The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Anything he’d ever said in any important, career-related meeting had always sounded like a plummeting, free falling “Whoops!” Never like a “Click!”

  Yes, no: he would’ve never been nicknamed LEGO.

  No, yes: unlike IKEA (and, who would imagine, unlike Penelope), he hadn’t been given any power. Or he’d been given rare abilities. Abilities that didn’t include social networking or interweaving of webs of acquaintances or herding the names of others into his own corral like prize-winning cattle to make them his own.

  IKEA collected names and liked to name them. IKEA liked dropping names. For IKEA, names of celebrities were battering rams (while for him, those same names were shields, defense mechanisms, surnames behind which to take refuge or defend himself, like that arm in the Nabokov coat of arms, saber aloft, like someone fencing with a pen, and the motto Za hrabrost: “with valor.” What would the motto on his coat of arms be? Ah, yes: Cut & Paste). And so, IKEA had attained the highest pinnacle, supported by easy-to-assemble books he promoted with a sort of hypnotic speech, learned in some self-help course and whose strategy was to ceaselessly drop cosmic names and then append his own name and work to them. IKEA was a devoted influencee of influencers, producing the increasingly common misconception among the increasingly naïve and credulous that the influencer somehow ectoplasmically selects the person who claims their influence. Thus, then, IKEA stimulating the confusion by designating himself someone’s disciple without granting said master the right of reply (unless by means of a successful séance session) was more or less the same as being their disciple and protégé. And this is how IKEA talked: “I blah-blah Chekhov blah-blah-blah Flaubert blah-blah Gabo (never García Márquez) blah blah blah-blah-blah Kafka blah-blah blah Borges blah Cervantes blah me.” And one time at a roundtable they shared—when Penelope’s success had already transcended all borders and to his complete astonishment—he even spouted off an “I blah-blah-blah the sister of this man I have sitting next to me.”

  Had IKEA really read all those names he ceaselessly invoked? A quick and instinctive answer would be no, impossible, absolutely not. But he wasn’t so sure: it’s known that exposure to the radiations of genius can traumatize or paralyze the more or less talented, but, paradoxically, have a stimulating effect on the mediocre. That’s why, for every genius, there’s an average of a thousand mediocre artists. In any case—there, auto-fictionalized but non-fictitious, in Gifts Received—what did IKEA think about, along his short walk up to harvest and give thanks for, with a stoic pride, more laurels? Easy, the same thing as before: about many more names. About many important names, about a synthetic collection of anecdotes, about cultural sketches, about summaries, easy to comment on and repeat via Google and the like, IKEA as a sort of master of ceremonies reigning over all of it. IKEA like the host and owner and decorator of a house with a library to be put together according to his instructions. Because IKEA had discovered very early on that saying “Shakespeare” repeatedly brought him closer, by association, to Shakespeare in the ears and eyes of readers, increasingly wild and anxious to feel cultured with the least possible effort. IKEA was that guy who had the courage and the nerve to publically claim “I was influenced by Shakespeare” (when anybody with an iota of intelligence knew Shakespeare had influenced nobody, yet at the same time, he’d influenced everybody, down to the illiterate man who monologues and begs for alms on his knees in the metro station) and to keep on smiling as if it were nothing. IKEA was the guy who said he was “indebted to all of them,” but, far from that leaving him bankrupt, he’d gotten rich by osmosis, insinuating himself into the picture, with almost hypnotic insistence in front of judges and among critics, both increasingly open to suggestion and domestication. In the beginning, he’d been deeply outraged by the succession of crowns and medals on IKEA’s head and chest. But as time went by, he’d come to take it as a kind of perverse consolation: the fact that IKEA was considered the greatest and the best did nothing but offer irrefutable evidence he inhabited an idiotic world that didn’t belong to him and that, as such, didn’t recognize him as anything more than a poetic mirage or a scientific disturbance. “The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience,” postulated the energetic pessimist Schopenhauer who, of course, had a great number of repeaters of that quote (him included) who clung to the comfort of the mathematics, automatic as it was imprecise, of writing for a very limited but very intelligent few, those few for whom it was still worth the sorrow and the joy, because there weren’t many specimens of that race left in the world. Or to live convinced that his kingdom was not of this world while dragging behind him the cross and the glory of an unknown masterpiece. From such certainty, it was only one step to leap into the territory of quantum physics, of multiple dimensions, of glimpsing other planes of existence where he was a sort of messiah of letters (hours ago he’d already fantasized deliriously about a global success for his latest book hoping it would make the night pass faster) while IKEA had been ripped to shreds by mobs and blogs of unpublished hyenas just arriving to the “publishing community” and living in the Age of the Professionalized Amateur.

