Borges concealed his fondness for mirrors by affirming the opposite, the narrator of Mirrors Aren’t Terrifying says, a narrator called Jules Jakobsdóttir who’s lecturing her bathroom mirror about how she isn’t amused by her reflection across multiple dimensions because (a) multiple dimensions are a cliché and (b) they are probably a sign she needs medication, which is strange because she’s already on medication ha ha, and in some dimensions a benevolent professor version of herself lectures the bathroom mirror version of herself about the ontology of clichés — if you no longer speak your native language on a daily basis, Professor Jakobsdóttir says, nostalgia will exalt the clichés of your native language — and in other dimensions a dentist version of herself offers the bathroom mirror version of herself LSD instead of Novocain for reasons that will only become apparent to readers of The God of the Labyrinth, and in this dimension, the one where Antonio is rereading Mirrors Aren’t Terrifying, the first story in A Lexicon of Terror & Other Stories by Silvina, he can’t recall if he’d told Silvina that the concept of a reflection across multiple dimensions reminded him of something Peter Ström, a New Age therapist, had told him during one of the two constellation therapies Antonio underwent with him, back when Antonio and his former wife were still trying to separate without rupturing their daughters’ lives — but before I tell you what Peter Ström told me, Antonio writes, I would like to explain that, in constellation therapy, facilitators like Peter Ström operate under the assumption that present difficulties are influenced by traumas suffered in previous generations of the family, even if those affected now are unaware of the original events in the past, and these systemic entanglements, as Hellinger calls them, or invisible loyalties, as Iván Böszörményi-Nagy calls them, or quantum quackery, as cynics like me call them, or los tentáculos invisibles, as my mother, a facilitator like Peter Ström, probably doesn’t call them, are said to occur when unresolved trauma has afflicted a family through an event such as murder, suicide, incest, death of a mother in childbirth, war, emigration, abuse, in other words an event so traumatic that it causes a rift in the family system — there is a deep need for justice and retribution within family systems, Hellinger says — in other words even if you luck out and your father isn’t as horrifying as mine, Antonio writes, you’re still probably doomed by a suicidal uncle you and your parents didn’t even know — and now that I’ve explained constellation therapy, Antonio writes, I would like to explain the mechanics of the therapy itself — although here Antonio stops writing and tries to remember the steep stairs to Peter Ström’s subterranean home in Hollywood Hills, which at the time didn’t bring to mind his psychotherapy sessions with Dr. Adler in a subterranean office in Santa Monica almost ten years prior to his first constellation therapy — my objective is to peel myself like an artichoke and become who I am in a year, he’d said to Dr. Adler during his first session with her, and five years later they would sometimes joke about what he’d said to her in that first session — I am exhausted by this ceaseless examining of myself, he’d said to Dr. Adler during his final session with her, I can’t keep battling these inherited undercurrents — and after descending toward an audience of ten or twelve people in Peter Ström’s pleasant living room in Hollywood Hills, Antonio’s former wife says to Peter Ström my husband and I want to work on our relationship, so Peter Ström draws family charts on a chalkboard for both him and his former wife and asks her to pick representatives from the audience so that one of these representatives will become her father, one of them will become her grandmother (he doesn’t remember what any of these representatives looked like, except Peter Ström, who looked like J. M. Coetzee, at ease in his humorlessness), and these representatives aren’t told what his former wife’s parents were like, but they are told by Peter Ström to behave whichever way they feel in the moment, in other words you’re vessels of complex energetic forces, Peter Ström says, and because Antonio’s former wife was raised by her grandmother in Czechia, a grandmother who protected his former wife from her older, abusive sister, a grandmother he can easily imagine because his former wife has told him about her and there’s a picture on the fridge of this grandmother holding his former wife when she was a baby, and since this grandmother died when his former wife was thirteen, when the representative for her grandmother says to his former wife I want to hold on to you forever, please don’t let me go, his former wife cries inconsolably, and Peter Ström says you can’t start your own family if you don’t let your grandmother go, do let her go, tell her you love her and say goodbye, but his former wife refuses, she cries inconsolably and refuses, and then he’s in a different constellation therapy session months later and the representative for his mother says I am scared of you, or perhaps he is the one saying to the representative for his mother I think you