The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Yes, every so often, he experienced the mild contractions of the temptation to give birth to his own little myth. But his life hadn’t been that interesting and speaking ill of everyone and everything in interviews wasn’t his thing and was the thing of so many others. The easy and preferred method of certain contemporary legends, addicts of the boutade and the condemnation, positioning themselves vis-à-vis what they dislike rather than what they like (and the success of this posture can be perceived just by counting the number of comments that they receive, on a blog, for a defenestration, comparing it to minimal effect, putting to bed rather than rousing any praise or sympathy), thinking that demonstrating enthusiasm for or taking pleasure in something is almost for cowards. The Internet seemed full of hyenas and vultures (some internauts even suggested names and titles for everyone to take down all at once) always poised and ready to emerge from the shadows of their terminals and throw themselves on the fallen and rip them apart while laughing and pecking in comments that are crude and rotten and badly written in their haste, the so-strange happiness of being so vile. There were too many things he liked, he’d always been criticized for it, and the idea of being or playing the bad guy seemed just as exhausting as going from festival to festival repeating two or three of his own lines that now, after so much repeating, seemed almost foreign, like the echo of a supposedly original voice that sounded and was farther away all the time. So no, better no, even worse no. Shutting his eyes on all of that. Later, trying to fall asleep not by counting sheep but by distracting himself with subtractions and remainders. Morbid subjects; like the music he’d want played at his funeral. His funerals: his imminent end as a writer and his increasingly proximal end as such. To wit: the aria, in Glenn Gould’s last and definitive piano solo version of J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations (Bach, who was never paid much for his work, for that music made to frighten the insomnia out of a count of the Saxony court; and who permitted himself the joke of composing the last of said variations on the foundation of two popular melodies whose titles, translated, would be, not kidding, “I have been away from you so long, come near, come near” and “The cabbage and the turnips have driven me away, if mother had cooked meat, maybe I would’ve stayed”), followed by The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” and Harry Nilsson’s “Good Old Desk” (both about the conjoined act of reading and writing), The Kinks “Days,” and saying goodbye, the casket heading for the flames with “Wigwam,” that hummed, borderland instrumental by Bob Dylan. And then, time and desire permitting, as a kind of encore, during that epilogue when everyone will wipe away tears many of them never thought they’d shed and embrace bodies they never embraced and even let out a laugh (because nothing causes more surprise humor than celebrating someone’s death, feeling suddenly so alive), the last and ninth part of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” composed in its entirety by the immense and never-fully-appreciated Rick Wright, rest in peace. Lyrics and music punctuating the elegies (some of them quite funny and sentimental, for sure) of his dwindling friends; because those who write well and read better are dwindling. But he doesn’t rule out a surprise appearance, another surprise appearance, by IKEA, just in case, because you never know what might happen to a dead writer and it’s no sweat off IKEA’s back to make an appearance. And to put on that how-sad-for-him mask over that how-happy-for-me face he tends to reveal and barely conceals on such occasions. And on and on like that until sleep comes and he closes his eyes and opens them to dreams of things that, he’s certain, only he dreams. Dreams where he enters a bookstore not of used books but of read books (a condition and mystery and breathing that, again, no electronic invention could ever aspire to) and there, opening one, discovers inside it that legendary stolen or lost letter, that fundamental missing link to understanding the evolution of the novel: lines and pages that, previously supposed and suddenly certain, Henry James sent to Marcel Proust after reading the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. Obviously it’s a childish dream. A dream as childish as his vocation. But it’s much better to dream like this, sweetly and among shelves and books, than to dream the dream that the nightmares tend to bring, the one where he’s a very old old man (the redundancy is valid), not at all elegant, wrapped in a fog of of vigorous and healthy afflictions that no longer leave him, and irascible not like one of those twisted Charles Dickens characters, but like the illustration of one of those twisted Charles Dickens characters. A kind of Ebenezer Scrooge who spurns everyone because he knows himself spurned and who’s not at all interested in the interested and methodological affection of university students who circle him like vultures, waiting for him to die so they can resuscitate him in theses and theories. Someone who has already forgotten what it was to leap. Someone who can no longer leap and detach himself from the ground and fly in the air for a second or two. Someone who at any moment will break a hip, because his bones can no longer bear the call and pull of the gravity of an earth that’s reclaiming his body, that wants him not on his feet but lying down and underground. And he thinks about all of that, considers all of it without feeling any need to put it in writing, in the savannah of his sheets, tossing and turning, not bothering anybody because he sleeps alone and wakes up even more alone, repeating until he sinks into insomnia, eyes shut, like a blind mantra, things like “My kingdom is not of this world . . . Mykingdomisnot ofthisworld . . . Mykingdomisnotofthisworld . . .”

