The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  And there below—vacillating between a comic with a voluptuous vampire and a novel with Malaysian pirates—he hears the sound the telephone makes when somebody is dialing. One of various telephones distributed throughout the house. Because, at the time, telephones are heavy as turtles and they never move and you have to go to them every time they call, calling you.

  And he, curious, picks up the apparatus and hears on the other end, the high and small voice of his little sister. And the nextwriter has picked up the receiver before the call is connected—one number is still needed to complete the code on that dial where you insert your finger and push—and he hears his little sister.

  And her words are terrible and not at all sweetened by the smallness of her voice, as if from an animated but motionless drawing.

  And what his little sister has done—he discovers—is call that number from that television commercial where citizens are asked to denounce any subversive or suspicious activity.

  And, there and then, his little sister is communicating their parents’ plans, not realizing that she isn’t speaking to anyone, that he’s the only one listening.

  And he uses his deepest voice and thanks his little sister and hears her hang up.

  And hours later—during the commercial break of an episode of The Twilight Zone—they broadcast that “public service message” along with that other one with the man drowning and the one with the poor boy in the street.

  And he writes down the number for informants and says he has to go to the bathroom, and then turns, and goes to another of the telephones, the farthest one of all, the one in the kitchen.

  And he calls it.

  And they answer on the other end.

  And—in a voice far more believable than his little sister’s—he informs on his parents, explaining and detailing what his parents have planned for that Christmas Eve. Their subversive happening and all of that.

  And there are various clicks and switches of listeners and receivers and they take note and thank him and tell him that he’s a true patriot, that he should feel proud of what he’s done.

  And the nextwriter goes back and sits down beside his little sister and says nothing to her about what he did.

  And he’ll never tell her she’s innocent and he’s guilty, but, hey, first and foremost and when all is said and done, it was her idea, and he only limited himself to revising it, right? He couldn’t help but continue the story, to find out where it would end up.

  And he’ll never ever tell her anything; not even when—years later or right there and then—his sister loses her mind never to get it back again.

  And the nextwriter tells himself he did what he did because he thought it would make a good story, though he knows he’ll never put it in writing, unless he has nothing else left to tell, nothing left to write, if it just won’t come anymore, and deliver us from nada; pues nada.

  Days later, at sunset on December 24th, they arrive to the capital on the train and what follows is the story of a long nighttime walk through the city, in the company of a somewhat unhinged but oh-so-fun uncle.

  And, there, the discovery of the night. “A Day in the Life,” the summer night like a dream (lengthy temporal-geographical spiel, melting together spaces and times and streets and avenues; re-read and re-watch the nocturnal walks of Dream of Heroes and La Dolce Vita).

  And searching for their parents.

  And not finding them, of course. Because their parents had already been found by others.

  And there, walking, the nextwriter and his little sister who, each of them, without exchanging a word, know what’s going to happen, what’s happening; but they don’t want to know it.

  And at some point during that night, the nextwriter starts to cry and his little sister does too and their uncle asks them what’s wrong.

  And the nextwriter asks—tears filling his eyes—how it’s possible that nobody has thought to invent “mini-telephones.” Small and portable telephones that don’t need cords and that even allow you to precisely locate their owners and let them know that you need them, that they are in danger, to get out of there as fast as they can. Small devices, like the ones that Captain James Tiberius Kirk uses to order that they teletransport him at the last moment off of those chaotic and dangerous planets to the secure home of the Enterprise and the protective logic of Mr. Spock. A device that would keep children informed at every moment what their parents were up to. And would allow children to warn and save their parents from all the dangers lying in wait for them. Or—maybe, even, if they were very powerful inventions—vice versa. A miraculous talisman that would keep the family connected and together and allow the errors of the children and the flaws of the parents to be corrected.

  But no.

  Doesn’t exist.

  Cannot be found

  All there is are the tears of the nextwriter and his little sister.

  And their uncle starts to cry too, because he’s a very sensitive person and because it doesn’t seem right to him to be the only person not crying.

  And jump forward, to the present, like someone jumping to the end of their story, like someone reaching the end of a story where a telephone is ringing (another telephone, a telephone the protagonist hears and hesitates, not knowing if he should pick up or not) and where, then, in the air of that hesitation, he hears the last sentence in the story.

  And the last sentence of the story is:

  “And that’s why this now-immobile man has always hated mobile phones.”

  † After a tragedy, you turn into two people, you split in two: you are the one who keeps on living and the one who keeps on dying, who feels vitally dead. And, at the same time, the expansive wave of horror that has passed over you seems to never entirely pass and makes you feel a trembling and profound love for everything around you. The world is perfect and so interesting (because you are so absolutely aware of the absence of those who no longer form a part of it and you force yourself to feel and admire everything that they can no longer admire or feel), and everything sparkles so achingly beautiful. With time, luckily, normality is reestablished and you become again who you always were. And you recover the gift of having almost everything and almost everyone around you.

