The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  A book that would be like a gift: like a bone a dog fetches for someone who is intent on catching a new butterfly in order to give it the Latin deformation of his own last name.

  A book like a TV that the dead and the extraterrestrials tune in to watch us, to try to understand the pages of our sitcoms.

  A book with seven channels broadcasting seven simultaneous programs that are all one (and that, if he were alive, Shakespeare would never have written for HBO) and in which a monster is vanquished and success is achieved and there is searching and laughter and weeping and rebirth and stepping out of the shadows and into the light.

  A book that—unlike the vice of many recent movies—wouldn’t settle for a final surprise scene, for an illuminating or entertaining coda, forcing the spectators to remain sitting in the darkness until the lights come on, after lengthy final credits, but instead would offer numerous variations and alternatives of what’s already been seen, already read.

  A book whose seven sections would be written simultaneously, quickly changing the place of things, like cards in a game of solitaire or a Tarot reading in which The Writer card always comes out face down and too close to The Madman, The Wheel of Fortune, The Hangman, and Death.

  A book whose ample middle, in an omnipresent state of permanent agitation, would be flanked by two texts with the convex concavities of parentheses, the past and the future.

  A book that would advance ceaselessly into the past until it reached the goal of its point of departure.

  A book that never entirely crystallizes.

  A book that would sound like the promise of something deafening and symphonic but composed of almost inaudible words, from inside a tiny camera, where nothing is revealed.

  And the absurd solemnity of this last idea, he thinks, is an unequivocal sign that he’s in trouble again. The same trouble as always. The same trouble as every time he writes. In the air but convinced that Earth’s inhabitants were, fundamentally, writers. And that those who weren’t had the obligation—really, he was discovering over the years, what they had was the pleasure and the blessing—of being, merely, readers.

  But what was important to him had always been the damned and miserable writers.

  He was a writer addict. Nothing interested him more as theme and storyline.

  So he’d read biographies and autobiographies and collections of letters and memoirs and diaries and journals. Always with insatiable voracity, as if in the lives and memories of his predecessors (and his few friends, all of whom, for some time, were writers or people involved in literature) he’d find the key to the mystery. A, yes, completely childish notion: that of the existence of some Rosetta Stone that would help pass along and teach the secret and turn the whole thing into the most exact of sciences. And that, when he hadn’t found it, he’d limited himself to writing about them and only them. About that kind of animal which he subsequently became. Novels and stories in which there was always a writer. Pursuing them like reflections of himself in a deforming mirror, composing them far and wide across the years, until he was exhausted, until he felt extinguished and snuffed out or overwhelmed by some uncontainable desire to press the fantasy button that would deactivate and suck out the energy that makes writers writers. Groping with closed eyes along the walls of a blinding house. Praying to find a switch to turn off the light, and that, once it was out, he’d be allowed to open his eyes and see, for the first time, something that wasn’t writers and writing. To leave behind the kind of trouble that he didn’t want to be in or to think about anymore and that, as a result of a kind of superpower for morons, would allow him to contemplate all of it inside his own mind. As if he were reading it, like those eternal and ascending texts at the beginning of science fiction movies where the spectator understands little or nothing amid all the consonant-laden names of faraway planets. Reading all of that and almost immediately beginning to correct it, not necessarily for the better or for his own good. Because for him, correcting always meant adding. So, better to go along changing frequency and definitions and, maybe, ideas. But a book is a book is a book and now he keeps on enumerating possibilities for what book that will be. He can’t stop. But he can shift his gaze slightly, squint his eyes, look on with less trust, and remember that thing (who’d said it?, Nathan Zuckerman?, Richard Tull?, Bill Grey?, Sigbjørn Wilderness?, Bradley Pearson?, Paul Benjamin?, Ted Cole?, Julio Méndez?, Buddy Glass?, Kenneth Toomey?, Vadim Vadimovitch N.?, Kilgore Trout?, person?, character?, it doesn’t matter: writer!) about how a book is like blubbering thing, wandering and tripping and dragging itself through the hallways of the house. An idiot with deformed feet and tongue hanging out, drooling and incontinent, pissing and shitting itself, head so heavy its body can barely hold it up. A creature that is monstrous and yet we can’t help but love it and feel responsible for it and want the best for it and for it to be the best it can be once it goes out into the world. It’s not that writers are bad or inattentive parents: what actually happens is that writers are always fretting over the children they conceived all on their own (knowing that their biological children are much better off and far more intelligent) and so the writers spoil them, terrified by how they grow and grow until they are stronger than their creators, who they enjoy beating until they have them down on the floor, howling “More! More!”

