The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira

by Cesar Aira

  He did this because even though it was a question of humanity, and the theory considered the human as it was manifested in the real, he was fashioning a personalized cure. So he had to take into account — even if with broad brushstrokes and divinations — the man’s lifestyle. Already he was operating in “lifestyle” and concomitant elements. He did not have a very clear idea (nobody does) of a millionaire’s daily routine, but he could imagine it and complement his fantasies with common sense. For example, he needed only simple logic to determine that this subject must have traveled little or not at all by bus, in the world where he was dying of cancer as little as in the one he was in the process of creating, where he would be saved. But he knew he shouldn’t rush to conclusions based on that fact, for his employees took buses, as did the friends and families of his employees, as did a waiter in a restaurant who had once served him, and the mother-in-law of that waiter, and people in general, all of whom became part of the system through its near and far-flung ramifications. Here the line of screens also turned into a pom-pom, and it was enough to think about the virtually infinite complications of the bus lines in Buenos Aires through any slice of time, any slice of the map, or through all the slices of all the moments since the invention of buses, to conceive of the number of turns the separator had to take. The screen cut through possibilities like sheet metal through a cube of butter, as if the material were made for it. Those who wanted to take the 86 bus to work tomorrow would have quite a surprise when they discovered that in the new universe the 86 didn’t go down Rivadavia but rather Santa Fe, or that it didn’t exist, or that it was called the 165! But no, nobody would be surprised because the “surprise” and every individual surprise, as well as every work routine (not to mention the names of the streets and the layout of the city map), were also objects to be sorted, and the resulting new universe, however it ended up, would necessarily be coherent. And, of course, public transportation in Buenos Aires would not be the only thing affected, far from it.

  After journeys, it was time for light, an element that included everything from photons to chiaroscuros depicting the volume of an object in a seventeenth-century copper engraving . . . It was a broad heading because there has not been a single occasion not swathed in light — for example each one of the journeys previously processed had lighting, and a whole series of lighting possibilities existed for each one, as there did for every conceivable or manifest occasion. In fact, this “generalization” characterized every heading; also the journeys or displacements, because could there possibly be an occasion that didn’t imply, somehow or other, some displacement? So, everything was a journey, just as everything was light . . . The screens’ trajectories doubled back upon themselves to make it possible to update a previous trajectory and allow it to serve a new function.

  Light presented an additional difficulty, because light, or rather lighting, occurs at a determined intensity, which is the manifestation of a continuum of intensities that can only be arbitrarily calibrated. But was this a difficulty specific to the element “light,” or was it an attribute of all headings? Still within the heading already discussed, of journeys, there was also a continu­um: the extension of the trajectory traveled. Or many continuums: of velocity, of the pleasure or displeasure with which the trip was made, the sum of the perceptions experienced en route . . . And just as in the case of light, intensity was not the only continuum in play, for there was also the temperature, atmospheric resistance, color . . .

  Things were happening in less time than it would take to explain them. If Dr. Aira could have stopped to think he would have asked himself about the sequence “journeys-light.” Why had he started with the first? Why had he continued with the second? What kind of catalogue was he consulting? Where did the directory come from? From nowhere: there was no catalogue, no order. The entire operation of the Cure had the perfect coherence of the plausible, like a novel (again). It wasn’t like in the theater, where anything can happen, even something completely disconnected from all the rest; in that case, one could resort to a list of themes and proceed to remove each one using aesthetic criteria; in any case, if we wish to hold on to the theater metaphor, we would have to think about bourgeois theater, full of weighty psychosocial assumptions pretending to be plausible.

  The plausible in its pure state, which was at work here, was characterized by simultaneity. Therefore, saying that after light came flags is just a figure of speech. The flags of all the nations of the world, those that had once flown and the possible ones that had accompanied them during their passage through History, with their colors and symbols, their silks or paper or retinal impressions, were underpinned by light and journeys. A luxuriant pom-pom of foldout screens cut through the entire sphere of the Universe, leaving some flags in and others out. Immediately, it turned to the cutting of hair. Screens. Hundreds of millions of barber shops, hairdressers, and scissors were excluded from the Cure’s New World, while others remained inside.

  Collaborating with this simultaneity was the fact that throughout the process the screens that were doing the sorting continued along their trajectory a little farther (there were no established boundaries), and a bit at random, tracing lines of division through other, contiguous categories, on other planes and levels. Dr. Aira accepted these random contributions because he was in no position to reject any help he could get. By the same token, he began to notice that the same screen could function as more than one partition through the effect of the overlapping of fields of meaning.

