The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  And now, for him, everything that he’d written down there was nothing. He didn’t even know what it was that it wasn’t. Two stories? One novella? Two parts of a whole or random pieces of a puzzle that he didn’t understand, but was sure that he’d understood at some point, when he wrote those two lines down the way you write down dreams that you don’t remember or understand when you read them the next morning? Only connect? ONLY connect? Yes, only try to connect, why didn’t you come out of the closet, damned E. M.? Easy to say, hard to do and even harder to write. Something had stopped working, something had broken. Inside of him. And he wanted and needed to believe that it wasn’t the simple and banal and undignified and undeserved material fatigue (the sickness of airplanes) and he preferred to think that behind that motionless void there had to be something more transcendent. Something that would explain everything and, once absorbed, would provide the answer to the question and put things in motion again. Something like a recently-exploded childhood trauma, like those bombs from bygone wars that, every so often, are found in a fallow field. Or something like what supposedly happened to J. D. Salinger, something that nobody actually knows whether it did or did not happen. Or something even more banal but, at least, easier to pin down: like what he felt when, not long ago, one night, he woke up with a pain in his chest. As if there, inside him—he thought at the time and liked the image—was growing a black rose whose petals were thorns. And, after dragging himself to the emergency room, it’d been removed, but maybe, unknowingly, along with the malignancy of that dangerous flower, they’d also taken something important, something vital. Or, who knows, maybe they actually implanted something. He remembers that it was there, while he waited for the results of some tests and a diagnosis, in those two or three hours of uncertainty, wandering through the hallways of the clinic, that he experienced, diminished by panic, the unexpected and furious deluge of ideas for stories. So many that he could barely get one written down because another wave was already coming—another possible story. He filled the notebook with more than enough material for a book that could well have been titled Book of Families or Fathers, Mothers, Brothers, Sisters & Co. The whole thing felt like a last will and testament, like a possible legacy. But when the doctor arrived with good news, it was as if it all dissolved, lost potency and importance. And the next day, rereading his notes, all of it seemed—once again—like a flat-tire dream wrapped in a transparent veil that protected nothing beneath the Bubble Wrap of his eyelids. Since then, nothing. He’d tried absurd methods like copying things he’d written decades ago to see if that’d get the engines running. Or coming up with sequels or prequels to classics. Or classics written from another point of view. Moby-Dick narrated by the white whale. Things like that. Then, pretty much right away, he started drinking. Not to excess; but enough so that his days went by as if they were being written by someone else, by someone who was writing him and freeing him from having to write himself, from having to think about impotent actors or potential actresses.

  If, at some point, the stories of the Shakespearean disturbances and of Kate Harrington could’ve blended into something about the girl turning into a brilliant Shakespearean actress in successful contemporary young-adult adaptations, set in high schools, something like that. Into something like Rosemary Hoyt in Tender Is the Night, adored by her fans; but also in the crosshairs of a sect of fanatical purists and terrorist protectors of the memory and legacy of Shakespeare self-styled The Revengeful Hamlets and . . .

  Now, not so much. Now everything sounded to him like the deafening and incomprehensible buzz of that voice over the airport loudspeakers from which he managed to pick out only a few stray words until, among them, he discovered the repetition of his last name followed by the final and urgent call to board his plane or be left behind, possibly forever.

  So, again, with the attitude of someone who believes he’s breaking some Olympic record, he starts running, at a speed that was once a brisk walk. He is, yes, in the last of those borderland ages: a place where there’s nothing but a sad highway motel, between fifty and sixty years old, a place he’ll never pass through again. That spectral decade in which, suddenly, so many things stop happening. And stop happening forever. The features of a middle-aged man haven’t yet ceased to be those they were previously; but, ah, they’re already beginning to be what they’ll become: those of the man no longer so firm and as if turning to liquid, as if passing through the first stages of a thaw from which there’s no going back. Watching him closely, seeing him pass by at what’s full speed for him but really not so fast, he thinks, must produce the nauseous sensation of looking at an out-of-focus photograph. One of those blurry and red-pupiled photos that no longer exist, that are no longer taken, that no one shoots or waits to have developed. So there he goes. Running in slow motion, but not like in those movies or shows where slowness is a device used to show hyper-velocity. No, his is not a special effect but (how many times has he already deployed this awkward play on words?) a special defect. There he goes. Breathing through his mouth from the effort. As if he weren’t on his feet and moving, but sitting and motionless. How he once felt, so long ago, holding any of his many favorite novels. With his eyes wide open and with one of those books that, with time’s rapid passing, with time’s running, from the start, make you pay the toll of having to learn everything anew: a new game of new rules, a breathing all its own, whose rhythm you have to absorb and follow if what you want is to climb up on the shore at the top of the last page.

  Now, again, no longer, no more.

