The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Hotel rooms—like that suite to end all suites, at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey—are, also, closed ecosystems, sites to destroy, limbos in which to disappear, impious laboratories where, alone, you’re always the specimen in the experiment. In a hotel room—as if under oath—you cannot lie to yourself. And you judge yourself. And condemn yourself.

  The night before—in the implacable magic mirror of the hotel, its border of electric bulbs as if he were a vintage Hollywood starlet ready for her close-up and fade to black—the not-so-successful premiere of something no makeup artist or director of photography could hide: the indisputable and undeniable body of a newly old man, of an old man who’s still relatively young, but who can’t ignore the growing sound of the avalanche that’s bearing down on him. Should he have played more sports, taken better care of himself, when his muscles were still moist and supple? Probably. And it’s not the first time he’s said this to himself and remembered forgetting to do it. But he’s not fooling himself or feeling guilty either: he was always so clumsy at all physical activity that, more likely than not, if he had done any, he’d have died a long time ago, broken into pieces or crushed or squeezed by the improper use of one of those hellish contraptions for gymnasiums with names like Abdominal Crunch Machine or Chest Press Stimulator or Mucho Muscle Terminator. Chiseled chiselers of bodies deluded by the relatively impractical theory that their health and physique will be improved and toned, all of a sudden and when it’s already too late, demanding something from them that hadn’t been asked in decades. Something as absurd as if he spontaneously imposed the form of perfect and golden sonnets or of screenplays for summer blockbusters on his writing. The only thing that can come from such delusion and torment, the inevitable collapse of internal and indispensable muscles like the heart and the brain.

  So, when he’s staying in a hotel, he likes to wander through the empty fitness centers at night, like a ghost. To look and not touch. And yes, in a real dark night of the soul it’s always three o’clock in the morning, so what time in the dark night of the soul would it be when—like right now, on this hotel night, the night before the night on the airplane—it is exactly three o’clock in the morning.

  He leaves his hotel room walking very slowly, imitating the movements of an astronaut exiting his space pod to float neither up nor down in space, advancing toward the elevators down a hallway of closed doors and empty food trays. Why does he persist in the same nonsense he did when he was a kid? A good question that doesn’t need a bad answer. Best to answer: just because. And keep on doing it. Another of his many private rituals. Like that private ritual that he started when he was about six or seven and still does every time he goes out to take a walk into the street: he chooses a person and follows them and, tracing their footsteps, he tells himself that he’ll only stop and change objective and prey when he sees a woman wearing a blue shirt. And he’ll follow that shirt until, for example, a boy with a red baseball cap appears. And so on—several strangers later—to see where he ends up. And ask himself what he’s doing and what to do there. Now that he thinks about it, he wrote about this before. And, before writing about this, he always wrote a little bit like this. About everything and everyone. With pure intuition, as if tracing the blueprint of a building while building it. And seeing how and what emerges and whether or not it’s possible to live there. But at three o’clock in the morning (he remembers another one of these walks, a while back, through one of those hospitals/state-of-the-art clinics), there’s nobody to follow but himself.

  So, in the modality of astronaut David Bowman, he arrives to the elevator and pushes the button to go down to the basement-level fitness center and the doors open and—“My God, it’s full of stars!”—inside are two massive black men and, in between them, there’s something that’s either a little man or a huge bird. They shift only slightly to allow him to enter and the black men cross their column-sized arms and, up close, the being whose body they’re obviously guarding looks at him with small, curious eyes. His face has the fresh and timeless texture of the greatest mummies, if mummies could sport a thin moustache like a Tombstone or Deadwood card shark. And his features—as if a stone had been thrown into the pond of his face—seem to flow, liquid, between adolescence and old age and forward again and now back—outside of time. It takes him a few long seconds to realize that that man is Bob Dylan. He repeats it to himself to confirm it, to believe it: “That man is Bob Dylan.” That. Man. Is. Bob Dylan. Beside him. In a hotel elevator. And, suddenly, it’s as if that brief descending trajectory lasts for years. His years. Years, like now, for a couple minutes, beside Bob Dylan. Each and every single year that—he brings a hand to his nose, knowing that he’s giving off the unbearably cloying baby-shit stench of a star-struck-novice—he’s spent listening to and admiring Bob Dylan. Years that include that long night of his youth when, in the darkness and with headphones on, in one sitting, he listened to Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde for the first time, and, when he was done, eight sides and one hundred seventy minutes and eighty-four seconds later, he was someone else, he’d changed forever.

