The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  It’s late now, now it’s too late to forget—now he’ll never forget it—what Penelope did or stopped doing with her little son.

  Now noises come in from the street. Screams, sirens, metal on metal, strings falling from the skies, the sound of the last orchestra in the world because “having read the book, I’d love to turn . . . you . . . on . . .”

  In a while, he could swear it, he’ll dream about his old and absent friend who, now, suddenly, might be physically in all places. He’ll see him like that sand man, glowing, standing on a dune of diamond dust, a suit and a hat and, at his feet, a suitcase with stickers of exotic and desolate places, places like Kolmanskop. But we’re not quite there yet. Now, it’s still the lupine hour of the night’s breaking news and, again, once more, here comes the howling at the moon of another news story about parents who kill their children. Now, even though it’s his night off, when the news doesn’t need his music, Tom wonders what the right melody would be to harmonize the monstrosity of parents putting an end to their children. Atonal notes, cacophonous blasts on the keys like someone, despair confronting the horror, pounding on the lid of a coffin too small to be real and yet, yes, it does exist. Music for the most undesired and unforgivable absences. He has to think about it (maybe appearing on camera covering his ears and throwing a monitor out the window of the studio, like Pink in The Wall?) because it’s clear that any of these dark weeknights he’s going to have to do it: musicalize that. Because there are more cases all the time. More all the time. Like in the early stages of an epidemic. Tom has been hyperaware of this issue—he feels it swelling like a black and secret tide—since his son was born, at a time when there was that news story about that girl with the strange eyes who disappeared when her parents neglected her or something like that. Years later, there’s no evidence that they’re to blame, apart from the irresponsibility of leaving her alone, asleep, in a house with the doors and windows open; but the truth is that Tom hears and sees and studies with great care more and more cases of parents snuffing out their offspring. A sign of the times. A bad sign of bad times. Mothers who put their kids in suitcases and throw them off a cliff, fathers who set fire to little bodies put to sleep forever with sedatives, mothers and fathers who decide to suffocate a child because “they were being annoying” or because “the skies opened and a voice from on high commanded them to do it.” Could it be that they’re afraid that those little kids will grow up and, reaching adolescence—this has also been reported—beat the shit out of them when they try to cancel their mobile phone service? Or could they be, simply, the first bars of the azure and liquid waltz danced by Life After People: the mystery solved that the series doesn’t dare elucidate, the prologue that nobody dares to narrate, the irrational explanation for why we disappeared, a story for which his friend, wherever he is, could now write a different ending, a better ending, a happy ending?

  He opens his eyes and it occurs to him why it is that parents look at their children the way they do when they’re already asleep and the lights are off. Because a child, awake and lucid, would have a hard time bearing the intensity of that gaze, as possessive as it is liberating: its boundless love, its infinite gratitude, its terror of everything that might befall the little big ones and, in time, the big little ones. Parents and children are the same. Bound together until death do them part, projecting themselves from the past into an eternity beyond winds and deserts that extend out endlessly like someone stretching their body. Screaming across an abyss that is, ultimately, unbridgeable, and yet, always and forever, they go on designing bridges from whose vertices, connected but opposed, no matter how badly the one wants the other to come to them, without waiting, time and again, both of them strike out across, whenever they can and whenever possible, that fullest of emptinesses.

  That’s how he’s going to go look at Fin, at his son.

  Right now.

  He needs to look at him so badly.

  With all the love in the world, in the universe.

  The last newscast of the night concluded (there, again the photo where a recently murdered boy points, smiling at the person who took the photo and will be his killer), Tom struggles to his feet and walks slowly, feeling his way along that hallway’s walls with the tips of his fingers, until he reaches the absolute and definitive center of his universe, now and for millions of years. And—not caring that his son is already asleep and that it hurts him to think that Fin is getting closer and closer to that age when he might begin to enjoy disliking it when they hug him—he enters the bedroom, decorated with posters of androids and planets that radiate a shy green glow in the darkness. And under that artificial glow—artificial and yet, still, ready to transmit something infinite and unfathomable—Tom looks at his son. And what he looks at, what he sees, is his life with him, their whole life together, for the rest of his life.

  And Tom turns on the light. And wakes Fin up and hugs him. Squeezes him. He won’t let him go. He won’t let go. Ever.

  Sitting on the edge of the little bed, he holds his son to keep from falling.

  MEANWHILE, ONCE AGAIN, BESIDE THE MUSEUM STAIRWAY, UNDER A BIG SKY

  “What time is it?” he and she say, at the same time, at the same hour, meanwhile, once again, beside the Museum stairway, under a big sky.

  And they laugh.

  And neither of them focuses their eyes on their watch to read aloud what it says.

  No need.

  What time is it?

  It is, precisely, the time to say: “What time is it?”

  So, they don’t fix the spheres of their eyes on the spheres of their watches, but all the same, it’s as if needles were fixing the one to the other. They are, yes, fastened with pins. Like something never sewn up all the way and put off until later because, at the same time, there is still time, all the time in the world.