  Now he’s running not like someone chasing but like someone fleeing. And someone who knows that it won’t be long now before he’s caught.

  Entering an airplane is like entering a really bad novel. One of those realist novels (so proud to be so and to proclaim it) that, though it tries, is unable convince us of anything it says and where we can anticipate everything that’ll happen, because we’ve already lived it, we’ve already been there, it already happened to us—déjà visité more than déjà vu.

  There, that absolute fidelity to the utterly repeatable. A novel that would do much better to call itself fantastic. Or, even better, true. To admit from the outset, in case of an accident, that the oxygen masks only serve to dull the hysteria of the passengers and that the function of the seatbelts is to keep bodies from scattering all over the place at the moment of impact and the whole thing about putting your head between your knees (impossible position, taking into account the increasingly diminished space between seats) was good for nothing except (just like that absurd illusion of nonsmoking seats was good for nothing back when airplanes were like a tank of suspended nicotine gas), if you survive, to leave you with a brutal muscular contraction or, if you’re unlucky, a broken spinal cord.

  Almost collapsing, he presented himself panting at the gate of departure, which was about to close, and they took him in a car to the airplane, which had already cut the umbilical cord connecting it to the airport, and—he liked this detail—they had to pull up an old stair car so that he could climb up to the rear door. Now, entering that airplane, for him, is also an unpleasant experience: because he has to traverse the whole plane until he gets up to the front end and climbs up to first class, and several of the passengers sarcastically applaud his arrival as he passes by. His distraction with what was going on around him and his concentration on what he’d already taken in has delayed the flight’s departure. A flight that’s now lost its turn for takeoff and—the captain informs them, identifying the culprit with first and last name—will be “around fifty-five minutes” late, which is far better than saying “an hour.” And then the none-too-convincing consolation of “we’ll do our best to make up the lost time during the flight,” and over and out. He makes a little bow to the resentful coach passengers (with that air of cargo on a slave ship) and arrives to that small exclusive hump of the 747 (démodé futurism, Heywood Floyd, pen floating in the air), deposits his suitcase in the overhead compartment after removing a b
ook that’s not by William Faulkner, lets himself fall into his wide seat full of controls (a new function in the remote control and the screen on the seatback in front of you allows you to traipse through a blueprint of the plane and start a chat with unknown passengers sitting in other seats and discuss things like being afraid of heights and the quality of the food and the curves of that girl sitting up front or the shrieks of that baby crying in the back, he surmises; anything to distract you from the temptation of reading a terrestrial novel from the nineteenth century, when mankind only dreamed of flying and wrote about it), and orders the first of various shots of bourbon from the flight attendant who, perfectly trained, because he’s one of the elite, smiles at him with all her teeth, unconcerned about the delay he’s occasioned. She hands him a case containing toiletries, headphones, and items he’ll never use, those slippers and that eye mask. And she keeps on smiling. It’s clear that she’s paid to smile at him, but he chooses to believe that she loves him, that it’s love at first sight, something that’s just about as impossible to believe in (maybe even more) as the thing about the seatbelt, the oxygen, the emergency position, the nearest exit, as if the exit were ever nearby.

  In the seatback in front of him is the newest edition of the airline company magazine (just opening it sharpens the pain in his back, the echo of the beating he’d been given); so he skips straight to the last pages, ignoring the brief and breezy articles about beaches and bars and palaces and some celebrity saying that “Nothing interests me less than being famous.” And, yes, the celebrity is IKEA, following him and finding him on earth as in the heavens. So, better, he opts for the pages—could the lack of oxygen contribute to the uncontrollable desire to buy things you don’t need?, he wonders—advertising an array of products. The pages enumerating and exhibiting the on-board duty-free items. And—among the chocolates and watches and perfumes and fountain pens, next to airplane replicas and miniature videogame consoles and, this is true, this is true, an app you can download on your mobile phone that can remotely control where cockroaches go in your house—they have for sale a surprising and dignified antique toy. Something out of time and place. Something that, without a doubt, few would want but that, all of a sudden, as if in the vertigo of a sudden fever, in that indeterminate nowhere that is the interior of an airplane, he needs more than anything in the universe. There, in the photo, they’re offering a small windup tin man carrying a suitcase—Mr. Trip. He decides, without really knowing why, that he’s going to buy it. Maybe to see whether or not the little man’s suitcase has wheels, to make it easier to carry, so that the toy would help him carry himself.

