The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  So—(a) and (b) and (c): he has no time to lose, having all the time in the world whatever time it might be—now is then and whatever will be will be—as that saccharine song says.

  But the song isn’t the same song, the song is another song.

  And now the other song sings:

  “Same as it ever was … Time isn’t holding up … Time is an asterisk … Same as it ever was … Same as it ever was … Same as it ever was … Same as it ever was … Same as it ever was … Same as it ever was … Same as it ever was … Yeah, the twister comes … Here comes the twister … Same as it ever was …”

  Lyrics and music that arrive to him from a nearby house, while he tries not to hear them, distracting himself with multiple approximations of the idea of the past.

  But it’s hard for him not to hear it because he recognizes it, remembers it, sings it between his teeth.

  A kind of invocation.

  An almost tribal litany, enumerative and muy lista, ever so clever.

  A song of his and Penelope’s youth.

  A song by Penelope’s favorite band, but a band he liked a lot too, really, truly. And also, for its time, a great music video (one of the first great songs to watch) that sang of letting yourself go, floating in the inertia of not thinking too much until one day, as if waking up from a long dream, you may ask yourself how did you get here: to a beautiful house with a beautiful wife, neither of which you recognize, what have you done, how do you work this, while you let the days go by like silent water flowing underground and under the rocks and stones and into the blue again.

  A spasmodic song of the kind that in his youth—after years of those, for him, prohibitive, due to lack of coordination, disco-choreographies of fevered Saturdays—finally allowed him to dance spasmodically, to dance like the singer who sang that song.

  A song that was and is almost a march to the battlefront and that looks and sounds nothing of the tenderness of what, again, is broadcast out in the night by the country-music stations, accompanied by the vaporous cough of the hot water shooting up with a wild and high-pitched and mercurial sound through the heating pipes.

  And, right, yes, as the song sings, will they not even let him forget it now?: this is not your beautiful house.

  This is Penelope’s beautiful house where he may wonder how did he get there without needing an answer: because he knows perfectly how he got there.

  He came with nothing and no one.

  Like an orphan.

  In any case, now, all of a sudden hearing this song, like a thing of the past that distracts him from the present. And, in the present, this convulsive refrain reaching him from the nearby home of that family of monsters, of incessantly talking heads, he’s come to call “The Intruders.” Epithet referencing those science-fiction movies or series from his childhood, produced during the smoldering Cold War, where the extraterrestrials adopted and usurped human bodies and they could only be identified with the help of some special glasses or by slight anatomical particularities or manufacturing defects like the inability to flex their pinky fingers or something like that. Days when science fiction was the literature of dreamers and, if you stayed asleep, while you were sleeping, the extraterrestrial spores enveloped you in a membrane and duplicated your body. And replaced you (or, even worse, replaced the adults, replaced your parents, who’d always been pretty Martian, you’ve got to admit) and “They’re here already! You’re next!”

  And, oh, what he wouldn’t give to be replaced and invaded with the ability to sleep a little, when not sleeping turns you into some increasingly unrecognizable and alien and foreign and faraway thing. And especially fragile confronted by the activity of The Intruders whom he also calls “The Motherfuckers Who Never Let Me Sleep Though, True Enough, I Must Admit, To Be Fair, I Barely Slept Before.”

  But it would be most accurate to call them “The Guests.”

  A tribe of performance artists he’d like to blame for his present situation, except for the fact that they weren’t to blame. But, even still, so conveniently at hand and eye and ear when someone needed to be blamed: because they’re there, in the vicinity, on his property, which is, actually, technically not his property. Both he and The Intruders are there (he in the main mansion; they in a house across the road, where the forest ends so the sea can begin; where there once was a house where a little boy vanished, a house that burned in the night) by the good will and memory and patronage of Penelope, his lost and missing sister, now turned to ashes in the wind.

  So he’s not an intruder, but he’s not a lord and master either. He lives off a loan he’ll never be asked to pay back and never even a hint he’ll ever have to leave.

  He lives here—paradox, irony—thanks to the books Penelope wrote. Those sagas with neo-gothic lunatics who replaced the child wizards and witches and teenage vampires and young rebels and post-apocalyptics, competing with and combating the tyranny of adults with strange hairdos and imperial get-ups. Books that seduced millions of readers in hundreds of languages (how many languages were there?), and had made Penelope into a sort of perfect poster-woman for all tribes. Sects running the gamut from wowed little girls to veteran feminists with stops at all stations in between.

  Yes, he was now “the brother of.”

  And, he supposes, having moved past all gestures of uncertain pride and false dignity a while ago, the truth is he can’t complain.

  And his only gesture of self-esteem had been, on repeated occasions, to refuse to write a biographic memoir about Penelope. It was one thing to live off of what she’d written and another to live off writing about her. For the moment, he set certain limits though he often stared at them fixedly, like someone staring at a border that might be crossed should the situation so require. The public explanation he’d given for refusing had been that he had nothing to add to her myth. The real reason was that—in the eventual case that he might put something in writing—what he had to tell, if he were honest, was too terrible to be true.

