Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

  He was, he reminded himself, misbegotten: born out of the irresistible need and imperishable desire of an old fool whose brain had been addled by television. Therefore, he himself was a by-blow of the junk culture that was addling the brains of many fools old and young, maybe even of America. Maybe this was what the symptoms of illness looked like in such an irregular creation as himself, born in the wrong way, motherless, only putatively real, like something from Syfy that stepped through the screen, and so possibly doomed to die a quasi-electronic death, death by a failure of the signal.

  I’m too young to die. The fallacy of youth. Death had never cared about the ages of those it claimed.

  He stiffened his resolve. If he had been created by an act of will, it followed that he must have inherited a strong will of his own. Didn’t it? Very well then. If his father had imposed his will upon the angel of life, then he in his turn would set his will against the death angel. And how would he do it?

  “Mine is a love story,” he said aloud, “and love will find a way.” The echo does not know it is an echo. It resounds, until it fades.

  * * *

  —

  THE SANDWICH LADY’S EYES popped open and at once she was wide awake and speaking rapidly. “The second crisis,” she said, “is the crisis of everything.”

  “Everything sounds like a lot,” Sancho said.

  “All of us are in two stories at the same time,” said the sandwich lady. “Life and Times. There is our own personal story, and the bigger story of what’s happening around us. When both are in trouble simultaneously, when the crisis inside you intersects with the crisis outside you, things get a little crazy.”

  “How crazy are we talking about?” Sancho wanted to know.

  “Bad Times,” she answered. “The worst ever. Things are falling apart. People have begun to notice. It’s going to be a wild ride and I’m not sure how we can get through it and come out on the other side. I’m not sure that we will.”

  “Seems like wherever I go people are talking about the end of the world,” Sancho said. “I think I’ll bet on the world not ending, as per usual.”

  “What I want to say to you is this,” the sandwich lady said. “The larger crisis changes my views regarding your personal ambitions. Regarding, that is to say, the lady at the end of the bus ride. This is not to say I’m willing to hand out the love potions, no, sir. But I’m thinking, if time is short for all of us, then go for it, kid. Go see her, be polite, but make your pitch. If she slams the door in your face, then damn, okay, you’re going to have to respect that, but you tried. Maybe she will, maybe she won’t. Go give it your best shot.” And with that, she disappeared.

  “Thank you,” Sancho said, and felt simultaneously uplifted and afraid. “Thank you, I will.”

  But when he got off the bus in Beautiful, at the depot that was just down the road from the Rey-Nard mall, it was already too late. There were snowflakes gusting in the air, it was six degrees below, and the wind chill made it feel much colder. People were running wild in the streets, screaming The sky is falling. There were cars on fire and broken Best Buy windows, revealing that the desire for meaningless destruction and free TVs survived even at the end of days. This was the twelfth-best city to live in in the United States and its citizens, the twelfth-best citizens in America, were losing their minds. They’ll never make the top ten now, Sancho thought, trying to hold it together, trying to keep a hold on sanity, as he began to run. The absences, the holes in time and space which he had seen in the sky, had multiplied rapidly and come down lower, and one of them yawned terrifyingly in the space where the Powers Bar & Grill used to be. Just to look at that thing—that no-thing which was the negation of all things—was to be filled with an incurable dread. Sancho ran from it as one might from the jaws of a man-eating dragon. As he ran he felt himself beginning to splinter too. He looked down at his arms, his hands, his torso, his legs. They were crackling and distorted. The picture quality had become really bad. Was there no Wi-Fi around here? He ran as hard as he could and as he neared the street where she lived he felt a kind of hammer blow fall, and the thought arrived unbidden that his father, Quichotte, who had fashioned him from falling stars, had despaired of him and unwished his mighty wish. Who is Sancho without Quichotte? The answer appeared to be, nobody. A fiction that could not endure.

  Had he deserved his father’s despairing rejection, if that was what had happened? And could it be that his creator could uncreate him after all, that without his father’s love he would simply cease to be? Was paternal love the lifeblood he lacked, without which even romantic love could not save him? Had he loved his father? If he was truthful with himself, the answer was, he had not. So, then, these were his just desserts.

  His deterioration accelerated. He went from high definition to early analog and now his only hope, all his hope, was that the woman he loved would open her arms and heart and love—love itself!—would burst through his body and make him whole. A woman’s love could do that. A good woman’s love. It could save your life, even if you had not loved your father as you should have, even if you were lost to him, so far away; even then, her love could let you live. Right? Right? he asked, but there was nobody to answer him. All he could do was run.

  He passed an SUV abandoned with its motor running and the radio playing, Sinatra, “Taking a Chance on Love.” “That’s a good omen,” he shouted to himself, and his voice crackled and broke, his body popped and broke and became pixelated and then recovered its form, and he ran, or something did, and he repeated, over and over, love will find a way.