  And you smile again.

  Or, maybe, you don’t actually smile: you just bare your teeth, your fangs.

  Either way, it’s all the same: those who look at you have no reason to see you and perceive what you’re really thinking, the things that occur to you, everything you look down on them for.

  It’s as if you’d been sleeping soundly and dreaming deeply.

  And suddenly—the closest thing to a happy ending; a contented continuation—you’re awake.

  Awake like he is now.

  And the tale ends but the story continues.

  And a telephone rings.

  A different telephone.

  And yet, a telephone like the one in the tale.

  A telephone like the ones from before.

  The telephone he has beside his bed.

  A telephone that’s not as old as he imagined: and a bed that’s not as complex and articulated as the one he’d invented.

  A telephone he thought was hollow and empty and voiceless, impossible to call and make ring and yet it is ringing.

  A telephone he answers with the hand not of a centenarian but of someone who is what’s referred to as “a man of a certain age,” that luminous or dark middle age. That age halfway between the ultracradle and the ultratomb. A comfortably troubling or troublingly comfortable place. A time when you start to think all the time about things you haven’t thought about much (or didn’t want to think about at all), a time when memories start to transform into something else, into what those memories have meant: the precise and decisive difference between a photograph and a portrait. The interpretation of events and the manner and style in which they’ll finally and definitely be stored away and evoked.

  Not what actually happened but what you tell everyone happened.r />
  Realized reality.

  That reality that’s not detailed even when contemplated from near the end of life; when we want to believe that we’re reading it in its totality, but we fool ourselves, inventing chapters and justifications and oversights; stranding what’s happening in the slow rapids of what happened, floating in the “great shroud of the sea” and quoting that line “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

  But the voice on the telephone doesn’t say that.

  The voice on the telephone says, “Let me in! … Let me in!”

  And it’s a voice he recognizes beyond a shadow of a doubt, but doubts it could be true.

  It’s Penelope’s voice.

  And then he hears a tapping on the window and he gets out of bed like someone descending from the throne of a dead man, with a last breath but an inspired agility that surprises him. True, his joints do creak, but in the end, they can still bend.

  And he opens the window and on the sill, standing at attention, as if awaiting the order to attack, is a little wooden soldier.

  And a few meters beyond, on the path that leads to the sea and the forest, he sees another.

  And, a little farther along, another.

  And he goes along collecting them one by one, and it’s been so long since he got out of bed and out of the house that the sound of the waves and the branches is like something he is hearing for the first time, after having heard it so many times. Like that song he hears now. He knows which one it is, but it’s been a long time since he heard it. “Good Night,” it’s called. The Beatles on The Beatles. The last song on the last side of that two-disc set; and he remembers Uncle Hey Walrus telling him (when he was recalling his time at Apple and Abbey Road, Uncle Hey Walrus fell into something like a trance, with encyclopedic diction, as if he were a relatively close relative of HAL 9000) that he was there, when they recorded it. That he was a witness. That he saw and heard it all. And that it neither was nor had it been easy to be part of that, to bear witness to that collapse and that shipwreck of four people (four of the most beloved people in the world) who had loved each other so much and who suddenly couldn’t see each other and much less hear each other. And who, now, recorded their tracks separately and in a self-destructive yet hyper-creative way and sent each other little messages more acidic than lysergic from one song to the next. And so it was that an ultraviolent P. played at being more J. than J. on the bestial and chaotic and screaming and primal “Helter Skelter” which, he said, he wanted to have “the sound of the fall of the Roman Empire”; and no, it’s no surprise that Charles Manson had understood it as a war cry and a battle hymn and a thirst for bloodshed. And so J.—who’d distilled “the sound of the end of the world” on “A Day in the Life”—counterattacked with the orchestral and elegant and dulcet lullaby “Good Night,” which he heard now, closer all the time, drifting through the tree trunks and sand dunes, R.’s voice as if giftwrapped and floating in the orchestral sweetness.

  He tracks the origin of the song with some difficulty, under the light of the moon. He was never a parks and plazas kind of kid. He was never a boy scout. He never learned to dive headfirst or stand on his head. And he goes along, collecting little soldiers and putting them in the pockets of his robe and pajamas. He is good at that: at collecting what others forget or let drop or lose along the way. One after another. Nine and ten and eleven and, when he reaches solider number twelve, he looks up and discovers he’s reached a clearing in the forest.

  And there are The Intruders.

  The fucking performance artists.

  Four of them: the two parents and the two children.

  And he looks at them but they don’t look at him, because they’re busy doing their thing. They’re performing, or whatever it is you call what they do.

  And then not only does he look at them, but he sees them.

  He sees what they’re doing.

  The two adults are dressed up as his parents. They’re identical. The illusion is so perfect that it’s as if, looking at them, his memory of his parents were a kind of crude and rushed imitation, a hurried sketch.

  And the two children are he and Penelope the way they once were.

  And they all look happy.

