by A. G. Porta
The screenwriter finds he must resist his tendency for writing stories with duplicitous characters, the kinds with fake identities that usually feature in police-procedural dramas or spy movies and that become hackneyed through overuse, for he’s written about such characters before and he doesn’t want a rehash. The girl’s head is seething with information and she needs to relax. She decides to read something by this actor-dramatist the screenwriter recommended, a figure so central to the literary canon that everyone else seems to simply orbit around him, and so, according to the screenwriter, she could certainly learn a thing or two from him, assuming his greatness doesn’t prove so daunting that the girl is intimidated into silence. Perhaps she should read something more to her taste, he thinks, science fiction, say, but the screenwriter would prefer it if, from the beginning, she was reading only those works that have set the standards of literature. After spending some time reading, she feels the urge to write, but is somehow unable. The most she can do is smudge a page or two of her notebook with a few brief notes. She’s still wondering if the alias she discovered is in fact her father’s real name. This produces in her an immense desire to reveal her discoveries to the young conductor of the orchestra, but he’s already left with the other musicians. Maybe it’s for the best. These kinds of secrets shouldn’t be shared with anyone. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have taken care to leave her father’s room before he returned. Sometimes she feels she’s imprisoned inside a tower of gold, a room with a piano in the center reminding her constantly of her inescapable fate to be always and only a concert pianist. This was probably her mother’s intention anyway. The girl does some piano exercises while waiting for the journalist and photographer, both of whom eventually arrive at the same time. She receives them together while seated at the piano, answers the journalist’s questions while allowing the photographer to gather some shots of her puttering at the piano keys. At night, she goes searching for the young conductor in all the usual haunts, particularly those bars that happen to have foosball tables. She eventually gives up on the idea of showing up suddenly and surprising him, and decides to just call him on the phone. When they finally meet up, they end up having an argument because she catches him hitting on another girl. Then, after some hours, when the storm has blown over, and the new day dawns serenely over the river, the screenwriter decides that the camera should track slowly through the morning mist before alighting on the three friends seated together on a bench, their voices becoming audible as the camera closes in on them. “The clown, in an ecstasy / drinks deeply from the holy chalice to soothe his unrest,” they sing together in unison. A sad lyric, since all the poems the clown recites are sad and desperate. The girl, perhaps, would rather to be singing something else, as she stares vacantly past the opposite bank toward the horizon, her thoughts becalming themselves on a vanishing point in the distance. She should’ve gone to bed early. In a few short hours, she has to do a TV interview and then leave for a recital in her native city. She drank too much and took too many pills, and now she doesn’t really know what it is she wants. She does like the twelve-tone world though, is passionate about it — although the screenwriter dismisses it as a passing fad — a world of pure contrast between dissonance and harmony, in which pleasure is derived merely by finding different ways of resolving the conflict. She sits with her shoes in hand on the bank’s retaining wall reciting a poem, as if wishing to prolong the previous night’s adventure. The humidity around the river could damage her vocal cords, but she’s not thinking about her vocal chords right now. She recites in a style all her own, not in the soprano register, because she wants to surprise her audience. They certainly won’t expect to see her, the virtuoso pianist, swap the piano for voice. Beside her, the brilliant composer is cleaning his glasses on his shirttail, while the young conductor of the orchestra paces up and down in his Institute’s uniform, which he’d been wearing most of the night. He’s had too much to drink, and insists on telling the girl about some last-minute changes to the No World Symphony. The girl isn’t listening, though, being too tired and intoxicated to pay attention to his list of finicky alterations, not that she’d even remember or get the chance to rehearse them. She’s no longer jealous, their argument ended some time ago; and, although it’s the beginning of a new day, she feels as if the old one is still drawing to a close. The screenwriter sips the dregs of his glass and continues writing. He doesn’t know what shape these last moments will eventually have, since they only take a few seconds to transpire. He writes whole paragraphs he’ll probably cut from the final script, but he writes them anyway, because they give the story consistency, and because he’s in the moment. He thinks about the significance of that nightmarish work in which a mendacious clown wanders about aimlessly, without purpose or direction. Maybe the girl feels the same, that she too has no purpose or direction, that she too only tells lies. He thinks about when they first began meeting up in secret, far from prying eyes. He’d like her to think about him, even momentarily, as she sits on that riverbank. Maybe she is, he tells himself, before immediately banishing the thought. She knows it’s only part of a game. The screenwriter may not know the rules, but he supposes it’s a game to which she and the young conductor have decided to dedicate their lives, perhaps the brilliant composer too. At times they’re musicians, at other times hustlers or even aliens. Their whole life is part of a game. Sometimes, the screenwriter questions the girl about it, but her answers are always ambiguous. Maybe he’s just jealous, feels powerless for not knowing what to do about it, for not even knowing whether the girl’s desire to be a writer is also only part of a game.
