Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

  “The question to be answered,” the cricket said, “is not, what is it to be a cricket, but what is it to be a man, and have you passed that examination?”

  At the Port Authority in the middle of the night a man sitting on a piss-drenched bench talking to himself was not only not unusual, it was actually conventional, so the few other nightcrawlers moving past Sancho did not even trouble to turn their heads as the thief raised his voice. “Look at me,” he said. “Flesh and blood. I live and breathe and think and feel. What more do you want? You’re the one who told me I even have an insula, and that means I’m a genuine human person. You told me that.”

  “Without a conscience,” said the cricket, “you’re not even a genuine chimpanzee.”

  “I’ve only been around for a short time,” Sancho said, “but in that period I have noticed that conscience isn’t a major requirement in human affairs. Ruthlessness, narcissism, dishonesty, greed, bigotry, violence, yes.”

  “It would not be prudente to make such a judgment based on the TV news,” said the cricket. “Many people remain who know the difference between good and evil, and who let their conscience be their guide. This is the warning I give to you. Lascia che la tua coscienza sia la tua guida. If you choose that other path—spietatezza, narcisismo, disonestà, avidità, bigotteria, violenza—it will not go well for you. Also, to pursue a woman who is a stranger to you, be aware that that may not look like love to her. That may appear to her as molestie sessuali. As we say, lo stalking.”

  “Did I mention,” Sancho said insolently, “that I don’t understand Italian? Also, I don’t speak cricket. We may be experiencing a failure to communicate.”

  “Yes,” said the cricket. “Incidentalmente, regarding that matter of squashing me with your thumb, I have a brief demonstration for you. Guarda.”

  A cricket can jump quite a distance when it wants to, and before Sancho could do anything about it the insect was on his head. There followed a sensation of immense pressure and pain, as if a giant invisible mountain were crushing him beneath its weight, and Sancho fell back and slipped down to the floor. The cricket jumped off and was back in its place on the bench. “Do not make the mistake,” it said, speaking perfect English, “of equating size with power. Or you might find a cricket squashing you under its thumb.”

  Sancho climbed back onto the bench, twisting his neck. “That hurt,” he said.

  “So the first question of Sancho,” said the cricket, “is, can he become a human being before it is too late?”

  “Oh, there’s more than one question now,” Sancho grumbled, still rubbing his head, neck, and shoulders.

  “The second question is, who is Sancho without Quichotte?”

  “Sancho is Sancho,” Sancho mumbled, with a slight note of defiance.

  “You say this,” the cricket replied. “But who is Hardy without Laurel? Who, without Groucho, are Chico and Harpo? Who is Garfunkel without Simon? Capisc’? You are now riding alone on a bicycle built for two. Not so easy! You remember how it was in the beginning? If you moved too far away from him you felt yourself breaking up? Now you want to move very far away. It remains to be seen if you can have any prolonged existence without him at such a distance. A solo career? Resta da vedere. Now I must go.”

  Sancho gathered his strength for one last sally. “Anyway,” he said, “I didn’t think that the life expectancy of a cricket was this long. I Googled it. Three months. Aren’t you past your sell-by date?”

  “Conscience never dies,” the cricket said. “There will always be a cricket for those who deserve, who are worthy. But for those who are non degni, no. Addio.”

  * * *

  —

  ON THE BUS HE BEGAN to see things again, the things he hated to call visions. It was dark outside the windows; the streetlamps flashed by, their little lights barely touching the black heart of the night, and every so often a gas station, a highway interchange, a little burst of convenience stores. Mostly, however, nothing, except what he was seeing out there. The night sky like a huge jigsaw puzzle. The edges of the interlocking pieces visible, like a crazy grid system. And yes, there were missing pieces. Absence did not look the same as night. Night was something. Absence was nothing. In the blackness of the rushing night he saw absences passing by.

  The bus itself contained more problematic sights. Was he turning into—revealing himself to be—Quichotte’s true offspring, as obsessed as he with the unreal real? If not then why were there long-fanged vampires here, and members of the tribes of the walking dead? Why men with the hairy paws of wolves protruding unshod from the cuffed bottoms of their pants? America, what happened to your optimism, your new frontiers, your simple Rockwell dreams? I’m plunging into your night, America, pushing myself deep into your heart like a knife, but the blade of my weapon is hope. Recapture yourself, America, shed these werewolf hides and zombie shells. Here comes Sancho, holding on to love.

