The Planets

by Sergio Chejfec

  Grino was also a secret alcoholic; he only drank at home. “You wouldn’t really understand,” M’s father said. Though at first he had been ashamed, his secretiveness was not due entirely to this. He felt that alcohol was incompatible with company, that drinking only worked in solitude. His house, the walls of which he had indifferently been covering for years, cluttering them with clippings from old magazines, almanacs, and with little images of saints—a graphic tangle, the exact meaning and names of which escaped him—echoed the abandon with which he tried, night after night, to disappear into the naively clandestine nature of his drinking. A force from within him allowed this squalor to remain as it was; as such, it was critical that it never manifest itself completely. (They say that people have reserves of hope, of will, of dignity, et cetera, but it would be more accurate to say that they have reserves of malevolence, indolence, and degeneration.) If one saw him as a desperate man, it would seem obvious that he teetered on the verge of desperation, yet that word vanishes as soon as he is seen in another light: simply as a worker.

  He drank the same thing for years: the same amount of the same drink. He thought back on the children as they were growing up; the neighbors’ kids, whose heads he would pat every morning, and who would get a coin or two from him every now and then. They were adults now, many of them had their own children, and when he would run into them they would speak as equals, with a slight air of mystery. And yet, he thought, clutching the neck of the bottle at midnight, they grew up and I’m still here, drinking the same amount. These associations were arbitrary and had an element of self-pity to them, but he also felt—though this was a product of desperation—that his consistency deserved to be rewarded, and that this reward should be the prolongation of his routine. He buried his empty bottles out behind the house. Later, when there was no space left under the ground, or when he lacked the strength or the motivation to dig, he began to leave them scattered against the wire fence. The bottles formed fairly tall mounds with broad bases; during the summer, mosquitoes would breed in the water that collected inside them. It was unsettling to see so many, with the same faded label and the same colored glass, making up an undefined—but nonetheless clear and uniform—mass. In this way, something as intangible as a routine would manifest itself with all the materiality of a habit. “Just imagine: one bottle every day, over years and years of drinking,” M’s father elaborated. Grino started in shortly after coming home from dinner. He walked the five blocks from the diner thinking about whatever came to mind, a series of provisional ideas and associations absorbed and shaped by the certainty that, no matter what he might think, what he would do when he got home was open—naturally, as though it were an accidental deflection of his will—his flask, as he called it, assigning benign powers to each new bottle.

  There was one fantasy that sometimes calmed him down: that of controlling reality, saying that he didn’t need to drink, that he just wanted to. This allowed him to get up and walk around, to see himself as something else or, rather, something better. After about two hours, when he reached the height of his arousal, he would masturbate. Bitches, bitches, he would repeat, rubbing himself violently and brandishing the bottle in his free hand. At those moments, just as on his walks or in the storehouse, he thought of nothing in particular. He fixed his gaze straight ahead without actually looking at anything. It had been a long time since he had pictured a specific woman; he thought instead about something at once precise and undefined: a parahuman category, part of reality, a universal female type. Bitches, bitches, he would mutter, meaning no offense; he imagined, suspended in the air, a savage femininity in stark contrast to his restrained masculinity. When he finished, he would let out a few deep breaths, less from pleasure than confusion, and the alcohol would gradually stop splashing around in the bottle; the movements of his arm were nervous, electric twitches of the pressure that had finally been relieved. And yet, strangely, he drank from a glass. “I say strange the way one might say peculiar, because during his drinking hours he never let go of that bottle, though every now and then he would forget about the glass.” He did not let go of it because he saw in it a genuine importance: the glass was circumstantial—the way one might say, “There are plenty of glasses”—but the bottle was unique. Long before, Grino had read something in one of his illustrated magazines that had stayed with him: the number of bowls, vessels, and containers used by a kitchen was a function of its complexity. Glass, bottle, and sex formed, for him, a complex system that was one part private ceremony and one part daily ritual. The vague charm of the night arose from this duality and continued its work anonymously in the crystalline mounds out back. Between swigs, he might put the glass down on the table half full, but he never let go of the bottle. He went to bed when the liquor ran out. Weighed down by depression and listlessness, he stretched out on his bed and slowly relaxed his fingers, letting the bottle fall to the floor, where it stayed. In the morning, the first thing he would do after waking up was cast his eyes over empty container from the night before: he needed to verify the memory, the guide to the past. He experienced the fleeting clarity that prefigures a moment of recognition: once it has come into being but before it is fully formed. He would see the bottle and immediately remember. There was a kinship between him and the air that had replaced the liquid inside it: a solidarity that joined his confusion to the transparency contained within the glass, which seemed to render it illusory.

