The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  He remembers, along with so many other things, that when he had to do obligatory military service, during imaginarias (this term, referring to night-watch duty, always seemed to him one of the most auspicious in an otherwise generally unimaginative military jargon), he, imaginarily, inside his head, put on Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. And he listened to it note for note, word for word, sound for sound, to distract himself, so that the time would pass faster. He tries to do it again now, but discovers there are parts he’s forgotten. To keep from getting depressed, thinking that his memory isn’t what it used to be, he chooses another strategy—to imagine that everything that’s happening to him is a story. To imagine how, if it were a story, it would begin. And, facing the impossibility of writing it, to begin to tell it to himself, as if he were reading it.

  Like this.

  He arrived to the clinic—which seemed to him an exhibition of refined sadism—after crossing a labyrinthine garden, between green hedges, losing and finding his way, guided by the lights over the entrance. The clinic—he’d read or someone told him this at some point; he reads it now in the air of that machine where he vibrates and is examined and rocked by invisible waves—had originally been a palace that a patrician and philanthropic family had donated to their beloved city, though, actually, it’d just been the required tribute, the way to whitewash the mess of too many years of “forgetting” to pay taxes.

  In the building’s reception area there abounded photos of aristocrats on the day of the inauguration of what, overnight, became the place to give birth and to be born and to recover, more or less, and to die. Various glossy magazines had permanent correspondents in the bar/restaurant, which was run by one of those chefs who’re internationally famous for having turned a sandwich (a sandwich that you just had to enjoy in order to be someone) into soup or ice cream or into anything that in no way resembled a sandwich. They were many, the happy few who went there to have a drink without even knowing any admitted patients. And the prevailing feeling (if you ignored the signs asking the healthy people to keep quiet so that the sick people could moan as they pleased; a request that was ignored, because the hallways were full of the shouts of people with double and triple surnames, demonstrations of model-pain or model-joy surprise, as appropriate, finding themselves there as if it were a night at the opera or a day at the races or an afternoon in the VIP lounge of an airport) was of having arrived to the best of all possible worlds. To a corrected and augmented version of the world (because the palace’s original architecture had received new additions of futuristic wings, emerging like prosthetic limbs of concrete and glass from the original and Versaillesque nucleus/body) that, like everything augmented and corrected, produced a mild anxiety. The same comfortable uncomfortableness that certain airports have (and he’d written several times about how hospitals were oh so similar to airports, passengers so closely resembling patients, both subject to arrivals and departures) where everything was carefully planned down to the millimeter so that something unforeseen always happens, something unexpected that can alter the course of your life or affirm the direction of your death.

  When he got there, however, the social activity was minimal, the sonic volume and bodily movement were low, and the elevators were quietly singing a version of the string quartet of the Goldberg Variations, between metal doors and under that light that—along with mirrors, where all faces are like the faces of recently embalmed bodies—should be banned inside elevators. And—after being freed of the machine, after they informed him that he’d get the results back in about an hour—there he was, playing the game he played when he was a boy, the game he never stopped playing, because, he fears, he’ll never stop being a boy. He never got that appendix removed, never lost that tooth. To know, to teach, to learn: there are afternoons when he goes out on a walk and, randomly, decides to follow somebody. Then, after a few blocks of following them, he says to himself that he’ll change objective and prey as soon as he encounters someone—man or woman, either way—wearing a yellow shirt. And that he’ll follow the yellow shirt until, for example, a black jacket or white high heels appear. And see where it takes him. And wonder what they’re doing or what they’re on their way to do whenever they arrive wherever they’re going.

  Here and now, there’s a lot of movement and almost everyone’s wearing a uniform—of a soft and relaxing and consoling green-water color—that was, no doubt, proposed and discussed by some expert in the marketing of pain and uncertainty. After a few minutes, they all kind of blend together (it might have something to do with the relaxant they gave him) into a single entity. So he has to concentrate: eye color and hair color and height and whether they’re left-or right-handed. And there he goes, following some and then others, through hallways decorated with prints that are always (another recommendation of experts in subliminal communication and sanitarium psychology, of course) of luminous impressionist style and never the abstract expressionism that evokes metastasis and tumors.