are scared of me, and then Antonio and the representative for his mother jostle each other because Peter Ström has asked Antonio to hold hands with his mother but instead of holding hands they’re clasping their hands as if trying to push each other off a ring, and at some point, before or after the jostling with his mother, Peter Ström picks a sturdy man from the audience and tells him to stand behind Antonio and place his arms on Antonio’s shoulders, a sturdy man who isn’t a representative of any family member of yours, Peter Ström says, but a representative of all men across multiple generations, which is what Silvina’s concept of a reflection across multiple dimensions brought to mind as he read Mirrors Aren’t Terrifying for the first time, soon after Silvina & Antonio started sneaking into each other’s life during summer #7.
Ulrica Thrale (the protagonist of Ramifications of Scholarships) boosts her college application by playacting on the cello, the harpsichord, the viola — show me the version where I play the triangle, Ulrica Thrale says — jokes do pass the time, Ulrica Thrale’s best friend says — by performing a panoply of extracurricular activities that might impress the college admissions officials, but unfortunately every extracurricular activity ramifies into other extracurricular activities — the cello ramified into learning Italian → volunteering at The Cinematheque → handmaking kaleidoscopes, Ulrica Thrale says — and because her parents aren’t around to advise her against submitting her complete ramifications, she submits a college application the size of an encyclopedia, which clearly (according to the admissions letter that Ulrica Thrale never receives) is a sign of the applicant’s brilliance, and although Silvina didn’t submit a college application the size of an encyclopedia, she did try to impress the admissions officials with a panoply of extracurricular activities to be admitted to Princeton, which is also what Antonio had done to be admitted to Yale, after he graduated from high school in Bogotá and arrived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, starting a newspaper at his community college and volunteering at Big Brothers Big Sisters so he could be considered as a transfer student to Yale or Harvard or Stanford — I attended a Jesuit high school in Bogotá, Antonio writes, and although my grades were almost perfect, I was often suspended from school for misconduct — please don’t expel Antonio this time he did have an altercation with his father, Father Ignacio — such that when the time came for me to apply to Yale and Harvard and Stanford I had to write a long letter to the principal of San Luis Gonzaga begging him to please answer no to the question in the college application asking if this student ever had any behavioral problems at school — and yet according to Antonio he’d wanted to be admitted to Yale or Harvard or Stanford not because he wanted to change his miserable life, as Ulrica Thrale was trying to do — when I arrived at Princeton I thought at last I have ceased to be what I have been, Silvina said — all of your priors will be expunged and none of your priors will be expunged do you understand, Ulrica Thrale’s math teacher says — but because he needed to prepare himself for the great task of returning to Colombia and running for office so he could save the poor and so on, and yes, he did possess this impulse to return to Colombia to run for office, but one of the many aspects of Ramifications of Scholarships that disrupted his attempts at writing fiction was Silvina’s openness in writing about her own shame about having less money than others, an openness Antonio didn’t possess back then because there was no way he was going to acknowledge to anyone, even to himself, that part of the reason he’d never returned to Colombia to run for office had to do with finally having a job in Los Angeles that allowed him to have enough money to spend on expensive clothes — my mother glued acrylic nails inside our garage, Antonio writes, which she had converted into a nail salon where she also sold difficult to find imports like Toblerones, and since we didn’t have a car I always had to beg my classmates for a ride, such that I had to drop out of tennis lessons after school when I was in elementary school because no one could give me a ride back home — your son has tremendous potential in tennis please find a way for him to continue lessons, Doña Leonora — and perhaps because during summer #7 Silvina was living in such precarious conditions (she had just graduated with a masters in neuroscience, her boyfriend had broken up with her so she had to move out of his apartment to a temporary sublet above Gratitude Cafe, didn’t have a job yet and didn’t have the kind of parents who could provide financial assistance — dear financial aid office at Yale I misled you when I wrote down that my mother’s annual income was $700, Antonio writes, I was too embarrassed to ask my mother how much she accumulated per year from her acrylic nails garage business — dear financial aid office at Yale the summer before flying to you I sold Hawaiian shirts at the mall so I could afford the plane ticket from Chapel Hill to New Haven, Antonio writes — dear