The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Besides, SHE-IKEA had shot him up to volcanic heights of a rare orgasm that night when he arrived, almost dragging himself, to the emergency room, certain his heart was breaking down inside his chest. Thinking all the while of things unthinkable in that place: possible short fictions (which he wrote down in another of his notebooks) and brief capsules of nonfiction. Example: the fact that between one beat and the next, organically and technically, the heart pauses, as if doubting its pace, to then continue on doing its thing. A true petite mort reminding him that, throughout this long life, everything is hanging by a taut thread or a high wire, when it comes to finding a way out of the labyrinth or across the abyss. And so, for that reason, from the day of our birth and all throughout our lives, we never stop experiencing a succession of tiny deaths. A Morse code of dots between dashes, a kind of coming soon; an empty parentheses between a pair of colons until the cardiac rhythm begins to slow and grow more irregular and the polarities flip and finally the pause becomes a constant and the beat a pause and a stop. Meanwhile and in the meantime, he thinks, that silence that always resides between two beats amounts to the third part of the life of the heart.

  To another third part: like the slept or dreamed part.

  That third part that we spend with our eyes closed and our mind more open than ever and that signifies, yes, as dreamers we all always die young: more or less before reaching an average of thirty years of shut-eyed life. The age that, in his brain and in his heart, he was and would forever remain. The age he more or less was when he published his first book, which—he discussed this at some point with several colleagues, the same thing happened to all of them—is the age writers seem to be stuck at forever. Like those silhouettes imprinted on the walls among the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the force of the radiation of the first and unforgettable time. A debut that fixes and legitimizes you and prevents you from recalling that atomic second when you ceased to be the possibility of a mechanism to become the reality of an explosion that wants to illuminate and move the world. Something you can’t and don’t want to forget years later. Having made mistakes, of course, but mistakes more or less paid for whenever they don’t imply homicide or suicide committed in a trance, as a way to go along crossing yourself out until you wind up, like what’s set out in Transparent Things or in the inconclusive Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov. With a lot behind you, and yet—for a while—everything before you.

  Almost three decades after his public debut as a writer—decades that amount to an eternity and not a return—he was accumulating too many small mistakes that, by accumulation, add up to one enormous error, one irreparable manufacturing defect.

  It was then that (though he still went to dinners where he discovered he was the only one who’d lived through, live and direct, man’s arrival to the Moon or the breakup of The Beatles) the dream began to fall apart, to kick off the blankets, to play it cool.

  After turning fifty, his great crisis also reached into his nights: it was then the dream awoke. He struggled not only to fall asleep but also to stay asleep. He slept, yes; but at most a couple hours and then, all of a sudden, he would find himself lost in the darkness but lit up by too many thoughts. The childish fantasies didn’t hold up to the wear and the degradation of the ill known as maturity, that stage in the life cycle of fruit that precedes rot. And he’d had the waking dream of trying, nothing more and nothing less, to destroy the planet, barricading himself inside a Swiss particle accelerator and …

  And HE-IKEA had interceded on his behalf and paid his fine at a Swiss jail, after he’d tried to destroy the world or, better, like he said before, to rewrite it in his image and semblance and fantasizing that he would be transformed into an enlightened and all-powerful deity, after forcing his way into and pressing all the red buttons on the control boards at a hadron collider near Geneva.

  A city where he’d come to deliver one of his increasingly infrequent talks about the dangers of the internet and its environs for literature in particular and human relations in general. To “denounce” for a fee how—at the mercy of those who were caught in the act—up-and-coming writers were renouncing one of the most basic aspects of their training: to paint with letters a faraway painting; to film with words a movie that’s almost impossible to see again and that, when it does come back around, was a cinemateca copy, increasingly fragile or flagellated by black-and-white commercial interruptions; to hum the recording of a song on a record or cassette that played over and over until it turned to dust. And thus to change and rewrite (and repaint and refilm and rerecord) all those things in their own way and style, in order to prove that a thousand words could say something different and far more personal than any image or sound. And also to warn that readers no longer missed or wondered what their loved—and possibly unfaithful, of course—one was doing. And to remember that there was a time when the imagination flew instead of crashing into an immediate and not-all-that-creative fact checking of everything. Everyone knew where everyone was now; nobody ignored what movie Christopher Walken had debuted in (but, yes, they might not know who Christopher Walken was). And there was no longer any need to describe: because showing on the screen, pointing out with an impolite finger, was so much quicker and supposedly more precise and easy to dismiss and on to something else.