  The magazine shop, attended by a woman of vampiric pallor, is full of sports publications (a subject that, like the western or war genre, never interested him at all; but he’s astonished by the increasingly frequent statements from multimillionaire soccer players, confessing almost existential anxieties), sugar free candies, flowers of suspicious and amphetaminic vitality, some sad toy (no robot, no maddening little man with a suitcase), and newspapers that seem to age more quickly and more badly. The headlines from the previous morning—from the few rumpled copies that remain, on life support; that morning’s papers having not yet arrived—talk about the inauguration a particle accelerator. Reading that, a particle of interest enters through The Lonely Man’s eyes and arrives to his accelerated brain. Maybe he could write about that for that monthly that’d asked him to write a piece about a destination of his choice, maybe he could go there instead of Manhattan or London, it’d be more original and unexpected, he says to himself. A particle accelerator that, some claim, could open a black hole in the cosmic fabric of our dimension that would end up devouring our world and everything in it. But he’s not too worried; he’s already been there, breathing in that intoxicating air of possible planetary catastrophe. Not long ago, though it seems like forever. When—on the edge of the new millennium, when everyone was debating whether or not the year 2000 was already the twenty-first century—everything was trembling in that frozen second when all the hours and dates on all the computers would reach 23:59 hours on December 31st, 1999. And no one knew—inexplicably, nobody could be sure, nobody had run tests or simulations, maybe to keep from spoiling the terror or the tranquility of the second after—whether the computers would seamlessly move on to the new first digit. Or if they’d go back, confused, to 00:00 hours of the year 1900. And then all the airplanes would fall from the skies, money would vanish from bank accounts, all manuscripts of unfinished novels would disappear, and a prehistoric darkness would fall over everything and everyone. Farewell to civilization—flatline on all monitors. But nothing had happened. Absolutely nothing. The falsest of alarms. The bells and sirens, the nocturnal sound of the New Year moving right to left across the map, as if it were reading an ancient and powerful Jewish and Cabalistic formula. And the TVs, that kept right on working perfectly, had been showing—alternating between cameras located in different metropolises—the typical shots of all normal years, the same years as always always dying the same way, with no regard for the striking roundness of their number. Multitudes hugging each other in historic squares, some cold and some hot, raising glasses and effortlessly making history while their respective nights exploded with fireworks and—admit it—more than one person sighed, resigned to the fact that everything would go on the same as always. Somewhat sad and disappointed to surrender and relinquish the tempting yet no longer practical theory of being able to strip the figurehead from the prow of their faces, to kiss an iceberg, and dance the last and increasingly vertiginous waltz across the deck of the end of history.

  Now, the truth is th
at—confronting the imminent possibility of a private shipwreck, of his body going out of order—nothing would be less troubling and more appealing than a global holocaust to keep him company and free him from the responsibility of having to make drastic decisions; or having to undergo treatments as painful as they are expensive and, in the end, ineffective; or to be observed, as light after light goes out, the way you look at something that, yes, is luckily happening to someone else, just someone else, that’s all.

  Now the Lonely Man keeps moving down the hospital hallways because he thinks that if he doesn’t, if he stops moving, it’ll be impossible for him to go on. Suddenly he sees somebody, in the distance, dressed distinctly, walking toward him. He decides that, when they pass by each other, he’ll wait two or three steps and then turn around and follow him. Then he realizes that the person he sees is himself, approaching without advancing, inside a mirror. So he’s the person who’s approaching him. And he looks at him and looks at himself.