financial aid office at Yale I will always love you —), Antonio had felt a kinship with Silvina, although he didn’t think about her in terms of kinship back then, when he would drive her home whenever they ran into each other at the literature in translation series at Skylight Books and she would answer his questions awkwardly and he would try not to flirt with her because he was sure she was waiting for him to flirt with her just so that she could say to her friends see, these Latin American men are all alike, sure she was worried he was going to reach across and grab her leg any minute now as he drove her to her sublet above Gratitude Cafe, and yet one night, out of despair or boredom or because here was this beautiful science fiction writer on his passenger seat, Antonio said to her I don’t feel like going home yet would you like to stop for a drink somewhere, and Silvina said sure, and Antonio said great (and not much else so as to not risk blurting out anything that could change her mind), driving to Tabula Rasa on Hollywood Boulevard, where their knees almost touched as they half swiveled on the barstools not out of coquetry but because they were both anxiously fishing for statements in each other’s monologues that could feed their own monologues so as to cast a loop of compatibilities, in other words they were trying to create the illusion of fluidity because according to the mating culture of the United States fluidity amounted to chemistry, and this so-called chemistry was supposed to be a good sign and not just one accretion of traumas called Antonio at birth sniffing another accretion of traumas called Silvina at birth and saying, like the song in that movie where Philip Seymour Hoffman listens to an ersatz god on an earpiece before he dies alone, I know you, you’re the one I’ve waited for — my father lives in a homeless shelter, Antonio — soon my sister will live in a homeless shelter too, Silvina — and after they finished their drinks at Tabula Rasa they danced to dancehall in a corner of the bar and he asked her if it was okay if he flirted with her and she said yes, and so he kissed her, and so they exited the bar and they entered her temporary bedroom above Gratitude Cafe, where he discovered Silvina’s predilections weren’t too dissimilar from Hari’s — elephant? — no, Antonio writes, Silvina picked László Krasznahorkai as her safeword to amuse me — and where, the next morning, he awoke to discover he was still there — dinosaur jokes straight to the left, sir, Augusto Monterroso says — and although he doesn’t remember everything they said to each other the next morning, he likes to believe he will always remember her box set of the complete works of Silvina Ocampo, which he encountered in her temporary kitchen and which he carried to her temporary bedroom, where he said are you trying to change your name to Silvina so you can say you wrote these, and Silvina said my Venezuelan father wanted to call me Silvina but my Icelandic mother hated my father so much that she picked a name he couldn’t pronounce, and because Silvina frowned at Antonio every time he called her Silvina, twisting her mouth in disapproval, he continued to call her Silvina, exaggerating his fake Italian accent so that it sounded like Silvína.
Parallel Longings, the most experimental of Silvina’s stories, is written in the form of a Q&A with the chatbot of a detective agency called Parallel Longings, which clients hire to investigate what happens in their parallel lives — our detectives have special access to subspace corridors, the chatbot replies to the question how do your detectives travel between parallel lives — and as Antonio rereads Parallel Longings, imagining its subspace corridors as those apocryphal tunnels connecting monasteries to convents in the Dark Ages or the Renaissance or whenever, he tries not to populate these subspace corridors with his sister, with images of his sister pacing back and forth along the subspace corridor linking her to him and deciding to fly from Baltimore to Los Angeles to spend one day with him, months before her mind was overlaid with too many errors of comprehension — does the white noise of airplanes soothe you as much as it soothes me? — who is this? — topo number two — my answer is your answer, Toñito — on long airplane rides to Czechia the white noise of the plane would blank my ability to read and all I could manage to do was watch saccharine movies featuring charming reversals, Silvina — and what I wanted to tell you, Antonio writes, no, I don’t want to tell you anything — plus you already know that, before the onset of the misfortunes that await all of you, Antonio thinks, you won’t become something other than what you are, in other words if your sister spends six hours each way inside a plane to see you for a day no red alert will force you to notice her desperation, no red alert will alter the intractable passageways that constitute your so-called stable family life in Los Angeles to warn you that no one boards a plane from Baltimore to Los Angeles to see anyone for a day unless that someone is desperate to reconstitute the passageways that might reestablish who she has been before an accretion of misfortunes began to disrupt her perceptions — let’s play topos, Toñito — how do you play topos? — easy just repeat after me topo / topo / topo — desperate to untrace the passageways already overtaken by conspirative voices incognizant of the spatiotemporal regulations in the USA — my little brother thinks he’s better than me because he spent two years at Yale what a sham — no red alert will warn you and your former wife that if your sister spends six hours each way inside a plane to visit you for a day you probably shouldn’t reprimand your sister for eating all the baby carrots in the fridge — that is so rude, Estela — just as no red alert warned Antonio that, as summer #7 was coming to an end, as his daughters and former wife were boarding a plane from Czechia to Los Angeles, he was beginning to relegate Silvina to where the rest of his former companions were already fading and not fading from him, even though he didn’t want to relegate Silvina anywhere — but before I tell you about The End of Silvina I want to tell you about Thomas Bernhard, Antonio writes, about that one afternoon inside a food court sushi place in the financial district of Los Angeles where Silvina, knowing I was organizing a marathon reading of Correction by Thomas Bernhard, one sentence per person, one shot of Cava per appearance of the word Cone, surprised me by gifting me a hardcover first edition of Correction by Thomas Bernhard — she didn’t have enough money for food why would she spend $35 on me? — don’t be a moron, Toñio — the hardcover first edition of Correction by Thomas Bernhard with two statues on the cover that reminded him of the human figures on Easter Island, the best gift anyone had ever given him, Antonio realized as she handed him the beautiful hardcover first edition of Correction by Thomas Bernhard, displacing in seconds all the wrongheaded gifts he’d received from former girlfriends throughout the years like thin belts, boxer shorts, franchise coffee, a pillow shaped like a pair of breasts, a snowboard, and either because Correction by Thomas Bernhard was the best gift anyone had ever given him or because he already knew that Silvina would be gone from him soon after the end of summer #7, even if he didn’t want to acknowledge it to himself just yet — I have come to define happiness collectively, Antonio writes, and it’s ridiculous, given that most adult relationships end anyway, Antonio reassures himself, to pursue a relationship with another adult at the expense of my daughters, who are so little still — his face, trying to suppress his impulse to cry, adopted a pained look that he tried to soften by repeating thank you so much, Silvina, thank you so much — find me Silvina’s hands at that precise moment please — anything you say, boss — and, a week later, at the marathon reading of Correction by Thomas Bernhard, he bunched next to Silvina at a booth in Gratitude Cafe and pretended he wasn’t spending every other evening with her (why did he encourage her to keep their relationship secret? so as to not upset Silvina’s friends whose advances she’d turned down in college? so that there would be less explaining to do once it was over?), and, many months later, after the relegation had been completed and Silvina’s apparitions had shifted from being painful reminders of what could have been to being forms of consolation for him — where are you taking me now, Antonio? — everywhere I go you go, Silvina — he boarded a plane to Baltimore to check on his sister, who, as she became less suspicious about the purpose of his unannounced visit, ranted at him with the same fervent repetitions, the same manic delivery of Thomas Bernhard — I don’t understand why Bernhard’s always so pissed, Silvina — read his autobiography? — an autobiography that chronicles Bernhard’s terrible upbringing and repeatedly acknowledges how this terrible upbringing has irreversibly marked him — by means of the cruel words my mother shouted at me she achieved peace and quiet, Thomas Bernhard says, but every time they plunged me into the most terrible pit of suffering, from which I have never escaped as long as I have lived — and as Antonio rereads Thomas Bernhard’s autobiography he finds in the back of it some notes he’d written years ago about a coworker of his who reminded Antonio of Doc Brown in Back to the Future, a jovial man in his seventies who’d lent him a VHS tape on Borges and had told Antonio about growing up with his eccentric parents, both of them railroad workers, Doc Brown said, and sometimes my father would appear before my mother in one of his military costumes and recite poetry to her, and my mother, not to be outdone, would unearth her toga from the closet and refute my father by reciting from her side of the poetry stack, I knew a woman, Doc Brown recited, lovely in her bones, and last year, Doc Brown said, after I awoke from a coma, the heart surgeon asked me if I understood where I was, what had happened to me, and I wanted to tell him I was fine but didn’t know how, couldn’t articulate a simple statement to confirm I understood him so I panicked and began to declaim from Julius Caesar, friends, I said, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him, and so the heart surgeon called his nurses, Doc Brown said, alarmed