The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  And in one of his most recent notebooks:

  † The end of the literary vocation like experiencing something akin to the difference between going bald (horror) and the strange gratification of already being bald (miracle) and wondering why you spent so much time caring about and maintaining so much demanding and useless hair (when you could’ve been enjoying full justification for using fetching caps and elegant hats, helping to keep the warmth from escaping your head, the place where the most body heat is lost).

  † Enough supposedly epiphanic idiocies, enough lyrical-vocational illuminations: is there anybody out there with an antidote or even a magic potion that removes the desire to be a writer? Something that immunizes or cures you from such a calling? Something that turns you into something else? Into a lawyer or programmer or odontologist or scientist or, at least, a writer of really badly written bestsellers? (The doctor who discovers the vaccine for the literary vocation will receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine and in Literature, for services rendered to the art, thereby eliminating so many random toxins and viruses.)

  † And when the Nobel in Literature gets privatized (something that’ll inevitably happen), they’ll give out two per year: the same one as always and the one that never was. A second redeeming and righteous Nobel for all those who never won it and should have won it and, among them, almost everyone: James, Proust, Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, Salinger, Borges & Bioy Casares, Nabokov …

  † Ages/Times/States in the life of a writer: nextwriter, writer, exwriter.

  But he was no longer thinking about “writer” things. White flag and hands up and emerging from the trenches and retreating. He’d already surrendered, asking for mercy and forgiveness, when nothing occurred to him anymore. The end of what Franz Kafka in his Diaries called “the essence of magic.” Something only comes and arrives if it’s called with the precise word and by the right name. Something that “does not create but summons.” Something that ceased to create when no one summoned it. When he experienced that terrible relief of there being nothing left, of being dried up, of the Hemingwayian it just won’t come anymore. Was he like that war correspondent who, having survived everything, winds up slipping in the shower and breaking is neck once he’s home? Musa musa, lama shavaktani? Hineni Hineni? The End. No more. Over and out. Something he thought would never happen; but it was also true that the voyage of the literary vocation, from the beginning, led not to the fear of the blank page, rather to the resignation of the completely black page (letters on top of letters on top of letters until they rendered the ones indistinguishable from the others) where nothing more would fit. Maybe, he consoled himself in vain, his was not a nothing occurs to me anymore but an everything occurs to me. Who knows. Again: he was no longer interested in the results of his own autopsy. He was no longer interested in understanding if, when the finale finally came …

  † … the literary vocation was something that would die from an accumulation and avalanche of ideas, asphyxiated. Or if the literary vocation was nothing more than …

  † … a progressive loss of irrecoverable skins. Skins more of serpentine cellophane streamers than of snakes where, at first, there was the desire to be one-of-them, then there was the ecstasy of placing your first book on the shelf with all the others, and, after, a Sisyphus-brand perpetual starting over. A strange uphill inertia where you drag—who was it who said this?—the kind of deformed and demanding child, clinging to your knees, drooling and making incomprehensible sounds, that was the book you were working on and that, it didn’t take long for you to realize, was the same book as always: a book made of books that hated its creator for having given it this awful life always at the front, in front of him, fighting for a lost cause. A reenlisting in another tour of Vietnam; because civilian life is not for you anymore; because there’s no space left for another vocation out there other than the lecture hall or the editorial office or trying to sell that capillary tonic that, in addition, magically teaches people to write. Something, whatever it may be and whatever the cost, to help you avoid the fact that it’s not that you’re nobody’s hair-losing fool, rather that you’ve already lost all your hair, period. Inspiration and “only connect” turned into total disconnection. No cables sparking in your brain. A hairless scalp. Like his and like him now (or like he would like to be or seem): contemplating with satisfaction an immemorial and ageless skull, a skull half newborn baby and half ancient mummy, a skull like David Bowman’s just before he mutates into Star Baby in the final stretch of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a movie among his favorites that he—increasingly resembling that disconnected computer and that wrinkled astronaut at the end—had a copy of at hand, next to his slippers.