  Also gone was the concept of rarity, of having something almost nobody else had, because, in one way or another, everything was there in the air of the internet. The exception being, yes, first editions of books: one of the few objects that continue to be tangible and palpable pieces of private property. Editions endowed with that yellowish and soulful aroma of sweaty soup in the winter that old and immortal books acquire. Therefore and on that basis, he’d “composed” a “denunciation of the state of things” (to his regret and embarrassment, as more dates on that never-ending tour keep passing, closer to the disgust of Bill Murray than the enthusiasm of Robin Williams), which once had made him “simpatico” to the tracers of sharp-cornered roundtables and the programming of “literary festivals.” A kind of civil rant that combined bad jokes and serious concerns, concerns that actually concerned him less all the time. On the other hand, the threat of the electronic book hadn’t amounted to much. (Suddenly, gadgets appeared in such quick succession, with no transition, annulling each other in a flash. Formats that no longer supported anything and disappeared overnight for the dawning of a new product that retired the previous one, rendering it useless; not like before, like when the VHS had coexisted for quite a while with the DVD, and the Walkman had coexisted for quite a while with the Discman, and the Homo Neanderthal with the Homo Cro-Magnon; and others have already warned that soon there wouldn’t been enough electricity produced to satisfy so many plug-in-able devices and plugged-in people.) Their devotees and worshippers (the same people who had no problem paying small fortunes for unsustainable and voluminous volumes by Taschen that they only ever opened once) had lost all interest in the idea and the ease of carrying approximately two thousand pirated books they’d never read around with them. And holding sway beyond any novelty or technological temptation was the same primordial and organic fear as always, a fear that had nothing to do with the digital or the virtual or the technological: people read fewer books all the time.

  Why?

  Simple and even understandable: such a ceaseless procession of new and increasingly advanced models (but also more fragile and with increasingly brief lifespans of utility) had generated a complete lack of interest, when not outright hostility, toward the more solid stuff of the past.

  And in the past, always and forever, were books.

  All of them.

  The classics and the contemporary and the immediately disposable.

  Books that were written or had been written so long before to be read forever after and that demanded too much time and concentration on just one thing when it was possible to explore so many different things.

  Books that sank you into the depths when all you wanted was to float on the s
urface of everything, without boundaries or borders.

  That’s why people preferred to read immediate and quick things that didn’t slow you down too much in moving on to the next thing. Text messages. Twitter. Song and flight of birds, birds with the irksome ability to defecate in the air, sullying as they fly and sing. Right now. That’s why people read more on phones and watches. And he still remembered times when being successful made you into someone who no longer needed to know what time it was or who was calling on the phone, someone out of reach of everything and everyone. But suddenly, phones and watches had turned into prestige objects to which everyone submitted with a dumb smile and vacant eyes and with the certainty that that was, for them, the way to be a chosen one, to belong to the very few. And this was confirmed every time he entered a metro or train car, or an airplane, or a bus (dreaming of any of those modes of transportation, the dream dictionaries informed him, meant “Moving up in life!!!” except when you dream they come off the rails or explode or crash, which means “Something bad is going to happen!!!”), or so many other places where nobody reads books and, as such, nobody moved forward except toward something bad happening. Or not even that: nothing happened. They read, all of them, about themselves or about real virtuous friends or false virtual friends. Or they tracked their heartbeats or the ups and downs of the atmospheric pressure. And so, it was now nearly impossible to participate in that venerable sport, around the city or high in the sky, consisting of surreptitiously and tensely contorting your neck to scan the cover and confirm the book some other passenger was reading and, much less, top off that confirmation by executing the treacherous triple-jump adolescent fantasy of, between one station and the next or over the course of several airborne hours, falling in love with that peculiar but singularly beautiful girl, reading a heavily-underlined copy of Franny and Zooey with exclamation points in the margins.

  He felt sorry for anybody incapable of feeling what it felt like to feel things like that. Because why should he be interested in the inferior beings who, unlike him, weren’t intrigued, for example, by what could be done here and now with everything the nineteenth century had to teach about the novel, without falling into pale imitations or pasty pastiches. And yet, in exchange for a few bills, they all gravitated toward the antimatter of book fairs, increasingly numerous and well attended while simultaneously selling fewer books.