  Or the first and long-anticipated Bob Dylan concert—coinciding with the publication of his first successful book, everything so perfect—that he attended, when Bob Dylan wasn’t at the top of his game, but it didn’t matter, because the first time is always special.

  Or when he subsequently convinced a friend, who worked for the rock-impresario who’d brought the behemoth, that they go knock on the door of Bob Dylan’s hotel room. His friend had been assigned as Bob Dylan’s personal assistant, and, right away, Bob Dylan sent someone to tell her that he wouldn’t need her for anything, that really he didn’t exist for her; so it was better that she not exist for him. But he did want to exist for Bob Dylan. So he insisted, until he drove his friend crazy, and they went up and knocked (three soft knocks, like timid ghosts) and Dylan opened the door wearing one of those cowboy party shirts embroidered with flowers and hummingbirds. And boxer shorts. And his legs were so skinny, he thought, marveling and terrified; because, he trembled with fear, what biblical curse would strike down from on high anyone who’d seen Bob Dylan in boxer shorts. Then Bob Dylan asked them curtly what they wanted. And in one hand he was holding something that could only be a pale stone that he’d proceed to crack their skulls with, but it actually turned out to be one of those primitive bars of soap for washing clothes. To one side of him, the half-open bathroom door revealed a bathtub full to the brim and multiple pairs of jeans floating in it. His friend, embarrassed and stammering, told Bob Dylan to, please, make use of the laundry service. Then Bob Dylan burst out in a, yes, vomotific monologue, sinuous yet full of edges, with that diction and phrasing, like a sermon that’d bring to their knees both sinners and saints. “My mother told me: always wash your own jeans, Bobby, never entrust them to anybody, because your jeans are yours and only yours and . . .” And on like that for several stanzas until, abruptly, Bob Dylan’s nose slammed the door on their noses and they were left there, uncertain if they’d witnessed a miracle or committed an unpardonable sin.

  Or that other time when—prisoner of one of those foundations for writers—he escaped on a bus through the cornfields to attend another Bob Dylan concert in the decadent city of Davenport. There, waiting in line to enter a small theater that looked like it hadn’t been used since the days of silent films, he’d met a young and giant Indian, a Native American, named Rolling Thunder, thusly christened because the eponymous circus tour captained by Bob Dylan had come to his reservation when his mother was pregnant with him. And Bob Dylan had behaved oh so charmingly and put his hand on Rolling Thunder’s mother’s belly and spoken a few words that must’ve been magic. Now, Rolling Thunder had come to give thanks for the gifts he’d been given and, he explained, looking for their seats in the theater, that he planned to jump on the stage to pay tribute to his spiritual and poetic father. He told him don’t even think about it, that Bob Dylan’s security was ru
thless, that Bob Dylan didn’t like that kind of thing, and that, if he tried something like that, he ran the risk of the night being brought to an early and bad end. But Rolling Thunder had no doubts and was convinced and, when the time for the encore came, he said he was going and asked him if he wanted to go too. He didn’t give it a second thought and grabbed onto Rolling Thunder’s neck and shut his eyes and the sensation was of riding a great wind, and everything (people, seats) fell away in before them, and, suddenly, a leap through the air and there they were, in front of Bob Dylan. And Rolling Thunder fell to his knees and dragged him along with him. And Bob Dylan looked at them uncomprehendingly. And Rolling Thunder raised and lowered his arms, making those halting and monosyllabic Indian sounds that are like the voices of smoke signals, like urgent telegrams to Manitou. And Bob Dylan, all of a sudden, was smiling. And the three of them ended up singing “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” together, the last song of the night. And he, as if charged by a strange electricity, couldn’t sleep for two days.

