The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  And so, he was, merely, like an important part of the scene (he’d read that, again, Bill Murray had bequeathed his skull to be used in performances of Hamlet, in “an easy role to play, but always much-anticipated role in a very good play”); he was like a master of ceremonies who didn’t remotely reach the creative stature or grace of Rod Serling, at the beginnings and ends of those episodes of The Twilight Zone that he’d seen for the first of many times as a child. Episodes he’d watched and learned, by osmosis, how to structure a story.

  † Wishing to be Rod Serling when you’re a kid and still wishing to be him when you’re older though not necessarily grown up. To be Rod Serling like being a story’s elegant host. Knowing perfectly how it begins and unfolds and ends. Minimal time but maximal efficiency when it comes to telling it, to producing it. None of the Laurence-Sternian “I progress as I digress,” but, rather, a Rod-Serlingian “I progress” and that’s that, period.

  And new paragraph.

  And on to the next one.

  Episodes of The Twilight Zone like the dreams he remembered to perfection the next morning and discussed with his Cabrera classmates, on the playground at recess. Because they’ve all dreamed the same thing, they’ve all seen The Twilight Zone the night before, and after they’ve all gone to sleep and have dreamed those self-contained chapters/stories. Many of them related to sleeping and dreaming because—since the dawn of time—there’s nothing more supernatural yet certifiable and real than the act of closing our eyes here to open them elsewhere.

  Dream episodes of The Twilight Zone:

  “Perchance to Dream”: the story of a man who, distressed, goes to see a psychiatrist and tells him that he dreams in chapters. He dreams of Maya, a seductive carnival dancer wearing leopard-print tights (which were discussed at length at the school), and she lures him into a funhouse and then onto the roller coaster. And the man has a heart condition and knows that, if he goes any further, he’ll die in his sleep. On the other hand, if he stays awake (and the man has been up for eighty hours without sleeping), the exhaustion would end up damaging his heart, and that would also end badly. The man realizes that the psychiatrist can’t help him and, leaving his office, he discovers that the receptionist is identical to the woman from the funhouse. Terrified, he turns and runs back into the office and jumps out of the window to his death. Just then, the doctor calls to his secretary and asks her to come into his office and the man, the patient from the beginning, is there, lying on the divan. And the doctor explains to the girl that his patient came in, lay down, fell asleep, let out a scream, and died on the spot.

  “I Dream of Genie”: another attractive secretary in the office where the protagonist is a bookkeeper. The man goes into an antique shop and buys an antique and somewhat dented Arabian lamp for twenty dollars. But back in his office, the man discovers that a coworker of his (a very attractive and ambitious man) has given the secretary a very sexy negligee. The man, embarrassed, doesn’t give her the lamp, he takes it home, and when he’s cleaning it, polishing it, out comes a genie. The genie wears modern clothes and speaks slang and the only thing that gives him away are those absurd curving and pointed shoes. And he grants not three but just one wish. And he tells the man he’s going to give him time to think it over carefully and goes back into his lamp. What follows are not sleeping dreams but waking dreams: the man fantasizing that he’s married to the secretary, who has become a big movie star (and who doesn’t have time for him and does have time for an affair with another movie star; so he rejects that one); that he’s a magnate of such generosity it ends up complicating his life (he rejects that one too); so he settles for the Great American Dream: to be president of the United States (but the responsibility is too great and he doesn’t know what to do faced with a crises caused by an alien invasion; so not that one either). But, in the end, he has an idea. In the next scene, a homeless man finds the lamp in a garbage can, rubs it, out comes the genie. And the genie is none other than that shy bookkeeper who doesn’t know what to ask for.

  “Where Is Everybody?”: the most unsettling of all and the original pilot of The Twilight Zone. A man with the uniform of an Air Force service man wanders through a town where there are no people, but he has the sensation of being watched. He goes into a café, a telephone booth, a police station, a drugstore, a movie theater. “Time to wake up now! Time to wake up now … I’m in the middle of a nightmare I can’t wake up from … I must be a very imaginative guy. Nobody in the world can have a dream as complete as mine, down to the last detail … I’d like to wake up now,” the man says over and over again. His solitary desperation grows until, frantic, he ends up pressing the button at the stoplight over and over in order to cross a street where no cars pass by. Then it’s revealed that that button is, actually, a “panic button” that “wakes” him up inside an isolation chamber where he’s been for the last 484 hours, as part of a program for astronauts training to go to the moon. In the final scene, the (failed) astronaut in training is taken out of the hanger on a stretcher, and he looks up at the sky where the moon is shining, and he says something like “Hey! Don’t go away up there! Next time it won’t be a dream or a nightmare. Next time it’ll be real.”

