The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Up there, anything is impossible.

  And here he goes again, and there’s X when he wasn’t yet X, when he was The Writer and, across the aisle, he, who for a while will, once again, be The Young Man.

  The Young Man flies alone but accompanied: in the seat next to him, with the seat belt fastened, travels the metallic receptacle containing the still-warm ashes of his best friend, the ashes of the immense-in-all-senses Ishmael Tantor.

  The Young Man met Ishmael Tantor on another airplane.

  Ishmael Tantor—one of those colossal bodies that nobody dares call “fat” because, for good reason, they fear the consequences—is occupying two seats and writing on a laptop computer. And The Young Man, automatic reflex, can’t help, out of the corner of his eye, spying on the screen where Ishmael Tantor types with enormous fingers and large font. And what he reads there, also in prodigious size, is: “DO YOU MIND TELLING ME WHY YOU’RE READING WHAT I’M WRITING?”

  Then Ishmael Tantor laughs. And his laughter is like the trumpeting of an elephant that feels absolutely no fear of the mouse that, embarrassed, The Young Man has suddenly become.

  Then they start to talk and become friends with the ease people of a certain age have for making friends; because it’s a time when what matters is to have someone, and to have that someone support you.

  Ishmael Tantor and The Young Man were born the same year. Both of them are at some undetermined place in that oh so liquid second decade of life when you’re thirsty all the time and start to think there won’t be enough water for everyone.

  And yet (Ishmael Tantor tells The Young Man that he wasn’t always like this; he explains that until he was ten years old he was small and rickety, that he got hit by a car and wasn’t injured, but after the accident he started to “blow up,” as if all of a sudden he experienced a glandular abnormality) Ishmael seems to have that timeless age of all giant beings.

  And they like the same movies and the same painters and the same kind of girls—delicate in appearance but fatal in essence and who, of course, “are very good, though they pretend not to know it.”

  And most important of all: they both want to be writers; they both need to be writers. But The Young Man wants to be a writer more than Ishmael Tantor, he thinks.

  And—take note—their favorite writer is the same: The Writer who will one day be X and who will think them and write them and situate them like loose pieces in a toy airplane.

  But we’re not there yet, a few scenes left to go, a private sidereal cataclysm, the end of his world as the world keeps on turning.

  Now, then, before, Ishmael Tantor and The Young Man still write themselves. And they do so with true grace, with that immediate sympathy that all coming-of-age stories produce, not yet imagining the endings to which they’ll be submitted all too soon—almost at the turn of the page.

  When they touch down, Ishmael Tantor and The Young Man keep on as they were in the air. And there they’ll stay, sharing space: best friends—who don’t necessarily protagonize the best of friendships—who float, wrapped more in the vapors of their shared deficiencies than their common affinities. And so, with time, a slight shift or fluctuation—some ascent or descent in the position or height of one of the pilots—is all it takes to make the whole thing come crashing down or, at least, to land beset by an irreparable emergency. None of that will happen to them—the early disappearance of one will turn the other into an eternally hunted hunter, details coming soon—because their dead relationship will be immortalized, as if wrapped in the amber glacier of the greatest fossils and perfectly preserved things, things many prefer petrified rather than alive, in order to see them better even though touching them is not allowed.

  Before all of that, not a day passes nor do they pass a day without seeing each other or, at least, calling each other on the phone, reading paragraphs from texts that at first, cautious, are always written by someone else, but that they claim as part of their DNA, like something they feel influenced and, in a way, chosen by: paragraphs like standards they wave from one hilltop to the next.

