The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  And what follows, once more but not as a part of Stella D’Or’s father’s plans, seems again to take on the nineteenth-century chiaroscuros of those serialized novels, with the end of each chapter left hanging from the edge of a bottomless cliff and (to be continued …). A cliffhanger as narrative as it is geographic. Illustrations instead of photographs so you can visualize the invisible, the so remote, the almost impossible to imagine; because that black winter sky and that austral white down below are like a landscape where nothing seems to happen, but, at the same time, that void is so tempting to smudge, mixing the white and the black until the perfect gray tonality of catastrophe is achieved.

  Lost signals, artic storms, ice mirages, and the voice of the man who already is—though nobody suspects it—Stella D’Or’s father, appearing and disappearing on the other side of receivers, like an aurora borealis of words. His voice, all of a sudden, interrupting the programming not to offer his latitude and longitude, but to describe gigantic birds that shriek “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

  A year and a half after going missing, the man is found.

  They find him floating on a small ice floe, out of his mind, clutching something that turns out to be a newborn girl. An infant—an illness more miraculous than any cure—who, they realize right away, smiles in the darkness and cries under even the weakest light, which burns and blisters her skin. Stella D’Or’s father manages to tell them—the only words he says that seem to make any sense, his last words—the name she should be given and registered under. And he goes mute. And he returns to Somber Hymns. And he shuts himself away never to come out or make another sound, because—as someone argues with a truly absurd but subsequently so quotable lyricism—“now he ceaselessly speaks the perfect language of absolute silence.”

  At last, it was time, it all arrived, an innovation in the familiar landscape of mists and mansions and curses, a delayed but sorely-missed variation in the genre: a gothic madman, a delusional masculine figure shut away in the attic of the mansion.

  Anyway, apart from what’s already more or less known based on what happens in those serialized melodramatic novels, there are more alluring mysteries. Like that of the origin of the girl: a blood test reveals that, yes, she is her father’s daughter.

  Her mother’s identity is never known; there are traces of Inuit in her chromosome strand and her almond-shaped eyes, but, also, spirals of something not of this world in the double helix of her DNA. And Stella D’Or (who imagines her mother as an Amazon in a palace with the shape of a colossal igloo, empress of the eternal snows and ices amid bipolar bears and unctuous whales and sarcarctic sharks, all of them white) will always like the idea, also her father’s daughter after all, that “Inuit” is written and sounds so similar to “minuit.”

  And soon (in the care of governesses with top-model profiles sponsored by companies once linked to her father, and whose marketing consultants have determined there’s nothing more attractive than Stella D’Or’s story) she rejects all those children’s stories that terrify with black nights and dark places. And Stella D’Or opts for the luminosity of the Inuit legends. Stories far more intriguing than those tales of princes and princesses who see vanquishing witches and dragons as a necessary formality to be able to attain the triumph of marriage. Stella D’Or prefers tales told on those long and strange nights (nights that are really pure dusk and dawn with nothing between the one and the other) when the sky seems dazzled by the light of the moon (Taqiq) reflecting off the snow blanketing the Earth (Nunarjuaq). That glow like a gag and a blindfold that keeps the stars from helping you figure out where you are and how not to get lost. There, in a landscape where little or nothing happens. A landscape where, with the arrival of the long polar day and of the sun (Siqniq), everything looks even more like a frightening impossible-to-fill blank page. And so (contrary to what’s repeated over and over, the arctic nights do not last six months, but four and a half months; the rest of the year everything is white or gray) the Inuit have, really, only two and a half months of authentically nocturnal and black sky when they can learn to read it and later to retrace it from memory. And so they’ve been forced to simplify and synthesize and abbreviate. To impose limits on the sky. For the Inuit it’s enough to name thirty-three principal stars. And to divide all the rest into sixteen constellations, with a little story attributed to each one. You remember a story faster and better than a name or a bright spot twinkling through light pollution and atmospheric disturbance and, better, why seek a scientific explanation when you’ve got emotional motivations, for the unstable moods and concentration of those who inhabit the celestial firmament. And so a Man in the Moon disinterestedly harpooning sperm whales; and hunters chasing a bear that escapes with the help of the aurora borealis ascending high overhead; and foxes who turn the Northern Lights on or off at will. Stories her father cannot tell her because her father no longer speaks and only emits a low and deep sound like the sound of the wind. Stories Stella D’Or carefully compiles in a succession of notebooks that’ll end up becoming the too many volumes of her A Brief History of Darkness and that, later on, will be studied as credo and dogma and manifesto by her followers. Notebooks where Stella D’Or not only writes down the mythic origins of the night according to Inuit beliefs (Malina, sun goddess, coexisting with Annigan, her divine and lunatic brother and the terrible fight they have and Malina runs away and Annigan chases her and the centrifugal force of the one racing after the other gives rise to the spinning of the Earth and the impossibility of them ever being together), but, also, those of so many other races and nations and religions.