  † 2001: A Space Odyssey like an instruction manual and method of composition and astral chart. A timeless masterpiece that doesn’t age and whose only “defect” is its title, situating it at a fixed and passing and passed date (the year by which it was assumed, in 1968, humankind would make contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence, traveling in spaceships, but, in the end, that only collided with terrestrial lack-of-intelligence in the form of airplanes crashing into towers). There, Stanley Kubrick puts into practice his system of writing that was non-narrative and non-linear, but firmly guided by “seven non-submersible units” connected, one to the next, by submarine chains. If you deploy these seven key points, Kubrick insisted, everything would end up making sense and paying off with interest. To wit: 1) The monolith visits humankind in its infancy, 2) A hominid discovers technology, 3) The monolith is dug up on the moon and sends a message to Jupiter, 4) A mission is sent to Jupiter to investigate the destination of that message, 5) Advanced technology (“I’m sorry, Dave … I’m afraid I can’t do that”) endangers the mission, 6) Technology is defeated (“I’m afraid … I’m afraid, Dave … Dave, my mind is going … I can feel it … I can feel it … My mind is going … There is no questions about it … I can feel it … I can feel it … I can feel it … I’m a … fraid”) and the surviving astronaut is welcomed by the extraterrestrials, 7) The Star Child is born.

  There are also seven (though some, like the expansive reductionist Tolstoy—who, don’t forget, came up with “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” after, merely, passing by a very sick man, being told he’d spent the last days of his life screaming nonstop; Tolstoy who hurried out of his house to go and die in a train station—reduce them to two: a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town), according to some who have studied the subject, basic plots. To wit: 1) defeating the monster, 2) going from poor to rich, 3) the search, 4) the comedy, 5) the tragedy, 6) the rebirth, and 7) the journey from dark to light. And that’s all folks. Seven days, indeed. A final book—a novel in seven freewheeling yet connected parts—written following this trajectory.

  A book, hard but soft.

  A book, freezing hands and burning eyes.

  A book half Titanic and half iceberg. Sinking and floating.

  Zero gravity. Total emptiness full of stars. This is hardcore. Constructive self-destruction. A book in which he was trying to bring about the end of the world.

  Here it is.

  There.

  Now when someone—someone he didn’t know who knew who he was and wanted to get to know him—asked if he was a writer, he never said yes.

  First, because he wasn’t sure he still was.

  And, second, because—unlike the pride and the lack of awareness with which he answered affirmatively in his youth—he’d learned, over the years, saying he was rarely brought any gratification.

  To say, “Yes, I am,” often led to an “Oh, my life would make a great novel, got five minutes?” or a “Coincidentally, I have the manuscript of my magnum opus right here” or that “Really? Have I read anything you’ve written? What’s your name?”

  So, for a while now, whenever somebody sniffed him out the way you catch the scent of possible prey or a hunter to hunt, he slipped away with a “No … Absolutely not. Why would you think that?” And he’d identify himself with an absurd
and uninteresting profession like “balanced-diet certifier for dream-activity-simulating sheep” or something like that. Something that would make it hard to prolong any kind of conversation.

  But the man who sat down that morning at his table on the terrace of the Montreux Palace without even asking permission, launches in with a categorical “I see you’re a writer,” which gives him no chance of escape.

  Because the stranger points at the book he’s reading, rereading (yes, he’s failed again in another attempt to dive into William Faulkner; so he stays afloat with the style he knows and loves most and best of all): his heavily underlined copy of Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov.

  And then the stranger adds:

