The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  He’s already said it many times: airplanes don’t scare him, but airports terrify him. Airports are like enormous and devouring leviathans run aground on the shore of all things, too heavy to be pushed back out to sea. Airports are like cathedrals of an always late and retarded faith (and he remembers that aboriginal cargo cult where even today modern primitive men send prayers up to Melanesian clouds so they’ll rain airplanes and beautiful things down on them, like the silver ghost of Melody Nelson and no, of course not, her ballad will never echo through the air of an airport) and airports are the sanctuary where everyone prays and begs that their flights leave on time, and that they arrive on time, and that their luggage doesn’t disappear into some wrinkle in space-time, and that everything that goes up does come down but doesn’t fall, amen. Airports are like hospitals: you know when you go in but not when you’ll come out and you sit there like something patient, something passing. By comparison, the omnipresence of the past millennium of ports, the greater warmth of train stations, and the minimalist atmosphere of bus terminals seem to him so much more moving and better written. Airports, on the other hand, are like airport bestsellers. They’re easy to read, you forget them quickly, you promise yourself to never again succumb to their temptation, and yet the brightness, those signs, those letters in metallic relief . . . And the passengers who consume those airport bestsellers are increasingly worthy of them. Beings with decreasing capacity for concentration, robots of flesh and bone who can’t go even a minute without connecting to their devices and extensions, as if they were waiting for the confirmation of the success of a sports star they idolize or the news that they’ve become fathers or mothers, even though their respective spouses are right there beside them in that very moment, looking after little kids hooked up to tablets where they surf without waves or a beach.

  He sits down to catch his breath and can’t help being disturbed by the constant sound of mobile phones. Not long ago he read a survey where sixty-five percent of participants said they felt desperate whenever their batteries ran out, because they couldn’t help but imagine that “everything important was happening right during that ‘disconnected time.’” And they added that they’d relinquish wine, beer, shoes, chocolate, TV, and their car; but never ever their phone. Twenty-two percent went even further and confessed that “their mobile phone was what they most liked taking to bed.” And most disturbing of all was actually not, he thought, that their phone was what they most liked to take to bed, but the fact that they took their phone to bed in the first place. And that they were never going to experience the pleasure of cutting off everything, with a powerful and categorical slam, in the middle of a conversation, but had to resign themselves to the placebo of carefully locating that small END button to sign off and over and out. Of course, the new phones were lighter and easier to throw against the wall; but such an outburst ended up being really expensive and . . . He’d read, also, about a woman who, being interrogated by her husband, swallowed her mobile phone and its incendiary messages from her lover so that her infidelity wouldn’t be discovered. And that something called WhatsApp was responsible for twenty-eight million divorces; because men and women considered the fact that their respective spouses didn’t respond immediately to their messages, requests, trivialities as “mental cruelty” and “psychological abuse.” And he’d seen a photo of a phone-shaped coffin. And, of course, he could accept the practicality of mobile phones that, for example, on September 11th, 2001, and during so many other catastrophes, allowed and will allow someone to say goodbye to his loved ones. But, for him, something had been ruined forever in the moment that the ability to be reached everywhere and to work from anywhere was considered a small objective for man and a giant leap for mankind. Something had broken on the oh so functional day when, dysfunctional, the domestic and sedentary and universal onomatopoeia of the ring had stepped down to be absorbed into with the babel of personalized and purchasable ringtones: screams, celebrity catch phrases, theme music from TV shows, the ephemeral hit song. Everything that, in the end, does nothing but increase the desire to climb aboard that place where—for now, but they say not for long—you are ordered to turn all of that off, provoking in the eyes and ears of the possessed the same anxiety as a lack of nicotine in the lungs and brain. Withdrawal—an eternity disconnected—from knowing what their unknown friends think of them, from continuing to kill zombies with that zombie from Shanghai whom they’ll never meet, but whom they can’t live without. From doing all those things they can do today thanks to men of science, who chose to devote themselves to fitting all of life into a telephone instead of, like the mad scientists from the black and white movies of his youth, taking on challenges like teletransportation (which would’ve put an end to airports as a species) without even worrying about the possibility of an accidental what-if.