  But the different branches of what those stories tell—beyond whether their deities are wielding katanas of cosmic samurais or are decked out in feathered headdresses with names of pure pre-Columbian consonants or are ascending, always in profile, into pyramidal desert netherworlds or are riding in chariots drawn by the Mediterranean sun—always have a single root: the night being pursued by the day for a crime it never committed.

  And it ends up being impossible for Stella D’Or—her phosphorescent skin lashed by ultraviolet whips, her life of lowered blinds and drawn curtains and the hours of a vampire who doesn’t bite—not to identify with all of that and not to feel the need to alter the polarized plotline of the pursuer and pursued. Vengeance and revenge and—also there, in those notebooks, in minuscule script and florescent ink—astrological alchemy and quantum physics. And the perfectly calibrated recipe for the composition of the night, the ingredients that illuminate the darkness: zodiacal light (a diffuse glow that extends like space dust from the vicinity of the Sun); gegenschein (that soft shimmer in the area of the antisolar point glimpsed for the first time by a Jesuit astronomer, but only later named by a German explorer wandering through South American jungles); bioluminescence (all its light emitted by a living organism, though it be the microscopic incandescence of mortal bacteria, or the contagious glimmer of love in the eyes of the suddenly in-love, or the plasmatic pollutions of the newly-invented body part that is the immobilizing mobile phone); and the airglow or nightglow (which is nothing but the restructuring of atoms that’ve been irradiated throughout the day and that, suddenly, when night falls, seem to burn).

  And that, when the exact configuration of dusk has dawned, is when the trouble begins, when discussions light up about what to do with sleepless nights or the dreams of Stella D’Or.

  What to do with her, what to make her do.

  What she will or won’t be.

  Should Stella D’Or be a devout luminescent scientist; warning humanity about the psychological-spiritual-physiological damage of living in cities that are so bright at night, streetlights reducing the body’s production of melatonin, the “hormone of the night and sleep,” and where it’s no longer possible to stare up at the healing light of the soothing stars?

  Or, better, an urban warrior battling neon lights around the world, causing blackouts on The Strip and on Broadway and darkening forever the Eiffel Tower, which you can ph
otograph for free by day, but, when the sun goes down, if you want its portrait, you have to pay the company that makes the lights that illuminate it?

  Or to go even further and turn Stella D’Or into a terrifying character feared by children and adults and guilty of “invading” their little teddy bears and giving them a voice that keeps the children from falling asleep?

  Or maybe, better, make her an artist? An intellectual rocker—first a writer and then a songwriter—fronting a band called Nocturnal Habits of the Army Dreamers, albums with titles like The Sleep Disorders or Lights Out! or Black to Fade on which they put lyrics to W. A. Mozart’s Eine kleine Nacht-music or music to F. Nietzsche’s Das Nachtlied or do a happy-aching-voiced version of “Nightime” by Big Star or “The Night” by Morphine or “Tonight, Tonight” by Smashing Pumpkins or “Well … All Right” by Buddy Holly where you hear, in a sweet and perverse voice, that thing about dreams and desires you desire at night when the lights are low?

  Or turn her into someone who died suddenly in her sleep: a tragic and romantic and spiteful nymph, victim of Ondine Syndrome, saying farewell with a “Darkness is not the absence of light, light is the absence of darkness”?

  And once her fate is chosen, how to tell it, what form should it take?

  Long or almost monosyllabic phrases? Free stream of consciousness in the first person? Or classical third person, watching her from outside and starting with something like “In the early years of the twenty-first century, when the Reign of X was approaching the end of a long decline, the art of turning off the lights became first a twinkling hobby and then a burning fever and …”?

  Now, the three of them argue and fight over her (and she hears them and writes down what they say).

  The three sisters locked in combat over the combative Stella D’Or, to settle who thought of her first, to whom she belongs more, though they all know that Stella D’Or belongs to all of them. That they couldn’t live without her. That she wouldn’t exist if not for their different yet complimentary gazes (all of which are her own gaze, the one who watches the three of them watch Stella D’Or) that now, as always, stare down at her. And they write her with conviction so thousands of kilometers away millions of people can hear them read her aloud and, without yet knowing what will happen to her in the coming chapters, imagine her like this: whirling in the darkness, looking up at the night sky, Stella D’Or, asking herself what will become of me and answering what will be will be and asking again who it is who’s writing me.

  II

  Who wrote that and who is writing this, now, in the place where, once again, all three of them come out and raise their eyes and look at the Earth.

  And they go leaping through the air and return to the place with the footprints and the flags.

  The footprints that are still there, as if those steps had just been taken, fossils in soft yet motionless dust. The old but brilliant flags—stars and stripes and hammers and sickles—taut in the windless air.

  The meteorites—large and small—seem to have reached an agreement not to touch them, not to unmake the History made by those who walked there and raised those flags in ever more remote times when arriving here still meant something.

  And the three of them have taken great care—since arriving on the Moon, so many years ago—not to touch anything and not to break something. Back when they were so young and didn’t yet know how to read or write, but—with the help of some little wind-up tin astronauts that they were given during the farewell ceremony, in front of the TV cameras, beside the space shuttle—were already imagining and coming up with stories. Stories that they said, as soon as they were able, they would transform into letters and words and sentences.

