The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira (8 page)

After journeys, it was time for light, an element that
included everything from photons to chiaroscuros depicting the volume of an
object in a seventeenth-century copper engraving . . . It was a broad heading
because there has not been a single occasion not swathed in light — for example
each one of the journeys previously processed had lighting, and a whole series
of lighting possibilities existed for each one, as there did for every
conceivable or manifest occasion. In fact, this “generalization” characterized
every heading; also the journeys or displacements, because could there possibly
be an occasion that didn’t imply, somehow or other, some displacement? So,
everything was a journey, just as everything was light . . . The screens’
trajectories doubled back upon themselves to make it possible to update a
previous trajectory and allow it to serve a new function.

Light presented an additional difficulty, because light,
or rather lighting, occurs at a determined intensity, which is the manifestation
of a continuum of intensities that can only be arbitrarily calibrated. But was
this a difficulty specific to the element “light,” or was it an attribute of all
headings? Still within the heading already discussed, of journeys, there was
also a continu­um: the extension of the trajectory traveled. Or many
continuums: of velocity, of the pleasure or displeasure with which the trip was
made, the sum of the perceptions experienced en route . . . And just as in the
case of light, intensity was not the only continuum in play, for there was also
the temperature, atmospheric resistance, color . . .

Things were happening in less time than it would take to
explain them. If Dr. Aira could have stopped to think he would have asked
himself about the sequence “journeys-light.” Why had he started with the first?
Why had he continued with the second? What kind of catalogue was he consulting?
Where did the directory come from? From nowhere: there was no catalogue, no
order. The entire operation of the Cure had the perfect coherence of the
plausible, like a novel (again). It wasn’t like in the theater, where anything
can happen, even something completely disconnected from all the rest; in that
case, one could resort to a list of themes and proceed to remove each one using
aesthetic criteria; in any case, if we wish to hold on to the theater metaphor,
we would have to think about bourgeois theater, full of weighty psychosocial
assumptions pretending to be plausible.

The plausible in its pure state, which was at work here,
was characterized by simultaneity. Therefore, saying that after light came flags
is just a figure of speech. The flags of all the nations of the world, those
that had once flown and the possible ones that had accompanied them during their
passage through History, with their colors and symbols, their silks or paper or
retinal impressions, were underpinned by light and journeys. A luxuriant pom-pom
of foldout screens cut through the entire sphere of the Universe, leaving some
flags in and others out. Immediately, it turned to the cutting of hair. Screens.
Hundreds of millions of barber shops, hairdressers, and scissors were excluded
from the Cure’s New World, while others remained inside.

Collaborating with this simultaneity was the fact that
throughout the process the screens that were doing the sorting continued along
their trajectory a little farther (there were no established boundaries), and a
bit at random, tracing lines of division through other, contiguous categories,
on other planes and levels. Dr. Aira accepted these random contributions because
he was in no position to reject any help he could get. By the same token, he
began to notice that the same screen could function as more than one partition
through the effect of the overlapping of fields of meaning.

He was moderately concerned about the fact that every
“heading” coincided with a word. He was not unaware that the Universe cannot be
divided into words, even less so those of one language. He was also using
phrases (“the cutting of hair” was one example), and in general he tried to turn
a deaf ear to words, to inhabit a space beyond them. But words constituted a
good point of departure because of their connotations and associations, their
so-called “like ideas.” Thus with the word “sex.” He traced a crazy zigzag with
the screen, leaving outside half of all sexual activity, past and future. The
bundles of panels that rose and fell according to the participant, the pleasure,
the modality, et cetera, again formed the familiar pom-pom. This was
particularly delicate material, so he divided it up with particular brutality.
The patient might get out of bed only to discover that he had not had a
particular lover, or that he liked boys, or that he had once slept with a
Chinese woman, but it was all worth it, if the tradeoff was life. That the same
thing would happen to the rest of the planet’s inhabitants, including the
animals, was less important, because individual memories, which could only
function with the parts that remained within the new universe, wouldn’t remember
anything. Many beautiful love stories would vanish into the ether, or would
never have been.

