The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Dreams are the DNA spirals of the mind.

  And even those dreams that are dreamed en masse, dreams everyone dreams * (those sticky and somewhat banal and automatically-hummable oneiric greatest hits in which you find yourself naked in public, falling from the sky, swept away by a giant wave, chased through the darkness, weeping for the death of a loved one, suddenly rich and famous or making love to that person or being raped by that other person, and worst of all: back in high school, taking an exam you didn’t study for), are never identical, not even close, to those of other dreamers. * (“We live as we dream: alone,” wrote Joseph Conrad; which could also be read as “We dream as we live: alone.”) Nobody falls the same, nobody is the same when they’re naked, every person is so personal in the moment of the agonized cry or the orgasmic moan and, of course, no two waves are the same, and the answers to that exam are never repeated …

  But he had nothing else left, he had nothing left.

  He’d already sold everything sellable: his car (that he never learned to drive, and that was the legacy of a suicidal and insomniac friend, who went out driving it at night, imagining he ran himself over and didn’t stop to help himself); his books and his collection of films and LPs * (that were many and many and many; and that were so valued and loved and necessary; and for which he was given just a handful of wrinkled bills, because nobody read or watched or listened anymore); his house * (that, already empty of writing and music and scenes, was just an empty, impersonal space, which he let go of like someone taking off their clothes, all alone, almost without realizing they were taking off their clothes, because it’d been so long since anyone had seen them naked). There, almost a bubble, transparent and fragile, in whose center floated a firm mattress, and a less and less cool refrigerator, and a desk * (that reminded him more and more of one of those empty parking lots beside a shopping mall where all the stores are vacant and horrible teenagers meet up to do nothing, to not look each other in the eye but only at their screens), and a chair, tired of holding him, where he only sat down now to not write.

  Then, when there was nothing left for him outside, he began to sell himself: his blood * (which proved to be light and of the most banal and innutritious type, even for the thirstiest vampires) and his semen * (which turned out to be weak and impotent and made up of spermatozoids of the kind that don’t feel the least hurry to arrive to an ovum and fertilize it, because they don’t want to be babies in the first place and much less parents later).

  And so, again, his dreams.

  His sleeping dreams, sleeping yet more awake than the dreams of most everyone else.

  Dreams that, yes, were coveted specimens of a race on the brink of extinction.

  Dreams that were worth a great deal and that he surrendered, one by one, like someone removing secret parts of a model to be assembled or important pieces of a puzzle to be completed elsewhere, far away from the dreamer and in the vicinity of those who could no longer dream.

  And, of course, money, yes.

  A great deal of money in exchange for his dreams.

  But, also, the answer to the question of his growing need to let her go, to forget her, to never dream of Ella ever again.

  So here he goes, here he is, here he comes.

  Recounting all of this in the same voice with which others count sheep.

  A voice-over about to turn off.

  A countdown voice.

  A voice as if he were, at the same time, under the influence of a hypnotic pill and, also, the sedative diction of a hypnotist who counts down from 10 to 0.

  A voice speaking strangely; with a strange cadence.

  An inverted voice, unpronounceable and yet comprehensible.

  A ventriloquist voice busting out of the belly of his mind and sounding like that voice made of random words that come together automatically and that, at one time, informed you of the exact time on a telephone as heavy and as dark as those nights when you couldn’t sleep.

  A voice that sounds first recorded, then listened to in rewind, then with repeating and recording the rewound part, then playing it back and listening to it straight through, sitting in a red room where a dwarf dances. Yes, that dwarf.

  A voice that’s like the flipside of a language and not the language it speaks, as if it were the shadow of the voice and not the voice itself speaking.

  A voice running in reverse, yet moving forward, never looking back at everything it leaves behind.

  A voice climbing the hill that leads to the Onirium to sell its dreams, another dream.

  Or—to be more precise—to sell the only dream it has left.

  The most coveted and desired dream of all.

  And the dream most cherished by him.

  A last dream, yes; but a recurring dream.

  And also—and this is what has made it such a rare and valuable specimen for those in charge of the Onirium—a dream that came true.

  His dream of you.

  Your dream of his.

