The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  In “Knives,” a sleeping boy wakes up in the middle of the night. It hasn’t been long since he went to bed, because his eyes aren’t yet “full of lasagnas” (this childish error was corrected some time ago, but the humor of switching “lasagnas” for “lagañas,”—the Spanish word for “eye boogers”—has remained implanted as a family joke). The boy, about four or five years old, fell asleep a couple hours earlier thinking about how a paper airplane seems to weigh more than the same piece of paper before it’s folded. The boy wonders if the seed of a possible calling might pulse inside this intrigue, but—still lacking the color wheel with the colors of physics, or Zen, or poetry—he doesn’t wonder what that calling might be. He has enough to deal with at the moment, having to respond to the horrible question that adults shouldn’t be allowed to ask children: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Or even worse: “What are you going to be when you grow up?” Questions far more disturbing than that already classic question, easy to process/escape with a “Both the same”: “Who do you love more: Mommy or Daddy?” Now, then, thinking about all of this with his eyes shut, the boy opens them ever so slightly and discovers his mother and father, standing in his bedroom doorway, looking at him with that terrifying intensity that adults only direct at children when they’re sleeping, so they don’t frighten them. The father’s and mother’s eyes are full of tears and strange smiles hang from their mouths and, in their hands, the boy discovers and trembles with half-closed eyes, pretending to be asleep, both of them are holding big, long knives. And the father and the mother don’t say anything; they just look at him, as if waiting to be granted the courage to do what they want to do. At last, they turn around and go back to the kitchen where they’re cutting onions for a salad and tell each other how much they love their son. But the boy (his eyes tightly shut, begging for the arrival and comfort and relief of a nightmare about monsters or one where he finds himself naked in front of his classmates or one where he falls and falls from way up high in the sky) doesn’t hear them. And he’ll never forget. And he won’t say anything to them the next morning when, starting then and until the end, nothing will ever be the same again, nothing will ever be the same after seeing his parents and their knives, the knives of his parents.

  Not long now before the appointed hour. In a few short minutes, his life might change forever. It’s even possible that his life will begin to die in order to give birth to the shadow of his death. The Lonely Man had always fantasized about the idea of a sudden lightning strike, a flash, an instant snapshot. To stop all of a sudden, like a little toy tin-man with no one to wind it up. Or, better yet, to die in his sleep, and the only sign that something new is underway is a subtle yet notable shift in the mechanics of his dreams: dreaming, like the boy from that last story idea, that he’s falling, naked, from high in the sky, but this time, this last time, he doesn’t wake up at the moment of impact.

  Now, with his eyes wide open, The Lonely Man has never felt so awake. The Lonely Man opens the first door his hand finds and goes inside. He needs—before going back to the doctor’s office—to sit and rest and catch what might be the first of his last breaths.

  The room is in the half-light and, inside it, there are two beds, and in the beds, an old man and a boy. The old man has the look of a mummified pharaoh who never got put in his pyramid. He must be ninety-something at least. He must have seen and lived through so many things. He must have witnessed the end of so many wars, The Lonely Man thinks. Now, there he is, living history fading away, breathing through a mouth that his jaws no longer protect, growling not like a bear but like a cave where bears hibernate. A cave where it’s always winter. The old man looks at him with bluish-white eyes. And says nothing. The old man is fully occupied with making it to the vertiginous summit of the next minute and, once there, asking himself whether it’s worth it to begin scaling the next one.

  In the bed beside him is a boy. The other extreme of the same spectrum. The boy doesn’t have a single hair on his head and his skin exhibits the tautness of a drum beaten by the closed fists of a fever. The boy must be about six years old, but he also looks like a new and eternal and timeless animal. The boy looks at him with an arrogance that belongs not to him, but to the disease. One of those terrible diseases with a hyphenated name. One of those difficult to pronounce diseases. Looking at the boy, terrified, The Lonely Man escapes into the memory of a scary movie with a clown doctor. What was it called? Patch Adams, yes. Starring the actor The Lonely Man hated more than any other, always and forever—Robin Williams. Robin Williams, who was like a mime who screams and doesn’t stop screaming and there, in the most distasteful of all his distasteful movies, Williams was good, very good, as Patch, a doctor ready to do whatever he could to yank a smile out of a kid whose days-hours-minutes-seconds were numbered and running out. A man convinced that all a terminal boy needs is a fool like him making faces at the foot of his bed. Now, the boy looks at him and doesn’t know if he should stick out his tongue and start clucking all around the room or pretend that he’s holding up a door in front of him. He doesn’t buy it, to tell the truth. A boy who’s about to die doesn’t care about those things, because he’s really busy thinking about, when he dies, how—“What do you not want to be when you don’t grow up?”—the infinite people he could’ve been will die with him. When the old man dies, on the other side of that unbridgeable abyss between the two beds, one person will die, the one he already was; because all the possible and discarded sketches were destroyed in another millennium. The boy, on the other hand, could’ve been so many things, he could’ve saved humanity to later destroy it. Or, at least, he could’ve found out how his favorite show—with zombies and vampires and people who come back through the door on the other side of death—would end. But, though they give him such thrills (and frighten him a little), the boy doesn’t believe in them, he doesn’t believe in second supernatural chances, just like he no longer believes in all the waning diagnostic seconds that his parents collect as if they were postcards of places their son will never go. Now, the boy looks at him and says nothing; but The Lonely Man is almost certain—like in a silent movie, like on those posters with white letters across a black background—that he lets slip, moving his lips, without emitting a sound, a thundering “Why me?”

  In “Another Girlfriend in a Coma,” the protagonist enters a hospital room where, in adjacent beds, lie a centenarian and a boy who hasn’t and won’t make it through the first half-decade of life. The young protagonist (who escaped from a waiting room where, sadly infuriated, his girlfriend’s family members were waiting; she tried to commit suicide and though it wasn’t his fault exactly, the fact that he was leaving her didn’t really help the fragile stability of her recurrent instability) enters that room and sighs with relief. The old man looks at him with a smile and begins to recite something that seems like a well-rehearsed monologue: “When you’re a kid you think about death, when you’re an adult you think about childhood and old age, when you’re old you think again about death . . . Old age is like a black and distorting mirror of infancy: you start sleeping and crying all the time again, nobody understands what you say, you can’t control your basic bodily functions, they take you everywhere in a wheelchair, you take medicines constantly, and everyone tells you they love you so much, but nobody pays any attention to you . . . And every night, you close your eyes, thinking that maybe you won’t open them again. But the morning is still there the next morning. And you’re still in that world. As if you’d been reborn or reincarnated; but in the same failing body, in a body that once ran on beaches and now is dragged through hallways, a body like the ruins of what was once a temple where you—who no longer believe in anything—are the only one who worships now, always on your knees, unable to stand . . . Ah, you can’t imagine how badly I wish I could leave my death a widow . . . I’m so tired of not dying. All my friends and acquaintances have gone on ahead of me. I am the last and the only one left. Living in a cemetery. A kind of negative of a g
host, an inversion of the theorem: the survivor in a world where no one is left, where everyone has already gone to another planet and, if they think about me, wherever they are, they do so as if invoking an apparition—disappeared, left behind, so far away and Beyond. Someday you’ll understand what I’m saying, if you’re granted the so-called blessing of a long life. They say we’re going to live longer and longer and that our brains, not ready for so much thinking, will go mad. And that, having evolved to live longer, we’ll discover that as superadults (the average Medieval life expectancy was barely forty years of bad living), we’ve devolved into mega-old prehistorics, who have no idea what to do with so many years and so little body to endure them. And that we’ll walk on all fours again, weighed down by gravity, until we’re almost invertebrates and mononeuronales. And that the world will fill up with madmen and madwomen, madder than ever, who will have to be cared for by fewer and fewer young people, because fewer people are born all the time. Who knows . . . But I can assure you that, before long, all around you, everyone will start to die. One drop at a time. Until they form a damp stain on the wall that soon will come down, pushed by the tsunami of birthdays becoming wakes and funerals, into ephemeral ephemera and . . .” Worn out and thinking of running back to the bedside of his ex-girlfriend and waking her with a magic kiss and falling to his knees and asking for her hand, because he needs a hand to hold onto, the young man decides to focus on the boy, who fixes him with eyes of feline intensity in the half-light and commands him, knowing full well what he’s thinking, as if he’d known him all his life, in a high-pitched voice: “I strictly forbid you to have an epiphany.”

  But, take note, quick, he does have an epiphany and, at the door to the doctor’s office, he says: “If everything is fine, I promise I’ll never write again.” He repeats it aloud without anyone but him hearing, like saying magic words so that the trick doesn’t work, so that box doesn’t open and—final presto!—is transformed into a coffin ready for the most Viking of funerals.

  “The end,” he says.

  “It’s over,” he says.

  And he wonders if he’ll be able to keep his promise. If there might not be some drug (ask the doctor) with effects similar to apomorphine, which years ago was given to homosexuals and nymphomaniacs who wanted to change or to criminals who were oh so happy being criminals. A kind of Ludovico Technique that provokes nausea in place of the panic of the blank page. Maybe not. Maybe no high-octane and superior-potency medicine will be necessary. For a while now, The Lonely Man writes little and slowly, with more or less directed inertia and the reflexes of an old elephant, stopping too often to ask how things are going en route to its graveyard. Anyway, he makes that promise—to stop, to give up his profession, the only thing he knows how to do—like someone handing over his most prized offering, like sending his son to be sacrificed, his son who he loves more than anything, but, also, thinking that he’s so tired; that it’d be the perfect excuse; that really, to tell the truth, he enjoyed writing less all the time, that maybe he’d never really enjoyed writing.

  The Lonely Man opens the door and there’s the doctor—who is now his doctor, just his, he doesn’t want to think that he shares him with others, that his devotion isn’t exclusive—with a folder full of papers and graphs and X-rays and ascending and descending lines. All the information about his personal catastrophe—his intimate and private earthquake. He’s already suffered its effects and now he just has to wait for them to tell him how many victims were inside that one victim and pray that new aftershocks and conflicts aren’t provoked inside him. But—it’s been proven, every time the earth opens to close over its parasites or a giant wave decides to take revenge and swallow all those annoying surfers or a church comes crashing down and buries those who believed that in that place God would protect them from his own fury—we know absolutely nothing about earthquakes. When they happen, all you can do is tremble and hope that they pass soon and that you don’t pass with them.

  “Everything fine. Everything in order. False alarm,” says the doctor and, in the same second, The Lonely Man doesn’t know whether to love him or to hate him. Because the doctor seems somewhat disappointed faced with the simple banality of something that’d almost split him in two. And he forgets the explanation of his case (the doctor explains it to him in the manner of a disgruntled Sherlock Holmes who’s been bothered with a trifle like searching for and finding lost keys, it seems to him; the particulars escape him as soon as he hears them, coming to his ears as if dragged through the mud of white noise and interference and ellipses) almost at the same time that it’s communicated to him: “It could’ve been anything. It could’ve been a heart attack or the advance of cerebral ictus or the first signs of a tumor. But it was just gastritis,” the doctor tells him. “Supergastritis. But gastritis in the end. A digestive disorder provoked by an inflammation of the . . . which provoked certain pressure on the heart and the decreased arrival of oxygen to the . . . and hence the symptoms: the dizziness, the . . . , and the . . . and . . . and that’s it.”

  With an almost childish smile, he tries to explain that it wasn’t a joke, that it was serious, that it wasn’t some trifle that almost sent him tumbling down the mountain:

  “But it’s just that I felt like I was dying,” he implores, as if apologizing.

  “Of course,” the doctor soothes him, as if he were a boy swearing that he’d studied the lesson, that he understood all of it, but that, now, he doesn’t know what happened at all.

  And the doctor continues:

  “In fact, the symptom you experienced is called, precisely, sensation of death. Something similar to the full experience of death, down to the smallest and richest detail, but without dying. And there are many documented cases of people with what you had, who, convinced they’re dying, hence the name, are so frightened by what’s happening to them that, believing they’re dying, they actually die,” the doctor concludes releasing a final little laugh of barely a syllable, but with a deadpan expression.

  Then the doctor looks for and finds a notepad and scribbles something incomprehensible: “One every twenty-four hours, before dinner. The syrup when you get up. And mix the powders in water and drink them with lunch,” he instructs. And, yes, thinks The Lonely Man, another unequivocal sign that his time is passing and running out: it takes more and more medicines to tame the beast of a single pain. And the doctor gives him the prescription and shakes his hand and, over his shoulder, looks toward the door. His shift is over. His time in a starring role under the lights and sensors has come to an end. Good luck.

  But he’s not ready to go just yet. It doesn’t seem like a good ending.

  Trick of the trade.

  There’s something missing here and he doesn’t know what it is. He searches for it in the air and doesn’t find it.

  “Any questions?,” asks the doctor, who suddenly seems younger than ever, almost like a boy playing doctor.

  “Well, while I’ve got you here, there were always a couple things that have intrigued me for as long as I can remember and maybe you can clear them up for me,” suggests The Lonely Man.

  The doctor looks at him with a mix of annoyance and curiosity.

  “Tell me,” he says with the automatic diction of someone preparing to compete in a contest, to win an award.

  “Well, the first thing is about the shoes . . . The shoes of people who are hit in the street. By a car. Or by a bus. You know: I never understood why the body is there, sprawled, and the shoes are always elsewhere, at a slight distance and . . .”

  “Simple: when you receive a hard impact, the torso, which houses the majority of the vital organs, swells up to cushion the blow. And the extremities contract. Automatic reflex. Hence the feet make themselves smaller and the shoes and even the socks fly off. And it doesn’t only happen with shoes and feet. The same thing happens with hands. It also happens with rings. Or with dentures and glass eyes. Anything else?” answers and asks the doctor, disappointed, once again, by the softn
ess of the mystery that he’s posed.

  “Well, yes: the thing about asparagus. Why does your urine smell like asparagus a short time after you eat it? Why doesn’t the same thing happen when you ingest other foods? Why doesn’t urine smell like braised chicken with potatoes or like a cheeseburger or like French fries?”

  The doctor smiles and it’s obvious that this second question, even if it isn’t worthy of his diploma and his talent, at least strikes him as more unexpected and original.

  “Ah, yes: that is due to the breakdown and metabolization of a particular amino acid. It’s called asparagine. But, so you know, it doesn’t happen to everyone. The latest samples and studies have concluded that only forty-three percent of people who eat asparagus metabolize the amino acid. And there are some who do metabolize it, but aren’t able to smell it when they go to the bathroom. Hence they conclude that one’s capacity to produce urine with the smell of asparagus is due to the influence of certain genetic polymorphisms. In fact, I don’t produce it. Or it could be that I don’t smell it. Who knows . . .” the doctor pronounces these last words with an almost melancholic tone. As if, very much in spite of himself, he were—in the presence of an absolute stranger inside of whose organism he knows everything that happens—metabolizing the amino acid of ungranted wishes, of everything he’ll never experience.

  And the doctor adds: “But everything I’m telling you, if you’re so intrigued, you could’ve found out in a matter of seconds via Google . . . Why didn’t you just do that?”

  And the Lonely Man doesn’t have the strength to tell him that, if that’d been the case, they’d never have had that conversation.

  The Lonely Man decides, now, yes, it’s time to go, time to get out of there, thinking that he could include all of this in a story or novel. But then he remembers his promise—to stop writing in exchange for being able to keep on reading. Or not even that. Because the world must be full of people who don’t read or write and who, nevertheless, are happy and normal, right? It’s even possible that they’re more normal and more happy.