  Nobody would want to believe him.

  And not to mention that to do so would’ve been to push himself over the edge into a bottomless abyss.

  So, better not to.

  Better to stay how and where he was.

  And yet (few things are more unsettling than a comfortable situation with neither rules to abide by nor directions to follow, but, also, coming to its end, without rights to invoke or protections to demand) there’s no waking night when he doesn’t take five minutes to imagine the possibility, oh so nineteenth-century and Penelopean, of, any day now, a lawyer knocking on his door that’s not entirely his. A lawyer informing him that, at 00:00 hours of the next day, a posthumous clause in his sister’s last will and testament would take effect, specifying the expiration date and immediate end of the armistice and the commencement of hostilities, which is why …

  And to tell the truth, again: it’s not The Intruders’ activities that keep him from sleep. If they weren’t there next door, he would still lie awake and settle for blaming, though it wasn’t their fault either, the incessant conversation of bacteria and microbes nesting in his ears. But it’s true that their familiar and noisy presence makes him more aware of his lack of sleep, of the solitude of someone who no longer wakes up because he no longer sleeps.

  There they are.

  Come from a nearby kingdom to the north, probably, he thinks.

  And, like so many of their compatriots, convinced that here, by the sea and in the sun and to the south, they can do anything they so desire and everything they’re not allowed to do back home. They—though he’s not seen them up close yet—are definitely always soused in alcohol. Cheeks red and swollen, shrinking their eyes, bellies rising with yeast, arms always at a right angle with hands always half-closed, clutching or not a can of beer. And their wild children (an older boy and a younger girl; he’s identified the always pressured and pressuring timbre of their tremendous little voices). All of them and all of it coming together now. He doesn’t even need to see the
m to know what they’re like. He knows them by heart, and not having had children of his own has made him an expert in everyone else’s children. And so, he knows it, the adults will play at growling at the children (to scare them) and the children will play at screaming at the adults (to scare themselves) and, yes, that’s the standard dynamic of parents and children who have little or nothing to say to each other. Fright like a dense language of shared blood. Mutual fear like a bond. So some of them growl and some of them scream, and the years go by, he says to himself, until at some point the roles are inverted and it’s the children who frighten and the parents who’re frightened.

  He’s watched it more or less close up—but always at a distance—with friends of his he hasn’t seen now for such a long time. And at that time he said to himself that never, that he was never going to trip or stumble into that.

  He would be an orphan in both directions: he no longer had parents, and he was never going to have children who would have him as parent.

  He’d previously celebrated every anti-conceptive advance and—as soon as he heard that rumor—he started writing lying on his back and with his laptop balanced atop his lower belly to facilitate the radioactive frying and clean sterilization of his spermatozoids.

  He’d been great and lots of fun (in brief and homeopathic doses) with the children of others (not so much with the parents of those children, disturbed as they were by his comments like, “Why do you have to undergo so many tests to adopt a child and none to have one of your own?”) and, above all, with Penelope’s son (whose name should not be mentioned; his name is like brambles in his mouth), whom he doesn’t dare think of as entirely gone though he no longer has him.

  And he thinks about that and about that unnamable boy (who gave names to so many things he later wrote down in his books; like that thing about the “floating doll,” that spectral figure that frightened him at night, hanging from the ceiling; or Camilo Camito Camoncio, that horizontal boy controlling the entire world from his bed) and changes the subject like someone changing the channel. Tuning in the image of that boy—ghosted, with issues adjusting the verticals and the horizontals, with antennas constantly needing reorientation, like those enormous cubic televisions from his childhood—hurts so much.

  So he focuses on these intruder children.

  And, every so often, he watches them at a distance, just in case, in their comings and goings through the branches and bushes. Like zoetropic stains, like flies in the eyes: like the spasms of those minuscule drawings in the upper-right-hand corner of the pages of small books that give the impression of movement as they’re flipped through, high speed, with the tip of a thumb. Digital technology, indeed; but with traction and blood. Or like how you see something when you blink your eyelids open and closed quickly and repeatedly. Or the way people run and fall and get back up in silent movies. But here in colorful octophonic sound. Music and screams and cries and the piano recently added to the mix, a piano the Mother Intruder plays as if she were playing it to death: an occasional and never-predictable faltering fingering of the most basic scales that are cut off and dropped with a clumsiness that doesn’t even reach an infantile level, with an infrantile clumsiness (his own mother once got excited for five minutes about the idea of learning to play the piano and those were the most terrible five minutes ever, he remembers). Now, again, those melodies of unlearning, all the time: The Intruders with that ever so flexible but never so muscular schedule that’s the schedule of alcoholics and the children of alcoholics who, when they grow up, will also become alcoholics and alcoholic parents and grandparents.

