Plus, the sparking scent of electricity (the invisible scent of something invisible) covers up the swampy smell of his own acoustic (but rusting, that rust that never rests) body and makes the metal in the molars of his childhood flash, a metal (a toxic amalgam of silver, tin, aluminum, copper, and mercury) that, so long ago, a dentist explained to him should be replaced with one of those new artisanal plastic or ceramic substances. A dentist whose office he never returned to, because her knowledge was insufficient when it came to clarifying his great dental question: how was it that those multicolor stripes of toothpaste emerged from their tubes so straight and well separated and didn’t get mixed together when you squeezed them, there inside, where it was incomprehensible how they were able to get them inside without twisting them together, eh? The dentist (one of the many who throughout his life looked at his teeth with a combination of horror and pity) pretended not to hear him, probably attributing his curiosity to the effect of the anesthesia. And she opted to return to one of the favorite territories of dentists in particular and deliverers of healthcare in general: terror, the terrortory, all the frightening things that can happen to you there, always your own fault, for not having visited the given arcanist more often. And the dentist went on telling him that the most fundamentalist practitioners of her trade insisted the slow yet constant flow of mercurial vapors from the teeth to the brain were responsible for all the mysterious and inexplicable diseases, for those fires in the mind that every so often bring down their thinkers, accused of seeking refuge in the psychosomatic until it’s already too late and the fire makes it impossible to see the forest. The metal in those molars, the woman went on, could be the cause of other annoyances: sometimes it allowed you to tune in radio broadcasts, songs and voices, and ever more telephonic videos that could be mistaken for the stuff of dreams and cause sudden waking and insomnia. Who knows … That would explain his present condition: he doesn’t sleep because actually everything he thinks he’s thinking might be nothing more than a random collection of rants and sounds piped in from far away. His head like the last radio, playing shooting stars, waiting for the last fire truck from hell. Live and direct. That would, also, he tells himself, be of some comfort; but he’s not kidding himself: there are too many personal details in those ethereal-cerebral waves. Too many names belonging to others, yet his, and too many actions unlike him but that he has to own in his monologue, more that of lay-down tragedian than a stand-up comedian. More laughing with tears than crying with laughter. The finite but increasingly-long-to-tell jest of his past repassing and revising itself, yes, from the here and now to the there and then, when, if there’s something of which he’s certain, it’s that, in bed, everyone, in a way, turns back into children of impossible-to-measure dimensions. The size of that head they’ve had since so early on and with which the body only attains harmony when they’re about twelve years old. A body whose—like now—length or height turn out to be difficult to specify under sheets and blankets. The only thing he doesn’t doubt is that there—body on mattress and not on earth—everyone, in a way, regained the condition of those feverish children who stay in bed, reading all throughout eternal and elastic days when school seems to acquire the contours of a mythic land.
And—healthily infirm—floating in the darkness, the bed like a raft or an island, like him now, someone no school would accept as teacher or student.
In this bed.
And, between the legs of this bed, almost as tall as those of a giraffe, multiple bookcases. Arranged there—down below, like cats of ink and paper—the first editions of his favorite books; some signed and dedicated to him or to strangers whose descendants (the books of the dead are the first thing processed by their living survivors, the paper alongside the ashes) dumped all of that on second-hand bookstores, never suspecting what it was they were virtually giving away.
And his unpublished journals and his photo albums from times when photographs still had to be developed and you had to wait and they never came out entirely how you imagined when you’d framed them.
And his notebooks—one for each of his published books—that every so often he flips through and eyes as if they were family records and in which, passing through, he’s moved to find how each of them begins with slow and deliberate handwriting, more time given to the notes themselves than on what he’ll do with those notes. And how, as time passed, he spent less time on them and more on the manuscript. And his handwriting became crazier and wilder, almost illegible, like a Hyde imposing himself on a Jekyll, anxious to get out of there only to come back and realize the best moment of his life is the brief moment of transformation and not the more-or-less-drawn-out moment of being transformed.
And all his many biji notebooks. Notebooks with broken lines and inopportune quotations (visionary quotations of others blindly quoted; but the idea was, always, that those lines from other writers operated as part of the action, almost like characters).
And random and somnambulant photographs and ideas that, they say, it was better not to awaken from their trance for fear they would lose their reason or their reasons for coming into being.
And his collection of writer biographies from which he extracted famous lines and oft-cited pronouncements that he clung to to keep from being pulled under with the shipwreck of the night. And so, big names and marmoreal quotes and him spinning through all of it: like a Forest Gump launching forward, magnetized by celebrities sighted in various sites, citing them, so the night would pass more quickly.
Thus, and therein, the lie of the present as something clever and current (when really it’s just something instantaneous, an instant, something that, right away, already happened) and of the future as something splendid, a time when everything would be better except for the fatal clause, the fine print, that you won’t be part of it.
