The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  “For example?” he asks without understanding why; but it’s also true that the fact that the stranger has not read IKEA instantly makes him an appealing person, deserving of a little kindness and civility.

  “To begin with, death by drowning, contrary to what many think or wish, is not a romantic or fluid death. Maybe they’re confused or fooled by the presence of water. The whole thing about sinking and floating underwater. To relax and let yourself be taken by the currents like someone slowly falling asleep and filling up with some cool and liquid thing until they dissolve. We come from water and to water we’ll return. But no, no, no: all death, including ‘normal’ death is nothing more and nothing less than the abrupt cessation of activity of an engine that’s been running, with luck, uninterrupted for a long time. All death is, as such, as quick as a cataclysm for the body as a natural disaster is for a city, suddenly left without any power supply.”

  “Aha.”

  “And so, when it comes to drowning, the process itself is particularly thought-provoking. The different stages that take place in the act itself. It’s like a performance in multiple acts. In all death, even from the physiological standpoint, there’s a kind of storyline, a narrative arc.”

  “Aha.”

  And the man begins to recite, enumerating on his little fingers:

  “Act one: fear. Most people scream and flail their arms. Act two: they go under and swallow water. More fear. The larynx and vocal chords contract and it’s no longer easy to scream. This is known as laryngospasm. An involuntary reflex. Act three: unconsciousness and the beginning of the cessation of breathing. Act four: small and abrupt movements, hypoxic convulsions, the skin beginning to change color. Blue. Act five: clinical death. Cardiac arrest. The end of the blood’s circulation. Act six, and this is when things get interesting: biological death. Some four minutes after clinical death. It’s like the death of death. The point of no return, so far away that nobody can be brought back from it. Any cardiopulmonary resuscitation impossible. See you never. Sweet dreams.”

  Hey: but if that’s the case, it’s exactly how I feel whenever I try to write, he thinks.

  “But, and most people don’t know this, most important of all”—the man continued, after taking a sip of his welcome-aboard champagne—“is the fear. Fear is what marks all death. Fear is death’s true author and, in multiple autopsies, I’ve found a small sphere of something that looks like lead; like an antique bullet, covered in fine and short capillary filaments. But it’s not lead; it’s organic matter. Though maybe, at the same time, it’s like a bullet. Because it is, I’m certain, the solidification of fear. Fear’s physical and solid and palpable manifestation. And I’ve only found it in people who, I’ve checked, were very frightened when they died. Oddly enough, the majority were either victims of drowning or practicing Catholics. The former is understandable; because it’s the kind of death that lasts longer and allows the fear to grow and lodge itself inside us, with us. The latter I don’t really get, because you’d think that, finally, they’d be gaining access to that oh so anticipated heaven, right? The greatest fear I discovered was in the guts of a cardinal. But I’ve never had a writer. Are writers really frightened when they die? Because it’s obvious that, I imagine, they live in terror, right? It can’t be easy to spend your whole life afraid that no ideas will come to you. Or that ideas will stop coming to you. And, suddenly, you die convinced that your best, your best idea, could well have been yet to come or has been left irretrievably behind, right? If you’re thinking of dying in the near future, here’s my card. It’d be a huge favor, I’d be very grateful. If you let me look inside your body, I mean. I’d be discrete, scout’s honor. Of course, I haven’t included anything about the spheres of terror in my autopsy reports. I take them home, of course. I have a large collection.”

  “Ah . . .” he says. And he remembers the terror glands, in that comic, from his more or less terrifying childhood, but, ah, he loved the horror genre so much; but this man was starting to frighten him, another kind of fear—not the fear that you seek out for the pleasure of being frightened, but the fear that comes looking to frighten you.

  “And having said what I said and seeing your face, I don’t think there’s any reason for us to talk for the rest of the flight, right? So let’s trade books. And nothing to see here,” concludes the examiner.

  He hands over Ways of Dying and takes The Story of Stories, like someone exchanging one prisoner for another, in the middle of a border bridge cloaked in shadows and fog, in a black and white movie, or in one of those novels where you know from the start—the best friend or the beloved mentor will always be the treacherous mole.

