The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  And it’s true that Tom had really liked the girl (whose name was Hilda and, yes, she was really ugly, but her ugliness was such that it came off as almost epic and noble; Hilda was the daughter of a national sex symbol who had died years ago in a car accident and a surviving father who had turned into the kind of person who shows up drunk at high school parties). And Fin had liked her too. And he was really sad to say goodbye to her. And once, through a half-open door, he’d listened to them talking, Hilda and Fin. About new theories regarding the age of the universe and its expiration date, about the probability that some day a family of meteors would crash into Earth and wipe us off the map like the dinosaurs. And Tom liked so much to listen to his son speak, how he speaks, using inexplicable, quasi-nineteenth century turns of phrase like “I suppose,” “rather, I would say that,” “now that you mention it,” “perhaps you are referring to,” and “one small thing.” Tom wonders where all of that comes from. Or where all the characters that Fin invents come from: Ratita (a rodent who has amassed a fortune in coconuts) or Pésimo Malini, the worst magician in the world who, while performing his tricks, making things disappear, always asks the audience to close their eyes and not to open them until he tells them to, between five and ten minutes later, after he’s hidden everything backstage.

  Of course, Tom thinks, the thing with Fin couldn’t have anything to do with his fairly limited exposure, as mentioned, to popular cartoons. Tom watched some of them with Fin—Sponge Bob, Phineas & Ferb, South Park, The Simpsons, and his favorite: Monsters vs. Aliens— * and he was surprised by their hallucinogenic potency and zapping delirium of references: it was clear to Tom that the show’s young and multimillionaire creators grew up marked by multitudinous TV channels and laboratory drugs and blitzkriegs, just as their direct predecessors (The Pink Panther or Wile E. Coyote and The Roadrunner) had smoked to excess in the circular irresolution of Vietnam, or their parents (Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry) had been good ol’ boys disembarking on Omaha Beach and getting their booze and cigarettes via parachute drops. And again Tom catches himself thinking in a way he never thought he’d think—as if someone else were thinking for him or dictating his thoughts. And he wonders if the same thing might not happen to his son, if his son might not be a kind of loudspeaker for an interplanetary civilization and . . . Now, yes, he’s thinking like himself: because science fiction was always his thing and, for a while now, according to the mother of his son, another one of the possible bad influences contaminating Fin.

  And, OK, it’s possible that Fin isn’t normal.

  But not that he’s worse. Or that he has problems.

  Sometimes, watching Fin without him realizing, Tom has the unsettling and hard-to-explain sensation that Fin knows-something-he-doesn’t-know. He experienced it recently, when they were coming out of a movie theater. A movie in which humans designed gigantic robots so they could take a stand against monsters emerging from a crack in the bottom of the ocean. Or that other one that made Fin say: “Papi, how can it be that in the movie where Captain Kirk of the Enterprise is young, everything is much more technologically advanced than in the series in which Captain Kirk is already much older?” Tom wasn’t really sure which of the two movies it was. But he was sure that he and Fin went running through the street, down the metro stairs, jogging across the platform at a speed that he’d never have believed himself still capable of achieving and, with undreamed grace and efficiency, they jumped into the train car just as the door slid shut. Already in their seats and heading home (so satisfied with his achievement, memorizing the day and time and name of the station, making history), he couldn’t help but say to himself silently, with a shiver, something like: “This was probably the last time my body will let me do something like that.” To which—as if he could clearly hear the secret frequency of his thoughts—Fin, squeezing his hand, said: “I don’t think so.”

