The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Later, a few months after his death-life, he slipped from his mother’s arms and fell to the floor and split open his chin (requiring several stitches) and, almost immediately thereafter, a cavernous cough, like black lung, landed him at the pediatrician who, studying an X-ray, explained to his parents that their son was a mutant—he had an extra rib. (The oddities of his bones would catch up with him again four decades later when he was informed by a disconcerted osteopath that what he thought was arthritic pain was actually a consequence of a condition that only presented in menopausal women and NBA stars, and since he was neither, the doctor didn’t dare recommend any treatment.) Then, throughout his childhood, the apocalypse of his teeth. And not much else, apart from a simultaneously funny and troubling propensity for domestic and school and vacation accidents. But no broken bones. No surgeries. No fever more dangerous than the typical ones, accompanied in his case by small splotches all over his face and body which, for a few days, make him sort of abstract and expressionist. And, yes, now he remembers, greatest hit: blasting headlong and without brakes into adolescence, an explosion of sores in his mouth and a fire in his skull that render him bedridden for almost a month, nourished by the juices of tropical fruits with strange shapes and names, unable to chew solid foods, and a sudden growth spurt of several centimeters so that, finally, back on his feet, he’s no longer the shadow of the boy he’d once been but the shadow of the man he’d one day become.

  And that’s pretty much it for him as protagonist-invalid; the exception being (more a cure than an ailment) the understandable and wondrous and wholesome and purifying and disinfecting cataclysm every time he finished and submitted and extracted and amputated—suddenly overcome with relief—a new book from his system. That malaria that he’d been putting up with for years, singing to his brain.

  And he systematically scheduled and postponed his yearly physical, not out of fear but out of discomfort. And out of a lack of desire to be humiliated by carrying urine and fecal samples in a little bag.

  Or narrating in excess detail—as if he were writing it down—a recent episode of something that he prefers to disguise by putting it (courtesy of Wikipedia, so if this isn’t the right spelling, it’s not his fault) in the original and foundational Greek, because it looks so much better: αἱμορροΐς.

  Or seeing himself forced into that so-feared and anticipated . . . what was the term used to put it delicately? Insertion? Invasion? Intrusion? . . . Ah, right: EXPLORATION, a euphemism that seems to want to evoke the dandy and heroic figure of a Victorian adventurer exploring an unknown continent. And in that movie, it was understood, his role wouldn’t be that of the lord explorer but of the continent to be examined and subjugated.

  Anyway, he thinks now, maybe it would’ve been better to return here like that, pain free, rather than like he’s returned now—as if struck by a bolt of lightning that refuses to leave his body. Saying the onomatopoetic and oh so funny and not at all funny magic word: “check-up” like “Shazam!” or like, referring to cavernous openings, “Open Sesame!” But he thinks about it a little more and says to himself that, no, it’s better like this: better to suffer something external and his own than to be made to suffer something internal and predetermined and to have it go well and to leave feeling fine and immortal, but only for another year. People he knew were constantly reminding him not to forget. And they did so with the smile of people who’ve been there before, like Vietnam veterans. But he kept calling his doctor’s office, only to hang up after the first ring or beep or whatever. And oh how, at that moment, he missed the old Bakelite rotary phones that allowed you, listening to that sound of coming and going, so similar to a masticating skull-and-crossbones, to think of so many things, to be indecisive and, every so often, via a capricious tangle of phone lines, to spy on other people’s strange conversations. Phones that, in addition, forced you to use address books, that subspecies of book, to write down telephonic indexes, starting over every year, revising, crossing off names and numbers like someone delivering a sentence—condemning or pardoning. Now, whenever he gathered the necessary amount of coward’s courage to (not) make the appointment, the doctor’s number was like a gust of wireless code that only left time for a delayed tap of the thumb. And moving right along. And to try in vain to forget that interview with the noir rocker Warren Zevon when he—already condemned and with a final expiration date, having ignored that nonsense of annual check-ups until it was already too late—recommended to his fans that “don’t do like I did, and go to the doctor more regularly, okay? And enjoy every sandwich.” And to try not to think about that character of Don Delillo’s from Cosmopolis—submitted to a daily “exploration” for the abnormality of an “asymmetric prostrate.” And, yes, he wanted to keep on enjoying each and every one of his sandwiches, definitely; but nothing interested him less than being informed that his prostate was asymmetrical, and that’s why . . .