  He closed his eyes. The last time he had seen the masks slipping and the truth about people becoming visible, the broken-leashed who-let-the-dogs-out truth, he had been kicked and beaten within an inch of his life. Before I open my eyes, he begged, put your masks back on, and let’s pretend. I won’t tell anyone who you are if you’ll just let me live.

  He opened his eyes. Everything was normal. The lady across the aisle, blond, Nordic, and almost two seats wide, wearing a shapeless long blue sweater over a shapeless long blue dress, was offering him a sandwich. He was grateful for this glimpse of human kindliness but he was afraid that she might be concealing a terrifying, monstrous identity beneath her close-to-bag-lady mask. He saw a tiny bright blue flame flickering in her eyeball and that unnerved him. He politely refused the sandwich.

  I am new to the human race, he thought, but it seems to me that this species is mistaken, or perhaps deluded, about its own nature. It has become so accustomed to wearing its masks that it has grown blind to what lies beneath. Here in this bus I’m being given a glimpse of reality, which is more fantastic, more dreadful, more to be feared than my poor words can express. Tonight we are a capsule containing evidence of human life and intelligence, sent hurtling into the black depths of the universe to tell anyone who might be listening, here we are. This is us. We are the golden record aboard the Voyager, containing memories of the sounds of the Earth. We are the map of the Earth engraved on the Keo spacecraft, the drop of blood in the diamond. We are the Hydra-headed Representative of Planet Three, the many melded into one. Maybe we are the Last Photographs in the time capsule satellite orbiting the Earth, which, long after we have extinguished the last traces of ourselves, will tell arriving aliens who we once were.

  We are scary as shit.

  * * *

  —

  DAYLIGHT DID NOT BRING an end to strangeness. They came off I-70 for a restroom stop at a gas station outside Pocahontas, Illinois (pop. 784, temp. 30 degrees F), and when Sancho returned to his seat after relieving himself a man wearing a straw hat and red suspenders was sitting there, dozing, with an old-fashioned transistor radio on his lap.

  “Excuse me,” Sancho said, “but that’s my place.”

  The sandwich lady looked at him with a puzzled expression. “Son, you talking to someone?” she asked. “Because I can’t see who you might be addressing.”

  “You don’t see this gentleman right here?” Sancho demanded, and at that point the sleeper awoke, looking embarrassed, and stood up.

  “Beg pardon,” he said. “Sometimes I forgit. I use to ride this Greyhound all the way—all the way!—but that was before and this is after. No offense.” As he vacated the seat he passed right through Sancho’s body and moved off down the aisle and out through the open door of the bus.

  “You okay?” the sandwich lady asked. “You lookin’ kinda green, like you saw a ghost.”

  So there were ghosts now and maybe the sandwich lady knew that, maybe everyone on the bus knew that,
had known it all the time. Maybe this Greyhound was a ghost bus and it was taking him not toward Beautiful but to the ghost town at the end of the road. Maybe this wasn’t the I-70 but the ghost road to Hell. Maybe he had completely lost his fucking mind.

  He was a kind of ghost himself, he reminded himself. He was a parthenogenetically created, unrecorded person, no birth certificate or other trace of him on any file. He was here, but he wasn’t meant to be. He was the deluded one. Of course he wasn’t real. Reality was a cloak he had put on. He felt it crumbling off his shoulders as if made of ancient Egyptian papyrus. Maybe he would soon start crumbling, too, dust to dust. Maybe a child born under a meteor shower had only a meteor’s life: short, dazzling for a moment, but then burned out. A small pile of ashes blown away by the first uncaring breeze.

  Serves me right for telling the cricket he was past it, he thought. The one with the low life expectancy is me. He leaned back in his seat, losing his grip on the world. He felt in that instant that he would not make it to Beautiful and would never see the woman of his dreams again. He felt that he would dissolve right here in this window seat and that would be the end of his story.