  Or that other time when, looking in the window display of a bookstore, they saw a small tin toy. An old toy. The kind that runs on a cord and by inserting a key and winding it up so that it moves and walks. The figure of a little man wearing a hat and carrying a suitcase. Fin looked at it for a few seconds and said, with a voice that seemed to come from very far away and seeming—like when a movie gets dubbed into another language—to not entirely correspond to the movement of his lips: “You should put that little man on the cover of your next book. In addition: you should make that little man the main character your next book too.” Smiling, Tom pointed out that he wasn’t a writer—he was a musician. Which Fin corrected: “That’s here, Papi; but in another of the many space-time wrinkles, you’re a writer. And you’re very happy with Mamá. And Mamá is very happy with you. And I wear glasses. And I go to a school without priests or nuns, where everyone speaks French, oui, monsieur.” So, after such a revelation, he—as if hypnotized—went into the store and bought the toy. And, sure, it would look really nice on a book cover and, yes, it reminded him a lot of the stylized and seductive covers of the paperbacks that he bought blindly as he emerged from childhood, judging them by their covers—as beguiling as Storm Thorgerson’s designs—and always finding them innocent, and in whose pages he read H. P. Lovecraft and Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares and other strange science-fictioneers for the first time. And he bought a funny replica of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey as well, just a rectangular piece of black metal sold with the sarcastic label ACTION FIGURE: ZERO POINTS OF ARTICULATION! He doesn’t know where the monolith might have ended up; but he has the little tin man, always, on top of the synthesizer in his studio and inside its box that, in loud caps, warns: ATTENTION: THIS IS NOT A TOY / FOR ADULT COLLECTORS ONLY. But it doesn’t matter what it says there: Tom lends it to Fin. And Fin falls asleep with the little tin man in his hand after, every night that he sleeps at Tom’s house, watching an episode of Life After People and, if possible, his favorite—the first episode of the second season titled: “Wrath of God.”

  Tom saw it for the first time the other night. He decided to watch that particular episode when, walking along the street, he was startled to hear his son, multiple times, rhythmically repeating “Kolmanskop . . . Kolmanskop . . . Kolmanskop.”

  And when Tom asked him what that was, Fin answered: Life After People. “Wrath of God.”

  So here is Tom—tonight, watching the DVDs of the show he bought for Fin for his last and very recent birthday, the sixth, coinciding with one year of life without him, except on weekends—to find out what Kolmanskop is.

  And then he knows. The episode “Wrath of God” deals with the fragility of the religious symbols that mankind has left in the wake of its processes and processions—the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the Coliseum, the Christ the Redeemer Statue, San Pedro, the glass case that houses the Shroud of Turin—and all of it leading to Kolmanskop. Because—he’s already hooked, he’s already a convert to Life After People—one of the show’s discoveries, after bombarding you with digital animations anticipating a future where everything, invariably, comes crashing down due to elemental activity, is that of seeking out and finding a real place that, here and now, while we’re still here, singularly reproduces the plurality of conditions of a morning when everything will be covered by a blanket of water and ice and earth and vegetation and oblivion, because nobody will be left to remember it and to make memory.

  Hence Kolmanskop.

  “Kolmanskop!” exclaims his son, with the happiness of it now being, once again, his turn to show his father something he doesn’t know about.

  And they hug.

  And there they go.

  To Kolmanskop.

  Kolmanskop—Coleman’s Hill in Afrikaans or Kolmannskuppe in German—is an abandoned mining colony in the Namibian desert, a few short kilometers inland from the port of Lüderitz. The name comes from a truck driver named Johnny Coleman, who was trapped there during a sandstorm. And, in Life After People, Kolmanskop corresponds to and occupies the space and category of Fifty Years Without Us. The nar
rator—over vistas of open doors and broken windows and stairways that lead nowhere; in houses that are now parts of sand dunes and homes to serpents—describes in a voice between mellifluous and implacable: “Fifty years after people, desert towns around the world are being sandblasted into oblivion . . . How do we know this? There’s one forsaken place, in the middle of an ancient desert, where it has already happened. In fifty years without people, unstoppable forces play hell with man’s legacy. In one remote desert of the world, a devil wind is methodically drowning homes and dismantling a town brick by brick. Here, a biblical plague has already arrived.”

  “What’s ‘biblical?’” his son asks.

  “In general, first and foremost, it means bad news,” he answers. “It gets a little better in the sequel. But not much,” he adds.

  And from the screen, the narrator continues:

  “This is Kolmanskop, Namibia. It may seem like a hellish mirage rising from southern Africa’s Namib Desert, but this is no illusion. It is one of the most remarkable sites on the planet. A town whose fate could have been ripped directly from the pages of the Old Testament. Dozens of homes and public buildings scar the desert hillside like half-buried corpses.”