  He had, now, the mild comfort of thinking that the pain in the north of his body that was barely letting him breathe couldn’t have anything to do with his prostate, far to the south. It must be bad, he says to himself, it had all the appearance of something sudden and fatal and whose denouement couldn’t be far off and, to avoid that train of thought, he starts to make a list of his favorite invalids: Walter White, Ralph Touchett, Iván Illich; all of them terminal, but going slowly. Given a choice, it wouldn’t bother him to be like one of them. Beings between fierce and melancholy recalling the good old days—“houses of healing,” they called them—when hospitals were buildings where others went to stay and, at most, you went to visit them for a while, almost unable to hide your need to get out of there as quickly as possible.

  And, yes, he visited many hospitals as a supporting actor or an extra.

  Once, when he was ten years old, he visited his hospitalized father, there for a minor and quickly resolved issue. His father who, from the bed, imperial yet terrified, ordered him not to worry, he planned to outlive him by a long shot. Because in his world—his father’s world—parents survived their children. Or, at least, in his father’s world, who, a few hours after his visit, after having staged a very All That Jazz moment, managed to get the doctors (who couldn’t stand him anymore and even started to fantasize about doping him or sinking him into a deep coma) to sign his release, call him a taxi, and add his name to a top-secret list of undesirable patients that circulates, classified, through all the hospitals of the world.

  He visited a hospital again during that summer of historic heat when rivers were scars, birds fell from the trees, the old melted, the young made love and licked sweat off each other to ward off dehydration, and babies dreamed (without knowing that it was Europe or Africa; but the soaring temperatures increased their intellectual capacity on nights when the moon seemed a sun, crouching and ready to pounce) of shimmering European outposts in Africa, devoured by the sands of a voracious desert. That summer when he and everyone else (not like in one of those paintings of solitary men, but like a participant in one of those colossal frescos in the Louvre where supporting characters amass—for coronations or shipwrecks or battles or in heavens or hells—and the true protagonist is outside the frame) went, all together, to watch a friend die. Or, better, to imagine a friend dying, on the other side of a wall that they touched with the tips of their fingers, believing that they were sending him their energy, their we’re-here-for-you, their you’re-notalone. A friend that he did see, just for a second and almost out of the corner of his eye, when he opened the door to a room reserved for family members: his face, no longer of this world and giving off the glow of that mortified god of ancient legend, chained to a mountainside, suffering the daily retribution of an eagle devouring his intestines for all eternity. That same night, the night that would be the night of his friend’s death, half asleep and a quarter awake and another quarter not one thing or the other, in a dream of half-open or half-closed eyes, his pupils already accustomed to absorbing all possible light from the darkness (he never told
anybody about this, fearing that they’d think he was crazy or consider him dysfunctional, much less put it in writing; he swore he never would), he sensed a presence at the foot of his bed, in his house. A vibration in the prickling skin of the air that could only be his dying friend finally reaching the end of his agony. A last sign, like a sigh. Then he looked at the phosphorescent time on his alarm clock, memorized those four numbers with two dots at their center, and he didn’t have to wait long for the phone to ring, to receive the breaking bad news that he already sensed. He asked for the exact time of death without needing to. He already knew it, he’d already seen it and felt it.

  Since that time, for many years now, The Lonely Man has been convinced of the nonexistence of of ghosts returning long term, coming from the other side to reveal or beseech or demand. But he does believe in ghosts who depart quickly, whose existence lasts just as long as the act of dying—all systems offline and, finally, the brain saying goodbye to itself, launching a final probe into space, trusting that someone will be able to catch it and believe in it forever, and never forget it.

  In another hospital it fell on him to identify a recently deceased friend. A pair of employees, in charge of taking the bodies down to the basement where they’d be picked up by the funeral home, opened the door to a descending elevator and there was his friend, dead and sitting up, his jaw slumped; they asked him to identify the body, to state it aloud and sign it on paper. And there was something terrible about seeing a corpse sitting up instead of lying down. A sitting corpse was the closest thing to a specter, he thought then; but this death is previous to the previous death and to the awareness he acquired then regarding the shy performance, debut and farewell, of apparitions, exit ghost, yes.

