No World Concerto

by A. G. Porta

  A death would make sense, thinks the screenwriter, as he finishes his cigarette and faces the building opposite. For once, though, his eyes aren’t searching the darkness of his neighbor’s window, but the darkness of the sky above it. A death would add suspense. He’d planned to involve the old guy in the classically-cut suit in some sort of shady affair. The girl’s father is an expert in these dealings. He supposes the guy in the classically-cut suit is the one to kill off, but then he can’t picture the circumstances under which it would happen. Not yet, at least. He can’t see a single star in that cosmic dark from which they came. The aliens who don’t know they’re aliens. The screenwriter gives up the search and goes to the mini-kitchen. He lets the cold tap run a few seconds before filling his glass. A death would add an element of intrigue. But it doesn’t have to be a death that provides this. He postpones his decision, takes a sip of water, and leaves the glass on the sink. After a minute or two, he’s back in front of the typewriter. He can’t just turn his mind off by flipping a switch. But doesn’t he always say this when it happens to be on? The characters have independent lives. They make and break relationships, leave old paths to follow new ones. He thinks again about a possible death. The girl is on a path to a new life. In a moment, she’ll discover her father’s involved in something she hasn’t yet considered, thinks the screenwriter, who’s now rewriting a scene he isn’t satisfied with. After hearing his stomach groan a fifth time, he decides to go to the café in the plaza and grab a sandwich. The waitress doesn’t usually work nights, not that he’s even thinking about her right now. He must consider the story’s structure again. He feels rusty, like someone who’s come back to do a job after a long absence. Still, he draws up a list of key characters. There’s no such thing as gratuitousness in a movie — everything happens for a reason, exists for a reason.

  He writes their names in the order he remembers them: the young conductor of the orchestra, the brilliant composer, the mother, the father, Cousin Dedalus, McGregor, the old guy in the classically-cut suit. . who else? He thinks a few moments. He knows he’s forgetting someone. He gives up. Besides, he’s almost completely worn out after two days’ almost uninterrupted writing. Once back in his room, he turns on the TV and lies back on the bed. He wonders if the girl will surprise him by showing up tonight. No. He doesn’t want to get his hopes up. On the screen, the most notorious terrorist in history is appearing before the bench — his hands cuffed, dressed completely in white, smirking.