  He rounded a corner and then he was at the door of that modest home, that cream-colored two-story building, with the word WELCOME, in English, sprayed in white paint on a red ground in the small forecourt, below a small OM sign. There was no doorbell. He took hold of the brass knocker—his hand sizzling and shifting and hissing with static like the rest of him—and he knocked. And there she was, there she was!, Beautiful from Beautiful, Khoobsoorat sé Khoobsoorat, which also meant “more beautiful than beautiful,” the girl of his dreams, and this was his one chance, and he knew what he had to say.

  “I love you, and I know that’s insane, but I also know that love takes courage, and I take my courage in my hands and say, I love you, and God, I hope you remember who I am.”

  “Hello?” she said, looking left and right. “Is anybody there?”

  “Take my hand,” he pleaded, hardly able to hear his own voice now, “say you love me and I’ll be able to live. I throw myself at your feet and beg.”

  “No,” she said, answering someone behind her in the depths of the house, “there’s nobody. Someone definitely knocked but there’s nobody here now.”

  And then there was nobody there.

  When he returned to New York the Author was not the same man. The tragic events in London had hit him hard, and his niece’s last accusation had been a spear in the heart. I could die right now, he had thought when she hurled those words at him. Angel of death. But the exterminating angel isn’t supposed to die, is he. Everyone else dies at his hands. And here he was back at his desk writing about the end of the world, in the process of wiping out everything he had invented to go along with the erasure of everything that mattered in his real life. His own world felt like it had just ended. Without a Sister, he was no longer a Brother. He was just a pseudonym, Sam DuChamp, writing the last bars of the music of his book. All that remained was the last of Quichotte.

  He was beset by his characters. They flew about his ears like bats, knowing that their stories were ending, insisting on his attention. Me, me, me, as Dr. Smile had taunted Quichotte, but now they were all doing it. Save me, save me. Quichotte alone found a little scrap of dignity, even nobility. He did not ask to be saved, but there was someone he wanted to save. The character was teaching the Author about the nature of true love.

  When his heart trouble began—he th
ought at once of Quichotte’s youthful arrhythmia—he understood that his book had known about it all along, even before he had any symptoms. Everything he had written about the malfunction of time began to make sense. He had sketched out scenes in which time accelerated or decelerated, in which it became staccato, a series of pounding moments, or in which it seemed to skip a beat. As the laws of nature lost their authority, time would lose its rhythm. He already had that worked out. And now in his own body his fiction was coming to life.

  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.

  There had been a moment in the writing when a character assumed a more important role than his author had originally envisaged for him. The scientist-entrepreneur Evel Cent had moved to center stage and taken command of the book’s larger narrative, and plainly would play an important part in its conclusion. When a character developed so dramatically on the page, in the act of making, one had to say to oneself, okay, but is this right? Is this helpful, should I hold on to his coattails and go along for the ride, or is it taking me down a blind alley I don’t want to end up in? He had decided to allow Evel Cent’s enlarged presence to remain in the text. CentCorp and NEXT portals would have their place. The decay of the Earth in the novel would be a parallel to the decay—the environmental, political, social, moral decay—of the planet on which he lived.

  In the week after his return, his health continued to deteriorate. This was a shock to him. He had been blessed with good health most of his life, with only minor complaints to report. He remembered Sister’s words. Your good health is the thing you have until the day your doctor tells you you don’t have it anymore.

  Then he was in the clutches of the medical profession and there wasn’t much to say about that except that it was so. Tests and examinations bombarded him as if he were a Syrian refugee enclave. There was a schedule of meds and then there was bypass surgery. He was warned that even this might not entirely solve the problem of his wayward heartbeat but it would help. After the surgery he felt better fast. They had told him the recovery took between six and twelve weeks, but it seemed he was one of the fortunate quick recoverers. He felt so much better so soon that he started calling people up and recommending the procedure. “Don’t hold back. Have the whole quintuple. It’s great.” (Again, he heard the echo of one of his characters, Miss Salma R, recommending electroconvulsive therapy to her crazy friends.) He was told to take it easy. But the return of energy, of functionality, was exciting. His only problem was insomnia, and in the insomniac nights his optimism waned, and his heart sent him a secret message. I’m not done with you, it said. You know it. There’s an endgame up ahead.

  Just let me finish my book, he replied.

