The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  And he wondered if he shouldn’t also blame his machine, programed with something whose name was as absurd as it is intimidating and, in the end, deceitful (WordPerfect), and include it along with mobile phones and “smart” watches and tablets in his luddite diatribes. That ghost-time invention in whose memory past and dead books reappeared in new circumstances. But it was also clear to him that without the help of the search and the cut and paste he would never have been able to write the books he wrote. Especially the last one, with all its echoes and all those reflections between some pages and others. If he had to use a normal typewriter, like from back when he was starting out, when his stories were so much easier to read aloud (and, he had to acknowledge it, his sentences sounded so much more marmoreal and immovable and finished), he would’ve never dared to use the liquid structures of his last book, of—if he could keep from getting worn out and think with greater optimism—his last book so far.

  The question, of course, was whether or not a book like that would’ve happened without such technical assistance; the enigma was whether the book’s form was more a product of the tool than of his head. Should he try to find out? Should he look for and find that book in the library of his bed and spend his insomniac night like that? No, sir! Reading yourself is difficult, hard, and even dangerous. It’s like going back to the old neighborhood and going up to that house where you once lived and putting your face up to the window and looking inside and discovering that the furnishings are different (really they aren’t different, but they’ve been rearranged, and the kitchen is now the bathroom); that other people live there now, that none of it is yours anymore and that, if you don’t leave soon, someone (who looks a lot like you or, better, looks like you once looked, and yet …) could come out with a rifle and mistake you for a psychopath and shoot first and only ask what you’re doing there after. And so you flee.

  And it’s so dark.

  And it’s raining.

  And all the dogs on that street bite your name and gnaw on your signature.

  His own books were not there, under his body. To the contrary: he had them in the most remote and frozen regions of his library, several rooms to the south, in the never-now-explored Antarctic of his readings. His books were now for him like the point at the center of the Pole: he knew of their existence, he’d seen photographs of their creaking and breakable flags waving in a cold so cold it no longer gave you time to feel the cold, it just froze you instantly; but he had no need to revisit them.

  Similarly, another unrealizable fantasy, decades ago he’d given up in defeat when it came to the chimerical promise and impossible desire to put his library in some kind of order. So he let it run wild and free throughout the rooms and the kitchen and the bathrooms. Once he’d dreamed of a possible system of classification for his always-nightmarish bookshelves, scaling to the tops and ends of the walls and filling up all the jolly corners. Wanting a criterion that would bring them closer, at least for a while, to his sister’s best and most maniacal crowds, stretching out and encompassing entire buildings. To wit: alphabetical order by author, nationality, century, subject and genre, publisher, date of publication or, even, the color of their spines, until they composed one of those horizontal and panoramic bookshelves like the most vivid of tableaux vivants, just the opposite of dead nature. But then he’d failed. And, so, ever since, that incomprehensible secret classification where the books change places when you’re not looking and provoke that terrible joy of—just as in life outside of books—finding this when you were looking for that.

  Magic.

  Presto!

  Now you see it, now you don’t just see it but so much more than it.

  Everything here and everything there.

  Miracle.

  And on more than one occasion he wondered if, maybe, the most perfect—and, of course, impossible—classification system for personal and domestic yet wild libraries would not be to have a lifetime of books, from first to last, arranged in the order they were read. Thus—like those concentric circles that tell the age of a tree when it’s chopped down—from the wood the paper’s made of we come and to the wood and paper we return. And you could—following titles and authors, high and low, clear sequences and untimely detours, that put Mary Shelley next to Charles Bukowski next to Ford Madox Ford next to Juan Carlos Onetti next to Cervantes—read the novel of your own existence, punctuated every so often by the parentheses of your own books that were written, from “Once upon a time …” to “And they died happy.” The library as liferary. Like an alternate but parallel form of the biography. A personal bibliography. The library is the mirror of the soul you sold to the Devil or God or both; because, after all, if they exist, they’re the same person. The person who enjoys writing us so much, complete with errors and moments of absolute genius, but who later leaves, and there they both go, going and going and gone.