  And the narrator continues telling the history of the place with the diction of a reverse prophet, as if precisely divining the past but never fully understanding it. For the first time, he—and his son as if it were the first time—listen to what was and look at what’s left of a colony founded when, in 1903, a German railroad worker, alerted by the reflection of a ray of sunlight, found a diamond scarcely covered by a thin layer of sand. The man showed it to his boss and, lickety-split—wealthy settlement. The sand and the constant wind aren’t easy to withstand; but the diamonds that “millions of years earlier erupted from the earth and were slowly scattered and blown north” compensate for any hardships with interest. And soon, a hospital is built and a ballroom and a school and a casino and an icemaker and the first street car on the continent. Because “in Kolmanskop, the workers literally plucked diamonds from the surface, often using the light of the moon.” And Tom can imagine them: men and women dressed for a ball, strolling through the dunes, with their children competing for who can find and collect the most diamonds, like in a surrealist tableau vivant. Of course, the diamonds run out and World War One complicates things and, by 1954, the site is abandoned and is now just an attraction for strange tourists or, he thinks, fans of J. G. Ballard or Philip K. Dick, or worshippers of the new ruin and dysfunctionality of everything. An ode to entropy from a throat ravaged by thirst and cold. An architectural representation of Alzheimer’s, Tom thinks: the perfect postcard of oblivion and absence as a territory regaining its virginity. Something that reminds him of something else that, presently, he remembers.

  Wish You Were Here.

  Crazy diamond.

  “Kolmanskop looks like a Pink Floyd album cover,” Tom says.

  “What’s a Pink Floyd?” asks Fin.

  And now, oh so happy, it’s the father’s turn to teach his son something for a change.

  And Tom goes to his studio and finds all the editions he has of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. Many. Two vinyl and Made-in-the-UK originals: one open, so he could see everything it contains, and the other closed and virginal and still wrapped and sealed in its black shrink-wrap with the sticker where two metallic hands clasp together over seas and skies and deserts. One Made-in-the-USA edition with an alternate take from the same photo shoot in the alleys around a film studio where the man in flames greeting his friend looks somewhat more upright than in the Made-in-the-UK edition. Then, the special edition in transparent vinyl (the one that the sandman à la René Magritte is holding in one of the images on the interior sleeve), the ephemeral and quickly extinct quadraphonic species, the successive remasterings and remixes on CD (one of them gold: 20 Bit Digital SBM 24 KARAT GOLD CD CK 64405 Limited Edition Master Sound) and, just recently, the crown jewel: the equally triumphant as it is somewhat absurd Immersion Box Set titled Ceci n’est pas une boíte. There, no less than four CDs with alternate takes (“Have a Cigar” without the voice of interloper Roy Harper, “Wish You Were Here” with the violin of Stéphane Grappelli) and live (Wembley 1974, concerts little appreciated in their day by the expert critic who, along the way, accused David Gilmour of not washing his hair). Also, DVDs and Blu-rays with films designed by Gerald Scarfe to be projected during the live performance of the album (with vistas of red tides and men weathered by cyclones very much à la Life After People) in addition to a variety of objects and paraphernalia and memorabilia. Commemorative books, reproductions of tickets to opening concerts, programs (Fin’s definitely going to really like the one with two extraterrestrials, contemplating the prismatic pyramid from the cover of The Dark Side of the Moon, marveling at the possibility of having found something with “creative energy” among the earthlings), three transparent marbles, and even a scarf! Tom, who (to the horror of the mother of his son) paid a great deal for all that treasure, told himself that the senselessness of the Immersion Box Set acquired a certain logic when justified as the discographers’ only possibly strategy to combat pirating and free downloads. And now he was even happier for having bought it: because it’d be a better way to, yes, immerse and explain everything to Fin. Because kids, first and foremost, understand everything with their eyes. The Immersion Box would be the perfect way to explain to Fin why that music was the soundtrack of his puberty and the most important verses of his life and that they had helped Tom become who he was today.

  Sure: who Tom is today isn’t who Tom wanted to be then, when he was growing up.

