The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Here are the Tense Sheets * (fundamentalist practitioners of making the bed as the first waking activity, because order is basic and indispensible, and it makes sense to assume that discipline commences upon waking and that the chaos of dreams has been left behind and set aside until the next night) and the Blanket Kickers * (who, to the contrary, advocate leaving it all up in the air so the mattress doesn’t turn into a stew of microorganism cultivation and who like to read shapes and messages in the forms the cottons and linens acquire after hours in motion but horizontal, like the lines of a hexagram) and the sort of bastardized mutations of both that are the Nibelung Eiderdowns and the Banzai Futons.

  Here are the Dreams of Reason * (always recalling Niels Bohr dreaming the structure of the atom and Elias Howe dreaming up the sewing machine from a dream of getting stabbed in a dark alleyway, the movement of the knife up and down; and Srinivasa Ramanujan dreaming revolutionary theorems under the guidance of goddess Namakkal; and August Kekulé von Stradonitz dreaming up the rings of benzene in the wake of a dream of snakes; and Frederick Banting dreaming of the distillation of insulin and Albert Einstein dreaming up the speed of light and the Theory of Relativity after dreaming of a herd of cows being electrocuted, one after another, hopping back from an electric fence; and Otto Loewi dreaming the frequencies of neurotransmitters and Thomas Jefferson dreaming the first draft of the Declaration of Independence and, oh, in times when dreams were less urgent a subject of study it was known that republicans have more nightmares than democrats; and the insomniac chronicle of Thomas Alva Edison dreaming of electricity and convinced that those responsible for waking memory or the fact that we often forget what we dream are “little people”—the same ones as Stevenson’s?—working in shifts inside our brains and that’s the reason we remember some and not other things, depending on which shift it is when we ask ourselves something; and René Descartes dreaming up his Method after a dream of hurricane winds and ghosts and watermelons and a bedroom in flames; and Colonel Harold Dickson dreaming of where in Kuwait to drill to find oil; and William Herschel dreaming of what point in the sky he should aim for to hit Uranus; and Dmitri Mendeleyev dreaming of each and every one of the spaces on the periodic table; and Marie-Marie Mantra dreaming the wet Multidimensional Theory of Swimming Pools). All colliding with the Produced Monsters * (inseparable and united by that famous quote etched in a Francisco Goya print of a man collapsing on the hard bed of his desk, dreaming of owls and nightmarish bats flapping around his head, which can only think of things that have gone wrong, that didn’t work out).

  Here they, and many more besides, are. Whirling like somnambulant dervishes, beating a horse to death on the roadside, beyond all crime and punishment, wearing those surrealist mushroom hats, howling lullabies at the moon, pulled together and apart by the centrifugal force of their desperation.

  Should he reproduce here and now the things they say, the sounds they emit, the careful and prolix senselessness of their beliefs?

  No.

  Better not.

  Let others who can still hear and speak to them do it.

  He, here and now, has grown tired of hearing them.

  Or maybe his lack of interest is, again, a direct result of knowing that soon, very soon, he’ll be like just them. He’ll be one of them. Bereft of his last dream, his recurrent dream; and he’ll have no choice but to join one of its factions, to be part of another feature on the nervous face of those who no longer dream and, as mentioned, only daydream of being able to dream again.

  But, warning, above all of them rises his favorite. The sect of a single man, prophetic and deafening, his throat already beyond all tearing. A man strangled by his own vocal cords. A voice that roars and shouldn’t exist but never ceases and gives the impression of being heard everywhere, in the farthest reaches of the world, ringing out in multiple languages simultaneously. In both the Latin and Cyrillic letters in which the man thought and spoke and felt, in color.

  The man—an old man, yes; but one of those old men with that youthful air and vigor that transforms them into something powerful and unsettling and outside of time—is always dressed in short trousers that come down to his knees and a shirt and light sweater and hiking boots and wearing a hat with the authority of one who wears a crown atop a royal and immense cranium. And in one hand he holds aloft and waves, as if it were a flag all his own, a net for hunting butterflies.

  The man—with a patrician face, one of those robust and satisfied faces that barely conceals the past of a gaunt and long-suffering face—reminds him of someone he can’t remember.

  A writer.

  He’s almost certain that it’s a writer, yes.

