by A. G. Porta
It’s a pity neither the dramatist of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries nor the writer who revolutionized twentieth-century literature are buried in the neighboring country’s capital. What an opportunity it would be to sit beside their tombs, only feet away from where their bodies lay, and read their works aloud. The girl is wandering the streets in search of a taxi to take her back to the hotel. She doesn’t find one, so she continues on foot along a wide avenue where, from a distance, she spots the young conductor and his latest conquest entering a nightclub. So she decides to enter as well, if for no other reason than to spoil their party. She sits at the bar, drinking lugubriously, at first mixing the contents of a cough-syrup bottle into a soft drink and then just drinking straight from the bottle. Although the bill won’t reflect it, she’s already drunk far too much alcohol, even for her. Nevertheless, she still thinks she can bring her plan to fruition. A black guy is dancing alone in the middle of the dance floor, so she moves into range in order to be able to make eye contact with him. Half distracted, the young conductor watches the proceedings with a sideways glance, trying to conceal a slight grin. The girl starts chatting with the black guy. He has doubts, suspects an ulterior motive. She takes his hand and leads him away from the dance floor. Do you have any condoms? she asks him. The black guy nods affirmatively, patting his side pocket. They lock themselves in one of the booths. She drops a pill, offers one to him, and then tells him to unbutton his pants. She wants to see if it’s true what they say about black men. She then jerks him off with both hands before telling him to take her from behind, which he does, fondling her breasts under her white dress, thrusting slowly at first, and then picking up speed. He asks for her name. She doesn’t understand why he wants to know her name. He says he just wants to know. She hesitates; then says her name is Ka. Ka? he exclaims. She tells him to stop talking. She wants to fuck, not have a conversation. The young conductor is still smiling when he sees her emerging from the back of the nightclub, offering the black guy her hand, flat, as if wanting him to read her future — this guy who just left a condom inside her — a future that should promise nothing but success. Then she walks past the young conductor, hand in hand with the black guy. Is this how you intend to improve your performance? she hears him ask behind her back.
She decides to skip her appointment with the screenwriter. She can’t afford to waste any more time, she needs to write. She tiptoes in, so as not to awaken her mother. Luckily, there’s a large living space separating their bedrooms. Her head’s spinning, but she’s looking forward to waking up in the morning and practicing her new magisterial interpretation of the 5 Pieces for piano. But then she checks her enthusiasm, reminded that there’s nothing magisterial about her current situation. She thinks about her writing, about not wasting any more time, for if the actor cum dramatist cum impresario of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was as prolific as he was, she must strive to be prolific too. Not that she valorizes quantity over quality, but she has no qualms about starting a new phase in her life this very day, about finally sitting down to begin her magnum opus, a work destined to be considered among the pinnacles of world literature. She reads a passage from another great work, a play by the dramatist, in which the protagonist, while in a cemetery, is presented with the skull of a man he knew. By contrast, the twentieth-century writer who revolutionized literature speaks of metempsychosis. She’s read that the word signifies the transmigration of souls, which corresponds with her own idea of beings on Earth that don’t realize they’re aliens. She’s drunk, and perhaps still under the influence of those pills, which would explain why she thinks she’s now having a vision. An unclear vision, mind you, one she’d have difficulty putting into words. But there it is. She writes in her notebook: “No World. Chapter One.” She’s lost count of how many times she’s written these same words, although now she thinks she’s onto something. After a while, she finds herself writing about the usual things.
