The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  In “Four Beers” (which might end up being called “Four Tequilas”) a man, a writer, takes his young son to a park near their house to ride his bicycle. In the center of the park, which is in the center of a barely domesticated forest, there is a bar. The man sits down at a table and keeps one eye on his son and the other on his notebook where he takes notes for a story. Notes that, he knows, he might not understand a few hours later. Because the notes for a story or a novel are made, almost always, from the stuff of dreams: when you wake up or go back and read them you barely remember them and you can’t recapture your enthusiasm or their initial significance either and—like the ephemeral yet spectacular effervescence of some indigestion medicines—their brief effect is nothing more than that, passing. Meanwhile, the man drinks one, two, three, four beers (or four tequilas). And confirms once again, first, that his alcohol tolerance is as admirable as it is disturbing (is that what it is to be an authentic alcoholic?, to have alcohol not effect you?) and, second, that with the last sip of the fourth glass or the fourth shot, the man finds, once again, that he’s attained that state, half placid nirvana and half centrifugal spiral, where everything comes at him all at once and hits him in the face. Like a wind waiting for you to open a window to slap you and challenge you to a duel, sabers or pistols, it makes no difference, the wind always wins. Left behind are the old and not exactly good, but, yes, simpler days when storylines came to him all at once like a pleasant breeze and not, like now, like perfumes searching for a body that’ll give them a reason to be and to be smelled, like loose and scattered puzzle pieces without a box or cover photo to use as a guide. Now, everything is more difficult and, at the same time, more interesting. Interesting times, yes, like that Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” And few adjectives are more ambiguous than “interesting” when applied to times or to a woman (or a man) someone wants to introduce to you. Then, all of a sudden, his son pedaling too close to the edge of the embankment, and the renewed wonder of seeing somebody ride a bicycle. And especially, like right now, his son. Just the upper part of his body behind a brick wall, as if he were running at an impossible speed for a boy. And, watching him, all of it comes to him at the same time from the same place, so near yet so far. Here it comes, here they come: a woman who names her dog after her ex-husband; that British expression he likes so much for the moment of death, for no longer resisting death’s call: “Give up the ghost”; an amateur detective named Capital Italic Ariel who—with the help of an attractive police officer named Jean Tonnik—solves cases while in a coma, in a bed in a hospital suite where his family of decadent millionaires have “deposited” him; a man who goes to a parent-teacher meeting at his daughter’s school with a bikini top under his shirt (and the shirt fabric is too light and transparent, and everyone can see it and talk about it in voices that are quiet yet perfectly audible to the little girl); a pederast whose alias is Mario Poppins; a politician defining something as “an instance of transcendence” and someone hearing him thinking that that “sounds like the title of a song by Yes”; a lion trainer addicted to cocaine whose chemical sweat provokes the stimulated felines to attack (forcing him to inject perfume under his skin to disguise his white-powder scent); the bizarre story of the body of Laurence Sterne compared with the bizarre story of the body of Gram Parsons (both bodies removed from their respective morgues for different reasons); a young man who recognizes his girlfriend (supposedly an executive assistant at a renowned multinational) as a living statue on one of the streets that lead to the sea; an allusion to Rolf Wütherich (in 1955, James Dean’s copilot riding in that fatal Porsche Spyder, who survives the accident in which the actor dies, just to die riding in another car, in 1981); a good name for another of his characters who, inevitably, will be a writer (Vidal-Mortes); the certainty that no blue is better than the blue of the top ranked Indian gods; that Mexican dealer who, in the beginning of Easy Rider, says: “Pura vida, hermano”; and, maybe at the end, a lonely man watching a movie on TV in the middle of the night and thinking that “One of the many possible ways to appreciate the passing of time is to read the credits at the ends of old movies and to find there the still-pale names of the bronzed stars of tomorrow. In small roles, two or three scenes, reciting, if they’re lucky, a handful of brief lines. There, their faces still fresh and undiscovered and youthful, but, in a way, already beginning to be illuminated by the light years; by the light coming not from the past of dead stars but from the glorious future of suns so bright you have to wear dark sunglasses all the time: not so you won’t be recognized but so you don’t have to recognize that everything that burns sooner or later burns out.”