  And they haven’t the slightest interest in reading us.

  And he—like one of those messianic and satanic mad scientists—has achieved the impossible. That his library flows—like that river flowing into the sea there outside—right into his bed.

  His bed that reminds him that, back when he was designing it, he remembered that dream once dreamed and put in writing by Leo Tolstoy. That dream much admired by Vladimir Nabokov in Anna Karenina (one of his favorite-favorite books), to which he devoted multiple pages of his lectures on literature, and described as “the double nightmare.” A nightmare dreamed by Tolstoy on the heels of the “triple dream” of that poem with concentric dreamers by Mikhaíl Lermontov. And where, in a few very perturbing lines, Tolstoy makes Anna Karenina and Vronsky dream simultaneously. The same dream, at the same time, like an unmistakable sign of the synchronicity of their love, but a dream not romantic in the least. Anna and Vronsky dream of a Russian peasant babbling in French. And Tolstoy dreams of himself in a kind of gadget-bed assembled with springs, suspended between an abyss below his feet and an abyss above his head. “The immensity below repels and frightens me; the immensity above attracts and strengthens me,” Tolstoy specified, making quite clear which of those paths most interested him. And suddenly and just before waking (and returning to his desk to punish his character, the ceaselessly afflicted Pierre in War and Peace, with a dream in which he was pursued and caught by dogs, attractive and fierce, as he pounded at the doors of the “temple of virtue”), Tolstoy hears a thundering and sweet and illuminating voice that orders him: “Pay attention! This is what it’s all about!”

  That hasn’t been his case, of course.

  He still doesn’t have the slightest idea about the story of his days and much less about the plotline of all Creation. He paid attention and yet no attention was paid to him. He gets into his bed not to drift over an abyss, but to keep his feet off the ground. The bed like a magic carpet. And that’s how he wound up deciding to go even further and not just to dream of but to build a bed en abyme. Neither war nor peace but bipolar armistice, between pacific and belligerent. A restless dream, a placid insomnia to be deposited just there. The bed like a vanishing point and him like a fugitive.

  And that’s how he conceives and imagines it.

  Like that, awake, he dreams it.

  His bed with the Victorian aesthetic of inventions he’d seen for the first time in movies of his childhood: The Time Machine, one of his mother’s favorites, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, among those his father liked best.

  His bed with four posts that don’t hold up curtains or canopies but are topped with four votive lanterns, their flames burning ceaselessly beneath a ceiling onto which they project galaxies and constellations.

  His bed to which he has added a receptacle for his bottles of Coca-Cola (the little vintage ones, emptied in just three big gulps), which he’s been drinking forever, as far back as he can remember, since back when he already wanted to be a writer, before he knew how to write. And he kept on drinking it when he was writing. And he keeps drinking it now that he’s not writing anymore. The spark of
his life, indeed. And there are nights he wonders if the residual accumulation of this caffeinated beverage over so many years in his organism might not be the root of his insomnia. And there are nights he thinks the famous and never-entirely-identified-with-absolute-certainty secret ingredient in Coca-Cola could only be him.