  And, moreover, that it’s a writer who had something to do with him. Better: that he had something to do with that writer. But, of course, having something to do with a writer could mean, no more and no less, having read him, having seen his lectures, and recognizing his face from photographs he once saw. He can see him now, can remember him a little. * (Again that face that seems painted by two portraitists—the greatest portraitists of the last century—at the same time. Lucian Freud for the skin and Francis Bacon for what’s beneath the skin. But not an oil painting, no.) In old photographs. Photographs in sepia, which isn’t the color of dreams but the color of memory.

  And making memory is a little like dreaming with your eyes open, right? Thus, when you are left without dreams, the first thing you lose is your memory. Researchers of the oneiric and custodians of the Onirium discovered it long ago: if you don’t dream of things not of this world you end up forgetting things of this world. Likewise if you don’t dream of the dead, the dead cannot ascend to the category of ghost, they can never return as waking dreams * (though not long ago he saw a movie about this, he has it on his list: a boy, whose dreams become material, starts to dream of a little brother he never knew, who died before he was born, spurred on by his increasingly nightmarish parents who’ve never gotten over the death of their firstborn; the premise was formidable, but, as always, it ended up spoiled by the obligatory special effects and lame plot twists). Dreams are like the varnish that fixes and protects paint, both oil and watercolor. Landscapes and portraits. Yes: when you stop dreaming you lose not only the possibility of imagining what never happened and will never happen, but, also, the memory of things that happened to you. And by “memory” he’s referring to personal and private memory. To things that did or didn’t happen or that you think happened or that should have happened. The rest: the collective memory, secondary things like song names and movie titles and characters in novels (unless they’ve been particularly important in your own life; all that gets forgotten) remain, almost always, unforgettable though he still remembers them, yes, as insubstantial things. More or less clean money, uncomfortable baggage. But out of context: without a bank or anywhere to go to buy something. Without context. As if in a dream dreamed by someone else. Like shards suspended in air rocked by an explosion. Loose fragments that, really, just upset you and stress you out and force you to think about everything you know and have seen and experienced and enjoyed, or not. But, now, as if memory were one of those gelatinous and invertebrate organisms, like one of those deep-sea phosphorescent fish never exposed to the light of the sun. Remembering yourself on the basis of everything you remember that isn’t as important as everything that’s forgotten and is, without a doubt, indispensible for you. And making you think that absolute and profound amnesia would be a gesture and symptom and consequence far more pious than this partial and frivolous and pure-surface memory.

  All he has left is one dream and almost no memory of his own.

  And that’s how he recognizes that name (the name of that person who, he thinks, is or was a writer) like a faint taste, on the tip of the tongue. A taste of the water of a long and winding river, flowing past a country house whose name he can’t fully or entirely remember either. The name of a river * (the name of a river [Oredezh?], read on a map, on a page at the beginning of a book that op
ens with a bit about a cradle rocking over an abyss) and the name of a writer that everyone pronounces incorrectly, stressing the wrong syllable, and that the writer never stopped correcting in interviews. But he remembers nothing more than that, nothing more than almost nothing. And within that almost nothing, some details perhaps secondary yet revelatory: like that the writer looked down on science fiction and all that “rocket racket” and “competitive confusion” and “phony gravitation”; though he once fantasized about writing something about an astronaut in love; and was deeply moved when man set foot on the moon (yet he completely dismissed the “utilitarian results” of the achievement as well as “irrelevant matters” like “wasted dollars and power politics”); and he’d written a novel that takes place in an alternate dimension; and that he once described himself as someone who traveled “through life with a space helmet.” A writer who considered fantascience boring and pedestrian and overrun with clichés (which is why, most likely, he’d be furious at seeing himself appear here involuntarily in such a future-tech context, the Onirium and all of that) and comparable to those cookies of varying shape but always the same taste of nothing. Beyond all of this, all these loose pieces, it was clear to him that this writer, this old-fashioned but ageless writer, has or had something to do with him or he had something to do with that writer. Beyond the simple fact of reading or of reading him. He’s almost certain. That’s why his name escapes him. Something to do with Switzerland, he thinks. The man who is maybe a writer, feet firmly planted on the ground, leaning onto the back legs of a worn-out chair * (but proudly upright, with the martial air of someone who has conquered a peak in the Alps), repeats something about how reality is overrated. How reality is nothing more than a combination of information and specialization, and how he refuses to let his dreams be interpreted; because his dreams were, for him, always of an absolute clarity. His dreams, he roars, had always been “useful dreams.” And he also talks about his desire for “translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of a textual line between commentary and eternity” and that “existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece” and …