  Sure, again: Tom is a musician. That is what he wanted to be. But he’d wanted to be a different class of musician. Tom wished that he’d lived the impossibility of “being in” Pink Floyd or, at least, that his musical project in the prime of his youth, The Silver River, had amounted to something beyond a few demos with songs about walking under the rain or across rooftops. Tom wished that his band had been built to last, to continue in the times of New Wave and of MTV and of that Pink Floyd II without Roger Waters that provoked so many conflicting emotions inside Tom. Almost more than Waters as a solo act. A Pink Floyd II that, in truth, was a Pink Floyd III; because Pink Floyd I, with Syd Barrett, had lasted the length of a sigh, the length of one of those gusts of wind you hear on Pink Floyd albums. Pink Floyd I hadn’t even lasted as long as The Silver River. And Tom thought that The Silver River was going to take him back to the pinnacle, back to the progressive rock of the end of his childhood. But careful: not to that ridiculous British progressive rock that (perhaps as a response to the Aquarian and Cancerous undertow of sensitive songwriters on the other side of the Atlantic) had taken refuge in epics with spirits and Tolkienesque giants, in an addiction to the conceptual, and in narcissistic excesses where keyboards were played by lashing them with whips or wielding Excalibur imitations. No, for Tom, progressive rock was distinct from and a kind of little brother to that rock that’d rolled off the rails: that rock of older cousins and young uncles and aunts and even premature parents now entering the third or fourth decade of their lives, as if entering a shadowy room after oh so many colored lights out in the open air. For Tom, true progressive rock was what’d transcended all of that and what now, yes, was progressing, moving in a new direction, and readying itself to no longer be the rebel music of clever teenagers leaving home in search of new and more powerful emotions, but the music for kids who had an excess of new and powerful emotions at home already. The long songs with so many parts and corners of the best progressive rock were—unlike those unadorned rock songs, brief as telegrams, sending simple messages like that you’re going to lose that girl or you want to hold her hand, like you can’t get no satisfaction, like you’re hoping to die before you get old, like all you need is love but money can’t buy it—the perfect and most practical soundtracks for those kids to hide inside of, inside the households of their young parents who, before long, realized they weren’t
so young anymore and that they no longer hoped to die before they got old, but who nevertheless remained exceedingly childish. Yes, progressive rock—the true and noblest of progressive rock—wasn’t the music of a mythical past or of a convulsing present but the music of a chrome future that aimed for the stars, the faraway stars, as far away as possible from those homes where it was always: Houston, we have a problem.

  Hence Tom’s admiration for Pink Floyd. For having formed in the mind-bending sixties so they could, like him, make something of themselves in the mind-bent seventies. For turning the page and the sheet of the score. For the stripped-down look of Pink Floyd and for the air of productive apathy of Pink Floyd; like slacker hippies, like easy-going professionals and their own bosses (unlike The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, Roger Waters and David Gilmour and Richard Wright and Nick Mason were children of “well-to-do” families), backing up that dandy indolence with the complex mechanics of their shows, riddled with special effects and flaming airplanes and flying pigs. A technical sophistication with a casual elegance approximated only—just a little, not much—by Genesis, already sans the histrionic Peter Gabriel, on the cover of Seconds Out: a live, double album that, in addition, inside, contained the seductive version of “Firth of Fifth.” A track that for a few days made Tom think and wonder (THE INSTRUMENT of progressive rock was not the electric guitar but the synthesizer, many synthesizers stacked like geologic layers and played with arms outstretched, as if from the trenches of arpeggios) whether he’d actually rather be the exhibitionist Tony Banks instead of the subtle and unsurpassable and little-considered Richard Wright. Luckily for him (Yes and their covers anticipating the Avatar silliness and Jon Anderson’s little voice were never a problem; Mike Oldfield was a species of Pink Floyd crossed with Liberace; King Crimson and Van der Graaf Generator were too hermetic and virtuosic; and the truth is that Ian Anderson and his flute and his shepherd stork poses make you feel a little embarrassed for him, like an undesirable drunk uncle whom you can’t, though you’d like nothing better, not invite to the family party), all those diversions, products of adolescent hormonal curiosity, didn’t last long. And Tom returned to his same desert oasis as always. Pink Floyd was unique, they began and ended in Pink Floyd. Their music—their harmonic climates and sonic sequences—remained classically modern and modernly classic; * so much more transcendent and serious and relaxed than that of today’s Pink Floyd for emos, the stiff and solemn and oh so self-conscious Radiohead. Radiohead who were like someone pretending to be Pink Floyd: kind of picking or stroking or just staring at their instruments. (All of a sudden—why?—he hated Radiohead so much, a hate he’d never felt before confronting the imagined image of their singer—his name is Thom? What’s the point of that h in Thom?—with lowered lashes, shaking in a little epileptic dance in one of his music videos, dancing perfectly awfully so that everyone who doesn’t know how to dance imitates him and thinks that they’re so cool dancing so awfully and their admiration for Radiohead is renewed and reinforced. And he makes an effort to stop thinking about Radiohead and Arcade Fire and all the complex and self-indulgent and “artistic” bands, so he can keep thinking about Pink Floyd. It’s a minimal effort; it takes almost no effort at all.)