No World Concerto (27 page)

He goes through every pocket twice. It’s no use. He doesn’t have another penny to his name. The prospect’s been looming for days now but he’s been simply ignoring it. He doesn’t even have enough to get a croissant. It’s not a good day for the screenwriter, who’s been scouring half-deserted streets where most of the stores are closed, as if it were a Sunday, looking for an affordable place to eat. He decides to go back to the hotel and have breakfast. It’s not only more expensive than the café on the plaza, but the waitress is hideous. At least the bill’s charged to his account, though, which relieves some pressure, and gives him time to consider his options. He eats in silence, thinking. He won’t be able to buy a newspaper today. He wonders if he’s nearing the end of the road. Never in his life did he imagine he’d be in such dire straits. He still receives a small pension every month, but it’s ridiculously small. If that was his only source of income, he’d die of starvation. He’ll probably get a bigger pension when he fully retires. But then he thinks he’ll probably never fully retire, that he’ll more than likely croak at his writing desk. Die with his boots on, so to speak. It’s too soon to be thinking about this; too early in the day for feeling sorry for oneself. With a coffee in hand, he takes out his notebook and comes up with a list of people he could petition for help. Then he performs a simple calculation that lays out his current financial situation: the second advance from the producer will barely cover his debts. He’ll call again. Then he thinks about calling his own son. No, not him. Maybe the girl will lend him some cash.

The producer’s not answering. So he’s back on the street, sitting on a bench, thinking about who he should turn to. He laughs at the image that pops in his head — an image of himself, dressed in rags, sitting in a damp street corner soliciting alms. He laughs because he’s unable to cry. He’s never been in such a desperate situation. He gets up and makes his way slowly back to the hotel. He thinks he’d survive without one of his jackets. That’s a good idea. And why not dispense with a couple of shirts as well? There’s also a pair of shoes he doesn’t need, a pair of trousers, and why does he need two suitcases?

He feels humiliated in front of the saleswoman. He’d have preferred to find the store closed, like so many other businesses on the day celebrating the neighboring capital’s liberation. He’d have preferred to burn the clothes than be insulted with such a paltry offer. But he knows he needs the money, so he tries haggling over a few cents’ difference before agreeing to the deal. Come on, it’s only a few cents, he says. The offer’s nonnegotiable, the saleswoman says. He has no choice but to accept. He takes the cash from her hands, trying his best to hold back the tears, and makes a promise to himself that he’ll buy all his stuff back as soon as possible. He fantasizes about buying a new wardrobe once the advance arrives. Then again, he doesn’t ever want to see his old shirts and jacket on the backs of strangers. No, he’ll buy them back as soon as possible. Back on the street, he thinks of an old movie in which someone says you can get away with being broke when you’re young, but never when you’re old.

Later that night, at the hotel in front of the Grand Central Station, the girl’s father still hasn’t gotten back, and she’s sitting beside the telephone, waiting for a call. She doesn’t know from whom, although she doesn’t expect the brilliant composer to call again. He was drunk as usual when he called earlier, so the girl, likewise as usual, cut the conversation short. She doesn’t want to hear about him, the young conductor, or any of that riffraff. She doesn’t care. As usual, she’s sitting in her room doing nothing. She certainly can’t write. Should she just wait around until something happens? She gets up and starts pacing up and down, growing angrier with every pace. Then she strikes the walls, again and again, before closing her eyes and gritting her teeth to hold back the tears. They’re not going to make me cry, she says to herself, before repeating it again and again. Idiot, idiot, idiot! she cries. Once again, she’s allowed herself to be made a fool of. To be made ridiculous. She feels like a laughingstock. She calls herself a stupid bitch for taking so long to wake up, to snap out of her fantasy, like a drunk who’s finally sobered up after amusing everyone with her antics the previous night. Now they’re all laughing at her. No, her mother just thinks she’s crazy, and as for her father: well, he doesn’t give a damn. But then there are those fuckers. She won’t let them depress her. Maybe she should say goodbye to her father before going back to her native city. The girl wonders where he could be. She doesn’t think there’ll be any trains arriving at this hour. She presumes that neither her father nor Cousin McGregor is in the station. She wonders what would happen to the voices she hears if the aliens were to finally appear. She’d probably lose her connection with them. They’ve already been communicating with her for a few years now — perhaps long enough. She walks up and down the hotel room, shaking her head, gesturing nervously, with her hands in and out of her pockets. She can’t seem to make a decision. Her stomach’s completely empty, and it’s starting to ache with all its churning, but she notes that the pain itself is killing her appetite. Like the pain of a wounded ego, she says. She’s thinking about waiting for her father to get back so she can tell him she’s going home. That she just can’t take it anymore. He didn’t tell her what time he’ll be back, but she doesn’t think it’ll be too late. She leaves a note on his bed and goes out to a nearby restaurant. Although she’s not hungry, she decides she must put something in her stomach. The night could be a long one, and she won’t be able to stand the constant churning. She picks up a newspaper and flips to the ads section. Still there: “I hear voices. 