  Not long ago—on another flight, mercifully short—he’d listened to the uninterrupted, hour-and-a-half long conversation of two creatures who, unable to talk on their phones, spent all their time talking about their phones. At first glance, their appearance was decidedly prehistoric, like tech hooligans. Domed skulls, small eyes, long arms, and huge thumbs, pupils dilated from the need to have something to read and write in increasingly minute text, the repetition of words that seemed to be missing letters. It could be that they weren’t even human, but just the previous suburban train station or the past model of Homo sapien. Or maybe the future. Trunk and Clunk? The one and the other—secure and immobile in their seats—fascinated by the properties of their small, currently-deactivated monoliths, referring to them and showing them off to each other and looking at them with the same fetishistic and comparative love that they once dedicated to their cars and women and sex organs in the locker room. Just that now, the pride was tied to having the lightest and smallest and fastest to perform its function. Size was no longer what mattered (or yes it was: but only being smallest) and Trunk and Clunk, nostalgic, unceasingly refer to past devices like dead friends, who’ll never be better than the future friends whose applications and superpowers they’re already fantasizing about.

  The complete opposite of what was going on with him: because mobile phones had complicated the practice of his trade: plotlines were accelerating, it was easy to find and even to track people, all characters were connected instantaneously, and as writer or spectator the only thing he liked was the ease with which those fragile little devices were destroyed once their mission was complete: like rabbits or chickens or cats or those kids who scream and cry and kick the back of the seat in front of them on airplanes and whose necks you tell them you’ll wring without thinking twice. But such consolation was no match for the sadness of there no longer being a place in books and movies and shows for wrong numbers, or for hearing something forbidden on crossed wires, or for spying from the living room phone on what someone says on the bedroom phone, or for a certain and vital piece of information to get delayed or lost in transit. Before, not long ago, everything was much simpler and therefore more narratively straightforward and primitive. Nothing was more terrifying than a telephone ringing in the dead of night, and phones weren’t going off every five minutes to say nothing. Everything was said, maybe, with bad words; but not written with orthographical errors; with that awful cacophonous lingua not so franca that, moreover, required greater or equal effort to learn than proper and precise grammar. And his thing, the faithful practice of his craft, required a certain deliberateness, a certain distance, greater silence to function. And so, recently, as an act of rebellion, his books went off in search of other planets or marine depths or distant bygone days: places where there was no coverage and where you could find yourself, far away from here, where it was reported, with a kind of happiness that was inexplicable to him, that across the surface and skies and substrata of the Earth there were already as many little mobile phones as there were earthlings, transporting them around from one place to another, like giants subjugated by the fussing of their electronic infants. Just beneath the s
urface of all this, all this irritation, he knows that something else is lurking: the realization that this silent and occasionally public diatribe against mobile phones and their applications is nothing more than the awareness that they’re all dialing the number of the end of something. The mobile phone—and all those people talking and looking and reading and raving about and on them—is simply the first device that doesn’t call to him. That doesn’t include him. For the first time. Almost alone and wondering if his grandfather felt something similar—when he watched those strange extraterrestrials that were his adolescent children moving from room to room in the house—in the fifties, at a time when cigarettes weren’t bad for you and amphetamines were good for you, plugging in a small Alligator White Philco Slender Seventeener Portable TV, here and there. Yes: that black-and-white white noise was, now, the same terrible sound of the ringtones that let him know that History was proceeding without him and that he—without friends or Facebook, without characters or Twitter—was already outside of History, behind History, out of sight, beyond his horizon. And that that History continued on its journey without him—no problem. In his books, telephones were still heavy and they rang—like oracles foreshadowing cataclysms—in a dark house in the middle of the night and not inside someone’s pocket. And so his books, taking place in the last millennium or in a present day of beings more antique than vintage, had less and less place and significance in a world (this was one of the aces up his sleeve that always elicited some laughter in his increasingly infrequent and poorly paid speeches) where, inexplicably, phones had evolved more than airplanes. Airplanes that kept flying at the same speed and offering the same inconveniences as always (and that food, chicken/pasta/meat/fish, of uniform aerodynamic flavor) but with less space between the seats. Lagging airplanes hadn’t even granted themselves the subterfuge of incorporating, for a lack of innovation, timeless virtues like the ability to toss excess weight or annoying individuals out the door, like they did in the old galleons when they crossed the subtropical Horse Latitudes, where the winds ceased to blow in the sails. All that’d evolved inside airplanes were the passengers. They no longer smoked, sheltered by the absurdity of that border, as invisible as it was ineffective, between the permeable zones of smoking and nonsmoking. And it’d been years since he saw or heard a passenger vomit into that sad and sordid little bag. And even the children behaved better—they didn’t scream or cry or run down aisles—because, he had to acknowledge and appreciate it, they were firmly glued to those small and authorized screens, killing or dying. Only the elderly—convinced of miracle cures—kept wandering like waking sleepwalkers, doing absurd, minimal-effort exercises and gripping all the seatbacks to keep from falling.

