The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  “Welcome,” said a sign near the hospital entrance.

  Very funny.

  And the Lonely Man doesn’t dare to wonder whether that sign is an ironic detail or something altogether more dreadful—the abbreviated and modern version of what’s written at the doors to Dante’s Inferno. How many characters does “Abandon all hope ye who enter here” have?” More than a hundred and forty? Less? He counts them: there are only thirty-four. More than enough space and, ah, again, The Lonely Man never felt a pain so . . . it’s not strong . . . no. It’s a pain that’s very wide. The Lonely Man never felt a pain as wide as the pain he feels now. A pain that’s located in a fixed and concentrated and small point. But a pain that, from there, spreads like waves to the rest of his body, until it conquers and colonizes his farthest reaches. The distant territories where his body and his pain are demarcated, here and now, in the emergency room, by other bodies and other pains.

  What happened? What happened to him? Who knows? What will be will be?

  His pain is pure novelty and, yes, the most merciless and immediate version of what’s known as “fear of the unknown.” Now, The Lonely Man is like an ancient sailor. Like those medieval explorers who launched themselves from the borders of ancient and unfinished maps into the liquid terra incognita. Maps where, next to a lavishly-adorned wind rose, as if to convince themselves that everything was under control and had a known cause, was written the gothic maxim “Beyond here are monsters” or “Here are dragons.” In Latin, the language of fear and the irrevocable, of faith and superstition, the secret language of all emergency rooms and doctors and diseases.

  But there’s something even worse than that, he thinks: the monster is here, at hand, in his chest, maw agape, bearing its teeth, gnawing at him. The Lonely Man holds one hand against his chest to cradle the pain. The pain in his chest is like a monstrous newborn. A newborn pain that brings him to the brink of tears and keeps growing with each passing minute. Before long, The Lonely Man thinks, the pain will grow into an adolescent howl, uncontrollable in its rebelliousness and impulses. And it won’t be easy to keep it there, inside his chest, with nothing but the simple support of a single hand or a slap. Later, after at most two hours of going on like that, before the newborn primordial cracking of that which can never be fixed, an already old and defeated moan will burst out of his throat from deep in his intestines. His physiological Waterloo. A Waterloo like the one in the first chapter of The Charterhouse of Parma: pure confusion and disorientation and no strategic map covered with little lead soldiers to be contemplated from the gallery of an officers’ mess hall. No, no, no: now, like Fabrizio del Dongo lost in space, he’s wondering where the front and the rearguard are and where is the office to negotiate surrender. The Lonely Man remembers when, so many years ago, he learned that the custom of the hand held against the chest wasn’t a gesture that Napoleon came up with for posing or posterity (his almost superhero quirk, a characteristic by which to be known or distinguished), but as a direct consequence of an ulcer or something like that. Terrible disappointment. He learned this around the same time that someone revealed to him that Hanna-Barbera was not a woman creator of animated drawings, but was actually two men. Another defeat. And it’s clear that, seeing him now, no one would mistake him for a god of war or a genius strategist. Now, The Lonely Man is struggling and alone. The hand he clutches to his chest doesn’t inspire or instill any call to be cast in bronze. To the contrary, his situation produces unease and tenderness: his hand shakes and, on his wrist, a plastic bracelet bears his first and last name (which aren’t important here either, and don’t even require initials) and a barcode which, The Lonely Man assumes, synthesizes the symptoms that he communicated to the receptionist when he arrived. Before collapsing into this chair to wait for them to call him and examine him and classify him and, who knows, maybe release him to the outside world and not force him to stay inside, for all eternity, for a few hours or a few days or for the five or six minutes of life he has left.

  The Lonely Man is inclined toward the first of the preceding options, but, out of superstition, to avoid tempting fate, he distracts himself—he’s not alone in there—watching the other people waiting in the waiting room.

  There’s an immemorial elderly woman of an aristocratic yet slightly decadent bearing who shouts incessantly into her mobile phone and seems desperately happy to be there, to be sick again, to be attended to and served and to relay everything to her descendants, to see what they plan to do about it in order to move up or down in the inheritance hierarchy. Her movements have the angularity of arachnids and The Lonely Man—who has always considered himself and been considered by those who know him an infallible judge of character—could guarantee that that old woman is the most malignant and detestable being that has ever scarred and disfigured the face of the earth. A wart of hate and rancor.

  And a young woman who never stops sending messages from her multiuse mobile phone. “Hey here at hospital 2 C what they say bout my belly and hope I’m not preggers hahahaha and that nobody finds out bout this cuz otherwise!!” guesses The Lonely Man, thinking about how that hypothetical message will be subsequently forwarded by its recipient. The Lonely Man often thinks about written things, about things he’s going to write (and he brings his hand to his chest, now, to feel for his notebook), but he never counts the characters. One hundred forty characters. The bizarre and new talent, not of writing well or writing correctly, but of writing one hundred forty characters exactly. In unjust times, when everything seems to settle for the bare minimum: abbreviating, reducing, miniaturizing, and when he, from action or reaction, is expanding like a gas, resolving to occupy all available space, repeating himself and correcting himself and repeating himself again. A form of rebellious resistance—to write nothing that doesn’t surpass one hundred forty characters. Before long, he says to himself, no idea will be longer or taller or deeper than that. And he remembers the girl in the funicular, her face mangled and covered in blood, like a freshly and recently finished painting (another painting) by Francis Bacon, and it’s as if he were closing that file, preferring not to think about that right now. He prefers, while waiting, light ideas. One hundred forty characters in length, in height, and in superficial depth, aspiring neither to slogan nor aphorism. Bijis, they’re called. When written. Like origami that open underwater. Or sea monkeys.

