The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Finished.

  From the epigraph and the dedication (to him: his name followed by a “No joke: the least funny guy in the world, thank you for everything”) to the word END at the bottom of the last page.

  The Young Man sat down to read it and it took him only a couple paragraphs to realize that it was—the title was Girl, Night, Swimming Pool, Etc.—a masterpiece.

  One of the best things—something that, of course, included the death of a doggy—he’d ever read, enhanced by the fact that it was written by a dear dead friend. A dead friend who was resuscitated and returned to him, in those pages, all-powerful and, without a doubt, on the road to immortality. A friend who, between the lines, seemed to be asking him “What’re you going to do now?”

  And for The Young Man the answer—right, true, irrefutable—was to do, bravely and without delay, what he had to do and what he was meant to do. To be something like Ishmael Tantor’s Max Brod. To be his footnote. To be the guardian and protector of his legend. To sacrifice himself so that his friend could live on.

  And that’s what The Young Man is thinking about, in the air again, pages in hand, rereading them to see if the effect held up.

  And not only did it hold up, but it seemed to grow with each rereading, with each paragraph that he returned to at random understanding that what he was now flipping through all by himself would soon belong to many: quotes recited from memory in bars and writing workshops and in the ears of girls to be seduced, etc.; like the girl by the swimming pool in Girl, Night, Swimming Pool, Etc.

  But things keep happening. This often happens: when a good story begins to be told, that story experiences endless flips and spins and dives from the highest diving board of all.

  So, there and then, some ten thousand meters above the earth, all of a sudden, The Young Man discovers himself sitting between the urn containing his friend’s ashes and, on the other side of the aisle (he can’t believe it, but since Ishmael Tantor’s death everything seems to have acquired the texture of a waking dream), his favorite writer, who was also Ishmael Tantor’s favorite writer. The Writer. There was The Writer, holding a book that appeared to be about the singular moment and the plural ways of dying.

  Which makes The Young Man think about death. Not about Ishmael Tantor’s death (a death which already happened and took place; a closed death, like the urn that contains his ashes and no, it’s not a magic lamp to be rubbed to summon the genie who wrote Girl, Night, Swimming Pool, Etc.), but, at first, about the temporal abstraction of death. And almost right away—death has a high degree of conductivity—about his own death. Near or far, sooner or later. But right there. His death like an invisible crow perched on his shoulder from whose beak issues the tic-tock-tic-tock of a time bomb.

  What The Young Man thinks next (what he happens to think should happen, but due to a defense mechanism and a way of assigning responsibility, he chalks up to the possibility of a good plotline, as if seeing himself from outside, the way people say you see yourself in the moment of your death) initially explodes in his head like a binge of fireworks illuminating the subsequent nauseous hangover. It’s something nontransferable. Something that—if it were set up on the alters of YouTube—would show nothing but his face frozen with feeling and not one thumbs up, not one like, not one view. Something that would be so moving in any ancient chiaroscuro portrait, more oscuro than chiaro, but that would never work in the infinite warehouse of the Internet, where, in order to be heard and remembered and viewed, you have to yell loudly and move all about, and, if possible, fall down and get hurt, with the laughter of the person holding the camera in the background.

  The Young Man stands up, runs to the bathroom in the back of the airplane, vomits, and sits in the lavatory until he overcomes the vertigo of knowing what he’s about to do, something for which there’s no excuse. All of this has taken no more than three or four minutes, but now, meanwhile, once again, beside the Museum stairway, under a big sky, he remembers it much better than when it happened.

  Here something ends so that something else can begin, he thinks.

  He’d read about—in those novels that attempt to locate the secret switch that activates killers—the strange elation produced by the decisive moment: a stepping outside yourself and, once again, a seeing yourself from outside, and a flash of white caused not by a chemical reaction (like in the final stages of dying, they say, when the brain starts to drown from lack of blood and oxygen) but by the initial stages of an almost physical action. The Young Man understands now—what he didn’t understand then—that the guilt of criminals and the impossibility of forgetting what you’ve done is the true punishment—prison is nothing more than the place to live over and over that crystal instant, not of committing the unforgivable act, but of deciding to do it. The pain of death is, for many, a painless reward: the chance to stop seeing what you can’t stop seeing even when you close your eyes. The shot of the starter pistol that is much louder than the shot that enters another body.

  The rest of what happens, for The Young Man (having made the decision that at first tastes bitter and then sickly sweet, like one of those energy drinks you get quickly addicted to and that, they say, disfigure your heart), is nothing more than the expansive wave of that initial shot. The signal to start running and keep running to avoid being caught and captured. Running until your legs no longer respond but, a mystery, keep moving anyway.

  He—who was once The Young Man—revisits what happens next not as living pictures in the most agonizing of flashbacks, but as glossy reproductions in the pages of a catalogue contemplated at high velocity. In those stores where—still dazzled by what you’ve seen, as if under a spell—you buy posters and postcards that, when you get home, you’ll look at with surprise and wonder where they came from and what you should do with all that stuff that cost so much.

  So The Young Man goes back to his seat and introduces himself to The Writer and asks him (executing awkward and tentative verbal hijinks across the tightrope of his shyness) if he would mind reading a few pages.