  And, of course, he imagined, dead, friends whom just the night before he’d seen full up to the nose with cocaine, jumping around under the lights of a dance club or floating in a pool of morphine, hallucinating that they were speaking their last words to Charon. Friends whom, at their wakes, he refused to look down at over the edge of the chasm of the coffin, because he preferred to remember them in motion and alive and dying of laughter.

  But yes, he said to himself now, dying of pain in the waiting room of a hospital without anyone to visit, sudden and absolute protagonist of a movie for which he was also the only spectator: beginning with his own initiating death, he’d had, not the pleasure, but the privilege (in days when—unlike centuries past, where everyone saw everyone die in their own home, in the same bed as always, or at the feet of an old horse or a new machine—it was increasingly difficult to witness someone’s last rights) of seeing dead people die. And, still, he’d always felt a little disappointed and somewhat disconcerted by the precise instant of death, by death as the one and only last will and testament. As if it were a long previewed movie or an untimely but well publicized death, suddenly premiering after one of those mysterious viral campaigns, the truth is, he’d always, every time he’d encountered it, expected more from death. More substance and plot. Instructions that’d help him understand and appreciate it better, with the reverence and wonder it deserved. But no. Nothing. Just the weight of a never-fully-fulfilled expectation. And, at one extreme, in the final scene of the most final of acts, a death. That’s it, friends and relatives and assorted debts. And what was that thing Plato said? Ah, yes: “The dead are the only ones who see the end of the war.” True; but it’s the living—traversing the still-warm battlefield—who watch the dead see this end and put it down in writing. That absence that a dead person leaves in life, like that spot where, for many years, a painting hung. A painting that, all of a sudden, is no longer there. But that all the same you can’t stop seeing. Or, at least, we perceive a difference in the tonality of the paint on that rectangle of wall. The painting is not there anymore, but, outlined, is the space where the painting hung. So you have no choice but to fill that empty space—and accept that oh so hermetic inheritance—that the dead leave behind for those who feel them die. Paradox: death, the most personal and nontransferable experience of all, is such inspiring material not for the dead—for whom it lasts but a second and then they are elsewhere, far away—but for the survivors who shape it as they wish, stretching it out into a panoramic novel, or reducing it to its most minimal and intimate expression. Like with the open endings in Chekov stories, so easily praised (nothing made him more mistrustful than writers who invoked Chekov’s name as if he were a family member or appended it to another name, without asking anyone’s permission, as in “young Chekov,” “Latin American Chekov,” “noir Chekov”) by those who feel that they are, though they don’t admit it, easy to imitate. And oh how they try. And, retroactively, they degrade them and strip away the shell of their mystery to reveal a miniscule and minimalist fruit. Those were the same people who celebrated that the Nobel Prize for Literature was given to a supposed direct descendent of the Russian like Alice Munro (“Chekov in a skirt”) and who made him wonder, shouting, alone, fist raised to the sky: “If they gave it to her for being Chekov in a skirt, why the hell, in his day, didn’t they give it to the Chekov in pants, eh?”

  Could it be because of things like this—so stupid, but that he feels so passionately about—that it seems like his chest is parting in two to reveal the reddest of seas? Is that the reason for this pain? And, obviously, this wasn’t the only literary rant that he found himself—between fascinated and worried—going off on these days. The Lonely Man, who’d always considered himself a kind of evangelist of his vocation and all his colleagues, in conversation with the dumbest or wildest of animals, promoting the pleasures of reading, and always publishing highly favorable reviews, because, he explained with a question: “Why malign something when there’re so many good things to recommend?”; some time ago, he’d found himself possessed by a new and unknown and almost Hulk-green fury. A euphoric thirst for vengeance and an exhilarating longing for destruction that, who knows, might’ve had something to do, once again, with the arrival of that pain in his chest and that made him so much like certain characters of Jewish American literature. Saul Bellow’s Von Humboldt Fleisher, Joseph Heller’s Bob Slocum, Bruce Jay Friedman’s Harry Towns, Phillip Roth’s Mickey Sabbath. People who, howling with rage and joy, laid waste to everything in their paths: families, jobs, and even hospitals. Homo Catastrophicos, their genesis the apocalypse of everyone else.