  The Young Man attends a writing workshop. A writing workshop where he learns little and where, every so often, pure impossible desire, someone evokes, with a dreamy voice, that literary workshop once taught by a drunk and staggering John Cheever in the middle of Iowa cornfields where, as an exercise, he recommended that his students keep a detailed journal for seven days and strive to bring together seven apparently irreconcilable people or landscapes or feelings in a single text and then finish it off with the decisive assignment that “never fails”: to write a love letter as if from inside a burning building. Of course, none of that impressed Ishmael Tantor. Ishmael Tantor thinks all of that is for “sadomasochists who like getting hit so they can hit back. Which isn’t a bad thing, but . . . Should you really have to pay someone just to watch and listen to how you give and take a hit?” So, in the beginning, they don’t show each other what they write except in pieces, from memory and sometimes inventing them on the spot, on the fly, from one mobile phone to the other. Later on, yes. Ishmael Tantor tells The Young Man that this or that story of his isn’t bad. The Young Man doesn’t have much to say; because what Ishmael Tantor shows him are just random and fairly cryptic and cataleptic sentences from “something that you can only see once it’s finished; because, faced with the most impressive of sunrises, I doubt you’d stop and look down at that small stone by the tip of one of your shoes, your left shoe to be more precise, and pick it up, and put it inside the shoe, and return home thinking ‘Now I’ve learned to limp, now I know what it feels like, and now I’m going to write about it.’”

  When Ishmael Tantor says this kind of thing, these unequivocally Tantorian spiels, The Young Man doesn’t know whether to take him seriously or to burst out laughing. Because Ishmael Tantor is, also, by his own definition and in his own words, “a verifiable comedic genius.” Not just for his many witticisms. Witticisms that include that “Does the doggy die?” which he asks every time someone says they’ve read a great book or seen a great movie, not caring what it is or what it’s about, not caring either whether or not a puppy ever appears on the screen or the page. Or his obsession with proving before the International Criminal Court in the Hague that in Raging Bull “both Robert De Niro and a fat man claiming to be Robert De Niro make appearances; but I know a lot about fat people, and I don’t buy it, my friend.” Or his theory (“I can provide all the necessary evidence”) about how Hemingway was murdered by his fourth and final wife—in complicity with the tormented transvestite and transsexual son he had with his second wife—who couldn’t stand him anymore, in Ketchum’s cold and long nights, bad-mouthing Francis Scott Fitzgerald all the time and evoking the somewhat dubious exploits of his youth.

  And it happens that Ishmael Tantor, when it comes to jokes, is endowed with a rare auditory-photographic memory—he remembers all of them, the jokes, word for word, line for line, punchline for punchline. A superpower—the ability to remember everything he hears; especially quickly-forgotten jokes—that, according to Ishmael Tantor’s father, a prestigious jurist, would make his only son a brilliant and unbeatable lawyer. Because nothing impresses a jury more, Ishmael Tantor’s father says, than a lawyer who never once consults his notes.

  Ishmael Tantor—who adores his father, though he doesn’t admire him—never dared explain to the author of his days that his prodigious memory only works like that for dark or dirty or absurdly funny little stories, or stories with the unique humor of something that’s not all that humorous except when it’s told by someone with a humoristic gift.

  Someone like Ishmael “The Joker” Tantor.

  And there are nights when The Young Man thinks he’ll never stop laughing and that his mouth will get stuck in an expression half-ecstasy half-pain, like Barón Sardonicus; because his lips and teeth and tongue and vocal chords and all the muscles grind and strike together like stones to make a smile that spreads as fast as forest fires in the summer heat.

>   And The Young Man has tried to tell Ishmael Tantor jokes.

  But he can’t, it doesn’t work—Ishmael Tantor knows them all.

  He identifies and anticipates and guesses them from the first words.

  Ishmael Tantor has them catalogued in the archives of his brain by subject, length, variety, type of punchline, rating based on the age and sex and political or religious ideology of the listeners.

  “Someday I’ll find the original joke. The first joke ever. The spark of the primordial laugh, prompted by something someone told someone else, in a cave, in the dark of the prehistoric night, so that the night wouldn’t be so cold, because laughter warms you,” Ishmael Tantor often tells him, with the smile of an explorer getting closer and closer to the starting point, to what really matters, to the place where everything began.

  Ishmael Tantor and The Young Man decide to live together, to share a flat and go on vacation together, to check out the same girls, to travel far away in order to feel closer to each other.