  He ascends to the Onirium with an elastic and floating step, the way you move in a dream. Like at the beginning of that old and nineteenth-century and gothic and lonely novel. A singular novel. That’s how he likes to imagine himself: moor and fog and him like that man to whom a good story will be told so, in turn, he can tell how it was told to him. As if he were Mr. Lockwood heading up the path that leads to a house known as Wuthering Heights, and arriving there, and being poorly received by its occupants. And lying down in a small bed with names carved in the wood. And falling asleep and dreaming a dream within a dream in which not a tree branch but an arm reaches through a windowpane and a hand with cold fingers grabs you and beseeches you and broken glass and blood on the sheets and a voice telling you it has been lost for a long time and asking you to let it in * (and, oh, he cuts himself off, he can’t, he shouldn’t speak of that book. He’s not allowed to. It’s a book that already has a mistress).

  And, as if in a dream, everything changes direction, though he keeps climbing, up the path. Again: as if in a dream. A dream in which, above and beyond any drifting of those who tend to drift in dreams, it’s unclear what’s up or what’s down or what’s in front or what’s behind * (though what’s behind—as postulated by the insomniac harlequin-mentalist Vadim Vadimovich and as already explained to him in the Onirium—doesn’t exist in dreams: in dreams there’s neither past nor memory nor previous stops; in dreams you cannot walk backward like a perfectly broken toy); but a dream in which he’s always certain he’s moving toward Ella.

  Her name, of course, isn’t Ella (she tells him her name in his dream, but he doesn’t manage to hear it, to hear her), but it’s what he’s decided to call her: a bit impersonal (especially in Spanish, as Ella, in addition to being a name, is the feminine pronoun meaning she/her), but at the same time, a personal and appropriate way to understand her. Ella is a way to identify her without forcing her to be someone she’s not or to send her down a path not hers, Ella’s, and from which there’s no escape in any sense.

  Ella is not, but somehow resembles, someone who left. And now she returns the way those who have left return: in dreams, in dreams that are the Great Beyond reaching out to us here, when we sleep and dream of people who have departed returning as ghosts, seeping and slipping in through cracks and holes, like smoke and rain.

  And now, a slight detour, he remembers how yesterday he listened to that song about dreams, about other dreams.

  He doesn’t mean that one named “In Dreams,” sung in an operatic voice and with deadpan and sinister face, by a man with dark sunglasses who looks like a wax sculpture of himself and whose name he doesn’t remember. * (His name is Roy Orbison; and, great Roy Orbison anecdote: Bono dreams and composes in his dreams a song titled “She’s a Mystery to Me” and he wakes up convinced it’s a song that already exists by Roy Orbison; he sings it to his U2 bandmates, who listen to it and diagnose: “Orbison”; but they look for it and can’t find it anywhere; and that same night, after the band’s show, someone knocks at th
eir dressing room door. It’s Roy Orbison, who smiles at Bono and says: “I think you have a song for me, don’t you?”) And he always thought there are few things more unsettling than seeing someone sing, hiding their eyes and saying things like “It’s too bad that all these things can only happen in my dreams / Only in dreams, in beautiful dreams.”

  And he’s not talking about that other song either. That white-piano ode, barely hiding the solipsism and the do-nothing-so-that-everything-disappears: the comforting idea of utopia concealing entropy’s ultimate desire, for everything to come crashing down and disappear. The one with that bit about “You may say I’m a dreamer / But I’m not the only one.” And, now that he thinks of it, isn’t it a little odd, like something out of a dream, that the piano isn’t a string instrument? And, yes, he’s not that surprised the man who wrote that song * (the one who also wrote “I’m Only Sleeping” and “I’m So Tired” and “Good Night”) and who sang it with the voice of someone just waking up or just falling asleep and the cadence of a hypnotic hymn—suggesting to listeners they imagine various impossibilities—has, unexpectedly, ended up with his body shot full of lead. Because, yes, it’s not advisable to suggest certain things, to open certain doors, to dream certain dreams. Inviting people to imagine absolute nothingness as the perfect form of harmony is tantamount to saying there is also too much of you; you are too much; there’s nothing for you to do there; it’s better to fade into the fog of dreams. To kill the messenger and there’s no dreamer more perfect or definitive than a dead person. * (Now one of his best bad jokes, told to him by his Uncle Hey Walrus, the last time they saw each other: “I do remember perfectly where I was and what I was doing on the night they assassinated John Lennon, signed: Mark David Chapman”; and he laughs alone in the dark of the night, and how strange your own laugh sounds when you hear it on your own; thinking there is nothing more dangerous than saying “I have a dream,” in front of multitudes; because dreams are not possessed, they don’t belong to the one who dreams them. And if you describe them as your own in public, dreams end up biting the hand and cutting off the head of the one who dreams them.) And it doesn’t surprise him that “Imagine” was, someone told him once, the favorite song of his mother, may she rest in peace, may she dream in peace.