  And for some strange reason (The Young Man can’t help but think that the stars have aligned or that the altitude makes all favorite writers into angelic beings or that, even better, the gods of literature are telling him that he’s doing the right thing), The Writer agrees to read them. The Writer sets down the book about death and picks up the pages of a dead man.

  And he reads them.

  And he finishes reading them.

  And he asks for a few more pages.

  And he gives them back without saying anything, but smiling.

  And he asks The Young Man his name.

  And The Young Man tells him.

  And, just then, The Young Man’s own name sounds strange and foreign to him, bearing an unexpected gravitas; as if he were already reading it, as if others were reading it, in print and, suddenly, curving and angular, for the first time more letters than sound. And what The Young Man doesn’t say to The Writer (what he doesn’t tell him) is that he is not the author of those pages.

  And The Young Man is, ah, oh so aware of not telling him.

  What comes next is already history; but it won’t figure in any textbook unless it occurs to X to rewrite a definitive version of everything he’s been correcting, including them, him and her, there forever and meanwhile, once again, beside the Museum stairway, under a big sky.

  A vertiginous counterpoint between the public and the private.

  Everything that happens starting with the moment that The Writer presses the forbidden button that will transform him into X.

  At first, an odd emptiness where everyone wonders what happened to The Writer. Everyone discusses his absence. The few who read him and the rest who have no idea who he was and what he’s become—The Writer as the first man to accelerate his particles and to fuse with the universe. Headline news, hashtag and trending topic, comfortable and captivating subject.

  Which for him and her—Young Man meets Young Woman—results in the proposal
and approval of the documentary.

  And there they go.

  To a house on a beach.

  And there waits The Writer’s Mad Sister (who insists on living shrouded in a hospital gown, her mouth covered with a surgeon’s mask “because I don’t want to absorb anything of my brother”) and, now, he wonders what might’ve become of her and there are times he thinks he sees her. There, meanwhile, once again, beside the Museum stairway, under a big sky, looking out from one of the windows, enveloped in flame, screaming her desperation or her hate or her rancor or whatever. But he can’t tell where the wail of The Writer’s Mad Sister comes from; because he’s focusing so intently on saying “goodbye” to her and trying, at the same time, to remember all of it, all of the little that he’s allowed to remember of who he once was, which is, always, related to The Writer who X once was.

  He remembers that beach and how one night, when he was still The Young Man, he sneaks into The Writer’s house without permission and picks up an antique toy (a windup tin tourist) and spies on the archive of a camcorder and there he sees his literary idol saying, in response to a small voice, that, unbelievable but true, The Young Man is one of his favorite writers. And then—pursued by the fury of The Writer’s Mad Sister—he hightails it out of there. Camera in hand and toy in jacket pocket and with The Young Woman on his mind and in his heart and the certainty that the misunderstanding of The Writer naming him as author of Ishmael Tantor’s manuscript can only be a magic sign, a twist of fate. And then The Young Man understands why dictators and psychopaths—a beam of light descending from the clouds, a talking cat, whatever—always invoke divine voices and higher powers as justification for horrors and madness. Besides, what he did won’t hurt anybody, he thinks. And it’s even possible that his friend Ishmael Tantor would’ve agreed to the whole thing and laughed about it. A good joke.

  So The Young Man uploads that video to YouTube and soon—like everything related to The vanished Writer, so in vogue—it goes viral.

  And his phone doesn’t stop ringing with calls from agents and The Young Man, out of respect, chooses the one who was The Writer’s editor.

  And Girl, Night, Swimming Pool, Etc. is a critical and popular and translated success and The Young Man is a success with The Young Woman (a success that’s also hers, The Young Woman thinks) and they’re really happy for a while, for a few months, for a couple years, whatever.

  He’s not sure how long they were together; because now time is something that’s only read, and its length and width depend on the time it takes you to read what X spins out as if he were a DJ mixing loops and lyrics.

  Because in the beginning, really, it’s just that: little glitches that are subsequently interpreted as the mischief of a being who’s far away but coming to Earth to change everything, like in one of those old science-fiction movies.

  Various examples: front page headlines of newspapers being replaced by sentences like “Before I could read, almost a baby, I imagined that God, this strange thing or person I heard about, was a book”—Jean Rhys; all the mobile phones in the world going off at the same time and a voice on the other end of the line saying, “From now on, you’ll only be authorized to receive calls from yourself. True, it sounds strange, but really it isn’t: it’ll be the closest thing to what was once called thinking, remember?”; the inability to send text messages of no importance or value or urgency, punishing the sender with a brief yet powerful dose of electricity every time they try; the simultaneous and global revelation of all the true identities behind all the anonymouses and aliases on all the blogs of the planet, that were subsequently abandoned in terror, like all the ones already abandoned from boredom or fatigue, all that junk floating in orbit, in the darkness of space where no one can hear you read.

  Then, sudden and mysterious sightings of The Writer.