  The Young Man doesn’t have a girlfriend. Ishmael Tantor isn’t under any illusions in that respect: “Not a woman exists who could bear me,” he laughs, laughs at himself; but without bothering or causing any discomfort or pain in whoever is listening.

  And yet there are times—not many, but they’re tremendous—when something that Ishmael Tantor keeps hidden and stored away under lock and key manages to escape and climb up a rope and reach the surface. Ishmael Tantor has christened that something “The Leviathan.” And The Young Man knows, when it happens, that it’s best to let him go away for a while, alone, so that hours later Ishmael Tantor can come back like someone returning, whole on the outside but wrecked on the inside, from a worn out war with no expiration date. Then, returned, Ishmael Tantor sits down like someone collapsing, and asks him to fill him a glass to the brim and tells him, “Stay calm . . . It won’t be long now.”

  One of those nights (Ishmael Tantor, pale and, for once, weak, as if his skeleton had been excised), The Young Man tries to distract him any way he can, to pull Ishmael Tantor out of that hole that is himself and whose bottom can’t be seen or heard no matter how many stones or torches are thrown into it and where the only thing that goes in and comes back is the echo of a scream. Ishmael Tantor is there, in front of him, crying soundlessly—the kind of crying that frightens more than saddens those who see it. A cry that is mute but made of tears that say everything. And what those tears say is “There’s nothing that can stop these tears now, I’m never going to be able to stop crying, I’m going to be The Crying Man and they’ll exhibit me in traveling circuses to make the people laugh or cry from laughter. Come and see.”

  The only thing The Young Man can think to do is to tell him a joke.

  A joke that Ishmael Tantor doesn’t know.

  A joke that Ishmael Tantor can’t know or have stored away in his archives; because The Young Man is going to invent it on the spot.

  The Young Man is going to cast out lines and take shots without a clue how he’ll make it to the fucking punchline.

  “How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb, Ishmael?” The Young Man asks.

  And then Ishmael Tantor looks at him, at first not understanding and then understanding everything, moved by the love his friend feels for him. And he starts to laugh. Slowly at first, like someone taking a few tentative first steps; and then in torrents, as if he were running, laughing at the desire to run that swelled in his throat.

  Ishmael Tantor laughs and laughs and can’t stop laughing and every time he tries to, so he can hear the answer and the unknown punchline, it gets worse.

  Ishmael Tantor is a massive being (Ishmael Tantor is like a bear dressed up as a man) and his laughter is too powerful and XL for his debilitated Medium or Small heart.

  Ishmael Tantor dies from laughter and dies of laughter and dies laughing.

  Ishmael Tantor brings his hand to his chest and The Young Man could swear that he hears the sound that Ishmael Tantor’s heart makes as it splits from laughter, as it shatters, as it breaks beyond any hope of repair.

  The last words and the final sounds of Ishmael Tantor—which The Young Man manages to decipher through his laughter—are: “Woof Woof.”

  The doggy dies.

  And what comes next are like disordered postcards: if happiness can be told over and over like a movie, pain can only be viewed in small doses, like on slides. One after another—as if separated by the clack-clack that carousal projectors made when the command was given to change the slide, in days when you still sent in what you photographed to be developed and didn’t see it until later (or ever: because lots of photos didn’t turn out as we thought)—and leaving room for memory and forgetfulness and for the surprise of seeing everything that you already imagined, again.

  The slides of the last three days are in perfect focus, fixed and motionless, unforgettable. One after another, clack-clack: the pall bearers who are unable to lift the body of Ishmael Tantor, the call to Ishmael Tantor’s father (who requests and demands details that seem absurd to The Young Man, as if the whole thing were a difficult case that he refused to close; and he almost ordered him to take charge of everything related to the autopsy and cremation of his son, and sent him various authorizations via his notary and a pair of airplane tickets), the procedures for the autopsy and the cremation, and going home on another airplane. On an airplane like the one where he met Ishmael Tantor but this time, courtesy of the deceased’s father, flying first class.