The girl dreams she’s surrounded by invisible aliens that talk to her incessantly. One of them talks about the planet and its destruction. It’s hard to accept that something which took so much time and effort to build up could disappear in an instant. One supreme instant, the voice says, in which the world blows up and vanishes from sight. The girl looks around, disbelieving. She can’t see them, but she knows the voices aren’t lying. The thought then occurs to her that perhaps this has already happened, and that the world she knows is nothing but a transitory ripple in eternity’s ocean, a ripple careening through space, perhaps a part of the expanding shock wave propelling outwards from that initial explosion. Maybe we’re only information in a microchip, or in a machine that can recreate the past and fabricate the future. Maybe we’re nothing at all, she says while smiling at the emptiness around her from which the alien voices seem to come. When the alarm sounds the next morning, she’s hungover, and can barely remember her dream or her argument with the young conductor. It’s going to be a long day, she thinks, as she opens the curtains and looks down on the city through the double-paned windows, which insulate her from the noise outside. She hears the distant muttering of her father in the living room talking on the phone. She can’t utter a single word that doesn’t set off the throbbing in her head, so she avoids him. The air conditioner has the temperature much too low and she starts shivering, although maybe her hangover’s at fault, the alcohol and drugs having screwed up her body temperature. She takes a quick shower and then goes outside to breathe in the air and feel the pleasant warmth of the sun on her skin. But it seems the sun doesn’t agree very well with hangovers, for the bright light almost cleaves her head in two, so she quickly retreats back inside. Her father’s no longer on the phone and is sitting down reading a newspaper. Do you believe aliens really exist? she asks. The screenwriter’s having a hard time with this father-daughter scene. After writing and rewriting, the dialogue is still unconvincing, so he ends up just jotting down the main idea: a scene in which they go over their flight schedules, the TV interview, and the concert in her native city. They also talk about topics of interest to the girl. As regards the aliens, her father says, if they’re not around, it’s because they don’t exist. If they existed, she muses, there’d be an organization set up to prevent us from knowing anything about them.
The girl is practicing on the piano. In it
s first few measures, the brilliant composer’s work flows clearly and smoothly, although a little farther on, it segues into a rough and discordant mishmash of notes. Someone told her it’s mathematically perfect, but the girl pays no attention to the score or its mathematical properties, and focuses solely on the keys. She’s performed the No World Symphony so often now that her fingers move without hesitation, and perhaps only a few people would notice that she’s straying from the score and encroaching on new territory. Then she stops playing the piano, goes over to the table, and spreads out the sheet music for the clown’s part in Dress Rehearsal for Voice and Music Boxes. She plays a cassette that reproduces the sound of the music boxes, and checks her reflection in the bathroom mirror before beginning the recitation. She notices the horrible bags under her eyes. She takes a pill from her pocket and swallows it with a sip of water. Maybe she needs two, just in case. She recites whole verses, forgets some others, while continuing to stare at herself in the mirror, perhaps looking for something she’s been purposely ignoring until now. I shouldn’t worry about anything, she sings, almost recites, putting her own words to the music.
Then she adds a deuteragonist to the scene: You shouldn’t fight with the young conductor, she says to the reflection in the mirror. And try not to worry about the voices, about your future, your father or what his real name might be, not even about extraterrestrials or your writing. Bags under your eyes, she sneers with an actress’s hammy delivery, beautiful teenage bags under your eyes. She can’t help thinking of the screenwriter at this point. Maybe it’s because he can relate to having bags under the eyes, unlike the young conductor of the orchestra. She goes back into her room and sits on her bed, trying to write while waiting for the pill to take effect. She could go in search of Cousin Dedalus, try to uncover his real story, because she doesn’t believe what she’s been told up until now. She calls her mother and asks about him, but this proves to be a mistake. Her mother doesn’t like it when people ask about her cousin, and she assures the girl they’ve completely lost track of him. Why do you want to know? she asks. The girl wants to go in search of him but she doesn’t know where to start looking. He more than likely changed his name, in which case there’s nothing more to be said. She could just make it all up, as novelists do with their characters. But she already has her No World. So to speak. Since all she really has is the title. Writing is such an ordeal for her. Perhaps it would be easier if her book was based on a true story.