  And, to keep from seeing that rodent face, he turns his head and looks across the aisle. A young man is staring at him. The seat beside him is empty and he wonders if it might not be better to go over there, next to him, as far from the fear-extractor as possible. But no, the seat isn’t empty—there’s something in it that looks like a thermos or a cocktail shaker, fastened with the seatbelt. The young man keeps staring at him as if, more than looking at him, he were reading him. The young man is holding a book and he smiles at him and shows it to him: The Seven Capitol Scenes. He’s read about it too. A kind of self-help manual for people who, due to some sort of genetic or psychological disorder, need to be writers. One of those books that makes a case for literature, but that doesn’t seem willing to let literature just be literature. So scientific elements are introduced, trying to find secret formulae, the primordial alchemy of “Once upon a time . . .” as a “DIY,” but always keeping it far out of reach of the children.

  The young man smiles at him, complicit, timid, anxious, a reader but not an entirely pure one. A turbulent halo surrounds him. He recognizes the species to which he belongs immediately—a reader who wants more than anything in the world to become a writer. With years and practice it’s become easy for him to identify them: dilated pupils, quivering nose, an odor between acidic and saccharine, like the shit of newborns who don’t know how to read but already want to write. It’s clear that the young man has also recognized him by his name—that the captain announced over the loudspeaker—and not by his face: his books haven’t included an author photo for a while now and he no longer looks anything like he did in the days when they wanted to photograph him. There was a time when he wore that same cloying and desperate perfume, and who knows what he smells like now. Maybe like an old book. Or like an old man with a book. Anyway, he hears the alarms and alerts and possible turbulence. And yet—not learning from the experience that years supposedly grant—his first impulse is to let himself be recognized and to acknowledge the young man. Make him more or less happy. Offer him strength and hope. Be a lightning god, for the long hours of this flight at least. Toss him a scrap, so he can go tell his young friends and colleagues about it and, not too underhandedly, give him a little push so he flies a bit too high and burns his wings and suffers and comes to know what it is to be good, in the worst way possible. He spies on him out of the corner of his eye and can sense his absolute tension, dancing the to-speak-or-not-to-speak minuet that he danced so often when he was young and ran into someone, into one of his favorite and not-so-favorite writers, in the streets. Back then, he remembers, writers weren’t as visible or accessible as today. They only emerged from their basements or came down from their attics for the occasional interview. Or, every so often, for the presentation of one of their or somebody else’s books every so often. Events where some brave or clueless person would force their self-published book on him. Small books with long handwritten dedications that can’t be recycled or exchanged for other books (he’s afraid to tear out the handwritten page because someone might utilize that magic trick of basic espionage, shading in the blankness of the next page with a black pencil so that “For the master to whom . . .” appears again) and which he disposed of, with true paranoia, not in hotel rooms but, just in case, in airport trashcans. Back when he was first starting out as a reader who wa
nted to be a writer, there weren’t so many book fairs and festivals or organizers who wrote to say that they were willing to cover travel and lodging costs, as if contemplating and longing for an alternate reality where writers crossed oceans for nothing and slept on the streets and in the parks. There weren’t any bookstores with cafes to make appearances in. Or blogs from which to harangue the feeble and puny masses, even (he read about this) from beyond the grave, prepaying a company to keep you alive and updated post-mortem. There was no Internet or email inboxes (and every more or less serious writer tends to have an easily traceable address: name and last name and @ symbol and the ending of one of those free corporate entities in the service of the FBI & CIA & Co., so happy now that citizens offer up their own private lives without protest or hesitation) where anyone can send you weighty text documents/files of unpublished work without paying for printing. Without even asking permission first and requesting a reading, an opinion (which has to be highly favorable), to be put in touch with an agent, an introduction to an editor, and, if possible, a shortcut to an award. So, when the most timid get up the nerve to ask for his address, he says whatever random thing, sending them down one of the web’s dead-end alleyways, when what he’d really like to do is shout at them: “Didn’t your parents ever teach you not to accept things from strangers? Yes, right? Good, the second part of that lesson is don’t expect strangers to accept anything from you, idiot.” He, back then, had never done anything like that. He’d come up as a writer’s apprentice at a time when the concept of vertical and precipitous hierarchies and levels and workplace seniority and access controls existed. Now, not so much. Now it was all open bar and horizontal and flat buffet, like the wide-open parking lot of a final encephalogram. Now everyone was sitting together at the same table. Now you lose your seat if you get up to go to the bathroom. And everything goes so fast, speed is so important now: they call you the “New Joyce” or “New Whoever You Like Best” not at the end, but at the beginning of your career, when your first book comes out. He said once that he liked being a writer less and less and liked writing more and more. Now, a while later, he didn’t like being a writer and he didn’t write. And he didn’t know what he was or what he liked anymore. But he knew everything he didn’t like all too well. And everything he didn’t like was almost everything. He didn’t have a plan B or, like airplanes, an emergency exit. What would be next? Launching himself like a kamikaze and starting to say things like writing is suffering and there’s no art without pain?

