The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  And, yes, he followed.

  And he finally came up with the answer to the question he’d been pondering while following along: who did that man remind him of? He reminds him of a character from a Kurt Vonnegut book, one of those enlightened lunatics. Better: he reminds him of a character from a book by the writer Kurt Vonnegut in a book by the writer Kilgore Trout. Those synthetic-capsules that summarize the plots of science-fiction stories down to the slightest expression, taking shelter in the certainty that the genre doesn’t produce novels of ideas but novels of an idea. Just one. So it was best to relate that idea in few words and move on to the next one, in the next nebula.

  “And, of course, many, almost everybody, laughed at me. They accused me of propagating pollutions and baseless pseudoscience, denying the Copernican Principal … My idea of Christianity as an exact science is too revolutionary. And my suggestion that miracles aren’t just supernatural events violating the laws of science but highly improbable events carried out by God without violating any natural law is … how to put it … a bit extreme. For example: the so-called Star of Bethlehem was not a conjunction of Jupiter, but a supernova exploding in the Andromeda Galaxy. But, attention, a supernova perfectly calculated by God to announce the Singularity of the birth of His son … The virginity of Mary: parthenogenesis! Something common among snakes and lizards and turkeys and that could be tested if they were to grant my request to analyze the DNA of the blood of Jesus on the holy Shroud of Turin and thereby prove that it doesn’t contain the gene of original sin but does contain the reverted neutrinos and antineutrinos that made his resurrection possible, when he materialized in a second body … a spare body … A Jesus Reloaded … Once this is proven, and it won’t take much, it will produce en-masse conversions of Jews and Muslims and Buddhists to Catholicism. And the first Jewish Pope will be crowned and, as I said, God will be pure and hard artificial intelligence. God will take charge of our advances and setbacks. And God will take responsibility of being … God … God will return. How to accelerate that encounter? How to hurry along His manifestation? … Easy: attract his attention. Smoke signals. Start fires. Awaken Him up from His dreaming the way Merlin is awoken … ‘Great novels are all great fairy tales,’ Monsieur Vladimir would say. But Creation is a witch tale. A script where everything is predetermined. Even our encounter here. Nothing is coincidental, no … And what you were saying about that article you’ve come to write … Your access to the particle accelerator puts you in an enviable position to call upon God. I can’t get in there anymore. They’ve got me well marked. But you, yes … And all you’d have to do is lock yourself in the control room and press the buttons I tell you and that I’ll write down for you here, with these instructions … It won’t take you more than a couple minutes to kick off the end of the world and the long night and the awakening from dreams and the end of God’s insomnia … You can’t deny it. You deny that you’re drawn to the possibility of being part of God and bringing back all your own dead, can you? … Another bullshot? … Yes? … Perfect … Now, if you want, I can tell you a bunch of entertaining first-hand anecdotes about Monsieur Vladimir … Although what pleasure or interest could they really hold for you when, by pressing here and here and here, you can converse with him directly. And ask him who is or who are the true and elusive and omnipresent narrators or narrator of Transparent Things.”

  And he wanted to be a narrator like that. Ambiguous. Diffuse. Divine. But, of course, it was already too late to be different. And nothing is more difficult—nothing is less productive—to question only at the end what you were so sure of in the beginning. Sure: there are great novels on the subject and with the believer-protagonist who ceases to believe. But a farewell like that really isn’t all that interesting. Or, at least, he’s never been interested in writing it. He never had any desire to put how he stopped writing in writing. On the other hand, he wrote about the opposite so many times: about the Alpha of the matter. He analyzed and reinvented it from all possible angles. And the thing is, so long ago, it felt to him like a mandate and a mission and a destiny. So he never hesitated. He was sure. He would be that and wouldn’t be anything else, because there was no way he could be. He wasn’t about to change direction or goal along that trajectory, because, defeated on various sports fields (he hadn’t made the slightest attempt to kick the ball toward the goal, knowing it would fire off in any other direction and, probably, break a window or end up in his own net) or confronting the exactitude of equations (commas and letters mixed with numbers? who came up with such nonsense?), he understood that he would be perfectly useless at any other activity or in any other profession. And such certainty made his parents nervous. Very nervous. They looked at him strangely. They referred to him, with apparent affection, as The Mole. They shut up and kept quiet (or communicated with each other in a supposedly secret language that’d only taken him one afternoon to decode) every time they sensed him come into the room, always with a little notebook in his hand and a little pen behind his ear, trailed by his little sister who, he announced, was his secretary. They watched him sidelong with a fear as childish as he was. Not because they were worried about how he would make a living doing that (it’d never been easy to access the grand prize and just desserts receiving 10 percent of the cover price of each copy sold signified), but because, narcissistic and self-absorbed and devotees and fans of themselves, his parents were disturbed that, in the future, he would offer his version of them. And others, not them, would read it. A vain and in-vain worry: because by the time he—as they feared—put them in writing, his parents had already been crossed out and ripped from the pages of History to enter the pages of his stories. And he remembers them and remembers himself, as if he were reading them, as if reading himself. He remembers the quaking in their eyes when he told them officially not that he wanted to be a writer when he grew up, but that he already was a writer, that he was already writing. He remembers, also, that someone said: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Or, really, that family starts over and is retold. Corrected and rewritten and … Now, he doesn’t write anymore, all he can do is remember his own, the ones he appropriated. Direct relatives or close acquaintances. And remember himself and remember them. And read what happened and what happened to him and what happened to them. Inventing them and dreaming them. The closest thing to writing, to writing himself. Consolation prize or punishment, who knows.