  “The Museum’s Visitor”: a man is sent by a powerful American businessman to recover an ancient family portrait that now hangs on the wall of a small provincial museum, in an unspecified European country. The envoy at first thinks the assignment is the whim of a millionaire, but it all turns out to be true: there’s the painting and among the faces of the people posing in it he recognizes his employer’s features. “It was rewarding, in a way, being part of a dream coming true, even if it was someone else’s dream,” says the traveler, who doesn’t hesitate to make an offer for the painting to the museum manager who, at first, denies the existence of the painting, then admits it, but nervously slips away through a small door. When he tries to follow, the envoy gets lost in the museum’s passageways and ends up falling asleep and has a dream in which he is contemplating a museum shaped like a giant wearing a hat and carrying a suitcase covered in tourist stickers, a museum of himself. The man wakes up with a start and discovers an emergency exit and goes out into a landscape that is the landscape of his childhood, in a forest, and through the trees he spies his parents and his little sister and himself, as a boy, a boy who sees him watching and smiles and lifts an index finger to his lips, signaling him to keep quiet. The episode ends with the man standing in front of the door that would take him back to the present, unsure whether to return or not; but the scene fades to black before we see if he walks through it. In the next scene, we’re back inside the museum and we’re treated to that oft-repeated ending: one of the paintings depicts the traveler with his back turned, outside the museum, all alone.

  And, yes, he could understand it: all he’d achieved—like multiple episodes of The Twilight Zone, stories of lone survivors of planetary catastrophes in whose modality he now inserted himself as imaginary centenarian—was the ambiguous feat of being left alone.

  Yes: he had nobody left.

  And he’d achieved this (through a combination of good genes and adequate diet and priceless latest-generation medications he got access to because of his good attitude and impeccable résumé as laboratory guinea pig) without great effort.

  Not even his regal solitude of solus rex on an empty chessboard, only held in check by his own shadow (which allowed him a panoramic view with the perspective of the lone survivor, of the one who laughs last, of the one who lives to tell the tale), could be understood as a success.

  Solitude—which at one time had been the perfect product of the ideal sanctuary; a cheap activity in which you could come up with the most valuable ideas—had gone out of style.

  It’d been eradicated.

  The moments and spaces for being alone (that place where, among other things, you read and wrote and daydreamed) had been occupied by the faux company of social media. By a constant typing and staring at text, in the constant comp
any of “friends” near or far, only interrupted by the eruption of some publishing phenomenon, fed by a mass hysteria of religious intensity, like what’d happened with Penelope’s books, which, now, ironically and paradoxically, financed his solitude.

  Now he wasn’t lonely.

  Now he was solitary.

  Now he was beyond all thought of someone who might be thinking about him, wondering, “Where could he be? What could he be doing?”

  And, even still, there he was, keeping himself company.

  And there was a great deal of triumphal melancholy in his persistence.

  And a great deal of paradoxical loss: because victory isn’t victory if you don’t have losing rivals to testify and bear witness to it.

  And he’d understood for a long time now that the process of obtaining such comfortable and functional rivals wasn’t easy. He realized then that there weren’t even that many colleagues of his for whom it was going that much better and whose successes were that indisputably unjust. Before long, in his fantasies, with IKEAS off the map, all there would be in his vicinity were names of his same stature and talent of those who’d gotten more recognition than he had.

  Why?

  Because of pure chance or the skill of literary agents who’d gotten some publisher drunk during the long nights of the Frankfurt Book Fair, before it shut down forever after that Islamic-fundamentalist attack, coinciding with the visit of the cartoonist author of Allah is Extra Large.

  Goodbye to any chance of signing a million-dollar contract there and thereby triggering a domino effect; because nobody wanted to be left out of the party when everything came to fruition and, if a small fortune were lost, well then, everybody lost; and automatic and collective amnesia; and nobody would bring it up in the coming years as a matter of protocol and good manners.

  In any case, nothing even remotely close to that had ever happened to him after National Industry.

  He’d never been “discovered” at Frankfurt.

  He’d become what’s known as a “writer’s writer,” at a time when writers had stopped reading (and, again, he still couldn’t read Ada, or Ardor, could it be because, according to its author, its theme was “happiness,” and he was so far away from that theme?) because they were too busy reading only what they were writing or, at most, what someone who might give them something they needed was writing and … ah … uh …

  But, again, the digression is the secret language of insomnia and channel-surfing its dialect.

  Insomnia’s favorite song is “All Together Now.”

  And so, with an effort and adjustment of his pillow, he tries to return from there, to jump back a few thoughts, as if rewinding without the remotest control.

  To concentrate on something.

  On a fixed and unwavering point.

  On, after so many years, giving shape to a more or less precise space through which to move. A handful of hours on his hands like a number of lines on a map.

  And so, he opens a notebook and thinks about writing something that—he imagines he’s already contemplating it from the other side, from the shore to be reached and not from the shore from which to reach—speaks and is written in the language of dreams and the dialect of insomnia.

  A kind of flipside to his last book. A book that spoke in the tongue writers speak when they think, in silence, awake and not daydreaming, about what they’re going to write. Now, on the other hand, to explore what a writer thinks he’s thinking when he dreams, sleeping or waking.

