaining purpose and most proper function of the good Earth itself. He thought, too, of another, more contemporary inventor, the scientist-entrepreneur Evel Cent, and his NEXT machines. It might be that these magic portals of Mr. Cent’s, the Mayflower etc., had been brought into being to make possible a perfect ending, in which Quichotte and Salma escaped this dying vale of tears to live in timeless bliss in—what had the Trampoline called them?—the Elysian Fields. Things were coming together nicely.
He felt himself flowing back into himself. He had spent too long in the valley of apology and healing, the dale of restored harmony; too long in the realm of the necessary, which had had to be endured to make possible what was needed. The Trampoline had taken him on a journey back into the past and wrapped him in a self that no longer had any meaning for him, and that past was, anyway, only her version of events and of him as well, a version within which he still sometimes suspected that the truth had somehow become inverted somewhere along the way. There were moments when he was possessed by the idea that in fact she had been the one who had done him wrong, who had accused him of things, who had been unloving, and if only he could remember, if only he could get past the fog in his mind that stopped him remembering, he would be able to see, to know, to say, to face her with the facts, the knowledge that she had the whole story ass backwards (if he could, in the privacy of his own thoughts, permit himself such a vulgarity)—so that the person who needed to be apologized to had ended up doing the apologizing, abasing himself both formally and unreservedly. But he couldn’t remember. There was only confusion, and the fog. And finally it was okay, he didn’t mind, she was probably right, and anyway peace had had to be made, a surrender had had to take place, an offering up of a vanquished sword, a kneeling, even on such unfair terms. She had made him put on, after so many years, a skin that no longer fitted him, and he had had to wear it like a hair shirt, doing penance for what he could not remember having done. No matter. Now that old skin had been shed and he, Quichotte, had reemerged: the gallant knight, the mystical amant, the Galahad quester, the seeker for the grail of love, gathering his strength as he prepared to make, at long last, his tryst.
* * *
—
AT THE MOMENT OF reconciliation there had been a separation. He had understood that a knight pursuing his quest could not accept even one soft night in a palatial residence, even as his own sister’s lodger. Such a knight must remain hard, ascetic, pure. Softness was weakness. “Does that work?” the Trampoline had asked him, generously offering him comfort and a respite from his long wanderings. And to his surprise his answer was “No.” The Blue Yorker, for all its faults, was a better place for him. That was the kind of story he was in, and not the loft-in-Tribeca kind. He found himself anxious to return to his room and watch some comforting TV.
“Thank you,” he told her, “but we will stay where we are, my child, my car, and I.”
Sancho reacted with shock. “You cannot be serious.”
“I am in deadly earnest, I assure you,” he replied sternly. “This has been an important encounter, and I am grateful for it, but we must follow our own path.”
A mutiny followed. “Maybe we don’t have to stay together,” Sancho said. “Maybe it’s time I had a life of my own. ‘Every man has his own Grail,’ isn’t that right? You’re the one who taught me that. You have your beloved, I have mine.”
“In the first place,” Quichotte said, “you are not ready to be a man, and in the second place, that girl, Beautiful from Beautiful, is just a pipe dream.”
“And then what, tell me,” Sancho replied rudely, “is Miss Salma R?”
Here the Trampoline intervened. “It’s been a big evening,” she said. “Everyone’s tired. Let’s just put everything on hold. If the young man wants to stay, let him stay. If you,” she said, turning to her brother, “insist on returning to your fleapit, then so be it. Let’s all take a moment. Tomorrow is another day.”
As he drove
back uptown to the unpleasant little hotel, Quichotte felt the emptiness of the seat beside him, felt it like an acute pain, like the severing of a limb. Was this the last and hardest thing required of him, he wondered: the sacrifice of a son? Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter to put the wind in his sails. But Agamemnon ended up dead in his bathtub, murdered by Iphigenia’s vengeful mother, Clytemnestra, his queen. Was the empty passenger seat his death sentence too?
But Sancho had no mother. The ancient stories did not always have modern echoes. And yes: every man had his own Grail.
* * *
—
THREE DAYS PASSED AND there was no further word from Dr. Smile, and none from Sancho or the Trampoline either. Quichotte sat alone in his room, bathed in the light of the screen. A man told him that in two years everyone would believe that the Earth was flat. A woman told him that vaccinations were part of a global conspiracy against children. A man told him that condensation trails left by high-flying jet aircraft were composed of chemical and biological agents that enabled the psychological manipulation of human beings, or sterilized women to control the population explosion, or were proof of the use of biological and/or chemical weapons upon an unsuspecting world. A woman told him that someone known as Q had unearned proof of a conspiracy against the government. A man told him about heavy traffic on the FDR.
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