The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  If he could choose, The Lonely Man would choose to call himself and to be called Heywood Floyd. Dr. Heywood Floyd. A man and a name not to be confused with that of the bluesmen blended together without their permission into the Siamese Pink Floyd. A name of science and of science fiction in times when the space race has come to an end (not likely that anybody out there is concerned with saving or invading us) so it can mutate into the exploration of another space: the body itself. The spiral of DNA in place of the spiral of the Andromeda Nebula.

  So, for him, terrified, saying “Dr. Heywood Floyd” would be like an act of resistance and simultaneous invocation of a memory of the future, of a time when, maybe, no one will have whatever it is that he has now, because everyone will have been cured of it. And, when the other doctor, the real doctor, asked him his age and said, “For a man of seventy, you’re in extremely good shape; I’d have put you down as not more than sixty-five,” he’d be able to quote with a smile, “Happy to hear it, Oleg, especially as I’m a hundred and three—as you know perfectly well.”

  This is what he’s thinking about, as the beginning not of a story but of a novel, when the doctor (suddenly, all the doctors are much younger than he is, when did that happen—overnight?) asks him his age and he answers, automatically: “One hundred and three, Oleg—as you know perfectly well.” And the doctor looks at him with that specially-designed doctor face. The face they’re taught to put on during the final months of their training, when they’re already practicing, and it’s the face of, “Uh-oh, it’s one of those patients.” A face always accompanied by a tense smile and narrowed eyes; like a clockmaker peering into the unfathomable unsolved mystery of another clock—springs and rubies and gears—and who knows what’s wrong with it and, ah, why is it always up to me to figure it out?

  “Ah, sorry. Fifty? I’m fifty years old? I was just thinking about a book? 2061: Odyssey Three? Arthur C. Clarke? Heywood Floyd? Remember? In the movie? 2001? He’s the doctor who travels to the moon and falls asleep in the space shuttle and his pen floats and then he talks to his daughter on the videophone and then goes down to the Tycho crater to look at and touch the monolith?” recites The Lonely Man.

  And he discovers a new symptom of his affliction: he can no longer affirm anything. Everything he says comes out with the tone and inflexion of questions that aren’t seeking any answer. The doctor nods several times, asks him to take off his shirt, says “I’ll be right back,” and exits the little room. “To drink a whiskey, probably,” thinks The Lonely Man, more alone than Heywood Floyd at the end of his days, naked from the waist up, absurdly happy not to be naked from the waist down, but still oh so exposed, expecting the unexpected. Getting down from the bed where he was sitting with an awkward little hop and going to the hook where his jacket hung, searching for and finding his notebook and asking himself why it is that almost everything that occurs to him and, he suspects, that will occur to him moving forward, while he’s here, inside, has and will have to do with kids, with children, with fathers, with mothers—with families. With people who, though they cannot and do not want to see each other, will never, for better or worse, be able to be as lonely as The Lonely Man.

  In “St. Valentine’s Blues,” a man with no one to love him and no one to love wakes up early, day after day, year after year. And February after February, each and every Valentine’s Day, he buys an impressive bouquet of roses. More a bush than a bouquet. Something that’s hard to hold up and yet he holds it, as if it were a sweet-smelling torch lighting his way. The man walks around, bouquet in hand, all day. He enters and exits metro cars, gets on and off buses, in and out of taxis. And he keeps on walking, crossing off key neighborhoods, and essential avenues. And the only thing that interests him—what gratifies him so much, what makes him oh so happy, almost as if he loved and was loved by somebody—is the way the women and men look at and admire first his bouquet and then him, with an inevitable smile that says “Here’s a man very much in love.” When the shadows fall, the man returns home. His arms are heavy and ache—but it’s worth it. The roses look a little tired too, but, he thinks, I’ll put them in a jar of water right away and, as his mother said, add a couple aspirin, so they last longer, so the day doesn’t have to end, and see you next year, same time, same places.

