The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  In any case—with the collaboration of another bourbon—Bug! helps him close his eyes without getting too worried about what he’ll have turned into when he wakes up. He’s already felt like a cockroach for a while now. Meanwhile and in the meantime, he’s on a beach, in the black and white of dreams, trailing the footsteps of a bishop in holiday attire who raises his hand and makes the sign of the cross and blesses everything in a language he can’t identify, but presently memorizes and recites after the Bishop. “Porpozec ciebie nie prosze dorzanin albo zyolpocz ciwego,” the bishop repeats over and over. And without knowing how or why, it seems to him that it can only mean “There are many good things in life, so don’t go looking for things that don’t exist.”

  “What things?” he says in the dream, out loud, and the sound of his own voice wakes him up and everything hurts. He could blame the guards (again: be patient, there’s enough for everyone, and there are still more sordid details to be handed out); but it wouldn’t be fair and would be overstating their power and training. No: this pain has been coming on for a long time. Not a growing pain but the pain (except the nose, which supposedly grows until your last breath) of no longer growing. Though the first-class seat is like a small bed that adjusts to his body like a warm and soft and protective mold by Bubble Wrap or like returning after so much wandering to the perfect and unbeatable little bed of that turbulence zone of his childhood. Or maybe he woke up inside another dream, like in Chinese boxes or Russian nesting dolls. Henry James warned: tell a dream, lose a reader. But on this point, he did not agree with Henry James, who, moreover, had ended his life in the waking dream of a delirium where he’d believed he was Napoleon and had dictated orders and his last will and testament, like the most banal and badly written of madmen. Dreams are useful and they work. Worst case, tell a dream, gain some time. And that’s to say nothing of nightmares: proclaim not “I had a dream” but “I had a nightmare” at a crowded party and everything stops and you become, for a while, the king of the evening, to whom everyone listens. Nothing beats the story of the dark ride of the mare of the night. And suddenly wide-awake and not bored anymore—and vertical and upright and civil—everyone pays attention and makes comparisons and raises their hands to ask their turn. And to be able to tell the always vague and imprecise and yet hard-working and interpretable memory of the micro-macrostories (because the storyline of sleeping stories never correspond to the waking time passing outside them) that they wake from startled by the sound of their own screams or the taste of their own tears. And then start to forget them, to invent them, to insert all their unconfessed desires into them. And in this way put to bed the suspicion that, actually, real dreams are never that clever and always recurrent; like that repeated dream of his where a couple does nothing but say goodbye at the doors to an absurd building. Or that the worst nightmares are nothing but the natural alarm clock of a part of the brain yet to be identified and located, whose function is to startle us, so we jump out of bed and don’t succumb to the temptation of dreaming on and on forever, in order to escape the real horrors of everyday life. So, maybe, when we wake up, wanting and needing to justify all those hours elsewhere (in the third part of our lives; that’s why, aware of the farce, wise newborns and innocent individuals on death’s doorstep sleep less), we force them on ourselves dream when awake that we dream something when asleep. We invent stories, lies, alternate lives. Or maybe it’s something that only happens to him: nothing occurs to him when awake, nothing occurs to him when asleep.

  He always liked—in books and in movies and in beds—to be told dreams. Even the childish dreams of children—public nudity or flying or falling—which are the dreams that stay with us for the rest of our lives. Or the obvious dreams from the first films with psychoanalysts to whom what’s dreamt is recounted awake with the none-too-reliable precision of someone who’s no longer sleeping and whose interpretation is, for that reason, as unfaithful as the story of ourselves that someone else tells for us or that we tell for someone else. Or the auteur dreams in those other films: highways frozen with traffic or little people emerging from behind radiators in films that seem pure dream: oneiric features where we never discover who it is that’s dreaming. Or the disturbing dreams of a lover (who killed him over and over in increasingly elaborate ways), who would wake up and wake him up to tell him about it first with a luxury and then a lust of details; because nothing turned her on more than feeling like a voracious praying mantis.