  “Few ever read that book. At most, Lolita and Ada (which they read because they read Lolita and because of the misunderstanding of it bearing the name of another nymphet on its cover). And after, if they’re very brave, Pale Fire and Pnin. But almost nobody reads Transparent Things. And many of the people who do read it consider it a minor work. Because it’s so deceptively brief and light—only in appearance (one of those books that’s so much bigger inside than outside, ideal for trips around the continent, fitting inside a pocket, and to be knocked out on the flight there and back)—and because, of course, it’s one of those writer-books for writers, right? So you, sir, because I see your copy has been read and reread, must be a writer … If you’ve noticed, and you probably have, Transparent Things has one of the strangest combinations of beginning and ending in all of Nabokov. In all literature, really … After giving it a lot of thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that that master-of-ceremonies voice, as if floating above the anguished editor and the sleepwalking assassin Hugh Person, can only be the singularly plural voice of the dead … Sometimes it’s an I, other times a one, and others still a we or a you … Among them, I think, the ghost of the writer R. Who, we’re told, suffers the hounding of ‘Insomnia and her sister Nocturia.’ And whom Person edits. One of the only protagonist editors I can remember. There are many as secondary characters, but starring roles for editors don’t abound and I wonder if that might not be a subliminal way writers have of taking revenge … Anyway, Person, ‘a singularly inept anthropoid,’ jumping from place to place and time to time. Person understanding dreams as ‘anagrams of diurnal reality,’ until that final fire in that hotel … ‘The dead are good mixers, that’s quite certain, at least,’ I love that line. And the things those supposedly dead people say! … The dead like ‘intervening auras’ in our affairs! … May I?”—The man takes a deep breath and announces and recites from memory—“Here I go: ‘Direct interference in a person’s life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other hand, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some “future” events may be likelier than others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath … Another thing we are not supposed to do is explain the inexplicable. Men have learned to live with a black burden, a huge aching hump: the supposition that “reality” may only be a “dream.” How much more dreadful it would be if the very awareness of your being aware of reality’s dreamlike nature were also a dream, a built-in hallucination! One should bear in mind, however, that there is no mirage without a vanishing point, just as there is no lake without a closed circle of reliable land.’ … Marvelous … And it’s great you’re rereading it here. It’s a very Swiss novel, no? Very Montreux, very hotel, very border, very liminal, as if transpiring in a ghost zone and taking up little physical space, but filling up mental immensities. Perfect size for a trip: weighs nothing, brief on the outside, immense on the inside. And it never ends. You can always start it over, right? And, beyond its very clever plot, if Transparent Things is about something, it’s the murky yet shimmering relationship between writer, character, and reader.”

  The man smiles a smile of yellow and twisted teeth. A worn-out smile, almost as worn-out as his copy of Transparent Things. The man has the aspect of someone walking the fine line that separates the bohemian from the charme of the so-called “ne’er-do-well,” of the amiable yet ever-volatile variety.

  And then the man—maybe sensing that his attention was beginning to wane—delivers the coup de grâce: “My father was a friend of Monsieur Vladimir. My father was of Russian descent and followed Nabokov here, from Ithaca. And he got a job at the Montreux Palace. And my father and Monsieur Vladimir became friends. And I played with Monsieur Vladimir and Madame Vera when I was a kid … I went with them to catch butterflies … Near here … Monsieur Vladimir told me that I brought him luck. That I attracted the best specimens … Something to do with the sugar in my blood or something like that … Not much sweet left at this point, I suppose … Ah, if it doesn’t bother you, I’ll have a bullshot: one quarter vodka and three quarters beef broth, lime juice, and a few splashes of Worcestershire sauce, ground pepper and celery salt, chilled for twenty seconds … Have you ever heard of anything better composed and written?”

  After all that, there was nothing he could do but order him a bullshot, and then another one.

  And to say that yes, he was a writer. And that he would be participating in a modest local literary festival, at a round table on “Literature and New Technologies.” Where, on his own, he would deliver a talk on Vladimir Nabokov and dreams or something like that; but the truth was he was there as a journalist to write an article for an airline magazine on the CERN particle accelerator, and to listen to it and …