  The first Bob Dylan album he bought—his eyes still irritated by all the artificial smoke of progressive rock—was Street Legal. It received a great deal of (bad) criticism in 1978 and later (as tends to happen with each and every one of Bob Dylan’s more or less questionable gestures) was vindicated as almost sublime. Anyway, he bought it for the cover. He knew little to nothing about Dylan at the time. His parents (always in the process of separating and getting back together) had The Beatles and Cat Stevens and The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd in their houses, but nothing by Bob Dylan; with the exception of that celebrated poster designed by Milton Glaser with shadowed profile and hair lit with colors. He’d come to Bob Dylan on his own, in his own way, after—in inevitable, full-on beatnik-reading fervor or in an Andy Warhol biography, he wasn’t sure—the singer’s name appeared alongside the name of the King of the Beats or the Emperor of The Factory. It didn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that he subsequently learned (and obtained) absolutely everything he could related to Bob Dylan and he hasn’t stopped learning (and obtaining) everything since. Even that photograph of Bob Dylan peering out from a doorway (more the photo of a writer than of a rocker) that’s still one of his favorites. And that always seemed one of his best and most revelatory and definitive “poses” when it comes to capturing, without words, what Bob Dylan does when he performs. Bob Dylan always appears, takes a look around, goes back inside and tells, in his own way, what he saw. And Bob Dylan saw a lot. And Bob Dylan had led him to so many other things. The middle-aged Bob Dylan had been the hero of his adolescence and the old Bob Dylan was now the hero of his middle age and the young Bob Dylan would be his hero forever. And how many heroes were able to endure and make it through the passing of epochs and trends and their own years and the years of their followers? Very few, he thought. Sure, there are writers who last you your whole life, but really it’s not them who last—what lasts are their books, not their lives, their personas, their characters, not their persons. Bob Dylan had found a way to meld it all together, so that everything came and went through him.

  Now, descending into the depths of a fitness center in the basement of a Swiss hotel, he thinks that he should work up the nerve to tell Dylan that they were old, albeit occasional, acquaintances. Was he already that crazy? Did he have much or anything to lose? Or would it maybe be better to tell him that there were few times in his life as a reader that he’d be been as moved as he had when he read the story of the epiphany Dylan experienced on October 5th, 1987, during a concert at the Piazza Grande Di Locarno, not far from there, on a night of wind and fog? At the time, Bob Dylan told in his autobiography, he was completely disillusioned and empty, almost certain that he’d reached the end of the road, and thinking that maybe he should “go someplace for the mentally ill . . .” His songs were no longer his, he felt no attachment to them, they lacked all meaning except for the people who chorused them back at him, like more or less assiduous parrots, one stage after another. That’s why, to rattle and unsettle them (and he’d always dreamed that writers could do the same thing with their novels and stories, as if they were albums and singles), he always changed them, so the audience couldn’t sing them to him, the person who’d written them but who had no interest whatsoever in having them read aloud to him from memory. But then, without warning, it was as if Bob Dylan heard a voice commanding him to go on. And suddenly “things have changed,” Bob Dylan had become aware of “a set of dynamic principals” and that he “could shift the levels of perception” to “give my songs a brighter countenance, call them up from the grave—stretch out the stiffness in their bodies and straighten them out. It was like parts of my psyche were being communicated to by angels. There was a big fireplace and the wind was making it roar. The veil had been lifted.” In subsequent interviews, Dylan had insisted on that miraculous night and on the renewed sensation of having done nothing yet, because everything was yet to be done and no one could do it but him. And that now, at last, he had the secret formula, the philosopher’s stone, the proper modulation of an Open Sesame and . . .

  Should he confide in Bob Dylan that he’s having the same problems? Dare to ask if he can borrow the instructions and the magic word? Run the risk of having his bones ground into the finest of powders by his bodyguards? Better not: Bob Dylan’s thing, his blues, were something epic and thrilling. While his own long trek across the desert was something more worthy, if he’s lucky, of a miserable Hallmark Channel movie. Those movies always featuring the same bad actors: the guy, afflicted by a rare form of cancer last week, survived several days buried under a rockslide this week, and we’re already coming up with something else for next week.

  Anyway, there was no time left for confidences or for dictating formulas that would activate dynamic principals or heighten levels of perception. They’d already arrived to the subterranean fitness center, the bodyguards were patrolling the area to root out and capture any overnight fans, while Bob Dylan wrapped his hands and proceeded, with unthinkable ferocity, to punch a punching bag with every bit of life he had left in him. He, under the menacing gaze of the bodyguards, sat down at the only machine whose mechanics and operation he sort of understood—the stationary bicycle—and from there he watched Bob Dylan deliver one blow after another. Thinking about Dylan’s voice, about Dylan’s voices. About his first voice, unprecedented in its virtuosity. A voice that was, consequently, misunderstood initially and only now appreciated and admired by many, after hearing his current voice, ravaged by years of never-ending tours and the ingestion of a variety of substances over the course of the decades. The voice of someone who sounds as if he swallowed, whole and in one gulp, the Phantom of the Opera in the exact instant the acid is thrown in his face. But that voice was also—in ageless songs with long goodbyes like “Not Dark Yet” or “Sugar Baby” or “Nettie Moore” or “Long and Wasted Years”—a monstrously beautiful voice, capable of unthinkable modulations to articulate quintessential verses. Verses that the young and compulsive imaginer of imaginings, Bob Dylan, would never have dared sing or write, back when all he wanted was to sound vintage and timeless, like the old and synthetic and precise gunslinger Bob Dylan who was now working out his fists. To demolish the dictates of time and trend—he thinks, thinking about Bob Dylan while he watches him, as if transfigured, throwing punches with an energy that cannot be that of a septuagenarian—is to have made it home and to have found the answer after so many years of asking, “How does it feel? How does it feel?”