  And maybe it makes sense to point out here (though it might already be clear, now it’s more than obvious: because it’s with great difficulty that The Lonely Man sketches in his notebook, in just a few words, portraits of the people accompanying him in the wait and the emergency) that The Lonely Man is a writer. And that, consequently, his idea of a text message is far better composed than most text messages tend to be. And that The Lonely Man—getting himself “in character,” distorting automatic reflex—often thinks about this kind of thing. The Lonely Man thinks, as if he were writing, that the girl writes and thinks like that. And that she sends her message to thousands of friends, bouncing it off the ghost of electricity howling in the bones of her face.

  There are two parents worrying over their son, who must be about four years old. The little boy bears a striking resemblance to his parents, to both of them. Is that possible? Yes, if the father and mother also bear a striking resemblance to each other. And The Lonely Man wonders if it’d be good or bad—pleasant or disturbing—for your kid to look that much like you. Of course, in addition, the father is probably one of those fathers who names his son after himself. Who don’t go any further than that, who don’t even give it another thought, who pass their name along like property to be shared. He never understood that custom, which, he thinks, can only contain motives as egotistical as they are imbecilic: the implicit desire for someone to be just like you, to carry your name into a new era, to never forget the total idiot who preceded them, all their defects, all the undesirable gifts genetics grant you. And maybe the thing about the same name is actually better than that whole new crop of children wi
th names that are more like sounds than names. Names that sound like Cirque Du Soleil performances. Things like Ayunnah, Taköy, Mommoh, Lankinna, Oompah. If he’d ever had a son, he would’ve bowed down, on his knees, before the functional Esperanto of those international names barely foreignized by an accent mark or an altered or absent letter: Tomás, Martín, Sebastián . . . But he’s not really sure. He’s not sure of anything except that he wants to get out of here as soon as possible.

  Anyway, the subject of children isn’t his subject. Like the stable couple, he renounced it long ago. He laughed at everyone who insinuated that the wild growth of children was the only thing that cut off, with the most comical of blows, the civilized growth of parents. “I do it in the name of literature,” he said to himself, his first book already published, happy and as successful as he could possibly be, given the circumstances. That oath and promise were also, obviously, more comfortable ways to avoid thinking about anyone but himself. And now he wonders if that pain in his chest might actually be nothing more than exhaustion and material fatigue from thinking only of himself and of himself as part of literature. He wonders now—egocentric as only a writer can be—if it might not have been nice to be accompanied that night by a hypothetical and good-looking, twenty-something-year-old son who looked nothing like him, but closely resembled his hypothetical and exquisitely beautiful mother. And who didn’t take after him at all in his personality either, so he didn’t have to feel responsible for anything. A completely different son would also be more fun and more intriguing, right? If he had a son who was just like him, like the son of the man and woman over there, he reasoned, he’d constantly be wondering which parts were taken from him to build that scale model of himself.

  The little boy has a fever. “High,” Pa-Ma tells him, with the same voice at the same time, without him having asked anything. But none of that prevents the boy from talking. Talking to him. Talking—as if in a trance—about the arrivals and departures of a race of intergalactic robots, come to Earth to protect it from another race of intergalactic robots. Earth, it seems, turns into a battlefield for these androids that, while fighting among themselves, destroy a good part of everything around them. The Lonely Man listens attentively and nods at everything the boy says, though it isn’t entirely clear to him why those alien and exceedingly sophisticated intelligences and technologies that come down to our planet mutate into modes of transportation (the cars, trucks, helicopters, and airplanes of earthlings) that are oh so imperfect and easy to disassemble. Beyond that, The Lonely Man can appreciate the Mephistophelian genius of the creator of those “autobots” and “decepticons” that the boy is talking about—two toys in one.

  There was a time, thinks The Lonely Man, when people related to books like that. 2 × 1. What the writer gave you and what you did with it inside your own head. Now, not so much, less and less: it’s not the content that matters, it’s the packaging. The device. The latest model. Little mirrors and colored glass. Reading on it all the time, more than ever, but in homeopathic doses. And writing more than ever but, also, writing more about nothing and, the truth is, The Lonely Man couldn’t care less about these issues, which he thought and wrote about a great deal in another era, another dimension, just yesterday, in the days when he was healthy or at least felt healthy.