The ends of the screen continued to exceed the fields of
meaning and create others that immediately, and almost through the impetus of
their unfolding, cut huge and savage zigzags. Astronomy. The ability of parrots
and blackbirds to speak. The diesel engine. The Assyrians. Coffee. Clouds.
Screens, screens, and more screens. They were proliferating everywhere, and he
had to pay close attention to make sure that no sector failed to be sorted.
Fortunately, Dr. Aira had no time to notice the stress he was experiencing.
Attention was key, and perhaps no man had ever brought as much of it to bear as
he did for that hour. If the circumstances had been less serious, if he had been
able to adopt a more frivolous perspective, he could have said that the entire
procedure was an incomparable creator of attention, the most exhaustive ever
conceived to exercise this noble mental faculty. And it did not require an
extraordinary person; a common man could do it (and Dr. Aira would have been
quite satisfied to become a common man), for the Cure created all the attention
it demanded. It wasn’t like those video games, which are always trying to trick
it or avoid it or get one step ahead of it; to continue with this simile, it
should be said that the operator of the Cure was his own video game, his own
screen, and his own decoys, and that far from defying attention, they nurtured
it. Despite all this, the effort was superhuman, and it was yet to be seen if
Dr. Aira could hold out till the end.

His depletion was physical as well as mental. For although
the screens were only imaginary, the effort needed to unfold them and stretch
them across the vast teeming terrains of the Universe was very real. He held
them along their upper edges between the index finger and thumb of both hands,
and he opened them by stretching his arms out wide, and since he could never
quite reach, he had to move around, taking little leaps from side to side . . .
then he would return to touch up the line, expand or contract the angles. In
general he avoided straight lines, which were drawn when he stretched the
screens out too fully, because the straight line was too categorical and the
selection had to be more nuanced: a fact could be included or excluded at the
beginning or end of a folded panel — a singularity, which, however small, could
turn out to be crucial; anything could be.

And there were screens that extended upward, or downward .
. . To stretch them out he had to stand on his tiptoes, or jump on a chair; if
it descended, he threw himself on the floor or scrambled under the bed, under
the edge of the rug — as if he were trying to bore a hole through the floor. He
retreated and advanced as he stretched the screen overhead, all the while
adjusting the angle or the direction of another one under him with the tip of
his toe. As he could see nothing besides his screens, and the jungle of
iridescent elements they were cleaving through, his movement around the room
always ended with him banging into the walls, the furniture . . . He stumbled
frequently, and he was down on the floor more than he was standing up. Depending
on how much impetus he had, he was either stretched out or rolling around doing
spectacular half somersaults; but he took advantage of these involuntary plunges
to hang the screens in places he couldn’t have reached otherwise. Everything was
useful.

He never stopped moving. He was bathed in sweat; it was
streaming through his hair, and his clothes were stuck to his skin. He went back
and forth, up and down, every cell in his body shaking, arms and legs stretching
and contracting like rubber bands, and he was leaping around like an insect. His
face, usually so inexpressive, churned like ocean waves during a storm, never
pausing at any one expression; his lips formed all kinds of fleeting words,
drowned out by the panting, and when they opened, his tongue appeared, twisting
like an epileptic snake. If it had been possible to follow, with a stopwatch,
the rising and falling of his eyebrows, one could have read millions of
overlapping surprises. His gaze was fixed on his visions.

From the outside, and without knowing what any of it
was about, the practice of the Cure looked like a dance without music or rhythm,
a kind of gymnastic dance, which might appear to be designed to shape a
nonexistent specimen of the human. Admittedly, it was pretty demented. He looked
like Don Quixote attacking his invisible enemies, except his sword was the
bundle of metaphysical foldout screens and his opponent was the Universe.