  But his words are overwhelmed by the words of a woman who whirls and whirls and doesn’t stop whirling, howling: “Bang, here goes another kanga. Woomera. Ti-Ti-Ti. Me-Me-Me. Sing, O gods, the fury of Morpheus, son of Hypnos and Nyx or Pasithea, it matters not. All springing from the dense seed of Chaos’s nocturnal emissions. This one and those others making love in the Erebus underworld, in that dark cave with black curtains, where the sun never shines and through which flows the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and from there—remember?—dreams are forgotten or fade so quickly, as soon as you wake. That cave with two doors: true dreams emerge from a door made of horn and bone, false dreams from a door made of marble. That cave which now purports to resemble that cruel and sinful edifice known as the Onirium. That sanctuary of blasphemers, that infernal paradise, that mirage disguised as an oasis … Oh, forgive us and forgive them for taking your name in vain, Morpheus, brother of the daemons Icelus and Phobetor and Phantasos, who occupy themselves with the dreams of animals and inanimate things. Oh, but you, always first among the thousand Oneiroi and unjustly punished by Zeus, who accused you of inspiring mortal kings when they closed their eyes. You, beating your wings and bringing dreams of almost-immortal glory to those sleeping earthlings, those ancient Greeks, who never said I had a dream but rather I saw a dream. Not anymore, now we’ve ruined it all. Unforgivable mortal and sacrilegious sin … Forgive us, forgive us … Mercy, mercy … You who are not satisfied with having sunk the skies and fouled the waters and laid waste to the lands, men have destroyed the land and air and seas of dreams too and now don’t even have that anymore and …”

  And then sparks begin to shoot from her throat and the flames envelop that burning woman who keeps on whirling and now he knows how to go on, how not to end, like in a loop, the way the madwoman’s speech starts over without ever having ended. A raving that bites its own tail and the tail of the line that leads to the head of the Onirium grows ever shorter.

  And he’s already there, here, at the doors to the dreamed and dreamlike Promised Land.

  The edifice of the Onirium * (no matter that it’s already so well known and so oft seen and reproduced on postcards and miniatures/souvenirs like the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State or the Haworth Parsonage) still makes as much or more of an impression than the Empire State or the Eiffel Tower or the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Haworth Parsonage. * (He had already dreamed it and already put it in writing in another invented part of this same dreamed part: he dreamed it as a mutating museum of himself beside whose stairway, under a big sky, a Young Man and a Young Woman met over and over, a Young Man and a Young Woman who were not so young anymore, who’d once been two of his most devout fans, insisting on recapturing his absence in a world where he, accelerated and particulate, was contemplating and rewriting everything.) A black and glowing cube with a closed eye on each of its four faces that—due to the disposition of strategically positioned lights, at nightfall—appears to show the rapid movement of the pupil under the lid of always-lowered blinds. On the roof, there’s another eye and, he’s certain, on the bottom and subterranean face there’s another eye, staring into the depths, into the deep longing of dreams.

  And inside the edifice, there they are: the guardians of dreams. On each of his visits, he’s noticed that there are more and more Asian people among the Onirium’s staff * (someone told him the most advanced scientists of the theory and practice of dreams live in and come from China and Japan). And there, among the guardians of dreams, is Ella: the high priestess about whom, here outside, everyone speaks in reverential whispers. They worship her cold beauty and both fear and respect her professional treatment of some and contemptuous and calculating treatment of others. But, oh, what can he say about it, he who—chosen and privileged once again—knew her horizontal and naked and hot between the sheets. In times not so distant but, now, in his ever-briefer memory, seem to have acquired the condition of remote dispatches, as if transmitted from another planet.

  Clearly nobody would believe him if he said the two of them were together, in bed, and they made love.

  They would, no doubt, tell him he was dreaming and he dreamed her; and they would say it with the unmistakable and blatant envy of those who no longer dream and know he still can. Shutting his eyes, living impossible things, and waking up cleansed and renewed.