  And with time, the past itself becomes either a dream to be rewritten or an uneraseable nightmare. His recent past—sent to bed without dessert—was like an entertainment that devours itself, shrinking and shrinking until it attains the immensity of the nothingness, of the void. What he had dreamed of. He, who’d grumbled so much about new technologies, letting himself go to come back changed, inside a supreme machine, just by pressing a button. An epic form of suicide. An immortal death. Ceasing to be and departing in order to return, victorious, as a destructive and righteous force. Like those infinite sidereal villains in the Marvel comics he read when he was a kid possessed by the beautiful Ugly Spirit of science fiction. Full-page vignettes drawn by Jack Kirby showing disgraced, schizophrenic superheroes with messianic inferiority complexes—their speech bubbles always full of exclamation points, their mouths agape in terror, shouting the lines Stan Lee wrote for them—pointing to the skies where beings with ominous names like Galactus or Annihilus or Catastrophus or Apocaliptus Nowus were descending. Devourers of planets and shakers of molecules imposing their wills and disposing of everyone else’s. Vengeful Dantian visions—not of Dante but of Dantès—returning from the far reaches of the universe, from their “Negative Zones,” to take their revenge.

  That’s why he’d chosen to go to Geneva, on Christmas Eve, to the accelerator and collider of particles, when he received—after so many years—a phone call from Abel Rondeau asking him where in the world he wanted to go. Hearing Rondeau’s voice—after several decades without hearing it—confirmed for him what he’d always suspected: Rondeau was immortal, Rondeau was never going to die, Rondeau had always been like this, since he was a baby, so similar to the Nowhere Man Jeremy Hillary Boob PhD in the movie Yellow Submarine. Rondeau had been his first boss, the first person to pay him for something he’d written. And consequently he was the most important figure in his life as a writer. Rondeau—who’d been a precocious poet and, it was said, swam for years in the free verses of an infinite fluvial poem, singing to the rivers of his province—had specialized in editing credit card and airline magazines. Several well-known writers had passed through his columns, but he was the first one who’d started from zero and emerged from there. Now Rondeau—at the head of a publication called Volare—came back like the Ghost of Christmas past. And he told him that the magazine was celebrating a major anniversary. And the idea had occurred to him to bring back the “best names” of his professional life and send them around the planet to places of their choosing for a special issue of Volare. “Really send them,” Rondeau had clarified with one of his little laughs, raspy, like a scarab. Because he’d spent a good part of the second decade of his life and first decade of his professional life—under various pseudonyms and personalities, including a dandy, a spiteful wife, and the last link in the chain of a family of child prodigies—composing imaginary trips for the pages of a previous incarnation of Volare called Miles & Kilometers. Making them more or less believable, using information from tourist guides and photos that Rondeau bought from travel agencies (slipping in, as an act of rebellion, subliminal phrases like “the events precipitate,” “thunder and lightning,” “inexplicable delays” to subliminally terrorize their high altitude readers) until he became a kind of Marco Polo, enclosed inside the partitions of a cubicle with a latest generation typewriter and a first generation computer. It’d been, for him, he was certain, the best possible writing workshop. And his debt to Rondeau—on the increasingly infrequent days he felt happy about having become a writer—was infinite a
nd impossible to repay.

  And now Rondeau reentered his life and he said yes and pointed to that place on the map near Geneva where the Large Hadron Collider stood. And Rondeau gave a little laugh and said: “I’ll send you a first-class ticket and the details of your itinerary tomorrow. Forty thousand words. Two thousand euros. Have a nice trip.”

  The money wasn’t bad. Recently, he’d made a lot more for a lot less. But, suddenly, what really attracted him was having a destination and an end and a finale. What was it that captain/assassin Benjamin L. Willard had said before plunging into the infernos, heading upriver, out of Vietnam and into Cambodia, “about 75 clicks above the Do Lung Bridge”? Ah, yes: “Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another,” or something like that, right?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah: he’d go. He’d perform an unforgettable number. A number of many digits. The greatest gift in the history of humanity. The ultimate gift, no exchanges or refunds in the Total Liquidation of his fury. Selling out all existences in the EVERYTHING MUST GO of his revenge. He’d be a new Santa Claus called Cataclismicus. He’d be hole and black and supermassive and magnetic and void and quantum. He’d depart in order to return. He’d accelerate into the depths and collide with everything. He’d give up writing to erase everyone else: letter by letter going in reverse, leaving them floating in a monosyllabic loop, now everyone would know what it was to be good and Merry Christmas and Ho Ho Ho.