  The stellar moment of his odd number was when he brought his hand to his chest “where you keep your heart and your pistol” and pulled out from the inside of his jacket pocket an almost prehistoric mobile phone. A 2005 model. A mobile phone that only served to make phone calls. And then he explained to the audience in attendance that he regarded this gadget with a combination of disgust and pity. A device on which he ceaselessly received SMSs from the manufacturer requesting that he return it in exchange for a latest generation model that he would be given free of charge. Something that made him suspect—and that’s how he explained it to the auditorium—that “the electronic technology of this near-fossil was probably far more efficient, it’s never broken down on me, than that of its descendants; and that compromises the company’s executives and techs who don’t want it out there making the rounds anymore … There are nights when I think, before long, they’ll send out a squad of ninjas to reclaim it by force.” And, amid all that unfunny comedy and light humor, he’d dropped one certainty on the audience like a cluster bomb, leaving them a little shaken and not Tweeting or WhatsApping, at least for a few seconds, seconds that should be made eternal, restless, abstinent.

  Then, of course, in that place, they all belonged to the first generation that grew up with mobile phones. And he could almost swear (almost) they were all squirming with discomfort when he said the following words, reading them aloud from one of his notebooks:

  † Think about it a little: not that long ago none of you were going around carrying those little devices with you everywhere and you lived lives that were more or less the same as the ones you live now and you were masters of the same intelligence quotient and the same powers of internal and external observation … Tell me, what is it that’s changed so much in your lives and the lives of your acquaintances in recent years that’s made you feel the obligation or need to share everything that happens to you and everything that you happen to think of, eh? Sure, if all of you had, courtesy of some fork in space-time, been in Dallas with your little phones that morning in 1963, we’d probably know exactly how many shooters there were and where they shot from and we’d be able to see JFK’s head explode from all possible angles. But seriously, I mean it, believe me: nobody is interested in that photo of what you’re eating or that sunset you’re seeing or your most recent deep thought you just have to share with all of humanity unless you’re interested in their reflections and their sunsets and their meals too … Isn’t it true that not that long ago you liked many fewer things and that you took your time to think about whether something was or wasn’t worthy of a like? Isn’t it true that just a few years ago you didn’t read so much and definitely didn’t write so much? Isn’t it true that it used to make more to sense to go to the bathroom to read than to write? Isn’t it true that you used to live without wondering whether everything you did or thought was inspiring enough and worthy of being instantaneously and constantly sent out into the fullest emptiness in all of history? Isn’t it true that those lives were actually more interesting and that, every so often, it was fun to sit down with a friend, live and direct and in person, and say to them: “You have no idea what happened to me last week” and then proceed to tell them with a full luxury of details, just as you had practiced in your head, with authentic tears and laughter? Isn’t it true that it’s more appropriate to tell people about your pregnancies or tumors in privacy and one on one and in different ways depending on the person and not to tell everyone at the same time with the same words? Isn’t it true that there was a certain charm to coming home and—when it wasn’t bad news—finding a handwritten note on the ground beside the door or on a desk or stuck to the refrigerator door and opening it and under that cold light reading the warmth of that message? Isn’t it true that it’s disturbing to think that the activity you do most throughout the day is stare at your phone? Isn’t it true that it’s much more pleasant not to feel that already-diagnosed-by-neurologists “phantom vibration” at the height of your pockets, as if it were the phone that we forgot and that isn’t even there calling and reminding us of its existence from far away, like the reflex and memory of some unforgettable amputated body part. Isn’t it true that you kind of miss that delectable torture of not being able to remember something—a name, a title, a song—and instead of finding it and terminating that torture immediately via Google, allowing that forgotten thing to live and expand and, while you try to overcome it, to awaken other memories and other songs and titles and names? Isn’t it true that it used to be so gratifying to be the first to remember something in a gathering of the absentminded? Isn’t it true that it was much easier to detect the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s and to get ahead in its treatment without the use of instantaneous memory aids? Isn’t it true that it was exciting when every time you took a photo you were also making a choice? Isn’t it true that it was better to have memories that were far more precise than all those blurry photos where you can’t even tell who’s in them? Isn’t it true that it was more exciting when every time you didn’t take a photo you were also making a choice? Isn’t it true that you used to film and photograph your kids less and you looked at them more and saw them better at home or at end-of-year performances or on their birthdays? Isn’t it true that life was a little better when everyone who made fun of you in high school or at work could only do it from nine to five and not like now, on Facebook (“Facebook friend” was a great oxymoron, he thought) or Instagram or wherever, at all hours of the day and night, and you there promising and deceiving yourself that you won’t log back on to see how they hit you and insult you and laugh in your screen-face. Isn’t it true
