by Cesar Aira
The siren’s sudden escalation to ultrasound, combined with a screech of brakes just inches away, shook him out of his daydream. The scene plunged into a present where there was no room for thinking. That’s why he needed a few seconds to realize that the ambulance had found him and that he didn’t know what to do. The unthinkable had finally occurred. The dog, caught in the middle of its leap by harmonies only it could hear, did a somersault in the air, then began racing around in circles.
He turned, gathering up his scattered dissembling reflexes, and adopted a casual expression, one of almost indifferent curiosity. Two young doctors were getting out of the ambulance and starting to walk toward him (in any case, they were only a step away) with a decisive air, while the driver, an enormous black man in a nurse’s uniform, got out of the side door and started walking around the vehicle. He froze, pale and with his mouth dry.
“Dr. Aira?” said one of the doctors, as if he were confirming rather than asking.
He nodded briefly. There was no point in denying it. He still couldn’t believe that the ambulance, after such a long time, after so many twists and turns, had actually reached him. But there it was, materialized and white, so real as to be almost unbearable. And it had lifted him out (the doctor’s words had proved it) of that urban anonymity where one watches ambulances drive by . . .
“We’ve been looking for you for a long time; you can’t imagine how hard you’ve made it for us.”
“At your house,” the other said, “they told us you had gone out for a walk, and we went out to find you . . .”
The driver joined the group and interrupted, jokingly:
“No chance in hell we would have imagined you’d walk straight down this street!”
The others chuckled with complicity, eager to get to the point; all three had spoken at once, and therein ended the introductory chat.
“I am Dr. Ferreyra, pleased to meet you,” said one of the doctors, holding out his hand, which Dr. Aira took mechanically. “We have a desperate case, and they have requested your intervention.”
“Come, let’s continue our conversation in the ‘living room’ so we don’t waste any more time.”
And in a split second, and with worrying ease, they were inside the ambulance, the huge black man was behind the wheel, and they took off like lightning — the siren wailing, trees and houses slipping past like screen shots, all accompanied by the dog’s furious barking . . . Dr. Aira’s attention collapsed with the excess. The two young doctors were talking constantly, taking turns or overlapping, their eyes flashing, their handsome, youthful faces bathed in an invisible sweat. He heard them (too well) but didn’t register what they were saying, which didn’t worry him at the moment as he was certain that they were simply reciting the script they’d memorized, which they would be able to repeat as many times as necessary; perhaps they were already repeating it. The first thing he asked himself, once he was able to think again, was why he had agreed to get into this vehicle. He justified it by saying that it had been the simplest thing to do, the one that created the fewest problems. Now all he had to do was get out and return home; they were not going to get too carried away with this masquerade, because then it would turn into a kidnapping, and they would get into trouble with the police. His only concern now (and it didn’t present an insurmountable obstacle) was to refuse their requests and suggestions, refuse everything.
Whenever an unexpected incident disrupted his plans, he would become completely bewildered; as this happened to him fairly frequently, he had invented a remedy and had assembled a small recuperation kit, which he always carried in his pocket. The theory behind this solution was that he needed to restore the use of his senses, one by one, and the certainty that once he’d recovered his awareness of his senses, his ideas would fall into place on their own. The kit consisted of: an ampoule of French perfume, whose rubber top had a dipper immersed in the liquid, which he could remove and rub under his nostrils; a small silver bell the size of a thimble with a wooden handle; a little doll shaped like a bear, made of rabbit fur with a velvet cap he could rub his fingertips against; a quartz die with phosphorescent-colored dots, twenty-one of them, along with some other colors; and a piece of mint candy. It was so practical that he could make use of the entire kit in a few seconds. He carried it in a little tin box in his jacket pocket. But he had to use it secretly, which was impossible on this occasion, so he left it in his pocket. Moreover, he didn’t need to recover any particular level of lucidity to do so, quite the contrary. He knew he had a tendency to think too much, and he could even fall into his own traps.
They were the ones setting the trap. All he had to do was get out of it. The trap consisted of making him think until he’d convinced himself that it wasn’t a trap.
“Forgive me, I still haven’t introduced myself,” the other doctor said. “I am Dr. Bianchi.”
They shook hands, without having to stretch out their arms because they were sitting so close to each other on the folding benches in the back of the ambulance.
This was his indication that they were willing to begin repeating the explanations, now with the advantage of pretending they were just filling in details that had been left unclear or ambiguous. And the fact was, in what followed Dr. Aira managed to catch the word “Piñero,” which he had been expecting without realizing it. All the persecution he and his art were subjected to was instigated by the sinister Dr. Actyn, chief of medicine at Piñero Hospital. All the attacks and the ambushes came from there, and led to there, to the old hospital in the Lower Flores District of Buenos Aires.
