by A. G. Porta
The screenwriter doesn’t think he’s forgotten anything important. He extinguishes his cigarette and takes a deep breath, puts his glasses on the desk next to the typewriter, leans back and closes his eyes. He allows some time to pass by, enough to accommodate a daydream, before opening them again to examine a few photos of the girl. He took them a while back, well before his trip to the neighboring country’s capital. He goes through them slowly one by one, scrutinizing every detail. ONE: a photo of the girl posing nude, seated at the piano. A classic pose and well captured. TWO: a photo of the girl posing nude with her arms crossed standing next to the piano. Perhaps it’s the way the light hits her face, or the way she’s standing — a pose he’s seen her enact when fully-clothed — or the music she played that day, the notes that still resound in his ear, but he doesn’t know, can’t determine what it is that makes this photograph so special to him. THREE: a photo of the girl posing nude, stretched out on the piano. Her white skin contrasts exquisitely with the black lacquered finish on the instrument. FOUR: a photo of the girl posing nude, blindfolded, clenching in her teeth one end of a piece of ribbon, which passes between her legs and up along her back; the other end in her hands, clutched tightly above her head. FIVE: a photo of the girl posing nude, a piece of ribbon around her neck, which passes between her legs, tying her wrists behind her back. SIX: a photo of the girl posing nude, standing in the tub, holding a vessel over her head which she tips slightly, letting a trickle of water fall on her face. Also in the picture, seen from behind, is her old teacher, naked, kneeling on the ground, passing a sponge over her body. SEVEN: a photo of the girl posing nude in front of a large canvas on which she’s painting with a thick brush; beside her are two bottles of paint, one blue, one yellow. There’s paint everywhere — on the ground as much as on the canvas, and all over the girl’s body, especially her arms and legs. She’s covering every inch of the canvas with writing — disconnected phrases about nothingness, “ka,” space and time, and so on. They’re fine photographs, the screenwriter thinks as he goes through them. They may be a little crude, and perhaps a professional could tell at a glance they’re the work of an amateur, but they’re still quite good. He had a famous photographer in mind when he took them, one who’s well-known for his images of domineering women, always depicting them as being cold and aloof. The girl couldn’t pull it off though, she needs a few more years on her, but there’s something about her attitude, the look in her eyes, which suggests she has the potential. Maybe that’s her strength. He regrets not taking a photo of her wearing the tuxedo, the silken black necktie, and her mother’s high heel shoes, the latter perhaps a little too big for her. A photograph in which she’s almost nude, he thinks, but not quite.
Do you know what I think about before I fall asleep? the girl asks on the other end of the telephone. He doesn’t know. Aliens, she says. The screenwriter looks at his watch. Only an hour before he goes to bed, but he likes listening to her voice. The girl can’t sleep. She feels she should be writing, despite the fact she’s not getting anywhere with it. Instead, she records her ideas and impressions, filling whole pages of her notebook. Inspiration is impending, so close she can almost touch it, and she can’t possibly go to sleep until she does. So she decides to go over everything again: the plot, the argument, the characters, their attributes, every detail and all the links between them. She hasn’t assimilated enough to begin writing yet: the details of her story must be fully digested first, fully incorporated, as it were, for they must become a part of her. The screenwriter listens to her patiently. Why extraterrestrials? he asks himself. It’s neither new nor original. Though her idea is as original as things get, he thinks, referring the girl’s notion that every living thing on Earth is an alien but doesn’t know it. The screenwriter’s annoyed at having to waste so much time discussing sci-fi hokum; it’s a genre no one takes seriously. Literature shouldn’t be divided into genres anyway, he thinks. There should only be good books and bad books. Science fiction! he grumbles to himself, as the dawn starts peeping timorously into the room. If these beings exist in another galaxy, continues the girl, they’d have to travel faster than the speed of light, since it takes thousands of years for light to reach us even from the nearest star. Who knows, perhaps these beings experience time differently, perhaps a thousand years isn’t such a long time for them, and covering such distances may in fact be commonplace. They’ve probably found a way to move freely through the universe, perhaps by using a doorway or portal, like in the movies, portals connecting far-flung regions of the cosmos through wormholes tunneled in the fabric of space-time. In the movies, they call it a gateway to the stars, or something like that.
