Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

  “I love you,” Quichotte repeated. The radiance was still cascading and now perhaps a celestial choir had begun to sing.

  “Men do not talk so to men,” Dr. Smile admonished fiercely. “Yes, of course, there are family I-love-yous, and even between cousins, okay, but the tone of voice is different. It is casual, like air kisses near the cheek. What is this I luuuve you? Less emotion, please. We are not husband and wife.”

  But Quichotte in his reverie wanted to say, Can’t you see the radiance descending? Can’t you hear the angels as they sing? The miracle is upon us, and you are the man who has made it so, and how can I react except with openhearted love?

  “Tell her,” Dr. Smile said, changing the subject, “that we are making product improvements all the time. We will overcome our present obstacles and proceed. Soon we will have a small tablet, only three millimeters diameter, thirty micrograms. It will be ten times more powerful than the InSmile™ spray. Tell her, if she wishes, this also can be available.”

  Then Quichotte’s head swirled, the birds of the park spiraled over him in a phantom dance, and he entered an agon, a great interior struggle, in which his whole being was at war, a battle in which he was at once protagonist and antagonist. The first Quichotte exulted, My love is within my grasp, while the second objected, I am being asked to do a dishonorable thing, and are we not honorable men? The first cried, The miracle is upon me, and I cannot refuse it, and the second replied, She is not sick and this is medicine for the terminally ill. Beside that American oak which was by no means tropical and that Indian cousin who was by no means ethical, a nonsensical verse flowed unbidden through his broken mind.

  Under the bam

  Under the boo

  Under the bamboo tree

  He understood, to the best of his capacity, his true nature. He was impure. He was the bam and he was also the boo; the flawed as well as the fine, the honorable and the dishonorable too. He was not Sir Galahad, nor was he meant to be. As the realization dawned it was as if the entire structure of his quest fell away, shriveled and dissolved in that light like a night creature that hates the sun. It had been a delusion, the whole business of needing to be worthy, of needing to make himself worthy of her. All that mattered was this opportunity, knocking. This attaché case was all that mattered. Which made him not a knight but an opportunist, and an opportunist was an altogether lower form of life. Altogether unworthy.

  Then a heretical thought occurred. Was it possible, that she, the Beloved, was unworthy too? What he was being asked to do for her was wrong, yet she was asking it. A goddess or a queen did not ask her knight or her hero, who wore her favor on his helmet, to perform immoral tasks. So if she was asking this, then she was no more a queen or a goddess than he was a hero or a knight. Her request and his fulfillment of that request would topple them both off their pedestals and drag them down into the dirt together. And paradoxically, he thought, if she was no longer a queen-goddess, then she was no longer impossible for him, no longer out of his reach. Her fall from purity made her mortal, human, and therefore attainable.

  Dr. Smile was saying something. Through the torrent of his thoughts Quichotte heard his cousin say, “Also in every envelope there is Narcan, in case of need. Both in nasal spray form and in auto-injectors.”

  Narcan was naloxone, the medication of choice in case of opioid overdose. Auto-injection brought the fastest results: this worked in about two minutes and the effect lasted for thirty to sixty minutes, so multiple doses might be required in the case of a major crisis. Narcan, Quichotte thought, was also the moral salve which made it all right for him to do what he was being asked to do, the shield that would protect the Beloved from self-inflicted harm.

  “Narcan, good,” he said. But his mind was still mostly elsewhere, and Dr. Smile grew irritated.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he snapped. “Maybe you’re not the person for this very simple job. Maybe you’ve just become too loony and old dufferish. Maybe you’re not to be trusted and I need to find someone else.”

  You know those films of an explosion in reverse? How ffwwwappp everything comes flying back together and the world is in one piece again? The effect of these words on Quichotte was like that. He was alert and present and he would not let this opportunity slip. He would do what the Beloved asked of him and que sera sera. He straightened up and spoke clearly and firmly. “I’m your man,” he said. Destiny was pushing him over a moral boundary, and he suffered himself to be pushed. Lancelot, too, had forsaken morals for the love of Guinevere. He was not Galahad, but he might yet be Lancelot, and spirit the Beloved away—as he had once promised himself—to Joyous Gard.

  “Very well,” said Dr. Smile, in a hurry now. He took a paper out of his coat pocket and passed it to Quichotte. “There is everything you need. Contact information, how when where, and amount to be collected. You have the locker. You have the key. Stash the cash. I’ll be in touch.” Dr. Smile’s cellphone buzzed. “My good wife,” he said. Now he was the distracted one. “I have to run. Yes, literally, I must run. A man like me. It is disgraceful. I have lawyers. This will be fought. I will return. Like Zorro, isn’t it? I shall return.”

  Poof! He was gone, and Quichotte was alone in the ordinariness of the park, with the magic attaché case in his hand, tiny, crumbly black spots dancing in his field of vision, and a head full of unanswered questions. What would my son think of what I have agreed to do—my newly estranged son? he asked himself, and answered himself, Sancho may react with the puritan condemnations beloved of the very young.