that perhaps I’d become deranged because I was talking nonsense and crying as I remembered my parents reciting poetry to each other in our living room, my parents, both dead, whom I miss every day — I wish I had parents I could miss, Silvina — my father’s medication has shriveled the tentacles that tie him to his outer galaxies, Silvina said, but he has gained so much weight that he looks as if three versions of him have been crammed into one — and perhaps this image of Doc Brown’s parents reciting poetry to each other has become an essential element in Antonio’s narrative of how adult relationships should unfold, Antonio thinks, or at least the kind of adult relationships he would have liked to have for himself, and yes, during summer #7 Antonio did ask Silvina to read to him, although he doesn’t remember what exactly he’d asked Silvina to read to him (later he will find in his phone’s iTalk app (1) a 6:17 recording of Silvina reading from War & War by László Krasznahorkai, (2) a 1:46:43 recording of his mother telling him about her childhood, soon after losing track of his sister for the first time, (3) a 37:59 recording of his sister ranting at him, which he’d secretly recorded in Baltimore in case he needed to present evidence she was not well in order to commit her to a mental institute), and yet he does remember the story Dora read to him during summer #3 on the BART train on their way to see a Chekhov play in Orinda during their weekend trip to San Francisco, a story called Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov, a bafflingly slow story centered around a stern monologue warning you about the perils of happiness — there ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man, Chekhov says, someone standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him, disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others — an inadequate story for the occasion because Antonio & Dora were still young and light in each other’s presence and they were on the BART train on their way to see a play in an outdoor theater and they were carrying a picnic basket with sparkling wine, prosciutto, baguette — but there is no man with a hammer, Chekhov says — a quiet story they brushed off, Antonio thinks, just as they brushed off the homeless man who boarded the BART train and handed out miniature sign language instructions with a plea to please help him, a man that offended Antonio because Antonio was sure the man was pretending to be a mute, and neither Antonio nor Dora nor anyone else on the train handed the man who was pretending to be a mute any change, and so the man sat there, defeated, waiting for the next train stop so he could escape his embarrassing predicament, and a UC Berkeley student who looked as if she’d just come back from a Peace Corps assignment began to speak to him in sign language, and he replied to her in sign language, and she replied to him in sign language, and he replied to her in sign language, and Dora & Antonio could hear the man who wasn’t pretending to be a mute emitting guttural sounds as he spoke to her in sign language desperately, and as Antonio rereads Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov, he no longer finds the story bafflingly slow, or he does but finds the slowness reassuring, likely because he no longer feels like a carefree young man with a picnic basket, yes, (1) he has so many white hairs now that Ada has given up on plucking them, (2) after his evening soccer games his shins are so banged up that he has to submerge his legs in Epsom salt baths to feign recovery, (3) let us avoid an inventory of ailments, please, recalling instead, as he rereads Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov, that on the same BART train ride but in the other direction during an offsite in Concord for his database analyst job, months before his sister began to misperceive the inconcrete as concrete, months after he had relegated Dora to where the rest of his former companions were already fading and not fading from him, he’d listened to Mary Gaitskill reading Symbols and Signs by Nabokov on his oversized circumaural Sennheiser headphones and had thought about Dora and Chekhov and their picnic basket — so wonderful to see us again on this train, Dora — you have quite an imagination, Antonio — no, he won’t relisten to Symbols and Signs by Nabokov because he knows this time Dora and Chekhov will be the background and his sister will be the foreground, but of course he does relisten to Symbols and Signs by Nabokov, in which an old Russian couple visit their son at his sanatorium on his birthday, but unfortunately they can’t see him, the nurse informs them, he has tried to take his life and seeing you might disturb him — the boy, aged six, Mary Gaitskill reads, that was when he drew wonderful birds with human hands and feet — yes, Antonio thinks, no one is near his cubicle at Prudential Investments so he can listen to Symbols and Signs by Nabokov without needing to suppress tears as the old defeated Russian father says, lying to himself, that they will get their boy out of the sanatorium the next day — all this, and much more, the mother had accepted, Mary Gaitskill reads, for, after all, living does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case, mere possibilities of improvement — she thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure, Mary Gaitskill reads, of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion, of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world, of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness.