  He unfolds his tray table (not fixed to the seatback in front of him but that, exclusively, extends like a tentacle out from one of the armrests) and adopts the only position he believes in, the only position he could swear has afforded him any pleasure and survival, and that doesn’t figure in any manual of sexual techniques but in the most distant and yellowed pages of his life: the “resting position.” In elementary school. After lunch. Arms on top of the table, head on top of arms on top of the table, waiting for permission to go outside and play at the longest and most digestive recess. But now, after only a few minutes of that consoling darkness, between his arms, the flight attendant tells him to fold up his tray table and sit back for take off. It seems that the flight has been granted a pardon and an opening for departure. Prepare for takeoff. And, once again, confirmation that, no matter how many times it gets explained to him or he reads about it, he’ll never understand how and why airplanes fly. Better like that, right?

  He’s always distracted himself from such fortunately incomprehensible questions by opening a book whose mechanics and science feel more familiar to him and, at least, malleable. And his “travel book” has changed over the years. First, oh so obviously, it was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and, at the time of departure and having just emerged from adolescence, heading out on his obligatory formative journey, he read, as if it were a kind of prayer, that thing about “Live, travel, adventure, and don’t be sorry.” And that other thing about how “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

  Years later he moved on to John Cheever’s Journals and the recitation of that thing about “What I’m going to write is the last of what I have to say, and Exodus, I think, is what I have in mind. In the speech on the 27th I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess, and that its role as a consciousness must inform us of our inability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power. Literature has been the salvation of the damned; literature, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair, and can perhaps, in this case, save the world.”

  Now, he no longer believes in such things and the book that he always takes with him to open at the beginning of every trip is Ways of Dying: an award winning essay, penned by a prestigious surgeon who describes clearly and precisely—so that even he can understand it—the many manners and ways a human being can end up dead. The function of this book, of course, is to frighten away the stranger sitting next to him. An unequivocal signal that he’s not the type of person given to casual conversations or one who needs to be told your whole life story. His thing was death’s many forms and talking to him would, probably, bring bad luck and all of that. So best to let him rest in peace.

  He opens the book at random and starts to read the section devoted to death by drowning in oceans or seas or rivers or lakes. “Drowning is, in essence, a form of suffocation in which the mouth and nose are occluded by water,” it says. And “occlude”: he likes that verb. And it continues: “If it’s a suicidal drowning, the victim won’t resist inhaling the water. But if it’s accidental, he or she will fight to hold their breath until exhaustion prevents them from continuing to do so.” He likes its literal and literarily surgical and informative prose (it’s not the same, apparently, to drown in salt water as it is in fresh water; something to remember to use as a conversation starter with a stranger sitting at the bar in a bar) that talks about the liberation of great quantities of potassium and the destruction of red blood cells. It seems to him like such a functional prose and almost poetic in its total lack of linguistic devices. Like those Zen kōans that, merely descriptive, out of nowhere achieve the epiphanic with lines like the one he reads now: “A lifeless human body is heavier than water.” Or, after describing the dead body’s transit through the depths and its progressive deterioration until, after days or weeks, drifting in a liquid limbo, it finally rises and starts to float: “When the body returns to the surface, it’s difficult for its horrified discoverer to believe that that rotten thing once contained a human spirit and shared the air breathed by the living with the rest of humanity.” Exactly, he thinks, feeling now, simultaneously, like the horrified discoverer of his own rotten thing.

  “That book is quite good,” a voice says at his side. And it adds: “But it seems to me that, with respect to drowning, it comes up short. There are many more interesting things to be said about the subject.”

  He turns his head and, in the seat next to him, there’s a man who smiles at him with a smile like a cartoon rodent, holding a book as voluminous as his own. He reads the title: The Story of Stories. He’s heard people talk about that book. Another recently acclaimed essay that purports to establish an evolutionary theory of the art of telling stories or something like that. Stories surging from marine depths and landing on beaches, like talking crabs under moons of long and volcanic nights, conversing and exchanging plotlines and setting a course for high ground and telling each other that they’re not done yet, that this is just the beginning of a great adventure that, with the passing of millennia, they’ll be able to put in writing with pincers that’ll trap everyone who hears them and reads them and hears them reading them. There was a ti
me when he read that kind of book. Many. Many of them. Now he limits himself to reading various reviews and then it’s as if he’d read the books and, subsequently, he could even swear that he really did.

  “Excuse me?” he says with the tone of someone demanding an apology.

  The man keeps on smiling and points at Ways of Dying with a little finger that doesn’t look like a grown man’s finger. Small hands and his little finger resembling that of a kid who was never taught that you shouldn’t point in public.

  “It appears that we’ve gotten our books mixed up. I brought this to scare away a possible high altitude talker. You too, right? Because I know who you are. I was at your roundtable yesterday. No, I haven’t read your work. I’m sorry. I went with a niece who works in the press office of a publisher. She had to attend to the details of the visit by the author of Landscape with Hollow Men. A famous writer, they say. You know him?”

  “Just by name.”

  “Ah.”

  “Anyway, I’m a medical examiner. And the thing about drowning . . . There are more interesting things to be said about it.”