  He made his way back toward the gate, but paused by the Andersen statue and gazed at the immortal storyteller like a second duckling. As the end of a journey approached, it was natural for the traveler’s mind to circle back to the beginning. “An old fool gazed upon the image of a high princess,” Quichotte said to Hans Christian Andersen, “and dreamed that one day he would sit beside her on her throne.”

  “A good enough start,” said Hans Christian Andersen, “but how do you go forward?”

  “How do I go forward?”

  “Do you have, for example, a potion that will make her love you?”

  Quichotte considered the contents of the attaché case. “I have a thing like a potion that I think she loves, but will it make her love me?”

  “That’s up to you,” Hans Andersen answered. “What do you know that can help you?”

  “I know that I love her,” Quichotte replied. “I know that I am in the sixth valley, and I know that the purpose of all existence is to unite us.”

  “But what are you prepared to do?” the great author asked.

  “Anything and everything,” Quichotte said.

  “And if she protests your advances, what then?”

  “I will advance until she does not protest.”

  “And if she resists, what then?”

  “I will overcome her resistance.”

  “And if she doesn’t love you, what then?”

  “But she must. We must love each other absolutely and completely and then the world, having achieved its purpose, must end.”

  “And if the world doesn’t end, what then?”

  “It must end.”

  “The question is, do you mean to do right by her? Do you mean well by her? Or is your desire so great that it overwhelms your sense of the right and the good?”

  “I am no longer sure that I am good,” Quichotte confessed. “I have things in my bag that are bad, potions that she wants, that may help her to love me, but that are also dangerous. I have to collect her money, go to my locker, use my key, and stash the cash. I don’t know if any of this is good. I may be doing her harm.”

  “What’s in the locker? You talk about the locker and the key to the locker. When you open the locker, what do you see?”

  “There’s a gun in the locker.”

  “A gun? In the lo
cker?”

  “It’s locked there. I have the key.”

  “And why is it there?”

  “In case of need.”

  “Will you take the gun out of the locker?”

  “I need the locker to stash the cash. It’s not such a big locker.”

  “Will you take the gun?”

  “To make room. To stash the cash.”

  “So then you’ll have a gun, and if she doesn’t love you, what then? And if the world doesn’t end, what then?”

  “What then? What then? You tell me how it ends.”

  “It’s not my story, and a bronze statue tells no tales. But ask yourself this: are you—you, Quichotte, after your long journey!—are you the angel of love?”

  “I want to be,” Quichotte said. “I want to be the angel of our love.”

  “Or,” Hans Christian Andersen said, “with the dangerous potions in your case, and the gun in your locker, the gun you’ll take out to stash the cash…”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you perhaps the angel of death?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is the gun loaded?”

  “Yes,” said Quichotte, “it’s a loaded gun.”

  “So I ask the question again.”

  “Which question?”

  “Are you the angel of death?”

  * * *

  —

  THAT NIGHT AS HE SAT in his motel room filled with self-doubt with her phone number in his hand, she was on TV, on the attack, her introductory monologue given the title “Errorism in America,” allowing her and her comedy-writing team to take on all the enemies of contemporary reality: the anti-vaxxers, the climate loonies, the news paranoiacs, the UFOlogists, the president, the religious nuts, the birthers, the flat-earthers, the censorious young, the greedy old, the trolls, the dharma bums, the Holocaust deniers, the weed-banners, the dog lovers (she hated the domestication of animals), and Fox. “The truth,” she declaimed. “It’s still out there, still breathing, buried under the rubble of the bullshit bombs. We’re the emergency rescue squad. We’re going to get it out alive. We have to, or the errorists win.”

  Am I an errorist too? he asked himself. Is everything I believe a lie?

  The program must have been recorded earlier that day, “as live.” She was probably home by now, relaxing. He called the phone number. When her voice answered he panicked and said, “Wrong number,” and hung up.

  Of all the movies Quichotte had seen on TV dealing with the phenomenon of “first contact,” the first encounter between human beings and an alien species, two had stayed with him: the famous film whose climax took place at the Devils Tower, Wyoming—by a happy coincidence, the place where his son Sancho had been born!—and a much less well known TV show, a black-and-white piece from the 1960s, “Pictures Don’t Lie,” an episode of the series Out of this World, which he had caught by chance on an old reruns network, maybe Sci-Fi before it became Syfy. An alien spaceship contacts Earth. They look like us, we can translate their language, and they are coming in to land. But they can’t understand why our atmosphere is so thick, thick as glue, and when they say they have landed, they are invisible, and then afraid, because, they say, they are drowning. But on the landing field which fits their coordinates, there’s no lake or river, just a bit of a drizzle. Too late, one of the Earth team understands the problem. The aliens are so incredibly small it would take a magnifying glass to see them. They are drowning in a puddle of rain.

  That’s me, Quichotte thought. I’m about to make first contact, but I’m so insignificant compared to her great significance, such a common little ant beside her giant majesty, that I might drown in one of her tears.

  He called again. Voicemail. “Darling, I’m having the voltage today, I’m drinking that special juice of mine, so I don’t remember who you are. Leave your full name and tell me how we know each other. Mwah.” He understood that the show must be on hiatus, and the “Errorism” episode he had seen was a tape from a while ago. He didn’t leave a message. The next day he called again and she answered.