  Just the idea of a before and after in the story of his body and in what his body contains clouds his vision and fills his eyes with something that, please, not tears, right? The important thing is to distract yourself, to change frequency, to think about indestructible robots with a special talent for destroying everything around them. Bumper robots. The strangest thing of all (the kind of detail that writers tend to notice, a writer never wears out or turns off, like certain metallic humanoids) is that the boy, outside his futuristic delirium, is holding a very primitive toy in his hand. A toy made of tin. A windup toy. A little man wearing a hat and carrying a suitcase. The toy that the boy must have carefully chosen out of many to accompany him on a journey into the unknown and the X-rays. The Lonely Man is about to ask the boy something (Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? What’s an “Optimus Prime?” And an “Omicron?” And who gave him that antique toy that The Lonely Man can’t take his eyes off of?) when a door opens, a nurse says his name, and then The Lonely Man stands up, as if he were back in elementary school and he’d been ordered to go up to the front of the classroom and recite the lesson. Something that could only be memorized, pure sound, without the faintest idea what you’re saying, like when you sing a song in a language you don’t speak. The Lonely Man goes over what he’s going to say in his head. A list of symptoms. He’s concerned about being clear and not getting lost in long and virulent sentences adjectivized with bacteria. And, with his hand on his chest, he takes several uncertain steps, enters the zone of exam rooms (the swinging door closes behind him with a mechanical and muffled and pneumatic sound, a lot like the sound of an autobot-decepticon), and decides not too look back, fearing that he’ll be struck down by one of those curses and special effects that appear in the first part of the Bible.

  “If you fear thunder, let yourself be afraid,” instructs a Zen proverb. So, obedient and good pupil, welcome to fear—and nothing is more frightening than always magnanimous fear—understood as a complex universal language that, complexity notwithstanding, is immediately comprehensible and apprehended perfectly in a matter of seconds: the dialect of the disease where, like any other language, the first thing you learn to say and repeat are the questions why, how, how much, when. Fear like the equivalent of Helvetica font—everybody reads it, everybody understands it. Fear like the true Esperanto.

  To avoid reading the fear, his fear, The Lonely Man opens the book he picked out to bring with him to the hospital. He’d been really indecisive about it. Bring, out of superstition, a brief and slight book? Or, out of caution, a dense and voluminous book? And The Lonely Man is already an expert in the secret science of the right book for the right reason and right place. There are books for airplanes and books for trains and books for short trips on the metro or city bus. He’s always spent a lot of time thinking about that—about what book will accompany him and where. A lot more than he spends thinking about what to wear and what items to bring. But he’d never thought about what the perfect book for a hospital would be. So, he remembers how, one hour and millions of years ago, staggering in pain to the library, he looked and searched and didn’t find and his eyes clouded over making it almost impossible to read the spines on the shelves and he ended up choosing something to hold on to and to hold him up, as—he could already picture it—he moved from one doctor’s office to another. Yes, he said to himself, seeing himself as if from outside: he was going to enter and exit scanner apparatuses, possibly wrapped in one of those disposable paper robes that leave you with your ass and your dignity in the air. And he didn’t know what he should bring to read during all of that. He sensed that it should be blunt and dense and solid. He considered, for example, an immense volume of fragments with the almost Galenic title of The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. Or maybe the three tomes of the Penguin edition of The Arabian Nights and its infinite possibilities for an after and a tomorrow and a thousand and one nights. Or one of the six volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon and, oh, ruins, eternal ruins. Or The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu with its courtesan and controlled environs. Or The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Or, to cover almost everything, that total anthology that is The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, the Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World since 1953. Books that are large but consumable in brief fragments, prescribed doses. Something that would work both for a lightning incursion and—he thinks that he doesn’t want to think this—a “prolonged stay,” consequence of a “long and cruel illness” or any one of those written formulas later utilized in the comp
osition of obituaries.

  But those were all heavy books, uncomfortable, books that might end up a stone tied to his ankle, pulling him down into depths from which there was no coming back. Maybe, he said to himself, a book of stories. He remembers a story by John Updike, a writer whom he hasn’t stopped missing since his death in 2009. A writer whom he’d followed, starting as an adolescent, envying his apparently inexhaustible fertility (Updike published, from the beginning of his unparalleled career, one or two books a year in addition to his long essays and reviews in The New Yorker) and whom he’d stuck with until his departure. Until those final poems of hospital and convalescence and cancer, versifying the end of his life and the sadness of not being able to keep on writing, that with the end of life comes the end of the work. The day Updike died, he reread something the writer said in an interview and that he’d always found really moving: “My first thought about art, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.” And Updike—who also penned that thing about how writers are like snails moving slowly through the incommensurable volumes of the unexpressed “leaving behind a faint thread excreted out of ourselves”—had been indirectly responsible for his first job when, at the magazine where he got his professional training as a writer, a certain Abel Rondeau had tossed a handful of photos of the American writer onto his desk and had asked him to “invent an exclusive interview.” And he’d done it and obeyed him without hesitation; because, after all, Updike himself had always been great at reinterpreting and falsifying everything around him in order to leave his mark on it. Updike who had learned at a young age that “nothing in fiction rings quite as true as truth, slightly arranged.”