No World Concerto (17 page)

It’s quiet. The streets are deserted. The traffic lights are signaling in vain. The silhouette on the corner has abandoned its vigil and the girl is no longer peering through the curtains. The screenwriter’s still begging her to stay with him, still promising he’ll protect her. She doesn’t see how this paradise of his could benefit her writing. He can’t conceive of any paradise without her. But this could be fleeting. He may not feel the same way later on. He lowers his head and his eyes flit to the keys of the typewriter. Then the girl starts talking again, and seems like her old self. Why would a mind build an imaginary world around itself? she asks, referring to her idea of a whole world inhabited by beings who aren’t aware they’re from another planet. What role does such a mind play in the lives of these characters? What gives it the impression it’s created a world at all? These are the questions that constantly run through her mind, the answers to which, like indefinite shapes, are always vague, although becoming more distinct with every passing day. Perhaps her work should deal only with this. The girl asks the screenwriter for another cigarette and lights it by the window. Let’s imagine that nothing around us truly exists — that however much we believe what we see and touch is real, it’s all in fact the creation of a single mind; that that mind is but a thoughtlet in one small corner of another, greater mind — the one that conceives the universe; and that the universe is but a thoughtlet in an even greater mind, and so on, ad infinitum. Is it physically possible, or even logically feasible, to have more than one universe? The screenwriter doesn’t know. The girl expels a mouthful of smoke and asks: Does this cigarette exist? The smoke? “2.063 The sum-total of reality is the No World.” A slight alteration of W’s pronouncement. She goes back to her initial inquiry. She thinks the answer must be simple, because a thoughtlet is like a fundamental particle, and these constitute everything else in existence, everything a mind learns, and everything it imagines, are composed of these. And if it bodies forth a whole world, it must do so because it doesn’t want to be alone. It’s the only possible answer to the question. It’s the only answer the girl can think of. Listening to her, the screenwriter starts thinking he should imagine his script not as a series of concentric layers like an onion, but of a series of parallel planes, each successive one subsumed in the next. So where should he situate the girl’s watcher in the shadows? Should he exist in the same world in which she moves, or should he exist in the world she imagines? The plane she calls real, or the one she’s created? He parodies an old controversy, but instead of mathematics, he asks himself whether it was the No World that was discovered or invented. Perhaps he should avoid philosophical polemics and stick to thinking about the story’s subplots and themes, something better suited to a man of his trade. Nothing exists outside our minds — there is only intellectual curiosity, delusion, love. And aren’t these the very things the movies try to capture?

He’s inclined to believe the girl’s lost her mind, if only temporarily, or that she’s tired and this has impaired her reasoning, her thinking — he can’t think of the right word. He’s tired himself out. After all, she’s only just left his room after staying up most of the night. For some reason she’s obsessed with one of the least interesting elements of the plot, has warped it into something more important than it is. After arriving back at the hotel in front of the Grand Central Station, she found her father was out, which she thought suspicious, so she wrote something down that she says perfectly sums up her thinking on the matter. The screenwriter listens in the dark, his lights out, the girl’s voice, on the other end of the line, seeming to emerge from the darkness. She’s forgotten about the creations of her mind, including the shadow that stalks her in the night. He hears her voice plain and clear, although his dilated pupils are straining at the soft fletches of light filtering in through the curtains, as if to say we want more than this smattering of traffic light, lamplight, and moonlight — we hunger for a greater repast. But eyes can’t speak, so all he can hear is the voice on the other end of the line, and only that occupies his thoughts. McGregor speaking, he thinks. Suddenly, as if she were reading his thoughts, she starts talking about that same associate of her father’s, who, she says, as she only just discovered, is taking turns with him staying in the station. I think they’re both hunters, she declares. They’re pursuing a special kind of prey, but she hasn’t yet discovered what it is.