There has to be a good reason for migrating to another planet. The girl’s researched various motives, but none were satisfactory: beings whose existence and that of their whole civilization depends upon their finding another planet to settle on, having exhausted the resources of their own; beings who are running away from other beings; beings with imperialistic motives; beings who want to plunder other planets for resources. She asks herself if there’s anything novel about her characters being the unwitting colonists of another planet, being born there and subsequently losing all contact with their home, their past, all memory of their origins; and of having, at most, only a few chosen ones among them with the ability to hear strange voices now and then. She remembers reading somewhere that life on Earth was seeded by extraterrestrials. Why her, why is she able to intuit the truth? Is there really a fissure, a point of entry to a forgotten past, which only the chosen ones have access to? If someone from a distant planet wanted to make contact with the inhabitants of Earth, they’d choose the most sensible place. “3.41 This is the logical place. 3.411 The geometrical and the logical coincide in one place.” The girl draws up a list of possible contact zones: cathedrals, stadiums, railway stations, airports, skyscrapers. . in other words, places where large numbers of people gather. Why not a less crowded place? Because the alien hunter would surely target these places in order to interrupt any attempt to communicate, sever any link to the home planet. It’s possible that what he does is forbidden, but at the same time, there are certain inhabitants of Earth who’d condone his actions, for they wouldn’t tolerate aliens living among them. Some time passes, and the new day announces its arrival, dappling some flecks of light on the girl’s face as she lies fast asleep on the bed, her notebook having fallen on the floor. On awakening, she remembers what she’d written the previous night about beings from another world, but then the image of the young conductor dancing with his latest conquest pops into her head. Maybe she dreamed it. She starts breathing heavily, urging herself to control her emotions, but just when she believes herself at ease, something triggers a new panic. She gets out of the bed, wanting to know the time, guessing it must be late, very late. It’s midday in fact, and she hasn’t written a thing, and she won’t be able to write anything now either, because she’s dying of a hangover. A noise in the background like an engine running monopolizes her attention. She takes the notebook from the floor. She’s having a hard time focusing on nearby objects and is unable to read what she wrote during the night. After examining the pages more closely, however, she feels gratified at having written so much: not only did she fill many pages, but the handwriting on those pages is very small. Her mother left a note on the piano. She’ll see her at the church tonight. The girl hurriedly dresses, almost stumbling, and runs out the door to grab a taxi. She directs the driver to take her to the place where the young musicians are staying. She finds that the brilliant composer appears to have lost his mind, or perhaps he’s taken a few too many of those pills, because all he’s doing is repeating the same phrase again and again, over one of his compositions playing in the background. Disturbing the peace, changing what happened before, changing what happens within, he exults repeatedly. From the door, the girl notes the deplorable condition of the rooms he shares with the young conductor of the orchestra. The latter hasn’t slept in his bed, the only one that’s still made up — a pristine monument to a night of lovemaking with his latest conquest. It’s the vanguard’s duty to be unsettling, to disturb the peace, to alter musical convention note by note, declaims the composer. Next to his bed, a computer and tape recorder are playing a piece of music he’s programmed: thudding noises, the occasional sound of breaking glass, the din of an approaching tornado. Apparently, it’s the sound of foosball balls going down a tube. He’s entitled the piece game 1-3-3-4, a reference to the arrangement of the players on a foosball table. That sound is only the groundwork for the piece. Disturbing the peace, changing what happened before. . he repeats, saying he intends to write an opera to explain what it all means. The
girl has a massive hangover. Standing in this rat’s nest is taking an enormous toll on her, although the brilliant composer looks an even more pitiful sight than she. The whole idea of his project seems utter nonsense. Perhaps if he incorporated some piano passages to consolidate the medley of different sounds, it might be more comprehensible. She asks herself why she believes this, but at the moment she doesn’t want to think about the reasons, probably because she knows it’s to do with a silly personal bias, or a jealousy so pronounced, so nettlesome, it could bring on a rash. The brilliant composer has strewn the whole place — including his bed, the nightstand, the chairs, and floor — with newspaper clippings and pages of sheet music. The clippings are all about the Little Sinfonietta. He’s hopped up on those pills, she thinks. The most common of the clippings is a photo of the girl throwing her clown’s nose into the audience, which became quite a popular image in the newspapers. The pages of sheet music are covered variously with letters, numbers, straight lines, circles, and other geometrical shapes; nowhere does there appear a conventional symbol of notation. If he’s with his latest conquest, is there a chance he’s disturbing someone else’s peace? asks the composer, snickering, as he stretches himself out on the young conductor’s pristine bed, beckoning her to follow.
