The Invented Part Page 15

  So, writers move about in a trance and there’s always someone who points out—with a mix of reproach and jealousy—that they seem to be asleep, elsewhere, in the clouds or lost in space, and demands they come back right now. Some do come back. Others pretend—or try to convince themselves—that they’ve returned, that they’ve come back.

  The Young Man, right now, not the one thing or the other.

  The Young Man is about halfway down the road to a city called Everywhere, where it’s always night, where it rains more than in the Bible, and where the whole world seems, suddenly, full of infinite possibilities. There’s no place more simultaneously unpleasant and exciting than one where somebody who thinks they might someday—but not yet—become a writer lives. “For writing, with fondness and complete and slavish devotion,” would be written, just inside, as the manuscript’s dedication, so near and so far, on the other side of the cover. And once that threshold is crossed, there’s no longer an exit. Just an end.

  These are the things The Young Man thinks about, awake now.

  Left behind is the creaking whisper of a dream about telepathic crabs or something like that. Will he someday use the dreamlike memory of those crabs from his childhood in something he writes? And he answers himself that, no. Because at 3:06 in the morning we’re all fools who can’t even figure out how to get back to sleep. A minute is all it takes for that feeling of absolute talent and mastery that you have when you first open your eyes to dissolve. Now all that’s left is the addictive comfort of thinking about writers instead of thinking about writing. Because, as already mentioned, The Young Man isn’t a writer yet, but not one minute goes by—and now it’s 3:07—that he doesn’t think about being a writer. About being a genius even. But that’s as far as he takes it. Thinking about writing is much more complicated, dangerous. As if he were wading along the shores of a twilight zone, The Young Man, hotter all the time, prefers to keep telling himself that the water is still too cold. And that you don’t need to know how to swim to paint the ocean. And that hopefully that’s true. But, at the very least, you need to see it. And The Young Man decides to get up and leave the tent and walk out to where the waves are breaking. Actually, what he decides is that he has to get out of there. He can’t bear the sight of the sleeping body of The Young Woman next to him. The Young Woman’s body is wrapped in a cross between pajamas and a scuba suit with a zipper in front, which goes up, or—an expression of The Young Man’s desire—goes down from her neck to her belly button. Her “sleepyhead ninja uniform,” as The Young Woman calls it, is yellow, almost fluorescent, transversed with black elastic stripes. The black on yellow of the tape used to giftwrap crime scenes. “Corpus delicti,” thinks The Young Man, more than ready to kill or to die for that body. And, ah, The Young Woman has the terrible and captivating habit of sleeping in positions that make The Young Man think of the covers of old pulp novels from the golden age of science fiction and fantasy; with heroines in tight-fitting armor or spacesuits ripped in all the right places. And the shame is all his. Exclusive shame, one-size-fits-all, The Young Man suffers. Is it possible for years of reading to end in this? In preadolescent sexual fantasies? Is this why he’s read so much?

  Just after falling asleep, starting to dream, The Young Woman always slips out of her sleeping bag as if it were a shell, and reveals herself cautiously ready and surrendered, like a damsel lying defenseless, waiting to be taken and subdued by whatever warrior or alien is on duty. Every so often, to make matters worse yet better, The Young Woman lets slip a deep sigh or moist gasp (The Young Woman doesn’t snore, The Young Woman purrs) that provokes an irrepressible desire in The Young Man to dream what she’s dreaming, to enter her dream, to submit to her point of view, that it be The Young Woman who narrates the dream and that, yes, she do whatever she wants to his person and his character, but that, please, she do something. The Young Man is ready for The Young Woman to be the warrior, the extraterrestrial, the one who makes him fall to his knees at her feet. Miranda Urano could also be the name of a poet who fights battles in ancient Sumerian deserts after her spaceship crashes there as she flees from the imperial forces of the all-powerful Mad Kahar. The Young Man looks at her and sighs and—could this be definitive proof that he’ll never be a great writer, that it would never occur to him that one of his characters could behave like this?—imagines everything imaginable except that The Young Woman is maybe pretending to be asleep and that this is fun for her, torturing him without even touching him. And still less does The Young Man imagine that, on recent nights, there inside, sleeping together but separate, The Young Woman has enjoyed the apparent humor of the thing less and less and has gotten more and more turned on by it. And The Young Woman wonders, her eyes tightly shut and her ears wide open, almost impatient, how much longer The Young Man will be able to handle her carefully calculated and moist sounds and the perfectly choreographed movements of her body.