  “Who?” she said when he began with the code word on Dr. Smile’s sheet of paper. “Here, talk to Anderson.”

  First contact, Quichotte thought. One single word from her lips had entered his ear. He was filled with an immense happiness that washed away all his doubts and qualms.

  “Where do you want to meet?” Anderson Thayer asked, and the question was like cold water thrown in Quichotte’s face.

  “No, no, no,” he replied.

  “What do you mean, no, no, no?”

  Quichotte strengthened his resolve. “I mean, sir, and meaning no disrespect, but my instructions were clear. I must deliver into the lady’s hands. My hands to her hands. My instructions are clear.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Anderson Thayer said.

  Quichotte made the great gamble of his life, putting everything he had, so to speak, on a single number. “Then, I regret,” he told Anderson Thayer.

  There was muffled conversation at the other end of the line. Then a different voice; her voice, which so far had poured the single syllable who into his adoring ear.

  “Don’t be cross with poor Anderson, darling,” she said. “I’m the one who drank the juice, but he appears to be suffering from short-term memory loss on my behalf.”

  * * *

  —

  BETWEEN THE GODS AND MORTAL MEN and women there hung a veil, and its name was maya. The truth was that the fabled world of the gods was the real one, while the supposedly actual world inhabited by human beings was an illusion, and maya, the veil of illusion, was the magic by which the gods persuaded men and women that their illusory world was real. When Quichotte saw Miss Salma R walking toward him through the park, in her invisible mode, attracting not a single glance from the earthbound beings she passed, he understood that her power over the actual was very great, and also that he was about to have an experience granted to very few creatures of flesh and blood: he would pass through the veil and enter the realm of the blessed, where divinities made their sport.

  He had dressed for the occasion in his few remaining pieces of sartorial finery: the still-soiled camel cashmere coat which he had cleaned as best he could, a brown hat, scarf, and leather gloves. He wore, too, his finest sunglasses. First impressions counted. The attaché case had been placed in his locker, which he had emptied in order to fit it in, removing its contents and placing them in his pocket along with the envelope containing the first month’s supply of goods. He had rehearsed many times the words he wanted to say. He would hand her the envelope with a little bow of the head and say, “This is sent with all respects by Dr. R. K. Smile, and comes also with two brief stories with great admiration from myself.” If his powers of charm had not entirely faded she would allow him to tell the stories. The first story was the tale of what they had in common: a common city in the past, and the decision to leave it. The looking back and remembering, the decision not to look back, not to remember, and the ability of the past to insist, in spite of everything, on its right to return to haunt the present. This was their shared truth. The second story was an American story. Before the Mayflower became the first CentCorp portal into an unknowable future in an alternative reality, it was a ship, and among the travelers on the ship there was a love story. John Alden asked by Miles Standish to press his case to Miss Priscilla, who replied, Speak for yourself, John. And he, Quichotte, would say, I am here on another man’s behalf, but given permission I would speak for myself.

  She was standing in front of him. He had passed through the veil. He stood before her like a fool and stammered.

  “Make it quick, darling,” she said. “Eyes everywhere.”

  “This is sent with all respects by Dr. R. K. Smile,” he began, and then saw her eyes widen in fear and alarm. Her hand flew up to cover her mouth and she looked
from side to side, planning her escape.

  “Sent by a smile,” she said. “Oh my God, I know who you are. You sent your photograph. I know who you are.”

  “It comes also,” he continued desperately, “with two brief stories with great—”

  “Kwee-cho-tay,” she whispered. “The letter writer. Key-choat.”

  “Key-shot,” he corrected her.

  She made a lunge at the envelope in his gloved right hand. He held it away from her. “No, no, no,” he said, wretchedly. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. It wasn’t supposed to go this way at all. “Your envelope for mine. Cash on delivery.”

  She stepped back from him, gasping. Then, from the depths of her Moncler coat, an envelope emerged. She dropped it on the ground. “It’s all there,” she said. “Now throw yours to me.”

  He could not know if the required sum was in the envelope on the ground. But she was his Beloved and he would trust her. “Madam, catch,” he said, and threw her what she wanted. Which she grabbed; and ran. Leaving him standing there with a gun in his pocket and money in his hand.

  “…with great admiration from myself,” he said hopelessly, with tears in his eyes.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER THAT THE BLUE YORKER became most of his world, the TV set his only companion. He emerged occasionally to eat, unhealthily and at erratic times, wandering the city for ten days and nights in search of the junk food of America, finding it at IHOP, Denny’s, Applebee’s, TGI Fridays, Olive Garden; and at KFC, Ruby Tuesday, Five Guys, Dunkin’, Chipotle. Some nights, some days, he drank in bars with TV screens floating above the alcohol, and watched the sportsmen strive and vie, and heard the American stories of mass killings in various states and the slaughter of lovers by lovers, and the accidental deaths by shooting of parents at the hands of very small children. He spoke little and made no calls. At night he kept his loaded gun, a Gen4 Glock 22, on the nightstand by his bed, with the barrel pointing at his head.