  Once, in a book, due to demands of the plot, he’d found himself forced to invent a character, a literary critic, who referred to what he did in his writing. His cited sentence—unconsciously anticipating his desire to accelerate his particles—had been something like: “His thing is like thousands of ideas searching for a head to think them.” An ambiguous sentence that functioned simultaneously as praise and condemnation. And that, he thought at the time, reflected quite well the increasingly liquid and invertebrate and phosphorescent nature—like those deep-sea fish that end up transforming into their own suns in the absence of light—of his fictions. The sentence in question seemed to have been so appropriate and accurate that another literary critic (a critic whom he respected, a real critic of the few pure and consistent critics: a critic who wasn’t just a writer who wrote criticism every now and then) external to the book, but presenting it in a bookstore, had highlighted it and read it to the audience, thinking it the very true and very astute appraisal of a colleague. He remembers that night—back when books were still presented—and it’s like something that took place on another planet, so far away, like one of those explosions of impossible colors revealed every so often by the Hubble, like a distant light down below in that sky that now is Earth.

  The points of color—like a mirror of the stars—of the sunrise city that he’s now approaching, descending.

  And he starts preparing for landing, for lowering the landing gear, then preparing for the take off of . . .

  . . . a book that for the reader—seatbelt fastened for the whole flight, just in case, better that way—was first like the unexpected but always-feared voice of the pilot bursting from speakers and headphones to say “We have a small problem,” and then, after complicated and risky maneuvers, like the relief of having arrived safely to the end of the trip.

  And, at last, to rest in the warm shadow of a simple idea, something that, yes, might be a new beginning for him.

  Something that comes to him now from way back and that, in the end, is nothing but a purely physical movement—the idea that writing is something like climbing a tree. It’s easier to go up (when something occurs to you; as if you were reading it) than to go down (when, later, you have to make that something occur for everyone else, writing it). Or that writing is like learning to ride a bicycle: you never forgot how, but you don’t learn it perfectly either, you never learn well enough, you’ll always keep falling and hurting yourself in the most unexpected moment or the instant of greatest concentration.

  To stop writing, on the other hand, should be incredibly easy, he thinks.

  A letting go.

  To let the current drag you further and further from your
desk. To turn off the lights in your brain one by one until you forget not how you write, but how to make yourself feel the desire to sit down to write. Not even looking at trees anymore.

  Or to just stop pedaling.

  Or to pedal up to the top of a tree and, from the top branch, throw down the bicycle and watch it fall and hear it crash and sink down below until it reaches the bottom of all things.

  To spend the rest of your life as someone who doesn’t write anymore, introducing yourself not as a writer but as an ex-writer. Maybe, as a final gesture, to publish a manual that teaches how to give up writing or offer a workshop that demoralizes the participants and urges them to look for better ways to spend and earn a living. And to smile that sad smile of those who were once addicted to something—the smile of those who are better than they were, but not necessarily happier. The smile of those—in long nights of open eyes—who suspect that really they weren’t addicts but, merely, the addiction—the uncontrollable controlled substance, the equally effective and ephemeral drug. And, amid the shaking, they understand that something or someone has taken it away from them, because it doesn’t work anymore, it doesn’t do anything anymore, it has no effect at all anymore. And because of this, the drug has gone away, far away from them, in search of better and more powerful substances.