  “There is someone you say you love that you’re on your way to see, and you’ve convinced yourself there’s a good chance she returns your feelings,” said the sandwich lady. “You’re thinking, hold on to her. You’re telling yourself, you need love to keep things real.”

  Sancho sat up. “How do you know about me?” he asked, too loud. Heads turned. The sandwich lady shrugged, took a long sub out of her bag, and prepared to bite it. “Oh, darlin’,” she answered him, “let’s say, you’ve got that love light in your eye.”

  “Let’s say a whole lot more than that,” Sancho retorted. “Let’s start with, who are you?”

  “Let’s say, I’m friendly with someone better disposed toward you than you deserve.”

  She took a large bite of bread, salami, and provolone. Sancho waited.

  “He’s Italian,” the sandwich lady said, speaking with her mouth full. “And he’s pretty small. He asked me to keep my eye on you.”

  Sancho suddenly understood. “You’re the blue fairy,” he said, awestruck.

  “Call me what you like. I’m a woman in a plus-size blue outfit on a bus to nowhere,” she replied. “But you need to listen to me.”

  “Okay,” he said, “I’m listening.”

  “You and that parent of yours are cut from the same cloth,” the blue fairy said. “You’re chasing a stranger and so is he.”

  “Yes,” Sancho replied, “but he’s nuts.”

  “Once upon a time,” the blue fairy continued, ignoring that, “if you had two guardian angels—let’s say a cricket and a fairy—your path to true love would be pretty smooth. Between the two of us, we could spirit you to her door, and cast a magic spell on that girl, maybe give you a potion to drop in her drink, and—presto change-o!—she would love you to bits, and for evermore.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Sancho said.

  “Things have changed,” said the blue fairy. “Do you know what they call a gallant lover who shows up unannounced with a bunch of flowers at the door of a lady he does not know and drops a love potion in her tea?”

  “Smart?” Sancho hazarded.

  “They call him a rapist,” said the blue fairy. “Back in the day, Jupiter could disguise himself as a bull and carry Europa away, but this is frowned on at the present time.”

  “Then what am I to do?” Sancho cried sadly. “I am crossing America in the name of love, and yes, I believe this love may be my only salvation, my only chance of a true and long human existence, but if things are as you say, then I despair. Give me the potion, I beg you. If you were sent by the cricket to care for me, then this is the thing you can most tenderly do for me. I ask for nothing else.”

  “Have you heard of Bill Cosby?” the blue fairy asked.

  “I think my father liked his show,” Sancho said, tapping his temple. “I have his memories of the Huxtables in my head.”

  “Dig deeper,” the blue fairy advised. “Look for the ’ludes.”

  Some hours later the bus pulled in for a second time at the gas station near Pocahontas, Illinois, and the man with the straw hat and the red suspenders holding up his blue jeans climbed aboard again holding his transistor radio on his shoulder while it played songs from an oldies channel. Sancho felt suddenly dizzy. This wasn’t right. They shouldn’t be back here. They did this already. This ghost was hours ago. So was this gas station. Something was terribly wrong.

  The man with the straw hat and red suspenders tried once again to sit down in the seat in which Sancho was sitting, and once again Sancho protested, more forcefully this time.

  “Hey!”

  “Beg pardon,” the man said. “Sometimes I forgit. I use to ride this Greyhound all the way—all the way!—but that was before and this is after. No offense.”

  And off he went.

  “You okay?” the sandwich lady asked. “You lookin’ kinda green, like you saw a ghost.”

  “I’m scared,” Sancho admitted. “Why aren’t we there yet? Why are we here again?”

  “In the situation in which we find ourselves,” the sandwich lady said, “it’s hard for me to give you good advice, or even an answer that you could accept.”

  “Try,” Sancho said. “Because I’m freaking out here.”

  “The road is always unreliable,” the sandwich lady said. “It’ll twist and turn on you. It’ll duck and swerve and land you where you don’t expect and you got no business being. You need your wits about you if you want to ride the road.”

  “That’s BS,” Sancho said. “That’s what you’re saying so’s you don’t have to say what you don’t want to say. Give me the real thing now.”

  “The real thing is deep,” the sandwich lady said. “It might drown you.”

  “I’ll take that chance.”