Okay, so what was it about this time? And what was it going to be about? He knew it by heart: a terminal patient, the failure of conventional treatments, the family’s anguish . . . The thematic spectrum was so limited . . . Always the same! All the old miseries, even more depressing when taken out of their framework of absolute truth, of all or nothing . . . Because a doctor, as opposed to a patient, could always try again, even when it wasn’t fictional, as it surely was here. The possibility that it was a lie contaminated the very truth it was based on: the plausible itself.
A small curtain divided the ambulance longitudinally. They pulled it back: there was the patient, strapped to the stretcher. So they’d brought him here! Those wretches stopped at nothing! “All’s fair in war,” Actyn must have thought.
The two doctors leaned over him with such intense, professional attention that they forgot about Dr. Aira; they checked his IV, his pupils, the blood pressure monitor, the electrical activity in his brain, the magnetic ventilator. The ambulance was one of those new intensive care units. The patient was a man of about forty-five who had evidently undergone radiation therapy because the left side of his skull was bald, and the ear on that side showed mutations. It almost seemed authentic . . . But he shouldn’t think. He turned and looked out the window. They were still driving straight down the same street where they’d found him, still at very high speed and with the siren blasting, racing through intersections like an arrow, one after another after another . . . Where were they going? The houses, swept away like exhalations in their wake, were all small and humble, a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. They seemed to be accelerating constantly.
He started paying attention again because they were talking to him. They drew a clinical profile of the utmost gravity. The two doctors’ self-assurance was astounding; they used technical vocabulary as if they had been brought up surrounded by electronic circuits. All the machin
es were turned on, and they illustrated the points they were making by pointing to a blinking curve, a decimal number, an insulin intake chart. They had everything divided into zones on an undulating tridimensional grid that trembled on one of the screens like a multicolored cube of gelatin; they focused in on the numbers, which they entered into a wireless pocket keyboard.
“Are you familiar with this technology?” Ferreyra asked him upon noticing his astonishment. “It operates with induced evolving boards, made of dual proteins. Would you like to try?” he asked, handing him the keyboard.
“No! I’m afraid of doing something foolish.”
“You see, all these marvels of science cannot prevent . . . ”
Yeah, yeah, you can’t get me to bite that. Where’s the camera? It had undoubtedly been easy to hide among all those machines, and Actyn was probably watching him at that very moment, surrounded by his henchmen, recording everything. Now he understood why the ambulance kept driving in a straight line without turning down any side streets: turning interfered for a few instants with the transmission of the image, and Actyn didn’t want to miss a single second; this worried Dr. Aira, for it indicated that all they needed from him was a momentary slip . . .
What were they telling him? Had they reached the core of the issue?
“ . . . your gifts, Dr. Aira, though from our strictly rational point of view . . . ”
And the other, at the same time:
“ . . . everything possible is being done, technology helps use up all possibilities of action . . . ”
What this meant was that the deployment of incredible machines hastened the intervention of magical healers like himself, for conventional medical science could almost immediately reach its insurmountable limit. Which established a link between him and them, making more plausible their request for his intervention.
And what might that intervention be? To bring a goner back to life? Pull him back from the very brink of death. As if that were something out of the ordinary! Wasn’t this what always happened? Didn’t everybody in extremis get rescued? That was the normal mechanism of interaction between man and the world: reality would search for one more idea, search desperately for it when all ideas had already been thought . . . and it would find it in the nick of time.
Of course they were hoping to see the exotic and picturesque part of the operation, the grotesque magical ritual, the touch of the ridiculous that they would know how to draw attention to, the blunder they would publicize in the tabloids, the failure. And of course he would not give them that pleasure.
Because all of this was the same as a medical “hidden camera,” the difference being that they could no longer catch him off guard; they had already tried so many times that all they could do was risk “hiding the hidden,” hoping to slip it in between levels.
He watched them talk, his attention waxing and waning at irregular intervals, as a result of which the two enthusiastic and youthful — almost frenetic — faces he had so close to his began to seem unreal. And they were, he had no doubt about this, though only up to a certain point; because they did belong to two human beings of flesh and blood. The intensive use of hidden cameras in the last few years (in order to pull off all kinds of pranks, but also to catch corrupt officials, dishonest businessmen, tax evaders, and criminal infiltrators into the medical profession) required using up actors at a phenomenal rate, for they could never be employed a second time because of the risk of blowing their cover. They had to always be new, debutants; they couldn’t have appeared on any screen ever before, not even as extras, because given the high degree of distrust that had infiltrated society, the least hint of recognition was enough to ruin the operation. And that same, constantly increasing distrust forced actors to be constantly getting better, more believable. It was astonishing that they didn’t run out of them; of course, they didn’t need to be professionals (with the new Labor Contract Law, they were not strictly required to be members of the union), but in cases where a lot was at stake, it must have required a difficult decision to place the success or failure of an operation in the hands of an amateur.
