The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  “Goodbye?” he says.

  “Goodbye?” she says.

  And the sound of their words, of those words now pronounced so tentatively, like someone opening a door or stepping out on the edge of a frozen lake, feels insufficient and fragile and not at all safe.

  Is it time to say “hello” again? they wonder, almost not daring to ask.

  Above them, the sky is a perfect and riftless blue. A blue without clouds or birds, suspiciously immaculate, the blue of an animated drawing, the blue of a backdrop, of an overhead backdrop, a blue as if the color blue had just been invented.

  He and she look at each other.

  They have spent so much time as prisoners of an external will that now they don’t know what to say or do and they stand there motionless and waiting for directions and lines. And nothing happens and that nothing is a dreadful thing and he and she discover that that nothing is everything and that that nothing is the most dreadful thing that’s happened to them yet. The possibility of an ending—to be left blank and without panic or a page to turn—of maybe being liberated; that thing they dreamed of in low voices, in the silence of their thoughts, now seems to them like a deafening form of a new hell. Having to think about what to think about for themselves. Seeing themselves forced to do what they want and what they desire, trembling because, maybe, it’s already too late and, having lost not only the practice but also the theory, they can’t think of anything or want anything anymore.

  Just in case, before it is too late, he’s going to try.

  He’s going to say the first thing that comes to mind, which, actually, is something that’s been stuck there for so long. Since the last days of a new age.

  At first, the words—his words—are pure creaking; like the voice of a door that stopped being opened because there was nothing interesting on the other side, nothing memorable.

  He opens his mouth and remembers and speaks and asks:

  “How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?”

  And she looks at him uncomprehending at first, and then with a smile, the smile of someone who is, once again, The Young Woman, smiling at The Young Man.

  And, then, a scream descending from the skies and he and she understand that X hasn’t left, that he’ll never leave, that X is coming back, that they only have a few seconds of freedom left before turning back into characters, before they cease to belong to themselves and belong, once again, to X.

  Big Sky is very busy, but he’s going to busy himself with them.

  Right now.

  “How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?” he asks again. And answers:

  “A beach.”

  And they both laugh.

  And soon their laughter is drowned out by a din of gears and springs.

  And there he is.

  And they see him come and approach and arrive.

  X and X’s Museum are now a giant version of Mr. Trip.

  That tin toy. That little windup man with the hat and suitcase that he took from the house on the beach, like an Egyptian tomb robber who steals those small statues left to accompany the Pharaoh and his body and shadow and soul on their journey to the other side.

  And, truth be told, if he could remember where it was, where it ended up, he’d return it, to appease that fury and break that curse, he’d confess everything.

  But not now.

  There’s no time.

  What time is it?

  It’s time for the colossal and all-powerful Mr. Trip (as a voice tells him to come aboard immediately, that his flight is about to leave without him) to approach them and pick them up in one of his hands and open his suitcase with the other and put them inside.

  And he leaves them there until something better occurs to him; because something will occur to him, something has to occur to him.

  Please, let something occur, let something occur to him, let something occur to them, right?, right?, right?, meanwhile, once again, beside the Museum stairway, under a big sky.

  Meanwhile, once again, beside the Museum stairway, under a big sky, he says to himself that this is, in a way, the closest thing to an Anton Chekov story he’ll ever write. He wonders, also, if all the preceding might not be clearer if it were rearranged in strict chronological order, from back to front, with the most nocturnal of tenderness, until it arrived to this eternal present, meanwhile, once again, beside the Museum stairway, under a big sky.

  III

  THE IMAGINARY PERSON

  A life-view by the living can only be provisional. Perspectives are altered by the fact of being drawn; description solidifies the past and creates a gravitational body that wasn’t there before. A background of dark matter—all that is not said—remains, buzzing.

  —JOHN UPDIKE, Self-Consciousness

  But if you really want to know why something happened, if explanations are what you care about, it is usually possible to come up with one. If necessary, it can be fabricated.

  —WILLIAM MAXWELL, The Château

  My memory is reliable on the very things it chooses to remember.

  —RICK MOODY, The Omega Force

  The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

  —JOHN BANVILLE, The Infinities

  Imagination is a form of memory.