  But something strange happens, something strange happens to him, something that hasn’t happened to him for a long time and that he missed so much. Suddenly he, who felt himself finished and shut down, feels that he’s back. And with no departure in sight. Now he’s like part of a postcard from Ground Zero: not that place where there was something and now there’s only a hole in the ground, no, he’s the thing inside the hole in the ground where someday, with luck, there will be something. He wasn’t dead, he was buried alive. Or ready to resuscitate himself not with a “Get up and go” but with a “Don’t get up and write.” Something like that. Something that won’t be easy. To start over again. Something fragile and something that, of course, won’t take him too far. But something that if put to good use—like the last fumes in an empty fuel tank blowing on a spark so that everything stays in motion a little while longer—will be enough to make it home.

  And once there, who knows.

  And where is that damn fight attendant so he can order and purchase the walking and traveling and metallic Mr. Trip, eh? He needs so badly to wind him up and put him in motion and hang onto his neck like he once hung onto Rolling Thunder’s neck. He needs the times to be a-changin’. He needs to be blowing in the wind, for the hard rain to fall, to hear the ringing bell and people praying and the siren of the last fire truck from hell. He needs the sound of the last radio telling him what happened to him, what’s happening to him again. He needs a new dose of the resting position, though he’s never felt more restless and awake, as if a gremlin had removed his eyelids and ran and locked itself in the little airplane bathroom and used them like rolling papers to roll cigarettes and trigger all the alarms with smoke thick as storm clouds.

  And it’s a little absurd and really corny and totally clichéd, totally commonplace (but certain places have earned their commonness, in the best sense of the word, in the most singular definition of common, on their own and only after a long time being clumsy uncommon places) that, in that precise instant, the sun comes out (the sun flying below the plane) and its rays pierce through the aircraft from one side to the other. “Craft”: a word that—ah, he’s thinking like this again, about these things—he always liked a lot for its all-terrain and all-trajectory and all-time application. And he lifts his head and looks through squinted eyes. Those plastic curtains sliding up, one at a time, letting in the light. And something happens. And it’s one of those rare moments during a flight when you’re aware that you’re flying: after going straight for so long, the plane initiates a curving trajectory, tilting almost on its side, as if threatening to turn around, only to stop just before completing the turn. A movement whose computerized and schematic version doesn’t do it justice, on that small and sadistic map that tracks the trajectory, simultaneously so fast and so slow, of the airplane there to convince passengers of the lie that the skies can be delimited, beginning with the ground at their feet. An exercise in approximation that, no doubt, has a French name that’s difficult to pronounce and perform in the leaping argot of classical ballerinas. A pirouette of a delicateness almost obscene in its efficiency, as if faithfully following the sketch of a secret line, punctuated by the formal and variable language of the clouds. The exact and unrepeatable instant on all flights when he thinks that, finally and at last, it made sense to take the risk of going up so high: for nothing more than the pleasure of having been there and—as the voice of the pilot informs—the tranquility of the “We are now initiating our descent.”

  They will be landing “within approximately twenty minutes.” But he doesn’t care. He knows, too, that for airline companies “twenty minutes” is not twenty minutes—it’s between thirty and forty minutes. Twenty minutes for them is like saying “a while,” but in order not to say “a while” we say “twenty minutes” and everybody’s happy. In the air, where nothing is guaranteed, all gestures of precision are appreciated even if they’re compulsively imprecise. Appreciated above all by him, who now—restarting his engines while the airplane draws ever nearer to shutting down its own—is there above, alone. He doesn’t need anything or anyone now and he smiles with the smile of a flight attendant. A smile that the many muscles it required hadn’t produced in so long. Four hundred thirty muscles are needed to light up a smile, while for the prologue of anger or sadness, furrowing your brow, no more than thirty-four muscles are activated. Mathematics is exact and doesn’t lie—it’s more work to be happy than unhappy.