Some time later, the screenwriter dreams the girl’s father and this so-called McGregor emerge from the body of the old guy in the classically-cut suit. Then the two merge together and reincorporate him. The screenwriter awakens and writes a description of the dream while it’s still fresh — as if trying to photograph a shadow that only moves in the night, returning to its sanctuary in the river at dawn. He’s trying to remember where the dream was set, and thinks it took place in a city, but somewhere far from the neighboring country’s capital. He turns off the light and goes back to sleep. He dreams of some things about which he’s already written, and others about which he’d like to write, things he always fails to recall on awakening when they’ve returned to their sanctuary in his unconscious. Nevertheless, while still in bed, he goes over the note he wrote during the night. His handwriting is almost illegible, but it doesn’t matter: he still remembers the dream — although a little less clearly — and what he manages to decipher from his notes supplements what he’s forgotten. He gets out of bed and freshens up, has a look at himself in the bathroom mirror, takes a deep breath, and then heads down to the canteen for breakfast. The elevator takes its time arriving. He gets the feeling he may be better off taking the stairs. He’d do it, if it wasn’t for his damned limp. He grips his cane impatiently and knocks it against the floor a couple of times, the strokes, muted by the carpet, rendering the act meaningless. He doesn’t like those muffled thuds, he says to himself, because they probably unleashed a cloud of dust mites that are now colonizing his socks and the hem of his pants. Standing at the hotel’s entrance, he looks outside and wonders if the world he sees is real or an invention of the mind. It’s either one or the other, but it’s still the same world that greets him every morning: the looming buildings, the rushing vehicles, the passing faces, that woman who lifts the shutters of the lingerie store. He decides to go out for breakfast instead of having it in the canteen. He heads to a kiosk, located at the point where the boulevards intersect, and buys a broadsheet from his native country and one from the neighboring one as well, before heading to a café on the small island in the river. It will take him about twenty minutes to get there, but he thinks the walk will do him good, the fresh air will do him good before he shuts himself away again. On arriving, he asks for a sandwich and coffee, and reads the news from his native country. The star of the soccer team the girl supports is still on vacation and hasn’t made clear when he’ll be rejoining his team. The coach is now threatening him with a fine and suspension, so the star player has announced to the press that he doesn’t like being threatened. The same newspaper has a long article on the man who’s considered the worst terrorist in history. After his sandwich, the screenwriter drinks his coffee and checks what movies are being advertised. He’s especially interested in knowing which ones are showing in both cities. Only the big blockbusters, it seems. The movie business isn’t what it used to be. They don’t make quality films anymore. He’s annoyed at himself for having such a trite opinion, but it comes from hearing similar comments expressed by many other people in the business. He’d liked to have worked with the truly great screenwriters — especially the ones from the golden age — to be numbered among them, to be considered great, or at least be remembered for having collaborated with them. When he was young, he’d hoped that one day he might be considered great, but nowadays, he has no such illusions. He hasn’t the time or the energy he’d need to achieve greatness. But then he thinks of an exception to his rule — a movie whose screenwriter isn’t from the golden age, a quite recent movie in fact, but one that he admires a lot, the one in which angels listen to other people’s voices, perhaps those of everyone on Earth. He folds the newspapers and decides to stop thinking about it. Besides putting him in a bad mood, it’s becoming a repetitive thought pattern, and this makes him feel uninspired. He takes out his notebook. There’s something about the old guy in the classically-cut suit that’s bothering him. But when he thinks about him in the context of the whole story, he finds himself wondering more about what it is the girl’s father and the so-called McGregor are up to — why they take turns waiting in the Grand Central station, who or what it is they’re waiting for. He notes down a few plausible hypotheses, nothing too outlandish, although he wants to keep an open mind. On the outdoor terrace of a bar, the girl’s sitting down reading a newspaper while talking to her mother on her cell phone. She’s expressing reluctance at the prospect of being interviewed by one of the neighboring country’s leading newspapers, but her mother says she’s