  If he ever writes it, if he ever manages to decipher the correct order and internal logic of that possible story—the man calls the waiter over to pay his tab, it’s getting dark, where has his son gone and what’s his bicycle doing there, on the ground beside a tree?—he thinks it should be the last story in the book.

  At an intersection of hallways, The Lonely Man intersects with a woman, a young writer. An ex-young ex-writer. A writer who’s no longer a young woman and who almost never writes; but who nevertheless is younger than he is and, who knows, at this point, sure, might even write more than he does. A writer who will be younger than he is until he dies and, then, the distance will start to shrink; because the living stop aging the moment they die. And he’s already getting tired of thinking so much about the living and the dead as if they were rival teams in a sport whose rules are never entirely clear.

  She’s the ex-young ex-writer who, some time ago, The Lonely Man christened with a secret nickname for his own private use whose meaning and raison d’être won’t be revealed here and now, maybe later on, who knows. The nickname that The Lonely Man gave the young writer is—just so, blue caps inside a yellow oval—IKEA.

  IKEA—okay, hands up, he admits it: The Lonely Man did end up sharing the nickname with one friend; because the best and worst and funniest nicknames die if they’re kept in isolation—is now almost his nemesis, his sin and his crime, his long shadow, like time nipping his heels. Actually the thing with IKEA isn’t a big deal; but somehow thinking of her as something ominous and epic helps The Lonely Man bear the fact that they’re bound together forever. And The Lonely Man and IKEA are bound together forever by a laudatory blurb he wrote for the jacket of her first book. A blurb that she asked for the way you ask someone out on a date. And which The Lonely Man gave her, immediately and without even reading the book, so long ago (so satisfied with his ingenious speed that he couldn’t see how pathetic his sychophantic obedience was), in the tense center of one of the hurricane parties of what was still his youth. One of those parties where, after a certain hour, thoroughly faded, everyone started to spin around on themselves as if on ecstasy or cocaine or colorful pills or whatever designer drug was hip at the time. Why’d he do it? Good question with several possible bad answers. But all of them correct. Answers that originate with the obviousness of having been tangled in the seven veils of her hysteria. IKEA, in her day, hadn’t been a model writer, nor a writer model, but she had been a model-writer. In other words: IKEA modeled in the pages of the most fashionable fashion magazines. And she also wrote about it. And he remembers the seismic movements that a photo shoot in a short-lived magazine called Cool produced among male writers, where IKEA appeared in short silver shorts and a bikini top that was two sizes too small. In summary: IKEA was, like a piece of IKEA furniture, good to look at, desirable and, later, according to what he’d been told, oh so difficult to put together and easy to take apart, with the touch of a finger, invoking the figure of a father who’d transgressed in his affections for her, between ages eight and fifteen. IKEA’s father had been a legendary publisher in the sixties and her mother a telenovela actress who’d provoked a certain fetishistic fascination among intellectuals. And, of course, IKEA had written a painful and damaging memoir about both of them, their late nights and their excesses. And about her bulemia and anorexia and the supe
rficial cutting she did on her arms and legs. IKEA’s book—he had to admit it—had a really good possible title: Daughter of a . . . The other title IKEA threw around wasn’t bad either: My Favorite Damage. Yes, IKEA was a genius at writing titles. Maybe, he thought, IKEA should just publish titles. Create a new genre. Autotitleolgy. But don’t kid yourself, don’t lie. He liked IKEA. Or better: he liked being liked by IKEA. So, IKEA—he admits it—had beome his equally eroticized and narissistic fantasy of literary parentage, of artistic progeny, through whom he’d project himself onto other names and styles and literary generations. To begin, yes, to harvest disciples who’d hold him up and guarantee him a venerable old age and golden posterity. None of that interested IKEA, of course; and The Lonely Man’s blurb wasn’t the only one celebrating her debut. In fact, next to his name appeared the praise of someone who’d always been considered his aesthetic opposite and rival. IKEA’s strategy had been clear and astute: for her, even two irrconcilable duelists dropped their weapons and embraced each other so they could embrace her. So he, that night, drink in hand and nose asleep and brain awake, recited the requested blurb as if he were reading it. A blurb that she immediately memorized (he could almost see behind her eyes, the dance of an implacable mechanism of pulleys and pistons devoted to self-propulsion), but later, passing it along to her editor that same night, she made a favorable alteration, changing a “necessary” to an “indispensable.” At the time, he found the infraction amusing and, yes, juvenile. Now, that change of adjective, after almost two decades—IKEA, far more well-known and, consequently, more successful than he was, IKEA, who was among the first to transmit her life, live and direct, via a small camera attached to her laptop, IKEA, who tweeted an abortion—seems odious and unforgiveable. Something that, no doubt, in one of those republics of fundamentalist character, women are publicly stoned for, sometimes to death. It’s not that he wishes such a torment on IKEA. But she does seem deserving of something severe and unforgettable. An exemplary punishment. That her next book be a total failure, for example. Or that, if nothing else, she receive a withering review from a renowned name, unafraid to puncture the formidable carapace of political correctness and protection of diverse groups and vocal minorities that IKEA relies on to shield herself and her books from any criticism. Because, attention, the idea that her thing was “the great themes” and “necessary and long-overdue and long-silenced criticism” and “the voice of the voiceless” and all of that, was nothing but fiction. Or, if nothing else, that all editions of her next bestseller have to be recalled for having used a photo or painting on the cover without obtaining the necessary permissions. Or, if not, that a sudden allergic reaction deform her face at the presentation of her latest “multimedia manifesto of criticism.” Something. Please. Right?