  But it’s clear that whatever’s going to happen, it’s not going to happen tonight: The Young Man is already outside and The Young Woman opens her eyes and looks at the tent’s ceiling and focuses on the movement of a small spider, suspended above, hanging from a thread that comes out from inside it, about to begin its life’s great work. That’s how she thinks she feels. Hanging from a thread that, presumably, she must use to weave everything yet to come. Not hurrying but also not delaying. And The Young Woman asks herself something, in the low yet deafening voice of thought, that she doesn’t dare answer: isn’t it about time to think about things that are not literature? Isn’t it time to stop thinking about literature as if it were some kind of demanding religion that leaves no room for anything or anyone else? What time could it be? What time is it?

  The Young Woman thinks that it is the exact time when she begins to get sick of The Writer, of The Writer’s Mad Sister, of not sleeping in a bed; and that her pseudo-somnambulant ploys of seduction and torment with The Young Man might just be the banal symptoms of boredom, fatigue with the stuff of her fantasies, the result of spending her life wondering what the next book will be that she has to read to keep from falling behind in an absurd race around a track shrouded in fog with no finish line in sight. The Young Woman looks at the spider and says “Yes or no?” and the answer is yes, and she reaches out her arm and takes the spider with great care, holding it without squeezing it between the tip of her thumb and index finger, and puts it in her mouth, and swallows it. “Welcome,” says The Young Woman.

  “To where?” says The Young Man, on the beach.

  Because it’s clear that now the question, The Issue, is how to proceed. The feeling that he has few credits of future promise left to spend and that the moment has come to advance to the next stage in the game or to fade away. The Young Man tells himself that this whole project revolving around The Writer—which in the beginning seemed, though he’d never admit it to himself, like an excellent way to be something without being it—is starting to creak like a ship, now at high sea, where defects of structure and construction have been detected. Something hazardous, loose screws, ready to be torn away by a perfect storm of icebergs. A ship without an honorable captain or an orchestra to play right up until the final vertical second. The Young Man feels more like the ambitious and reckless shipbuilder who demanded more speed and who, when everything starts to tilt and sink, dresses as a woman and snatches a baby away from a third-class mother, and climbs aboard one of the few remaining boats and launches into an ocean of decades through which his dishonor will drift, no doubt, but his own shame will be the most epic of all. His cowardice will be understood, with time, as an extreme form of the genre and as a symptom. And there’s something tantalizing about that—to be the best of the worst, to successfully fail. And there’s also something about the way that—in a few seconds of thought, like traveling a distance of centuries driven by the electrifying and vertiginous speed of the brain—The Young Man goes from doubting everything to affirming himself in his resignation. The Young Man thinks too much. The Young Man
wishes he could think less. The Young Man wishes he’d wake up one day and discover that his thing was really the law or industrial design or odontology. Professions that you can disconnect from once you get home—professions that are left far and away, like certain animals mislabeled domestic—and that aren’t pulling at your sleeve all the time, calling your attention and obliging you to imagine what Julien Sorel or Christopher Teitjens or Jay Gatsby would have done (automatically recalling, another symptom of the same troubling affliction, that the real name of the latter was James Gatz) in this or that situation. Much safer and more relaxing professions that—when people ask what you do—don’t generate other questions, uncomfortable ones, like “What are your books about?” or “What’s your name?” or “Are you well known?” or “Were any of your books made into a movie?” or ultimate classics with a complicit wink like “I’ve got a great story . . . want me to tell it so you can use it?” and “Being a writer you must meet a lot of interesting women, huh?” Anything but that “Does the doggy die?” which his big and best and unique dead friend, Ishmael Tantor, used to mock him and everyone. Ishmael Tantor, who always introduced himself with the lame joke “Call me Ishmael,” and who never wanted to be a writer as badly as The Young Man and yet . . . But thinking about Ishmael Tantor hurts The Young Man so much. And it makes him think about that unforgivable moment—like, as already mentioned, with the despicable builder of the S. S. Titanic, but this time with the ashes of Ishmael Tantor safely and securely stowed, not in the overhead compartment, but in the next seat—on the airplane where he met The Writer, about situations that are more like earnest answers than absurd questions. So, better, the questions. And yet, here and now, another change of cerebral direction, The Young Man would sign in blood any microscopic-clause-crammed contract to be worthy of such questions, to be published, to be a “cult writer” or a “writer’s writer” or whatever. But, please, let it be in print, black on white, and let it have a beginning and an end, and later on let him see it on display for a while in bookstores where he’ll reposition it in a prime location and ask the employees—disguising his voice and hiding his face—what they think of it, whether or not they liked it, and walk out worrying that they might have recognized him and are laughing behind his back, but it doesn’t matter, hopefully they recognized him and . . .