coming to collect her to make sure she attends. The girl tells her the name of the bar she’s at then looks around for a street plaque to tell her the name of the street it’s on. She puts the cell phone away and goes through the headlines. News of the capture of the world’s worst terrorist occupies the first few pages. There’s no news about the star player of the soccer team she supports. It seems the neighboring country doesn’t care about his refusal to come back from vacation. She turns one page, then another, and then, suddenly, she sees a picture of a familiar face. The screenwriter imagines the girl’s puzzled expression, and then a shot of the page she’s looking at, the photograph of the old guy in the classically-cut suit, and the caption that reads, “Well-Known Scientist Seriously Ill.” The screenwriter wants to get the gist of the news across without worrying too much about the wording. So he summarizes the contents of the article telegraphically: World-renowned astrophysicist. Health declines sharply. Last twenty-four hours. Next to the article, a shaded box gives some information about his life. Apparently, the man she met in her father’s hotel room is an expert researcher into the possibility of life in other galaxies, and a stalwart advocate of radio telescopes as a means of detecting intelligent life in space. The girl can’t believe what she’s reading and wonders whether she should pinch herself. This news couldn’t be more exciting. She tears out the article and puts it between the pages of her diary as evidence, in case she ever doubts what she’s just read. But then she checks her enthusiasm. This isn’t exactly the windfall it seems to be, for although she’s finally discovered the identity of the old guy in the classically-cut suit, she’s done so at a point when his health’s in serious decline. She’s finally found someone to explain to her the reason there are so many churches and cathedrals scattered all over the planet, but that someone may in fact be on his deathbed. So the truth, like so many other things in her life so far, may be just out of reach. The next scene takes place in a taxi. Mother and daughter are sitting next to each other looking out their respective windows — not speaking to each other, the tension between them at breaking point. Finally, the mother asks what’s going through the girl’s mind. Nothing, she says. But, in reality, the girl’s disgusted at being dragged away from her writing to sit through an interview with the young conductor and brilliant composer.

We cut to a scene in an office where the girl is sitting impatiently with the young conductor, brilliant composer, and her mother. The young conductor’s latest conquest is also present, but at this point, there’s nothing new in that. The office’s glass walls make visible a large space where journalists, editors, and other employees are buzzing around like drones. The screenwriter pays without tipping, and makes his way back to the hotel, sticking to the narrow, winding streets that might otherwise be described as confining, labyrinthine, for he wants to empathize with the girl, confined in that office with people she dislikes. He walks slowly, leaning on his cane, the newspapers folded under his other arm, thinking about the girl, about the old guy in the classically-cut suit, the cathedrals, and the Little Sinfonietta, before deciding to stop at an ATM. He inserts the card and enters his PIN. He can’t believe his balance; his account’s almost empty. He takes out enough to survive on for the next few days, and then goes looking for a telephone booth. He wants to ask the producer for another advance, but no one answers the call. He checks the time. Perhaps he’s gone out. He calls the office, but again no one answers. Most businesses are closed for vacation in August, but he decides to try again later. He hangs up and continues to the hotel. If the producer asks to see part of the script, he’ll have to send him something more than sketches for a series of scenes. He’ll have to structure them better, arrange them in a sequence, and type them up. When he reaches the hotel, he stands in front of it for a moment, remembering the far better hotels he’s stayed in before. But duty presses him to forget about this. So he wobbles through the door and proceeds through the lobby, following the frayed track in the carpet that leads to the elevator. On entering his room, he wastes no time in sitting at the typewriter and cleaning up the scene where the girl finds out about the scientist’s illness. Then he tries calling the producer again. He sits at the edge of the bed listening to the rings, until the phone cuts out and he puts it back on the hook. Then he grins mischievously, as a bad guy would in the movies, picks up the phone again, and calls his own house. He waits five rings before hanging up. He stops smiling, remembers the pressing duty he’s already postponed too long, and returns to his post at the typewriter.