  And next to that always-full-to-be-emptied bottle, an empty telephone. A hollow telephone he’d emptied out. A telephone like the ones of his childhood: black, heavy, a numbered dial where you inserted your finger to turn and dial it, the way secret codes were decoded in those venerable spy movies. A telephone with a spiraling cord connecting the receiver to the dark Bakelite body that, in more than one thriller (and, yes, there was a whole subgenre of mysteries with insomniac detectives or killers), was utilized to bash heads or murder heroes and villains. A telephone of antique design, with features resembling those of—again—that time machine in that film about a time machine in which the only good thing was the time machine. One of those telephones with which, too often, it took so much work just to make brief and synthetic calls, saying only what was necessary and on to something else. One of those telephones that rang deep in the night and was so frightening. Fear itself was a telephone ringing in the dead of night, speaking in the universal language of bad news. An ominous device that, all of a sudden, took on the voice of a loved one, telling us another loved one no longer was or no longer loved us. A telephone that—in this case, with this specimen—would never ring again. Because he’d sent it to be eviscerated like a deposed king’s body, and he’s got it there as an adornment and, almost, an object of adoration, evoking times when phones didn’t go with you everywhere you went but stayed at home, like a bird in its cage, and were only used for making phone calls. The kind of device that, telephonically, was the equivalent of the monocle: nobody used it anymore and they couldn’t even remember anybody who’d once used it other than in those black and white movies where everyone speaks very quickly and hangs up even more quickly. The kind of device that—because it can’t ring—distracts him from the idea that, even if it could, nobody, on the other end of the twisted and scratchy line, would make it ring. There’s no busy signal when nobody’s picking up a phone nobody calls.

  His bed, including, also, a small retractable desk that folds out from the joint of a titanium arm, with a space for an inkwell, pens, paper, magnifying glass, and that antique toy, that little wind-up man made of tin, already mentioned back when it was new, in its youth.

  Mr. Trip.

  Here he comes again: he never functioned properly or, perhaps, always functioned perfectly; walking only backward, carrying a suitcase. It’s been years since he set that toy in motion for fear its key might break. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not necessary. Mr. Trip now fulfills the relaxing function served for many by a teddy bear or a little blanket faded after so many washings or any other comfort object of the kind used in various therapies and even seized by police and paramedics from those who end up surviving an accident or a murder.

  † Random notes for something about stuffed bears / otherwise known as teddy bears, iconic toy that owes its name to the American president Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, who hated that nickname, which he was given on a hunt in 1902, by some rather sadistic companions who tied a bear to a tree. And, the story goes, when Roosevelt saw that, he ordered them to finish off the animal quickly and mercifully. The newspapers published a caricature of the incident in which the bear was dubbed Teddy. Seeing it, the son of the founder of the Ideal Toy Company has an idea, a good idea. And he sends a prototype to Roosevelt and asks permission to use his name. Instant global success (at the same time, synchronicity, a toymaker in Germany launches his own line of little stuffed bears) that soon incorporate that exceedingly creepy mechanism of eyes that shut when you lie the bear down and open when you sit it up. And children’s books (Winnie-the-Pooh) and songs and movies (that run the gamut from childish innocence to adolescent transgression to hardcore yet fluffy porn) and novels (the little bear Aloysius, belonging to Lord Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh) and the dreaming soldiers who bring their little bears along with them to the nightmare of war.

  And possible plotlines: terrorists place bombs inside teddy bears; or they kidnap the teddy bear of a magnate and demand a ransom in the millions; or the rumor gets spread that Rosebud wasn’t a sled but a teddy bear.

  And the adults save all their teddy bears and continue to sleep with them (it’s estimated that 35 percent of the grown-up global population keeps doing so until the day they die) and the men and women pass on, but the teddy bears remain. And hotel managers are always receiving anguished calls from the far reaches of the world, people sobbing that they can’t sleep without them, that they never meant to leave them behind, begging the managers to send their little bears that have been but will never be forgotten back to them. Supposedly they are “transitional objects” that help young children to detach from their mothers and confront the long road of life alone. Alone but with a stuffed little bear. An animal that—unlike stuffed monkeys and dolphins and elephants and dogs and tigers and cats—seems to guarantee greater security and comfort and protection. Questioned for a study looking at the reason for that unconditional and never-ending love, all the subjects, invariably, gave the same answer: “It knows all my secrets.” And some have ventured even further never to return. There’s a documentary about them. They transform themselves into furries, into human stuffed animals, into people who live inside teddy-bear costumes, and who, no doubt, dream the sweetest and deepest dreams of all.

