And so that’s why he kneels down now and, pretending to collect samples, etches his initials into a rock. And why he then walks slowly, as if in slow motion, trying to look as little as possible where he is stepping (any lizard or any of those rolling balls of straw, tumbleweeds, they’re called; and his son calls them something very funny, but he can’t remember what it is right now, and that makes him feel a sadness like he never felt before). Or why he avoids looking up at the night sky that begins to spread out from overhead on down. And to look up at the moon from somewhere on Earth; that moon that doesn’t even have a name, that’s named nothing more and nothing less than what it is, as if all dogs were called Dog and all cats were called Cat. And it’s so easy to lie to a dog and it’s impossible to lie to a cat and that’s why parents, in general, choose dogs and not cats as pets for their children: because parents lie a lot to their children and, then, children lie to their parents.
And a dog fits much better in that irreal yet authentic landscape.
A dog helps you not see.
And he wouldn’t mind having a dog right now.
One of those dogs that—unlike those seeing eye dogs—help you not to see. Because to do so, to see everything that surrounds him, would ruin all possibility of believing that what he believes will never come to pass might indeed happen.
Hard to believe in anything in the desert.
There’s no context in the desert for him to hold onto as if it were an escape hatch. His surroundings are not a landscape. They’re a living-dead nature. A still life in suspension, in suspended animation.
And he’s tired of all of it, tired of all that nothing.
Tired of pretending. Here and in front of his young son.
So he brings his hands to his head and starts to unfasten the seals of his spacesuit helmet.
One by one.
From the base they transmit that he shouldn’t, that he shouldn’t be crazy, that he’s going to ruin everything, that he’ll put the whole “mission” in jeopardy, and that he will lose “everything he has heretofore accomplished.”
He doesn’t care.
Better that way.
He takes off his helmet and imagines his young son, at home, receiving the delivery of a medal and a flag.
And his wife, full and growing, with that pale and eclipsing beauty that never wanes from the widows of astronauts.
And his own face smiling in old but impeccable photographs on the evening news while the host says his name in a deep voice.
And he takes a deep breath and looks up at the moon.
And—though in the space of the desert nobody can hear you scream—he howls.
Eddie finishes reading her bit and Alex and Charley don’t say anything and—they can perceive a mild discomfort on the other end of the waves, back on Earth—say goodbye to their listeners because better not to add anything. Better to leave the new installments of Stella D’Or and dAlien for next week.
And, yes, their decision was a good one. Because as soon as the transmission is cut, Bertie shows up, absolutely and lunatically drunk, scream-singing that same thing he always sings. That “The lunatic is on the grass … The lunatic is on the grass” and then fading it into another song in another language with a “Qué lejos que estoy del suelo donde he nacido … Inmensa nostalgia invade mi pensamiento” and “Prefiero estar dormido que despierto” and then, swiping the microphone away from them with a “calling all of my fans, my planetary babies, with love from your favorite satellite boy—fortunately they have already cut the connection with the studios back on Earth—I also have something very interesting to share with you, my dear listeners.”