During the interview, the young conductor and brilliant composer act as if their partnership with the girl is destined to go on forever. The girl, on the other hand, is withdrawn, unable to get the article about the old guy in the classically-cut suit out of her head — a guy she discovered was a scientist, an astrophysicist and expert researcher into the possibility of life in other galaxies, a scientist who may in fact be on his deathbed. So she ignores all the questions, lets the others answer them. In fact, she doesn’t participate in the interview at all. The interviewer is a music journalist with a special interest in the Little Sinfonietta, who happens to work for one of the neighboring country’s leading newspapers. So, according to the girl’s mother, the interview is crucial for promoting the tour. The young conductor of the orchestra says you can never be too young to be a conductor, a composer, or a performer. Then he says the individual roles aren’t important in themselves, but that all three must work together if any one of them is to succeed. The girl observes the scene while listening to him sensationalize their story, a story like so many others, about a bunch of unruly kids who have a certain special something about them, a certain aura that sets them apart from other kids, other people. The kinds of kids who are sent to the Scholastic Institute so they can be with other special kids, other people who’ve been labeled exceptional, gifted. The term’s been overused, even abused. What teenager doesn’t believe he’s going to change the world, that all his ideas are great, original? Everyone thinks they’re special at our age, but the young conductor of the orchestra would like to believe that, in our case, it’s a fact. So he affects a grandiosity and self-assurance to give the journalist a visible manifestation of the fact — rattling on about the avant-garde, about how we’ve been, at one time or another, Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and even all three at once, since ours is perhaps the era when the vanguard finally comes to fruition; blathering on about how we have the best of everything, the best age, the best education, the best future, the best opportunity to achieve success, even glory. The girl’s eyes move from the young conductor to her mother, who knows he’s exaggerating, but is nonetheless mesmerized by the future star’s adept handling of the interview. Perhaps our time’s finally come, she hears him say. Then the girl turns to look at the latest conquest, sitting over there, imitating the journalist’s posture, his actions, taking her own notes. The journalist then asks the girl how she came up with the idea of throwing the clown’s nose into the crowd. The girl is stumped. That was perhaps the only spontaneous moment of the entire concert. She eventually says she’s getting sick of having to repeat the same performance over and over, like a ritual. It didn’t seem authentic. The others look at her, stupefied. Anyway, there was an urgent need to bring in extra noses, since the first offering to the crowd set a standard for the rest of the performances, but she’d have preferred to do something different every night instead of ritualizing that one spontaneous act. She thinks, for example, that she could’ve done a performance wearing the jersey of the soccer team she supports, with her favorite player’s name on the back. Then, after the concert, she’d exchange shirts with someone in the crowd. Number ten, she adds, a controversial player at the moment. The reporter isn’t aware he’s been in the news for refusing to return to training. Perhaps he doesn’t even know who the player is. A controversial player for a controversial young woman, her mother must be thinking. There are other questions, but the girl stops paying attention because she feels that the group is just reaffirming its commitment to a future of exploitation, of doing what’s expected of it, the same as so many young men and women in the past who were threatened by their parents with disinheritance unless they abandoned their dreams, did what they were told, married who they were told to marry. No writer who’s worth her salt would ever abandon her dreams for lucre. So she remains silent, happy to let the time run by until the end of the interview, thinking that it’s all just part of a game — quite a pretentious one, but a game nonetheless. But just as all this is going through her mind, the journalist interrupts her rumination: I’ve read somewhere, or maybe someone told me, that you say you can hear voices: I don’t mean like the one you’re hearing now, of course, but voices from another world.