He slept the whole morning, and needed a couple of coffees to bring him out of his stupor. Then he collected his clothes from the laundry place: in the neighboring country’s capital, the price of even getting one’s laundry done is extortionate. He should try harder to stick to his schedule, whatever the circumstances, no matter how tempting the opportunity to deviate from it. He goes to his desk and tries to get down to work. He let himself get carried away, almost to the point of believing the girl’s idea that a universe full of extraterrestrials emerged from a single miniscule point. But she doesn’t imagine just one universe, one point of origin, but many, existing in parallel — stories, some unique, some with alternate beginnings and endings, even some that don’t have a beginning or an ending at all, that don’t have a continuous narrative or identifiable characters, for the literary fashion is always changing, and who knows, perhaps the number of parallel universes is infinite. The screenwriter sets this conundrum aside for the time being, and considers another problem. Perhaps he should’ve made the girl older. Some of the scenes he’s describing won’t be suitable on film. Not that he’s going to rewrite them. Any concessions made for the sake of convenience or to resolve contradictions in the story would make him a liar and a copout. He needs the tender inexperience, the raw sexuality of someone young, very young in fact. He switches on the TV. Three people are having a discussion about television as a medium for quality programming. A fourth person, who must be the moderator, asks them if quality is even possible on TV. Being old gives you a new perspective on things, the screenwriter thinks. The same controversies tend to arise again and again. This debate has been going on since moving pictures were invented. Depending on his mood, he could argue quite well for either position. He’s done so in the past. He’s inclined to believe quality isn’t possible, but right now, since he’s sitting in front of the TV, he doesn’t mind suspending his disbelief, along with his inclination toward debate for its own sake. The discussion doesn’t really matter to him anyway. Perhaps it’s because he’s only an old curmudgeon at heart, someone with no real convictions; and perhaps this is because of the way he’s lived his life. He thinks about this, but can’t ascertain where exactly he went wrong, what led him to become so cynical. Nevertheless, he knows it’s true. He switches through the channels. Nothing worth watching. He looks at his watch. Too early for porn. So he turns off the TV and returns to the typewriter. Those disputes about quality, artistic merit, arise again and again, in each generation. No thinking person can avoid them, including the girl. Although, at the moment, she only thinks about one thing, her one desire in life, perhaps it’s an illusion, unreachable, something so close she can almost touch it, but perhaps it will always be out of reach. She feels like a writer. Being hypnotized instilled an inexorable belief in her. “2.223 To determine if a No World is true or false one must compare it with reality. 2.224 Reality doesn’t exist.” She revisits the idea of aliens from another planet being unaware of their origins. They came from their mothers’ wombs. This fact alone precludes their ever learning the truth about what they really are, and where they really come from. It’s the most extraordinary way to protect a secret. To live their whole lives and never be cured of an unwitting blindness, a disease they don’t even know they have. It’s not likely to be the Earth’s atmosphere that caused them to for
get, something she’s already considered, but rather a kind of innate programming. But why make them forget? For their own protection. But protection from what? From something she can’t even begin to fathom. Is there a planet in the universe called Ka? “6.5 If the No World provides questions, it also provides answers.” There is a girl with heightened perceptions who intuits that something isn’t right. It’s undoubtedly a defect in her programming. This girl has a peculiar feeling her name isn’t her real name, in the same way her father’s name isn’t really his. Sometimes, she hears people pronouncing it differently, wrongly; at other times, disembodied voices do so. The phenomenon is so bewildering she can’t share her thoughts with anyone, because no one else understands what’s going on. She hears them pronounce her name with the letter k, but the difference is subtle when her name is pronounced with a “ka” instead of a “k” sound. And there’s the rub. “4. The thought is the significant proposition.” It seems a crazy person has introduced herself into the novel. She feels strange when she writes “ka,” not knowing if it refers to her name or the name of a distant planet. She stops writing and forces herself to think. She couldn’t say how many times she’s begun writing only to subsequently destroy what she’d written. Now she writes every day, it doesn’t matter what. Perhaps it’s something about the mission she’s been entrusted with, to penetrate the mystery of “ka” or “k.” She knows she’s a writer. She’s heard it said that practice and experience lead to inspiration. No World could be the story of an old professor, an alien hunter, who fled from his hometown and settled in the City in Outer Space. It’s also the story of Cousin Dedalus, at least what she’s written so far, because she’s still afraid to tackle the next part, and would rather take her mind off it and focus on another character. He could be old, as old as the screenwriter, she tells herself, but from whom or what could this character be running? From himself perhaps, or his wife, maybe some people from his hometown. Another alien, she eventually decides, but one who isn’t aware he’s an alien. Slowly, the screenwriter considers the possible options. He used to describe the writing of a screenplay as the reverse of a police investigation. Now he’s trying to remember why. Probably because there’s no difference between the acts of constructing a fictional story from memory and imagination, and reconstructing a crime scene from evidence, at least in the way the mind operates. The screenwriter imagines a voiceover reciting some of the girl’s work, an ideal way to present her writings if he spreads her narration evenly through the script. If he begins with a voiceover, he should use it again periodically throughout the movie, to remind the audience who’s telling the story. Of course, the character telling the story is the girl, and her voice reminds us of the special way she views the world. She continues writing about the alien hunter who fled to the City in Outer Space. A guy who could be her Cousin Dedalus, except much older, perhaps the screenwriter himself, her old literature teacher, except this one teaches philosophy. He went there to reinvent himself, start his life over, even though he isn’t as reliant on place to do so, on being situated somewhere, having a home, as most people are. Then there’s the idea that nothing exists outside the mind, that there’s no external reality, that everything is conceived in the imagination: a hypothesis that allows each individual mind to create its own world, its own universe, from scratch. The kinds of minds that are unable to determine their own origins, she says to herself, minds that tend to sublimate their uncertainty in works of fiction, a book about people who don’t know they’re aliens, for example. This uncertainty could simply be the whim of a creator. To what end, though? she asks herself. Why create worlds at all, why populate them with characters, imbue them with intelligence, make them think they’re alive? And why only one creator, a single being that’s responsible for the existence of everything else, that regards everything else as its own possession? Let’s suppose nothing around us really exists. Could each of these characters’ minds then falsely conceive of millions of other minds, each of them unique, each of them believing itself to be central? Could each of these independent minds organize themselves into a system of networks, each node of which is somehow self-created, self-imagined, and yet at the center of everything? Could each of these minds believe they are God? Yes, replies a voice inside her. They could.