1. The No World is all that is the case. Ka.” Perhaps she’s made a mistake, and that’s why she hasn’t received an answer. Not that it matters to her now. Now she’s finally given up hope of ever making contact. She never thought her obsession with finding out whether or not she was hypnotized would affect her so much. Now, instead of aliens, she’s going in search of some elusive hypnotist. She reads that the coach of her favorite soccer team has fined the star player for his overlong vacation. She smiles, but it’s soon cut short when she stumbles across a picture of the scientist in the classically-cut suit. Before she reads a single word, she knows he’s dead, as if she can augur the contents of the article merely by looking at the photo, the layout of the page, the type, or something. She’s surprised he was found dead in a hotel. The astrophysicist had apparently been living there for the past few years. The newspaper says nothing more about it, so the girl reads the article again and again, while eating, without relish, what she can of her meal. They could have at least given the name of the hotel. She goes back up to her father’s room. Perhaps this is what’s been keeping her father away from his post in the station. The girl feels a little despondent over the news. She’d been expecting it for some time, but now that it’s happened, she’s still taken aback. She feels as if something’s suddenly changed, that nothing will be the same from this moment on. She’ll wait for her father to get back so she can say good-bye, then she’s going back home to try living her own life. She’s mad at her mother for having colluded with her ex-colleagues. Shouldn’t she just group them all together and refer to them collectively as enemies? If it weren’t for them, she’d have completed her cycle of concerts and done the recording by now. What does the young conductor know about performing the
5 Pieces for piano
anyway? Neither he nor her mother seem to understand that her disposition inclines her more toward performing in a recording studio, where certain effects can be produced and experimented with, and where subtle nuances can be captured on tape, which an audience in a concert hall couldn’t possibly register as they would when listening to the recording. When it comes to the business of wounding her pride, her mother’s as dispassionate as a corporate executive. She’d put a lot of stock in the girl one day becoming a great pianist, and she’s determined to see a return on her investment. But the girl ended up taking a different path. Besides, she’s not a commodity to be traded on the market. She has ideas of her own. What did her mother expect? She didn’t even know where to draw the line between parent and manager. And her father hasn’t exactly been a model parent either. So when it comes to choosing between them, her dilemma is more a case of picking the better of two evils. There’s still the screenwriter, she thinks. But the screenwriter’s just an innocent, unwitting participant in this cruel and perverse game. Perhaps she hasn’t been very honest with people generally. If something goes wrong, it’s part of the game, she repeats. She’s said it so many times it’s become like a mantra. Perhaps looking to blame others for wrongs done to oneself is also part of the game. How are the others playing the game? Is it she, or is it everyone else that’s not playing the way they should? She sits in a chair and makes a note of all the ways she plans to reproach her parents, then repeats them aloud to herself, as if rehearsing for a performance. She sets the first scene in the hotel room she’s sitting in now, where she’ll bid her father farewell by first incriminating him for his cold indifference, his unfeeling aloofness toward his own daughter. You damn egoist, she’ll say on marching out the door, after packing her bags in front of him. Then she’ll go to the hotel with the English name to spend the night, but only for the opportunity of haranguing her mother as well. Then she’ll get up early in the morning to begin her journey back home. Of course, she may only be a piano starlet because of mother’s connections. So she supposes it’s possible she’s only a commodity after all. Outside, fireworks are exploding to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the city’s liberation. Her mother could be a special guest at the fireworks display. The girl’s always seen her mother as an executive of sorts, but there’s nothing to say she isn’t a high-class hooker, rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful. The girl is still waiting, and beginning to think it’s a pointless vigil, because her father hasn’t even called. She forces herself to stay awake, even going so far as to hold her eyelids open, as children do, when she feels them beginning to droop. She forces herself to stay annoyed at him, finds that rehearsing her reproaches against him help to keep her frown intact. She knows that if she falls asleep her anger will have diffused by morning, and she won’t have enough fire left in her belly to really read him the riot act for all his years of neglect. But she also knows that if she falls asleep the voices will be there waiting for her on the other side, waiting in that world that overtakes us when we sleep, a world to which we all go to make our dreams a reality, and our realities a dream. When the girl eventually falls asleep, she dreams her reality is a game; that her father