  And, yes, he excuses himself, this is the kind of thing you think about when awaiting the fatal or not-fatal diagnosis, the verdict and the punishment of a potentially imminent death.

  And at first, The Lonely Man doesn’t recognize IKEA. Because you never want to run into someone you know in a hospital or clinic (because it’s almost as perturbing as having people you know see you coming out of a sex shop with a bag full of uninflated inflatable dolls, he supposes) and because IKEA spends her time mutating: last time he saw her she was some kind of tropical bird, decked out in colorful clothing and even the shadow of a moustache, not as obvious as Frida Kahlo’s but a moustache nonetheless. Prior to that, IKEA almost always appeared naked in her photos, displaying the credentials of an anorexia (the subject of one of her books) that he never totally bought into. Now, IKEA has a minimalist and androgenous look: her hair cut à la Louise Brooks and dyed blond, her body almost imprisoned in a kind of smoking jacket, her smile rarefied by what appears to him to be the sparkle of a diamond or something that wants to be a diamond in place of one tooth. Seeing her, reading her (because each one of the different IKEA models, from her first iteration as sex-kitten, passing through squalid-grunge girl, to a brief flirtation with religious mysticism and the shaved head of a luxury convent, have had to do, invariably, with the subject of her next novel or memoir), he’s unable to entirely decipher what she’s doing now, what her next book will be about. Probably a historic romance set in a Berlin preparing for the arrival of the Nazis, something to do with lesbianism, he thinks.

  “I’m doing research for something that I’m writing,” The Lonely Man says by way of greeting, almost making up an excuse, without her having asked him anything about what he was doing, in a clinic, at that hour.

  “Ah, I came for some test results,” she informs him solemnly, bringing her hand to her chest, as if that were the solemnest of oaths, as if she were swearing herself into History.

  For a second he was happy—and somewhat ashamed of his happiness, but not too ashamed—imagining IKEA with a terminal illness. But then he said to himself that he couldn’t be that despicable. And that, besides, an early death would, no doubt, turn IKEA into an invulnerable legend. And that, chances are, IKEA is lying (because they don’t deliver test results at that hour) and that, really, she’s probably visiting a young medical student boyfriend, whom she submits to sex acts she saw in a recent David Cronenberg retrospective.

