The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Pure illusion, of course. Impractical theories that, as always, don’t take long to be torn down, so that atop their happy ruins can be constructed spectacular certainties supported by scientific truths.

  To wit: the elderly sleep less because they lose a certain type of neuron. He didn’t know it then, but knows it now. They told him about it at the Onirium where he goes two days a week. Or so he believes. He believes in that place that only exists in his mind, but, in any case, such a belief isn’t that different from that of all those people who prostrate themselves in churches, convinced they’re houses of God. He goes to the Onirium, it’s understood, with his imagination, in his waking dreams. He arrives to that place that’s his version of the Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, where the dead are catalogued as if they were dreams, understanding and calibrating the dead as dreams that once came true. He looks it, ghostly, from under a sheet with two eyeholes. The actual place isn’t even called the Onirium, nor does it possess the messianic-architectural lines he attributed to it in … in something. In some vague, stray idea he once offered to Penelope, wanting it to be an apology when actually it was an entreaty. An opportunity to “collaborate on something.” Something in which he had attributed to that most late-night and vintage-sci-fi of places an entire mythology and planetary catastrophe and even the possibility of a great love that he surrenders to, like when he was young and surrendered to that great love. Something that’s come to him as if in broken pieces, as if in the random scenes of a dream he no longer has. Something he’s never able to grasp or tie down in letters and words. Something that, when he wrote it and when rereads it now, he made as if it were happening many years ago but in the future, in an alternate present ten or fifteen minutes from now. Something with mechanical dialogues (reference to movies and songs) inserted in an apparently romantic atmosphere (the activity of having breakfast the morning after) that does nothing but demonstrate his complete and absolute lack of knowledge about such a situation. It’s clear that, if he ever really fell in love, it was always unrequited. Reading it now, it’s obvious he composed that whole choreography with the inexpert and adolescent bumblings of someone who, in addition, never fell out of love: he never knew what it was to stop being in love, to just be there, passing time, waiting to see what happens now that everything has stopped happening.

  He had, yes, read and heard people talk about it. With good prose and bad words. But as it concerned him, love (a hormonal alteration, a chemical imbalance, and neurological aberration, in the end) was always getting closer to being declared an epidemic by the World Health Organization or by one of those organisms that patented plagues in order to, subsequently, sell pleasant placebos or miraculous cures to the world.

  In his case, when it came to love—beyond a succession of more or less interchangeable names and bodies—nothing of any importance beyond that first time ever came to pass. A succession of women like gifts from a less-than-generous melodrama. Until one day—or one night—there were no new gifts. Goodbye to the dream of giving himself to someone and of that someone giving herself to him and of dreaming happily and waking up together and of feeling as if they were running along a beach in slow motion, hand in hand. And everything spins around as they pause to kiss with their eyes closed and that first girl, who kissed him just once so he would “remember that kiss above and beyond any kisses that would come after,” and then let herself fall into the swimming pool.

  Here and now, he goes to that place—a laboratory where they’re trying to solve the mystery of insomnia—to see if they can give him back the lost desire to dream. And extract the bitter impossibility of dreaming sweet dreams. And wake him up from this horror of nights as long as days. And it’s the neurons in the intermediate lateral nuclear group of the brain, in the area of the brain designated the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus, that are to blame, they informed him, a female doctor who seems fascinated by the fact that he is or was a writer informed him. First, of course, they experimented on rats. And then on people. The doctor tells nonstop stories, spurred on, perhaps, by that wandering and aimless idea that clinical cases can make good stories, good literature, being backed up by statistical data like “A person who lives to be seventy-eight years old, for example, will have spent nine of those years watching television, four of them driving, ninety-two days in the bathroom, and forty-eight days maintaining sexual relations, and, of course, twenty-five years sleeping” or that “The world record for not sleeping is held by a student who, for a school science project, kept his eyes open for eleven days.” But the doctor—like so many others—seems ignorant of the most basic fact: nothing interests a writer less than having stories—apart from the stories he reads—told to him.

  It’s a common error: someone finds out you’re a writer and they start telling you something, anything, whatever.

  And so, the doctor tells him—and he listens with the annoyance of a sultan ready to decapitate her that the night, night number one that’ll never be one thousand—scientific facts about insomnia as if they were good ideas for future fictions.

  Some of them were interesting (like the case of that genetically insomniac Venetian family, afflicted with something called “fatal familial insomnia,” who generation after generation, die from sleep, from lack of sleep).

  But the truth is he’s not really interested in insomnia as something that knows how to open the door so Parkinson’s disease (and various viruses and mood swings and cardiac arrhythmias and a propensity for accidents and the acceleration of the engines of aging and the cutting off years of life and the reduction of his body of work) can come in to play.

  Or that thing about infectious and protein-based prions that keep you from sleeping by making you hear, all night long, their little feet dancing in pointy stilettos across the spongy surface of your brain until they turn it into something akin to the carnivorous minds of those mad cows.