  But no, it’s not “In Dreams” or “Imagine.”

  No: the song he’s referring to, the one he’s listening to now, is another song. Not the old man with the dark glasses * (Roy Orbison) and not the young man with the grandma glasses * (John Lennon). And he still hasn’t figured out whose it is or who sings it. And there’s nothing funnier to him than saying here he doesn’t remember the title or performer * (it is, he’s sure of it, one of the songs by his favorite songwriter, whom he went to see live so many times and with whom he crossed paths, unplugged, in hotels here and there, and the last time on … on … on that night when he planned to destroy himself and the whole world with him, in Switzerland, pressing buttons and pulling levers in that collider of hadrons and accelerator of particles, and was all that real or was it a dream he dreamed once and will never dream again?) and convincing himself he cannot pin it down, in the name of making it all work better as what gets told with eyes half closed.

  Then he decides—because it suits this story—he can’t remember particular features of that song, but he can remember the moment he heard it for the first time.

  And it’s just that there are songs that—when you hear them for the first time—function in the way of photography: they trap an instant forever and reveal it and fix it with the liquids of epiphany, so that, every time you hear that song, you can return to that definitive moment. Again and again. Everyone has their own: that song that functions like the key to the lock of the door of their lives * (not the eye of the keyhole but the ear of the keyhole where you rest your own ear when the eye sees nothing there) and to which they return again and again. Listening to it is more than remembering. Hearing it again is like accessing the possibility of suspending the undeniable and tyrannical laws of time: what was running before, suddenly, slows down and stops and … Listening to that song is, he understands all of a sudden, like a waking dream.

  Here it comes again.

  He hears it now coming uphill as he ascends to the Onirium. Jumping from the window of some burning building, playing again randomly on some eleventh-hour radio, tuning it in in the middle of the song, when the songwriter’s name has already been announced * (and, ah, in this sleepless and dreamless world there’s an overabundance of midnight DJs: a profession now as prestigious as that of a lawyer or doctor or soldier or priest). A song that is, at first, a series of possible dreams, a list * (and he loves making lists because lists end up making you and explaining who you are and what you’re like) of waking things corrected with the help of horizontal bodies and closed eyes. Nothing too spectacular, not anything specific, nothing too very scientific.

  There, in the song, again, a list of frayed events and disjointed objects. As if the song were more the dream of an object than of a person. No direction or any great connection, cards, numbers burning, folded umbrellas * (opening it up for conspiratorial and nightmarish interpretation of giving the signal to a sniper assassin or, waking explanation, reminding a president about to be killed of the past disgraces of his father / see-research JFK / The Umbrella Man / idea for a story or story for another one of those ideas that he’ll never tell?), to completely stop and, at last, running and climbing and witnessing a crime impossible to solve yet so easy to see. An exhibitionist crime. A crime that feels no guilt at all for being a crime. And that crime has always taken place in the past: in that place where we’re all guilty and for which we always invent excuses, alibis, an I-wasn’t-there or an I-was-sleeping-and-dreaming at the exact time when all that went down.

  Let’s see.

  Let’s listen.