  —VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Strong Opinions

  How to end.

  Or better: How to end?

  Adding the question mark that—nothing happens by chance—has the shape of . . . / OF WHAT? / INSERT HERE /; sharp and pointy pages like the edges of the wings of Jumbo Jets / FIND, PLEASE, A BETTER SIMILE TO CREATE THE ATMOSPHERE OF AN AIRPORT /, slicing into both those who rise and those who fall, pulling them, dragging them down the air-conditioned aisles or making them fly in pieces through the air to land just inside the airport of these parentheses / COULD THERE BE PLACES MORE “BETWEEN PARENTHESES” THAN AIRPORTS? (EXPAND) / that more than one person will criticize or judge as unnecessary; but that, in the uncertainty of a beginning, are oh so similar to hands coming together in an act of prayer, asking for a fair voyage now drawing to an end. And good luck to all, wishes you this voice / ALLUSION HERE TO THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE VOICE OF THE SIREN LOUDSPEAKERS THAT SING AND CONFUSE TRAVELERS IN AIRPORTS? TO THE IRRITATION OF SUCCESSIVE CHECKPOINTS CLOSING LIKE CHINESE BOXES OR RUSSIAN NESTING DOLLS? / that the gag of the parentheses renders unknown, and yet—like with certain unforgettable songs, whose melodies impose themselves over the title—it recalls the voice of someone whose name you can’t quite identify and recognize. / BOB DYLAN? PINK FLOYD? LLOYD COLE? THE BEATLES? NILSSON? THE KINKS? / And, yes, if possible, avoid this kind of paragraph from here onward / FORBID ANY FUTURE MENTION OF ELECTRONIC READERS ON PAIN OF DEATH? / ALLUDE TO THAT CHINESE CURSE “MAY YOU HAVE AN INTERESTING LIFE” TRANSLATED NOW INTO MILLIONS OF ASIANS ENSLAVED BY THE WEST TO PRODUCE THEIR SMALL ELECTRONIC INVENTIONS THAT, LATER, WILL IN TURN ENSLAVE THEM, TURNING THEM INTO ADDICTS OF A NEW FORM OF OPIUM? THE CYCLE OF THE INTERESTING LIFE? HAKUNA MATATA? / FEAR THAT THE WHOLE THING IS BEGINNING TO SOUND LIKE AN OBSESSION OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT, FEAR OF BEING LIKE THOSE LUNATICS SCREAMING IN EMPTY STREETS / because, they say, it scares away today’s readers, accustomed to reading quickly and briefly on small screens, counting up to one hundred forty, and send / AND, ALONG THE WAY, ASKING, JUST TO KNOW, WHAT PARENTHESES MEAN AND WHAT IS THEIR RAISON D’ÊTRE, BUT, PLEASE; WITHOUT SUCCUMBING TO IMAGES LIKE “PARENTHESES ARE LIKE PRAYER PINS” / THE THING ABOUT PARENTHESES AS “HANDS COMING TOGETHER IN AN ACT OF PRAYER” IS MORE THAN ENOUGH ALREADY” / and . . .

  . . . cut and jump and go directly to him running, breezing through checkpoints, shedding any metals, dragging a small but heavy suitcase. The size/weight relationship of luggage is, at a glance, as deceptive and difficult to calculate as that of books. Especially when—as in this case—the suitcase in question is almost completely full of books he’s never even opened, most of them by William Faulkner. Almost no clothes; because it was a trip that was short in time and long
in distance and he’d fantasized about not coming back or ending up somewhere where clothes wouldn’t matter, because particles would be accelerating and scattering and naked. And that’s when, taking advantage of the idea of the trip, to get some distance, he’d promised himself (in vain) to take advantage of an interoceanic day or hotel night. To read, there above or there below (nowhere in both cases; because airplanes and hotels are non-places), everything he didn’t read in his usual spaces, in the same bed as always, in the destinations he frequented. Right away, of course, he knows it won’t happen. That future books, books to be read (so many more than books already read, and to which, pure masochism and instant guilt, he adds another, bought right there, in the airport bookstore), will keep piling up in the library and on tables and on his desk and in chairs and in piles of wobbly architecture that, occasionally, fall in the night, making the exact sound of undead bodies, hungry for brains, crashing to the floor. Books that, removing them, bringing them into foreign territory, we’ll look at and will look at us with a face and a cover that say: now what? This is, obviously, an uncomfortable question. Another uncomfortable question. One he decides not to answer and to keep on pulling that little rectangle with its wheels and handle.