The screenwriter stops typing and turns toward the building across the street. He’s not looking at anything in particular, for his thoughts are elsewhere. He wonders if he’ll ever see through the onion layers of his screenplay, and if his idea of superposing different stories together in one script — one of them real, the rest fictitious, but keeping the viewer guessing which is which — could make for a decent movie, and if there’s someone out there who could even bring such a concept to the big screen. He doubts such a person exists today, a professional reminiscent of one of the greats from a bygone era. By his reckoning, the greatest difficulty is in preventing one narrative predominating over the rest. But his thinking has lately become disjointed and diffuse. It’s been days since he thought about McGregor, the strange voice that one day asked to speak to the girl’s father, a voice which could be that of her guardian angel from the planet Ka, an angel like the one in the movie who can hear other people’s voices, perhaps those of everyone on Earth. He thinks it’s amazing because it’s such a recent movie too, not belonging to the golden age, when movies of true quality were de rigueur — before they lost their soul, as he’d say. The girl would say the voices are responsible for his seeing the movie in this way, he thinks. And that they’ve influenced many other things besides. It’s time for a change, to find a turning point. The screenwriter fetches his index cards and searches through the headings for “McGregor.” It’s not good for a character to disappear from a story for so long.
The Little Sinfonietta has extended its run of performances by a week, which will include a tour of the provinces. It’s also emerged that a record company has expressed an interest in signing them. The girl listens to the news indifferently. She already has a contract with another label, and the provincial cities don’t matter very much to her. In fact, neither do the capital cities of the world. The Little Sinfonietta has some important decisions to make in the coming hours. The girl won’t be involved. She doesn’t care what they decide. Her future is writing. This is no longer a game, but a serious business, she hears her mother say, admonishing the younger musicians. A game: It’s as if she’s tapped into the girl’s private thoughts on the matter, and also those of the young conductor and brilliant composer. The game was a secret. Until now, only the three of them were privy to it. The girl’s eyes flit to the young conductor. She stares fixedly at him, waiting for a reaction to what her mother said, but he acts as if nothing’s changed. It’s all a game. Only one step further, that’s all it’s going to take, just one step. But the girl’s mother isn’t going to hold their hands anymore. It’s not her job. They should elect a representative, a manager, to handle their affairs. Later, during a tumultuous business dinner, they discuss contracts, albums, and the subject of fame, the responsibilities involved — about which they interrogate the girl, for she’s experienced it, asking about her travels, how many celebrities she knows. She doesn’t answer. To break an awkward silence, someone inquires whether one becomes more famous after death. There are cemeteries that are only famous for the people buried in them, opines one of the more recent additions to their group. In any major city, it’s easy to find a cemetery teeming with illustrious dead, but this is especially true in the neighboring country’s capital, where the cemeteries have become major tourist attractions, providing maps to the tombs of their famous occupants, the more notable graves bearing a plaque with a brief biography. The girl considers visiting one of these cemeteries. She asks if there’s one near the hotel. No one answers. It seems they didn’t hear the question, or perhaps they’re giving her reticence tit for tat. Nonetheless, the new arrival starts listing the names of some famous writers buried in a particular cemetery. It’s decided. She’ll go. In one of
the nightclubs where the group often stays until the early hours of the morning, the young conductor of the orchestra is chatting away, beleaguered by a bunch of admirers. The girl spends the whole night sitting beside her mother. Maybe she ought to visit one of those graveyards, and sit beside the graves writing elegies under the moonlight. What’s preoccupying you? asks her mother. The girl shrugs her shoulders. Nothing, nothing at all. But she immediately changes her attitude and suggests a visit to the cemetery. To pay tribute to those great authors who, in their work, still manage to address our present age. Stop talking nonsense! her mother scold her. Do you know the time? the girl asks, watching the young conductor dancing in a corner with his latest conquest. She then searches for the rest of the group, to recruit some volunteers to accompany her on an impromptu visit to the graveyard. Each will write a poem about a dead novelist, and a novel about a dead poet, excepting the young conductor and his conquest, who can dance on top of the tombs. Perhaps they’ll even dance over their own graves, she thinks, smiling. She looks everywhere for them, but it seems the pair have now disappeared. I’m leaving, whispers the girl to her mother, under the watchful eyes of some other members of the group who are getting ready to exclude themselves from an incursion on the cemetery, with some moving stealthily off, fearing they may be dragged there against their will. Her mother gives her a hug and asks her to speak openly with her. She is her mother, after all. The girl rises from the sofa, her eyes on the dance floor, lost in a haze of dry ice. You should consider yourself lucky, her mother rebukes her. You should consider yourself an idiot, mutters the girl.