  How does it feel? It feels bad. It feels awful. Like he’s got no direction home, not even to his own private Locarno. Like a complete unknown. He feels like he’s invisible and with nothing to hide. He feels worse than Bob Dylan, in his lowest and darkest hours, ever felt.

  The coup de grâce to his increasingly wretched vocation—more fragile at the time than the health of one of those secondary but key characters in stories of Americans sleepwalking through the Old World—was delivered during a talk at a writer’s fes
tival in Switzerland that he’d been invited to, taking advantage of the fact that he was already there and that his travel and accommodations had been covered by a magazine that he was writing a piece for. There, in front of everyone, at one of those sharp-cornered roundtables on the future of the book, where what they were actually talking about was the book of the future: the packaging, the model, the newest way to keep selling the, for most publishers, increasingly rambling—like a pilgrim without a shrine—idea that reading has some significance and reason to exist. And his role was obvious and easy: play the part of the not-too-vintage representative of the old guard, with a certain freakish air, not too out of tune with the rest of the participants, who ranged from adorers of the cybernetic to popular costumbrists of the comfortable, well-to-do left. To be, in the end, not a noble and sacrificial canary in a carbon mine, but a kind of vociferous and cowardly parrot; not a specialized cell, but a tumor, removable and more or less benign, but a tumor all the same. Comic relief and all of that. Why had he accepted the invitation? An easy and almost reflexive answer: because he was there and, in slightly finer print, for the money. They paid well. And he already knew what he was going to say, almost by heart. And it’d been nearly a year since he’d been paid to say it. He had a talk, written several incarnations ago, organized around five more or less good jokes: it all depended on the enthusiasm of his delivery or if before the rectangular roundtable he’d downed one or two vodka-tonics. If he drank three or four vodka-tonics, things could get complicated, the way his last stellar appearance had gotten complicated. Someone had filmed it on a phone and, of course, uploaded it to YouTube. There he was, they’d sent him the link and he couldn’t resist watching it between tremors, almost howling: “Ah, my little friends, mythology is so useful for this, writers like to feel that they are legendary in the practice of a craft that’s not all that epic physically. We’re like a Sisyphus who can’t even find the rock to push uphill. And, if we do find it, it’s oh so hard to push when you’re fixed to a chair. And don’t trust—don’t ever believe them, Hemingway and Nabokov were pathological liars with messiah complexes—those writers who say they write standing up and even pose for photos like that. I even posed like that once. Standing. Like a statue. And, now that I think about it, that’s why there are so few statues of writers—because nobody believes in the ‘idea’ of a standing writer. And because seated statues are almost a contradiction to the spirit of the thing, right? The statue of a seated writer is not very different from the vision of a seated writer, immobile like a statue. But yes . . . um . . . I did it too. There I was, writing vertical, leaning against a column of boxes full of books, just before what, I hope, was my final move. But I had an excuse and a justification: everyone talks about the writer’s great blues—the alcohol, the depressions, the drugs, the eternally anemic storms bursting out in winter and spring and fall and summer—but, from embarrassment and because it’s not anecdotally captivating, very few acknowledge writers’ other great stigma: hemorrhoids, consequence of so much time sitting. The hemorrhoids that keep you from sitting and that, one morning, make you tell the journalist, who has shown up with his corresponding photographer: ‘Didn’t you know I stand up when I write?’ Let’s see: who’d be brave enough to convene a round table, not about the future of the book, but about literary hemorrhoids? Without embarrassment, since even the noblest Greek philosophers referred to them and did their thing standing, expositing aloud, because of them, and it was the inferior castes who, seated and suffering, wrote everything down. How many writers are there in the room who haven’t had hemorrhoids at least once? Hands up, take a step forward, hey!”