The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Place your bets, don’t give it too much thought, quickly now.

  † The accelerating time of adults (the accelerating particles of adult-time, which makes them think and feel time is flying by and burning up and consuming itself faster and faster all the time) is, paradoxically, the promising and slow and leisurely time of children. The time of kids-children is what makes the journey of adults-parents so vertiginous. For people who haven’t had children, time passes more slowly, and they never get to experience the wild panting of watching, immobile, how children grow and grow with each passing day. Those who haven’t had children (those who’ve never gotten addicted to that substance of children, which makes you see so many things you’ve never seen and wouldn’t ever see if you hadn’t first been devoured by them, because best make clear: it’s Saturn’s own children who devour him) will never bear witness to that terrible sight that suddenly makes the Theory of Relativity so easy to understand. See it: there’s a boy of about six venturing into the cave of the open door of the wardrobe of his bedroom, to explore the prehistory of old toys (some broken but impossible to dispel to oblivion) while his father watches, trembling, the artifacts his son is unearthing and he bought what feels like yesterday or, at most, last week. Or they’ll never have the experience of watching a movie alone and having it seem dreadful and watching it later with their child and, commenting on it aloud while chewing popcorn, having it transform into something ingenious, into one of the best movies in the cinema of life. Also, all of them, childrenless children, are far more childish creatures than those who have children in the vicinity: they’re more afraid of the dark, the shadows that move, the death that approaches. And they end up wondering—like when they were little—where all those children who fill the streets and come out of schools with uniforms and barbaric manners come from. And, of course, children without children sleep much worse; because they’ve never helped anyone sleep better.

  But he did. He was of some help. He helped put Penelope’s son to sleep while struggling not to fall asleep himself. He sang stories and told songs to that little boy who wasn’t his son, but who was the closest thing to having a son there was, the closest thing to having a son he had. But that was a period in his life (a thousandth of a second in cosmological terms) that didn’t last long. A time that no longer is and that he remembers less and less; that has forced him to live forgetting, because it hurts and frightens him and because it makes him think that, if he ever sleeps again, maybe it’ll be to dream of the little boy. Penelope’s son appearing to him as something immense, like the sun and, at the same time, like a gray cloud obscuring the sun; like the light and the black hole that devours everything and transforms it into the most alive of dead energies, into the most solid of antimatter. Lost in space. But it’s an unfounded fear: his very occasional sleep—a verb in his case, lacking verbosity—isn’t long or deep enough to generate dreams. Now, for too long, his sleep has been reduced to sudden and brief and sporadic naps (interrupted with a start, with a whimper, as if afraid of themselves) during the days and nights, sighs in which nothing thinks or happens. Assorted dreams that remind him of those double or triple or even quadruple features at the movie theaters and on TV channels of his childhood. Extended sessions, they were called: you could enter any time, the show already underway, and imagine everything you’d missed while trying to wrap your head around why that blonde had just slapped that man with the twisted smile or wondering whether the man who’d just died was good or bad or just passing through like an extra, like a bit player with no role left to play. Movies of multiple or mixed genres, like dreams: westerns, biblical peplums, comedies, mysteries, horror, children’s (or horror with background music with the voice of little girl humming), some documentary that postulated the extraterrestrial origin of gods and pyramids, and those science fictions of the Cold War where everything ran through atomic energy and the imminent end of the world. Movies, often in lousy condition (depending on the honesty of the theater, a little poster at the box office warning of possible mishaps), cutting off, with scenes missing, subliminally teaching him the art of the ellipsis. And, sometimes, the movie continuing after the lights came up (after he wakes up) and after he falls back asleep (after the lights go out) to keep watching. What was showing? The Black Cat? Puss in Boots? When the Cat Comes? Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? The Aristocats? The Shadow of the Cat? The Cat That Couldn’t Sleep? To think of it in a blink of the eyes and what’s it called when you slept a little and nothing and something? Ah, yes. Catnaps: a feline sleeping. But, in his case, not the slumbers of those agile and aerodynamic cats, but the unsatisfying spells of round and heavy cats always on the laps of queens and fairies. Now he’s almost always awake to daydream and to watch new movies in perfect condition where the mutations aren’t a product of radiation but—like the one he saw a few nights ago—a result of the dumping of ultra-hormonized chicken shit into the waters of a bay where people go diving never surface again. All that empty time to fill with imaginary fears to cover up the true fear; with everything that already happened, with the little that might still happen, at the moment of nothing is happening or of, calm down, it already happened. That ocean full of sharks. Those fish that move even in their sleep, they say, and among them the one called Somniosus microcephalus and that, apparently, can live for more than three centuries (and he feels like that, so long-livingly somniosus, nothing makes you feel more anxiously long-living than the eternal nights of insomnia). Sharks he’s been evading, but can’t stop thinking about and pondering and attracting with the color of his bad blood. Moving from one wave to the next, the free association of ideas, thinking of everything and nothing and swimming from one small island to another, clinging to a piece of driftwood.

  And, he always remembers, how when they began to talk about surfing the Internet, how the novelty of the reflex wasn’t at all surprising to him.