  They are the three Tulpa sisters.

  Alex and Charley and Eddie Tulpa.

  Unisex names.

  Reversible names that are not their true names, but the ones they chose as noms de plume and are now known by the world over. That other world where they were born, but remember little or nothing about (the faces of their mother and their two older sisters who died when the other space shuttle that was to bring them here crashed during takeoff are, merely, shadows); because they were so young when they arrived to the moon with their father and their brother.

  Their brother who has also adopted a sexually ambiguous alias: Bertie.

  It has been a long time since Bertie has played or written with them.

  Bertie is going mad or, really, he always was. And now he is not going mad, rather he is going back to being mad after a brief interval of calm and reason. Bertie is returning to his madness.

  Alex and Charley and Eddie don’t know if they are a little afraid of him or just lack patience. In any case, they leave him alone. And they no longer include him in their writing sessions and in their transmissions when they read what they write. Reading what they wrote so that down below or there above (hard to say exactly, and they’re not really that interested in knowing clearly where things are for fear that would influence or limit their imagination) people listen and tremble and sigh along with the lives and exploits of the pale Stella D’Or, or of her glowing extraterrestrial son dAlien, or of all the things that take place in their imaginary and luminous Kingdom of Drakadia, on the ever so imaginative dark side of the moon.

  Bertie listens to them tell their stories too, the three of them alternating voices, which all sound like just one, in front of the microphone. And he just snorts with disdain. And keeps on drinking that moon-man vodka he distills from the juice of green potatoes. And sighing for the lost love of a starlet/journalist who came to the moon to interview “The Legendary Tulpas,” just so, with capital letters, a few months ago. And—refusing to let Alex and Charley and Eddie make any kind of statement—the girl slept with Bertie to mine him for information, and all she managed to tear out of him was his heart. Now, Bertie is a tragic and inspiring figure for his sisters. But he’s also an inconvenience and a hazard, because Bertie is always having issues with hatches and seals. And Bertie has gotten addicted to snorting lines of moon dust (which, he informs them, “doesn’t smell like Swiss cheese but like burnt gunpowder after it has put some holes in something or, better, someone”). And Bertie is determined to be the champion and lone player of a “sport” he himself invented (this has been his most recent and perhaps definitive creative gesture) and has named “Russian-American Roulette” in honor of the two protagonists of that first vertical race into the heavens. And Bertie adds with ethylic diction and phrasing: “I didn’t include the names of the Chinese or the Indians, who just landed on the moon not long ago, and showed up like those tourists only interested in crossing a place off a list, never to return … Begone from here, intruders and laggards! … My actions honor the memory of all those great men from one side and the other who arrived to this fucking rock who knows why or what for … Unless it was just because they wanted to take some good pictures of Earth and deliver some well-rehearsed phrase and take a few little leaps and, hey, time to go home now so they can applaud us first and ignore us later and we can go a little crazy believing we saw the Creator or become serious alcoholics and pack on that muscular fat, but fat all the same, and develop heart conditions as a result of all the weightless exploits we had up here and so, retaining only these short and almost-sculpted haircuts, we grow old leaning on the bartop and harassing the clientele with an ‘I’m sure you couldn’t even imagine it looking at me now, but can you guess where I went once upon a time? A clue: it’s very far away yet seems so near. Look up.’”

  The “sport” Bertie created (ever since Bertie learned human beings can survive up to ninety seconds without a helmet in atmosphere zero, fifteen of those seconds perfectly conscious that whenever they stop holding their breath their lungs will collapse) consists of staying outside as long as possible, without oxygen or spacesuit, looking up at the stars and interrogating them in silence, until they answer and tell him when his love will return.

  So far, the stars haven’t answered, but, Bertie i
nsists, they’ve told him that they’ll reveal something soon, that they’re thinking it over, that he be patient, that he not lose hope.

  The Tulpa sisters’ father, Pat Tulpa (not his real name either, but his daughters pinned it on him, and he indulged them because the pleasures he can give them are so few), is a believer in the faith that claims to worship the deity iGod. iGod being a carefully balanced combination of all the divine thoughts that brought about the end of religious conflicts around the middle of the twenty-first century. iGod as the application that homogenized and overcame the economic crises of all the churches by rebranding them as an universal gadget under a single brand, sponsored by a data empire and the immortal memory and infinite capacity of its creator. A man who—after all, he’d erected an entire model of faith as if atop the pillar of the unquestionable faith in the product he sold—had the guile and the resignation to end up providing that thing all religions demand: to die in order to be resurrected as myth. And Pat Tulpa arrived to the moon on the dime of one of his many disciples. Another digital magnate who’d hired him to found, in his name and with his money, the First Orbital Church. Pat Tulpa signed a lifetime contract with excessive fine print and clauses of the “Under no circumstances shall it be demanded of the employer to take responsibility for the return trip of the employee” variety. And it’s not like Pat Tulpa had an abundance of work opportunities on Earth either.