  She’s convinced they follow her. The feeling is always there, but for some reason, is more pronounced whenever she visits him. After finally managing to evade them, she goes to the window and peeps through a chink in the curtain just wide enough to see the dark, empty street below. They could be paparazzi, or a detective hired by her mother. They could be alien hunters who’ve found a way to detect her secret halo, who know her real name is Ka and, perhaps, that she came from a distant planet also called Ka. She has a feeling she’s being watched, that strange eyes are scanning her every inch. The screenwriter’s read somewhere that eyes have some sort of an effect on the objects they regard. Like the visual equivalent of echolocation used by bats. This is what produces our perception of distance, our consciousness of where an object or person really is, since it’s only an image, an illusion that appears on our retinas. But this process must also have an effect on the person or object perceived, which is why the girl senses she’s being watched, because she may have developed the ability to detect the movement of eyes on her body, by a kind of sixth sense. The screenwriter reads a series of descriptive passages the girl narrates in the third person. He reads slowly, sub-vocalizing the rhythm of each phrase, as if trying to uncover something new in the words, perhaps because he wants to estrange himself from what he wrote, as if he were in fact considering something she’d written herself: “3.31 I call any part of an image that characterizes its sense an expression (or a symbol). On the bed, the old alien hunter talks about youthful skin — dispassionately, as a dermatologist would, or so it would seem — while running his fingers slowly down her back and up her thighs and moving them stealthily toward her breasts. When he speaks about young women’s skin, he has the air of an expert, and expatiates as if it was the most important topic in the world. The female student knows exactly what he’s up to, but acts as if she doesn’t, acts interested in his discourse — as if she’s never heard anything so intriguing in all her young life — because she wants to seem innocent, inexperienced, for that’s the way he likes to think she is. He wants to know if she’s going out with someone. He must’ve asked her a dozen times by now, and every time her answer’s been the same. Yes, she says again, knowing he wanted the other answer, knowing a No would put his mind at ease, and a Yes would only make him suffer. 3.313 In the limiting case, the image becomes a constant, the expression becomes a proposition. Now, in the City in Outer Space, the old professor shudders in recalling that moment. Now he writes only to record his memories. If anyone ever finds this great floating spaceship, this City adrift in Outer Space, they could reconstruct his life on Earth with his words, including his version of the war. He likes to dream of such an outcome to ease the passage of the years, to make sense of his life as a survivor alone in a desolate city, to make him believe the record of his experiences will not have been written in vain, whatever the number of intervening centuries. But he knows it’s an absurd fantasy.” The girl returns to the window to peer through the chink in the curtain. The screenwriter begs her to stay. She doesn’t usually smoke, but this time it’s she who lights a cigarette and puffs at the ceiling. I’ll take care of you, she hears him promise. And you’ll be able to write as much as you want, he says while moving a stack of paper away from his desk. She keeps looking out the window. There’s a man down there at the corner — a guy she’s seen before, standing in the very same place; at the very same time, perhaps. But the shadows are obscuring his features. It’s probably just some guy waiting for someone. But then she remembers the time, and wonders who or what he’d be waiting for in the early hours of the morning. Maybe she didn’t manage to evade her stalkers after all. Maybe her fate has already been determined and they’re waiting for the right moment to move in on her. The screenwriter promises to protect her. What do you want more than anything else in the world? he asks her. She doesn’t answer him, doesn’t take her eyes off of the window. It’s a stupid question. She’s rich and already has everything he can offer and much more. Besides, what she wants more than anything else in the world no one can offer her. She must create it herself. The screenwriter suddenly feels distant from her, that he doesn’t know anything about her. He doesn’t know what else, besides writing, could possibly satisfy her. Outside the Institute, they’ve only ever been together in a dingy hotel room, or posing in a few random photographs. He tries for a moment to recall where else they might have been together. Of course, there was the night of the concert, the dinner afterward, and the running around the city with her and her retinue. But that doesn’t count, he thinks. It wasn’t a very good night. I’ll teach you everything I know, he says, breaking the silence, the great writers, their works, everything. We can even read them aloud together — it’ll be great — just promise you’ll stay. She ignores his supplication and keeps looking coldly out the window at the man on the street corner. She doesn’t even blink when the smoke rises up from the ashtray and drifts into her eyes, passing her face undisturbed, as if she were holding her breath, in case displacing the plume might give her away. You’ll have nothing to do but write, he ventures. We’ll just shut ourselves in this room forever. It will be our own little paradise.

  It’s quiet. The streets are deserted. The traffic lights are signaling in vain. The silhouette on the corner has abandoned its vigil and the girl is no longer peering through the curtains. The screenwriter’s still begging her to stay with him, still promising he’ll protect her. She doesn’t see how this paradise of his could benefit her writing. He can’t conceive of any paradise with
out her. But this could be fleeting. He may not feel the same way later on. He lowers his head and his eyes flit to the keys of the typewriter. Then the girl starts talking again, and seems like her old self. Why would a mind build an imaginary world around itself? she asks, referring to her idea of a whole world inhabited by beings who aren’t aware they’re from another planet. What role does such a mind play in the lives of these characters? What gives it the impression it’s created a world at all? These are the questions that constantly run through her mind, the answers to which, like indefinite shapes, are always vague, although becoming more distinct with every passing day. Perhaps her work should deal only with this. The girl asks the screenwriter for another cigarette and lights it by the window. Let’s imagine that nothing around us truly exists — that however much we believe what we see and touch is real, it’s all in fact the creation of a single mind; that that mind is but a thoughtlet in one small corner of another, greater mind — the one that conceives the universe; and that the universe is but a thoughtlet in an even greater mind, and so on, ad infinitum. Is it physically possible, or even logically feasible, to have more than one universe? The screenwriter doesn’t know. The girl expels a mouthful of smoke and asks: Does this cigarette exist? The smoke? “2.063 The sum-total of reality is the No World.” A slight alteration of W’s pronouncement. She goes back to her initial inquiry. She thinks the answer must be simple, because a thoughtlet is like a fundamental particle, and these constitute everything else in existence, everything a mind learns, and everything it imagines, are composed of these. And if it bodies forth a whole world, it must do so because it doesn’t want to be alone. It’s the only possible answer to the question. It’s the only answer the girl can think of. Listening to her, the screenwriter starts thinking he should imagine his script not as a series of concentric layers like an onion, but of a series of parallel planes, each successive one subsumed in the next. So where should he situate the girl’s watcher in the shadows? Should he exist in the same world in which she moves, or should he exist in the world she imagines? The plane she calls real, or the one she’s created? He parodies an old controversy, but instead of mathematics, he asks himself whether it was the No World that was discovered or invented. Perhaps he should avoid philosophical polemics and stick to thinking about the story’s subplots and themes, something better suited to a man of his trade. Nothing exists outside our minds — there is only intellectual curiosity, delusion, love. And aren’t these the very things the movies try to capture?