  He’s still who he’s always been, yes; but he’s not who he once was. It’s not that he’s old; rather that he’s not young anymore, and that, all of a sudden, old age isn’t a faraway country, but a residential neighborhood ready to be absorbed by the—increasingly scattered and maintenance-issue-plagued—architecture of his city. Chiaroscuro symptoms of it everywhere, unignorable telltale signs that the time he lives in is no longer his time. No, he’s not old, that’s true. But he is a young old man. A—will he ever rid himself of that damned habit of inventing a word by putting two together?—youngold man. A, like somebody sang, “uomo di una certa età” who begins to experience the symptoms of being an antique and of looking at everything like an old-fashioned explorer who would, actually, prefer to stay home and invent exploits that he can no longer carry out. Meanwhile, the perturbing and almost nagging sight of all those kids, more all the time, more and more, where do they all come from? For a while now, the vast majority of people around him seem like recently built machines, the latest models, giving off that new car smell and seemingly wrapped in the metallic paper of the most tempting and dangerous sweets of his distant childhood—the ones with really dark chocolate that, when you bit into them, released a shot of alcohol and mystery. All so young, it hurts to look at them; but it hurts even more to see the ones who aren’t you, his elders, his superiors in the descending ladder of life: nightmarish beings, their bodies between warped angle and Jell-O melted in the sun, always trying to enter first and leave last with no respect for places in line, speaking loudly or whispering to themselves or to someone who isn’t there, but without the excuse of one of those hands-free phones hanging from their ear. Abyssal creatures who, he gets it now, seem to have been born to be old—they were just making time, not killing time, but aging time. And now they were approaching their authentic and absolute zenith. And something really disturbing: if he stared at them—terrible superpower?, reverse prophecy?—he could see, through the cracks and canyons of their wrinkles, the faces of the boys and girls that they’d once been. And it was terrible to see himself like he was, to remember without any difficulty, with more and more clarity, the face of his own past. To perceive the erosion and entropy of the species. Soon he’d be like one of them, he’d be one of them. And not long after—thousandths of a second on the clock of the universe—all those kids would be too. Them there and him here: he’s aware now that the lack of care devoted to his physique in times when his body was something moldable and improvable—times when you have to train it to better endure the coming of The Horror, The Horror—didn’t bode well. And, again, he hasn’t gone for periodical exams and checkups either. He’s always preferred not to know, until he can no longer not know. Like the frog in that experiment: if you toss it into a pot of boiling water, it jumps right out; on the other hand, if you put it in a pot of cold water and heat it up slowly, it stays right there, until it boils alive and boils to death. Now, the water in his pot is quite hot and—though he doesn’t do anything about it—it’s beginning to dawn on him that something is happening or something is going to happen. Ribbitribbit. And it’s clear that he’s not the only one who suspects it, who knows it. He’s been discovering how, for a few years now, he’s turned, riding different modes of public transit, not into someone who’s invisible to young and not so young women, but into something much worse—he’s become someone who’s transparent. Some of them look at him as if they’re staring out at the distant horizon and only pay attention to him when he makes faces at the little ones accompanying them (little children, little siblings) and look at him with confusion. Then, almost out of obligation, they smile at him the way you smile at a more or less curious animal. And—after so many years of having been so careful when it comes to evaluating what he did or did not find attractive in the opposite sex—suddenly everything and everyone seemed somehow irresistible, alluring, tempting. As if he were walking across the slippery floor of one of those department stores that—a dulcet but firm voice informs over the loudspeakers—is going to close in five minutes. And that might never open again. Total liquidation of discounted beings. So you have to buy whatever you can get as fast as you can, stockpiling for the long, interminable winter that’s coming, pick everything out without thinking too much about whether or not it’ll fit, whether it’s the right size, whether it matches your style. Fill the cart. Nothing matters anymore, because anything is better than nothing.

