Cars on Fire

by Mónica Ramón Ríos

  The head was in a cheerful mood. She invited the secretary to sit down across from her desk. She told the secretary about joining the student marches and about the time when a classmate gave her her first orgasm on top of the protest signs they were painting. She talked about the time she attended an assembly and got into an argument with a member of the radical homosexual collective because he’d inadvertently sprayed her dark hair with saliva during a declamation. She talked about the time she’d lost the election to her Red Party opponent, because she’d incorrectly interpreted Marx in the debate by incorrectly citing Gramsci. She talked about the time after that when she’d led a resistance movement and had even written a poem and set it to music, although she’d never been able to sing it properly. She almost convinced the secretary to listen to it, so that the secretary could decide whether she’d been mistaken in abandoning her career as an artist of the revolution and dedicating her life to fricatives instead. But the secretary, glancing at the clock, kindly suggested postponing this performance until they had access to a guitar.

  As the secretary delivered her testimony, the second-floor halls filled with shouts, wails, and murmurs. As always, the PhD students were the last to hear the news. One of them even threw up his instant dinner, which he’d all but inhaled the night before as he graded a hundred papers he’d only been able to stomach by drinking straight from a transparent bottle of something, when he heard that, beyond the yellow police tape, the head had committed a poetic act by cutting off her own head.

  The Ghost

  The last time I saw him, he was sitting in an armchair in one of those chain cafés in a swanky Barrio Alto mall, in Santiago. It was early, so only the employees were moving around under the cold light as it reflected off the glassy tiles. I went in fifteen minutes after opening and he was already there, like a ghost, the only customer in the whole place. At the register, I accidentally dropped some money into my shopping bags and the bills scattered among the contents: new light bulbs, candles. He watched me out of the corner of his eye, my things taking on that vague morning smell of bleach and dirty mop. When I turned around, coffee in hand, his eyes were low in a book taken from the tower he’d stacked up on the corner of the table. I could see it was an interpretative essay on Freud and Lacan, which is what he studied in hopes of incorporating it into the psychoanalytic therapy that had left him completely mute.

  He greeted me with a nod.

  Back then, he never stopped talking. We never stopped talking about books.

  The question that arises, and which indeed all Freud’s previous indications allow us here to produce, is—What is it that wakes the sleeper? Is it not, in the dream, another reality?—the reality that Freud describes thus: that the child is near the father’s bed, takes him by the arm, and whispers to him reproachfully, Father, can’t you see that I am burning?

  The first time I saw him was under a single light bulb, facing a microphone, telling the whole school we weren’t worth shit. It was around 1990, and he was the only student who exercised his right to take the floor, which was theoretically available to us in our general assemblies—a mysterious idea cooked up by the school authorities to provide some semblance of liberty to those of us who’d never experienced it before. But that stonewalled society, which confined our fields of study, play, and seduction, cemented fears that our blackboards would come to snap the chain-like nerves that had been forged in the militaristic realism of the Chilean right.

  The phantom is the work in the unconscious of the inadmissible secret of an Other. Its manifestation, as anxiety, is the return of the phantom in bizarre words and acts and symptoms.

  Not long before, I’d seen him in a similar café, in another mall, drinking milky coffee with an astonishing amount of sugar, two books tucked under his arm. And before that, I’d seen him in my bedroom, his face marked by pain or pleasure, I could never tell which.

  As we always did when we saw each other, we talked about books that morning. Tight-lipped as he’d become, I talked far more than he did, until he excused himself and emerged a few minutes later from the bathroom, trailing the stench of weed. The café employees were so used to his presence that they didn’t even react.

  Despite all these phantasmagorical visits experienced during sleep, he wakes with a clearer, more resolute mind.

  I can still see him stepping barefoot along the rocky shore and into the lake, blue trunks, long hair, a bandanna of the same color dropping to the ground. He wore it like Axl Rose even after we’d forgotten the singer and his leather jackets with no T-shirt underneath. The same skinniness, the same femininity. I was so young that I mistook his affectation for rigor. When I saw him, fifteen years later, sitting in an easy chair with a haircut, underlining psychology books, as if the very act of reading could construct a world he’d lost in every glimmer of sunlight, I could see how fragile he was. I didn’t recognize myself. Even so, I said goodbye as I always had. I kept searching for the shameless kid who’d sat down across from me and my mother, high out of his mind, to confess that he loved me. My skin then was bronzed by the sun of a beach where my friend’s brother had undressed me and kissed my breasts while her other brother alerted the entire household. In the ghost’s confession, I only heard desire. By the next day, his words had abandoned him.

  Awakening, in Lacan’s reading of the dream, is itself the site of a trauma, the trauma of the necessity and impossibility of responding to another’s death. To awaken is thus precisely to awaken only to one’s repetition of a previous failure to see in time.

  Years later, in a similar psychotropic episode, he and his friends left my brother without his wallet, phone, keys, or jacket in a bar miles from home. No one knew where he was until the next day, when he turned up pale and hollow-eyed after walking all night long. My mother blamed the ghost, who had so often sat around drinking whiskey at our place. Even so, she went with my brother when we learned that his best friend had died under peculiar circumstances.

