The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  That place that Henry James called “the visitable past.” And such visits are known to be a high-risk endeavor, full of not necessarily pleasant surprises. Anything can happen. Something that’s not expecting us or that we’re not expecting. Nothing is as it seemed, as it seems. A memory is like a virus that mutates every time it’s vaccinated and the memory is a sickness from which only absolute amnesiacs are entirely cured. The rest of us wander around, almost in the dark, bumping into furniture we thought was somewhere else. Memory is an interior decorator; an interior decorator who seems to believe in feng-shui: shifting things around to find the ideal orientation for our wellbeing. Or tranquility. Or comfort. Or best and most convenient way and means of remembering. Because remembering is nothing but a slight mutation of forgetting, very personal and very private. We erase, we rewrite, we correct, we alter the order and calibrate intensities and voltages of scenes and scenarios. So the past is always a work in progress—an unfinished manuscript and, in the end, a posthumous work to be revised by strangers.

  To avoid this, as if wrapping himself in a fever, here and now he promises himself a posthumous book while he’s still alive. A zombie memoir (he’s a little worried about how often he thinks the word “zombie” lately), self-cannibalizing, starving for his brain and his brain alone. A kind of autistic autobiography: an autibiography focusing on (as if looking through a microscope with telescopic lenses or a telescope with microscopic lenses; approximating distances, distancing proximities, as if watching and seeing everything through the faraway yet nearby eye of a keyhole) an apparently insignificant but original and foundational detail. The Little Bang, the intimate and inaudible Genesis whose echo resounds, apocalyptic, across the years in catastrophes to come and miracles to be witnessed. Not Literature of the I, but Literature of the Who Am I. Or Literature of the What Do I Know. Or Literature of the Ex I, of the I that could have been but wasn’t, because it got off the train before reaching its destination or didn’t catch its plane on time. The figure hidden in the tapestry, the secret code, the magic word, the key that opens the door to the explosive clockwork mechanism of the head of a writer. Tick-tock, Knock-Knock. What time is it? The same time as always, all the time. The time, for him, to keep on thinking about how to proceed, about how to begin, about how to move on, about how to end, about how to begin again. The time for “Once upon a time . . .” The time never shown by nonexistent airport clocks (he’s come to think that some kind of deal must have been struck between airport administrators and mobile phone makers and inventors of various electronics; forcing users to depend on their devices for something as simple as the time and, of course, getting them immediately trapped in the spider web of messages and ads and games). The time shown only on digital clocks in the corners of plasma screens of movies and books clutched by electrocuted spectators and readers, holding onto those tablets as if they were a ledge or a life preserver on the brink of an abyss or in the midst of a shipwreck, convinced they’ll hold them aloft or keep them afloat when really they’ll fall and sink, no bottom in sight. Why not give all of them, he thinks now, in the sky, the hell of the definitive gadget. Why settle for an electronic reader when you can access an electronic writer. The unmitigated and unanesthetized truth. Not yet. Though, surely, it won’t be long, sooner or later that time will come. Bells at midnight, heralding the idea—that he’s hereby patenting—that’d allow readers, orally or intravenously or via a suppository or with the insertion of a chip, to gain direct and live access to the mind of a writer, of their favorite writer. Not selling books anymore but selling minds that think books. “E-Writer” or “iWrite” or “Bookman.” Experiencing live—a nonstop feed—how an idea occurs to a writer. An idea that, of course, won’t always be a good idea and that might be an awful idea, a terrible waste of time and useless expenditure of neuronal energy. Like reading a bad or confused book, but experiencing in the flesh what it’s like to work twenty-four hours a day. A truly never-ending tour (maybe an excursion, without the soft but firm voice of the GPS to orient you, through the disorienting and as yet unpublished Mount Karma, Abracadabra; you’ve been there, would you be able to come back and tell about it, give some shape to all that incandescent and chaotic material?, would you ever make it out of there or, having never lived something like that, being the child of a small extinct clan, would you stay there, addicted to that family whose name is legion?), a stone that keeps on rolling. Feeling each one of the dangerous curves and risky byways of a split brain and a megapolar personality. And suffering its flat tires and breathing in the euphoria of its peaks and, from there, jumping off into the abyss. And that’s just the beginning. Experiencing too the le mot juste and we work in the dark and the madness of art and the absurd conjectures and crazy superstitions and childish fantasies (daydreaming that you’re the author of that classic); struggling to reconcile the slow and secret construction of your work with the unstoppable demolition of life; and accepting the shameful certainty (because it’s easy to confess nothing when everyone is guilty) that the laurels another writer receives (especially if he or she is younger) can only be the very same laurels that, not understanding why, didn’t come to rest on the head of their rightful owner and author, the fault of some upstart and sycophantic social climber; inventing and believing in family tragedies and madness and disappearances to excuse yourself for not writing or to help yourself start writing again.