  Similarly, when, less often all the time, he goes to buy clothes (where did he leave that favorite T-shirt from when he was a kid with that thing, once so amusing, but that he doesn’t find funny anymore, printed across the chest about “Your mind is writing checks your body can’t cash”?) he’s noticed that, when making adjustments and accommodations to his pants and jackets, the salesmen who, until not long ago, had been complicit and talkative, now touch him in the most reverent of silences. And only with the tips of their fingers, as little as possible, with a mix of fear and disgust, as if they were holding a fragile relic, recently unearthed and smelling of confinement, a smell like a free sample of the perfume of the tomb.

  And, ah, fewer friends all the time and more mere acquaintances and fewer friends who ask if you heard “what happened” to so-and-so and give you—like ciphers of whispering spies—advice like “It’d be better, just in case, because of the dizziness or the diminished reflexes, to start to pee sitting down, like a girl, when you get up in the morning.” And—occupational hazard—he couldn’t help but tremble hearing the word “girl,” stuck there, cosmetically, to disguise and cover up that it should actually be “like an old lady.”

  And all of that was the least awful part, what caused him the least anxiety.

  The worst was what was secret, personal, intimate, his and only his, alone. That new almost-old face in the mirror, without wrinkles, but with bags under its eyes that hang down to his belly button, producing the unsettling effect of a photo that’s been left unfinished in the middle of a Photoshop session. Or the abandonment without warning—that at first he believed to be temporary and a product of stress but no—of those lightning-rod erections that used to greet him every morning (the absence of which he blames, without any evidence or proof, on a treatment/course of meditative T’ai chi ch’uan that he took a few years ago to, according to the oriental specialist, “slow down your mental activity,” “balance your biorhythms,” “improve your mood,” and even “inspire you to write more personal things.”). Or the discovery—more frequent all the time—that the remote past for the storylines and characters in movies was no longer prehistory or the Middle Ages or the fifties or any other time when he’d not yet arrived to the world, rather it was his own recollectable past. His story was already History. And the only comfort of being history was that of having lived somewhere in the vicinity, of having almost been a part of it, of having more things to tell than a newcomer who’d not yet entered History and who might never enter it and who, until the end, his end, would be but a witness. Or the sensation that nothing new would ever ha
ppen to him again, or that from here onward everything would just be wintery and funereal variations on a single theme. A sad and repetitive melody more sticky than catchy, backed by the concrete symphony of his own body’s sounds (like gears beginning to grind, like steam leaking from rusted pipes) waking him up in the middle of the night and not letting him fall back asleep. And the perfumes, the aromas, the odors that are, for him and only him, enjoyed and even catalogued as secret fragrances.

  And, every so often, yes, a new but undesired beginning of something that, up until today, was like the distant (and consequently almost inaudible) cry of a pain that never ended up presenting: the previews of a terrifying movie coming soon in 3-D with Sensurround and all the special effects. Now, all of a sudden, grand premiere and red carpet and flashes and reflectors and neon lights. Here comes something that started out as an extra playing the point of an invisible blade. Something that debuted like a new but not necessarily good idea, concentrated in the center of his chest to subsequently—triumphant and leading role, and nominee for the Oscar for Best Unexpected Pain—open like a black rose with petals of thorns. And from there, spread its cramping perfume to his legs (making it hard for him to get out of bed), and climb to his storm-clouded eyes and with the sensation that the hand of a gorilla was gripping his head and squeezing and he couldn’t breathe and maybe, he said to himself, this is fear, true fear. A fear that, nonetheless, makes him avoid the embarrassment of calling an ambulance and being hauled out while the neighbors looked on, taken down the winding mountain road, bound for that hell where he is now, looking at himself, as if seeing himself for the first time, which, who knows, might be the first of the last times. “I’d give anything for a drink,” he says to himself then, as if dubbed over by a voice not his own, a voice with an uninflected accent. Someone else’s voice on top of his. The voice of his reflection that looks at him and smiles and makes the gesture, in the mirror, of raising an invisible glass and says—never better, never more ironically appropriate—“To your health!”