Jules Jakobsdóttir’s daughter reads Mirrors Aren’t Terrifying and concludes she can improve her mother’s story with speech-to-text software, so she (i) records herself reading her mother’s story, (ii) runs the speech-to-text software, (i.ii) records herself reading the speech-to-text version of her mother’s story, (ii.ii) runs the speech-to-text software, (i.iii) records herself reading the speech-to-text version of the speech-to-text version of her mother’s story, repeating herself until her process transforms her mother’s story into Garbled Mother Generator, a story by Jules Jakobsdóttir’s daughter (who also happens to be called Jules Jakobsdóttir), and just as the casual reader is about to conclude that Garbled Mother Generator by Silvina Snæborg Ocampo is a straightforward process story about teenagers and their damn electronic devices, Jules Jakobsdóttir begins to receive transmissions from the Garbled Mother Generator, which instructs her to visit her mother at her homeless shelter — apparently my sister has driven from Baltimore to Milwaukee because she’d heard the homeless shelters there were better for women, Silvina — your sister’s storage, Antonio’s mother said over the phone, we have to find the name of your sister’s storage company in Baltimore — but by the time his mother discovered the name of the storage company in Baltimore where his sister deposited her belongings after she lost her house, all of his sister’s belongings had already been auctioned off — now folks today we’re going to auction off Missus Pimber’s things, Israbestis Tott says, I think you all knew Missus Pimber and you know she had some pretty nice things — why worry about her things Mom don’t we have enough to worry about already? — not her things Antonio her personal things that can’t be replaced, Antonio’s mother said — which Antonio does not want to imagine — the last time your sister came to visit me she removed all your childhood pictures from my albums to scan them and she never returned them to me, Antonio.
If someone would have shared with Antonio the amusing anecdote of a woman who, having had enough, drives to Washington, D.C., enters the Pentagon, asks the receptionist if she could please speak to a supervisor because her life has become unbearable due to the satellites orbiting her, please stop spying on me, Antonio would have chuckled, or perhaps Antonio would have chuckled later, once the amusing anecdote reaches the part where the receptionist at the Pentagon calls the woman’s mother, and the woman’s mother has to explain her daughter’s unfortunate circumstances and assure her she’s harmless, don’t worry, the receptionist says, thousands like her arrive here every year, I’ll tell her to go on home, except of course Antonio didn’t chuckle when his mother called him and told him she’d received a call from the receptionist at the Pentagon — how did she manage to drive from Baltimore to Washington in her condition, Antonio? — just as Antonio doesn’t chuckle now when he sees homeless people talking to themselves in downtown Los Angeles, homeless people screaming at the air or the Pentagon, for weeks Antonio could hear the screams of a homeless woman from his sixth-floor cubicle on South Flower Street, all those years prior to his sister’s illness he didn’t chuckle when he walked past homeless people talking to themselves because he just didn’t see them, homeless people not existing for him like those thousands of inconvenient memories of childhood his mind has managed to wipe from him, hundreds of insensate people on the streets who, some would argue, would stop malfunctioning if they simply swallowed their medication — I tell you it’s selfish not to take the pills because I know, Graham Caldwell says, because I take them too you understand, Dad? — except what if your acute powers of discernibility betray you without you noticing so you’re suspicious of anyone who tries to convince you that you need medication, Antonio thinks, believing instead that your family is conspiring against you by asking you to please see a doctor who could prescribe the right medication for you, listen, you can’t force someone into a mental institution, you can’t force someone, once she’s in a mental institution, to talk to you over the phone, moreover, once she’s in a mental institution, she can prohibit anyone in the mental institution to talk to you or even acknowledge to you that she is there, in other words if you’re suddenly afflicted by a perceptual disorder there is no way to unwind your disorder unless you agree to take your medication, in other words if you suddenly believe the inconcrete is concrete you could lose your job, as my sister did, you could threaten to shoot your neighbors and end up in jail, as my sister did, you could lose your house, as my sister did, you could decide to run away to Milwaukee after the judge finds you incompetent