Then he paused. And he felt them reflect, restless and even embarrassed at having succumbed to such a panacea/placebo; but the doubt and fear lasted but a sigh, no longer than it took them to type one hundred and forty characters. Then they took his picture and sent it with some little messages on their messenger apps with texts like: “This guy is SSINF, LOL, hahaha .” And something told him the person who sent all that could be none other than the girl—overweight with gigabytes and inactivity, her body stuffed into a T-shirt that, ironically and involuntarily, read WISH I WERE HERE—whom he’d had to yell at to get up and stop blocking the entrance with her ass and her screen. Whereas others came down on his side, but with rather disturbing (or equally ignorant) lines of reasoning, like that the Apple logo was the fruit of the tree of knowledge nibbled by temptation, that it was no coincidence that the price of the first Mac had been the oh so antichristian $666.66, and that the scriptures, in Revelations, warned about the “masses following Satan” and … There they were. Some and others, people who not only moved their lips when they read, but who, also, moved their lips when they wrote, and barely moved their lips when they spoke, having lost all ability to modulate their words and make them and make themselves heard and understood. The world had been invaded and conquered by fools. No: they weren’t even fools. They were fool’s fools. And yes, they detested him and he detested them (pretty quickly he realized he had before him people whose sole activity was to read badly and write worse, all the time, when they never would have had to, when really they were made for other things, things where letters and sentences were secondary or tertiary). And he thought how much nicer the world would be if they all admitted they hated each other. How much simpler and more comprehensible. How much easier to take. To understand affection as an exceptional and infrequent aberration and love as a mythological creature. And not to expect any of that to present itself or to take place. Hating was so much more logical. Hate was a great primary source. Hate sheltered you and provided warmth (“I write because I hate,” William H. Gass admitted once, a writer who once also referred to the past as that cape and hat you throw with carelessness and even disdain onto the sofa upon entering, knowing full well that when you leave you’ll have to put them back on again). And then he tried to extract some of that thick black bile that was filling his body up to his throat and making him gag in public. But his was a sterile and barren hate where nothing could germinate beyond his resigned contemplation. Just there, seeing them so busy, with the tips of their tongues poking out between their lips and thumbs moving (thumbs that once were one of the most important milestones of the human being’s evolutionary development), ever more myopic from the work of having to stab at those ever smaller touchpads, he hated them with all the love he had.
And then he deployed his secret weapon, the last bullet in the chamber, his final solution.
And, without pulling any punches, with all the hate in his heart, as a farewell gesture, he said to them:
† I don’t know if you know this, but the latest scientific studies have revealed that every time you send a text message or a tweet, you lose more or less a minute of your life. Good night and thank you for your generous attention.
And, driven from the auditorium by the wind of hate, a wave of booing that made him think, on the defensive and outside all reality, “Oh, this is how Henry James must have felt when, on opening night of his Guy Domville, he went out to greet the audience and—for fifteen minutes!—stood frozen under the lights amid a storm of hissing and jeering, condemned as if in a Roman circus.” Then he got out of there as fast as possible and disappeared into the most sunset of horizons.
James had, of course, understood then that there was no audience worthy of his greatness in “the age of trash triumphant.” And had proceeded to shut himself in and to write his masterful late novels and all those stories with writers (for him the best stories about writers ever written) always contemplating the twilight of their own careers and the dawn of those of their disciples, who never attained their giant stature, but found a way to scramble up on their shoulders all the same.
He, yes, thought and told himself the same thing. And that impulse drove him to write just one more book, one last book, belonging to the genre of last books.
Again.
That book.
A last book about a writer who refused to snuff himself out and opted to detonate an astrophysical and fulminant phenomenon far beyond all virtual-digital gadget or tech-format reader.
A last book that revealed, openly and with pride, its own concealed mechanisms and regained the pleasure of being overwritten and sought for its reader the same wonder of observing the moving gears of an old clock with its insides spilling out into the air, and in so doing constructing a more or less plausible idea of time that could never be precisely represented by digital devices with motionless circuits, sealed in the most inviolable of absolute voids. He’d read somewhere that the small pendularly-swinging, anchor-shaped piece (responsible for the tick-tock of the noblest clocks) was called the “escapement.” And that name had cracked him up, seeing as it referred, paradoxically and ironically, to something that marked the impossibility of escaping from the passage—as martial as it was décontracté and as deliberate as it was rapid—of a time that was passing ever faster. Because—another ironic and paradoxical detail—there was more and more to remember. But—unlike during our childhoods when everything was novel and transcendent—we pay less attention to our present, which never ceases to be a succession of repeated situations, uninspired variations, where there lurks only the originality of other peoples’ deaths and the anticipation of our own end.