  So he looks at the boy and stares into his eyes and thinks better of it—thinks it and period—and brings his index finger to his lips. Silence. Do not disturb. Do not even think about saying word one to me, kid. And, with a terrible smile, he watches the kid sink into himself, lower his gaze, almost releasing a dying moan. Ways of Dying. Dying of shame and, with time, if things go well for the boy, he’ll be forgiven, after all, it’s a good story for his history. Something the boy will recount in epic fashion, with added details, improving the anecdote of his terrible encounter with that total son of a bitch. Today’s fright is tomorrow’s delight, nothing is lost, everything is transformed and even rewritten, and that is exactly what literature is all about.

  So now he even has a feeling, or really a premonition, in that brief instant of the possibility of something, a distant spark that might start a fire somewhere nearby. It’s been a long time since he tuned in that station, which years ago he heard loud and clear and all the time and that seemed to only play his favorite music. What he hears now, on the other hand, is more like the tuneless message, more inaudible all the time, of an astronaut floating in space. A “Houston, I know we have a problem; but let me tell you . . .” It’s not much, but it’s something, or, at least, a lot more than he’s experienced in many years. So many that imagining what might come from that rather Henry Jamesian situation—a young aspiring writer approaching an old though not necessarily master writer whose experience isn’t good for anything anymore; plus the brilliant manuscript of a young, unpublished dead man—gives him a cosmic and floating headache. And in exchange for all of that, lost in space, outside his suit and the cloudy plastic of his helmet, just a few faraway spores that, if they come to rest on the right planet will evolve and turn into something worth telling. Would it be worth it to go back, to arrive to Jupiter and beyond infinity? But that feeling of weightlessness and dizziness doesn’t last long—the experiment has failed. False alarm and true relief and launch aborted. I’m sorry, my friends, but this mad scientist is no longer good for grand fantasies and deliriums. Run your test somewhere else and with a more resistant and less exhausted specimen. Out of Order, Out of Work. Find new instructions and disassemble a new model with batteries included and not worn out. Lightning and thunder and primordial stew and alphabet soup—elsewhere. Nothing works here anymore, nothing works.

  And The Story of Stories is about or, better, is trying to discover something its author denominates “the fiction genome,” to understand the need to tell stories as the thing that, Darwinianly, separates the human from the animal and makes it the fittest of species; if and when, of course, it is not a Disney-brand animal. And, once the genome is discovered, to draw a map going in reverse, not leading to the treasure, but departing from it. And the X on the map of the author of The Story of Stories is Homer’s The Odyssey. It’s clear that, before that time, humans were already expert weavers of storylines, but then and there, with Odysseus/Ulysses, the essayist claims, the writerly brain makes a quantitative and qualitative leap. Thereafter, he argues, writers—half sailors, half castaways—are constantly on their way back to Ithaca, but they’re not in any great hurry. And they’re more than ready to visit—along with sirens and cyclopes and ghosts—new ports. And, the romantic thinker continues, the key to transmitting, in a more decisive and memorable way, information that’s vital for our survival through the centuries resides in our ability to imagine enduring stories. So, writing and literature as a form of communion and blahblahblah, with abundant diagrams, periodic tables, and even reproductions of cranial X-rays.