to stand trial, as my sister did, and yet in Baltimore there is one way to institutionalize someone without their consent: if someone fills out a form attesting that the person in question is a danger to herself, as Antonio and his mother did, the police can capture the person in question, as the Baltimore police did, and the person in question can then be institutionalized for no more than two weeks, but if during those two weeks the person in question refuses to take any medication, as Antonio’s sister did, if, moreover, during those two weeks the mental institution refuses to communicate with you so you can explain the particulars of her unfortunate situation, as the New Horizons Hospital did, then after two weeks she is free to go, as Antonio’s sister had been, refusing to talk to Antonio and his mother ever again because see, my mother and my brother were conspiring against me (and here Antonio tries not to think about the message he sent to the private investigator this morning informing him that his sister’s probably at some homeless shelter in Milwaukee), in other words if you suddenly controvert what others agree isn’t there there’s no rapid process of retroversion unless you agree to swallow your medication.
All this, of course, Silvina reads, indeed his whole history, originated in the distant past, said Korin, and here Antonio rewinds the recording of Silvina reading from War & War by László Krasznahorkai, trying to remember where he’d recorded her, all this, of course, Silvina reads, indeed his whole history, originated in the distant past, said Korin, no, Antonio thinks, he can’t remember where he’d recorded her so he rewinds the recording to the beginning again, listening to Silvina’s voice again and thinking of Krapp’s Last Tape, which he’d seen once by himself when he was still twenty-five or twenty-two and once years later with Dora — we lay there without moving, Krapp hears himself say, but under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side [pause] — rewinding to the same part of the recording where Krapp talks about a woman lying stretched on the floorboards with her hands under her head, her eyes closed, the whole world moving under them, all this, of course, Silvina reads, indeed his whole history, originated in the distant past, said Korin, yes, Antonio thinks, he’d seen Krapp’s Last Tape twice: the first time he’d been twenty-five or twenty-two, his sister still a Senior Actuarial Associate in Baltimore, Dora and his former wife and Silvina still many years in the future, and because he was still trying to understand whether he could become a writer he was reading everything and attending so many performances for the first time, Waiting for Godot, for instance, Krapp’s Last Tape, both of them on the same weekend by the same theater troupe, and what he remembers of that first performance by the Gate Theatre from Dublin, almost fifteen years ago, aside from the audience laughing during the banana jokes, is the feeling that this rewinding business was as amazing a literary device as the letter writing in Herzog by Saul Bellow, and what he remembers of that second performance by the Cutting Ball Theater, eight or nine years later, is Dora reading his copy of Krapp’s Last Tape while smoking outside the theater before the performance, and Dora’s impassive presence in the audience next to him, and old Krapp so alone on the stage, passing the time before he dies by listening to tapes of himself as a young man talking about a woman whom he wishes to remember, again and again, we lay there without moving, Antonio can recite from memory, but under us all moved, which is how it had once been with Dora, with his former wife, with Silvina, although he can remember so few specifics about his time with Silvina, Silvina reading a 1,178-word sentence from War & War by László Krasznahorkai and laughing when she reached word 439 because the sentence was still going, pausing at word 839 to ask if he wanted her to keep going, of course I do, Antonio says, keep going, going on, call that going, call that on, listening to the recording of Silvina reading a sentence from War & War by László Krasznahorkai and hearing in the background the white noise of cars speeding by, which meant he’d recorded her on her temporary bed, in her second sublet apartment, near the off-ramp highway traffic, the windows in her room open because it was summer #7 still, Silvina outstretched on her bed in her cutoff jean shorts and a Motörhead T-shirt that was falling apart, her feet on my hands, Silvina & Antonio floating above the earth like Hari & Kris in Solaris, but unfortunately this is all that he can scrape out of this 6:17 recording of Silvina so he checks again to see if there’s any more recordings of Silvina in his iTalk app, yes, yes there is, a fifty-five-second unlabeled recording of him testing where to place the phone in his car because he was interviewing László Krasznahorkai that week while driving him around Los Angeles: this should work, he says, [turns down music from Messiaen’s Saint Francis of Assisi], can you talk a little bit while the car is running, hmmk so I, hmmk, she says, [in a Muppet voice], this is not really helpful, hmmk, he says, [in a Muppet