  Years later he would learn that reading and writing take an enormous physical toll, as much on the muscular tissue as on the nervous system. That several hours of sitting and typing was the same as running up the street. That illiterate people who were taught to read start needing more hours of sleep to restore their energy. But that’s not his case now, back then: reading and writing made him stronger. A double superpower. And one he’d have forever (or that’s what The Boy thinks) and not just a few minutes, like at the mouth of that river on that beach after almost drowning and living to tell the tale.

  Now, afterward, back then, The Boy can read all the time.

  He already has a library all his own and growing, finding itself unexpectedly added to when Pertusato, Nicolasito’s parents—moved by his ode to their dead little boy at the memorial service held at the school—insisted on bequeathing him the books of his ex-competitor. Now, without a rival, The Boy feels he reads better and faster and as if the novels burned up in his hands and turned into dense smoke his eyes absorbed. He needs more and more, and there is less and less space and time for all of them.

  Superman was, he remembers, the first great casualty of his reading life. Another death. There was a moment when he felt he had to choose—a time when there was only room for one superhero—and he didn’t hesitate even for a second: Batman. One and the other—Superman and Batman—shared with The Boy the tragic and violent death of their parents. But Batman’s get-up was so much better than Superman’s jingoistic pajamas with the underwear on the outside (the only thing that still interested him about Kal
-El, son of Krypton, was his allergy, kryptonitic and shared, to all matter from his home planet turned to stardust). And—he intuited it all along, but only recently rationalized and theorized it—Superman came already made, ready for use, instructed by his father who, yes, had had the oh so saturnine character to send him to a world with a perpetual propensity for the catastrophic. Whereas Bruce Wayne—Dickensian yet millionaire orphan—had made and invented and written himself. Bati-I Literature. When he was The Boy, very little of Marvel made it to his now nonexistent country of origin, and so he never wondered until he was already an adult why the X-Men are called X-Men when there are so many women among them, in that little, perpetually demolished school, where no halfway-responsible parent would enroll their children, mutants or otherwise and …

  OK, sure: like all writers, he never really grew up.

  Writers are bonsais who dream they are oaks.

  Writers are fragile and delicate and fade away so easily and what looks so easy from outside turns out to be so difficult to maintain with internal harmony. It’s not enough to be cultured to be able to cultivate and germinate and harvest something. And he was never great when it came to pruning. He was always more inclusive than exclusive.

  And so he always pretended to let leaves fall, while filling coffers he’ll keep on filling and filling throughout his life and his library.