  When he was born * (when he was born one of the many times he could’ve been born, the time he chooses for tonight like others choose the clothes they’ll put on the next morning), his mother was dreaming. And his first cry didn’t wake her * (it’s always been said, since the very beginning, it was all quite clear: you arrive to the world, you wake up to life after a nine-month dream, crying and not laughing; there must be some reason). Her own cries of pain didn’t wake her either, because his mother, fast asleep, didn’t make a single sound during the birth. So, in a way, he is more the child of her dreams than her child. He never knew her, but, in a way, he knew her better than anybody; because there’s nothing more intimate and personal than dreams. And she and he dreamed the same dream day and night for nine months. There were no borders for his mother’s dreams. Nothing interrupted them. They were, yes, perfect dreams; because they had nothing of that uncomfortable, immodest, embarrassing moment of being recognized and acknowledged as dreams, as just a dream, when you wake up and, the first thing you think, like, the most automatic of reflexes, that whole: “Oh, it was a dream.”

  * (But he’s not being clear, not explaining himself well. He begs your pardon, but the imprecision is inevitable: because he’s talking about his sleeping dreams with the liquid grammar and gaseous logic of waking dreams, of the dreams of someone not yet asleep. Let’s see, he’s going to give it a go. And it won’t be easy: it’s clear his mother and father aren’t the ones who appear here wearing their faces. But that’s what’s good about his mother and father, their definitive gesture with respect to him, his inheritance: that they disappeared so long ago and so spectacularly gave him—they gave it to him, so he’d give it back—the chance to alter and transform them the way people change in dreams, given that dreams are an accumulation of ways of being awake distorted by the fact of being asleep. For example: his true but oh so difficult to believe parents: terrorist parents for many but terrified ones for him, addicts of being en vogue and shaking from the withdrawals brought on by being passé, of passing out of fashion, of no longer being there. But now they’re coming back, now they’re coming back again, rewritten by him with
a finger in the air of the dark night, as if he were conducting a brief nocturnal score to be executed by two soloists already executed so long ago.)

  His mother * (this variation of his mother that he now composes and that performs here and that, yes, it’s true, also has something of his sister’s story) wanted a child but not a husband. So, in the tumult of one of those sleepless parties, her fertile ova dancing their dance in her belly, his mother approached—after a months-long investigation—someone who seemed to her the most genetically perfect specimen: a classmate who didn’t want a child but wanted his mother. If only for one night. All good then. Quick accord. No promises made. In and out and good luck and adiós.

  And so it was.

  His mother emerged hot and burning from the fire of that party, all her normal systems functioning to perfection while inside her body lights were turning on that’d never been turned on and buttons were being pushed and needles were jumping that’d been patiently waiting for that moment. Her biological clock struck the exact and precise hour and there he was, there inside, the future suddenly turned present. A dream made reality.

  His mother, of course, knew right away, right after; with the sorceress’ certainty only newly-minted mothers possess. His mother left that party smiling and, blind with joy, crossed the street and didn’t see the car coming at top speed * (driven by an insomniac man, a man who only stops to fill up with gas and then returns to the highway and there he stays, at top speed, counting those brief dashes and dots Morse-code style down the center of the asphalt, certain he’s reading faster and faster and unable to stop the best novel-in-code ever written, and so anxious to find out what’ll happen in the next chapter after having run over a woman in the last one) that ran her over and didn’t even stop to see what’d happened.

  His mother never woke up.

  The doctors diagnosed brain death, deep coma, one-way trip with no return ticket. At first, the doctors didn’t detect his presence, didn’t see him. The doctors were concerned with other things; and the concern gave way to resignation when it was decided the best thing, the most merciful thing, the most humane thing, was to pull the plug. And that’s what they did. But his mother—to the joy of his grandparents, who’d never been fully onboard with shutting down and burying the thing they loved most—kept on living and breathing and dreaming. Thus, his mother attained certain fame. The troubling fame of miracles. Magazines and TV channels devoted entire pages and long minutes to her, giving her a name as obvious as it was appropriate: “Sleeping Beauty.” Because his mother was, indeed, very beautiful. And very beautiful women are even more beautiful when shrouded in dreams. * (And his mother was even closer to the original version of Sleeping Beauty, in which the prostrate young woman is impregnated in her dream by the prince, more shady than charming, and gives birth, nine months later, without ever opening her eyes.) And the dreams that shrouded his mother were perfect, invulnerable, nothing could wake them up. Dreams without any meaning. Abstract and brilliant shapes multiplying themselves in abyssal mirrors, as if trapped inside the circle of a kaleidoscope aimed in vain and out of pure vanity at the stars.