The Invented Part Read online

  The Young Man enters the house, walks to the studio, and imagines that he’s climbing a rope up the side of a colossal idol, to the huge and precious stone in the center of its forehead—the third eye. The Young Man moves quietly and carefully to keep from waking the High Priestess and guardian of the place, The Writer’s Mad Sister. The Young Man imagines whatever he can, applying it as a coat of protective and imaginary varnish, to help protect him from the reality of what he’s doing. The Young Man tells himself that there’s probably nothing more frightening than walking through the darkness of an unfamiliar house and then corrects himself, edits himself: yes, there is something more frightening, and that’s hearing someone else walking through the darkness of your house, when you know you’re alone, or should be. And there’s a third, even more terrifying option: that the solitary mistress of the house who hears The terrified Young Man moving through the dark corridors is none other than The Writer’s terrifying Mad Sister, because who can know, The Young Man wonders, how a woman as unhinged as her might react, finding him here. It wouldn’t be surprising if The Writer’s Mad Sister had a whole arsenal of well-oiled firearms and various collections of kitchen knives and sharpened axes at her disposal that she’d always wanted to use.

  The Young Man changes the channel and thinks about anything else and there’s the half-open door and the library and The Young Man sings “You say you’re so happy now / You can hardly stand / Lean over on the bookcase / If you really want to get straight” and he can’t remember who sings it or what line comes next; but he does remember that it’s an old song, something from the mid-eighties, from another planet, because it’s a song from before he was born and that he came to after it was mentioned in one of The Writer’s books: “The songs written by the first rocker who grew old with him, at the same time.” The Young Man enters The Writer’s studio and there’s that other poster, one of those photos taken and sent back by the Hubble Space Telescope: in the background, the Milky Way on top of which The Writer has stuck a Post-it with the words “You are here . . .”; and, in the foreground, the ravenous yawn of a black hole in whose center there’s another Post-it and the words “. . . but I am / will be here.” And now The Young Man is there. In the Milky Way, or in a solar storm, all the same. Lost in space, floating like an astronaut somewhere that’s no longer the sky—because the sky is everything—but yes, my God, it’s full of stars. And, among them, presumably, the absolute consciousness of The Writer who now, accelerated and particular, is everywhere, even in the air that The Young Man breathes. And The Young Man inhales deeply and why not think that something of The Writer—something that must remain suspended in the air of his library—enters his lungs and mixes with his blood and becomes part of him. And that’s why The Young Man now feels authorized to do what he’s about to do. There’s the toy, on the bookshelf, next to the digital camera, and The Young Man thinks that it wouldn’t be bad to film his own hand, picking up that small tin tourist. To record that moment as if it were the instant that Arthur pulled the buried Excalibur from the stone, covered in moss and grasses, almost effortlessly, to change history, scour the rust of centuries, and give birth to a new and shining era.

  So The Young Man checks to see if the camera has enough battery-life (it has) and that it works (it works) and he turns it on and before focusing on the toy, with his hand entering the frame like a pale and trembling version of King Kong’s paw, the little screen fills with images. And The Young Man—one of the millions of bastard children of that Visual Age in which an image doesn’t say but screams another thousand images, capturing immediate attention, pausing any ongoing action to fix all eyes on whatever distorted format of screen—looks at what’s revealed there. Random visions, like loose pieces of a dream in the exact moment they’re dreamed and not, later, when you fall into the trap of organizing them for your interpretation, like someone hurriedly tidying up their apartment when notified of a surprise visit.

  The first thing he sees—images from different years, the robotically traced date and time numbers blinking in a corner of the small screen—is something that, beyond the smallness of the screen, is of colossal spirit: swarming multitudes like in a Cecil B. DeMille film or in the photographs by that one photographer (The Young Man doesn’t remember his name) where hundreds of people are shown, like suffering souls trying in vain to escape the mouth of the inferno, climbing up and down the ladders of a gold mine in a place whose name became unforgettable for him and, yes, at that time he wrote it down in a notebook followed by an exclamation point, convinced that it could be the password or magic word that’d make a novel, or at least a microstory, appear—Curionopolis.