  Fucking performance artists, he thinks, considering performance art the most convenient and easiest art form. Especially now that everyone’s life has been uploaded to the lowest of all places, online, and everyone’s convinced anyone can be an artist and the act of looking was part of being looked at. Like that woman who got rich by starting to cry in front of (and making cry) whoever sat down facing her in the halls of museums. What was that? Is that art? Is that what we’ve come to after millennia, from the Altamira Cathedral to the Rothko Chapel? And that’s what The Intruders are into. The exhibition of exhibitionism and more details about this and them coming up, he supposes.

  But not yet.

  There are many things to hang onto tonight. Many things to hang up, like paintings in a gallery, paintings looked at one by one, but that, at the same time, will no doubt end up telling a single story, a work: life.

  Life, which is written moving forward but read in reverse.

  And, looking back over it, rereading what was written, remembering this or that, somewhere in there, that paragraph that unfurls like one of those paper mandalas that open and flower when submerged in the water of memory.

  That night.

  This night, tonight, when he, suddenly, remembers that night; and now he can’t stop remembering, thinking about that, about that night on this night. And he wonders if that night will, tonight, this night, merit a new biji notebook to fill with crosses, like those burning crosses illuminating that night.

  That night that was the first night in his life he lived awake and not asleep and when he felt, walking through a wide-awake city, he was discovering the dreams of that hero that was him.

  That night when, remembering it, he is who he is now but, also, who he was.

  The Boy.

  The Boy, on that long and waking and as-if-dreamed night, trailing along behind his Uncle Hey Walrus through avenues and parks, searching for his parents, and at first leading his little sister by the hand and later carrying her on his shoulders.

  The Boy walking through a city that no longer exists.

  A city that’s been laid to rest beneath the waters, and where—in his precise memory—all those people they crossed paths with that night are dead. (And he always liked that thing about being dead; as if death were an occupation and being a dead person was like practicing a profession, like being a lawyer or doctor; as if you could be dead for a while and later stop, or retire from, being dead; as if having died were the same as having completed a very difficult task, your own life, with great success: “I’m dead now, but at least I was able to finish what came before.”)

  Being dead, yes, like being awake or being asleep.

  Some of the people The Boy and his sister and Uncle Hey Walrus are about to cross paths with are going to die very soon.

  It’s a dangerous time; “The lively Age of Aquarius is already giving way to the metastasis of the Age of Cancer,” foretells Uncle Hey Walrus, who not long ago had come back and been sent back from London. And those who survive, inevitably, will die over the years, incredulous, confronting the reality of having grown old, having believed they’d stay forever young. They’ll die from what’s known, perversely, as a “natural death.” In three movements/chapters: the moment their body ceases to function, the moment their body is disposed of according to their preferred method (earth, fire, air, water), and the truly mortal moment when, in the future, their name is uttered for the last time or the last living person who remembers them dies too. And again, he thinks: natural death. As if there were something natural in death, as if there were another variety known as artificial death, encompassing, presumably, all other forms of death. And he always remembers the conclusion in the forensic report of the volcanic Malcolm Lowry: “Death by misadventure,” the doctor wrote there. Death due to accidental bad luck, passing away from pure misfortune, or something like that. Did his parents and Penelope die and he survive them all by misadventure? Who is the truly misfortunate one in this story: those who no longer count or the one who recounts it all?

  In any case, in his memory, then, all those soon-to-be or on-the-point-of-being dead people now occupy a legendary space and, before long, become the fodder and fertilizer of mythology: the place where he was born, but that, for a long time now, is for him El Extranjero. A place that he no longer visits—in the absence of dreams—except in his mind. A territory that’s always outside and remo
te physically and inside and nearby mentally.

  There, in El Extranjero, in the past, a city that never sleeps and the impossibility of bookstores staying open all night that everyone has decided to believe in. The myth of people who wake up at three in the morning with an irrepressible need for a dose of Raymond Chandler or Gabriel García Márquez and there they go, with a robe over their pajamas, to the bookstore around the corner from their homes, because, in addition, as legend has it, there were bookstores on every block. And now, yes, all those people are dead and all those bookstores closed. And he remembers that, they say, those who’re dying or have little time left to live—defense mechanism on this side or coming soon from the other side?—tend to dream more and more frequently of their own dead. Or, he’s heard this too, that the dead stop being merely the stuff of dreams and start showing up throughout the day, like waking thoughts.

  And he remembers too—remembering that night from his childhood—a novel that at the time hadn’t yet been written. A novel by someone who, with time, would become one of his other many and multiple favorite writers. Better: he would become one of his favorite favorites. Top Five. A writer named Kurt Vonnegut whose work he would hear about for the first time that same night. That night that he’s now beginning to reconstruct (actually what he would hear and what he heard about was and would be a movie based on Vonnegut’s most famous novel). A writer who would be and remains very important to him and, over the years, he would read all his books; and who, many years later, he would finally meet, on a snow-covered street in Iowa City; and with whom he would have a brief and disconcerting conversation. But it’s not Kurt Vonnegut’s voice, under the snow, that he remembers that night.