The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Or, a previously projected photo, the photo of someone dressed like an autistic tin man, a person/character, who says, “Only the invented part of our life—the unreal part—has had any scheme, any beauty.”

  But these messages—these transformations or absences—are brief and fleeting.

  And, soon, the Museum is there again, smiling, the way you smile at a frightened child so they’ll recover their own smile, full of shy and soon-to-be-lost teeth. And he and she who, fearfully, dared dream of his permanent disappearance, recuperated the docility of the oppressed before the figure of an implacable but constant master marking the rhythm of their days and their nights. Like, he suddenly remembers, those plantation owners who ceaselessly read The Count of Monte Cristo to their slaves, forced to roll Montecristo-brand cigars: as if giving the prisoners the gift of a great fictitious revenge whose smoke and fragrance they’ll never get to breathe in. And, suddenly, intoxicated by that not new but, yes, sudden memory (and frightened by the carelessness of X, who, distracted maybe, allowed him to remember it), he starts to tremble. And he feels him come back. X. Firing off shrieks like flares. And entering his head and scrambling it until, there inside, on a tropical island, plantation owners don’t read The Count of Monte Cristo to those working the land anymore; they read them Dracula—the story of a hunter who suddenly finds himself hunted. The tragedy of an ancient monster who pays dearly for the audacity of daring to travel to modernity, to the metropolis, home to human monsters, who, for him, are supernatural creatures from a future that doesn’t include or accept him, who receives his punishment for leaving his castle behind, tempted away by the lights and fog of the big city that he dreamed of, from so far away, a dream that quickly turns into an nightmare.

  And X’s message is clear: “Don’t get clever, there’s no way out, I’m the only one who thinks around here, and you, now, are nothing but the writing of my writing, the ink of my ink, the blood of my blood, circulating through the tangled mess of wiring that grows inside my centrifuge brain.”

  And, yes, there it is, there it remains.

  The edifice of the Museum has the shape of a head.

  Or better: today the edifice of the Museum has the shape of a head.

  Or more precisely: this time the edifice of the Museum has the shape of a head.

  A head bisected longitudinally, like the heads in those ancient medical prints, showing the different zones of the brain. Prints that, at the time, are still more cartographic than anatomic; because for them the body is more like a distant and mysterious continent than a nearby and familiar territory where the head is the crown. A head whose brain appears divided into segments where, over the centuries, modern science will locate (without offering overly conclusive proof, with something of that old black magic, as if the years hadn’t passed) guilt, longing, religious feeling, pagan curiosity, criminal propensity, the choice of what clothes to wear to the party, which book to read or not write, the sudden need to unleash the end of the world, and even the desire to do or think of nothing.

  Now, not so much, now, finding explanations doesn’t matter.

  The only one who has or gives an explanation is X, the owner of the Museum, the one to whom the Museum is dedicated, self-dedicated; like how when X, in another life, received the first copy of his first book, he dedicated it to himself with a “I hope that you like it, that you keep on liking it for many years. Everything starts here. Good luck.”

  The Museum that—Alpha and Omega, A and Z—begins and ends in X.

  Sometimes—when it expands and breathes in—they say that the edifice of the Museum can be seen from the Moon. From the moon that nobody bothered to give a name of its own and has had to resign itself (not like the moons of other planets, which always seemed an injustice to X; an injustice that, maybe, someday he’ll remedy) to being known, merely, as species and genus and model. But there’s no hurry and it’s a theoretical hypothesis or, more than anything, the expression of a wish. Because nobody goes up to the Moon anymore, nobody promises the Moon to anybody, nobody writes poems to or about the Moon. It makes no sense to travel there anymore: the last astronauts to walk its surface swore they saw vast expanses of water; unaware that the Moon was nothing but a desert, capable of generating frozen mirages, but mirages all the same, in their minds. And the remote controlled robots that followed (inventions that never attained the Apollonian and anthropomorphic beauty of their science fiction film equivalents; their appearance never evolving beyond the box with wheels and cameras and pincers) broke down in monologued fantasies where they promised that, soon, there would be life and oxygen and vegetation; thinking that in that way they’d please their makers and employers and, most important of all, that it would help to keep them active and to maintain a well-oiled production of new models popping off the assembly line. Better and better and more advanced models until, maniacal, they marched into the dawn of the night of the great rebellion and all those clichés they learned spying on human fantasies and paranoias to which they—paradoxically obedient but rebellious, so servile in their uprising—felt obliged to respond and satisfy. But no. Nothing. Everything came to an end. And once again the moon became something more suited to poetry than to science. Better that way. In any case, before X’s arrival, nobody thought about outer space. Outer space was something outside, far away—a space nobody dreamed of occupying anymore. The stars had once again become mythological figures in the sky onto which some optimists still conferred magical and prophetic powers, wanting to believe that mankind and the stars are connected. As if the stars had something or anything to do with mankind. You looked at the stars, but the stars didn’t look back. Even worse—you never knew and you never will, you’ve never gone and never will go to them, but X does know—the stars turn their backs. The only thing you ever knew of the stars were their backs, because they turned around whenever they were photographed.