  But The Young Man realizes that what he’s seeing are shots of a massive party (a wedding?) where everyone appears to be dressed the same and all of them have the same hairstyles and seem to be orbiting around a woman riding a horse; then there’s a woman talking to the camera and saying strange things (“It’s hard to live knowing you’re a genius,” says the woman whose face, though young, already shows the signs of various surgeries and an outbreak of an adolescent but already mature rash); and cut and then another woman (who The Young Man finds drop-dead gorgeous and, as such, immediately similar to The Young Woman) on a stage and saying even stranger things, with a trickle of blood dripping from her head and speaking to a television that only broadcasts gray and static. And another more abrupt cut and there’s The Writer. The date is from about a year ago (shortly after I ran into him on the plane, The Young Man says to himself). And The Writer is walking along that same beach there outside (the landscape reveals, in the background, this same house, here inside) and he’s followed by the person who’s filming him, with a shaky hand and, as far as can be seen, from a low angle, as if the camera were held by a dwarf. Or, better—a boy. Because The Writer smiles and is chased by one of those little childish laughs that make you want to laugh. And The Writer—who advances with great triumphal leaps, as if The Writer were the style going in front of a cautious plot, taking small steps, dragging its feet—points at the invisible boy who catches him, who approaches him. The Writer sits down in the sand and stretches out his hand and takes the camera and turns it toward the boy and there he is: a kind of redheaded miracle. Four or five or six years old (those three years that melt into one long year of thirty-six months), laughing with the happiness of someone for whom a few tears are nothing more than the consequence of a blow or a fall, someone who knows that all his wishes will be granted; because all the adults who surround him depend on that immense and powerful happiness, more difficult to invoke all the time and oh so fragile. The Writer asks him two or three questions of the kind that people ask kids (questions that are supposedly simple, but that require absolute answers) and this unexpected aspect of The Writer moves The Young Man and he says to himself that he has to put this scene in the documentary, after a few sections and interviews. The Writer interviewing. Then the boy (The Boy from here onward) shows something to the camera with pride—it’s an antique toy. That little wind up man, with hat and suitcase, that The Young Man has there, within reach. And The Young Man feels a kind of dizziness, that vertigo of coming face to face with apparent twists of fate and coincidences. “Mister Trip!” exclaims The Boy. And he snatches the camera from The Writer and refocuses it and, with a deep and seemingly adult voice, The Boy asks, “Let’s see . . . Who’s your favorite writer?” and The Writer laughs and answers the same as always—those two American writers, that French writer—and then he pauses and stares straight ahead, without blinking, as if he were fixing his eyes on the eyes of The Young Man.

  And then he adds a fourth name to the list.

  And the fourth name on the list is The Young Man’s name.

  And The Young Man thinks he’s going mad.

  And the camera falls from his hands. And makes a lot of noise (that noise things make in the night and, yes, it’s as if someone turned up the volume on things in the night, as if things in the night always made a lot more noise)
and he has to catch himself on the bookcase, not to get straight, but so he won’t fall down and make the noisiest of nocturnal noises: that of a body crashing to the floor.

  The Young Man rewinds the image and looks at it again and listens again.

  And REW again.

  And there it is: his name, seemingly written and proclaimed in marble and bronze, but—he knows, he remembers, he can’t forget—actually in pure glitter and façade; because it’s all the result, not of a misunderstanding, but of something much darker and harder to confess. The past that comes back to look for him and find him and all of that.