  But, again, he’s just deluding himself: all that irritation with others—which, he’s beginning to realize, is the free sample of that constant irritation, for him now fast-approaching, of the old with the young—is, also, just the heavy blanket that he uses to try to cover up his own anger at himself. His literary vocation has run out of fuel and nobody is offering him an emergency runway on which to land. The irrepressible need to put things in writing that once kept him aloft has now surrendered to the gravity of a force that drags him earthward.

  Something has stopped working. Flaps. Radar. Something.

  Nothing seems to make sense, and the only thing left to wait for seems to be the final glorious explosion of the crash. The only thing that occurred to him was that nothing was occurring to him anymore. And looking back—remembering his books as if they were past destinies—he could sense what it was that’d happened and stopped happening: he’d started out telling very personal stories, his own; not strictly confessional but, yes, conscious of the fact that, in the end and to begin with, all fiction is autobiographical, because it happens to the writer, because it’s part of his or her real life. And little by little he’d been moving away from himself to tell of other things, of external subjects that he had to go out and hunt down and stuff and hang on the wall of his trophy room, but that never really belonged to him. Now, he understood, he was lost in a universe that was too wide where, in the beginning, everything seemed interesting and even possible to connect. “Only connect,” as the disciplined and deliberate E. M. Forster suggested and ordered in the epigraph of Howards End. But for him and for the velocity of his things, the free stream of consciousness had become one of his calling cards. Free? Ha. Suddenly he was prisoner in a prison that he’d built himself. And nothing made sense anymore. Short-circuited and circuit shorted. He’d lost (like losing the suitcase that never materializes on that rotating conveyer belt) his direction home. And, all of a sudden, he found himself fantasizing that the only solution to his problem was winning the massive first prize of a continental lottery that he’d been dutifully playing twice a week for a while now, so that later, once that huge sum of money was paid out, he’d say to himself “That’s it. Done. Enough. No more writing. From here onward just one life for me. Real life. Long live nonfiction.” He believed in that and told himself, imagining that he was cavorting about in mountains of money like a millionaire duck: “Ah, now I get it, all that lost time—this is what Catholics must feel. That’s why it’s such a popular religion: because the solution never comes from inside you, salvation always comes from above, and sins are always forgiven and . . .” But the number combinations that he bet on (combinations whose determination he entrusted, automatically, to a computer that he liked to imagine residing in a secret basement of some new Eastern European country, its red, lidless eye singing digits) had earned him, at most, a few high-grade coins and one or two low-caliber bills, every so often. Just enough to cover next week’s bets, except for when—one perfect July morning—he pocketed two hundred fifty euros. He remembers that he went out into the street taking little leaps with his fist raised in the air until, suddenly (like someone coming up to the surface, exultant, from the abyssal depths of an annual medical checkup and suddenly realizing that he’ll have another one next year and that eventually, sooner or later, the bad-news wind is going to blow), he realized that that money was, statistically, the one victory that the perverse gods of chance had granted him. That that was all he got and that—suddenly thinking in ancient and devalued prose—he’d squandered his one wish on so little. So—without retreating yet in retreat—he kept on thinking about what he could write, writing about what he could think. No longer looking for something to occur (and maybe that’s one of the early symptoms of wanting to be a writer: nothing happens, so then . . .) but for something to occur to him.