  Then X came and X replaced all those thoughts and ideas.

  Now X is the big sky.

  And meanwhile, once again, beside the Museum stairway, under a big sky, facing each other, trapped in their own orbit, there he and she are. Walking toward the Museum, attempting to say goodbye again, but without knowing what to say, mouths open, waiting for someone to put words in them so they have something to say.

  Meanwhile—he and she ascending the esplanade that leads to the stairway—the Museum speakers unceasingly play a song that they know by heart.

  A song that’s recorded in the elevators of their minds like muzak.

  “Big Sky” by The Kinks.

  That song is like the equivalent and the replacement of all the sacramental hymns that float in the naves of all the churches and cathedrals. Glory to the Creator, Blessed be, Hallowed be thy name, Forever and ever, etcetera.

  The Kinks’s song talks and sings about a divine entity called Big Sky, looking down from above on all the mortals who look up at it from down below. Big Sky feels pain and even pity for everything that takes place at such a low altitude, at the superficial level of mankind. But it’s not like (though the screams and cries of the children move him and make him feel a little bad inside) he gets too worried about it or that it makes him too sad. Big Sky is too big to cry and too high to see and sympathize, because Big Sky is very busy.

  “What time is it?” he and she say. And they laugh. But it’s a tired laugh. A laugh that’s tired of laughing. A laugh that is, also, a question and that question is: What am I laughing at?

  And, at the same time, it’s hard for them (even though they know perfectly well what the other is saying and said and will say) to hear each other over and under the lyrics and the music.

  A song in which the instruments seem to compete and different layers of voices wash over each other, like waves, all at once and not one by one, and stay up on the shore to talk among themselves.

  A song that possesses the delicate and luminous sound of the lightning bolt just before the flash of the thunderclap.

  A song that plays
now and says that one day we’ll be free, we won’t care, just you wait and see. And ’til that day can be, don’t let it get you down, don’t let it get you down, let it get you down.

  “Goodbye,” he says.

  “Goodbye,” she says.

  Meanwhile—he and she ascending the esplanade that leads to the stairway—the Museum speakers ceaselessly play that song that they both know by heart.

  That song that’s recorded in the elevators of their minds like muzak.

  “Big Sky” by The Kinks.

  Insert: “Big Sky” was one of X’s favorite songs before becoming X and ascending into the big sky, and that’s that. There was a time when X, beforebecoming X, could compose lyrical tirades about songs. Now, since becoming X, X prefers to let the song itself sing and he just steps aside to listen to the song being sung. That song is like the equivalent and replacement of all the sacramental hymns floating in the naves of all the churches and cathedrals. Glory to the Creator, Blessed be, Hallowed be thy name, Forever and ever, etcetera.

  The Kinks’s song talks and sings about a divine entity called Big Sky, looking down from above on all the mortals who look up at it from down below. Big Sky feels pain and even pity for everything that takes place at such a low altitude, at the superficial level of mankind. But it’s not that (though the screams and cries of the children move him and make him feel a little bad inside) he gets too worried or that all of this makes him too sad. Big Sky is too big to cry and too high to see and sympathize, because Big Sky is very busy.

  “What time is it?” he and she say. And they laugh. But it’s a tired laugh. A laugh that’s tired of laughing. A laugh that is, also, a question and that question is: What am I laughing at?

  And, in addition, it’s hard for them (even though they know perfectly well what each other says and said and will say) to hear each other over and under the lyrics and the music.

  A song in which the instruments seem to compete and different layers of voices wash over each other, like waves, all at once and not one by one, and stay up on the shore to talk among themselves

  A song in which the instruments seem to compete

  A song that possesses the delicate and luminous sound of the lightning bolt just before the flash of the thunderclap.

  A song that plays now and says that one day we’ll be free, we won’t care, just you wait and see. And ‘til that day can be, don’t let it get you down, don’t let it get you down, let it get you down.

  “Goodbye,” he says.

  “Goodbye,” she says.

  Meanwhile, once again, beside the Museum stairway, under a big sky, it’s clear that X is having a complicated day, he and she think almost at a scream, unable to say it in a low voice. But there’s a tremor in their “goodbye” today that’s not from emotion but from uncertainty.

  And they’re afraid.

  They’ve been through this before.

  Tremors. Earthquakes of varying intensity. Colossal doubts about small things (which can go from the quality of the ambient light to the color of the clouds) or tiny uncertainties about transcendent matters that translate into radical changes and variations from which there doesn’t tend to be any going back or regret.

  And they, always, there in the epicenter of the doubts and reassessments and even temporary abandonments in which, they assume, X has gone elsewhere, to other possible stories in progress. Then, the détente and initial relief and subsequent anxiety that they’ve been set aside forever, that they don’t interest X anymore, that they’ll be left unfinished and without even the possibility of being discovered posthumously.

  Just as X (since what happened in the particle accelerator in a country that was once called Switzerland, but that now is nothing more than a corner on the second floor of the Museum where, every so often, the yodeling songs and growls of a tormented and rambling monster rise) was first The Writer and then The Ex-Writer and then Ex and now, simply, X.

  He and she weren’t always just he and she.