  And—he has researched this—praised be Bernard B. Shadow, then vice president of a company devoted to the production of suitcases and their derivatives, deservedly proud owner of North American patent nº 3.653.474, and to whom it occurred, around the middle of the past century, to put those little wheels on horizontal suitcases. And praised be as well that Northwest Airlines 747 pilot Robert Plath (and subsequent president of Travelpro International), who years later perfected verticalizing the suitcase, shortening it, and (North American patent nº 4.995.487) adding the key evolutionary feature of the extendable handle for pulling it, and, in the beginning, selling it exclusively to crew members who quickly roused the envy and desire of passengers who saw them pass by with the elegance and agility of demigods. Such things—identifying the true geniuses of Humanity and not the false ingeniouses of Subhumanity—are what Google and its tributaries are for, he thinks.

  And, there he is, waiting for them to open the doors to his flight. Sitting but almost collapsed, his body adopting the shape of the chair as if he were an empty suit and jacket. Still hurting from the invisible beating delivered by officers specially trained to keep their blows from leaving any actionable bruises, after he tried to do what in the end he didn’t do—sordid details to follow. Now, meanwhile and in the meantime, he’s killing time. Reading, after his curiosity was piqued seeing so many rolling suitcases, on the screen of his laptop (someone told him that they don’t call them that anymore, because companies were afraid that their radiation, after sitting for so long on laps, would cause testicular or ovarian cancer in their users), about the geniuses Shadow & Plath. He finds all the information on a page where, in addition, they explain that the obviousness of the little wheels took so long to develop because airports used to be much smaller and because—sociologically and psychologically speaking—it seems that, for the postwar macho man, using little wheels and carryon luggage was for women or sissies—real men didn’t carry suitcases, they checked everything. And besides—like in those old movies that never seemed to age—the suitcases seemed to weigh nothing, they were almost ethereal, maybe they traveled empty from one stage to the next, from one scene to the next. And he wonders again: why, since his vocation was always that of inventing, he didn’t apply that talent to inventions like those of Shadow & Plath instead of to literature or whatever it is that he does, that he doesn’t do anymore, that, if anything, he undoes. Or—more favorite visionaries, more absurd and compulsive research—the invention of Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes, who, in 1957, created that bubbly plastic material to wrap and protect fragile objects. He looks it up and finds it, because the truth is that he’d like them to wrap him up in it now, very carefully, not so he doesn’t break but so he won’t keep breaking himself. Fielding & Chavannes, he discovers, were actually trying to make a wallpaper that was easy to put up and take down but—serendipity!—they stumbled onto this other thing. Bubble Wrap! Partners and owners of the Sealed Air Corporation! Perfect company! Best companion ever! Millions of dollars a year with a product/business that hangs like a stowaway around many business/products and benefits them just by existing, being there, always ready, like a boy scout! Bubble Wrap Eureka Hallelujah! Blessed be Bubble Wrap and amen, Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day has been celebrated on the last Monday in January all over the world ever since, on that day, a radio station in Bloomington, Indiana, inadvertently broadcast several minutes of the sound of those plastic bubbles bursting while some microphones were being unpacked! Bubble Wrap as something that, in addition, after opening the package, makes us almost want to completely put aside whatever’s been sent to us, so that, instead, the medium of transportation is the message, we can concentrate, like globalized villagers, on the addictive pleasure of popping bubbles, like how once upon a time, during our adolescence, we surrendered to the epic and forever losing battle against our acne. So, we liberate each tiny dose of sealed air one at a time (there’s a type of Bubble Wrap shaped like hearts; which adds to the initial attraction the metaphorical sensation of breaking hearts while we try to forget that it’s our own hearts that have been broken and that, there inside, all our personal items have been returned to us, wrapped in Bubble Wrap, and so long, see you never) and we pop them. One after another. Unable to stop. Until not one is left and (this makes even him laugh) there’s even an app that allows you to sate this vice virtually until you’re able to score a physical dose of the stuff. Finger on the screen and that sound. And keep on popping. What makes it even more ingenious: you have to buy meters of the product because we, our own fault entirely, have ruined any chance of reusing something that we discover, as if coming out of a trance, has ceased to have any use whatsoever. Like literature, if you think about it a little. Fiction whose most efficient application in great part functions according to and depends on the variable faculties of the user, of the use that he or she can give it in the space of his or her own nonfiction. He perceives an amusing idea there, an ingenious theory; but for a while now these ideas come to him broken, used up, worn out; as if, more than ideas about which to theorize, they were particles of something that he forgot to wrap in Bubble Wrap and that burst apart in the air and whose memory, never entirely articulated, hurts like slivers sinking into his body and going off and betraying him every time he passes through a metal detector that accuses him of no longer being who he once was and insists on making him pass as someone he used to be, wearing a far-fetched and half-baked mask of himself, as if trying to feed off his increasingly wide but, also, increasingly distant past.