  Here and there and everywhere. A figure of bluish light. A message in the sky. A mouthless laugh in vacant bookstores. Finally, a monolithic black stain darkening the skies (someone describes it, accurately, like “what happens when you spill drops of ink in a glass of water”) and emergency meetings of political and religious leaders to discuss what to do, what not to do. In the meantime, millions of people stop going to work and—obeying the instructions of that cloud in the clouds—stay at home rereading or reading for the first time the classics of literature. Some, the bravest or most faithful or most zealous, even try to write, to see if they can appease what, certainly, could only be pure and undiluted fury, contained, ready to burst out over the sharp edges of something that was drawing ever nearer, there above, preparing to land and demand explanations and amend errors.

  At the same time, also, he is there, he who is still The Young Man but who already senses that before long he’ll be, merely, he. It hasn’t taken long for The Young Man to discover—coming down from the ecstasy of success—that he can’t write anything. He tries everything. Transcendental meditation. Amphetamines of assorted colors. Bach Flowers that produce in him a surprisingly bellicose effect (as if they were Wagner Flowers). Cocaine as white as a blank page (at first he takes drugs to sit and write, but before long he sits down to write to take drugs, to flambé his brain in the frying pan of his cranium). Energy drinks for writers (Qwerty, Plot, Typë, DrINK, Nov/bel) that he doesn’t know if he tried before all of this, before they were banned for being carcinogenic and hallucinogenic and for causing all kinds of dysfunctions, or if X is, also, already introducing modifications not only into his eternal present but, also, into his ephemeral past.

  Anyway, it doesn’t really matter.

  What does matter is that The Young Woman is getting tired of The Young Man, as if he were a book that leads nowhere, especially, not to another book after Girl, Night, Swimming Pool, Etc.

  And the sex they have is sexless now: X—despite his writing—was never very good at the description of amorous and physical scenes and they want to believe that it isn’t their fault but X’s, whom they can still blame for almost everything. After reconciliations of nineteenth-century purity and a chaste and tentative first kiss of forgiveness; cut to—more in Zen/emaScope than in CinemaScope—waves breaking on rocks and fires in fireplaces and fades to black.

  One white night, The Young Man confesses everything to The Young Woman: he tells her about Ishmael Tantor, about Ishmael Tantor’s manuscript, about what happened on the airplane when he met The Writer, about what he didn’t say. The Young Woman listens, at first as if The Young Man were, suddenly, a good story, another good story; not as good as the one told in Girl, Night, Swimming Pool, Etc., but in the end, the beginning of something new. But then she understands that this isn’t the case. That it’s a terrible story, unforgivable; and that all is not justified in the name of literature.

  And goodbye and meeting again and goodbyes and meetings again and meanwhile, outside their lives, everything starts to disappear.

  Everything that remains is like a party in the apartment next door: you put a glass to the wall and all you hear are high-pitched murmurs and the low throbbing of music; the soundtrack of something that could be really fun or really boring.

  And at first, for them, a strange and perverse kind of pride, feeling that they’re all that’s left; that for X, everything passes through them and through the constant rewriting of their lives.

  Then, for the first of many times, the suspicion that, maybe, they’re not so special, that X (first and foremost and when all is said and done, that letter that, on the keys of ancient typewriters with the name of a rifle, was used over and over, like someone firing a hail of bullets, to cross out words and entire lines) has compartmentalized all of reality into small modular scenes that he reviews like an emperor inspecting his troops but never giving the order to attack.

  One morning, The Young Man and The Young Woman, The Man and The Woman, The Man Who Was Once The Young Man and The Woman Who Was Once The Young Woman, The Ex Young Man and The Ex Young Woman, He and She, he and she, discover themselves beside the Museum stairway and
under a big sky.

  And they look at their surroundings, disconcerted.

  And they ask each other where are we, what time is it.

  And they look at each other not knowing what to say. But then they know.

  “Goodbye,” he says.

  “Goodbye,” she says.

  “Goodbye,” he and she say, meanwhile, once again, beside the Museum stairway, under a big sky.

  Meanwhile, once again, beside the Museum stairway, under a big sky, there is nothing. For once, right now and for the time it takes to think “right now,” a kind of absolute emptiness fills everything.

  There, nothing but a stairway that leads to nothing, like a pedestal for something that once was there and no longer is, as if all meaning and reason to be had been stolen.

  There’s no Museum with the shape of head.

  There’s no luminous and oracular sign.

  The Great Inventing Part, like Elvis, has left the building. Stairs that now only lead down and, at the bottom, he and she wonder what to do, how to proceed, waiting for something to happen and for X to provide them with actions and words. Experiencing the loneliness of people who suddenly comprehend that loneliness is a new kind of company. An oppressive loneliness that—after so much time being watched, written, corrected—they don’t trust. A suffocating and possessive loneliness, overpopulated with the weight of the absence. Now—they can’t believe it, what happened, all they can do is repeat themselves, repeat previously read ideas—there is no Museum, just a stairway.

  The empty space where the edifice once stood is empty, no explanations, no excuses.

  What happened?

  What happened is that the Museum seems to have passed on, to have departed.

  And yet, the empty space it left continues to vibrate, for them, with its presence. As if, really, the Museum were now invisible or, better, as if its image, after seeing it for so long, all the time, had been imprinted like a fossil on their pupils.