You could write a manifesto about sex and infidelity, about having sex with his best friend in his own bed. The girl shuts the door and leaves. It doesn’t matter what the brilliant composer says, does, or even thinks, says the girl to herself, because he’s no one. But it isn’t yet the time to tell this no one she intends to quit the Little Sinfonietta. On her way back to the hotel, she wonders how to broach the issue when the time does come.
Minutes go by, maybe hours. She’s copied the first chapter of her No World and summarized the contents of her notebook on sheets of paper bearing the hotel’s letterhead, all of which she requested be delivered to the screenwriter. Then she rehearsed the 5 Pieces for piano, and performed a number of exercises to keep her skill at peak level. She had trouble concentrating, but she forced herself to complete all the exercises. It was something of a farewell. She knows there’s a before and after the decision she’s made, but no backing down from it. All she has left to do are the recordings, which she’ll bequeath to posterity, and that’ll be the end of her career as a musician. After laboring through the exercises, she collects her books, her sheet music, and other related material from her work desk, on her nightstand, and in the bathroom. In a few hours, the young conductor and the members of the Little Sinfonietta will decide whether or not they want to work with the new manager the girl’s mother will introduce to them, perhaps dreaming of all she vouchsafed them if they followed her advice. The girl, on the other hand, who’s all but abandoned her musical aspirations, is wondering whether or not to go to the meeting at all. She flings open her wardrobes and hurriedly packs her bags, fantasizing about her future as a writer. She calls the screenwriter to find out if he’s received the first chapter of her novel yet, and the summary of what she’s written in her diary. The screenwriter confirms he got them, that he’s already read them. He waits for the girl to ask his opinion. But she doesn’t care what he thinks. Perhaps she thinks it’s too soon for him to have an opinion. Perhaps it’s because she tells him there will be a major twist later. She then calls reception to collect her bags and asks them to get her a taxi. She’ll talk to her mother later in the church. She won’t see her until around the time of the concert anyway. She tells the driver to take her to the hotel in front of the Grand Central Station, the same one in which her father is staying. When she arrives in the lobby, the receptionist says there are no rooms available. She says she’s staying in the same room as her father. The receptionist goes through the list of all the guests and doesn’t find her father’s name among them. The girl tries calling him, but his phone is either out of range or turned off. She’d swear this is the hotel. The girl asks if there’s a room under someone else’s name, remembering the pseudonym she saw on her father’s other passport, but there’s no one by that name either. Then she recalls McGregor, that friendly voice she’s frequently heard on the phone asking to speak with her father. What about McGregor, she says. Is there someone called McGregor staying here? Yes, the receptionist responds, there is a McGregor staying with us. The screenwriter watches himself in the mirror, asks himself why, at his age, he’s still surprised by the old maxim, money is power. He imagines the girl’s peremptory attitude in picking up the phone and demanding they send a bellhop to collect her luggage, and someone else to deliver an envelope to his own hotel. Money is power, he murmurs on leaving the bathroom and returning to his writing desk. He remembers the girl’s plan to write about an old professor cum alien hunter who has fled to the City in Outer Space, a free port far away from Earth in which a gateway into paradise is located, a paradise somewhere else in the universe, far away. This man can no longer be the missing cousin Dedalus. He seems to have more in common with the screenwriter than anyone else. In the City in Outer Space, the alien hunter, who doesn’t know he’s an alien himself, is attempting to start his life over. Not that the place matters all that much, writes the girl, because he’s searching for something unknown to him: the reason why he fled there in the first place. Perhaps the girl should write about these preliminaries, give an account of his flight from his homeland. In the story there is a female student. The girl resists using the letter k to name this character. K or Ka? The oft repeated question. She’s not the protagonist, this character, but she’ll be an important part of the scaffolding propping the protagonist up. The scenes before his flight to the City in Outer Space pass quickly. What interests her most is the person he becomes years later — the alien hunter, aged and alone, the sole survivor of a devastating war, the sole inhabitant of a desolate city out in the nether regions of space. He can see the scene so clearly, like a recent memory, with the same intricacy as the design in the headboard of his bed, at which he happens to be looking, against which he’s frequently struck his pate while making love to the girl. “1.21 Love can be the case or not the case, while everything else remains the same. Or perhaps it’s not love, but something else, writes the female student, resting her back against a cushion. He blindly reaches for his cigarette lighter on the bedside table, his fingers probing the glass surface. On grasping it, he lights the cigarette and leaves it perched between his lips, blowing a mouthful of smoke toward the ceiling. Faintly, in the background, he hears the radio playing some classical music. The camera is moving slowly to one side until the old philosophy professor enters the shot, where it stops, maintaining an angle that captures the action as it unfolds. The man is much older than her, almost geriatric. She’s just a girl. Does it matter what it is, he says. She plucks the cigarette from between his fingers, takes a drag, returns it, and gets out of the bed to get dressed. If it’s not love and not nothing, then perhaps it’s an illness, he continues without looking at her. Cut to a close-up of his face, keeping the female student out of focus in the background.”