Again, once more, as always, forever returning to the same thing, the thing you can always return to: the past, of course, that equally placid and unstable parasite, feeding off the substance of everything yet to come. And the terrible paradox we opt to think about as little as possible: many, too many times, only in the distant morning or the morning after, do we attain the certainties and reasons for something we did yesterday. Everything that, suddenly, we recall as if it were an old photograph we rediscover stuck inside a book. But, even still, for that reason, we prefer to contemplate the future like a light at the end of the tunnel, a tunnel full of intestinal byways. What, they say, we see before us when we come to our own THE END. Something that, confronting the inevitable, we choose to think of as wondrous in the true sense of the word wonder. Thinking that, if you think about it a little, the future, right now, already contains us, he thinks. And so, overcoming that small and agonizing pain caused by being aware that everything will go on after we’re gone, the wonder and relief of believing, he believes, in something we won’t be part of, imagining it without any kind of passion or commitment. A perfect place, because it no longer makes the mistake or error of including us, or of considering the possibility of us figuring in the plot, or of thinking of us so we think of it. Looking at it from outside, from overhead, and from a distance, from that privileged perspective only possessed by divine immortals in ancient times and the gods of not-so-ancient times, the gods of his childhood.
And the last song has given way to the next song.
And now, from the house on the other side of the garden, someone who he’s heard scream many times, with all the power in his lungs, “When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide. Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride. Till I get to the bottom and I see you again. Yeah yeah yeah hey.”
Yes, you can climb up and go down and slide to the bottom, but you always end up seeing it all again.
Yeah yeah yeah hey.
To go and to come back.
To turn around and to do it again.
Another song of his, of his songs, but anterior to another song he heard before, that one that goes “Same as it ever was … Time isn�
�t holding up,” that drifted in to him, when night was falling, from the house where The Intruders reside and, supposedly, create. And it unsettles him a bit that The Intruders are turning into some sort of DJs of his past; that The Intruders are playing the soundtrack of his nights in reverse, as if they were approaching him from the other side of the street, crossing through the forest, coming ever closer to where he was, to where he felt so far away.
To that night, without going any farther.
He thinks “that night” and he’s moved by the possibilities those words offer him. A concept of going and coming, yin and yang, right and left, front and back: because “that night” sounds to him like a tempting beginning (with “That night …” functioning as a substitute for “Once upon a time …”) or an ending without extenuating circumstances (with a “… that night.” And that’s it, over and out, end of the world news).
Here and now, tonight, that other night comes back.
And it doesn’t come back alone.
It comes back with so many other things.
For example: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” He suddenly remembers that line. From Graham Greene.
And yet another from Flannery O’Connor: “Anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his life.”
He remembers, too, that years ago he copied them down in a biji notebook, because he was sure someday they would be useful to him.
But no. The lines remained random and he never inserted them (he forgot to) in his novel about childhood and its myths and not—the one from Greene coming from The Power and the Glory—in his Mexican novel either.
Maybe because they were oft-quoted quotations.
But he’s using them now. Not in his writing, but aloud, and rewriting them in his own way: “There is always one moment in the old age of a survivor of childhood when the door closes and shuts in the past.”
And, yes, contrary to what people say, it’s not that you’re always going back to childhood, rather, it’s childhood that’s always crashing back down on top of you. Childhood like one of those waves that seems to come out of nowhere and flatten us and—laughing and swallowing water—makes us think about the eddy it once was and, in the blink of an eye, is again. As if naked but clothed in darkness, stuck—again, sci-fi—inside pajamas of an athletic cut, woven with an organic fabric of antigravity plasma-steel (preventing those falls of old age where the earth seems to begin to reclaim your body and death is, always, slipping in via a broken hip and hello crack-up and goodbye hula-hoop and welcome to the limbo-world) and that, when he walks, keeps him always about five centimeters above the ground (like some characters at the ends of some stories, like being always in love without needing to fall in love) and makes his body almost cubical and disproportionate and, oh, the things that occur to him. A body, now that he thinks it and remembers it, again, like that singer of spastic phrasing and movements, singing that thing about, again, “Time is an asterisk … Same as it ever was …” in that song in that film of that concert of that band that Penelope loved so much and that he listened to and, he already remembered, even danced to, quite a bit in fact. A model of pajamas—he invents, he imagines—first designed for people struck with mysterious paralyzing illnesses, but adopted in the end by almost everyone, no longer with any desire to move or make the slightest effort. And, hey, is he hallucinating all this due to lack of sleep? These floating pajamas and this moveable bed? This démodé and ever so stale version of futurism? So much living to come to this, to the beginning of the idea of the future, without it having undergone a single evolution? Not even that previous and at-some-point-novel and already-antiquated variant where it’s always raining and the robots function worse than his own Mr. Trip? Could it be possible that such a thing might be possible? The future as it was understood and anticipated in the days of his childhood? In the sixties, in the last authentically sci-fi decade, before the future (with cities of glass and light and those superior beings arriving from tomorrow to warn of an imminent holocaust and Klattu barada nikto) took off from the tomorrow and leapt over the today and the now and proved itself to be far more banal? Or in his adolescence of predator and replicant and terminator and alien?