  And, yes, the protective bubbles and the rolling wheels are, also, parasitic inventions, like writers who wrap or protect or help carry the weight for readers. But, of course, little wheels and bubbles achieve this, unlike literature, without producing residual effects or unforeseen distortions. So he chose the purest and most turbulent and least profitable variety. He chose to tell stories, not to make History but histories, tuning out almost from the beginning—from his adolescence, when that thing about “When I grow up I want to be a writer” stopped being so funny and started to disturb his elders—warnings from his favorite authors of the time, like Truman Capote and his self-flagellating whip of God-given talent and the consequent difficulty of ascending into the clouds now to bring something back down here later. Or that thing Aldous Huxley said which, when he read it for the first time, still unpublished himself, he nodded and memorized with solemn complicity. That thing that he’d like to forget now, but he can’t, he can’t: “A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one . . . There is no substitute for talent.”

  Seriously: is he good for anything? Has he been left deflated and with no handle to hold him up and keep from falling? Are his stories good for anything or anyone? Do they reflect his time or, rather, the rarifi
ed and unbreathable atmosphere of a planet—Earth—still lacking even a divine or ancient name of its own, punishment maybe for being the only one inhabited by inferior beings? And what if he embraces the electronic, the hip, and patents a book that, every time you come to the end of a chapter, demands a summary and critical assessment of what you’ve been told and that, if you don’t live up to its demands, said book will sleep with your wife, rob your children of affection, and convince your boss to kick you to the curb? Anyway, once achieved, such a demanding book (which could end up tuning in the angst and anxiety of all those people who just want to belong to a brand) wouldn’t be of much use when it came to containing its own texts. Impossible to summarize and define. Not even he, in his most recent press conferences (small press conferences fairly light on journalists, the kind of journalists who call him because he’s “a cultural figure,” and ask him with gratuitous gratuitousness to choose two or three books for a section of recommendations for the Holidays or the New Year or the confluence of Jupiter with Uranus, and then subsequently misspell all the titles of the novels and the names of the writers that he mentioned and, when he reads them, he’ll feel like he was the one who’d said or written them incorrectly) and to the despair of his publisher there in attendance, to articulate one or two more or less portable and convenient thoughts. Something that would serve and work and win him a few centimeters in the culture pages of papers where—an old journalist had confided in him—the new and young section editors warned that “if you’re going to write about some writer, our manual of style dictates that his body of work is insufficient no matter how good he or she is; to dedicate space to a writer, he or she must, in addition, have an interesting life.” And what was an interesting life for a writer? Alcohol? Drugs? Women? Running with the bulls hot on your heels? A happy ending in a hotel suite looking out at a foreign lake? Spontaneously combusting? Vanishing into thin air? One thing was certain: he had little to offer. Nothing spectacular. Simple special effects. His work was like one of those poorly-aged and enormous travel trunks inside of which something always breaks. Pieces of luggage full of small compartments only suited for going on transatlantic voyages, without any hurry and, often, amid storms and seasickness and icebergs and sharks and ladies who want only to sit at the captain’s table.