  Or that thing about the elderly losing an hour of sleep. An hour that the present takes from that strange version of the past that are dreams; an hour of life, that’s all they earn, all they get, for their many unimaginative or well-imagined years of life, he commented, feeling like a centenarian, when they told him the thing about the neurons.

  Having crossed the threshold of a century of living (or at least feeling that way, like a relic, insomnia distorts times and spaces and he lets it take him, because rewriting yourself is the closest thing to writing), he’s not a simple old man. He’s a complex old man. A very old old man. An ancient old man. So he sleeps less than a young old man; taking a young old man to be someone who crosses the fifty-year line and heads out onto one of those beaches where the sea remains quite distant yet sometimes experiences sudden and devastating swells capable of sweeping you away in a matter of minutes. Thus, in the ocean of the night, he sleeps many hours less than those less old. One of the great paradoxes of such an old old-age is that he doesn’t have much time left to live, but all the time he has is free time. A minimum infinitude. A brief eternity where the minutes are long as days and an entire glacial age fits in a week. And all the time thinking. Thinking about things like the paradox of his present without much future. Thoughts that come to him as if between parentheses, yes. Parentheses that, when he was a boy, were always tomorrow and now are always yesterday. Parentheses that yesterday were a pause in the today and today are an intermission in the yesterday.

  And, there, not just what happened, but, also, what could’ve happened, what should’ve happened, what he would’ve liked to have had happen and to have had happen to him. The yesterday multiplying in variations and models. And thinking about all of that, as if replacing the dreams he no longer has, because in order to dream you have to be able to sleep. John Banville, another of his writers, had postulated something about that. Something about the need to dream first to remember later. But what happened if you couldn’t sleep? If the past passed through sleep to an insomnia that never passed. To dream of what he wou
ld dream if he could dream, like a placebo, until he attained a kind of timeless limbo. And the future or the futuristic no longer included him, though he may have something left there, awake, to live.

  And he no longer sleeps.

  He, merely, goes to bed, lies down. But he never reaches that place where he falls asleep. And the “experts” at the Onirium aren’t fooling him: they care less about “curing him” than about “studying him.” About discovering how the people who don’t sleep at night think. The way they order their ideas out of the disorder of their thoughts. Free stream of consciousness and all of that. And at one point, from behind a door, he heard them whispering about how he might be the first person impacted by an imminent epidemic. Patient Zero in the Ground Zero of his bed.

  It doesn’t matter. What does it matter?

  He’s elsewhere. Above them.

  Above the ground and looking at the roof where it’s so easy for the blades of the ventilators to sound like the blades of helicopters when you haven’t slept in so long and, yes, shit, you’re still in Zzzaigon, and bad joke, indeed. Insomniac joke, joke not of a zombie but yes—bad joke n.°2—of a zzzombie. But there and then very little seems funny, so better not waste funny things: nobody hears you when you laugh alone. And nobody can ask what you’re laughing at. And nobody, lying beside you, can reproach you with a how can you laugh at that??

  And—from the other side of the trees, from Penelope’s house where The Intruders reside—the harmoniously noisy music, a tumult of electric guitars and screams and helter skelter. And the drummer—after eighteen brutal takes—throwing his almost-flaming drumsticks and howling that he has blisters on his fingers while the guitarist runs in circles around the studio with a flaming ashtray on his head.

  Uncle Hey Walrus told him about that.

  Uncle Hey Walrus was there, in person, when The Beatles recorded that song.

  And now he, though alone and safe, takes advantage of that “I’ve got blisters on my fingers!” to release one of those gaseous accumulations that accumulate in his body, when he horizontalizes it every night, as if the stillness inflated him slowly, like a balloon. And, again, he’s shaken by that thunder of those intestines, his, so different from the sounds those same intestines released when he was a boy. New organs then, more onomatopoetic than noisy and more playful than broken, with the scent of animated drawings (ACME n.°5?), half gunpowder, half candy.

  Now, to the contrary, what he hears is like an airplane plummeting out of the sky to crash in a desert. Something unequivocally beaten, expired. He heard similar things bursting from the maws of whales beached on the beaches of his childhood or trumpets calling retreat in low-budget and high-drama movies. And all of it accompanied by the unbreathable stench that, he’s sure, is the same as the stench released every time they discover one of those tombs of unknown and pyramidless pharaohs. And he (though he read once that the old smell better than the young; the Japanese, who have names for everything, call it kaireshu or “smell of the elderly,” that mature and soft fragrance) takes a deep breath and reabsorbs with a scrunched up nose that scent of living mummy. That essence of a dead thing inside his body, where his organs, which should’ve been dust for decades, keep creaking on, thanks to the advances of science, advances with no clear aim. But he’s not complaining. It all could’ve been worse corporally.