  It’s clear if he told Ella, Ella wouldn’t believe him either.

  Now he enters.

  The lobby of the Onirium is like that of a cathedral, the ceiling so high that, there above, if the climate so chooses, clouds form and, sometimes, it even rains inside, as if in a dream.

  First, the guardians divide them into groups based on sex. The men they herd into an enclosure for the examination of all the Little Nemos * (baptized thusly after the comic by Winsor McCay, starring that compulsive and wild dreamer) while the women are led to another chamber where they will proceed to the classification of the Dorothys * (in honor of Dorothy Gale, the dreamer protagonist of The Wizard of Oz, who for him is the successful Americanized plagiarism, but plagiarism all the same, of the original dreamer: little Alice—Dorothy was considered a safer and more predictable name than Alice to assign the female patients—falling down a rabbit hole or passing through a looking glass bound for Wonderland and then waking up wondering who dreamed whom; and, really, truly, who in their right mind could believe for a second that Dorothy wants to go back to Kansas after having been in Oz simply because—in this she is right and because for worse or for worse—“there’s no place like home”?).

  The next stage in the process is quick and cruel * (discovering how with pleasure they submit to it though it isn’t necessary and the guardians barely conceal their annoyance at having to be complicit in such a farce: a kind
of eye exam like in the beginning of that movie whose title he doesn’t remember based on a book by someone whose name he doesn’t remember, either, and of which all he remembers is that scene in the first minutes and some questions like “Your little boy shows you his butterfly collection, plus the killing jar. What do you say?”; and he thinks about butterflies and thinks about that man there outside, at the foot of the Onirium, with his net, with his winged and colorful words) and soon eliminates all the imposters who have gotten in by lying that they still dream when, in reality, what they’re after is to be given the alms of a dream. To be given a dream like a coin tossed in a beggar’s nagging can. Any dream, a silly and banal dream, nothing grand or prolonged or worthy of an Endymion or a Merlin or a Rip Van Winkle. A dream of the kind that everyone has * (a dream that in other times, at one of those parties where a “You’ll never guess what I dreamed last night” turned you, for a few minutes, into the irresistible center of the night and into the object of the most varied and absurd interpretations, regarded with an air of faux interest and a look resembling that of those who smoke the green smoke of opium all day long) or a dream so banal and worn out that nobody would have dared recount it in public for fear of playing the fool.

  As they say, the impostors—the white plagues, the pale epidemics, those who have arrived there seeking the beneficence of a dream, of anything, even if it only lasts a second—are quickly detected and their information is taken so they won’t get past the first checkpoints again. They receive the tattoo of a small and permanent barcode in the center of their foreheads. And they are cordially ushered to the exit. It only takes a few seconds to detect their lie. They are instantly found out: all the symptoms of no-longer-dreaming, of nondreaming, are visible, in their gaze. You know: a sound in the eyelids like a poorly oiled door, a faded dryness in the color surrounding the corneas, the impossibility of tears, and pupils almost immobile, fixed, and dilated after so many nights without rapid eye movement. * (As a form of goodbye, like the bag of favors that mobs of hyperactive kids are sent home with after a birthday party, they are given a dream catcher, an atrapador de sueños, an iháŋbla gmunka, an asabikeshiinh: one of those pendants designed by the Lakota and Ojibwa tribes in North America and made with string and feathers and beads of various colors and shapes—skeleton, teardrop, turtle, spider—whose purpose is to capture everything that happens when your eyes are closed and thus protect sleepers from nightmares. A net. A filter that only lets good dreams through and that dissolves bad dreams between its strands, in times when there were bad dreams and not, like now, when any dream is good, valuable, indispensible. The person who hands out these magic—trick-less but, also, useless—objects is one of the Onirium “professionals.” The man has an aboriginal air, a crazed smile, and over his lab coat he wears a faded Confederate Army officer’s jacket and, as he distributes the dream catchers he shouts things like “I live in so many different centuries. Everybody is still alive!” and “Sabers, gentlemen, sabers!” He saw him outside once, riding Kawasaki 1500 motorcycles and Kamikaze 666 women, firing a pistol into the air and downing a bottle of bourbon, other models of dream catchers, yes.)