  Beyond all the foregoing, what had been most shocking and outrageous for him was the fact that IKEA had even figured out how to dodge the mud-slinging and condemnations of younger writers. IKEA had managed to deactivate the explosive charges of those who, supposedly, had the obligation to publically spurn him, if not like a father then at least like an unbearable older brother or a strutting and plumed cousin with too much good luck. But no. They weren’t up to the task of hounding and taking him down. Rather, sometimes, just the opposite. Unlike him (who, in the early years of his career had confronted, with loving respect and humble admiration, the Saturnian titans who’d come before him, because that was his role and what he had to do, in order to, soon thereafter, be chewed up in turn by his contemporaries and successors), now the new crops only wanted to be like IKEA. The times were different. The times were times of not wasting time on generational literary squabbles like in his youth. Then, sound and fury and mockery and refounding spirit. But, so when IKEA had come up, there was no flock of flaming angels in his vicinity demanding his expulsion and fall from the heights and the demolition of his kingdom. Just the opposite. They wanted his prizes, his sales, his translations, his invitations to festivals and talks, his women, his fans. His, yes, ductility (IKEA had taken lessons in tango and kabuki theater and bungee jumping or any other activity typical of the countries to which he was always traveling for long and messy festival nights), his radio-host voice (classes in phonetics and allocution), and his look (always before one of those sessions of those photographs in which, invariably, he appeared looking out at a flaming horizon, wearing a Montgomery jacket with the collar popped), including a romantic beard and leonine mane that, it was said, was the product of periodically injecting himself with very expensive doses of the glands of baby panda bears.