  Then, without saying anything else, IKEA was all over him. And she pushed him inside an empty and dirty operating room, which looked more like a five-star hotel room that had housed a rockstar and his entourage. And more than making love to him or raping him, IKEA centrifuges him. In a matter of seconds. It all happens so fast that he can’t even be sure he had an orgasm. After, IKEA straightens up in front of him and takes out her phone and snaps a picture of him, on the floor, as if swept by a cyclone, far from Kansas, but more black and white all the time, with the shades of a dream that asks itself, somewhat mischievously, if it’s going to turn into a nightmare.

  “For my blog,” IKEA explains.

  And there he stays.

  And, like in a vaudeville, two young residents walk in. Two novices who look more like skaters or surfers than doctors. Or like those eco-friendly and ethno-percussive and millionaire prog-rockers, but with the voices of beggars asking for alms. The two residents have tattoos on their arms and smell like marijuana and, no doubt, fantasize about traveling abroad, without borders, to distant and troubled lands where everyone’s too busy surviving or dying to go around getting sick. And there, at rifle and machete point, get kidnapped. And wind up in the newspapers. And upload videos of their captivity to YouTube, begging to be rescued and to have James Franco write and produce and star in and even pen the criticism of the movie of their lives. And have James Franco play both of them. One James Franco with a beard and another James Franco without a beard, digitally edited. And now the two of them dance (they dance very well, it must be said) and they lift him up off the floor and send him flying through the air to that room where the doctors go to break down or take drugs or rip off nurses’ uniforms with their teeth, he thinks, embarrassed, thinking so many clichés and, at the same time, about hospital mystique. But then he excuses and justifies himself: in moments of absolute uncertainty, there’s nothing better than the comfort of the commonplace—the readymade phrase, the trusty cliché. But nothing could’ve prepared The Lonely Man for what he sees now: the two young almost-doctors, their ties stained with fresh blood, open a closet and remove something from inside and suddenly they’re not dancing alone but with two of those dolls that are pure torso, utilized for practicing cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Both of them twirl and jump around the room singing over and over “Annie, are you okay? Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie?”

  And he watches them dance, smiling.

  And joins in.

  And all that jazz.

  “Smooth Criminals”—the second rock-pop vignette that comes to him, after the Bob Dylan one—reproduces the conversation between two ambulance drivers who are transporting the body of Michael Jackson along the highways of Los Angeles. They talk about their wives, about their kids, about their jobs,
and they turn on the radio. And the news of the death of the self-proclaimed King of Pop has already leaked and the different stations are starting to play his songs non-stop. Soon “Smooth Criminal” comes on and one of the drivers says to the other: “My favorite. Also, far and away, his best video. Much better than ‘Thriller’ as far as I’m concerned.” The other driver says: “Mmm . . . I’m not so sure. This song has always made me nervous. I don’t get it. That chorus where he’s always asking Annie if she’s okay. What’s that mean? Who’s Annie? Billy Jean’s daughter? Sure, Jacko was crazy but . . .” “Very simple,” interrupts the other guy, and explains: “I read an interview in a magazine with one of the musicians who played on Bad. When they recorded that song, Jackson was going around everywhere with a green suitcase. And inside that suitcase Jackson carried one of those dummies that are used to teach CPR maneuvers. The male version of the doll was named Andy and the female one, the one Jackson had, was named Annie. And the first instruction they give you for using it, the first thing you have to do before beginning the whole process, is to ask several times: “Annie, are you okay?” Jackson liked that a lot and he stuck it in as the chorus in his song.” They are both silent for a minute. Then, one of them says: “How crazy was that guy.” The other says: “Amen. Rest in peace.” Then they start to argue about what they’re going to eat after they drop off the pale body that they’re transporting in the back.