And he couldn’t stop thinking and feeling that all of the preceding wasn’t duly recorded by the new technologies for which the hour of a night and the plot of a novel were nothing but more applications among so many, like, for example, those games where cloying-colored candies lined up in descending rows, exploding with small explosions, no doubt, calibrated to yield a kind of toxic sonic addiction, preventing you from thinking about anything else that wasn’t precisely that.
When it came to this stuff, to readable electricity and the different gadgets, IKEA (who returned to his thoughts because he never left, wherever he was, alive or dead or enduring whatever terrible fate he imagined for him; because that whole thing about him disappearing in the Amazon was obviously just another of the many things he happened to think of and that didn’t do him any good in any way for any reason), of course, didn’t want to make any enemies. IKEA didn’t allow himself the idea of losing a single customer. And so he’d declared “I like to reread my favorite nineteenth-century authors in first editions, but I like my favorite readers to reread me in electronic books.”
And he listened to this with clenched teeth. And said to himself he would happily waste one of his three wishes to strip IKEA of that affected and oh so self-satisfied diction (an esperantic-babelic accent that seemed to contain skillfully balanced parts of all Spanish accents) and impose on him the little, exceedingly out-of-place voice of David Beckham: anything to make IKEA shut his mouth, to force him, at least, not to talk about anything but his books.
And everyone smiled and asked to take selfies with him.
With IKEA, in Geneva, sitting beside him, asking him through his teeth what time it was and if he’d noticed the tits on the blonde in the first row, eighth seat from the right.
So he’d shown up there ready to do his increasingly downtrodden and negative number in front of an audience wearing faces that asked who is this guy and not really caring about the answer that, when given, almost invariably, made them go back and ask all over again who was that guy.
And also, along the way and in the process, to write an article for an airline magazine (Volare, run by the person who years before had been his first boss and the editor of his early writing) about the aforementioned Large Hadron Collider. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, searching for something definitive they called “Higgs bos
on” or “The God Particle.” And for the exact re-creation of what happened in the seconds immediately after the beginning of all things.
Or something like that.
So he’d come to Geneva already believing in nothing and definitely not in the spiritual holiness of literature. Convinced that—as Maurice Blanchot had warned from his watchtower—“Literature is heading toward itself, toward its essence which is disappearance.” There he was, heading toward himself then. Disappeared from almost every shelf in disappearing bookstores. Agnostic and atheist and excommunicated when it came to the practice of his craft. Creatively destitute and driven by the inertia of his autopilot and his reflexive writing. An outlaw lacking any rule for the practice of the most fugitive of the arts. Nothing there of mathematics or of music or the laws of perspective in portraits of landscapes or, at least, that exactitude on which to get your footing and stand up in the meter of sonnets or in the obligatory spatiotemporal coordinates of haiku. Loose, lost, disconnected from the mother ship and the name of his creative forefathers.
He’d come to Geneva clinging to a well-worn but never-waded-into-beyond-its-shores copy of Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov. He’d tried in vain so many times to read it, but, mysteriously, he never managed to get past its first pages. Though Ada was, without a doubt, along with Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner and Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, the novel he’d started the most times but never continued or finished. And in which he’d gotten, at most, past the first twenty pages, or something like that, and broken off the most times, as if blinded by a unique fever. Penned by one of his literary heroes (his relationship with Vladimir Nabokov had become more and more impassioned with the passing of the years) whom, luckily, HEIKEA had forgotten to list in his polynomial blurbs and when he recounted his influences.
He had admiration and envy for the exemplary example of Nabokov. To him, a kind of singular specimen: someone who had always done things his way, who’d given no quarter, who’d succeeded on his own terms. Someone who’d gained access to the émigré paradise and territory of living and writing and dying in a hotel, in that no man’s land where you can do anything (he’d always thought an émigré was someone who went into exile but had time, in their flight, to pack up and bring along their library, their own portable homeland, the most nomadic of rooms, made to fit anywhere; which hadn’t kept him from, on more than one occasion, suffering the loss of losing books).