If so, he—who in the past read many novels of anticipation and always wanted to write something in it—never liked the technical part of the genre. Not now not then. Nothing matters less to him. And the books of science fiction he enjoyed most were the ones that ended up being books with science fiction and not of science fiction. Books in which every marvelous and imagined datum was but a faint fragrance or an uninteresting part of the scenography. And he liked those books from his past that took place in the future, yes, but whose protagonists lived and even suffered as if in a present where nothing worked all that well: androids disobeyed, nuclear cells inside rockets were left stranded in orbit, presidents pressed the wrong button, home computers got blocked because somebody sent a computer virus via email, social networks where people went around insulting each other under aliases or stole each other’s identities, things like that.
So he won’t say anything else about pajamas (probably inspired by the cuts and confections of elastic miniskirts and tight and instantly-out-of-style-but-eternally-arousing get-ups from those photographic productions his parents shot in front of backdrops with tons of acrylic and neon and monoliths for those ever-so in magazines with names like Astro or Tesla or Moloko Plus). Or about what did or didn’t happen in these last few years (is anyone interested in the thing about three great Islamic wars, that thing about the kamikaze bees, that thing about space-time distortions as a result of the decodification of all those prehistoric gravitational waves, that thing about the shift in the orbit of the moon and the colonists abandoned there to their fate, that thing about coastal cities underwater, that thing about the end of fertility and the death of sperm, the thing about himself as a frustrated master of the end of the world inside that Swiss hadron collider?); and he’ll concentrate on his thing. On the lack of sleep and the increasing abundance of waking dreams and in tracing the latest straight lines of his horizontal trajectory, as if running a blind race. Breathing deeply to fantasize about obtaining, at least, the consolation prize of being able to, at last, close his eyes. But no. No such luck. All that’s left for him is to lose time, trusting that time is falling out of his pockets, to beg for it to stop passing or for it to pass a bit faster, composing—could he go any lower?—mental chansons de geste to his high-tech organic pajamas. Pajamas that, at times, if you don’t inspect them carefully and just touch them, running a hand over his body, actually seem like normal, everyday pajamas. As normal as that real bed beneath his imagined bed. Flannel pajamas with a red and black plaid pattern, only different in their size from the ones he wore to sleep (and not to imagine luminous mutant pajamas in the darkness) when he was a kid. When sleep came like a cyclone, sweeping away everything, taking him by surprise, holding a great book about and with extinct extraterrestrials in his little hands. When he would never have thought to imagine that in the future he would spend hours (all times at the same time) imagining a futuristic garment specially recommended for those who had spent at least a third of their lives sitting and typing (reading and writing is another form of dreaming, another third of life) like immovable Sitting Bulls dreaming they were galloping Crazy Horses, with spinal columns that once were straight like an exclamation point now twisted like a question mark. And with no answer as to why they can no longer escape to that other third part of life: the part of sleeping and of dreaming and not of reading or writing or daydreaming about what they’ll never write or read.
The part where he didn’t think about what he was writing, but where, even still, something could always happen to him or he could always happen to think of something worthy of putting in writing.
Without excuses. Without alibis.
Because, of course, it’s true, though for him it doesn’t suffice as an explana
tion or feel like a justification: as people age they sleep less and sleep worse. Which (unlike the thing about the fragility of bones, which have been reinforced with graceful application of titanium coating) the specialists still haven’t been able to remedy. In the beginning, it was thought—the difficulty of keeping eyes closed—to be due to a kind of physical-psychological shift. That, having less time left in life, those who have been alive longer decided their days would begin earlier. In the dark (soon there would be more than enough time to sleep deeply and not wake up).
And in that way they could witness the birth of the light of day and accept what that light has to offer before those younger than them. A dirty and tremulous light. A light not yet transparent, but one you see and can almost touch, rubbing off on the tips of your fingers. A light with the color of the screens of the childish televisions of his childhood. Televisions that made him so happy whenever the people in charge of programming those nonstop cycles of multi-genre movies on Saturdays—him on the couch, cradling a bottle of Coca-Cola—decided it was time, once again, to broadcast Mr. Sardonicus or The Baron Sardonicus (he’d even gotten a DVD where they’d given it the title The Baron Mr. Sardonicus). A movie that his sister Penelope, of course, and she wasn’t wrong, had accused of stealing “parts and sentiments” from Wuthering Heights. But that was, nevertheless, his favorite movie to watch “at home” (2001: A Space Odyssey was his favorite to watch “on the big screen”); and oh how he savored that moment where, almost at the end, William Castle, the movie’s director, interrupted the action and asked the viewers if they would rather forgive or punish the monstrous mister/baron. And, of course, they say, they never found footage of the supposedly merciful option, but it wasn’t necessary: because everybody wanted the bad guy to meet a bad end. The petrified smile of Sardonicus (the state of Sardonicus’s teeth was even worse than his own as a kid, maybe that’s why he liked that movie so much) on a television on which you changed the channel by hand and with movements like those of turning the little dial to open a safe. Back then the channels stopped broadcasting around three in the morning, offering the last viewers that gray and staticky vibration where, if you stared at it, you started to feel you could see things and you ended up seeing visions there, in the ether behind the glass.
The Dreamed Part Page 43