Thud! He crashed into a chair and fell headfirst to the
floor, both his legs shaking; the crown of his head left a round damp mark on
the rug; but even down there he kept working: his right hand was tracing a large
semicircle, placing a screen that divided up the joys and sorrows of Muslims;
his left was pulling a little on another screen that had excluded too many
apples . . . Now he was on his feet again, lifting the white accordion of a
vertical screen that was crossing levels of reality as it sorted through
“latenesses” and “earlynesses” . . . ! And what looked like a tap dance meant to
recover his balance was him hanging two screens that would exclude certain
rickshaws and particular conversations. With his chest, his rear end, his knees,
his shoulders, and head-butts, he corrected the positions, angles, and
inclinations of the panels, enacting a true St. Vitus dance in the process. And
to think that this grotesque puppet was creating a New Universe!

And so it went. One might have thought that the space of
representation at his disposal was going to get overcrowded, that it was going
to start to get difficult to keep inserting more screens. But this didn’t happen
because the space wasn’t exactly the one of the representation but rather of
reality itself. In this way, miniaturization led to its own amplification. Like
in an individual big bang, space was being created, not getting filled, through
the process, hence within each pom-pom an entire Universe was being formed.

In honor of reality, he had left the door to the balcony
open. Through it long strips of screens were swept out into the heavens. He
couldn’t even see what some of them were excluding, but he trusted that in any
case they would leave at least one particularity in each arena on this side. As
often happens with difficult jobs, a point came when the only thing that
mattered was to finish. He almost lost interest in the results, because the
result that included all the others was to finish what he had started. He had
really had to dig in to find out how demanding the problem of Everything was,
what brain-racking pressure it created . . . Only by living it could he find
out; all prior calculations or fantasies fell short. Even though he didn’t have
the time, he fervently longed to return to human mode, which was so much more
relaxing because it gives license to do anything. Nevertheless, what he
was doing was deeply human, and given the mechanism of automatic re-absorption
the Cure enacted, his exhaustion approached rest; pressure, relaxation.

In fact, the hinges on the last panels of each screen
began to get welded to the other screens whose last panels were nearby, and with
this the process of exclusion and inclusion was concluding. These welds happened
on their own, one after the other, in cascades of billions that burst the heart
of a second, of the final seconds. This produced a greasy white spark in the
black depth of the Night. It was something like a nightmare, that “schluik . .
.” Dr. Aira’s utter exhaustion also contributed to this sense of feverish
delirium, for at the very end of his strength he felt nauseated, as if he were
suffocating; his ears were ringing, and there were red spots in front of his
eyes.

But the important thing was that the siege had been laid,
and the new Universe had been formed, as unfathomably complex as the old
Universe had been until then, but different, and just right for the cancer of
that man in that bed to never have been . . . The work of the Cure had been
completed right in front of his own eyes, half-closed from fatigue; his arms
fell to his sides, flaccid, his legs were barely able to hold him up; the room,
which he was now seeing again, was waltzing before his dizzy eyes; and in it the
patient’s bed, the spotlights, the cameramen, the nurses, the relatives . . .
The next time, he told himself in a state of exhaustion that rendered him
idiotic, he would have to think up a machine that could spread out the screens
for him. Compared with an automated system, more appropriate for the times in
which he lived, the dance to which he had surrendered would seem like some kind
of imperfect, handmade prehistoric Cure. But before thinking about an improbable
second time, he had to wait for the results of this one.

It was a wait truly laden with unknowns. Already, when he
witnessed the welds, and in the sudden passivity these allowed him after such
dense, nonstop action, he perceived that with each “closure” the plausible had
changed, only to change again with the next one; the closures, of course, didn’t
just happen; they were cumulative until they had formed one definitive closure.
It was an extreme case of “doing something with words.” The transposition of
plausibles was vertiginous, and Dr. Aira had no way of knowing where things
would stand in the end. That’s what mattered, when all was said and done.