  One night he has a dream in which he sees the girl climbing a tree. Grino is in the storehouse, watching her. Try as he might, he can’t help but notice that the way she stretches her legs has a specific, hardly innocent, beauty to it. Suddenly the girl makes a wrong move and falls; her back collides with a branch before she hits the ground. Grino is alone and does not know what to do, and this makes him feel somehow responsible. He has lived with his impotence his whole life, only now it seems inappropriate, out of place. He is aware of the risk of paralysis: that kind of injury can be dangerous. He does not attempt to revive her precisely because of his fear that she will not respond. He feels his world falling apart. Whatever happens, whichever of the two awakens, he knows that he will be blamed and will lose his job. When he wakes up in the morning, a diffuse sense of guilt keeps him from getting out of bed. Unlike what usually happens, in this case a dream broke the spell of reality. And so began his time out on the tracks.

  The driver pulls out of a garage next to a house with yellow doors. The back fender appears first, then the rest of the car. Once he has it out on the curb, the owner gets out of the car and closes the garage door. This action, so often repeated, is almost like doing nothing at all; M, his father, and the other agree that it seems like an invisible operation. At the same point on the opposite curb there is a grey car, somewhat protected from the sun by the shade of a young ash tree. The man closes the garage door as though he were wrestling with a corpse; it is unwieldy, with old ironwork and worn down tracks. He goes back to the car. He seems more absorbed than distracted, as though he were thinking about something other than what he was doing. This is only natural, observe the three, when one repeats something they have done so many times before. They are a few meters away, and are not thinking of anything in particular, either. The three, this trio in search of a microscopic blue car—a metallic sphere the size of a single point lost in a sea of metal—that submits itself to the work of chance; these three realize that something extraordinary is happening (or, rather, that something strange is about to happen). Though nothing had occurred, the stage had been set. The tension of the surroundings collects around the grey car, forgotten in the shade, and makes the street seem inhospitable. And so they—absorbed by the sense of danger and forgetting all else, even themselves—bore witness to the sovereignty of physics when, against all expectations, the driver hit the parked car as he pulled away from the curb. It is remarkable the way reality occasionally makes its own decisions. The collision was slow, unspectacular, and not particularly loud, but it was enough to open the t
runk of the grey car at the exact moment the three passed alongside it.

  An open door rarely fails to attract the attention of a passer-by lost in thought, awakening in him a curiosity that sometimes ends in horror, as in this instance. As soon as they looked into the trunk they jumped back, their arms raised like the devout. They had come across a nest of rats struggling to escape their confinement. The driver walked over until he was standing just behind them; thus protected, he spoke, or rather yelled, in a nervous voice—a voice that, under other circumstances, would have sounded weary and monotone, but was now terrified—asking them to close it. None of them felt up to anything of the sort, not as long as a frantic rat might jump out at his face. As always, they were at a loss for what to do; the man urged them on with words that were far too imperious for the occasion. In this fact they found their excuse to postpone their action. They turned around. It would have been better if they had not; they would be left speechless by the new terror that had been waiting at their backs.

  The other would never discuss this with M, but he knows that the three, as they turned their heads to look behind them that afternoon, thought back on fantastic parts of children’s stories in which animals have human attributes—clothes, language, feelings—or, conversely, in which the characters have the traits of animals. They were looking at a man whose face had been transformed. This change had nothing to do with the passage of time or with evolution—or, at least, not as it is commonly understood, as aging—the change was related to surprise, mystery, or magic. In the most literal sense, the man had the face of a rat. His features were not approximate, they did not share common traits—the way some say, “He looks like a dog,” or, “He looks like a monkey.” Instead, each detail of his face combined with the others to compose another countenance, that of a rat. Under different circumstances, this would not have surprised them at all; they might not even have noticed it. But there, with the car turned into a swarm, this face not only confirmed the apparition, it also endowed it with a sense of mystery and menace. “Close the trunk. I can’t stand the sight of rats,” he begged. For a moment, they thought of turning around and going on their way, leaving him there to face the teeming mass with which he had so much in common and yet rejected. But they did not; in the end, the rule of chance sometimes proves stronger than the will and, fearing that this was one of those occasions, the trio did not want to defy it with their actions.

  For a long time, the other would feel the fingers of the man on his back, pushing him toward the car. The man urged them to close the trunk, yet he, barely any further away, was incapable of doing so. M and the other had spoken on several occasions about animals in the city, which were invariably incorporated into its landscape. They began by talking about the way dogs walked, then thought of other animals until they had compiled a long list. Each species could have its specific attributes, but each individual—the cat that only crossed the street on a diagonal, the sparrow that hops to the left before flying to the right—was a cipher unto itself, turning its back on its peers. The meaning consisted of this, of seeing each animal as the atypical emblem of a group. All toads, for example, behaved as though they were toads, yet none could hide the singular disposition that revealed them to be an exception to the species. M and the other thought that animals were too easily distracted, that they were excessively curious, that they often forgot themselves, that they could not measure danger, that they possessed a human sense of eagerness. Animals make selective use of their instinct, M and the other observed, thinking of all they concealed. Yet animals inhabited the city, rendering themselves transparent by living alongside people.