voice, both laugh], let’s try again let me ask you a question when was the last time you were really fucked, he says, [he laughs], all right, she says, [in a tone of resignation], just kidding what’s your favorite book, he says, that’s a nice question, she says, I think you might have been there for it heeey, [both laugh], so I am seeing that girl I think on Sunday, she says, what are you talking about Sunday is my day, he says, you are just going to have to, you’re going to take a few hours off, she says, I am not sharing you with some girl who doesn’t want to hang out with us, he says, [she laughs], you just said you couldn’t blame her before you went on your death-wish spiral, and that’s it, Antonio thinks, fifty-five more seconds of Silvina on top of the 6:17 of her reading War & War by László Krasznahorkai — perhaps my best years are gone, Krapp hears himself say, when there was a chance of happiness, but I wouldn’t want them back, not with the fire in me now — Krapp should have recorded her instead of himself talking about her, Silvina — you think Krapp could withstand hearing her voice directly, Antonio? — all this, of course, Silvina reads, indeed his whole history [final time], originated in the distant past, said Korin, as far back as the time he first announced the fact that though an utterly mad world had made a madman of him, pure and simple, it didn’t mean that that is entirely what he was, for while it would have been stupid to deny that sooner or later, naturally enough, that was how he’d finish up, or rather, sooner or later, reach a state resembling madness, it was obvious that whatever might in fact happen, madness was not a particularly unfortunate condition that one should fear as being oppressive or threatening, a condition one should be frightened of, no, not in the least, or at least he personally was not scared of it, not for a moment, for it was simply a matter of fact, as he later explained, that one day the straw actually did break the camel’s back.
Ulrica Thrale’s granddaughter (the protagonist of A Lexicon of Terror who’s of course also called Ulrica Thrale) arrives at her father’s sanatorium to inform him she’s a management consultant now so she will be going away to Kansas City, and the next day she arrives to inform him she’s an investment banker now so she will be going away to Salt Lake City — we plant cauliflowers and groundhogs in the garden here, one of the nurses says — and the next day and the next she continues to arrive at her father’s sanatorium with a brand-new profession and her father always says permutations, connectives, infinitary annotations, scalars, and what Ulrica’s father says to Ulrica next made Antonio cry the first time he read A Lexicon of Terror — good one, Snivel — back at the beginning of summer #7, when he’d asked Silvina to please share with him a copy of A Lexicon of Terror & Other Stories, no I don’t even have a copy a Gloom Hulk who isn’t me wrote those stories, she’d said, hmmk, he’d said, in that case we’re going to Skylight Books to purchase a copy of A Lexicon of Terror & Other Stories, installing himself afterward at Gratitude Cafe to read Silvina’s stories and Silvina saying I’m not sitting here while you compose eldritch thoughts about those stories I wrote in high school so she escapes upstairs, and although Antonio doesn’t believe in so-called epiphanies he does like to believe that, as he was reading Silvina’s stories for the first time, imagining Silvina’s footsteps above him, he produced an actual epiphany for himself: if Silvina can write about her miserable childhood — her father covering all the mirrors in the house when he still lived with Silvina and her mother, her father recording his jumbled pronouncements that he would then send to the local radio station — so can I, and so Antonio rewrote large swaths of his first novel set in Bogotá, sharing with Silvina some of the worst episodes of his childhood in Bogotá in frantic monologues over dinner that he then assigned to his characters the next morning, and as he remembers those frantic monologues over dinner he thinks of that time during summer #7 when Silvina’s sublease above Gratitude Cafe expired and she didn’t know what to do with her ragged mattress, why don’t you leave it on the sidewalk, Antonio said, I’m not sure I can do that, Silvina said, of course you can everyone else does, Antonio said, so he helped her haul her ragged mattress to the sidewalk in front of Gratitude Cafe, and Silvina became quiet, looked nervous, as if someone was eyeing her as the two of us carried her ragged mattress downstairs, what’s the matter, Antonio said, I feel extremely uneasy about breaking any laws, she said, I think I’m afraid I’ll make one mistake and be deported or end up in a homeless shelter — I don’t think my mother will ever recover from knowing my sister ended up in a homeless shelter, Silvina — what about you how do you go on, Antonio? — it takes tremendous energy to keep functioning while carrying the memory of terror, Dr. Van Der Kolk says — and at Ulrica’s father’s sanatorium he says to her transmissions, emissions, subspace corridors, sensors, difficult job, I will write to your boss, Ulrica’s father says, I will come with you.