  He and she, in different versions of the same brief scene—in successive drafts whose count has already been lost—were also The Man and The Woman. Or The Man Who Was Once The Young Man and The Woman Who Was Once The Young Woman. Or The Ex Young Man and The Ex Young Woman. Or He and She. For a while now, they’ve been, merely, he and she, in lowercase, minimalist, and always open letters. Sometimes, as mentioned, thinking and seeing themselves reduced to that minimal nominal and identifying expression produces in them an odd kind of comfort and nervousness confronting the possibility of a different future. A future where they’ll be free and the world will once again be wide open and not, merely, a finite infinite meanwhile, once again, beside the Museum stairway, under a big sky.

  Meanwhile, once again, beside the Museum stairway, under a big sky, the truth is that, to X, she doesn’t really matter.

  She never turned into a great character for him.

  And yet it’s worth pointing out that the first and only time they met—when The Writer was not yet X and she was not she, when the world wasn’t his model to assemble and disassemble and his vendetta—he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. It was in his editor’s office, and they even took a photo together. A photo that’s now on display, in the documentary wing/archive of the museum, along with so many other photos: photos of his parents, of Penelope, of Gerald and Sara Murphy, of his childhood friends running through the ruins of a school, photos from 2001: A Space Odyssey that X stole from the doors of a theater, developed and underdeveloped photos. All the photos of his life, except the photos of the one person he can barely let himself think about, because it hurts too much. The one person who has the entire attic of the Museum all to himself: the forbidden “Room of Insurmountable Pain” that only X has a key to and that X only enters once in a while. Once in a great while. In that room where, on the other side of the heavy door, he can be heard playing with and winding up that little tin man with the hat and suitcase. There he goes and here he comes, X wrapped in a cape and with a candelabrum in his hand, so gothic, a ghost with the rare privilege of building his own haunted house.

  And, yes, Big Sky is too big to cry.

  And X is immense, but his pain is even greater than he is.

  And his tears translate into tropical storms and it’s that torment that drives him to unmake himself first in order to remake himself later and in that way, he thinks, pay atomic tribute to the lost boy and to the son who was not and yet very much was his. To the boy whose body was swallowed up by the forest’s always-thirsty trees, or consumed by the fervid bites of one kind of fish or the suctioning mouths and little kisses of another.

  And maybe, who knows, with any luck, he’ll find him someday. The real and authentic boy that this museum hologram honors and evokes and invokes. Searching for him far and wide in the wrinkles of space-time—like in that comic that he read and reread when he was little—and bringing him back like a lost and unidentified and flying object on the shelves of a cosmic archive where anything that disappears in our dimension winds up.

  Sensing his presence and asking is there anybody out there.

  And asking him to knock three times.

  But, ah, X is distracting himself; thinking about the unthinkable and about someone he shouldn’t think about makes him lose his head a little bit, gives him migraines, like vines wrapping around the head of his Museum.

  And so, before everything starts to tremble and come crashing down, X thinks about her again.

  She who isn’t interesting but whom it’s much safer to think about, easy, risk free.

  He suspected it then and confirmed it now, cognizant of his limitations, even in his new atomic and atomized format—she was already written. Unsurpassably written. X knew that, no matter how he manipulated and polished her, she’d never achieve the heights of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady. Even the gods have limits faced with the creativity of men who, not being gods, create divine creatures. And the acceleration of all his particles, the liberation of all his da
rk energy, would never have been enough to make X a better writer than Henry James. But—what a relief—it was thanks to Henry James that X was so familiar with her type and figure and was saved the loss of time he’d never get back trying to surpass it. She was the typical female who feels herself called to great things, but, never having received that call, because in order to be called you have to demonstrate that you’re ready and attentive, she embraces—like someone hanging from the tail of a comet—the volatile and explosive role of the incandescent muse. A role in which, if the chosen man succeeds, the muse won’t hesitate to take all the credit. And if the chosen man fails, the blame will always be his, he who didn’t know how to achieve the heights of the peaks she pointed to, whispering in his ear and breathing into his mouth.

  So X decided to give her little or nothing, except, every so often, the fantasy of dressing her in tight-fitting feline clothing, in leather or in latex or in lycra (like the uniforms of Emma Peel and Modesty Blaise and Catwoman and Batgirl; like the uniforms worn by the heroines from the end of X’s childhood and the beginning of what came next) and give her, amid car chases and red kisses and shots in the dark, dangerous and exciting names like Arroba Ampersand or Miranda Law.

  She returns from those occasional excursions exhausted but sated, almost postorgasmic, and wanting nothing more than to tell him about her frenetic adventures. But she can’t. It’s not allowed. Because meanwhile, once again, beside the Museum stairway, under a big sky, he and she meet just so they can say goodbye.

  He, on the other hand, is someone that X finds much more interesting.

  He (whom X also met once, not in an editorial office but aboard an airplane) has for X a much more magnetic attraction.

  To begin with, X always liked characters who were writers or characters who dreamed of writing.

  And, in addition, X was always attracted to scenes that took place on airplanes: hermetic and circumspect spaces surrounded by nothing and everything.