Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

he fell victim to that increasingly prevalent psychological disorder in which the boundary between truth and lies became smudged and indistinct, so that at times he found himself incapable of distinguishing one from the other, reality from “reality,” and began to think of himself as a natural citizen (and potential inhabitant) of that imaginary world beyond the screen to which he was so devoted, and which, he believed, provided him, and therefore everyone, with the moral, social, and practical guidelines by which all men and women should live.

that moment between waking and sleeping when the imagined world behind our eyelids can drip its magic into the world we see when we open our eyes.

Because of his blurry uncertainty about the location of the truth-lie frontier, and his personal charm and pleasant manner, he inspired confidence and came across as the perfect promoter of his cousin’s wares.

“Sancho,” Quichotte cried, full of a happiness he didn’t know how to express. “My silly little Sancho, my big tall Sancho, my son, my sidekick, my squire! Hutch to my Starsky, Spock to my Kirk, Scully to my Mulder, BJ to my Hawkeye, Robin to my Batman! Peele to my Key, Stimpy to my Ren, Niles to my Frazier, Arya to my Hound! Peggy to my Don, Jesse to my Walter, Tubbs to my Crockett, I love you! O my warrior Sancho sent by Perseus to help me slay my Medusas and win my Salma’s heart, here you are at last.” “Cut it out, ‘Dad,’ ” the imaginary young man rejoined. “What’s in all this for me?”

Men on the road together have three choices. They separate, they kill one another, or they work things out.

If the two guiding principles of the universe were paranoia (the belief that the world had meaning, but that meaning was located at a concealed level, which was very possibly hostile to the overt, absurd level, which meant, in brief, you) and entropy (the belief that life was meaningless, that things fell apart and the heat-death of the universe was inevitable), then he was definitely in the paranoid camp.

There was no escape from dynastic biochemistry. In Miss Salma R’s family the darkness was always there, sitting like a panther in the corner of the room, waiting for its time.

In response to real events the series introduced a wholly imaginary chief executive who was obsessed by cable news, who pandered to a white supremacist base, and who had played golf with Salma C’s predecessor and talked locker-room shit to him about girls.

It was also at this moment that she revealed her absolute independence and personal power to the people who believed themselves to be responsible for her success, who were convinced that she owed them everything and that therefore they owned her, the men who knew they would never fuck her and therefore sought to possess her in other ways, the agents, managers, lawyers, showrunners, and production executives, the personal publicists, the show publicists, the publicists for the streaming network, as well as the exalted individuals who were never named but were at the foundation of everything, who gnawed like the Nidhogg at the roots of the World-Tree—that is to say, the rich people, the super-rich and the ultra-rich, who owned the people who owned the people who owned the network that owned the show that had made her what she was.

TO BE A LAWYER in a lawless time was like being a clown among the humorless: which was to say, either completely redundant or absolutely essential.

There are people who need to impose a shape upon the shapelessness of life. For such people the quest narrative is always attractive. It prevents them from suffering the agony of feeling what’s the word. Incoherent.

Reality was a white lady at Lake Capote, it was what came out of the angry mouths he’d seen at a diner in Oklahoma, it was gunshots in Kansas, two wounded, one dead, a community shaken and in mourning, a beautiful young woman slamming a door in his face.

One day on Tenth Avenue, a dozen blocks down from the Blue Yorker motel, he saw a drunk woman stamping on a rainbow. This was outside a store selling crystals and incense. A ray of light from the store passed through a prism dangling in the storefront window and created this fortuitous spectrum on the sidewalk. The drunk woman, a big woman dressed all in black and missing several teeth, was trying to smash the rainbow with her feet and swearing profusely as she did so, unleashing a torrent, a drool, of homophobic abuse. Okay, that didn’t have to be a vision, but then there was a change in the light, maybe someone moved a lamp in the store, and the rainbow disappeared, but so did the cursing woman. As if the one engendered the other. The rainbow engendered the hatred. Yeah, he thought. That’s fucked up.

They could easily have killed him, but they didn’t. Maybe he wasn’t worth it. Maybe it was because he was unreal. Maybe it was because they were men who until recently had been tamed and under control and this unleashing, whatever caused it, was something new for them.

Sometimes the story being told was wiser than the teller. He was learning, for example, that just as a real son could become unreal, so also an imaginary child could become an actual one, while, moving in the opposite direction, a whole, real country could turn into a “reality”-like unreality.

Cyberwar was the attack on truth by lies. It was the pollution of the real by the unreal, of fact by fiction. It was the erosion and devaluation of the empirical intellect and its replacement by confirmations of previously held prejudices.

She would not bore him with statistics. But she would ask him to believe that in her field, the microfinancing of poor women to enable them to become economically self-sufficient, she could not count on the backing of the men in their lives. In her work she and her teams in the field subscribed to the so-called sixteen decisions of the Grameen Bank movement, and decision eleven, for example, “We shall not take any dowry at our sons’ weddings, nor shall we give away any dowry at our daughters’ weddings,” was not popular with the patriarchy. Sexual violence against South Asian women was present wherever and whenever women tried to establish independent lives and expand the zone of their personal freedoms.

It was at a time when I was feeling worn down by the battle, I admit that, and I expressed my frustration about the many ways, big and small, in which South Asian men held women back, the many obstacles of old-fashioned attitudes that had to be negotiated and overcome. The article was well received at first and was reprinted in many countries, including the South Asian countries. For a moment I was happy about the article’s reception. Then the craziness began. People—South Asian men—began to send me messages of abuse. ‘Man hater,’ ‘lesbian,’ et cetera. Death threats were also received, and descriptions of the terrible things that would be done to my body before and after I died, and promises of hellfire, and, worst of all, threats against the women who used our organization. What shocked me was that respected, senior male members of the community in this country condemned me too. Religious leaders, but also business leaders, the same ones who had previously encouraged me and supported my initiatives. There was a demand that I make a public apology to all Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Sri Lankan men,

He had to start thinking seriously about what he ate, and about getting fit, he told himself, not for the first time. Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, had died after going to the gym as everyone in California was obliged to do by the state’s unwritten laws, to worship at the altar of one’s body all the world’s gods of health, whose names were only known to those who, being vegan and gluten-free, were pure enough to receive the information: Fufluns the Etruscan deity of plants, wellness, and happiness, Aegle the Greek goddess of the healthy glow, Maximón the Mayan hero god of health, Haoma from Persia, and Panacea the goddess of the universal cure. Ever since Brother read about Adams’s death he had started saying, half joking, half defensively, that exercise was to be avoided because it killed people. Don’t panic. Have some fries with that.

“All these young women these days who describe the veil as a signifier of their identity. I tell them they are suffering from what that presently unfashionable philosopher Karl Marx would have called false consciousness. In most of the world the veil is not a free choice. Women are forced into invisibility by men. These girls in the West making their quote-unquote free choices are legitimizing the oppression of their sisters in the parts of the world where the choice is not free. That’s what I tell them, and they are very shocked. They tell me they find my remarks offensive. I tell them I feel the same way about the veil. It’s exhausting. I’ve become embittered. I just needed to stop.”

Maybe this was the human condition, to live inside fictions created by untruths or the withholding of actual truths. Maybe human life was truly fictional in this sense, that those who lived it didn’t understand it wasn’t real.

“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.