The girl spends a few hours canceling her appointments in the neighboring country’s capital. She’s ostensibly traveling to her native city for a TV interview and to perform a concert. In reality, her trip has taken on a new significance, because she’s going in search of an image, a clue perhaps, some vestige of her lost cousin Dedalus. She signs some autographs at the airport while waiting in the VIP area. The next shot shows her alighting from a car in front of her home and asking the chauffeur to wait. We then see her walking around a spacious, luxurious apartment very few families could afford. The floor is completely empty, perhaps because the servants are on vacation. Then we see her looking through a photo album. There are pictures of the girl, her father and mother, and various other relatives and friends. She glances over the pictures one at a time, pausing at her favorite ones, the ones she links to pleasant memories: pictures of the garden of her old house; of her first attempts at playing the piano; of her father when he was younger. In a panoramic shot of a swimming pool, she’s shown next to the brilliant composer, who was only known as the talented boy back then. She reckons it was taken about ten years earlier because they’re only little kids. It’s a charming photo: both their faces are covered in chocolate, and neither is wearing a school uniform. She remembers how strange he looked without a school uniform, without his navy-blue blazer, gray pants, white shirt, and necktie. There are also pictures of her mother when she was younger. She looks happy; much different from the way she looks today. While leafing through the album, the girl recites some verses from the piece they’ve entitled Dress Rehearsal for Voice and Music Boxes. She plays the clown, but uses her own lyrics, the ones that tell her not to care about her father’s real name, or worry about herself; words that remind her not to fight with the young conductor, and to stop fretting about her writing. There’s one photo she particularly detests, in which she’s posing with a doll that was quite popular at the time, before she developed her aversion for dolls. All of a sudden, she finds what she was looking for: a snapshot of her cousin Dedalus, taken before he fled to the neighboring country’s capital. He’s posing on a pier she assumes is somewhere in her native city, and there’s a boat behind him whose name she can’t quite make out. He looks young in it, but the most striking thing about him is his face, it is the face of the man she keeps seeing in the neighboring country’s capital. The man she saw sitting at the bar in the dance club, and standing in front of the theater where she rehearses. She’s certain he’s her cousin, only he looks a lot older now. The girl strains to read the name of the boat behind him, but gives up because she’d need a magnifying glass. Perhaps she’s reading too much into it — that the boat betokens his intention to embark on a journey. There’s also a passport-sized photo, and another of him sitting beside the girl’s mother at some sort of family reunion. The screenwriter leaves his glasses on the desk and lights a cigarette, taking a deep drag as he fixes his gaze on the building across the street. He leans back in the chair and contemplates the unfeasibility of matching up the time it takes to show so many images with the speed at which the girl would tend to flip through the album. In any case, he should have enough time to show the most important ones. Perhaps he need only show a few. His likens his writing process to the way some painters work, marking off areas of the canvas before drawing their preliminary sketches, the figures gradually coming to life as they take on more definite features. He extinguishes his cigarette, puts his glasses back on, and turns toward the typewriter. For some reason, the girl’s convinced there are no such things as coincidences, despite being unable to understand why she keeps running into the man she presumes is her cousin. She goes out to take a hurried look into her mother’s study, ferreting frantically through her correspondence and the agendas she keeps in meticulous order, because the girl feels that the photographs are a testament of the past, reminding her of certain moments in her life, urging her to discover more. It’s possible her cousin doesn’t sign his correspondence with his own name or the pseudonym Dedalus, so she pays close attention to any letter with a sender or addressee she doesn’t recognize. She’s running out of time, so she starts focusing on specific dates. She answers a call on the landline. The chauffeur is getting nervous because they’re going to be late. Some of the letters are quite strange. One is a donation request for an ostensibly noble cause, but the girl thinks it’s probably a scam. But then she’s suddenly taken aback by the following line: “Since our genetic code reveals that all living things have a common ancestry, it might lead one to believe that life on Earth was seeded by extraterrestrial engineers.” She searches in vain for her mother’s response. She gets the impression she’s missing something crucial, but intuits she won’t find anything else pertaining to her cousin, so decides to put an end to the investigation. Before leaving the apartment, she takes out a black dress from the back of a closet. She can’t give a concert in a white T-shirt and jeans. She looks through the mail and listens to a message on the answering machine. Once again, the Principal of the Scholastic Institute wants to speak to the girl’s mother. She erases the message.