According to the newspaper, the soccer team the girl supports has lost a pre-season friendly match, and the star player still hasn’t returned. The screenwriter takes a walk by the river and crosses one of the bridges. All he can think about is his script. Reading the girl’s first chapter was like pulling on a thread that unraveled a skein of ideas. He stops now and then beside a lamppost or illumined window to take a rest and jot a few notes. She waits for her father in the hotel lobby. Waiting can be good. It makes the mind aware of its surroundings, puts it in tune with the smallest of details. Later it spurs recollection, then thought, reading then writing, as an attempt to reconstruct that environment from a farrago of impressions, none of which are perfectly recalled, and even if they were, it would take the labor of ages to record them all. The girl could probably recall ten, maybe twelve of these details. So the mind must navigate the maelstrom by latching onto a few things at a time, otherwise it won’t be able to remember or think, to read or write, or even to exis
t at all. So, in choosing the details on which to focus, the mind takes part in its own creation, a unique creation, for no two minds agree on what details to take in. And it’s also a continuous creation, for what’s important today may be forgotten tomorrow. Nothing that continually creates itself can disappear, so long as it goes on existing through other beings, other characters — the number of which can be infinite, like a saga that goes on developing forever, a movie that never ends. There may only be so many actors, but there are many characters to play, and perhaps each actor changes roles continually, removing one mask, donning another. And each time a new character is born, the process starts again from scratch. Characters cannot procreate and pass on their accumulated experience. And the setting must remain the same, the mise-en-scène of an unrelenting pilgrimage: actors in their masks, stalking like ants around a globe that can never change, or not until. . she was going to say until its obliteration, its annihilation. Who knows, thinks the girl as she sits on the sofa in the lobby of the hotel in front of the Grand Central Station. It’s getting late, so she abandons the thought and leaves to perform at the concert. When she gets back, she takes her place on the sofa and waits for her father to return. There’s been no sign of McGregor either. But she continues waiting in the lobby, careless of the passing hours. She writes about the No World, adds an entry to her diary, then reads the writer who revolutionized twentieth-century literature and the dramatist who set the literary standard for everyone who came after him. The former writer’s novel describes the events of a single day, encompassing all its minutiae, as an inventory of quotidian experience — the city novel par excellence, a city through which consciousness flows as a river, carrying with it all its news, gossip, trade, men and women — flowing relentlessly in and out of the city, in and out of the protagonist’s mind, in and out of life. Some readers had said they felt as though they’d lived a whole lifetime in reading about that single day. There’s a chapter the girl especially likes. It’s probably because it takes place in a library, or because it’s about the dramatist who set the literary standard for everyone. Or perhaps it’s because of the voices, the various voices that claim to have discovered the dramatist’s greatest secret, as if they’d traveled back in time to eavesdrop on a backstage confession, voices that say he wasn’t the son but the father, not the prince but the murdered king, the husband betrayed by his queen, or as some of them say, the man betrayed by his own two brothers. Occasionally, the girl is assailed by doubt and tries calling her father, but his phone is either out of range or turned off, so she just leaves another message and hangs up. When he does arrive, he’ll find her asleep on the sofa in the lobby, having waited patiently for his return.