  And it was true. The book had known better than he did from the start. He had not contemplated his own mortality until now, but his book had been talking about death all the way. So was that what he’d been up to, without being fully conscious of it? This whole performance about the end of the world had really been a way of talking about the imminent end of the Author? And could there be anything more narcissistic than that, to equate one’s own departure with the end of everything, to say that if he was no longer around, nothing else would endure either? The battle would be over and all of humanity would lie sprawled on the battlefield alongside him? Let’s not talk about race or class or history or multiplicity or any damn thing in the beautiful broken world, let’s not argue or love or try to make a good world for our children, because all of that goes down the toilet along with me! L’univers, c’est moi? Was that the kind of megalomaniac he had shown himself to be?

  Did he have a good heart or was he shriveled inside?

  Even great Bellow, he saw in the Times, had been unclear on the question of the heart, and had asked on his deathbed: “Was I a man, or was I a jerk?”

  * * *

  —

  ON THE NIGHT HE FINALLY felt strong enough to face his book again, he went back into his office, and there in his Aeron chair waiting for him was the large Japanese-American gentleman with many names.

  “What are you doing here?” the Author cried, feeling his heart thump. “Has something happened to my son?”

  “Your son is fine,” the gentleman said. “And doing excellent work. He has proved himself to be a great American patriot, as I always believed he was. Thanks to him and others like him, we are winning the cyberwar.”

  “Is that right.”

  “Affirmative, sir. That’s our position.”

  “You scared me, showing up this way. You have to stop doing this. In the first place it’s a crime and in the second place I’m a heart patient now.”

  “I have good news. I have to give you props. You’ve been officially approved.” The agent rose to shake hands and offered the Author his card. Agent Clint Oshima, it read.

  “Good name.”

  “Thank you. Anyway, great job.”

  “What job would that be?”

  “Anthill,” Agent Oshima replied. “You didn’t leak. Not a word. We waited, and you did nothing. First class.”

  “Oh, yeah,” the Author remembered. “I wanted to ask you. There was an article in the Times a few months ago describing an operation pretty much like Anthill. I thought, if it’s so hush-hush, how is it in the paper? But it wasn’t called Anthill. It was called Hivemind.”

  “So let me explain,” said Agent Oshima. “When we are obliged to allow outside personnel to be brought into the covert operation—a parent, for example, like yourself—we give them certain information, but we don’t give any two people the same information. Then if the information enters the public domain we know who put it there.”

  “You mean it isn’t called Anthill, you just told me that?”

  “It’s called Anthill. Between ourselves.”

  “What happened to whoever you told it was called Hivemind?”

  “There were consequences.”

  “Grave consequences?”

  “A good way to express it.”

  “And you’re here to do what? To congratulate me or warn me or both?”

  “I’m here to congratulate you because as you have passed a certain set standard, we are prepared to permit certain access privileges.”

  “To Anthill?”

  “To your son.”

  When he heard those three words—when Son’s name was spoken—he felt, as he had never imagined he would feel, like Quichotte when Dr. Smile told him he would meet his Beloved. He wasn’t, by temperament, a great believer in radiance opening up in the heavens and flowing down over him in a cascade of joy, but something of the sort befell him at that moment. He no longer had any hope of encountering a great romance. That ship had sailed. Son was all he had to love, but he had been kept at a distance, first by Son’s own design and then by the intelligence community. If he was now to be allowed to spend time with his child—if his child wanted to spend time with him—that would make possible a renewal of his own belief in life. Or, in simpler words: it would make him happy.

  “In our evaluation,” Agent Oshima continued, “if we wish to maximize the effectiveness of our team of digital warriors, a degree of outside human contact is a benefit. A young man can go stir-crazy out there in cyberspace, in the max-security bubble. It’s good to come down to earth. What we propose is, one weekend every six weeks, and once a year a two-week vacation. I have recommended in your case that we begin with the two-week stretch and take it from there. How does that sound to you?”

  “What does he think?” the Author asked. “Does he want to do this?”

  “A young man needs his father,” said Agent Oshima. “He has expressed that need.”

  “Agent Oshima, Agent Kagemusha, Agent Mizoguchi, Agent Makioka,” the Author replied, “I think I love you. All of you.”

  The Japanese-American gentle
man looked embarrassed. “That’s inadvisable, sir,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  HIS HAIR HAD BEEN long the last time, falling in waves almost to his shoulders. Now it was brutally short, cut close to the scalp, like Sister’s. The Author winced when he saw it.

  “What?” Son wanted to know.

  “Nothing,” his father replied. “The hair.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I think I preferred it longer.”

  “Everyone likes it,” Son said, neutrally. “I’ve had a lot of compliments.”

  The first hours were awkward in this way. They sat across the breakfast table nursing their coffees and had to find out how to talk to each other.

  “What do you want to do, these two weeks?”

  A shrug. “I don’t know. Nothing. Anything. What do you want to do?”

  “I’d like to do stuff we’d both enjoy.”

  “I don’t know what that is. I’m fine with whatever you decide.”

  A long pause. Then: