The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  It was snowing as he left the theater and he had to put chains on his car tires; driving home, Gerald Murphy felt the memory of Fitzgerald returning to him with perfect clarity, as if he were seeing it all anew. In that instant. Gerald Murphy remembered saying to Fitzgerald that he’d read Tender Is the Night and—“not mentioning Sara’s feelings”—congratulating him on how good certain parts of the novel were. To which Fitzgerald picked up a copy of the book “and said, with that funny, faraway look in his eye, ‘Yes, it has magic. It has magic.’”

  Months later, Gerald Murphy’s cancer worsens and nothing can be done. His last words, seconds before dying, are the words of someone who was a gentleman to the last second of his life: “Smelling salts for the ladies.”

  And let the music keep on playing.

  † Sara Murphy dies on the 9th of October, 1975, singing—like the happiest and most accomplished of Miss Havishams—the Richard Wagner Bridal March in Lohengrin, the march that’d been played for her and Gerald sixty years before. “Here comes the bride . . . Here comes the bride . . .” she sings with that little girl’s voice that some old ladies have.

  There goes the bride.

  † His parents, whose weekdays of birth he never knew and whose day and month of death is a mystery whose solution would reveal nothing about them. His parents’ lives are devoured by the lives of the Murphys and the Fitzgeralds.

  His book—the book he won’t ever write and that doesn’t understand or comprehend who they were, he realizes, a boat against the current, orgasmic and orgiastic, orgastic past, into the past—wouldn’t reveal it either.

  † In 1998, the Modern Library put Tender Is the Night at number twenty-eight on the one hundred best novels in English of the twentieth century. The Great Gatsby is number two, after Ulysses by James Joyce.

  Has he read all of those novels? Just those one hundred novels?

  He looks on the Internet and finds it and—memo for the girl from the beginning—he discovers that yes he has read ninety-three of the one hundred on the list.

  And says to himself that that is something.

  Then he thinks that Christmas is coming.

  † In the dedication of Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night you can read, underwater and holding your breath, not drowning but feeling what it’s like to drown, like the sigh of a last biji, as the sun sets and night rises, tenderly:

  TO

  GERALD AND SARA

  MANY FÊTES

  † Magic.

  LIFE AFTER PEOPLE, OR NOTES FOR A BRIEF HISTORY OF PROGRESSIVE ROCK AND SCIENCE FICTION

  “Dun dun dun da-DAdun, da-DAdun . . .” He realizes that he’s in big trouble when, hearing a strange sound in his house and not being able to locate its source, he finally discovers that the sound is springing (springing, ah, such a sonic verb) from his own mouth. Through clenched teeth. And that it’s nothing but his own voice singing low, deep, martial, the ominous and instantly catchy and unforgettable musical theme that marks the entrances and exits of the dark and asthmatic and uniformed and reconstructed Darth Vader in the movies of the Star Wars saga.

  So that’s what he’s doing, advancing through a house that’s too big for him now. And he moves through its hallways and bedrooms with the sneaking suspicion that, behind and beneath them, are more hallways and more rooms. Not like the most imperial and oppressive of spaceships, more like those mansions from Victorian movies where butlers and servants suddenly appear, like living ghosts, obedient to those who’ve summoned them using a network of gongs and bells, popping out of trapdoors in the walls, hidden by wallpaper and paint and fabric and carpet, which they access via bottomless wardrobes that open onto stairways that lead into the depths. So, Darth Vader has traveled back in time and is walking, fearsome, through a setting of faux English countryside with no idea how he’s arrived there from his galaxy far far away.

  “What year is it?” he wonders.

  “Does it matter?” he answers.

  For a couple months now—since his wife left him, taking their little son with her—he’s been living in the near-suspended animation of the minute-to-minute. It’s harder—but it hurts less.

  She doesn’t come back; the boy comes back on weekends. Nothing is lost, everything is transformed.

  She was, just in case, first a foreign name that he made his own; then she was “the love of his life” (though the love of his life had already been another; so she, to be precise, had been “the love of his other life,” of the life and of the love that came after); and now she is, merely, “the mother of his son.”

  He’s been Tommy (when she loved him), Tomás (when she stopped loving him), Tom to his friends (when he was young and had his whole future in front of him).

  So now, since he’s been living alone, he prefers to think of himself as Tom. A percussive name. A name like a blow, but an affectionate blow; like one you might give someone, facing them, with a closed fist but soft, just below the left shoulder at the level of the heart. A name like a blow and like a salute. And a name that, he likes to think, corresponds to his son’s new name. Not the name they gave him (which was the result of arduous negotiations between relatives with dynastic aspirations and proclivities for the resurrection of names and even nicknames of ancestors as a primitive form of cloning and of keeping everything the same), but the name his son chose for himself for when he is with him: Friday afternoon until Sunday night and, like right now and today, one Christmas (and one New Year) every two years.

  His son announced that on weekends he wanted to be called Fin.

  “Finn?” he asked. “Like the Irish name?” “No, Fin,” answered his son, who is starting to write. “Or maybe End,” his son, who’s starting to speak English, added.

  And starting over (blend the “Dun dun dun da-DAdun da-DAdun . . .” of Darth Vader’s march with the “Dun dun dun dun . . .” of David Gilmour’s guitar) and hello again, Tom, the past has come looking for you.

  The past is a telephone that rings like those old telephones never rang, the ones that, in the beginning of their history, only rang to inform you of something decisive, historic. And, yes, with time there will be many people (though not as many as, for example, those who fixed in their memory the precise and private context that surrounded the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy or the death of John Lennon; those moments in History, with a capital H, that turn into something almost palpable, something that’s almost breathed and enters the lungs and heart and brain) who’ll remember with millimetric precision exactly what they were doing when they found out about the disintegration of that writer.

  Tom was sleeping when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed (he was a newborn baby then, and as far as he’s concerned Oswald acted alone but with a number of prompters). And he was also sleeping when John Lennon was killed (but he was still young, and he remembers that the first thing he thought the next morning, when he found out about everything, was that the ex-Beatle must have been taken out while trying to rob a bank or murdered by Yoko Ono).

  But yes Tom was wide awake and with fifty years draped over him like a very heavy blanket when the writer, who’d once been his best childhood and adolescent friend, evaporated in a storm of particles and quantum physics and dark matter. And, yes, Tom remembers precisely what he was doing then. Not only when he learned of the “accident”—better and more in-depth, on the news that night—but in the exact instant that it took place. Because he’d just finished not talking to the writer but listening to him * (“I’m calling you after so long because you have to know where I am and what I’m about to do, what I’m doing, what I did; because now all times are one for me. Now I no longer have time, I’m atemporal,” his friend had said from so far away) talk on the telephone; because Tom didn’t dare interrupt him, didn’t dare say a word. Tom just listened to his sharp and clear voice for a long time on the answering machine recording, after his son came to find him in the bathroom and said: “Papi, the phone is making a weird noise.”

  A
nd later, subsequently, before, now, he was already headed in that direction. Through the hallways of his house. Honoring the metallic and wheezing memory of Sith Lord Darth Vader, born Anakin Skywalker, Padawan and advisor of Chancellor Palpatine and future Emperor of the Galactic Empire, precocious and treacherous Jedi Knight abducted by the Dark Side of The Force and all of that but, first and foremost, the proudest model of one of the most winningly evil getups in the history of the universe.

  And he, Tom Vader, makes it to the phone and kneels down beside it. It’s an old telephone, the dial kind, that the mother of his son gave him (back when all gifts came wrapped in a combination of affection and jest) after hearing him get tangled up too many times in diatribes against mobile phones. * Mobile phones that actually immobilize you and find you wherever you are. These days, talking on a landline telephone or having it call out to us from some corner of the place where we live or work has acquired a very intimate texture, almost of explicit physical activity or the declassification of classified material. Lost is the dismissive pleasure of letting it ring and the slow frustration of not arriving in time to pick it up and play with the curl of its cord. Forgotten is the fact that at one time you only used the telephone to say what you didn’t dare put in writing, in brief messages or emails of varying size. Pretty soon (he thinks, wondering why he’s thinking this, telling himself that he doesn’t think like this, wondering to whom these thoughts that invade his head like a strange recording belong) none of the old people will be alive anymore who used the telephone simply to communicate. Brief conversations and precise messages, and, every so often, the oddity of fighting over the telephone or the pleasure of—slowly and contemplating each digit, tempted to hang up before dialing the whole number—requesting and receiving the aid of that faithful device to ask out a girl for the first time.

  So, sign of the times, and though he always stares at it whenever he passes by, as if challenging it, this telephone rarely rings. Almost nobody has its number. Actually, the mother of his son is the only person who does. And the mother of his son only uses it when there’s trouble, when he’s going to be in trouble. So the mother of his son has been using it quite a bit lately. So Tom—“Very funny,” she commented the first time she saw it again, the telephone, under a bell jar, when she came to pick up Fin—has painted it red and hooked it up to an antique answering machine, specially modified to allow uninterrupted messages to be left on an old but faithful cassette tape with a forty-five minute capacity per side. There, at least once a week, the mother of his son discharges present-day reproaches and immemorial accusations. And he listens to her, while cooking or cleaning as well as he’s able to cook or clean the house, better all the time, to tell the truth. All of this—testing out a new bathroom disinfectant or daring to try a complex recipe—while still paying extreme attention to the first five or ten minutes of the mother of his son’s telephonic diatribe, wanting to convince himself that this time he’ll be able to decode what happened and how it brought about the end of their love—or what he thought was love. And yet, after a little while, his ex’s voice turns into something else: into something he doesn’t hear but that accompanies him, like the whisper of trees greeting an autumn afternoon with their branches, a paradoxically relaxing sound.

  But it’s not the mother of his son’s voice that he hears now.

  What he hears is, yes, “a weird sound.” Something that sounds like a rushing sea, an orchestral crescendo launching into the triumphal overture of the Tsunami Symphony, a dissonant chaos of strings and winds running over each other to see who will be first to reach the shore and lay waste to all the sand castles and concrete hotels. And, then, a voice, that voice, a voice that he recognizes right away though so many years have come and gone.

  “Remember when you were young . . .” it says.

  The voice on the phone (the voice that he hears now and that he can almost see, like the shred of a ghost’s smokey sheet slipping away through the cracks of the answering machine) is the voice of someone he hasn’t seen in a long time, since the past millennium, since another life that was his once, but no longer. And yet, at the same time, it’s the voice of someone he can’t forget and has remembered often over the years, and he’s even been able to adjust and age the face that corresponds to that voice, seeing photos of its owner here and there. Talking—to his surprise and mild indignation—more about Bob Dylan and Ray Davies than about Pink Floyd. The owner of the voice is, to some, a writer. And to many—as the news of what happened to him is communicated and spread—he will be, for a few hours or a few days at least, The Writer. But for him, for Tom, he’ll always be Penelope’s brother. And Penelope was the first love of his life, the one that wasn’t meant to be and that, consequently (the laws of love challenge and trump the laws of time and space), he still feels and will continue to feel. So now, in the voice of Penelope’s brother (who called him Major Tom, to bother him, but who stopped when he threatened to tell Penelope), he could hear the faint but permanent echo of the voice of Penelope (who called him Tom-Tom, the only person who ever called him that). And Tom tries hard to listen more carefully, to not miss a single detail while, from the living room, another voice reaches him, the voice of a professional TV commentator, explaining to his son and to all humanity that our hours on this planet are numbered. And that there are fewer and fewer every time we go back and count them.