And, with liquid diction and floating words, Bertie begins:
“They say that this isn’t true. That it’s an urban and moon-man legend. That they have studied in detail the recordings and transcript of that unforgettable July 20th, 1969 down to the last recorded sound. But I don’t care. I do believe it’s true, because that’s what myths are for: to doubt them at first in public in order to, later, be able to remain convinced of their veracity in private. First the undeniable, the confirmed: the first lunar meal consisted of bacon, cookies, coffee, peaches, and grapefruit juice. But before that, the oh so religious Buzz Aldrin chewed up and slugged down, on the sly, a communion wafer and little bit of wine, blessed by the Presbyterian reverend of his parish. And he says the prayer they didn’t let him say aloud at NASA, so he wouldn’t offend the other Christians there who believe in other far more fun versions of the same thing and with many more gods. Not content with this, Aldrin was also the first man to piss on the moon, inside his spacesuit, and, hey, I know that feeling. I won’t be the first, but I can guarantee, esteemed listeners, I am the man who has pissed on and inside his spacesuit the most on the moon, where, one thing we do have too much of is water. But getting back to where I wanted to go … Ah … Eh … Uh … Yes, then Neil Armstrong saying (and the truth is, he doesn’t say it very well, his diction is imprecise, a little bit like mine) that “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” They forced him to memorize it. And he practiced it a lot, but didn’t understand it all that well … Oof, Neil Armstrong, stepping hard and for the first time on the surface of the moon. And I already said it and I’ll say it again: true story for some, sonic hallucination for others, thunderous rumor for all. A great story in any case: Armstrong says his celebrated and official little words and, then, almost in a whisper, he adds, on his own account: “Congratulations, Mr. Gorsky.” That phrase sent the CIA, FBI, and NASA, and all the acronyms of the day into a frenzy. Who was Gorsky? Was it possibly a coded message for the Russians? Had Armstrong suffered a burst of lunacy? And when he returns to Earth and is interrogated, Armstrong says nothing. He just clarified and promised it wasn’t anything that put the national security of the United States at risk and, over the years, Armstrong changes the subject every time the issue comes up in interviews. Many years later, in a report, Armstrong finally tells the tale and the story behind the story: ‘Now that Mr. Gorsky has died …’ Armstrong begins. And he clears up the dark side of what he said or didn’t say on the moon. To wit: one day, when he was a boy, little Neil’s ball landed in the yard of the next-door neighbor, one Mr. Gorsky. When he went to retrieve it, the boy clearly heard the voice of Mrs. Gorsky, coming out from a window, saying and laughing with one of those laughs that cause shame and pain and even fear: ‘Oral sex? Don’t even dream of it, Gorsky. You’ll get oral sex the day that Armstrong boy steps foot on the moon.’ Rest in peace, Mr. Armstrong, Mr. Gorsky, and Mrs. Gorsky. And congratulations to all of us who remain. And good night to all of you, including my love, wherever she may be … Fog: thy will be done … This is my last transmission from the planet of the monsters.”
Then Bertie stands up and struggles into his spacesuit, as if he were unleashing a battle against his own skin, and says to his three sisters that “I have received information about how there were chimpanzees that survived up to three minutes in the absolute void” and that “I’m taking a walk with my little shovel out to the Tycho Crater to see if I can find that fucking black monolith that sings so beautifully.”
And that’s the last time Alex and Charley and Eddie see and will see Bertie. And they don’t see him disappear on the dark side of the moon (the cameras distributed across the colony are few and they don’t record footage of that blind spot), but they do imagine him disappearing, walking into the shadows like someone exiting the stage.
And nobody, none of them, dares say it aloud, but they do imagine it in low voices. Better that way. Better that Bertie goes and doesn’t return. That he be gone because Bertie has already been gone for a long time now.
And Alex and Charley and Eddie remain silent and feel as if the silence is making itself, as if the pieces of the silence are putting themselves together, the ones with the others. A silence like the one you hear when there’s no sound, out there.
And without saying a word (they only need a look to comprehend;
so well do the three of them know and understand and intuit each other; nothing transmits ideas and thoughts better than the oxygen-less air of the small and concentrated and intense company on the infinite edge of that immense solitude) they tell each other there will be plenty of time to decide which one of them, and with what style and what form, will get to tell all of that and put it all in writing first so they can read it later.
III
Last night she dreamed she returned to Mount Karma. And then she woke up, immediately, to write it down. To write, to put it in writing; because for Penelope, to write is the only thing left for her to write.
To write that she writes, that she is writing.
To write in notebooks and on the walls of her cell/study and, sometimes, even on the sheets of her bed.
To write in the air, in the dark, her hand moving like that of the conductor of an invisible orchestra. Nothing of allegro, all adagissimo and dolente and lacrimoso, and yet, agitato and obbligato and risoluto and, above all, con fuoco.
To write, now, the overture to how last night she dreamed she returned to Mount Karma.