and Cousin McGregor are playing a game she doesn’t understand; that her mother is sitting on a throne in a palace somewhere seeing everything unfolding before her. Then the Queen speaks. She says the whole world functions as a game, that the young conductor and brilliant composer aren’t alone in understanding it as such. The girl pinches her arm to check if it’s real, and awakens. She sees that it’s dawn and that her father still hasn’t gotten back. Her arm hurts like hell. She sits up to contemplate the surrounding gloom. She does what she always does when she wakes up, except this time she’s fully clothed. She can never get any rest when she sleeps in her clothes. She gets up and goes to the mirror. She looks like shit, she thinks, and then notices the small bruise on her arm. First she goes to the balcony to wait, observing the traffic in front of the Grand Central Station. Then she goes back inside to continue her vigil in bed, staring at the ceiling, counting the minutes as they pass, her eyes opening and closing, sleep threatening to overtake her again until she gets up and splashes some cold water on her face, because this time she’s determined to stay awake. She puts on some music, sits down with her diary, and writes that she dreamed everything was just a game. After she’s done writing, she puts her earphones back on the nightstand and turns toward the balcony — toward the noise of the traffic outside, feeling reassured the world is once again on the march. After a shower and change of clothes and another futile attempt to continue her novel, she decides to just pack her bags and not wait for her father to return. She wanted him to see her pack her bags. It would’ve made her exit more theatrical. But she needed something to do, something to relieve all the tension. She’s not as angry as she was the night before, but she still has something in her belly that will singe his hair, so she decides to wait a little longer. Before long, though, she’s back in bed asleep, tossing and turning, the very picture of someone having a nightmare. The last one she had was about her mother conspiring with her father and Cousin McGregor to have her locked up in an institution. It’s the only way to snap her out of her hypnotic trance, they said.

It can’t be the case that everything is in fact nothing, or that it’s all a dream, that we’re all made of nothing but dream-stuff. So the screenwriter thinks, who’s trying to discern the difference between dreams and nothingness, although he prefers the idea of a bubble, or something similar, floating around in space, in which we all dream our own individual dreams — some sad, some happy, others hellish, and just a few like paradise — but all of them together constituting a single collective dream, which is that same bubble floating around in space. And when we dream within the dream, our souls enter a region outside time and space where we find — perhaps a better word is “visit”—where we visit an event that happened either before or after the moment we fell asleep. Hence the ability to dream of something that hasn’t happened yet, and who knows, maybe this would even allow for a man to dream he’s shaking hands with his own departed ghost. The screenwriter returns to the previous scene, in which the girl’s still waiting in her father’s hotel room. Her luggage is all packed and waiting beside the front door. On the table, a few half-crumpled pages suggest a writer’s unsuccessful attempts at self-resuscitation. The last thing she wrote was a kind of variation on the theme of the previous chapter. Nothing new, in other words. She thinks her inspiration has dried up, so she resorts to repetition, which gives her the illusion that she’s making progress, because at least she’s writing something. She counts the number of days she’s been writing. She feels being hypnotized was like someone’s putting a time bomb in her brain; that far from being responsible for her creativity, it ended up compromising it. She can’t stomach the image of herself writing under the eyes of people who know she’s been hypnotized. It’s horrible. Her father has spoken to her several times about the need for both inspiration and perspiration, that it’s no good having the strength to achieve something if one hasn’t the will. Before leaving, she decides to give it another shot. She turns on the laptop. If she can manage even a couple of lines, she thinks, all her problems will go away. Most people are happy to do their dreaming at night, when they’re asleep. They say it keeps them sane. Well, it’s writing that keeps the girl sane. It’s something like a drug that helps her dream by day. “5.153 In itself, a No World is neither probable nor improbable. Either a No World occurs or it does not: there is no middle way. The old professor is reading the philosopher W in one of the many dim and dank derelict buildings in the City in Outer Space. Little does he know that all his suffering, this terrible life he leads, is down to his being a hunter of aliens who doesn’t know he’s an alien himself.” The girl then consults some notes she wrote previously, but finds nothing that galvanizes her. A couple of pages, at least! she implores, as if supplicating a deity to let some crumbs of inspiration fall from his table — or perhaps an alien from another galaxy, the same one who constantly sends her messages about Ka; either way, a being who could answer her prayer. She’s read of the possibility of becoming a God oneself. It is achieved in stages — perhaps they’re degrees of enlightenment — the last being the stage at which one can finally create a world of one’s own. When she thinks about it, it’s not much different from wanting to become a writer. The girl places the old professor in a modest