  The father, M, and the other looked for a branch, a stick, a pipe—anything long that they could use to close the trunk from a distance. They did not find anything nearby, but a little further along, about fifty meters away, a pile of junk imposed itself on the sidewalk and on part of the street, the way rubble tends to be left in the suburbs. Maybe, thought the three without saying a word, they would find the magic rod in there. As in all triads, there were certain rules: there could not be a fifth element. As such, the fourth—the driver of the car—was erased from the minds of the three so that the stick, pipe, or whatever it was could occupy his place. Meanwhile, the man’s affliction continued to grow; he was being taken over by a violent anxiety. The three were infected by his nervous breathing: they heard its murmur, faintly; an articulation preceding a cry, like a dream or a spasm—the picture of reflexive fear. Not so much because of any danger presented by the rats—their sheer number rendered them abstract, and their lack of place made them seem clumsy—but due, rather, to the terror of the driver, their role as guardians became clear to them and they acted accordingly.

  And so M, his father, and the other began a nervous dialogue filled with elided and half-spoken words, urgent gestures that were too quick and tense to actually communicate anything; they, too, had been left breathless. It was a matter of finding, in that pile of junk, the instrument of their salvation. M and his father resorted to a disjointed, but apparently effective, language. “Bugs and nails,” stammered the father, pondering the dangers of rooting around in there. He said it too late: M was already on his way, after replying—though he spoke first—“I’ll get.” His words, as sometimes happens, would hang in the air as he moved into the distance.

  I found it surprising, under the circumstances—that mix of disquiet, hesitation, pressure and reserve brought about by the rats—that M would return, with those two words, to a domestic language lost who knows when by who knows whom. That “I’ll get” had its own, immediate, referents: in my own home there were those who said I’ll get several times a day. Between “I’ll get it” and “get going” or some other variant, those two words emerged, diluting the meaning by which the phrase was assumed to be conjugated, imprecisely but with eloquence: a paradigm of ambiguity. It was only a few minutes before dusk: the horizon was not yet ablaze but the process of the sunset was already set in motion, tinting the end of the street with a yellow that grew more and more intense, and would soon veer toward orange. M looked like a shadow cut out of that backdrop as he leaned over the mountain of junk, rummaging through it for the magical lance with the delicate movements of a rag and bone man.

  In this way M, whose form was already slight, seemed to grow even more delicate from where we stood. The intensity of the light blotted out his silhouette, like those moths that grow even more transparent when they come to rest on a lamp. For a moment, we did not hear the rats, the man interrupted his litany, and M was endowed with a distinct plasticity in which magic, something ritual not unlike a dance, combined with beauty, drama, and surrender as we watched his body dissolve like a cloud against the light. His father and I watched as his silhouette, cut through by the line of the street, grew more and more narrow; his feet, restless atop the chaos of objects, tried to gain the balance that would allow him to continue his search, disappearing for fractions of a second at a time. It was then that he levitated before us, our impassive eyes filled with admiration. His father said, “He moves like a frog,” or something to that effect, alluding to his tentative movements and his transparency. I did not answer him; I understood the processes of the afternoon that were making M dissolve. Knowing this, however, did not reduce my fascination; on the contrary, it was enhanced because I was able to see this effect as essential, a legitimate confluence rather than something providential. As such, I was left in silent awe.

  It would be easy, now, to interpret these incidents like dreams and M’s powerful, though fleeting, luminous apogee as the prefiguration of his absence, but this story has been particularly redundant and there is no need for allusions. Just as consciousness registers what is easy, incorporating it in a more or less mysterious way into its workings, it also coexists with the difficult, even the unknown, in order to dispel the field of darkness against which its silhouette appears. Now I am more than twice as old—that is, as many years have passed since M’s disappearance as did, for
either him or me, before his death—and I simply can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Despite the workings of time, which forces us, among other things, to give up our resistance and yield to its advance, and despite the fact that this “I can’t believe it” became, in some way, rhetorical as the years went by, over time this rhetoric acquired, or regained, the full measure of truth contained by the original words. It is against the backdrop of the shallow, dark pit formed by that conclusive reality, the deepest subjective manifestation of which is, after all, this “I can’t believe it,” that I float, repeating the words. Like all rhetoric, it alludes to a truth in and of itself, though with years of repetition I have distanced myself from the original mystery, from the root of that darkness, to construct another: the foundation of all the time that has passed without M. Event and disbelief are castled, changing places as though “I can’t believe it” were the event and M’s disappearance the verbal form that questioned it. Sometimes I catch my mind wandering, as everyone’s does, only to immediately return to this thought and, if the circumstances are right, repeat under my breath that I can’t believe I can’t believe it, when so much time has passed and nothing has filled the void of his absence.