  There was a time, oh so many frequent flyer miles ago, when he believed and even got excited about subjects and proposals like this. It was easier for him to believe in all of that, the way he once believed in Sandokan and D’Artagnan and Nemo. Literature functioning, physiologically, as an organized organism, as a kind of brotherhood that he belonged to—we happy few, band of brothers, etcetera.

  Now, not so much. Now he’s alone. And empty. And withered. Now, not back in his house but in a house he can’t escape from and where not even his dog would recognize him. Now he’s like a beggar who barks but no longer bites and who, almost without realizing it, falls asleep in the first armchair he finds, run aground, not tied to a mast; not hearing the sinuous call of sirens, but the deep voice of the captain from the bridge in his cockpit in the stars, saying something over the airplane’s loudspeaker. A voice like a cheap DJ with awful musical taste saying something that isn’t “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course.” Saying, in multiple languages, that they were entering a turbulence zone, as if “Turbulence Zone” were a hit-single that everybody knows yet nobody dares sing, but c’mon, all together now, here’s one we all know.

  “The truest and best and most venerable bluesmen never repeated themselves, not because they decided not to, but because they didn’t know how: for them, never having recorded albums where they could listen to themselves, the concept of singing the same song the same way didn’t even exist,” he thought, just a few hours ago, yesterday, in a hotel room, in another country farther away all the time as the airplane advances into the storm, through the night going in reverse. The kind of thing that comes to him more often all the time. Without warning. Random phrases that, as mentioned, until recently he wrote down in notebooks or on pieces of paper because they could be useful in something or for something. Now—also again, repeating himself in an attempt to convince himself that h
e’s doing something and at a point in his life when everything that he’s stopped doing is difficult to start to do again—not so much. As soon as hears them inside his head, he says them aloud to see how they sound and waits for oblivion to take them. Phrases like hotel rooms where you stay for a while and then leave for the next hotel and the next room and, if it were up to him, he’d sign up for his own future death in a hotel room. Death in a hotel room as a way of dying. To order death like room service and to sit down and wait for Death to bring his death to him and, humming the blues, to leave him on the other side, at the opening of the gate and “Fixin’ to Die,” “In My Time of Dying,” and “See That My Grave is Kept Clean.”

  For him, hotel rooms were always—like for Vladimir Nabokov, in a hotel near to this one, because though he’d finally recovered his fortune “it makes no sense to buy a villa, because I won’t live long enough to train the servants to my taste and needs”—the peak of civilization. There (even though the designer showerheads had become too complicated in recent times and the magnetic cards to unlock the doors incessantly deactivated themselves and you had to go down to the front desk to get them reprogrammed) you had everything you needed to survive: doorway (where they recommend that you stand in case of an earthquake and where nobody stops to check their Twitter feed), bed, food, TV (where they always seem to be broadcasting 2001: A Space Odyssey or Apocalypse Now, two of the greatest hotel films in the entire history of film), even one big book (the Bible in the bedside table drawer). And a small and almost monastic desk that helps maintain a certain order or lack of disorder (and that, in its asceticism, seems to inspire writing or to summon despair; so, better to write, to create disorder). And a pleasant landscape whose discomforts (heat and noise, insects and cold) cannot come inside, thanks to those windows that don’t close because they can’t be opened. Also, the possibility to make it so the telephone doesn’t ring and even to request paid companionship, where the always ambiguous and unstable foreign currency of feelings won’t be a factor. And the magic of that little sign that you hang on the doorknob—not ordering but imploring: PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB—that he once took home with him and scanned and that now he sends as an automatic response to any inopportune, undesired, and unnecessary email.