These two were really good; they not only handled the jargon perfectly but they even had the gestures, tics, bearing, and voices of doctors . . . Perhaps they were doctors who were collaborating with Actyn out of conviction; in that case, they were new recruits, because Dr. Aira knew all the original fanatics. Actyn had the necessary prestige and charisma to keep acquiring new adherents to his cause, which he called the cause of Reason and Decency. But it was a fact that doctors were also human beings, subject to the vicissitudes of incurable diseases, and whoever got “burned” in front of Dr. Aira would then be unable to use his services, even if the case was desperate. Hence Actyn’s only option was to seek active supporters among the ranks of the youngest doctors, those who would least consider their personal risk. This explained why these two were so young.
Of course there was also the possibility that this was a real case. A very remote possibility, one in a million, yet it persisted as a pure possibility, lost among all the possibilities. In a different era, before these cursed spy technologies had been perfected, it would have been the opposite: the possibility that this was a performance would have been so improbable that he wouldn’t have even entertained the idea; in those days, whatever happened was inevitably considered real. But there was no point in lamenting the good old days, because historical circumstances formed a block: everything would have been different in days gone by; you wouldn’t have been able to record a blunder in order to broadcast it urbi et orbi, but miracles were accepted as a matter of course, because the precise boundary between what was and was not a miracle had not yet been established.
If he could trust in the existence of true symmetry, he might be able to hope, now that this boundary had been clearly drawn, that the corresponding boundary — the one that divided blunders from what were not blunders — would begin to dissolve.
Because blunders were a tributary of spontaneity, and without it, they would vanish like an illusion. In this respect, Actyn might have gone too far, and he might now be entering the arena where all his efforts were automatically sterile. Ever since he had decided to turn all his firepower against Dr. Aira and his Miracle Cures, he had burned through stages, unable to stop because of the very dynamic of the war, in which he was the one who took every initiative. In reality, he had overcome the first stages — those of direct confrontation, libel, defamation, and ridicule — in the blink of an eye, condemned as they were to inefficiency. Actyn had understood that he could never achieve results in those terrains. The historical reconstruction of a failure was by its very nature impossible; he ran the risk of reconstituting a success. He then moved on (but this was his initial proposition, the only one that justified him) to attempts to produce the complete scenario, to pluck one out of nothingness . . . He had no weapons besides those of performance, and he had been using them for years without respite. Dr. Aira, in the crosshairs, had gotten used to living as if he were crossing a minefield, in his case mined with the theatrical, which was constantly exploding. Fortunately they were invisible, intangible explosions, which enveloped him like air. Escaping from one trap didn’t mean anything, because his enemy was so stubborn he would set another one; one performance sprung from another; he was living in an unreal world. He could never know where his pursuer would stop, and in reality he never stopped, and at nothing. Actyn, in his eyes, was like one of those comic-book supervillains, who never p
ursues anything less than world domination . . . the only difference being that in this adventure it was Dr. Aira’s mental world that was at stake.
But, according to the law of the circle, everything flowed into its opposite, and the lie moved in a great curve toward the truth, theater toward reality . . . The authentic, the spontaneous, were on the reverse side of these transparencies.
Be that as it may, the ambulance kept driving, the dog kept barking like crazy at the wheels (the sound waves of the siren, which continued wailing, must have carried the ultrasound frequency of the television broadcast, which the animal perceived), and the two dimwits kept holding forth. Now their alternating discourses focused on the patient — his personal circumstances, his history. How had that poor devil ended up in the state he was in? In the usual way, one any doctor could discover on a daily basis in the majority of the population: an unnatural diet and the exacerbation of the passions. This was the deadly duo that caused more premature deaths than war. Dr. Aira was struck by this old-fashioned and solemn vocabulary, but he reflected that this anachronism was enough to suggest a second interpretation on the next level into which everything would be translated if he succumbed: the “deadly duo” would turn into the abuse of minors and the enthusiasm for televised soccer.
In any case, whatever they were saying served no purpose other than as visual backup for the dubbing they would add subsequently to the film. It might even have been planned in order to provoke from him certain responses that in the dubbed version would become replicas of other sentences; because the only voice they wouldn’t dub over would be his, but they could radically change the meaning based on the context, which they did plan to change.