  Of course, something went wrong, nothing went right. The whole moment had the tremulous and ultraviolent choreography of one of those old silent (but seemingly filmed at full volume) Keystone Kops movies. Or, better, of one of the Coen brothers’ movies where dreamers and visionaries like Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski or Llewyn Davis or Herbert I. “Hi” McDunnough or Tom Reagan or Ulysses Everett McGill don’t get what they deserve but do get what a good story deserves, and so—for them as for him now—events precipitate, yessir. They spotted him approaching a restricted access door and, immediately, he was jumped on by several guards who—they weren’t fooling him—were direct descendants of SS officers. They quickly subdued and removed him without a beating (“Elvis has left the building,” he thought as they cuffed his hands and feet and dragged him out of there), but executing a series of tai-chi martial arts moves and Vulcan death grips on his cervical nerves that left no trace, and he wasn’t so much tossed as deposited in a holding cell that was far nicer and cleaner than the flat he lived in and that, oh boy, seemed decorated entirely with, yes, IKEA-brand furniture. There, in the privacy of his great public failure, he felt that, in some perverse way, he’d succeeded: he’d become, at last and in the end, one of those Homo catastrophicos of American literature, so loved and triumphant in their defeats. Always protagonists of novels with their last names (generally Jewish) as title and code word on the cover. He liked it so much when a book was named for a person. And now he was something like Shivastein, bruised dancer in the destruction of worlds, laughing tears, in an air-conditioned cell of impeccable credentials.

  And then—ultimate humiliation—he was rescued by IKEA.

  IKEA, who wasn’t as he’d thought him, as he’d described him, as he’d, in part, invented him.

  IKEA was an excellent person, who had always been very grateful to him for everything, and who pulled strings and used his considerable influence to get him released and paid his fine in the millions for “attempting to bring about the end of the world.” So, even though it was an alternate version of what he understood as talent, IKEA’s work—which, also, relied on simpler and better tools and instruction manuals that were easier to follow and understand—still had certain merit beyond the fact that his solemn and so unjustifiably self-satisfied prose evoked for him a lesson learned down to the smallest detail by a student lacking any talent apart from a photographic memory, not bringing anything unique or particular or personal to the table, and sounding to him like one of those thundering soundtracks that, in movies directed by directors of the “skilled artisan” variety, underscore the romantic or dramatic but never the funny moments; because IKEA couldn’t conceive of the idea that humor could be a serious part of serious literature. IKEA was more concerned with a different kind of humor. With a serious humor. With distilling the secret code of the import/export of literature. An instantly assimilable exoticism or an automatically international nationalism. And truth be thought but never told: between having things go well for IKEA or for one of his other contemporaries whom he considered his odd couples or ink brothers, he preferred—it was much easier to bear and even allowed him to feel a fragile disdain—to have things go well for IKEA.