  He was moderately concerned about the fact that every “heading” coincided with a word. He was not unaware that the Universe cannot be divided into words, even less so those of one language. He was also using phrases (“the cutting of hair” was one example), and in general he tried to turn a deaf ear to words, to inhabit a space beyond them. But words constituted a good point of departure because of their connotations and associations, their so-called “like ideas.” Thus with the word “sex.” He traced a crazy zigzag with the screen, leaving outside half of all sexual activity, past and future. The bundles of panels that rose and fell according to the participant, the pleasure, the modality, et cetera, again formed the familiar pom-pom. This was particularly delicate material, so he divided it up with particular brutality. The patient might get out of bed only to discover that he had not had a particular lover, or that he liked boys, or that he had once slept with a Chinese woman, but it was all worth it, if the tradeoff was life. That the same thing would happen to the rest of the planet’s inhabitants, including the animals, was less important, because individual memories, which could only function with the parts that remained within the new universe, wouldn’t remember anything. Many beautiful love stories would vanish into the ether, or would never have been.

  The ends of the screen continued to exceed the fields of meaning and create others that immediately, and almost through the impetus of their unfolding, cut huge and savage zigzags. Astronomy. The ability of parrots and blackbirds to speak. The diesel engine. The Assyrians. Coffee. Clouds. Screens, screens, and more screens. They were proliferating everywhere, and he had to pay close attention to make sure that no sector failed to be sorted. Fortunately, Dr. Aira had no time to notice the stress he was experiencing. Attention was key, and perhaps no man had ever brought as much of it to bear as he did for that hour. If the circumstances had been less serious, if he had been able to adopt a more frivolous perspective, he could have said that the entire procedure was an incomparable creator of attention, the most exha
ustive ever conceived to exercise this noble mental faculty. And it did not require an extraordinary person; a common man could do it (and Dr. Aira would have been quite satisfied to become a common man), for the Cure created all the attention it demanded. It wasn’t like those video games, which are always trying to trick it or avoid it or get one step ahead of it; to continue with this simile, it should be said that the operator of the Cure was his own video game, his own screen, and his own decoys, and that far from defying attention, they nurtured it. Despite all this, the effort was superhuman, and it was yet to be seen if Dr. Aira could hold out till the end.

  His depletion was physical as well as mental. For although the screens were only imaginary, the effort needed to unfold them and stretch them across the vast teeming terrains of the Universe was very real. He held them along their upper edges between the index finger and thumb of both hands, and he opened them by stretching his arms out wide, and since he could never quite reach, he had to move around, taking little leaps from side to side . . . then he would return to touch up the line, expand or contract the angles. In general he avoided straight lines, which were drawn when he stretched the screens out too fully, because the straight line was too categorical and the selection had to be more nuanced: a fact could be included or excluded at the beginning or end of a folded panel — a singularity, which, however small, could turn out to be crucial; anything could be.

  And there were screens that extended upward, or downward . . . To stretch them out he had to stand on his tiptoes, or jump on a chair; if it descended, he threw himself on the floor or scrambled under the bed, under the edge of the rug — as if he were trying to bore a hole through the floor. He retreated and advanced as he stretched the screen overhead, all the while adjusting the angle or the direction of another one under him with the tip of his toe. As he could see nothing besides his screens, and the jungle of iridescent elements they were cleaving through, his movement around the room always ended with him banging into the walls, the furniture . . . He stumbled frequently, and he was down on the floor more than he was standing up. Depending on how much impetus he had, he was either stretched out or rolling around doing spectacular half somersaults; but he took advantage of these involuntary plunges to hang the screens in places he couldn’t have reached otherwise. Everything was useful.

  He never stopped moving. He was bathed in sweat; it was streaming through his hair, and his clothes were stuck to his skin. He went back and forth, up and down, every cell in his body shaking, arms and legs stretching and contracting like rubber bands, and he was leaping around like an insect. His face, usually so inexpressive, churned like ocean waves during a storm, never pausing at any one expression; his lips formed all kinds of fleeting words, drowned out by the panting, and when they opened, his tongue appeared, twisting like an epileptic snake. If it had been possible to follow, with a stopwatch, the rising and falling of his eyebrows, one could have read millions of overlapping surprises. His gaze was fixed on his visions.

  From the outside, and without knowing what any of it was about, the practice of the Cure looked like a dance without music or rhythm, a kind of gymnastic dance, which might appear to be designed to shape a nonexistent specimen of the human. Admittedly, it was pretty demented. He looked like Don Quixote attacking his invisible enemies, except his sword was the bundle of metaphysical foldout screens and his opponent was the Universe.

  Thud! He crashed into a chair and fell headfirst to the floor, both his legs shaking; the crown of his head left a round damp mark on the rug; but even down there he kept working: his right hand was tracing a large semicircle, placing a screen that divided up the joys and sorrows of Muslims; his left was pulling a little on another screen that had excluded too many apples . . . Now he was on his feet again, lifting the white accordion of a vertical screen that was crossing levels of reality as it sorted through “latenesses” and “earlynesses” . . . ! And what looked like a tap dance meant to recover his balance was him hanging two screens that would exclude certain rickshaws and particular conversations. With his chest, his rear end, his knees, his shoulders, and head-butts, he corrected the positions, angles, and inclinations of the panels, enacting a true St. Vitus dance in the process. And to think that this grotesque puppet was creating a New Universe!