And for him, Nabokov was someone with whom, he felt or wanted to feel, he shared traits and gestures and flaws. Phobias and jokes, like his referential mania and his propensity for self-reference; his ease at moving far and wide in the world from an atomized and volatized family; considering himself a professional foreigner; his polyglot wordplay and polished alliterations and his distorting echoes and repeated repetitions and polyglot rants; his hatred of the roar of motorcycles and his vicarious shame, standing before the paintings of Marc Chagall; his dentition issues during his youth; his affection for the parenthetical and his lack of interest, bordering on disdain, for scripted dialogue as a narrative device in his own fiction and even in real life; his hatred of the telephone as an instrument for dialoging (in the Demonia a.k.a Antiterra of Ada, or Ardor, he knew this because though he hadn’t read the novel he had read several books about the novel, there are neither telephones nor television screens); his annoyance at group activities, his disdain for any jazz (free or hot or cool or swing or acid) performance; his certainty that reality is overrated (looking down on the expression “everyday reality”) and that time was something it wasn’t worth believing in; that his head would never rest on a divan to recount dreams aloud; his adoration for the figure of the recurring muse; and, of course, his insomnia. (Noteworthy difference and inevitable to mention: nothing terrified him more than the proximity of nymphets and the like; and nothing mattered to him less and bored him more than the problematic movement of chess pieces.)
For him, Nabokov was the most moveable and most moving writer in every sense.
And, he thought, perhaps, the writer who sounded more joyful than anyone when he read what he’d written. Nabokov was the writer of joy (of absolute joy when it came to the act of writing), no matter the horrors and sorrows he might narrate.
That was the truth. That’s why he reread Nabokov all the time. And read everything he could find about him. Vladimir Nabokov had proposed/warned that the only true biography of a writer was the history of his style. And he was right. And he’d become such an aficionado/addict of all academic studies of Nabokov that focused on his lively style. Volumes published by university presses in which the authors, invariably, wind up transformed into true Charles Kinbotes. Creatures staggered and driven crazy, haggard and burned by the carefully deployed winks of the Russian, like small but smart-delayed time bombs. Wordplay and cryptic allusions and levels of self-references that they proceeded to activate with their obsessive theories. Running the gamut from intriguing to absurd and that’d made Nabokov truly immortal, on par with Shakespeare, always in progress and never entirely finished being read deeply and to the end. He’d “discovered” something himself: that the phantasmagoric daughter of John Shade (who’s reproached by her father for not haunting him) was named Hazel and that, when you break down her name into Haze, L. you’re referred laterally and subliminally to the nymphet Lolita Haze. And, true, strictly speaking, it should be Dolores Haze, and … The many and so many other books by and with and for and about Nabokov that until recently he was reading and rereading, in search of some secret key, a mysterious formula that would bring him back from the loss of his gift. Writers have—by obligation and necessity—very childish mentalities. And he thought that maybe, who knows, here’s hoping, Nabokov would somehow help him, infect him with his thing.
He—who at one time, in days when plotlines never stopped occurring to him, had fantasized about the existence of a button that, when pressed, would allow him to stop being a writer for a while, to stop thinking like that, to unplug—now dreamed of the alms of a few lines or even just a title.
He imagined possible “solutions” that, of course, though clever, would be completely ineffective: from a deal with the Devil (he even attended a Satanist group that told him they weren’t interested in “a soul of so little substance”) to fasting and drinking a tall brimming glass of squid ink. Every so often—when he worked up the courage and shed unconsciousness—he reread himself with half-closed eyes, as if the written words were like those burning but moistening eye drops. And he wondered if he’d completely dried up the deposit or vein where all of that’d come from, while enumerating the five stations of the cross of Kübler-Ross-brand grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) to which he added a sixth station: the parentheses in suspense of (to be continued …). That maneuver so typical of the comics of his childhood where, when everything seemed used up and closed off, you could start over by repeating all of it, resorting to the idea of alternate dimensions or corrections to what’d already been told. Something like putting in practice an ambiguous Aloha State of Mind, a word that meant “goodbye” as well as “hello,” the result, perhaps, of spending too much time on Hawaiian beaches, wondering if the waves were coming or going. A turning around to advance, a going back to go forward. A maneuver adopted in dark days by several of his most beloved and admired superheroes.
The Dreamed Part Page 54