  Life After People is Fin’s favorite TV show and it’s broadcast on Fin’s favorite channel: The History Channel. It’s not that Fin eschews cartoons or other products targeting kids his age. But Fin prefers documentaries. He said once that he prefers “the real part” to “the invented part.” Not long ago, Tom tempted him with a trip to Disney World and, first to his surprise and then admiration and subsequent fatherly pride, the answer was: “Papi: Disney on TV and at the movies; but Disney in real life, please, I’m asking you, I don’t want to.”

  And, of all the many forms and types of reality, Fin seems to prefer the alternate reality of Life After People and its variations on the aria of a catastrophe caused not by the actions of human beings but just the opposite: by their sudden lack of action, by their absence.

  What Life After People describes and shows and narrates is not exactly the real part, but it’s not the invented part either.

  What Life After People describes and shows and narrates is the hypothesis of what might happen to our planet if we, suddenly and without warning, were to disappear without leaving behind a trace or a body or smoking ruins. When Fin explained it to him, he decided to watch at least one episode, just to make sure it wasn’t some kind of subliminal sermon of the Christian creationist-fundamentalist eschatology, etcetera. That thing about, all of a sudden, the Rapture: the just and the pure ascending to the heavens to “be received among the clouds” and “meet the Lord on high.” But no, fortunately, everything all Darwinian and serious and documented and, yes, realist: impassioned but rational testimonies of ecologists, engineers, geologists, archeologists, and climatologists theorizing, in a vertiginous crescendo, about what will happen to everything we leave behind—animals and buildings and landscapes—after we’ve gone never to return. And the truth is that the structure and mechanics of Life After People is kind of addictive, producing the need in the spectator for increasingly high doses of a drug called Absence. Because in Life After People this is how it goes: each episode—separated by different subjects/items, like modes of transport, skyscrapers, historical monuments, military arsenals, works of art, and mummified bodies, along with many other materials and matters that, of course, don’t include love, love after people, Tom after the love that he once had and that once had him—explains what’s going to happen to everything we’ve left behind one day after our departure.

  And then two and three and ten days.

  And, later, one and five and twenty and a hundred and a hundred fifty and two hundred and five hundred years.

  And on like that up to a thousand and ten thousand and two million years
.

  This predilection of Fin’s for the most passive and aggressive of the apocalyptic (summed up in drawings he did at school, when the teacher asked him to draw a portrait of his family and all he turned in was the nearly blank outline of an empty house); after another drawing, for Holy Week (can someone explain to Tom what his son is doing in a religious school, where they praise Jesus Christ on the cross but, instead of INRI, it has UFO written on it?), landed him in immediate appointments with pediatricians and psychologists. The expert diagnosis (that to him, having to do with his son, so special and unique, seemed of offensive simplicity and banality) concluded that “the little boy, who in addition to having the particularity of being born to older parents,” was expressing “the unconscious desire—coming to grips with the end of his parents’ marriage—for the end of absolutely everything.” At a parents’ meeting, he didn’t hesitate to offer his own theory, which, of course, further disturbed the teacher and prompted that look from his ex where she shuts her eyes as tight as she can. Of course, his ideas about the different perception of the future among today’s kids (because they already live in the future and they’re not interested in the classic fantasy of rockets and computers, which is why they prefer to project themselves much further, into the terra incognita of a new prehistory, he explained) were as warily received as they were quickly discarded while, he could intuit it, as if he were reading subtitles at her feet, the teacher thought: “Aha . . . now I get what’s going on with the kid.”

  “The two of us, my son and I, really like science fiction,” he said apologetically while his ex tried to help him out but not really; because then she clarified that it was he and not she who, when his son was between four and five years old, had hired as a babysitter “that ugly ugly girl who studied cosmic anthropology or something like that, and who spent all her time talking about finding irrefutable proof of intelligent life on other planets and things like that. She doesn’t work for us anymore, of course.”