  The sandwich lady who was also the blue fairy made a heavy sighing sound and then she told Sancho the things that were hard to hear. There were two crises unfolding simultaneously, she said, and it wasn’t easy to see how either could come out well. The first was the crisis of Sancho himself. “You’re seeing things I can’t see myself,” she said. “Ghosts, zombies, crazy shit. What this tells me is, you’re in danger of slipping into a ghost world from which I won’t be able to get you back and nor will anyone else. It says to me, our little Italian friend did a great job, he got you most of the way to bein’ a real live boy, but maybe he didn’t finish the job. And now that you’ve broken away from your daddy things are getting worse. I look at you and it’s like your presence isn’t strong. Like there’s bad reception, a bad signal, and you aren’t always coming through clearly. Am I making myself understood?”

  “Yes,” Sancho said. “You’re saying I’m dying.”

  “Let’s not jump that far,” the blue fairy said. “I’m just saying there’s a problem.”

  “Can you save me?” Sancho pleaded. “I want to live.”

  “You been talking a whole lot about love,” the blue fairy said. “Seems to me you’ve got it ass backward and upside down. Let me tell you what I mean by that fine sentiment. I understand it to be, first of all, selfless. Love makes the other more important than you. And the other isn’t necessarily an individual. It can be a town, a community, a country. It can be a football team or a car. If times were normal here’s what I’d say to you: Forget about this girl at the end of the road. Go back where you came from and set things right for yourself. Your aunt? You owe her a big apology just like your daddy did. Funny how you’re like his echo. You owe her an apology and money also. She’s not pressing charges, told the cops it was a domestic dispute. That’s pretty nice of her. Go, apologize, get a job, work until you’ve paid her back, and cling to the love of being alive and living a decent life. That’s the love that makes you real. Thi
s girl? She’s just one of your ghosts.”

  “Okay,” Sancho said, recovering a measure of defiance, “so this is advice I’m definitely not going to take. This I can find on an Internet meme or in a fortune cookie.”

  A hubbub had arisen. Passengers on long-distance bus rides habitually fell into a transitional state, a kind of in-between torpor, half asleep, listening to music on their headphones, watching sitcoms on small seat-back screens, eating mini-pretzels or cinnamon grahams, dreaming of the possibility of happiness. The country rolled by outside the windows, unobserved. But now some passengers at least had noticed the disturbance, the feedback loop which had fed them back to where they had been several hours ago, and people were panicking, not helped by the driver, who threw up his hands and said, “Beats me. I just drive the bus, I don’t make the roads.”

  “One moment,” the sandwich lady said to Sancho. “Let me see what I can do.”

  She stood up in the aisle amid the shrieking of her fellow passengers and closed her eyes. There followed a series of heavy bumps, the kind one might feel on a railway train changing tracks across multiple points, and then she sagged down into her seat, exhausted.

  “Okay, we’re back where we should be,” she said to Sancho, “but that was pretty much above my pay grade. I’m going to need to recover before we discuss the second crisis.”

  The noise in the bus subsided as the street signs began to make sense once more. Beautiful wasn’t far away now. Some passengers accused others of having mistakenly raised an alarm for which there was no need. The driver shrugged his seen-it-all-before shrug and drove on. The sandwich lady snored gently in her seat. Sancho alone was fully alert. It seemed plain to him that the second crisis might be worse than the first.

  As he waited he became aware of certain disturbing changes in himself. Like there’s bad reception, a bad signal, and you aren’t always coming through clearly. That had been the sandwich lady a.k.a. blue fairy’s unsentimental diagnosis. Now he was beginning to feel it too. He was experiencing fuzzy spells, when his thoughts became clouded and unclear, the kind of grogginess one might feel if one had a bad case of the flu. There was also a kind of intermittency, a series of very short interruptions during which the stream of consciousness apparently vanished and then returned. Most worrying of all were the visual and aural symptoms. He looked down at his hand and saw it break up before his eyes like a bad TV image, and then re-form. That was impossible. He used the hand to rub his eyes and it worked just like a hand ought to work, which was partially reassuring. Then a few moments later he saw the phenomenon again. He wanted to ask the sandwich lady for help but she was out cold, snoring. He called out to her and to his horror heard his voice crackle and pop like a radio station that wasn’t properly tuned in.