  And again, coming back, here once more. He never had a teddy bear like that (and much less did he turn himself into a giant stuffed bear). But he still has this, his little tin traveling man. Mr. Trip. With its, for him, always noteworthy particularity, a reversed polarity: though there was a time when he even tried using it as a substitute for counting sheep (he imagined it always retroceding, moving backward toward the interior of airplanes, always flying in reverse, so the point of departure become the destination), that tin toy is now a mascot for not sleeping. A mechanism that makes him think of all the time behind him, that forces him to reread everything that happened and happens again every time he remembers it, though he doesn’t wind it up and let whatever happens happen, which is what happened, yes.

  And, next to Mr. Trip, there’s even a special spot for that invention that’d been developed for all those increasingly numerous writers and was petrifying their cerebral innervation, whose function was to appreciate reality as they became more and more creative. More fictitious in times when the confessional and the testimonial had taken over. A small terminal loaded with autobiographical fragments and revising all of it, inserting it into the context of current events: cleaning it like a fish of its scales, removing all imaginative gestures to serve it up as pure-boiled or steamed chronicle without added ingredients of any kind. He tried it a couple of times; but he wasn’t at all interested in that clear linearity, that lack of style as style, that “commitment” to the real world. But many people plugged in, delighted to be there, to be guests on more and more TV talk shows and to write more and more newspaper columns where they opined about their first love or the recent elections. And to write a lot about themselves. A wish granted. A blessed curse. Like that horrifying story he read and got scared by for the first time when he was a kid. Again: “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs. Soon all of them, wrung out, began to die off because they had nothing left to tell, to tell about themselves. He never contracted that disease that came to be known as Qwerty’s Malady. Or that he named thusly, in one of his many waking dreams and he no longer knows if he remembers it as a nightmare or as a dream he hopes will come true. That defense mechanism against not dreaming: waking dreaming, waking up dreaming, dreaming dreams with eyes wide open. And so, anyway, Qwerty’s Malady: the virus that attacked and struck down writers by the hundreds, all at once, no-names and celebrities alike, whose bodies had to be quickly incinerated for fear
of contagion.

  And so, no more epic funerals like those of insomniacs Charles Dickens (last words: “On the ground!”) and Victor Hugo (last words: “This is the fight of day and night. I see black light”) and Leo Tolstoy (last words, depending on the version you prefer: “But the peasants, how do they die?” or “Run! Run!”).

  Just, a special and increasingly robust and healthy section in the newspapers: cultural obituaries. And—if there were any and if anybody spoke them—those firsthand last words are always suspect. And he remembers that his mother and his father once fantasized about growing old and, when they were old (something that, they were certain, would never happen because someone would discover the elixir of eternal youth), setting up an “agency of last words … slogans for the dying, custom-made for imminent death … the spark of death and the rest, not refreshing but embalming and …”

  There it is. It’s over.

  That waking dream.

  It doesn’t last long, it fades quickly, like one of those effervescent pills to assist digestion after a heavy meal. Short-lived relief to hide his own ailment, the impossibility of falling asleep, like a screen hiding another impossibility: the impossibility of that form of dreaming that is writing. Which, for him and inside him, isn’t even pure laziness or the law of minimal effort or having enough money to spend on anything he wants. His thing is impotence and drought. He put his last words in writing, but he’s gone on living. Anticlimax, lengthy coda, an ending so open it seems like a beginning. So, once in a while (once in a great while) he winks an eye (the latest computers no longer require typing fingers) and there, on the almost-organic plasma of the screen, he reads “zzzzzzz.” And he must stay awake and horizontal.

  In his bed. It’s not bad. It could be worse. He could be standing up and unable to sleep. Or upside down. Or walking. Besides, he likes that his bed buzzes and vibrates. He likes to feel like part of a machine that achieves its goal to perfection (and that, though shame keeps him from even thinking of it, includes the vanity of a sophisticated mechanism of pipes and swirling waters enabling him to carry out both physiological functions without needing to get up). The bed is, after and above all, a machine for lying down and he can do that. Lying down is the consolation prize (or punishment, depending on the day, depending on the night) for one who doesn’t sleep.