  He’d always done it, that, always.

  He’d never thought or moved in a different way and, probably, all writers moved like that, from one thing to another, finding not what they were looking for but what, even still, would work for something, clinging to a piece of wood that once belonged to a shipwrecked bed.

  The bed is also a whole made of pieces, each of them, indispensable.

  The pillows that start a fight or are used to silence a scream or hide a smile or suffocate a dream.

  The mattress beneath which is hidden the fondled money or nudie magazines or secret letters (letters that for a while now aren’t written with good handwriting, with written handwriting, with ideas considered deliberately and at almost the same speed that it took letters to reach their recipient, always with a trace of the sender’s DNA in the saliva that moistened the backs of the stamps).

  The sheets that function as well at the hour of escaping as at that of hanging yourself and that are the stitched shroud and raw husk of a ghost (it was never clear to him if sheets are the underground fabric that the ghost slips into to acquire shape and solidity or if sheets are, also, phantasmagoric and were sewn on looms of air).

  And so many things fit under the bed: monsters and lovers and the dust that we came from and the dust to which we return.

  And the idea of counting beds—like a historic encyclopedia of the horizontal—is, if you can’t get to sleep, at least a way of reaching the sanctuary of your own bed, at the end of all those other beds. Like on the good cover of that bad Pink Floyd album, for many (not for him, that title was taken by, yes, Yes) the greatest band of somniferous music in history.

  Draw me a sheep!

  No!

  What do you want a sheep for (or was it a lamb)?

  Draw me a bed!

  A bed in which—puny yet princely—to sleep thinking what’s essential is invisible to closed eyes. And nothing matters to you less than that they draw you a lamb.

  What could you want a lamb for?

  What you need is for them to take all those thousands of unconscious pieces of meat covered in wool to the slau
ghterhouse so you never have to count them again.

  What you need is a bed that sleeps across its entire surface and that dreams deeply.

  What you need is a bed in which to fall asleep counting beds.

  † And so, from the depths of millennia (like in those increasingly erect graphics showing the evolution of the sleeper) beginning with the straight and horizontal line where somebody collapses with sleepiness. Anywhere at all and the ground is hard. And next a stack of straw and palm fronds beside a wall where painted buffalo graze (imagine primitive peoples falling asleep and looking up at that the way now, during childhood, children fall asleep looking up at the childish figures on the wallpapered walls). And moving on to the hides of animals killed while they slept. To Moses’s basket floating on the water. To the stiff beds of the Egyptian pharaohs lying in profile (a copy close at hand of The Book of the Dead: that instruction manual for getting back to the eternal dream that taught them how not to go underground face down or how to adopt the head of a crocodile and how to not be decapitated by the guardians of the Underworld). To smooth stones, Odysseus’s charpoy of taught rope in The Odyssey, there dreaming of the faraway nuptial bed he carved for his wife, now besieged by suitors. To the first headboards made of turtle shells and the arrival of pillows and pillowcases as luxury items and status symbols on Roman mattresses (already back then and even now the absurd and disproportionate prices of mattresses as “inventions” designed to last ten years if used with restraint and courtesy). To mattresses stuffed with feathers and lectus cubicularis (for sleeping alone) and lectus genialis (to go to bed and not sleep with another person) and lectus discubitorius (where the revolutionary custom of eating in bed is premiered) and lectus lucubratorius (for studying) and lectus funebris or lectus emortualis (for displaying the lifeless body and it occurs to him now that his current bed is all of these beds minus genialis and not yet funebris). To the heavy and immobile medieval beds with posts and canopies, incorporating the little bedside table with reading material and candle. To the magnificent Renaissance beds. To the four hundred and thirteen beds (and the courtesans who played in them) of Louis XIV, especially that one in Versailles with The Triumph of Venus embroidered in gold thread on its curtains. To the “bed of justice” from which the kings of France ruled their court and parliament (the princes were sitting, high ranking officials standing, low ranking ones kneeling) and the most relaxed chambre de parade for receiving ambassadors and artists, like the first version of TV in the bedroom. To “my second best bed” that Shakespeare bequeaths to his wife, without specifying to whom he is leaving the first and best one. To the iron beds cast in the eighteenth century (free at last from the insects and termites in the wood). To the beds whose measurements are defined as King or Queen. To the beds on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum. To the silver bed of a maharaja and the Spartan futons of samurais and the minimalist ottoman sommiers. To the novelty of convertible beds (there is one that turned into a piano or was it a piano that turned into a bed) and to the modern air mattresses and waterbeds (which are like rafts containing oceans and many associate with shipwreck-like orgasms) and to the hammocks on ships cast off for dreamed-of lands. To the psychotic sofa beds and with the shy beds named Murphy that lift up and turn into wall and to beds that vibrate if you feed them coins. To beds in flames (not because you fall asleep smoking, but because you’ve fallen into the vice of sleeping with your mobile phone under the pillow and the device heats up and explodes; in that place where once rested a tooth, a photograph, a cross, a perfumed letter, or even the dose of an addiction far more interesting and creative than those little marooned messages without a bottle). To hospital beds that can end up being deathbeds and where many—like a few bull fighters—say goodbye with a “Mommy” or a “Mamita.”