  And he and she comprehend that once again it’s time to part ways, that after the time of wondering “what time is it?” comes the romantic time, unmarked by numerals Roman or digital, of saying goodbye. The time of ending so that everything can begin again. Parting in order to to come back together. Soon, right away, again, and feeling almost, not old, but yes like those old people who just repeat situations and words to keep from getting lost in the brevity of their future and the immensity of their past. The unold equivalent of the un-dead. Zombies of what they once were—alive but barely—floating in the repetitious wind of perpetual rewinds.

  “Goodbye,” he says.

  “Goodbye,” she says.

  Both of them taking care not to say “goodbye” at the same time again, afraid not of what they might say to each other, but of what the one who watches them might say, the one who has gotten angry at them numerous times, finding them literally incorrigible.

  So, the one “goodbye” sounds almost like a ventriloquist echo of the other “goodbye.” A “goodbyebye.”

  And as the years pass (some of them are years lived together, before being captured forever in the circular infinity of this instant; but the memory of those years is more diffuse all the time, not like something that they lived but like something they told, something they tell and retell again) their voices come to resemble each other a great deal, too much. Their voices are the masculine and feminine models of a single voice that—in its moment, far from the Museum stairway and inside a small, increasingly suffocating flat—learned a perfect mastery of the art of the goodbye and the stage exit, sometimes with shouting, sometimes with a door slamming like a slap.

  There was a time when, yes, they were the ones who decided and improvised how they said goodbye and how they got back together, amid tears and laughter, masters of a story that might have been poorly written but, at least, they were the ones writing it.

  Now, not so much, not anymore.

  Now, the goodbye is final and refined and elegant.

  A carefully considered and calculated and far better written goodbye; but a goodbye written by someone else.

  Written by someone who i
s never entirely pleased with the result and, so, starting over, saying “hello” again to say “goodbye” again. Though now the one who writes and edits them seems to be concentrating not on the twist of the reunion, but, solely, on the pogo-stick of the goodbye.

  And at first, that’s pretty much it.

  Two people—not entirely characters yet, but no longer the people they used to be—saying goodbye forever and for the last time, over and over.

  A man and a woman who know—or sense—that the last goodbye is as powerful and emotionally charged a thing as the first “hello” that they scarcely hear in their mouths anymore and barely remember. An unforgettable instant set to become an eternity. To become a goodbye that’ll continue echoing, obedient but bouncing off at unanticipated angles whenever it’s evoked under the unpredictable acoustics of memory’s irregular cupola. It’ll always be the same, but successive visions will convince the credulous of the transcendental nature of minimal variations and hidden meanings that may not be there, that never were; but the two of them always felt they were so modern and, in the end, misunderstandings like this are what modern art and its performances where almost nothing happens are built on.

  With time, one of them will be the first to die, and the other only later.

  They know their “author”—X—all too well.

  And they’ve read all of X and all about X, so they know better than to think he’ll fall into the awkward trap of one ending for both of them, together, falling from on high or getting swept away by a giant wave or being left stranded on an island of repetitions or whatever. They’ll die, maybe, beside the Museum stairway and under a big sky. First one and then the other, as if parodying the death in two movements of Romeo and Juliet. They’ll die not poisoned or stabbed, but bored of the toxic purity of their exhaustion. Their exhaustion or the exhaustion of the one who watches them. If they’re lucky. If someday they’re allowed to escape from this moment and its multiple and subtle variations.

  And then, when that time finally comes, all of it will be lost forever, like so many other things that have been lost, without ever receiving the false piety of the consolation prize of the ruins.

  Unless X, he who is above everything and everyone, gives them the surprise of freeing them from this moment and yanks them out of this kind of microstory without dénouement or any sort of surprise ending.

  And sends them on their way.

  And follows them.

  And turns them into a story.

  Or a novel.

  But neither he nor she is really sure—like at other times, like at the beginning—that they want something like that to happen.

  Really, the only thing they want is, please, let this be the last time they say goodbye and not number I’ve-already-lost-count-of-how-many-times-we’ve-said-goodbye-forever, always the same, always, maybe, some slight shift or adjustment or new flaw or clever correction, meanwhile, once again, beside the Museum stairway, under a big sky.

  Meanwhile, once again, beside the Museum stairway, under a big sky, he and she wonder how and why they’ve ended up there, after so long without seeing each other (though really it was only a few minutes ago that they said goodbye, again), and only so they can say goodbye.

  Pure coincidence, it’s possible.

  But for him and for her that idea of pure coincidence always seemed a contradiction in terms, a . . . what was the word that always reminded him of the name of a medication and her of a rare animal made up of the parts of other animals?

  Ah, yes: oxymoron.