  Doctors are as implacable with their patients as writers are with their characters. And, as far as he’s concerned, they’re divided into two large groups: doctors who like to give good news and doctors who like to give not so good news. And, sooner or later, the first ones, like it or not, only have bad news to give; because good news, sooner or later, runs out, in the same way that the health of sick bodies runs out. So, the primary task of doctors is to tell us that something isn’t totally right or that something is going totally wrong. Some of them—never many, actually very few—can partially and temporarily solve some of the contretemps. But against time, all battles are lost, and no strategy works, and sooner or later the enemy corners us, and leaves us vanquished.

  And then doctors come back to tell us that something isn’t totally right or that something is going totally wrong. And that, as far as they’re concerned, there’s nothing left to do but await the inevitable. Then, they outline different periods of survival that tend to fall between six months and a year. After that, everything is pure mystery and good luck. Before six months, of course, there’s a small but very powerful percent of possibility that something will advance. And that’s what he’s thinking about, about how the next six months of his life or of the end of his life will be, when the doctor returns, enters, looks at him, keeps looking at him and, finally, as if waiting for the cue of an invisible prompter, more than addressing him, addresses an invisible audience: “There’s something that worries me.” That worries him, the doctor. And as he says this, The Lonely Man watches the doctor worry about him, about the patient. But, the doctor doesn’t fool him, he’s not that good of an actor: worried, yes; but not too worried. Not as worried as The Lonely Man is, who—dumbstruck, without words—thinks not about what to say, but about what he imagines is going on outside, where the sun will be starting to rise, but with the shyness of someone who says they’re only going to be around for a little while. Rising just so it can set.

  The title “Not Dark Yet” comes directly, obviously, from that Bob Dylan song on his album Time Out of Mind. A song not about death but about its constant imminence and lack of fixed or marked time. One of the songs—they say, its author said—Dylan wrote in a cabin, on a farm in Minnesota, isolated by a perfect storm of snow and wind during the winter of 1995-1996. Dylan left there, with the coming of the first thaws, with notebooks full of his slanted handwriting and—after so much time without writing—ready to record “Not Dark Yet” and another handful of crepuscular songs. Songs with a broken heart and a ravaged voice: the voice of someone who has swallowed The Phantom of the Opera without chewing; the voice of his old age; the voice that in interviews says things like: “My childhood is so far away . . . it’s like I don’t even remember being a child. I think that it was someone else who was that child. Did you ever think like that?”; the shattered yet whole voice of someone who has sung too much; the voice that, at some point in life, sounds perfect when it tells the person next to us or ourselves in the mirror that: “I think I feel a pain in my chest.” “Not Dark Yet” (the Bob Dylan song) ends explaining that “I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still.” “Not Dark Yet” (the story, his story) begins with the protagonist dragging himself to the Emergency Room of a hospital in the night. There, they evaluate him and a doctor listens to the concrete music of his chest and says, “It could be something very serious or it could be something trivial.” And continues: “It could be something like strong indigestion or gastritis. Or, on the other hand, something like acute pulmonary histoplasmosis.” And the man, shaking with pain and fear, asks himself why the names of illnesses aren’t capitalized. And why they don’t append them with, not the surname of the person who identifi
ed and patented the illnesses, but the surname of the sick person: to individuate them, to turn them into something singular and unique, something that helps you fool yourself and makes you think you’re the owner of the disease and it’s not the disease that possesses you, uses you, and ends up discarding you. Aha, yes, the kind of thing to ask yourself and think about so that you can think about anything other than that you’re living and starring in the final scenes of the movie of your life. The kind of thing you ask yourself so you don’t have to ask yourself, “How much time do I have left?” Then, suddenly, the doctor takes a deep breath and keeps talking. But now his phrasing has nothing of the polished and sterilized cadence that doctors speak with, rather it seems sinuous and sharp and as if coming in gusts: “As you will well know, acute pulmonary histoplasmosis is the ailment for which Bob Dylan was treated and admitted on May 25, 1997. Sudden chest pains. Something that, for all those who never had a heart attack, they assume could only be a heart attack. But actually it’s pericarditis. A painful inflammation of the fibrous sack that surrounds the heart and chokes off your voice. Caused by microscopic spores in the golden air of Ohio or Mississippi, blowing in the wind, waiting to be inhaled, and from there they head to the lungs, to incubate for weeks, preparing their toothy grins until given the order to attack. And, depending on their mood or spirit, it all might turn into a simple and transitory cold or, conversely, into something far more serious and definitive. A siege of the reticuloendothelial system. With screams and torches. Scaling walls, catapulting boulders. The immune, suddenly, so vulnerable. Bob Dylan was able to contain the threat in time and was admitted and emerged weakened a week later, almost unable to stand, but whole. And he told the press that thing about ‘I really thought I was on my way to see Elvis . . .’ That could be what you have. Or it could be some sudden activation of a previously undetected genetic disorder. Like a letter sent to you from the dawn of time. A message sent by an ancestor who lives on in your veins and arteries that are now liquefying and drowning you, from inside and on terra firma, turning you into your own ocean. And I’ve read in specialized journals that death from an internal hemorrhage is the sweetest death of all—your internal clock losing the beat, time stretching out into an almost Mexican eternity of minutes, the feeling that you’re dying of immortality.”