  We must analyze the abrupt awakening of other horizons that manifest themselves in the same word and which must lead to other unspeakable catastrophes that have occurred in the lives of others, in a beyond-myself. In this other life and in this other topic, the other horizons of the same word, its secret horizons, are destined for non-existence, for silence, for death without a burial.

  Not long before he met his end, his psychoanalyst, also a martial arts expert, was arrested for stabbing a young man in the belly in the doorway of a party where the psychoanalyst worked as a security guard. We could only watch how it happened on TV and in pieces: we beheld a body deformed by excessive exercise and food, his head shaved to the scalp. Years prior, the psychoanalyst had organized a Lacan study group at his house. He’d been fired from the university and banned from the psychoanalytical association for strange reasons he recounted with laughter and the ghost insistently defended. The home where the Lacanian psychoanalyst held his study group, I determined over the couple months of my attendance, was a dimming promise. His wife had left him. His young daughters divided their time between the school bus and a silent second floor. Sometimes the power was out. On other occasions, a maid would open the door for us and bring in glasses of water and then be gone the next week. The psychoanalyst’s house, high on a hillside miles from the bus we took to get there, was in an up-and-coming neighborhood that had never finished coming up. The red tiles stained our shoes, so our footprints marked the concrete when we filed out after our sessions. One week, a puppy appeared. Stroking his head, I realized his ears were newly mutilated, the scabs crumbling into my hands. I never saw him again. Apparently, the dog grew dangerous. There was nothing special about the living room where we met: dark walls, semi-new furniture, a plant or two, paintings with dense brushstrokes. One day the walls were bare: empty rectangles stood out against the reddish paint where things had once been. When I decided to leave the study group, I sent the psychoanalyst a handwritten letter. He had my brother tell me to visit him, for a reason I decid
ed, shivering, that I wanted to know nothing else about. My brother soon stopped going, too. Sometime later, still in therapy, the ghost went essentially mute.

  My brother would often tell me when we spoke on the phone that the ghost was now living with a friend, a girl who’d been his classmate at the university. They’d both studied psychology but neither had graduated. She inherited two adjacent houses and a fortune after her father died. At the same time, he’d discovered in therapy that being adopted had haunted him with a constant sense of abandonment. He was incredibly thin. She was obese. The heiress’s house—they invited me over once—had thick, dusty curtains and velvetupholstered furniture, also coated in dust, with feet that sank into a lumpy carpet. It was like an abandoned basement.

  To some people the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psycho-analysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lasciviousness—the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence.

  The owner of the house had a boyfriend who looked exactly like the two or three friends who were always with him. They all wore black jeans, dark T-shirts with satanic white faces, and black sneakers. They drank pisco and Coke. None of them had a job or went to school, but they had luxurious objects strapped to their wrists and tucked into their pockets. The house had several stories and a cellar divided into small concrete rooms with no windows or flooring. They were just concrete blocks inhabited by some spartan furniture. A few months later, the rooms were occupied by two classmates of the heiress’s from the university, one schizophrenic, the other afflicted by a constant sense of abandonment. I imagine there were probably also books in the ghost’s room.

  Analysis can throw light on such an affect but, far from insisting on breaking it down, it should make way for esthetics (some might add philosophy), with which to saturate its phantasmal progression and insure its cathartic eternal return.

  My brother told me, curt, his voice hoarser than usual, that the ghost had died from asphyxiation, staring up at the light.

  When we were all still young and lived in the protection of our parents’ homes, there were things the ghost would always keep on his bedside table: an ashtray, a pipe, a pack of cigarettes or two, tobacco, marijuana, rolling paper, a lighter, a candle, incense sticks, and an incense holder. Despite the lung scans, my brother said, he’d never kicked the habit.

  He was found on the floor, the candle burned down, the mattress half-charred, a blow to the head from where he’d fallen.

  The Patient

  She woke that morning to the caws of the crows on her windowsill. She wandered around my office as if inspecting every detail, trailing one of her wool scarves, dangling pompoms. I told her that was why most patients ended up here. She shot me a reproving glare through her thick blue frames. I offered to hang up her coat, but a leather-gloved gesture made it clear that she’d rather keep her belongings close by. She took a few moments to settle into her chair, skittishly rearranging her layers, her scarves, hides, feathers, bags. She pulled off her hat with lace-sheathed fingers and twisted her hair into a nest on top of her head. She started speaking with a perverse kind of nonchalance, as she did in her well-known lectures and talks.

  She said: I don’t like being compared to other people. All this talk of how every experience is just as ordinary as any other—it’s a pointless way of resigning yourself to being yourself. I’d rather die if that were true.

  Her speech wasn’t fluid or relaxed. She forced her consonants against her small teeth. As I took notes, she fixed her eyes on the shelves where I kept, among other things, my psychology books.

  That’s why I started writing. Novels, the best novels, explore the singularity of our perceptions. That sensation, whether it makes us feel part of something or inspires total indifference, is what people are looking for when they open a book.