  And his ears get plugged up as if he were back on that airplane. Sitting across the aisle from The Writer, trying hard to hold up that absurd and heavy self-help manual for struggling writers—The Seven Deadly Scenes was its supposedly ingenious title—and wondering if he could work up the nerve to talk to him. And he finally gets up the nerve and talks to him and, now, on the most turbulent of solid grounds, a year later—that fear of falling and crashing. Delayed punishment for his high-altitude crime. The eternity of two or three minutes in which The Young Man feels finished, erased, discarded in the trash barrel of his own infamy. He’s never felt like this, few people ever feel this way in their lives. The feeling that there’s no possible after anymore, after that final point. A pain that throbs in his chest and connects with another pain in his head and, suddenly, the void, absolute emptiness.

  And—REW again—The Writer’s smile after he says his name and, surprise, that smile translates into another smile, now on The Young Man’s lips. He’s survived and he’s happy. He’s gained access to the paradise of the damned, which is even deeper than hell, a little to the left, but that doesn’t make it any less a paradise. Heaven is above, yes, but who cares; who wants to be in heaven and not to have heaven overhead. Better there, where he is, where he stays, with the future in his hands, inside that camera. And, of course, it’s a wish that’s granted in the same way, as mentioned, as the wishes granted in the most twisted of genie tales. Wishes granted with fine print and clauses and dirty tricks. But nobody who isn’t him has any reason to know or suspect it. Everyone else involved in the thing is either dead or disappeared and he’s the only one who, yes, has lived to tell the tale. And it’s funny, he says to himself, how everything that, up to a few minutes ago, embarrassed him to the point where he couldn’t think about it, now fills him with something very akin to pride, though not exactly. The hubris of falsifying something everyone thinks is authentic. The satisfaction of the serial killer who knows he’ll never be caught. The happiness of the person who finds the winning lottery ticket in a dead man’s pocket, and keeps it.

  I have a lot to do, The Young Man says to himself. Suddenly, ecstatic, he has a map, instructions to follow, an objective in reach, a goal so near. The first thing—with a rapid dance of his fingers across a keypad—will be to upload that video from The Writer’s camera, launch it into the space of the Internet and wait for it to, inevitably, return to that planet of shipwrecked astronauts and spread like a virus and come back to him and to The Young Woman. And The Young Man can almost see The Young Woman’s surprise—her mouth half open, the circle of her lips letting out an: “Oh!”—when she sees and hears his name as one of The Writer’s favorites. Then her love, her adoration for him, will be inevitable, The Young Man says to himself. And then . . .

  What’ll come later will be even more undignified and embarrassing. But nothing is forgotten as quickly as what embarrasses you; especially when nobody else knows it or suspects it and, now, his name in the mouth and voice of The Writer, almost seems to authorize him. It’s even possible that, with time, he’ll forget it too. The way he forgets a dream, the way he emerges from a nightmare thinking, “That’s it, it’s over, that’s the end.” If you aren’t caught, if you aren’t publicly guilty, the guilt evaporates like a hangover after a forbidden party. And the guilty is no longer guilty, becoming, conversely, guilt-free. Could this be what people who sell their souls to the devil feel like? If so—that’s not so bad. The feeling that nothing depends on you anymore; with the added benefit that you get to be your own demon creditor and are aware that you never had a soul to sell in the first place. If you know that you’re soulless, you never buy beyond your means. And there’s something even more interesting, something that’ll bolster you in your crime, The Young Man rationalizes: the conviction that almost everyone is just like you. Only, maybe, the odd and quite infrequent sensation that someone is staring at you, the suspicion that they know everything, because that’s the only reward and punishment of being innocent—the unattenuated and unanesthetized torment of the complicity, almost on your own, of perceiving and suffering absolute awareness of the putrefaction that surrounds you—and, subsequently, the relieved certainty that that’s impossible—because you’re the only one who knows what you know. The Young Man says all these things to reinforce his resolve to pass through that door beyond which there’s no coming back. How do you pass through that door? Easy: stop thinking such foolish things, poorly aimed ideas from his increasingly distant adolescence, when he sat down to chew over the slow food of Dostoevsky and Camus, not worrying how it was going to strike him, or come crashing down upon him. No more excessively long aphorisms, enough maxims. Goodbye, goodbye to all of that; but now, yes, there is someone looking at him and staring him.