  IKEA’s persona was to the “concept” of the young continental novelist what Derek Zoolander was to a certain type of eighties-nineties supermodel. Or, at most, in his raptures of free sincerity, one of those sympathetic amoral characters from certain Coen brothers films. Or, in his best and most courteous moments, like the social-climbing and troublemaking Eve Harrington in All About Eve. (And, oh, how antiquated and archaic all his pop references were now; he, who once had been distinguished and categorized for being, precisely, someone always on the avant-garde and/or beloved child of his time, was now an orphan of a time that, to top it off, didn’t acknowledge and had disowned him.) IKEA like a kind of parody that transforms into what it’s parodying to the point where it acquires the same respectability as the original but without being aware (and making it so nobody is aware of its imitation and considers it authentic) that it’s a falsification. Blue Steel. Magnum. New Boom. IKEA was the diet simplification of something substantial and complex, but, even still, on sale and fat free, supposedly nutritious and rich in vitamins. IKEA was to classic literatu
re what Amadeus was to W. A. Mozart. And so IKEA, on the other hand, now enjoyed the timelessness of the dead, of what’s fixed forever in a time and place, and thus evoked intact, impeccable, portrayed in the colors saints are painted on cathedral ceilings. That’s why, again, the young writers opted—better, just in case—to deny the omnipresent IKEA. To not even mention and much less condemn him, except in private after too much drugs; thus turning his name and brand into something deafening by omission, like someone avoiding the pronunciation of a forbidden spell for fear of reprisals, never aware of the obvious and maybe even more painful radiations of its echo. They didn’t even, just in case, allude to the names or the books by IKEA’s innumerable and classic “masters.” The only names those up-and-coming and cool-inked kids cared about were their own and those of their closest contemporaries and, in general, friends from anthologies. The new young writers were, at that time, like creationists: for them, the history of literature began just five or at most ten years before their own appearance on the scene. And man had coexisted with simians since the dawn of time. That’s why they opted to insult each other behind the scenes and among themselves and, also, in the process, murder him in the foyer. He, after all, had “discovered” IKEA and, besides, he’d become a kind of multiuse target, always ripe for reflexive mockery and automatic discredit. He was the symbol of a rotten time, they said. He was the product of the bad practices and various corruptions of the publishing world. He was someone who, in his day, in those amoral times, people read to, better, avoid seeing what was happening outside his books. He, with perspective, amounted to a distracting distraction and was accused of never having been concerned with reality and with “his time.” There abounded, yes, writers who time and again declared themselves committed to society, from the comfort of newspaper columns and roundtables; and, no doubt, some of them must have dedicated hours to charity work and donated part of their royalties to charitable organizations and participated in literacy programs in low-income communities; but he’d never met any of them. Even still, he’d invented a character/personality double who responded in secret to the name Anito (simultaneously a play on Orphan Annie—because he was an orphan—and the diminutive of the Spanish word for anus) and who every now and then burst out with clichés and slogans and even sobs for his “missing in action,” desaparecidos parents, and spontaneous performances of protest hymns/songs of the Latin American left, to the initial confusion and subsequent indignation of attendees of literary festivals and viewers of TV shows that aired at three in the morning.

  And, yes, of course, his accusers had justification, all the justification not in the world but yes in their politically correct world: he—like so many others before him—had become a writer in order to read. To work with the stuff of dreams where what time it was never mattered; to get as far away as possible from his now nonexistent country of origin and city of birth, a city that now, according to footage captured by drones drifting overhead, lost in the sky, had been transformed into Venice-like wreckage, sunk to its knees in the sweaty stew of global warming. Nothing mattered less to him than reality, because, in his opinion, reality was always poorly written.

  And what had become of IKEA—favorite of right-minded readers—after all of that, after his particular Swiss-quantum-accelerated episode? Shortly after publishing his prize-winning collection of stories about his prizes, IKEA had left his second wife: an actress/model, but, fundamentally, more / than actress or model. IKEA’s first wife, having efficiently fulfilled—following the lineaments of the women of the Boom—her role as secretary/mother/groupie (here the / were nothing more than that), was cast aside after acquiring a figure of the kind frequently referred to as Rubenesque, and then came a chanteuse who subsequently made herself a multimillionaire with impassioned torch songs dedicated to her ex, deploying a functional blend of affection and spite. Number 3 was, inevitably, a writer of bestsellers, but risqué bestsellers, who’d made the jump from her city of origin to American campuses and to New York vernissages with “installations” where she reproduced the crimes of Charlie Manson’s girls using Barbie dolls, things like that (and, ah, from The Intruder’s house, again that song and those screams and that electricity and sliding down and reaching the bottom and going back up to the top to slide down again). A perennial girl who didn’t hesitate to state, with a deep voice and a sharp smile, things like “There are nights when the phosphorescent and irradiated and radioactive Amazonic ovarian tumors of Clarice (referring, of course, to Clarice Lispector) visit me in my studio … And they dictate to me … And I listen to them… And I take notes … And later I perfect and make what they told me my own” or “I also directed my own adaptation of Equus in which all the actors were horses, real horses” or “My stories are transgressive, but seriously trangressive: while everyone writes stories about fathers who sleep with their daughters, I write stories about grandfathers who sleep with their granddaughters.”