  Because he let himself be convinced that IKEA was suited for something he’d never be. On the other hand, it’d be an entirely different matter and there would be no excuses or alibis if one of his own, a writer’s writer, were to succeed . . . So, better this way. IKEA—a reader’s writer—bore no resemblance to his mental IKEA at all. To that entity constructed like a laboratory monster from loose pieces of various writers. A man with a hammer for whom everything was nails to be pounded and driven. A man he’d constructed and, in his sick mind, summoned and deformed and perfected into an infectious caricature, day after day, googling the news of his latest and never last successes. One of those caricatures belonging to that school of caricaturism that he despised: drawings with huge heads and tiny bodies, as if the only thing worth caricaturing were faces. Or, not satisfied with that, imagining IKEA’s face inserted into one of those posters for theater performances (generally French vaudevilles where everyone shouted and pounded on doors and, like in IKEA’s novels, for him a physical description from which there was no coming back once it was written, “turned on their heels”) where the actors appear all together with their eyes and mouths wide open, in supposedly but never actually funny poses. In his mental caricatures in the backstage of his insomnia, IKEA was like a big hot air balloon, like Oz the Great and Powerful floating in the air, controlled by a pygmy behind a curtain. IKEA was his project. He devoted hours to him. Hours he could’ve spent writing. Or reading. Or doing nothing. It was unendingly sad, this waste of creativity: there was a time when the emissions of his nocturnal fantasies revolved around what it would’ve been like to sleep with those girls he never slept with but, he was almost certain, could’ve slept with if he’d just taken the initiative. There was another time when he thought about nothing but the novel he was working on and, in his lowest moments, about the acceptance speeches he’d give for awards that never came and never would. Now, on the other hand, all his wet dreams revolved around a fantastic and impossible IKEA. Well, actually, his IKEA did somewhat resemble IKEA; because—let’s not forget—for someone to inspire and respire, someone has to expire. IKEA was so happy to distinguish himself, he seemed to be posing more for a bust than a photo, he was an efficient broadcaster of clichés in his interviews and was, also, an internationally successful author of a novel called Landscape with Hollow Men that—though it didn’t entirely fit his synopsis—was just as horrifying as that of his IKEA. The truth was, as far as he was concerned—and on the rare and increasingly infrequent occasions when, with considerable mental and physical effort he was able to force himself to feel and behave like a dignified human being, beyond good and evil—IKEA’s success wasn’t that upsetting. Again, seriously: with a couple gin and tonics in and on top of him, he was even happy for him. And he was jealous of something IKEA had and had retained. Something he’d lost the moment he felt he’d achieved it—the terrible desire to be a writer. IKEA—and many of the writers of his generation—had more and more desire to be writers and to act like writers and to be asked to do what they assumed writers should do, which isn’t writing exactly but going around the world telling people that they write, what they write, for whom they write, and how they write, until on the one hand there was the work itself and on the other there was
what they claimed that work was. Good for them, good for IKEA, bad for him, who enjoyed not so much being a writer but playing a writer, acting like a writer, less and less. But he couldn’t help but feel sad for the many unjustly fallen along the way. That the immense loser Fitzgerald only knew in death the success enjoyed by the little winner IKEA seemed to him an unforgivable injustice. That IKEA incessantly pronounced Fitzgerald’s name as “one of my maestros” sounded like total blasphemy. And that IKEA referred to The Great Gatsby as “the book that taught me everything I know” wasn’t just sacrilegious, but, it also confirmed (he could swear that the author of Landscape with Hollow Men had learned nothing from Tender Is the Night, because he’d never opened it) that IKEA only read his “maestro’s” most well-known books. But nobody seemed to notice. Or nobody seemed to care. Such was life, and life had no reason to give or receive pleasure from the way that literature—even in its most heartbreaking storylines—provides some sense of justice and morality and recompense. Because, in the end, both the miserable Julien Sorel and the miserable Emma Bovary, Alonso Quijano, Cathy Earnshaw, Ahab, Bergotte, Cass Cleave, Ralph Touchett, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Geoffrey Fermin, Morel’s Faustine, die happy because, immortal, they’re well written. To die like that was to be more alive than ever.

  So he didn’t aspire to die happy anymore, but he did aspire to write something that would make him happy again. Happy the way he used to be when he wrote. Happy the way he was when he read something that was sad but written euphorically.

  Where could he go? Where could he find all of that again? When? Maybe—and he ordered another bourbon from the flight attendant—in the time of books. In that continuous present where the past and the future pass away. A time that passes simultaneously, and that you enter and exit the way you enter a house where, having once resided there, you still live. A house that looks more and more like a museum. A house where you always, like when you evoke your childhood, remember everything being much bigger, but then, as you move through its hallways, everything feels smaller and smaller.