  In his youth he was—as advertising for the Charles Atlas method on the backs of the comics he read as a kid warned and accused—one of those “44-kilogram weaklings” who got sand thrown in their faces at the beach. And yet, as time passed, he hadn’t turned out that badly. And around middle age, his body acquired a kind of martial bearing (of a hibernating bear) it still retains. Or maybe he’s still only in his fifth decade, who knows (and he tells himself that, whatever it is and whatever age he is, his skeleton is experiencing something similar to what Vladimir Nabokov experienced in that space between those slender youthful photographs at Yale and those other corpulent and old-age photographs in Ithaca). And, again, that whole thing of being an Onirium-centenarian might be nothing but a hallucination, resulting from insomnia, from inhabiting that territory that’s the most post-apocalyptic of all.

  Another of his waking dreams.

  Few things make you feel older and more outside of time than insomnia.

  In insomnia—this is the only way to bear such punishment—you can’t help but think of all the lucky sleepers as dead and think of yourself as the lone survivor living to tell the tale.

  In any case, whatever age he is, he’s already an elderly man who retains certain physical authority but, also, an illusion verging on a mirage. Because his brain, against all visual and palpable evidence, keeps fooling him into thinking of himself as if he were twenty-some years old. Lying to himself in the same way that, as long as you don’t get the diagnosis/diploma from the hands of an expert, it’s possible that you’re dying without being aware of it. When do you know that you’re old? Easy: when you no longer know how old young people are and all of them seem to be moving through some imprecise time between fifteen and twenty-five years old and between twenty-five and thirty-five years old and between fifteen and thirty-five years old.

  In any case, he’s not complaining, with perspective, he’s come out on top, he’s laughing last: his great decline has given him an authority he never had in his short-lived glory. To the contrary, the svelte and toned athletes of his adolescence (some of whom even ended up becoming writers) collapsed like the slow and controlled explosions of those outmoded gangster hotels in Las Vegas, built at a time when stubborn atomic bombs were being tested in the nearby desert. Structures that sighed as they fell, like cheap miracles, watched by openmouthed spectators on the artificial slopes of Centennial Hills. Buildings that come crashing down, down from above, like faces folding in on themselves, like what had happened to his face, which is now like an accordion in repose that nobody touches or plays anymore.

  Ah, the problem—the boomerang curse—of possessing true elegance and good posture too early and too intensely: the heartbreak of the breakdown is so long and so captivating in the worst and most perverse possible way for everyone else. Each successive downgrade in rank becomes more apparent; as if medals were being torn one by one from your once firm chest. And all of it happens as if in slow motion and in descending order. Enveloped in a dust cloud in front of spectators who will always remember (and remind you of) what you once were and no longer are and won’t ever be again.

  Again, that wasn’t his case: he always knew, from early on, he wasn’t that attractive, nothing concerned him less, and this ended up making him into an “interesting” person.

  And you can be interesting for more years than you can be attractive.

  And being nothing more than interesting had led him to cultivate a real sense of humor (it’s true, that thing about how women want, as they respond on romantic surveys, “someone who makes me laugh”) and to harvest a couple always-useful tantric tricks (because women also want someone who can make them moan amid all that laughter). Poses and positions picked up from volumes in the meditative and transcendental library of his parents who, in one very evanescent Zen moment (the different aesthetic-spiritual incarnations of his parents lasted as long as a seasonal product and sometimes not even that long), bought a chacra—or country house—in the outskirts of the city that they (with characteristic advertising wit) christened Chakra.

  A place that, after a brief period of running it as a “de luxe hedonistic religious center for beautiful people,” was converted by his parents into a training camp for their fashionista-terrorist cell (really it’s not that they changed it much in form or function; more than holding machine guns, his parents seemed to pose with them, swathed in bandoliers and camouflage-print bathing suits and smoking Cuban cigars, for a revolutionary centerfold) from where they designed “cosmetic-guerilla performances” preordained by consultations with the I Ching and …

  But, now, the evocation of those past and passing vict
ories is a relief that doesn’t calm him but keeps him alert. Remembering is the same as continuing to play. And nothing succeeds at getting his body—much less his mind, which keeps dealing cards like a mad croupier—to sleep. No thing or substance has been discovered that could take him back to the deep sleep, without untimely visions, of those first nights in a cradle, nights that span almost whole days. When there isn’t yet any dreamable material, or memories to remember, or reality to distort, or fear to sublimate, or longing to lift you up among the clouds, or terror of finding yourself naked in the streets. But even that would be preferable: he would give anything for the most absurd or terrifying of nightmares and the exquisite relief of waking up. Anything would be better than this uninterrupted projection of a waking film with serious structural issues. A film where all the lines seem improvised or barely written (and that’s the paradox of improvisation: it doesn’t work unless you know perfectly what you’re improvising; and nobody knows anything about insomnia except that they don’t know where it’s going). Insomnia where there’s no precise plot, and where everything seems avant-garde; but really it’s so easy to understand. The shared desire for the wish that time pass be granted. And that the lights of day be switched on and, already awake, to feel normal among the waking and to no longer be a solo pariah.