that it’s better to go out into the street and meet up with friends and not to capture virtual monsters that cost you less and less money, which takes more and more work to earn? Isn’t it true that it was better to go out walking in the street and randomly run into people instead of knowing where they are at all times but never seeing them in person? Isn’t it true that it was so nice to go out walking and be sure that nobody could call you on the phone? Isn’t it true that it was better to go out into the street when there were none of those new stoplights, on the ground, specially located to protect people who keep getting run over because they’re walking, head down, looking at the screen of their phone? Isn’t it true that it was nobler to immediately come to the aid of the unknown victim of an accident instead of making a video and “sharing it” first? Isn’t it true that it’s weird that doctors, when it comes time to let family members say goodbye to their loved ones—many of them dying because they were so concentrated on their phones they never saw what was coming at them until it was too late—have opted, I read about this the other day, to unplug the screens of the monitors that register the dying vital signs, because many people, reflexively, ignore the dying person and stare at those devices that make sounds like a video-game, and are the sounds of “game over”? Isn’t it true that everything sounded better when all the phones sounded more or less the same, when their voice was more or less the same? Isn’t it true that you kind of miss those days when having a good memory was something to be proud of and not something we put in the hands of that device in our hands? Isn’t it true that it was exciting to memorize the phone number of a person you loved and to dial their digits one at a time, as if they were the letters of the person’s name, instead of just pressing a button without ever knowing what those numbers might add to or subtract from our hearts? Isn’t it true that we should be prouder of the memory of our soft brain than that of our hard disc? Isn’t it true that the world seemed better ordered and fairer when it wasn’t so easy to reach anybody via email, and certain levels of friendship and hierarchies of familiarity and rules of protocol were respected? Isn’t it true that things worked better when someone asked the legitimate owner first before casually giving away their phone number and email address to just anybody? Isn’t it true that it was a pleasure to unplug the phone or to think that you’d achieved enough success in your life that you could dispense with it, that you had someone to deal with those ring-ring-rings or with those ringtones personalized—like those car horns that used to sing “La cucaracha”—with songs from TV shows or movies or famous speeches or, even worse, the wailing of your own baby? Isn’t it true that you made love more often or at least thought about making love more often or slept more and more deeply dreaming about making love and not about staring at and talking on your phone? Isn’t it true that it was much more enjoyable to go to the bathroom with a book than a phone? Isn’t it true that spy thrillers and love stories were much better and more exciting when their moles and kitty cats had to search for and locate a phone on the street or in a bar and weren’t carrying it with them everywhere? Isn’t it true that the president of the United States still looks more elegant in the oval office with an old-school telephone and not holding one of those plastic and metal wafers? Isn’t it true that everything was more convenient when you didn’t have to declare them at airports as if they were lethal weapons? Isn’t it true that it was easier to live a calmer life in a world where phones weren’t exploding and the new model of something wasn’t worse than previous models? Isn’t it true that your lives were better when you were people who had a thought, and thought about it for a while before broadcasting it, and your face and name were out in the open and not the maniacal masks of avatars and aliases and anonymous and invasive body snatchers? Isn’t it true that everything was much nicer when phone calls were much less frequent and lasted much less time? Isn’t it true that life was more relaxed when you spent time reading absolutely nothing and maybe achieved some kind of Zen emptiness, unlike now when you read all the time, and all you read are brief inanities that, in their accumulation, end up turning you into a big inane nothing? Isn’t it true that what makes you check your social media profiles every minute isn’t the satisfaction of seeing yourselves there but of confronting the constant dissatisfaction of not really being seen by anyone? Isn’t it true that everything was much nicer when you didn’t have to take constant and interminable seminars to be able to use new applications, suspecting that soon everything would completely flip upside down and you’d have to start from a technological ground zero and take classes to learn how to hold a spoon and slurp down your soup? Isn’t it true that everything seemed much grander and much more expressive when the world was much smaller and much more incommunicado? Isn’t it true that everything felt much more exciting and adventurous and proximal and close when the long-distance thing existed? Isn’t it true that it was easier to trust those foldable and uncomfortable and silent but oh so much more believable paper maps that, in addition to showing you where you were, pointed out where you had been and where you would be? Isn’t it true that the air felt lighter and the landscape shone far brighter when the only thing you knew about writers was what was in their books or in the occasional interview and when you knew absolutely nothing about the life and work of readers because readers didn’t write? …