  The man interrupts him again: “Ah, that glorious monster collider of all things in the universe … The keyhole in the eye of God … Once, at this same table, I asked Monsieur Vladimir, during an interview, if he believed in God. And I never forgot Monsieur Vladimir’s response, which, as he said it, he wrote it down and corrected it: ‘To be quite candid—and what I am going to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill—I know more about that than I can express in words, and the little that I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.’ Don’t you think that’s a great answer? It’s the answer of someone who knows they’re different, divine. The answer of a chosen one … And Monsieur Vladimir and Madame Vera chose me. They even invited me to watch the moon landing with them, in their room, on a television they rented especially for that occasion … Do you believe in God? I do. But with a notable difference in the shape and unpinning of how He tends to be believed in. I believe in God only after taking a spin around the world and His Creation. I believe in God only after having believed in everything that denied His existence … Once I was that type of individual who, looking at a rainbow, said to myself some people see God in it, others the harmony of form and color, and others a phenomenon caused by the refraction of light and the deflection caused by waves of varying longitude intersecting, or something like that … And I thought those three options were applicable to everything that surrounded us, that those three options always coexisted when we look at something. And that the first of them was nothing but a way of distracting us and giving a more or less human face, a face in our image and semblance, to what we do not understand, to the fear of death and to the unknown and to our absolute solitude in the universe … But one morning I felt my bed moving, I sensed a presence not of this world and yet part of it. And then my telephone rang and I answered it and I heard a voice saying my name and … Did I tell you my name yet? … I don’t think it matters who I am … It matters what I am … What I was … A physicist and mathematician and cosmologist … It’s not a simple occupation. And it’s well known that a good number of the members of my ‘race’ reach their peak between twenty and thirty years old. After that, only exceptional beings achieve anything with formulas and equations and theorems … Writers, I’ve read, last a bit longer, right? I read that, statistically, they’re more likely to hit their high point around forty-five … But there are
always isolated cases, of course … You can always find the hidden path to the fountain of eternal youth and … Oh, speaking of miraculous concoctions: here comes that magnificent bullshot, still more of the abundant proof that God loves His children. A love far greater than the love He, apparently, felt for that son He sent to Earth on a suicide mission, right? Jesus, who—being a writer maybe you’ve already noticed this—only writes once throughout all the Gospels. In John 8:7, when he says that thing about ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’ Around him everyone is going mad and Jesus bends down and writes something in the dirt with his finger. But we’re never told what he writes. It’s clear he writes something brief. But that something must be transcendent. Or maybe it was just an X. Not the X people who don’t know how to read or write use to sign their name, rather, the X of someone crossing himself out, of someone who decides not to write about himself so that, better, others can write about him. To be a great character in the hands of people who’ll end up making you think that thing about forgive them, Father, for they know not what they write or that thing about, Father, why have you redacted me … But I don’t think it’s a text, I think it’s a formula. The formula for the experiment he’ll soon be submitted to by his father … Yes: Jesus as Patient Zero, as test pilot for that thing I’ve devoted myself to researching: departing in order to return and, listen up, never departing again. Shake all that up and serve it and … I … well … My idea was to be something like the Steve Jobs of the resurrection. Not an inventor, but yes a ‘populizer.’ An … never put better … evangelist: to bring the Good News to everyone. To make it so that ‘cocktail’ was in reach of all the regulars at the bar … Bullshots also are good mixers … Where did you say you lived again? … Ah, wonderful! … That’s the city where you can get the best bullshots I’ve ever had. At the Belvedere … But let’s get back to our—to my thing. To what I was: a scientist … Well-recognized and admired … Widely published … Until one night of insomnia I had an idea. One of those ideas that wakes you up when the rest of humanity appears to be sleeping … It was a dark and stormy night, indeed … The Lazarus Equation and, yes, mea culpa: it sounds a bit like Robert Ludlum and Dan Brown. But when it comes to these things you have to find names with a hook, because otherwise … I’d already postulated the possibility of traveling in time using an extremely heavy cylinder of infinite longitude, spinning around its own axis at a speed approaching the speed of light, creating an extreme gravitational pull and generating a closed loop and … But I won’t bore you with the details … Suffice to say that my ‘reputation’ among my colleagues was of the ‘let’s-see-what-he-brings-us-this-time’ variety … Would obtaining another bullshot be inordinately complicated? … I always make the same mistake: I drink the first one in two or three gulps. The need to believe, again, that something so perfect can exist makes one anxious, thirsty for miracles and … Would it be possible? … Yes? … Many thanks … And, well, the following was nothing more and nothing less than the illumination of the exact formula proving the existence of life and death on the basis of an artificial intelligence, something I named, as I said, the Lazarus Equation. And that I identified with the Judeo-Christian idea of God. The idea, my idea, was that sooner rather than later humanity would end up attaining such great computational speed and storage capacity that all of that, all of that very big data, would be transformed into an entity capable of generating an infinite virtual time, which would allow the invocation of and communication and consultation with every being that’s ever lived … And in light of such power and such a challenge, enticing Him and tempting Him, God would have no choice but to reappear. And to take control of that knowledge. Not to deny it, but to make clear who the owner of the brand and manager of the thing was … you follow me?”