  He can imagine all the used up users, the addicts of the ephemeral novelty of this new toy: smiling with fascination at first but before long releasing little horrified screams and cries for help. And then unplugging and running away, certain that they do not want to be that, but maybe, from then on, treating books and the alphabet with greater respect. And valuing how that process, that adventurous voyage, corresponds to the way the letters jump from the page and enter our eyes and arrive to the interior of our brains. And once there and from there, to try, once again, to free trembling prisoners and burning lunatics and to inspire and guide lovers, vanquishing despair and, maybe, saving the world. Blessed be.

  Meanwhile and in the meantime, he says, why not the coming-soon of a book that isn’t like a book but like a writer. Variations on a theme, with the lights out, while everyone but him sleeps in the darkness of space wrapped in the void: A book . . . A book . . . A book . . .

  A book that wouldn’t be avant-garde but retro-garde: the part behind a book, its backstage and making-of, its how-to in code and loose pieces to be trapped. Because there’s no gesture more avant-garde or experimental in a book than the one made in the very moment of its creation, before it comes into being. A before that’s nothing but a long during in which everything that could happen happens irrespective of times or spaces or structures: that voyage without clear direction or precise destination where the writer reads a book that’s not yet been written. During that time—that era—that is, always, the moment of maximum plenitude and happiness—when everything is yet to be done and you look out at the future as if it were an ideal and limitless landscape, from the top of a tall mountain. With your hands on your waist and your legs planted slightly apart, solid and on your feet. And you see everything. And you understand and comprehend everything. Down to the smallest and most revealing detail.

  A book that thinks like a writer in the act of thinking up a book, what he’s thinking about when he happens to think of a book, when that book happens to him, and about what happens with that book.

  A book that would be read in the same way it was written.

  A book that would be read—like those medieval monks read, perfecting first the art of reading in a low voice, their lips barely moving—like a prayer.

  A book in the most singular and first of third persons.

  A book that—aired or aerated—would be like the stand-up comedian of itself, all alone, in a club on the last night of the end of the world.

  A book like antimatter, like the antimaterial that—its energy so dark—will turn into another book, in another dimension
.

  A book that would sound like an album of greatest hits composed of rarities or like disrespectful or distorted but sincere covers of itself.

  A book that, entering the airport, its helixes already spinning and ready for take off, would obey without argument and even with enthusiasm the order to round up the usual suspects.

  A book like a suspension bridge to throw oh so many things off of as you cross it and arrive to the other side, ah, so light and free of baggage.

  A book that promises to whomever it may concern—after its author has written writers of children, writers of saints, writers of songs, writers of comics, writers of obituaries, writers of children’s books, writers of science fiction—that in the next book, if there is one, there won’t be any more writers. Or that, at least, he’ll try his best, really, seriously, right?

  A book that would invite you in with a “Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story” and that, once you’re there, would push you over the edge and, as you fall headlong into the void, would shout at you, “But why’d you believe me? Didn’t your parents ever tell you not to talk to strangers?”

  A book that would include celebrity faces. Ray Davies, gripped by panic, feeling the whole big sky coming down on top of him. William Burroughs killing his wife in order to be born as a writer. Bob Dylan lost in the mythic inertia of being Bob Dylan and claiming that he doesn’t need to write any more songs because “The world don’t need any more songs . . . They’ve got enough. They’ve got too many. As a matter of fact, if nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world ain’t gonna suffer for it. Nobody cares.” And, even still, he kept right on pulling fragments and notes and words and papers and bijis out of his “Box” because it’s better to write for others than to read yourself. Francis Scott Fitzgerald sinking into the swamp of a long and exceedingly rough and not at all tender night. Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd portrayed with that cadence and phrasing and style, not forever young but forever juvenile, of rock journalism—that exhibitionism somewhere between encyclopedic and ignorant—that contaminates everyone during puberty, when they listen to albums and write over those albums with their ears. All of them, there inside, with their mouths shut and eyes open wide, features frozen in the terrible moment when it occurs to them that nothing occurs to them but to invent parts of their lives that seem, even to them, more and more like fictions.

  A book that would overflow with epigraphs and where each of them is like a piece of a secret message or like those ransom notes assembled from clippings of letters, in different fonts and personalities and styles, but all of them wanting and demanding the same thing.

  A book that, like all his books, would keep on growing in successive editions, incorporating new paragraphs and pages and even chapters in a writer’s cut. Last minute bonus tracks and deleted scenes. The same thing had always happened to him: the book finished, in the final round of proofs, as if he were looking back at his whole life a handful of minutes before the end, ideas and actions came to him that he hadn’t remembered at the time but that now . . .

  A book that—with any luck—over time would become one of those books like On the Road or The Catcher in the Rye—forever juvenile books that you reread throughout life to assess how you’re aging.

  A book that would include, disappeared, the Greatest Desaparecido of All Time. A book about someone who disappears and then reappears in order to make everything disappear or change or start over; like someone crumpling a page into a ball and throwing it toward the circle of that waste basket at the foot of the desk and, did it make it or not?