  But there’s a time when it’s not so hard, when happiness is that endless beach where you run the way children run. Like wise children who run without yet thinking that someone is watching them run. Children who run unaware that, unfortunately, for a total lack of fortune, soon there will be a uniform and proper and respectable and harmonious way to run. And to run is to read and may you be fast, you readers who run like you once ran, like when you weren’t yet able to read, like a celebration of muscles and femurs and kneecaps and tibias and excited laughter. Without shame or shyness or fear of what you’ll say and what you’ll see. Children who laugh between three hundred and four hundred fifty times a day and whose number of laughs, when they grow up, statistically, will drop to less than twenty a day. And many of them will be cold and biting and bitter laughs and laughs that laugh at others and that laugh to keep from crying. The kind of laugh that he’s been using and consuming for a while now. Laughs that are like X-rays of a laugh, revealing a dark stain that requires increasingly complex tests. Laughs that no longer cure but are incurable. Terminal laughs.

  Laughs that sounded and looked nothing like his laugh now. A sudden and unexpectedly clean and childish laugh. Laugh No. 450 that was once his everyday laugh and that now he hears again inside himself, new, bouncing around inside the big head of a little body that grows by the minute. The laugh of a body that just caught up to the height and proportions of its twelve-year-old head.

  Now he looks out the little window and down below is a beach, and the mouth of a river opening onto the sea, and a speck floating in the water that—he could swear it—is a boy who looks up at the sky and points at the airplane and at him inside it, looking down. Now, at the end but again at the beginning, his mouth is full of water and laughter. He’s drowning but, seen from the present of his future, as if invoking the ghost of vacation past, he knows he’ll survive, that he’ll live to tell it and turn it into a story. But knowing how something ends doesn’t make it any less interesting. Just the opposite, the details of that small moment merge with the immensity of what’s to come and, for example, now he can specify that the novel, the same novel, that his parents are reading is Tender Is the Night (1934, first published in four installments, between January and April of that year, in S
cribner’s Magazine) and that its author is Francis Scott Fitzgerald (St. Paul Minnesota 1896 / Hollywood, California, 1940). He also knows why they’re arguing, near but far away, on the beach, unaware their son is drowning. And also—courtesy of Ways of Dying—he understands in detail what’s happening: the way the water is entering his body to dilute his blood. The fireworks of endorphins getting ready to explode in his brain, throwing the party of the white light at the end of the tunnel. An entire life revisited in a couple minutes, like one of those little books with pictures printed in the margins that, when you flip through it at full speed, creates the illusion of a kind of movement. Seeing himself from outside as if, correcting what he just finished writing, he were reading himself and, reading himself, he remembers how he read once that one of Truman Capote’s favorite questions was what do you imagine you would imagine—“what images, in the classic tradition,” to be precise—in that eternal moment of drowning.

  He’s drowning and he’s dying and now he lives all of the preceding again. Dies all of it again. With the insatiable anxiety of someone who needs to know how to move on and what key details escaped him. Details he longs to write, feeling again that he’s more than ready to put in motion all the muscles necessary to do so. Because not drowning and all the life he has left to live depends on it.

  So, driven by mysterious currents—revisiting the scene, writing it, he likes to think that he’s the one who saves himself—he reaches the shore with no strength left in his body, but his mind more powerful than ever, shrouded in the supernatural calm of those who have departed and returned.

  With his legs barely holding him up, he goes over to his parents, who haven’t noticed anything, who are still composing another variation of the same argument as always. He has the urgent need to tell them what’s happened, what happened to him, but he knows too that he doesn’t have the words needed to communicate it yet. So he stops next to them—they’re lying down, they’ve become experts in arguing while lying down—and makes strange noises and moves his arms all around and splashes them with drops of water from his body. And for the first time in a long time, mother and father seem to agree on something. And, for the first time, they say the same thing at the same time. And what they say is something absurd. They don’t say, they don’t list off possible suggestions like “Why don’t you build a sand castle?” or “Why don’t you go take a nap in the house?” or impossible ones—because they didn’t let him bring it on vacation—like “Why don’t you go play with your little windup metal man?” No. What they ask him—a question that expects no answer, a question that is a command—is something he can’t do yet, but that he, suddenly, feels is possible. Even though nobody has taught him how. His mother and father, in perfect synchrony, creating a new voice made of two voices, more annoyed with him than with each other, say: “Why don’t you go write?”