  And so it went. One might have thought that the space of representation at his disposal was going to get overcrowded, that it was going to start to get difficult to keep inserting more screens. But this didn’t happen because the space wasn’t exactly the one of the representation but rather of reality itself. In this way, miniaturization led to its own amplification. Like in an individual big bang, space was being created, not getting filled, through the process, hence within each pom-pom an entire Universe was being formed.

  In honor of reality, he had left the door to the balcony open. Through it long strips of screens were swept out into the heavens. He couldn’t even see what some of them were excluding, but he trusted that in any case they would leave at least one particularity in each arena on this side. As often happens with difficult jobs, a point came when the only thing that mattered was to finish. He almost lost interest in the results, because the result that included all the others was to finish what he had started. He had really had to dig in to find out how demanding the problem of Everything was, what brain-racking pressure it created . . . Only by living it could he find out; all prior calculations or fantasies fell short. Even though he didn’t have the time, he fervently longed to return to human mode, which was so much more

  relaxing because it gives license to do anything. Nevertheless, what he was doing was deeply human, and given the mechanism of automatic re-absorption the Cure enacted, his exhaustion approached rest; pressure, relaxation.

  In fact, the hinges on the last panels of each screen began to get welded to the other screens whose last panels were nearby, and with this the process of exclusion and inclusion was concluding. These welds happened on their own, one after the other, in cascades of billions that burst the heart of a second, of the final seconds. This produced a greasy white spark in the black depth of the Night. It was something like a nightmare, that “schluik . . .” Dr. Aira’s utter exhaustion also contributed to this sense of feverish delirium, for at the very end of his strength he felt nauseated, as if he were suffocating; his ears were ringing, and there were red spots in front of his eyes.

  But the important thing was that the siege had been laid, and the new Universe had been formed, as unfathomably complex as the old Universe had been until then, but different, and just right for the cancer of that man in that bed to never have been . . . The work of the Cure had been completed right in front of his own eyes, half-closed from fatigue; his arms fell to his sides, flaccid, his legs were barely able to hold him up; the room, which he was now seeing again, was waltzing before his dizzy eyes; and in it the patient’s bed, the spotlights, the cameramen, the nurses, the relatives . . . The next time, he told himself in a state of exhaustion that rendered him idiotic, he would have to think up a machine that could spread out the screens for him. Compared with an automated system, more appropriate for the times in which he lived, the dance to which he had surrendered would seem like some kind of imperfect, handmade prehistoric Cure. But before thinking about an improbable second time, he had to wait for the results of this one.

  It was a wait truly laden with unknowns. Already, when he witnessed the welds, and in the sudden passivity these allowed him after such dense, nonstop action, he perceived that with each
“closure” the plausible had changed, only to change again with the next one; the closures, of course, didn’t just happen; they were cumulative until they had formed one definitive closure. It was an extreme case of “doing something with words.” The transposition of plausibles was vertiginous, and Dr. Aira had no way of knowing where things would stand in the end. That’s what mattered, when all was said and done.

  It didn’t take long for him to find out. In fact, in the overdetermination of the present, waking up was accompanied by guffaws . . . which was part of the nightmare, but on another level. Laughter was increasing around him, reordering and giving substance to the space of the bedroom, and from there to the house, the neighborhood, Buenos Aires, the world. He was the last to sort himself out and to understand what was happening; he knew himself and was resigned to such delays. In the meantime, the only thing he knew was that from that moment on whatever happened in reality depended on the angle some panel of the screen was hung, no matter how far-flung it was; for example, the one that had excluded from this new Universe of reality a bonfire, or the flying sparks of a bonfire, in the prehistory of the Maori people . . . Amid the laughter, his eyes opened onto a New World, really truly new.

  And in this new world, those present were laughing heartily; the cameramen were turning off their cameras and lowering them, revealing themselves as the two fake doctors from the ambulance on Bonifacio Street; and the patient, choking on his laughter, was sitting up in bed and pointing a finger at him, unable to speak because he was laughing so hard . . . It was Actyn! That wretch . . . Everything had been staged by him! Or at least that’s what he thought. The truth is that he wasn’t dying, he didn’t have cancer nor had he ever, and he wasn’t a very wealthy businessman . . . The plausible had completely changed. Laughter was justified; happiness needed no other motive. After years of trying in vain, Actyn had managed to get Dr. Aira to commit the biggest blunder of his career, the definitive one . . . And in reality it was: the blunder as the transformation of the plausible, that is, as a visible trace — the only one that could remain inscribed on memory — of the transformation of one Universe into another, and hence of the secret power of the Miracle Cure.