Penelope writes her dreams.
Not to keep from forgetting them (supposedly that’s why people write them down, but, really, they’re almost always forgotten in the act itself of putting them on the page and what’s left is like the impression of a thing already gone), but (and supposedly this is another reason people write dreams down) so they aren’t repeated.
Or, which would be even worse, so they don’t come true.
Especially that dream that once was true and that she returns to again and again and to which, she’s sure, she couldn’t bear returning to awake, as if in a nightmare.
Penelope thinks that first sentence—Last night she dreamed she returned to Mount Karma—and remembers that other first sentence. Sentences in which someone arrives to a place they don’t know or returns to a place they thought they did.
And she also remembers (she doesn’t remember well, she’s going to remember now) what her bad older brother once told her on one of his, fortunately for her, increasingly sporadic visits. Better that way. It’s not like she misses him, or that she’s happy to see him. Her bad brother who always shows up with an air that’s like a combination of asking forgiveness and an expectation of gratitude. Yes: her own private Branwell Brontë. A useless man with multiple applications who, after believing he was great for so long, now thinks the rest of the world should believe it too. And—sometimes, many times, it happens—he can’t believe the world doesn’t believe it. And, of course, it hasn’t been easy for him to accept that she has succeeded as a writer; no matter how much he looks down on what she writes. And yet, he is always suggesting “possible collaborations” because “it would be interesting to see what came of it, right?”
And no: the truth is that, for Penelope, it wouldn’t be interesting to see what came of it, because she’s already seen what she would see, what would come of it. Penelope has read her bad brother’s books. Including the one on commission in which her bad brother had the audacity and lack of respect to appropriate the Karmas (the Karmas who, if they belonged to anyone, belonged to her) transplanting them from Abracadabra to Mexico City.
And yet—Saint Penelope of All the Guilt—she continues to listen patiently to what her bad brother continues to propose.
And she—not to love him a little, but yes to forgive him a lot—wants to think her brother proposes all that to fill the silence with noise. That silence so wide and yet so uncomfortable where—as if in outer space—no one makes a sound about their disappeared parents or her lost little son who was (or so he says, said, does not say anymore, because the doctors have forbidden him to do so in front of her) like a little son to him, her bad brother.
So, her bad brother, hands waving around and pupils dilated, like someone selling hair tonic or machines to make it rain in the desert, his, his own. There, dehydrating, her bad brother’s ideas (in her bad brother’s almost-hairless head) to “be incorporated into the Tulpa Universe,” he reasons.
That thing about the never-finished project by his beloved Vladimir Nabokov for Alfred Hitchcock: “A love story between an astronaut and a starlet that’ll be developed by one of your little Tulpa sisters, right? Throw in a little wink for connoisseurs and all of that, right? I can take care of the purple Nabokovian prose and you who’re so good at coming up with plots with a hook …”
And that thing about the Onirium, which her brother has reentered, amid dreams of Bob Dylan and Vladimir Nabokov and that girl who falls into swimming pools in all his books, and that’s the only thing of her bad brother’s she envies: that love. For that girl. She remembers little to nothing about her, except one unforgettable detail: she didn’t like The Beatles, which, for Penelope, was like saying you don’t like oxygen and, for their Uncle Hey Walrus, would have meant, if he’d ever met her, one/another of his mental breakdowns. But, in any case, envy. A lot of it. For that love, yes. A kind of love she never felt. A victorious love, Victorian in its loss. Her bad brother like the paladin of unconsummated love and her like the priestess of all-consuming love. Her bad brother who’d begun falling in love early. First, with that middle-school teacher who’d supported his literary vocation and all that. Her brother, it seemed, had the need to fall in love over and over again in order not to love anybody but his impossible love. Whereas she never had anybody. There’d been that boy they met at the movie theater, when they went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey and who became their friend and with whom they hung out and listened to Pink Floyd. But really it wasn’t him she was attracted to, it was the fact that he was so attracted to her and, yes, she was like a Catherine Earnshaw awaiting a Healthcliff who never appeared and who never would because, maybe, he’d already appeared in a book, in her book.