  He’s inclined to believe the girl’s lost her mind, if only temporarily, or that she’s tired and this has impaired her reasoning, her thinking — he can’t think of the right word. He’s tired himself out. After all, she’s only just left his room after staying up most of the night. For some reason she’s obsessed with one of the least interesting elements of the plot, has warped it into something more important than it is. After arriving back at the hotel in front of the Grand Central Station, she found her father was out, which she thought suspicious, so she wrote something down that she says perfectly sums up her thinking on the matter. The screenwriter listens in the dark, his lights out, the girl’s voice, on the other end of the line, seeming to emerge from the darkness. She’s forgotten about the creations of her mind, including the shadow that stalks her in the night. He hears her voice plain and clear, although his dilated pupils are straining at the soft fletches of light filtering in through the curtains, as if to say we want more than this smattering of traffic light, lamplight, and moonlight — we hunger for a greater repast. But eyes can’t speak, so all he can hear is the voice on the other end of the line, and only that occupies his thoughts. McGregor speaking, he thinks. Suddenly, as if she were reading his thoughts, she starts talking about that same associate of her father’s, who, she says, as she only just discovered, is taking turns with him staying in the station. I think they’re both hunters, she declares. They’re pursuing a special kind of prey, but she hasn’t yet discovered what it is.

  Some time later, the screenwriter dreams the girl’s father and this so-called McGregor emerge from the body of the old guy in the classically-cut suit. Then the two merge together and reincorporate him. The screenwriter awakens and writes a description of the dream while it’s still fresh — as if trying to photograph a shadow that only moves in the night, returning to its sanctuary in the river at dawn. He’s trying to remember where the dream was set, and thinks it took place in a city, but somewhere far from the neighboring country’s capital. He turns off the light and goes back to sleep. He dreams of some things about which he’s already written, and others about which he’d like to write, things he always fails to recall on awakening when they’ve returned to their sanctuary in his unconscious. Nevertheless, while still in bed, he goes over the note he wrote during the night. His handwriting is almost illegible, but it doesn’t matter: he still remembers the dream — although a little less clearly — and what he manages to decipher from his notes supplements what he’s forgotten. He gets out of bed and freshens up, has a look at himself in the bathroom mirror, takes a deep breath, and then heads down to the canteen for breakfast. The elevator takes its time arriving. He gets the feeling he may be better off taking the stairs. He’d do it, if it wasn’t for his damned limp. He grips his cane impatiently and knocks it against the floor a couple of times, the strokes, muted by the carpet, rendering the act meaningless. He doesn’t like those muffled thuds, he says to himself, because they probably unleashed a cloud of dust mites that are now colonizing his socks and the hem of his pants. Standing at the hotel’s entrance, he looks outside and wonders if the world he sees is real or an invention of the mind. It’s either one or the other, but it’s still the same world that greets him every morning: the looming buildings, the rushing vehicles, the passing faces, that woman who lifts the shutters of the lingerie store. He decides to go out for breakfast instead of having it in the canteen. He heads to a kiosk, located at the point where the boulevards intersect, and buys a broadsheet from his native country and one from the neighboring one as well, before heading to a café on the small island in the river. It will take him about twenty minutes to get there, but he thinks the walk will do him good, the fresh air will do him good before he shuts himself away again. On arriving, he asks for a sandwich and coffee, and reads the news from his native country. The star of the soccer team the girl supports is still on vacation and hasn’t made clear when he’ll be rejoining his team. The coach is now threatening him with a fine and suspension, so the star player has announced to the press that he doesn’t like being threatened. The same newspaper has a long article on the man who’s considered the worst terrorist in