  Where was his kingdom? he wondered now, thousands of meters above the earth, hurtling through the air at a thousand kilometers per hour, not long after trying and failing to bring about the end of the world. Was this flying metal horse his kingdom? Or was there a place out there somewhere waiting to welcome him home after so many years away on his convoluted Crusades? On which he discovered that God didn’t exist or—even worse, maybe—that God didn’t read his books; because on the seventh day he wanted something light and entertaining, something that would assure him that mankind was to blame for all the horrors of humanity.

  Why?

  Why not?

  He wanted—he needed—something like that now too. Something passing for the passenger he was. So he pressed buttons and scrolled up and down the list of movies and saw that, among the nearly fifty titles, was the recently released musical version of The Metamorphosis called Bug! Something strange had happened—something that couldn’t be good—when it was decided that the genre of classical musicals (the one where the characters suddenly, possessed by an ecstatic happiness, started to sing and dance without it striking anyone as strange) had to infect the great tragedies of literature. Not long ago he’d endured fifteen minutes of Les Misérables on TV and had shuddered when he saw those colossal set designs and flags flying in the wind, fading into close-ups of characters’ faces, excessively sullied by the most cosmetic of poverties, singing their penury at full volume, eyes and mouths so wide they looked ready to pop out of their sockets or dislocate their jaws. Out of pure curiosity, after watching a documentary about John Cazale and another about Harry Dean Stanton (two first-rate B-roll actors), he selects Bug! The star of the movie is that hip prodigy: L. B. Wild. Lost Boy Wild—a name his agent gave him—is a boy who was discovered wandering around a supposedly uninhabited Pacific island, where a crew had gone to film a show about paranormal activity that, though incomprehensible, had a good part of humanity on the edges of their seats. Another one of those shows automatically celebrated by the automatic celebrators, shows that go on for seasons and seasons, submitting their followers to a sadomasochistic exercise (Once upon a time upon a time upon a time upon a time) comparable to that of the loving and terrible mother with the personality of a wicked stepmother who draws out telling her children the stories of Cinderella and Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood over five years. Shows like new favorite colors or astrological signs or foods: “What show are you watching?” as the perfect question to strike up a stupid conversation. Fans—who called themselves wildies across an infinity of paranoid blogs and conspiratorial forums—had celebra
ted the discovery of the lost, wild boy as if it were an evolution of the show, as if it were incontrovertible proof that this was much more than a simple TV series. So L. B. Wild was brought back to civilization and an attempt was made to trace his origin to a possible accident where his parents or family members had died, a shipwreck or a small plane crash, whatever. But no record was found. Nobody had lost that strange boy who—almost two meters tall, muscular, blond, blue eyes—was quickly selected as the sexiest man on the planet. And nobody was particularly surprised that L.B. Wild possessed wild talents for acting (years of forced survival in the jungle had given him a almost supernatural mimetic capacity), music (his voice reached vertiginous highs and deep lows and he was able to imitate the sounds of all the animals and of the sea and the rain and the wind in the trees), and painting (his eyes, having lost nothing of their childish curiosity, had made him a master of a new thing that critics had rushed to classify as “Popexsionism”). So, L. B. Wild had won an Oscar for Bug!, he had simultaneous shows in the galleries of Charles Saatchi (London) and Larry Gagosian (New York); his first album—You Jane, Me NOT Tarzan, featuring collaborations with U2, Kanye West, Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga, and DJ Thomas Pincho—had topped the sales charts in several countries; his autobiography had been announced (was he going mad or had he heard on the news that IKEA would be in charge of “helping him civilize his wild past?”); he was modeling for top clothing designers; and, they said, he’d been raped and sexually initiated by Miley Cyrus at a nightclub-casino in Vegas.