  The patient, confused, listens to all of that and asks: “How’d you know I’m a Bob Dylan fan?”

  And then they—doctor and patient—strike up a conversation about the artist’s latest album.

  And what the doctor tells him is, simply, that he wants to run more tests. “To rule out possibilities,” he explains. And he invites him to come down into the hospital basements, to pass through the door with the sign warning of the presence of radiation. To put himself inside an apparatus that, no doubt, will choose the exact moment he’s inside it to break down, to release an invisible plutonium or uranium vapor or whatever, and transform him into a secret monster that’ll never even know the joy of mutating into one of those crazy laboratory creatures from the paranoid science fiction movies that he enjoyed so much as a kid. No: he’ll leave the hospital as if nothing had happened and, a few days later, he’ll discover that he’s radiating a strange phosphorescence in the darkness and, subsequently, that he’s starting to shrink. And this glowing and diminishing revelation will also bring a roundabout blessing—the perfect excuse to never leave the house again.

  The title “The Little Dwarf” (automatic reflex of the giant albino idea, The Lonely Man self-diagnoses: stories sometimes come in twos, with opposite faces, like those twins who look nothing alike but are twins nonetheless) seems, at first, a redundancy, a joke as bad as it is cruel and wrong. But no. Or yes. It depends on how you look at that boy, about four years old, who appears in its opening lines, on a street in the city of B, so that two friends, taking a walk to their favorite bookstore, encounter him and watch and discuss him with barely hidden fascination. The two friends are writers and have been resigned for a while now to the fact that everything they see on this side can end up being useful in the other part, a place they refuse to call “their work,” but, really, what else can they call it? So better, yes, to call it “The Other Part.” As mentioned, the boy must be three or four or five years old. But even though, for his age, he’s the “right” and “normal” height (note: find better adjectives), the boy is already, also, a dwarf. The short arms, the short legs, the big head. The boy is, for the two writer friends, a curious organism: a being living in two times at the same time. His present as a boy of the appropriate height already coexisting with his increasingly near future as a dwarf. The two writer friends watch him walk by, give a slight shudder, change the subject: neither of them can stop thinking about the little dwarf and, now in the bookstore, leafing through books, they can barely contain the desire to run out of there. To head home at full velocity, to their desks, to their computers, to see how and where they can insert that little dwarf into what they’re writing. He’ll fit somewhere, in the other part.

  “Welcome, My Son / Welcome to the Machine . . .” Now it’s as if The Lonely Man were inside a Pink Floyd album, his favorite Pink Floyd album, one of his favorite albums: welcome to the machine, inside a machine, listening to all those mysterious sounds and whispers that are heard in the background and give shape to all those songs that he knows by heart. Not just the words of their verses, but also—it being Pink Floyd—every sound and murmur and doorway that opens and closes. He doesn’t want to be there, obviously. They inserted him—after giving him a powerful relaxant that’s relieved almost all his pain and given him the sensation of being embalmed alive, of having had all his organs removed except his brain, which seems to be thinking more than ever—into a mechanical cylinder. They put him on a sliding gurney that emerged like a tongue, so that he could lie down on it and it could eat him alive and carry him inside, where now he’s chewed up and bombarded and photographed from every angle, millimeter by millimeter by mesmeric energies that he prefers to know as little about as possible. Now, The Lonely Man is read like an open book that doesn’t need to be opened to be read, to know what happens (what needs to be edited or corrected or crossed out or cut or extracted) in the novel of his body that might just—test results revealed and interpreted—say goodbye with the abrupt ending of a microstory.