history. After his sandwich, the screenwriter drinks his coffee and checks what movies are being advertised. He’s especially interested in knowing which ones are showing in both cities. Only the big blockbusters, it seems. The movie business isn’t what it used to be. They don’t make quality films anymore. He’s annoyed at himself for having such a trite opinion, but it comes from hearing similar comments expressed by many other people in the business. He’d liked to have worked with the truly great screenwriters — especially the ones from the golden age — to be numbered among them, to be considered great, or at least be remembered for having collaborated with them. When he was young, he’d hoped that one day he might be considered great, but nowadays, he has no such illusions. He hasn’t the time or the energy he’d need to achieve greatness. But then he thinks of an exception to his rule — a movie whose screenwriter isn’t from the golden age, a quite recent movie in fact, but one that he admires a lot, the one in which angels listen to other people’s voices, perhaps those of everyone on Earth. He folds the newspapers and decides to stop thinking about it. Besides putting him in a bad mood, it’s becoming a repetitive thought pattern, and this makes him feel uninspired. He takes out his notebook. There’s something about the old guy in the classically-cut suit that’s bothering him. But when he thinks about him in the context of the whole story, he
finds himself wondering more about what it is the girl’s father and the so-called McGregor are up to — why they take turns waiting in the Grand Central station, who or what it is they’re waiting for. He notes down a few plausible hypotheses, nothing too outlandish, although he wants to keep an open mind. On the outdoor terrace of a bar, the girl’s sitting down reading a newspaper while talking to her mother on her cell phone. She’s expressing reluctance at the prospect of being interviewed by one of the neighboring country’s leading newspapers, but her mother says she’s coming to collect her to make sure she attends. The girl tells her the name of the bar she’s at then looks around for a street plaque to tell her the name of the street it’s on. She puts the cell phone away and goes through the headlines. News of the capture of the world’s worst terrorist occupies the first few pages. There’s no news about the star player of the soccer team she supports. It seems the neighboring country doesn’t care about his refusal to come back from vacation. She turns one page, then another, and then, suddenly, she sees a picture of a familiar face. The screenwriter imagines the girl’s puzzled expression, and then a shot of the page she’s looking at, the photograph of the old guy in the classically-cut suit, and the caption that reads, “Well-Known Scientist Seriously Ill.” The screenwriter wants to get the gist of the news across without worrying too much about the wording. So he summarizes the contents of the article telegraphically: World-renowned astrophysicist. Health declines sharply. Last twenty-four hours. Next to the article, a shaded box gives some information about his life. Apparently, the man she met in her father’s hotel room is an expert researcher into the possibility of life in other galaxies, and a stalwart advocate of radio telescopes as a means of detecting intelligent life in space. The girl can’t believe what she’s reading and wonders whether she should pinch herself. This news couldn’t be more exciting. She tears out the article and puts it between the pages of her diary as evidence, in case she ever doubts what she’s just read. But then she checks her enthusiasm. This isn’t exactly the windfall it seems to be, for although she’s finally discovered the identity of the old guy in the classically-cut suit, she’s done so at a point when his health’s in serious decline. She’s finally found someone to explain to her the reason there are so many churches and cathedrals scattered all over the planet, but that someone may in fact be on his deathbed. So the truth, like so many other things in her life so far, may be just out of reach. The next scene takes place in a taxi. Mother and daughter are sitting next to each other looking out their respective windows — not speaking to each other, the tension between them at breaking point. Finally, the mother asks what’s going through the girl’s mind. Nothing, she says. But, in reality, the girl’s disgusted at being dragged away from her writing to sit through an interview with the young conductor and brilliant composer.