room where he’ll spend his days waiting for the female student to visit him. He’s not sure she’ll ever come, but he clings to the hope she will. The girl wonders if the professor carries any false documents. No, he’s not like her father, she thinks, despite the fact that he’s an alien hunter who doesn’t have a license. In reality, he wouldn’t even know where to get a license. Before finding a job, he’d probably take some time out to think about the future. The girl tries to decide how much time he’d have before the police came to arrest him. She wonders if it will be his wife, the director of the Academy, or one of the female student’s parents who’ll get the police involved. He’d probably feel safe in the City in Outer Space, since it’s out of the terrestrial police’s jurisdiction. They wouldn’t bother chasing him into space anyway, not on the paltry charge of sleeping with one of his students. At least, that’s what the girl thinks. She chronicles the arrival of the old philosophy professor at his new home, his first tentative steps of acclimation to his new environment — getting used to the false gravity, to the simulated days and nights, to the way the space colony’s regulated, to the shapes of the buildings, the streets. . She begins with the line: An alien hunter with minimal experience stands with his luggage in front of his new home, wishing he could know, or at least have a good idea, how the adventure he’s begun is going to end. The girl gets up, nervously lights a cigarette, and ambles onto the balcony to smoke it. The screenwriter lights a cigarette and opens the window to aerate the room, then lifts his feet onto the sill, and leans back in his chair. More so than a writer, he feels like a detective following a variety of leads, any of which could either help or hinder his investigation. That is, trying to find ways of developing an already impossible plotline. He needs to link a series of set pieces, each belonging to a different scene, because he thinks it will help move his story along. He thinks about the screenplays that were written in the golden age, that long-since vanished epoch. What great films they became, he thinks. Nowadays, the devices he uses are considered hackneyed, perhaps even obsolete. When he’s done writing, he doesn’t know if he’ll have the energy to finish up the dialogue with another screenwriter; and he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to put in all the changes the director, the producer, and the secretary who sleeps with them will want him to make. The girl’s having a hard time concentrating. Even so, he thinks, at least she knows where she is, where the old professor in her story is — waiting in his modest room for a female student who may never show up. And that’s all he
should
do, or that and reading the philosopher W’s magnum opus. He doesn’t start on page one either, but just flips through the book picking out passages at random. Such a long vigil would be purgatorial, but the screenwriter suspects the old professor would rather wait than suffer the damnation the screenwriter is already feeling, the pain in his stomach, in his heart, that never ceases. Sometimes he asks himself why he keeps on writing, but he never has an answer. There were times he resolved to quit altogether, and was quite serious about it, but within a few days, often a few hours, he found himself back at his writing desk writing. He doesn’t know why. He never has an answer. It’s not for the money, that’s for sure. But he knows he needs the money, and this reminds him to start making headway on the producer’s draft. Whatever money he gets he uses for subsistence, not luxury. So although, technically, he
does
do it for the money, it’s more accurate to say he does it to survive. If he needs money, there’s always the girl, who’s rich, although she’s also a minor, and perhaps wouldn’t have the kind of disposable cash he needs at this precise moment. When he proposed they run away together, he had in mind a life in which he could easily make a living. Money worries, he says while writing, knowing that it doesn’t matter what he says or thinks, money governs and directs the lives of everyone involved in the movie business, and he means everyone, both real and imaginary. He turns his attention back to the girl, leaning on the balcony railing, smoking a cigarette, her luggage still waiting for her inside, the idle laptop on the table, in its usual screensaver mode. Suddenly, the telephone rings. The agency that handled her personal ad has received a reply. The girl notes it down. It’s short, cryptic, just like her message. It seems to hint at a meeting that night. In all honesty, the girl doesn’t believe it’s genuine, but she won’t ignore it after so many days’ effort. Besides, it’ll only require her to stay one more day in the capital. But she does wonder, why now? Why, at the precise moment she’s about to grab her bags and hit the road — bam! — a reply to her message? She no longer trusts in the prospect of an alien encounter; the law of probabilities tells her it’s unlikely, but it’s not this that suddenly renders her a skeptic, but her recent disillusionment. If she still believes in anything, it’s in the voices; the ones that tell her she’s been chosen for a special mission, but she doesn’t think she can figure it out all by herself, and she doesn’t expect that these voices from another world, perhaps a No World, are about to start whispering any clues. But isn’t she supposed to be gifted, a young woman with enormous talent, a superior being, unlike the great mass of plodding drudges that populate the Earth? And isn’t this the only reason they speak to her? But how does she know they don’t communicate with others? Either way, if they are