  So, Ishmael Tantor—ashes where once there was fire—once again in the seat next to his, but diminished now and portable and unmade, in his most minimal expression, a final joke: the involuntary sad smile that the unctuous funeral-home employee’s words brought to his lips, explaining to him that “we had to use an XL-Jumbo size urn, the ones for married couples or parents and children or entire families.”

  There, seat belt securely fastened, occupying, by order of his father, “a seat of his own, because I don’t want him to travel with the suitcases and bags in the overhead compartment,” Ishmael Tantor turned to dust and him turned to dust too. By his friend’s unspeakable death, which, from a technical and physiological standpoint, he caused—involuntary killer. And by something the The Young Man doesn’t even dare admit to himself. But how can he silence that interior voice which unceasingly reminds him of something unforgettable, of what happened when he was gathering together Ishmael Tantor’s belongings and packing his suitcases to face the trip home. He’d tried everything, anything he could to attenuate what’d happened just a few hours earlier. Something that already feels like an historic event in his life, like an introduction to what will soon be part of everyone’s history. And yet, nothing works. He can think of nothing else and, suddenly, it seems far more important and transcendent than his friend’s death. The Young Man drank the better part of a bottle of vodka and smoked the rest of the marijuana that he and Ishmael had kept hidden inside a book. The book—now even more hollow than it’d been before they customized it to stash the drug—that he holds in his hands, illegible, broken sentences, cut off and continuing on the other side and that, at times, create an effect of false occurrence or cut-up, in the formal as well as the physical sense.

  The book is titled The Seven Deadly Scenes and it’s an essay of over seven hundred pages that, barely subliminally, promises to reveal to the most desperate writer (and he bought it because that’s what he is, sinful and blocked and ready for anything; though when he showed it to Ishmael Tantor, he did so mocking everything it proposed and suggested) the mechanics of writing stories and novels. Reducing them to basic formulas, based on the theory that there only exist seven basic plotlines that repeat themselves with slight variations from the beginning and until the end of time and books and theater and film and television. To wit: 1) vanquishing the monster, 2) rags to riches, 3) the search, 4) the comedy, 5) the tragedy, 6) the rebirth, and 7) the journey from dark to light. And that’s all folks. Or not: because he was missin
g the most important and interesting plotline of all. Plotline 8) for him it was like the eighth passenger, devouring all those who came before, one by one. The plotline that asked itself what is happening and what do I do to get out of here, out of this burning building, and into that other one, or vice versa.

  And he—like all readers of this kind of book—tends to read this kind of tractate back to front. That is: starting with the onomastic and bibliographical index, scanning for and finding what he’s interested in and what he’s after and what might be of some use, and then flipping back to the page in question. And praying for a miracle.

  What The Young Man looks for now (what he looked for then but remembers now; not really sure if that’s how it went or if this is one of the many corrections and additions X has made to his increasingly irreal reality) is some mention of Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.

  And there it was.

  The author of The Seven Deadly Scenes postulated that novel—“much less perfect, but so much more interesting than The Great Gatsby”—as one of the most accomplished examples of a “pseudo-ending,” where “Fitzgerald tries to make the fact that nothing in its plot can be resolved into a virtue.” In summary: kids, don’t try this at home with or without adult supervision and, while we’re at it, adults, don’t try it either.

  The Young Man doesn’t really understand what the book is referring to (though he does know that Fitzgerald had a hard time writing Tender Is the Night and that he even changed its structure, for the worse, with the novel already in print and in bookstores); but that thing about how “nothing in its plot can be resolved” and a “pseudo-ending” sticks in his head like a shard of glass, like the echo of a headache that broke in a thousand pieces the night before, a night neither soft nor tender.

  The night when, in the enormous case/portfolio housing his friend’s exceedingly heavy computer (Ishmael Tantor said that “All my accessories must be voluminous, because otherwise everything I hold makes me look too much like King Kong”), The Young Man found a manuscript of around three hundred pages.