  And from there to his own beds, the beds that are his. To his parents’ bed, to his cradle (that cradle that, yes, “rocked above an abyss”), to the little bed in the shape of a rocket and the trundle bed (him on top and Penelope below), and his first bed away from home, accompanying him up and down in various apartments, and the hotel beds and the beds at some literary foundation, and the beds where he stayed a few nights (never a thousand and one), and the ones in which, the next day, he woke up thinking “How did I end up in this bed and what is the name of its owner, there beside him, sleeping or pretending to sleep?” and praying that she not wake up before he leaves, because the truth is she talks nonstop and what she has to tell isn’t on a level with what Scheherazade told.

  There he is now.

  In bed.

  Inside it.

  But knowing where he is and how he got there and what his own name is. Alone. And he can’t even pretend to sleep, because he has already forgotten what it was like to be able to pretend to sleep.

  His definitive bed.

  His noble, end-of-the-road model bed.

  The bed he imagines now in bed, a waking dream, trying to silence the attack of the past by playing at futurism, but an antiquated futurism, a steampunk futurism.

  The bed—like the planet where that bed lies down to go to bed—that has been modified with the passing of the pillows and mattresses.

  The bed that began being meteoric in the late-decadent Des Esseintes style on Sunday morning after an agitated Saturday night.

  The bed with Finnegans pillow and blankets with Oblomov print.

  The bed to which he has been adding pieces and appendices and even a ladder to access its height (the height of one of those lofted beds of his childhood, bunk beds they’re called, command bridges, off of which to jump or up which to climb) making it something unmistakably his, a unique specimen. Almost a living and fluctuating organism. Or a kind of exoskeleton that defines and contains him. The furniture version—a bed that you don’t take off even to go to bed—of that second skin that’s the ruinous wedding dress in flames of Miss Havisham or something like that. But in perfect shape and perfectly maintained.

  His bed like a cathedral, like a site of worship and pilgrimage.

  His bed like a dream made reality.

  Or is it an irreality made dream?

  Or a †?

  Does it matter?

  His bed is, yes, much more than a bed. This bed is a normal bed like a black marble mausoleum with angels and gargoyles is a simple tomb in the earth with two pieces of wood forming a cross.

  His bed is a colossal structure—ebony with inlaid mirrors and precious stones—that seems to rock, like a ship, on the waves of his memories and on the rails by which he moves far and wide throughout his house. He has ordered (the royalties that ceaselessly pour in courtesy of the gothic fantasies of his flamboyant sister have allowed him this and so many other whims) walls torn down and hallways fit with rails and stairways turned to ramps and a complex invention woven with steel cables and pulleys that carries him here and there without ever needing to get up. Like in the old comics about the sleepyhead Little Nemo.

  His bed moves.

  His bed travels.

  The sheets like sails, the pillows like clouds where gulls get tangled and can only escape by leaving behind their feather suits, and his memories like a voyage across mutinous waves that he shouts at from the command bridge. And they pretend to obey him. From his bed, the world is horizontal, like a beach where, lying down, he walks in reverse, backward, burying his feet again in the sandy echo of his own footsteps. Some of them still appear clearly defined, others have almost been erased by the tide. But even still, he can see them with his eyes closed, he can feel them still fresh, easy to trace and to be used like the dotted lines on those maps that lead you to the site of the original treasure.

  And this is the moment when he would be forced to offer some specifics. The latitude and longitude from where he thinks all of this, for example. But, sorry, he never liked that almost reflexive gesture of the supposedly realist novels of his childhood. The almost obligatory need to situate everything (to plant and germinate the stage of a world) before the characters c
an begin to play their parts. Because reality isn’t like that; it doesn’t obey such strict orders or fall in, disciplined, like battalions preparing for the attack of the plot and the story.

  Vladimir Nabokov thinks the same thing as he does or, better, Nabokov thought it first so that, later, when he read it, he could think, so excited and pleased: “Hey, but if I think the same thing as Nabokov …”

  † Vladimir Nabokov / Interview: “Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average ‘reality’ perceived by the communal eye. […] You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects—that machine, there (the recorder?), for instance. It’s a complete ghost to me—I don’t understand a thing about it and, well, it’s a mystery to me, as much of a mystery as it would be to Lord Byron […]. We speak of one thing as being like some other thing, when what we are really craving to do is to describe something that is like nothing on earth.”

  He read that in the night, with a little blanket around his shoulders, at a time when he didn’t yet dare consider himself an insomniac, but someone who “worked better when everyone else is asleep.” And he looked at his computer and his computer looked back with a circular and red and HAL-9000 screensaver and transported part of the best day into part of the best book and “Do you read me, HAL?”

  And no: nobody read him.

  The laptop computer like a medium between his dead-living ideas and a living-dead book and the more than probable possibility that he’d already written the best thing he would ever write without being fully aware of it, but suspecting it all the same.