  They told him he’d be inside for about forty minutes and that he should try not to move “at all.” Which, of course, immediately produced and kept on producing an absolute need to move. But, to the previous instruction, they added a “If you move, we’ll have to start over.” And for The Lonely Man, lonelier than ever there inside, there’s nothing less appealing than seeing himself trapped in a loop of clicks and clicks and bzzzs and t-chacks asking himself—like in the song—where have you been and answering that it’s alright we know just where you’ve been—there, staying still, though it looks like he’s moving. Because—restless yet motionless—there’s a possibility that something isn’t alright at all inside his machine, now, inside a machine. After having the doctor listen to his symptoms, ask questions (with a diction that reminds him of those caretakers of haunted houses who ask at the beginning of the movie, “But, is it possible you don’t know what happened here?”), and tell him that what he has “might be nothing or it might be very serious; so we better make sure.”

  So there he is, increasingly uncertain of everything, except for the flood of ideas that comes to him—after so much time, like someone discovering not oil, but dinosaur bones—for possible stories. One after another. Invented parts. Unfinished products rolling off the assembly line and mocking him, tempting him to move, so he can get out of there and write them down, distilled to a sentence or two, in his notebook, inside his jacket pocket, hanging there a few meters and thousands of light years away from his body.

  There, inside the machine, he comes up with a machine: the still primitive version, the crawling and not yet walking prototype, that some prodigy from Silicon Valley will offer to a writer l
ike an irresistible apple. A device that allows writers to extract, at the speed of thought, without spilling, all of what will later be written on a screen or on paper. Something that he imagines and anticipates having a design resembling a scorpion stinger, sticking into the nape of writers’ necks, not to poison them, but to extract a dense and dark liquid and transfer it via transparent tube directly to the core of a laptop computer. And thus allow the writer to be a true reader of himself. A writer reader. And all the books would be incredibly alive. The book happening in its entirety, just as the writer happens to think of it.

  Just the idea of having to remember right now everything he shouldn’t forget so he can write it down as soon as he gets out of the machine makes him feel a kind of lethargy, the beginning of falling asleep. Which wouldn’t be bad: he never moves in his sleep, he was always one of those sleepers who—after, always with difficulty, managing to close his eyes—seemed dead or comatose, victims of a not necessarily maleficent spell. Because, after all, falling into an ageless sleep isn’t so bad compared with getting transformed into a beast or a pig or whatever, right? Being in a cursed sleep is better than being very sick and awake. So, all of a sudden, he tells himself he’d rather stay in there, better this moment of mechanical and mechanized suspense, than to be pulled out of there at full velocity and put on a gurney and pushed at a run to an operating room and opened up so something malignant can be removed. Better this somnolence, lulled to sleep by an apparatus, than the shutdown of general anesthesia, which (he read somewhere, why has he read so much?) doesn’t entirely wear off until months after the operation. A month of fatigue and disorientation and forgetfulness and confusion, they calculate, for every hour you spend chemically knocked out—like a boxer who has been stripped of his title and table of contents and various decisive chapters—crooning “Where have you been? / It’s alright we know where you’ve been,” as you find yourself in front of the open refrigerator, stroking your scar with almost sacred reverence, and never wondering what you came there to find, but placing the book you’re reading inside, among the fruits and vegetables and meats. A book that, just a few pages from the end, you remember absolutely nothing of except that the protagonist really likes beer, or was it tequila? And, later—“You’ve been in the pipeline, filling in time”—more noises filling your head. Like the noises he hears now, in a time without time, when his whole life passes before his eyes not in a matter of seconds, but in minutes as long as a whole lifetime.