  Two hands, bony as claws, clutched at the bags in her lap. The bags looked heavy, as if they were full of gold ingots.

  Some people might read them for entertainment.

  That must be why you read novels, she retorted, drawing out the you like an owl and tilting her head toward one of the shelves. Have you read them all?

  Yes.

  And you found them entertaining.

  She stretched her words. I couldn’t tell if it was a question or a statement.

  Some of them, yes.

  Almost no one has read all the books they own.

  Have you?

  She paused before answering, as if she’d tripped on some syllables poised on the tip of her tongue.

  I’ve practiced many kinds of reading. I’ve spent quite some time looking for the same thing in every book, something indescribable. If it doesn’t appear in the first few pages, I’ll flip through the rest without even reading them. Some books are only good for steadying the crooked leg of a table. And when I find what I’m looking for, I have to stop and take in every word, savor them slowly, absorb them with total intensity among other, lesser books.

  Does it bother you when you can’t describe something in words?

  No. Her accent was hard to place. It’s part of how I survive. At least at this point in my life.

  And what point is that?, we said almost in unison, with the same inflection, though hers was sarcastic and mine sincere. She crowned our chorus with a harsh bark of laughter, as if to say: sometimes the words flow out of us according to plan, like a mere replica. Didn’t I know that, after so many years of practice? I’d heard the same words used again and again to explain the most disparate circumstances. For decades, the medical profession had been perfecting a system to simplify the scale with which patients measure and express physical discomfort. Is it a sharp pain? A sense of heat spreading across a large area? Or do you feel as if your flesh were burning with intense cold? Or maybe it’s like a knife were slicing into your skin and advancing slowly into your ribcage? Take a close look at the Wong-Baker scale, the EVA chart, the Pfeiffer SPMSQ questionnaire, the Karnofsky scale, the Mankoski scale, the McGill questionnaire, the IPAT, the FLACC. How would you describe the pain you feel when something’s tearing your chest open and you think you’re about to die?

  I’m here to explore the ways I can express pain. The woman interrupted my thoughts, looking serious. To compose a complex score of its gradations. Look, doctor, I’ve spent my whole life writing about pain. I’ve chiseled out a written voice, a voice that’s controlled in every way. I can use words, channel them with my own hands, and glaze them with polished wisdom. I can, if you prefer, entertain my readers with other people’s pain, which is what the books on those shelves of yours do. But now I’m here to learn from our oral exchange.

  I was going to ask her something, but she didn’t even notice.

  I’m here in search of a place to experiment with this trembling, childlike voice of mine, to talk my way into a tone I’ve never found, to strike the perfect chord in saying what’s never before been said between two people. Is this a reasonable objective for someone in your line of work?

  Within seconds, I’d assessed the dame with medical eyes, with a man’s eyes, with the eyes of someone who’s read all the books the patient ever wrote. A thought came to me, utterly clear: will I ever be able to look at anything again as if for the first time. She’d chosen this particular staging for her experiment, motivated, perhaps, by our obvious age difference, by my credentials, and by the positive comments other patients had posted on my public profile. Did she know her way around that kind of technology? The wrinkles on her face sometimes seemed to vanish altogether. Her hands looked as if they’d borne those knuckles for a century, and her eyes assessed me with real hunger. A coil of her hair rested on a corner of the table. Curled there, it looked like a tangled little nest. She tossed me a devilish, adolescent look from her chair.

  If you agree, then I’d like to start right away.

  She peered
into one of her bags and pulled out a small leather sack. She fingered it obscenely for a moment, then dropped it open onto the table between us. A thick bundle of hundred-dollar bills slipped gently out of it.

  This is what I’m offering you. You’ll have to accept it as willingly as a prostitute accepts her charge.

  My brow furrowed, stopping her.

  Prostitution is nothing to be ashamed of, Dr. Segal. It’s much like work in every way. And workers should never be ashamed of what they do to support themselves. The people who pay are the ones who should be ashamed of their need to exploit.

  And you’re not ashamed.

  You and I both know that I’ve exerted a certain power over you ever since I stepped into this office. Ever since I made an appointment and gave you my name. You’ve been waiting for me, you’ve prepared for our session, you’ve hidden my novels on one of these shelves. And you’ve been observing me, you’ve been wondering about my clothes. I’m sure you’ve noticed that I pick them out every morning with great care. And so do you. I noticed it as soon as I set eyes on you a few months ago, at that awards ceremony at the university. That’s one of the reasons why I chose you. You’re pleasant to look at. That, and the shine of your hair.

  The patient’s lusty smile broadened as she followed the arc of my hand, which I could no longer control, as it reached up to touch my own hair, swept up into a quiff and fixed in place with gel.

  What are the other reasons?

  Her smile disappeared, as if the question had disappointed her somehow.

  Your age. Also, you don’t speak my mother tongue, which leaves me no choice but to address you in this foreign language. You have no idea how hard it is to find someone who doesn’t speak Spanish in this city.

  I’m interested in why you enjoy comparing any job to prostitution.

  She tilted her head to one side. Maybe they’re simply words stripped of meaning.