  Now what?: the kinds of questions that readers ask themselves when they’re alone, reading, certain that the answer is already on the way, a few lines below, a turn of the page, in the next chapter, coming soon, somewhere between here and the end. What readers don’t know or suspect is the number of times that a writer asks that same question, between A and B and Z, so many times, knowing that just ahead, right there, there’s nothing but a white and empty night waiting to be filled with words and stars.

  Now what?

  The Young Man looks out at the horizon—and, at night, on a beach, the horizon is something that’s there but not seen, like something thought but not yet written—and latches onto the solitary and never-last point of a light, twinkling in the darkness. A submarine coming to his rescue and to invite him on the adventure of voyaging first and recounting it later? Like Joseph Conrad and Jack London? To get experience and grow strong on this side before departing for the other, adrift, bound for a shipwrecked and deserted island with a lone palm tree as his only inspiration? Without any “interesting women” to meet. Without The Writer’s Mad Sister, without The Young Woman, and with someone more like his first and only girlfriend, whom he now describes to others as “my most serious relationship” and with whom his breakup was mutual. Which really means that he couldn’t help but agree when his girlfriend wanted to “take some time to meet other people.” Something that his ex did immediately and without wasting any time, and a week later she called him, excited, to tell him that she’d met the man of her dreams and good luck, thanks for everything, best friends forever, and all that. What did he think about then? About one of the proven and supposedly sure formulas of the trade: Trauma + Settling of Scores = Masterpiece. An unforgettable formula, easy to learn and memorize: out of all the terrible pain and overwhelming fury, I’ll write a great novel, he said, he swore. But theory isn’t the same as practice and the pain wasn’t that terrible or the fury that overwhelming; so the novel never was and remained unresolved and (?), his X factor, between parentheses and never solved for. Never even reduced to the exercise of a story. The title—which he thought was really good and probably was: Ex—soon dried out and died, like a plant that isn’t watered and which you tell, because someone once said that it’s good to talk to plants: “I’ll water you tomorrow, I promise.”

  And, yes, Ex was one of the many, oh so many, titles that sprouted from, like many things, two or three leaves and the flower of some more or less promising sentence that he cut out and stashed away inside a notebook, and every so often he opens it and rereads them, fragile, not touching them, afraid they’ll break apart between his fingers, with the pain of what he never was and the shame of what he never did. Everything that seemed like the promise of something more or less green or colorful (the unthinkable ideas he’s been having—almost as irritating as the sand that he never manages to entirely brush off before entering the tent—about writing something about The Young Woman) produces in him something a lot like nausea. Before long, he realizes, not even he will believe in himself anymore. And all he’ll have left is the definitive trauma of not being able to be a writer, moving through meetings and workshops and book presentations, drinking too much and trying to convince some dupe (or, better, some young girl more innocent than interesting) that he’s spent years working on “something” that’s already reached two thousand pages; something destined to change everything, but the world—not him—isn’t ready for that kind of impact. And to return home afterward, not to the panic or to the blank page or to the screen, but to the fear of not even being able to sit down in front of the page or the screen.