  † To the Titans of the Inclusive (like Laurence Sterne and Herman Melville) and to the XL-Men and the Baggy Monsters of overflowing pockets and flashing zippers and to those Divine Devourers of Entire Worlds (remembering with special affection and respect—he’ll come back to them later—that bicephalous and bisexual and bi-ethnic entity composed of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow, two so imperfectly perfect writers). And also to all those riff writers (Thomas Wolfe and Henry Miller and Malcolm Lowry and Jack Kerouac and Ralph Ellison and Harold Brodkey and Richard Brautigan and Frederick Exley and Barry Hannah, to mention only a few who write in English) who produced that joy of watching somebody run and at the same time, reading them, to feel you were running with them, alongside them, not really comprehending why and not really understanding what they’re trying to tell us there, in that deafening wind, hands and arms and legs in ceaseless motion. Almost nobody read those writers anymore; almost nobody dared feel that kind of euphoria or had the energy to run like that. There were almost no writers who wanted to be like them anymore; because, near the end of literature, writers began to say things like “When I write I think about the reader” and “What I’m concerned with are the problems of the people” and a Nobel Prize winner had even stated that “Many writers have distanced themselves from public life and even feel a certain disdain for politics. But I think the writer should always be in that sphere, he cannot be isolated like Proust, who ordered his walls lined with cork so no outside sound would reach him. That image terrifies me.” And he said it perfectly and gloatingly unaware of the other terror he was producing by saying such things and, while he was at it, failing to recall the pages upon pages upon pages the Frenchman devoted to the Dreyfus Affair in the life of his novel.

  And thinking it wouldn’t be too bad—in the face of such nonsense—for what’s given to also be able to be taken away. And so everybody would have to be a little more careful about what they say and what they write. And would read again those who did their thing in small spaces, invoking immensities, giving life to brooms, provoking floods.

  † But also—with time, perhaps because the brain increasingly resembled the prostate and the lines came out like ever more sporadic drops—you have to know how to learn to prostrate yourself before those magicians of that deceptive brevity that contains everything. Not the iceberg of Hemingway but the icicle of, for example, Penelope Fitzgerald. Another form of running or, better, more than running, of skating. As if sliding on sharp steel blades across ice that might break at any moment, but doesn’t. That kind of absolute lucidity that delivers the straight-line speed and precision you—after years of so many elaborate spins and baroque pirouettes and falls—crave in your own life.

  But no.

  There are some wishes that never come true.

  † In the same way, you learn to be more courteous with all those very unsuccessful yet, also, very ambitious and triumphantly failed books (helping them cross the street the way you help a blind man, far more sensitive and interesting than all those wary youths with perfect eyesight, calculating each and every movement, worried first and foremost and when all is said and done, about never falling down in public. But, sooner or later, if there’s any justice, they do fall).

  But it’s a long time before he’ll think or write like that. Back then he’s new and happy: he reads without thinking about writing or, at least, about what writing will mean. He’s pure and innocent and he is The Boy. And then, Treasure Island, which is, probably, the best first book (and the best written) that a boy who already wants and needs to be a writer can read and that, in its way and subliminally, functions as the best possible metaphor/symbolism for the reader for whom it’s no longer enough just to read: because if the pirates kidnap you, then you join the pirates. And—after passing quickly through the trio of Jules Verne & Emilio Salgari & Alexandre Dumas, through voyages and wars and friendships and betrayals—he’s already on to other things. To “real” books and “original versions.” He was already on to Frankenstein (which has nothing to do with the movie and whose monster, whom almost everybody calls Frankenstein, as if his creator had, also, sewn his own last name onto him, drags around his backpack of select books to educate himself, like those of Plutarch and Milton and Goethe). And to the insomniac Dracula (a gift from Uncle Hey Walrus, with the monster that barely makes an appearance in the book, but seems to be there all the time, reading over your shoulder and the shoulders of those who write and describe him without seeing him). And to the Fellowship of the Ring (is it just him or is there something sadistic about Gandalf, who always seems to wait until the last minute in battles or adventures, first allowing hundreds of men or elves or dwarves to die, only to intervene at the end and save Frodo and his friends? And wouldn’t it have been much faster and more practical to climb aboard those giant eagles that show up at the end and, from the beginning, fly directly and without delay, from the Shire to Mordor and throw the fucking ring from the air into Mount Doom and save themselves all that walking and all those battles and all that death?). And, also, to the occasional aberration; like that book full of photographs of a seagull that believed it was Jesus Christ or something like that. And he mixes all of that together and invents characters like D’Arktagnan, the undead musketeer descending to the center of the Earth to recover the ring (and not the necklace) from the Kingdom of Darkness. And then Martín Eden (where he read for the first time about the effect of the hurricane of literature entering into a life and how it’s possible that, after experiencing something like that, the hero ends up committing suicide); and David Copperfield (where it’s not very clear where the character ends and the author begins). And soon flying and teleporting with all those science-fiction novels that begin to land in all the bookstores along with entire collections of noir novels. And, yes, it’s the beginning of the days of lead bullets and laser beams and people thrown from the heights or vanishing into thin air above his city.