  Here and now, of course, he wasn’t howling. Now: silence, hospital. Now he was saving up all his internal howls for a sanctuary of definitive and irrefutable outcomes. And yet a circuitous death wasn’t a perfect ending. Death wasn’t an exact science. It wasn’t subject to formulas. You can die at any moment, never knowing why and without ever understanding anything. Like—in his case—poetry. Or jazz. Something whose meaning you infer all of a sudden, when it’s already too late, after having not understood it your whole life. Like madness, whose sanity of spirit and raison d’être are only fully understood by the mad.

  And, back on this side, do psychiatric hospitals count as hospitals? Presumably. And all of that—those “rest-homes”—is known and familiar to him. Numerous instances of checking in or visiting or bringing Penelope home to almost immediately turn around and check her back in—commit her. Psychiatric hospitals that have nothing to do with his idea of nineteenth-century insane asylums in deranged novels. (Yes: he thinks about movies and blockbusters, he invokes them and remembers them, when he wants and needs oh so urgently to think about anything that’s not his own lowly home movie, with its shaky and out-of-focus picture, the short in which he’s suddenly acting, acting badly.) That movie in which an old and confessional Salieri softly sings his infamy with Mozart melodies, amid shit-smeared walls and histrionic lunatics, too many of whom—this always struck him as quite curious—believe they are Napoleon and none of whom believe they are Don Quixote. Or maybe nothing interests a madman less than madness, because, just as he thought, for the madman, madness is perfectly reasonable.

  Just the opposite, the “homes” where, every
so often, Penelope “retreated” (following her return from that strange nuptial voyage to the other side of the ocean, increasingly immersed in the self-analysis of her “condition”), had about them, every single one, the suspicious tranquility and silence of some hermetically-sealed thing. Like space stations orbiting around a healthy and external normality, that was, actually, far more abnormal than what they were breathing in there. Whenever he’d gone to visit her, he, strolling along with his hands behind his back, had always thought the same thing: “What a great place to shut yourself in to write or read.”

  The present hospital, his hospital, on the other hand, just makes him want to burn books and raze nations and do all the things despots do to inspire fear, because nothing inspires more fear than what they feel, knowing themselves to be all-powerful and, consequently, ephemeral, weak, and already ready to be blown away by the winds of history.

  He’s sitting next to one machine selling cold drinks and another machine selling hot drinks and another machine selling candy and more or less salty things like braised-chicken-and-potato flavored potato chips (yes, potato chips that feature the inclusion of the flavor of potato as part of their allure) or cheeseburger flavored potato chips. The absurd potato-chip-industry and mutant equivalent of an ebook (another contradiction in terms in a single product, he thinks). Like food for mad astronauts and just enough of it to survive on while you wait to be told whether or not you’re going to survive. The Lonely Man wonders if he’ll get a chance or if it’d be a bad idea for him to drink a—last?—Coca-Cola. After all, wasn’t Coca-Cola “the spark of life”? And isn’t that exactly what he’s in need of here and now? The spark? Of life? Something to reignite him? Something to rekindle his fire, in danger of going out, surrounded by treacherous and circular winds? Something to bring him back to the beaches of the plausible and palpable immortality of good health? Good health that we don’t know we have until we don’t have it anymore? Good health like an un-gifted gift, like a medal stripped from our chest, rendering our uniform torn and demoted? That good health that (apart from small aches, or great pains, but nothing serious: like the already mentioned and long-bygone thing about his mouth exploding in flames and fires, or the recent and inconfessible and fleeting Hellenic impossibility of sitting down that he’s even come to appreciate as a vacation from the obligation of working in front of his screen) he had until last night? The good health that he felt secretly proud of as, knock on wood, he watched beings more or less close to him get struck down by syndromes and illnesses of a varying caliber? Now not so much. Not anymore. Now is when the rust starts to grow on his iron health, now is when “poor health” begins. Now that poverty is his. A new era.