And there are long and waking nights when Penelope touches herself down below, in the Antarctic to the south of her shriveled heart and her polar brain, to see if it exists, if there’s still any life down there.
And she wonders if her favorite book might not be partly to blame: a book so passionate and at the same time so chaste, without sex, pure desire, like something that could only be written by a burning virgin. Sublimated theory before realist practice in nineteenth-century days when opposites never touched: dandy and exotic degeneration or husbands collapsing on their wedding nights when they discover their wives—unlike the Greek statues in the British Museum—have pubic hair and even bleed from between their legs several days a month. And, in the center—between the freak and the meek—the sex act like nothing but a mechanism to produce children for manual labor, children who labor manually as soon and as quickly as possible.
And Penelope tells herself she never fell in love with anybody because she never met anybody capable of falling in love with her the way her hero fell in love with her heroine. Or the way her heroine fell in love with her heroine.
And then Penelope remembers Lina in Abracadabra and …
But, ah, the so many pages of the “treatment”—another treatment, as if there weren’t enough treatments in her life—that her brother put her through and that are almost illegible. And that, besides, as if it weren’t enough that he’d stolen the Karmas for his little mercenary and Mexican novel, he keeps appropriating and altering what doesn’t belong to him and what belongs to her.
And, there, a comatose woman inspired by Maxi who gives birth to a son possessed by recurrent dreams. And, there, all those quotes from different places. And all those different names. And the conciliatory and evidently servile gesture of including Talking Heads in the mix to ingratiate himself to her, though it was more than clear he preferred cooler and more cult bands like Lloyd Cole and The Commotions (Lloyd Cole had a case of referential mania almost as acute as his and Vladimir Nabokov’s and Bob Dylan’s); not bands you get high to, but bands whose songs about getting high, when you listened to them, were better than any high on any drug. And, oof, it must be hard to live in her bad brother’s head. It c
an’t be easy to be interested in so many things, to have to remember so any things, and to have to think about so many things, Penelope says to herself. So many songs and so many movies and so many novels. And to remain not so young but so juvenile with so many years atop and to the sides and under him.
And so she gives thanks—many thanks, all the thanks necessary—because hers has been a fixed idea, a single and immoveable idea, bolted down like the chairs and tables on ship decks. Something unsinkable and basic and primordial that doesn’t resist all change, but resists all change of trajectory.
A book.
That book.
For Penelope one book is enough and more than enough so long as it’s that book.
And, again, Penelope does remember now that her bad brother once told her something about a writer insisting—with that oh so childish certainty that uncertain adult writers, even the great ones, tend to have—that all stories could be boiled down and synthesized into two, going in two directions: someone leaves home or someone arrives somewhere they’ve never been.
In Penelope’s favorite novel—her only favorite novel—both things happen.
And if it were true—though Penelope is certain it’s not—hers, her own case, presents a third possible story: that of someone who doesn’t leave and doesn’t arrive anywhere, and who’s never entirely sure where she is.
She is—Penelope does know this for sure, on a physical and geographical plane that does not include the mental—in a religious monastery where they welcome people who feel they have lost their place in the world, who no longer know how to be anywhere. So, a retreat for a not-necessarily-happy few. The monastery-convent-retreat-deluxe asylum is called Our Lady of Our Lady of Our Lady of … And (when Penelope’s lawyers presented it to her as an elegant-reclusive option if she wanted to avoid other more severe options and locations after what happened at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, in Haworth, in West Yorkshire; at the place where Penelope had wanted to shut herself in forever and never come out again) here Penelope came. To a place she didn’t know, from a home—hers—that no longer existed. And from that other foreign home she knew everything about, from which she was removed by force and restrained and left floating in a chemical fog, so different from the fog surrounding that house that couldn’t be bought with all the money in the world.
The Dreamed Part Page 17