  And he’s never felt the happiness they feel.

  Or maybe he has, just now, all of a sudden, he’s not sure.

  Maybe, he thinks, Penelope has left The Intruders instructions to do this, so he remembers them and so, with that memory, he can forget them and let them rest in peace and let himself rest in peace.

  And go on to whatever comes next.

  Now, The Intruders—who’re no longer The Intruders, but he and Penelope and their parents—announce they’re going to sleep.

  And all four of them, together, climb into an immense bed with all sorts of drawers and compartments built into it.

  A bed like the one he imagined for himself.

  A bed with parts of that time machine and that flying car from those movies they once watched, all together.

  And they close their eyes.

  And they dream.

  Then the reflectors that illuminate them go out and a beam of light shines through the trees and lights up a screen, and on that screen he sees him, he sees him again, he was the one who filmed him: a boy with flaming red hair, smiling at him, running backward the way only certain unbroken children or certain broken toys can run. Penelope’s lost son (and a son who was sort of his own) going into the forest, yelling back through his laughter and laughing through his yelling “I bet you can’t come and find me!”

  “Good night … Good night, everybody … Everybody, everywhere … Good night …” R. sings and says goodbye.

  And suddenly he knows what he has to do.

  And knowing what he has to do seems so much like knowing what he has to write and that thing that suddenly stings his face is called … what’s it called?, oh, yes: it’s called “a smile.”

  He already told it because, perhaps, it’s the only thing worth telling: in the beginning of all things, before he learned to read and write (but already feeling himself a writer and a reader), he almost drowned.

  He thinks now that slowly slipping out of a dream is something like that: to save yourself, to kick up from the depths of the dream, to reach for the light there above, on the surface of the sheets, and, at last, to find the air of consciousness and, awake and saved, not the interpretation of that dream but its performance.

  Putting it into practice.

  He would like to be able to write a book like that, but he no longer can. And yet, for a moment, it is as if he were seeing it and feeling it complete and finished. As if he could see it and feel it with the tips of his eyes and the concentric pupils of his fingerprints. Right away, of course, he begins to forget it. He feels that it’s escaping and that he should let it escape, so it doesn’t pull him under, so he doesn’t sink into it. He watches it slip through his fingers and drift down toward the bottom.

  He squeezes his eyes shut. Telling and convincing himself—aloud, but with that strangest of voices, like someone talking in a dream—he’s sleeping. Wanting to believe it’s all been a dream.

  And he opens his eyes slowly, as if just waking up.

  And the book—or the idea of the book, which is almost the same thing—was still there.

  And the book floats now and it’s like something to cling to and not let go, something that keeps him alive and breathing. He sees it through the blinds of his eyelids; uneasy because there’s someone out there waiting for him or because there’s nobody waiting for him; wondering what comes next, what will happen now, what’s going to happen in the end.

  Tell me, tell me, tell me the answer, he sings through his teeth.

  Careful, because that’s where he’s headed, head spinning and blisters on his fingers from so much writing.

  The gentle collapse that’ll come when he extracts what he’s been carrying around inside.

  A familiar return, a state of pity (“Beauty plus
pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition of art,” Nabokov taught in his classes), a change in the weather, an unforgettable landscape, a loss of the center, a surge at suddenly feeling so light and swift, a waking part, a transparent thing, a speed of things. And it’s been so long since he felt like that, since he felt what he feels every time he finishes a book. Like ripping out a tumor to implant a brain inside it. Discovering, upon reviewing the manuscript and the final proofs, all the new things that occurred to him to put in that book; and feeling that everything he’s read written by others seemed to be in direct conversation with what he’d written: opening any novel or story or poem at random and discovering there inside little tin toys, windswept moors, dead sisters together forever, perfectly incompatible and lucky families, burning buildings, and dreams, dreams, dreams. And then, at last, closing it and closing them and going back to sleep well and deep, as if he were running like he’s running now down that path at that speed.

  That recovered speed accelerating down a road where there’s no traveler but him, not worrying about anybody or anything, except, when the moment comes, remembering to, before departing, insert that lie that “No character herein bears any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, and …” or “Any resemblance in what is described, the people described, or the people doing the describing to reality is …” Like how the past once was, in the past, remember.

  † The past is a book and insomnia could become a book. Insomnia that turns into a book written first and read after and reread later and then rewritten; and, at last, the writer attains his most evolved iteration: that of the rewriter, someone who can only rewrite the same thing over and over, the same night, by night.

  Insomnia like the key that turns the gear that sets in motion the memory of someone who remembers in order to rewrite a book, to tell what happened and what will keep happening forever. To tell it better.

  A book with all times at the same time, which, when seen all at once, produce an image of life that’s beautiful and surprising and deep. There’s no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no cause, no effect. Nothing but marvelous moments, where invention is the control, dreams the entropy, and memory somewhere in between, somnambulant and ambulating through what’s created while awake and what’s thought while asleep.