  His last and brief words in the limited space remaining in a notebook that debuted almost a year ago (on a white hospital night when, out of fear, he experienced a terminal indigestion of plotlines), did nothing but reflect his impotence. Just two notes. And both—bad sign—based on real events.

  To wit: “Shakespeare Riots” and “Kate Harrington/Truman Capote.”

  The first note corresponded to something that happened involving two Shakespearean actors and confrontations between fans of the theater that left at least twenty-five dead and more than a hundred injured at the doors to Astor Place Opera House in New York on May 10th, 1849. The actors were the American Edwin Forrest and the Englishman William Charles Macready, and what happened was two opposing factions took up arms and raised fists to settle which of the two actors was the better Hamlet and, along the way, to demonstrate the always complicated relationship between the Empire and its former colonies. So, the anglophiles were on the side of the aristocratic and deliberate Macready and the defenders of the New World supported Forrest (whose Danish prince was more like a swashbuckler of the cinema with an air of a working class hero). And when the latter was booed in London (or was it Forrest, passing through London, who booed Macready from the audience, he couldn’t really remember anymore), fans from both factions waited for Forrest and Macready’s respective Danish princes to coincide in Manhattan. And, like hooligans, like Trunks and Clunks, they arranged to meet at the theater exit .
. .

  The second of the notes came from reading a long testimony included in a Truman Capote biography. Kate Harrington was the young daughter of Capote’s lover: one John O’Shea, a theretofore heterosexual family-man and more or less selfless yet unhappy husband. O’Shea’s wife—who adored the writer—didn’t get in the way of the relationship. So, everybody happy. And the writer didn’t hesitate to adopt the little twelve-year-old Kate—the O’Shea’s daughter—and submit her to a kind of modernized version of My Fair Lady. Richard Avedon and Francesco Scavullo take photos of her for a portfolio (Kate ends up appearing in the glossy pages of Mademoiselle and Seventeen), he orders her to keep a diary of her private thoughts (that he corrects and edits), he takes her to his flat at 870 United Nations Plaza and he shows her books and demands that she read In Cold Blood and Out of Africa. He teaches her to dress and combine colors and brands of clothes and introduces her to his Park Avenue “swans” (Babe Paley and Mary Lazar) and to Henry Kissinger and to Sammy Davis, Jr. and to Ryan O’Neal (who falls in love with her, Kate’s now fifteen or sixteen) and he sneaks her into crazy parties at Studio 54 (in the book there’s a photo of her and Truman Capote, his face covered by one of those hats he wore, next to an ancient Gloria Swanson). At some point, Capote decides that the next step will be to turn Kate into an actress. But Kate refuses. She knows her limits. She knows she doesn’t have the talent for that and she can’t help but notice that the writer seems increasingly erratic and desperate. “Okay. I just wanted to help,” says Capote. And that’s it. Capote stops calling her. It was over. Or maybe Capote called once, but nobody was home at the O’Shea residence (that’s another thing phones used to be good for and another thing today’s phones have done away with: the fantasy that someone did call you, but you weren’t there to answer) and soon Capote can no longer dial a number without getting it wrong and before long making a phone call is as hard as writing that novel he’d talked about so much, that novel that no longer answered his call, under storm clouds and lashing whips of lightning.