communicating with her, why is she finding it so difficult to figure out her mission, her purpose in life? Like a wheel spinning in a rut, she thinks about it long and hard before eventually giving up. Still, she has other things to worry about. They may be less dramatic, but at least they’re easier to deal with, she thinks. Maybe she should try resolving her problems one at a time instead of all at once. She wonders what to start with. That damn hypnosis. She needs to ask them who was present. She considers what she means by “them,” and quickly comes up with a list: the young conductor, the brilliant composer, and the hypnotist herself, of course: they’re the first ones that come to mind. Who else? she thinks. The people closest to them: that juggler, the latest conquest, the girl’s mother. . Maybe it happened on the night the screenwriter was with them, although she’s already asked the screenwriter and her mother about this. There were always a bunch of people with them when they hit the clubs, but she wouldn’t have the least idea where to find most of them. She flicks her cigarette away and heads back inside, turns the computer off, and goes out for a walk. She wanders the streets without paying heed to which direction she’s going in, like that character created by the writer who revolutionized twentieth-century literature, a man who wanders the streets of his city aimlessly, divagating through his conscious mind, through regions of his unconscious, dark regions from which bubble recollections of his past, the things he’s read, the music he’s heard, what he fears the most, what he loves the most, mingling the grand with the quotidian, walking aimlessly through the streets, and thinking aimlessly, guided only by the flux of his thoughts and feelings, joys and dejections, the systoles and diastoles that subtend a single day. As she walks the streets of the neighboring country’s capital, the girl’s mind bandies between thoughts of her hypnosis and her meeting with the supposed aliens. Whenever she thinks she’s found a way to proceed, she immediately changes her mind, like trying to pick out a single image, idea, sensation, or association from a farrago of indistinguishable impressions flashing past her at incredible speed. It’s driving her crazy. If sticking her head in a fridge would slow down her thoughts, she’d do it. By contrast, the screenwriter’s story would fit into a feuilleton, the clichéd story of a man facing ruin if he can’t solve his financial problems. He needs to find out if the producer sent the advance yet. He dials the number, but there’s no answer. Then he calls the producer’s wife, just on the off chance. If she’s able to take the call, he’ll ask for the contact information of old friends who live here in the neighboring country’s capital. But it’s useless, he thinks, a stupid plan in fact, and he hangs up. He’s already thinking of other options. He needs to get a loan from somewhere before the advance comes through. He remembers the woman with whom he had a relationship forty years before. He figures it’s been ten years since he last wrote to her. Not too long for an old friend. He remembers where she lived because he’s been there more than once. She was always inclined to spinsterhood, so he doesn’t think she’ll be married. He only hopes her address will also be unchanged. He has other friends, but most are in the movie business, colleagues with whom he’s worked on occasion, but most of whom he doesn’t see otherwise. But if he hasn’t got their contact details, there’s no point in even considering them. He thinks of the box of office supplies in which he keeps all his old agendas. In his imagination he sees pages and pages of collaborative notes from back when he was somebody of note in the movie business. But he won’t be able to conjure up his collaborators’ addresses and phone numbers from an examination of their handwriting. He decides to visit the woman. He still thinks of her as the young woman he knew, but he knows she’s no longer young. He’s no longer young himself. He remembers her as she was then, as he was then: it was another time, another world; and despite their having written to each other long after that world had vanished, they haven’t seen each other since. But the screenwriter never put much effort into the relationship, especially when it became strictly by correspondence, whereas she’d always write to him, always send him a card on Christmas. Walking along the street, the screenwriter asks some pedestrians for spare change, explaining that his wallet was stolen, and he needs the money to get back to his hotel. The ruse works, and he eventually has enough to grab a taxi. Once inside the building, he recalls the floor on which his friend’s apartment was located, but not the apartment number. So he tries buzzing the first one. No answer. Typical, he thinks. He presses the button for the second apartment. This time a boy answers. The screenwriter asks for his friend. She’s not at home, the boy says. Do you know where she is? But the boy has hung up, and the screenwriter’s words are lost in the ether. He presses another button. He’ll ask all her neighbors one by one if he has to. Again it’s not his friend who answers, but the woman on the other end is acquainted with her, and tells the screenwriter she’s gone on vacation. Great! He’s just wasted time, money, and effort he simply can’t afford to waste. Thanks, he says to the woman. He notes down his friend’s apartment number. He finds it curious the floor still lingers in his memory. It may serve as a location to stage the girl’s meeting with her friend, he thinks while heading back to the hotel, wondering who this friend will be, because, at the moment, this character doesn’t even exist.