  The funny thing is that he’d known her. He knew her. Her. From back in that time that, with the passing of years, he defines as before, to avoid going into uncomfortable details like dates and places that many would rather forget and, if they can’t, at least deny. But he couldn’t deny anything; because—again, no one made him—he’d left behind incriminating written testimony and proof. On the jacket of a book. Between quotation marks that, sometimes, seem like two little hands trying to strangle that sentence you should have never thought and much less handed over, hmm, disinterestedly. But he’d done it, knowing perfectly well that writers never do anything disinterestedly. Writers don’t work like that. Vocational training and occupational hazard. Writers—at least writers like him—did everything interestedly, because they were interested in everything, if only a little bit. And they considered even that little bit to be worthy of consideration, as if they were reading first and writing after, wondering if there was something there, in the lives of others, that might wind up being useful to them in their own work. Besides, she had a sublime ass. An interesting ass. Very much so. One of those asses you couldn’t stop reading in order to describe later. And he’d also been responsible in large part for her literary breakout. Hers and her ass’s. He, during his fifteen pages of fame, improvised an ingenious line for the promotion of the first book of that girl who was still just a girl and far too pretty. There she was: always slipped into short dresses that seemed to have been spray-painted on her body, in the center of one of those many centrifugal parties he was known to frequent back then, on his most famous nights (he’d always known she was very good at what she did, which wasn’t the same as saying what she did was very good or that it had anything to do with literature). And years later, he’d been almost raped by her in a disturbing episode/performance in an emergency clinic. And, yes, he’d named her IKEA too. To complete the game, to keep playing, all alone. And he couldn’t help but admire the ways reality sometimes figured out how to be so invented and inventive.

  IKEA & IKEA were now IKEAS, and they were even exploring the possibility of starring in “the first highbrow reality show.” He’d received a two-way call from his agent and his publisher to ask if it might not be “interesting” to “contact” IKEAS and “suggest” they included him as a “guest appearance” on the show. Perhaps for a touch of “tragicomic relief” or as an “anti-antihero”: the one who was “there when they were born,” now surpassed by his disciples.

  He’d enjoyed lying and repeating that Zen proverb about how “if the master isn’t surpassed by his pupils then he never was a master.” But those two weren’t his followers. No: IKEAS didn’t follow anybody but themselves and they were a couple of chasers of everything, a couple of clowns clowning. And he’d felt an odd blend of indignation-disgust-uncertainty-what-if and promised his publisher and agent, to calm them down, “to give it some serious thought.”

  And just when he prophesized that the fusion of both monsters into one two-headed monster would give birth to the inevitable Antichrist of continental literature (Little
Big Supersize Mega Maximum IKEA), IKEAS had traveled to a bend in the Amazon on the dime of some magazine, to star in a fashion production (to publicize a book they’d written together; a massive “X-rated-magical-realist” novel with immortal generals and single-breasted nymphomaniac warriors addicted to hallucinogenic piranha eggs) and they were caught in the middle of one of those sporadic uprisings where the local natives get tired of being photographed and having their souls stolen.

  And all trace of IKEAS had been lost.

  It was assumed they’d been devoured by cannibals and digested and transformed into a pinch of dust floating in the wind of golden and emerald jungles. But he preferred to imagine them—like at the end of that Edwardian novel—condemned to, for the rest of their days, read the complete works of Dickens to the natives. And to see if, in that way, at last, they learned something (the two of them, not the natives) and, no, better not: better to have IKEAS reading themselves to each other, but saying “Dickens has had a big influence on us.”

  And then—as Auden said of Yeats—IKEAS “became their admirers.” And IKEAS’s admirers—as admirers of phenomena unworthy of any admiration tend to be—didn’t take long to head off in search of something alive and current to admire.

  Whereas he, before long, realized he missed them.

  So much.

  Too much.

  All of that was true too.

  It was also true that he owed them something. Or that, at least, their debt to him (was there anything easier and quicker to process than a vacuum-packed literary blurb?) had been thoroughly repaid.