The screenwriter remembers he hasn’t eaten, so he makes a couple of sandwiches and eats them at his desk while rereading some passages and taking notes. Once finished, he rests a while before freshening up and going out. He’s still thinking about the girl’s interview. Fucking spoiled brats, he thinks, annoyed at the kinds of kids who are given everything on a silver platter, who hardly do any work and still succeed, who achieve their dreams without breaking a sweat. He’s well acquainted with the type. They were once his students. He grants that they’re special, uncommonly talented, but talent isn’t enough. There’s no merit, no accomplishment, if it comes too easily, he thinks. He leans on his cane and starts limping toward the fountain in the center of the plaza. He prefers people like the girl’s father, guys who had to struggle to achieve their goals, who had to kick down doors, not have them opened for them; the kinds of people who would lie, cheat, and steal, if necessary, to succeed. But then they have children, mollycoddled brats who are given the freedom to do whatever they wish, to cast aspersions on the world while playing musical games like dodecaphony, or whatever, who invent silly terms like “No World,” who have parents that allow them to sulk through a very important interview, who didn’t have to shed a drop of their own blood for the fortune they’ll eventually inherit. Who’ve never experienced suffering, he concludes. What would he have written about if he didn’t have this script about musical prodigies? The screenwriter contemplates the café terrace on the other side of the plaza. The barmaid notices him watching, but continues cleaning the table before hurrying back inside. What would he have written about if he was free to choose? He doesn’t know. Maybe screenwriters were treated differently back in the golden age, had more freedom. The golden age, he repeats aloud, addressing the fountain. Might there be any truth to such myths? He likes to think so. At least it’s something to believe in, periods in history far better than the present one, which the world won’t see the like of again, something to look back on when there’s nothing to look forward to. He wonders if, sometime in the future, there will be a golden age he’ll be too old to appreciate, too set in his ways to understand, or too blind to even recognize. Where are the myths about today, for example? He smiles to himself. There can’t be a golden age happening now. If a golden age stuck its head over the parapet, the marketplace would shoot it off. Maybe he’s deceiving himself, maybe he’s living in the middle of a golden age, and he’s the only screenwriter everyone’s ignoring, because he’s considered unfashionable, unmarketable, by those who think he’s only an old retiree who supplements his pension by teaching a bunch of brats, some of whom are not only gifted but rich — twice blessed, in other words — as if having one or the other isn’t enough. Maybe he truly despises these kids, resents them. He doesn’t want to think about it. He turns his attention to modern cinema, which he feels he knows less and less about every day. Perhaps it’s because he hasn’t been paying attention, or hasn’t been keeping up, or whatever — he can’t think of the right phrase. Perhaps his preoccupation with the past has caused him to fall behind, made him antiquated, and he hasn’t the strength or desire to catch up. Besides, it would be an uncomfortable transition, to suddenly return to the present. He can’t cope with sudden changes. Unlike the girl’s father: an old agent asleep in bed who is suddenly awakened by a phone call, a knock on the door, or a gunshot, or something, and finds he has to immediately adapt to this alarming situation. It’s an old movie cliché that’s been used again and again, to good effect, over the years. The screenwriter doesn’t want to think of himself as an old cliché that still has its uses. An out-of-shape soccer player, rather, that’s lost his passion, his instinct for the game, and is consequently at the point of retiring. He’d liked to have written about two old detectives who come out of retirement to solve a cold case that’s been obsessing them for years: men who live in the past, in their memories. It’s an old idea, about which he couldn’t even manage a first draft. Why? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t even know why he began thinking about those old detectives just now. If he hates these gifted kids so much, what is it he finds so enchanting about the girl? Not only is she rich, and a paragon among child prodigies, she’s also famous: thrice blessed. He should hate her more than all the rest, but he doesn’t, he isn’t able. Is there only so much hatred one can harbor for a person before it somehow short-circuits? All he knows is it’s a contradiction. He circumambulates the plaza. When he passes the café, he notices there aren’t many customers, and he can’t see the waitress, so he decides to pass it by. He needs to do some thinking anyway, and he prefers to walk while doing so, and he won’t stop until he resolves the contradictions in his story, and he assumes they can all be resolved during a single stroll. Two retired detectives remembering the old days. An idea no one today would touch with a barge pole. But what about the guy who agreed to produce the screenplay he’s writing now? Contradictions, he murmurs while walking to the hotel.