  “It’s not hard for me to write. It’s hard for me to sit down to write,” said The Writer in one of the TV interviews that The Young Man and The Young Woman had compiled. And The Young Man discovers—with a mix of terror and strange happiness—that he might be starting to hate The Writer. To hate him for what he said and for what he wrote and for how he lived and for how he disappeared and for how he’s indirectly responsible for bringing The Young Woman into The Young Man’s life. And, above all, he hates him for that unforgettable moment of infamy, sitting beside him, aboard an airplane. A moment that The Young Man tries not to remember, but that he can’t forget and . . . And The Writer would add: “Which isn’t at all paradoxical, because this is simultaneously the most sedentary and nomadic of professions. The body is immobile, but the head never stops moving, traveling. Where then is the true home? So all the complications of space—a whole universe and an eternity—fit inside that small object that might be an Aladdin’s lamp or a Pandora’s box.” All very funny and very ingenious and equally sad and sordid and desperate. And The Young Man decides that he’s hit bottom, the finale, a dead-end alley. This is, yes, the real dark night of the soul and it’s 3:15 a.m. and there are, presumably, forty-five more minutes of shadows and despondency. And The Young Man tells himself he won’t be able to hang on that long, that before then it’ll be out to sea with no escape (well, no, it’s not really that bad; but the idea of suicide does have its appeal and it’s even possible that The Young Woman would assume that he did it in her name and that his watery ghost will torment her to her deathbed) or some other version of what’s known as a “desperate act.”

  The Young Man bends down and picks up a seashell from the shore and brings it to his ear. “No, it’s not the sound of the sea that you hear inside a seashell but the sound of the sea’s absence. People want to convince themselves that it is so, as if seashells were a kind of cellular telephone communicating with the depths. But no. The only thing that a seashell offers is the terror and the whimper of knowing that you’re outside of everything, in the wrong pla
ce, far away. What a seashell says is ‘Wrong number. Nobody named Sea lives here,’” The Young Man says to himself and, once again, should he write this down or not? Write it in the sand? Yes, The Young Man is and continues to be, despite everything, someone who wants to write. And, naked and small facing the suicidal possibility of his own unhappy ending, he retreats to the “Once upon a time”s of his childhood. And he chooses a magical and miraculous solution; something—Pandora’s box and Aladdin’s lamp—worthy of the two thousand and second night.

  If politics is the last refuge of losers, then magical thinking (which is nothing but a comfortable designer religion, personalized and custom fit) is the last hope of the tormented. And so it is that The Young Man decides the solution to all his problems is to obtain, to rob like the thief of Baghdad, the magic talisman that once granted The Writer absolute and creative powers and that is there, now, waiting for him—the next chosen one in a chain that’s been adding new links since the dawn of time and, also, includes the great names of literature. The Young Man decides—with the conviction of the enlightened acting in the shadows—that that talisman must be the small toy that he filmed a few days ago—that little wind-up man made of metal and carrying a suitcase full of black and not blank pages, pages covered with ideas and words and brilliant situations ready to be his. All he has to do is go inside The Writer’s house, go to his study, take the little metal man, wind it up, wind himself up. Without a doubt, like in all stories of ambiguously gray magic and granted wishes, a price will have to be paid. But The Young Man is ready to pay whatever it takes down the road, so that he can write now. Anything would be better than this life that’s not a life and that seems to start over, like a defective machine, every morning when he wakes from a dream that—wondrous as it is—turns into a nightmare when he opens his eyes, when he realizes that’s all it was: a brief illusion, courtesy of a brain that was telling him that everything was going to start over now so that everything could go on as before with the slight novelty that, yes, it was another day and one day less of his life as a writer who is not yet a writer.