  A book that when you throw it against a wall bounces back into your hands. Or that, at least, when it falls to the ground, always falls open to the page you were on when you threw it against the wall.

  A book, (im)personal and self-referential, with oh so many winks for connoisseurs and marvelous moments frozen in time that it starts off and ends up resembling a face beaten by a tidal wave of tics, drowned by a tsunami of tick-tocks: like the secret voice of someone who’s desperate to tell us something but who can’t speak, because his tongue is tied, because suddenly his tongue speaks in the strangest of tongues.

  A book that—as Beckett said of Proust—would beneficently and joyously suffer “that most necessary, wholesome and monotonous plagiarism—the plagiarism of oneself.”

  A book that speaks a different language, its own, but that also tells you: “Okay, true, you don’t understand me now, but you’ll learn, because I’ll teach you. Let me see: let’s start at the end . . .”

  A book in which everything happens at the same time.

  A book that’s obviously adolescent: pimples, changing voice, altered personality and mood and character, always horny; but written from that second adolescence that begins at the end of middle-age and the beginning of old-age.

  A book that—if it weren’t the last of everything but the first of something—would end up, over the years, producing a certain discomfort in its author. An anxiety like the anxiety caused by running into a childhood friend who knows too much and whom you’ve not seen for a long time. And when, all of a sudden, you see them again, you can’t help but wonder how it is that you ever had anything to do with someone like that and what you should do to avoid being recognized, so they don’t come running over, shouting and waving their arms, attacking, on guard.

  A book that wouldn’t make you wonder what is and isn’t true, but that answers without hesitating or lying how this guy happens to think of these things.

  A book that, if it were a building, would be the Flatiron in Manhattan, and everything is expressed architecturally, right?

  A book that’s studied like those ancient anatomical prints, displaying a panoramic bisection of the head, revealing zones inhabited by moods, sensations, feelings, come look, come see, come read. The same thing that—with the space race canceled, no signs of extraterrestrial life out there, or, at least, not of superior beings with enough interest in us to reveal themselves—is now sought with the most futuristic and space-age of technologies. But the objective is the same: find the exact centers of love and guilt and hate and desire and even religious faith. One by one—scientists make claims without offering us much in the way of proof, as if filling an album with trading cards—these exact sites in our brain are being located. While the most difficult card—The Invented Part, the part that’s invented—doesn’t stay still and changes position like someone changing his mind.

  A book that’s toxic—both for its author and its readers—but a book that, once processed and digested, the fever broken, functions as a kind of exorcism, leaving behind someone who, after feeling like hell, looks up at the sky and smiles that smile of prayer-card saints.

  A book like one of those poisons that, via its careful and precise administration, ends up becoming its own antidote.

  A book that’s vomitific like a purge and an exorcism.

  A book that’s like a tumor you have to rock and sing to so it won’t wake up and matastisize.

  A book to be excised.

  A book that would be an open book, though not consequently clear and figurative, but cloudy and abstract.

  A book like one of Edward Hopper’s clean and well-lit rooms, but with a Jackson Pollock waiting to come out of the closet.

  A book near whose end he’d also say and is going to say—right now, listen to him say it—that thing about “I had something to write. But my task was longer than his, my words had to reach more than a single person. My task was long.”

  A book that would function like a journal and like the communion of apparently irreconcilable people and landscapes and that would end up being like a love letter written inside a burning building.

  A book that’s like a book of ghosts but where the ghost is the book itself, the dead life of the work.

  A book that would be written as if after a long time without writing, as if starting over; like that jazz pianist who had to learn everything all over aga
in by listening to himself, after undergoing the dance of electroshock: as if emerging from a prolonged coma and learning to walk again, without entirely forgetting that at one time he ran the way the pages run by and discovering that he’s different now, that he writes differently from how he once wrote—now he writes like only someone who gave up writing can write, like someone who suddenly gives up giving up writing writes.

  A book not of nonfiction but of yes-fiction.

  A book that, all the time, changes all the time.

  A book that—divine and comedy, infernal and purgative and paradisiacal—would be thinking about not writing the entire time it’s being written.

  A book that once finished—transcending its practice and exercise—would immediately begin thinking about its theory, which sends it out walking all day long, buying things for a party, through a city distant in space and nearby in the library, departing from Westminster, crossing St. James’s Park, heading up Queen’s Walk, turning right on Piccadilly, going back up Old Bond Street and New Bond Street, a slight turn toward Harley Street, traversing Regent’s Park and starting over again, restarting that trajectory every time he rereads that day, better all the time, discovering new things all the time.

  A book whose genre would be like that sworn statement that J. D. Salinger—trying and ultimately succeeding to prevent the publication of a biography of him—made to a judge when they asked him what it is he does and how he does it: “I just start writing fiction and see what happens to it.”

  A book as if (dis)assembled by the scissors of a priestly Invisible Man, like random little papers emerging from the box/voice of a songwriter outside time and space, like loose pieces stuck to a wall, freely associated victims of Keyzer Söze Syndrome.