  Because there are few things less pure—and seemingly so embroidered with strange particles and foreign corpuscles—than a coincidence. Coincidences are always contaminated by the murky idea of a randomness that isn’t random. And coincidences—falsifications of the fantastic—are nothing more than brief and concentrated and self-sufficient and instantly-analyzable versions of reality. Invented parts. Like slivers of fiction embedded in nonfiction. But no. Merely systemic defects to be eliminated before they become obvious and fascinating to everyone searching for maps and horoscopes and compasses and astrological charts. But always by the hands of another, someone who transcends it and who is, without a doubt, better at guiding them through a house with rooms that are always dark. So, every so often, one of them, one of those coincidences, escapes and has to be chased, like an insect with a hard, iridescent carapace, until it’s cornered and stomped out and exterminated, so it doesn’t reproduce on this side of things. And so (possessors of that quality that turns them into something that’s as easy as it is functional when it comes to being narrated; before the Museum was erected, there were other writers, “normal” writers who built their entire body of work on the more or less secret pillar of coincidence, and did quite well with that alluring and childish magic) coincidences are unsettling, they produce a kind of fear of the unknown, and make you consider the more or less distinct possibility of a superior being, of a Great Author, reigning over the storyline of our lives. And so, in addition, there are a lot of people who go around, proud of being like coincidence magnets; because it makes them feel chosen and slightly closer to decoding the secret language of all things. And so, again, many people who never believed in God, in any God, fervently believe in coincidences as divine intervention. Believing in coincidences is like believing in the need to commit to believing. The best of both worlds: believing in coincidences is like believing in God without the obligation to worship or abide by complex and guilt-ridden and often contradictory instruction manuals. Believing in coincidences is like believing in God before God had a name and names and created man, before men created and gave a name and names to God. Believing in coincidences is comfortable or, better, it was oh so comfortable.

  Now, not so much.

  Because now every coincidence in so-called real life has a master and a signature and resembles, too closely, the coincidences in fiction.

  Coincidences like hinges and gears that unite or move moments or characters and help them reach a happy ending, or not.

  But isn’t that their case now, the two of them who are waiting—who have been waiting so long—for the blessing of an ending the way other people wait for a coincidence?

  Which brings us, once again, to him and to her, meanwhile, once again, no longer beside the Museum and under a big sky, but (better, a small yet potentially decisive shift: something unexpected preceding the same predictable scenario as always) approaching it. He and she approaching the Museum along one of the streets that leads to the Museum, the Museum that honors the unforgettable memory of X.

  The Museum that’s always remembering X, because X doesn’t let it think about anything else.

  The X Museum is the X on all the maps.

  Impossible to get lost.

  For a while now, all the streets of all the cities in all the world lead to the Museum. To that edifice of elastic and variable architecture that even, every so often, makes itself invisible. As if it were a lighthouse blinking out, leaving the pilgrims (because it’s advisable to pay a visit to the Museum at least once in a lifetime, to stroll its perimeter, circle it with just the right mixture of love and fear) at the mercy of the tides of their own bewilderment, knowing that the lighthouse was there nearby, but not knowing exactly where.

  Sometimes, the Museum appears transformed into something else, like, for instance, one of those great luminous signs on the side of the highway that provide information about traffic conditions and maximum and minimum speed limits and the quality of the pavement and if there’s an accident up ahead, in that coming glow of red lights and screams, a few curves down the road, on the other side of the trees. But this sign is different and what it broadcasts and illuminates, in letters punctuated by small lightbulbs that also recall marquees for musical comedies, are random phrases from books or quotes by writers that offer a glimpse of what X is thinking, of whatever is passing and perambulating through his always full-throttle brain, ready to be ticketed for excess referential mania and synapses en
dangering other drivers. There, on that transformed Museum, he once read, “They called for more structure, then, so we brought in some big hairy four-by-fours from the back shed and nailed them into place with railroad spikes.” And he wondered who would’ve said or written that, and what they meant to say; but sensed that, maybe, that request for greater structural integrity, something fastened with nails and bolts and timbers and girders, might express X’s particular nostalgia for something that, literarily and stylistically, he lost forever in exchange for attaining the infinite. Or his idea of the infinite. The infinite as a blank page that doesn’t produce panic, but challenges you to approach it and cover it with letters and names, as if you were christening planets and galaxies and stars that play dead. And something that he thinks comes from a song sung by a sharp voice: “Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial / Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while” and who was it who said that, who sang that?

  Other times, the quotes are clearly identifiable; and he can’t help but feel that they’re darts that X is throwing at him and him alone. Like that one from Aldous Huxley stating that: “A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul. But the bad author’s soul being, artistically at least, of inferior quality, its sincerities will be, if not intrinsically uninteresting, at any rate uninterestingly expressed, and the labor expended on the expression will be wasted. Nature is monstrously unjust. There is no substitute for talent.” And there are other times when the luminous sign almost sounds like an apology or an attempt at an explanation for why he’s doing this to them, to him and to her; why he forces them to say the same thing over and over. In those moments, whoever is speaking through the sign is not a writer but a character—Sherlock Holmes deducing, elementary, that “All life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.”