  A book that—with any luck—won’t put people to sleep but will make them dream. The always difficult to ford second act preceding the third movement that would bring, with eyes half-closed, both tongues together in a single language: that form of the inventive dreaming that is making and unmaking memory.

  He tries a few lines. The letters come out strange, hesitant, with sketchy profiles akin to those of his beginnings, to his first letters. He practices, short words and brief lines, at first. Nothing to do with and reading nothing like the sentences (more prayers than sentences, overflowing with dashes and commas and semicolons and colons and parentheses) he uses to think.

  He, with caution, braves short distances.

  Going from here to there.

  To ascend downhill or descend uphill.

  But, then, he picks up speed and, with it, so much to lose.

  Writing, he discovers, is like riding a bicycle: it’s true you never forget (and he doesn’t forget that he learned to ride very late, on a bike without training wheels, his parents already gone); what you do forget is the desire to pedal, that maybe you could get back on that bicycle and see what doesn’t happen or never get on it again and see what does.

  Which doesn’t mean, once you’ve regained equilibrium, that you won’t fall again, so many times, that in the sorrow of the fall is the grace of getting back up.

  And his bones (especially his skull and what resides inside his skull, with his ever tauter skin stretching across his bones, reminding him of that protective plastic, like alien saliva, wrapped around suitcases on those rotating machines in airports) are no longer what they were. The handlebars pushing back against his hands, like the horns of an animal he’s landed astride of, legs spread, rodeoing through the rodeo of his life.

  And, of course, he moves tentatively, first executing esses and, subsequently, the rest of the letters.

  † To begin, perhaps, the way books read by the young and the not so young began back then (when children didn’t only read books that were just written, new books, books freshly made and especially designed for children and only for children or for adults who let themselves be swept away by a melancholic fever). To begin the way that book that opened with “It was the best of times, it was the worse of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair”; and, yes, in the public schools there had been teachers who insisted that a personal and childish adaptation of a Shakespeare play was the best option for an end-of-the-year performance and …

  And he feels a dizziness.

  He loses air and strength and his eyes cloud over and, yes, he falls. Not off the bed, but almost (his legs pedaling frenetically under the sheets and blankets, searching for pedals that suddenly aren’t there).

  And the pen falls from his hand (Magic-Pen brand, a pen with a built-in light) and he has to execute a complicated contortion to retrieve it from the footboard of his bed and …

  So, just in case, as a precautionary measure, he opts to drop the simile of writing like pedaling. And he chooses walking instead. Slower but safer, and so much easier to synch up with the memory of that nighttime walk.

  Of that Great Nighttime Walk, when he was a boy who liked to run and for whom the act of walking was a form of reflection.

  Back then, you walked to see and to feel better, you ran to get to weariness more quickly and then you could walk with your duty fulfilled.

  And the night he now describes and scribbles down is the night of the Great Nighttime Walk and, remembering himself moving forward, is for him like walking backward, in reverse. Like Mr. Trip, like his perfect and functionally dysfunctional but not-broken toy. Looking up at the black sky. Counting stars in moonshot countdowns (he starts with star number ten thousand and, from there, down to star zero) to stay awake while others recount stories or count sheep in order to, then, fall back asleep. To stare up at the stars and challenge them to a let’s see who blinks first and the stars lose within one second yet know themselves winners for all eternity.

  But, it tends to happen, behind the stage of one definitive night is the backstage and the accumulated props and the dressing rooms and all the overlapping curtains of so many days before and so many years after.

  And the days preceding that night in his life are days of austral summer. Long days with short nights when he and Penelope have, once again, been
sent by their parents to Sad Songs. To the south. To what will end up being his Zembla and his Vyra; because sooner or later everyone ends up an exiled king of their own childhood, driven mad by the memory of youth in a world far wider than the world of adult life, fearing that a shadow of that past will catch up to it and sacrifice it in its name and its story.

  There they go. He and Penelope. To Sad Songs. Where their other grandparents (the provincial Russian grandparents; their Russian grandparents in the capital take care of them during the school year and on weekends, with the rest of their time devoted to perfecting the simultaneously infallible and honest method of fleecing friends and friends of friends in games of blackjack) are waiting for them. Both pairs of grandparents came here, from so far, when they were children. To his now nonexistent country of origin. His grandparents had been émigrés, fleeing the clamor of red cavalries and white guards. And, oh, the irony that now, after all of that, they have to put up with a new revolution, featuring their own, grown but never-grown-up, children, dressed in T-shirts adorned with stars and sickles and hammers. And so they cling to their grandchildren as if they were sacred icons: their grandparents believe in Penelope’s and his childhood as if it were a religion that worshipped the idea of better and less convulsive days. And so, the provincial grandparents receive him and Penelope during their vacations, with a combination of love and resignation. As if those restless children, kept still throughout the school year, experienced a sudden thaw in those open spaces, like an opportune and seasonal natural phenomenon. Like good stormy weather.