  He’s sure of it.

  The Young Man feels it in his spine and on the nape of his neck, like the red dot that precedes a gunshot. Like two red dots. Like the pupils of a ferocious wolf. And, with the camera in one hand and the toy in the other, he raises his arms, not daring to turn around, awaiting some kind of instruction, his heart in his throat. The Young Man always hated the use of that kind of image to explain a sensation like “his heart in his throat.” But, suddenly, not only does he understand its practical utility, but, in addition, its terrifying and indisputable truth. The Young Man wants to say something (to beg forgiveness, justify his presence, swear that he’s leaving now) but he knows that, if he opens his mouth, his heart will shoot out from inside him, like the cuckoo of a cuckoo clock, like one of those ultraviolent animated drawings where everyone dies over and over and over in order to earn the right to keep on living and coming back to life.

  The Young Man—terror allows you to see yourself from outside, because when we’re terrified we want to be anywhere else and not be ourselves—sees himself right there. Legs apart and arms extended. His body forming an X that he now imagines dyed that night-vision-goggle shade of green: the dangerous and unerring color of the gaze of assault commandos with infallible aim, ready to lay waste to everybody in the name of God and country.

  A shade of nocturnal extraterrestrial that, every so often, comes back into Penelope’s eyes and that she considers, without doubt and with certainty, a kind of hallucinogenic flashback from all that mutant Giant Green Cow’s milk she drank that wedding night, in the shining desert near Mount Karma, in Abracadabra, picking up diamonds and putting them in her mouth.

  Penelope looks at The Young Man and asks herself what he might be doing there, at that hour, in the dark, and then answers herself. And she doesn’t like the answer. Because it’s an answer that isn’t about her. That doesn’t even take her into account. It’s an answer—another one—that puts her on the sidelines of everything and below everything and in the finest print. Like a footnote to the main text. As if she were a decorative figure or merely a detail in someone else’s portrait: the flower in the lapel, the mark left on the wall by a painting that’s no longer there, the song whistled by someone passing by in the street. And the flower withers and nobody remembers what was in the painting and the whistled melody belongs to a summer song from long ago.

  Penelope is very tired.

  Of everything, of everyone, of her absent brother and, especially, of herself and everything she didn’t do and the little that she did.

  And of the fact that He Whose Name Must Not Be Mentioned—the long and powerful
shadow of what might have been cast by the short and weak body that no longer is—hasn’t yet been turned into or elevated to He Of Whom You Must Not Think, much less, He Who At Last And Forever Has Been Forgotten.

  With respect to that and to him, Penelope has just made it to the stage of not naming; but she knows that, in the very effort to not name something, resides the implicit punishment of being unable to stop thinking about it, of never being able to forget it. And also that, sometimes, even in the solitude of the fortress she’s built herself—in her Angria, in her Gondal—she experiences the weakness of its architecture, the decisive design failure where the final crack will burst. Like right now—that small voice that Penelope hasn’t heard for so long and thought she’d never hear again. Where did it come from? From The Young Man’s hand? From something The Young Man is holding in his hand? “Let’s see . . . Who’s your favorite writer?” Penelope hears again. And then she gets it: it doesn’t matter how well you’ve swept everything under the heaviest of rugs; because the broom will always remain, behind a door or inside a closet, to remind you that at some point you held it the way you hold a pen that crosses out and sweeps away but doesn’t erase. Perfect oblivion doesn’t exist just like the perfect crime doesn’t exist. To win the prize, not just of I don’t remember, but of I don’t even remember what I don’t remember, Penelope says to herself, you have to cross finish lines that more closely resemble the treacherous curves of madness and suicide. And though Penelope has, more than once, looked down from the tempting balcony of those choices, the truth is they don’t interest her, they don’t seem like dignified exits.