People have two separate attention systems, according to experts. Thinking quickly is the first. Strictly speaking, it is almost like not thinking at all—it is acting instantly, instinctively, fluently. The second is thinking slowly, which is overthinking—it involves thinking twice and, if there is time, three times, so that in the end the thinking is focused more on the neurotic loop of the thought process than on the thought itself. I have discovered my problem: I fall into the second group, and I always wanted to belong to the first.
I rapidly gauged this woman desperately bursting into the clinic and who, from what she was saying, sounded like she was a doctor. I went over to the nurse and discreetly asked the nature of the woman’s problem and she told me that the woman had a thirteen-year-old daughter with West syndrome. I’m sorry, I said, what is West syndrome? I discovered that the woman’s daughter could not move, that she suffered as many as twenty epileptic seizures a day, and that right now, when the woman burst into the clinic, she was having difficulty breathing. Is there any cure? I asked. West syndrome is a degenerative condition, the nurse said, every day she will get a little worse.
I was thinking about this as I left, but not because I wanted to. On the contrary, it was one of those thoughts you want to shake off but cannot, a series of pieces of information that, from the way they interact when brought together, seem to be self-evident. A thirteen-year-old girl, a degenerative illness, more than twenty epileptic fits a day. We were riding in a carriage and I spent the whole journey brooding about this. I was holding Mariana while my children were chatting and the coach driver was screaming insults at the horse to go faster.
Debris gathers above our heads, as though the soft afternoon light was being filtered through a sieve suspended above us. Then this distills, slowly blurring the buildings and the houses in the pueblo, a municipal milk-white film. By now, it had stopped raining. After the showers, everything looked dirtier and grubbier. Spots of mud on my shoes and my pant cuffs.
The carriage sank into every pothole. With every jolt of the wheel, puddles of dirty water exploded and we quivered like springs inside the coach. The rusted iron frame, rather than keeping moving to the trot of the horse, juddered from side to side. The vinyl seats threatened to split at every bump. Steam from the rainstorm rose from the tarmac and mingled with the dust of dried horse manure.
That night was not particularly memorable. I think we ate a few sandwiches, something light. Mariana had said she had something to tell us, but none of us reminded her or asked her anything. She was covered in bruises and those who are ill acquire a moral standing that allows them to act or not to act, to speak or not to speak, while we, the healthy, defer to them after a fashion. We spent a couple of hours sitting in front of the television, although none of us was really paying attention to the programs—we were all engrossed in our own thoughts. I can’t say what was distracting the others, but I was still fascinated by the sick thirteen-year-old girl. I found it impossible to imagine such a situation, what exactly it would be like, her illness, her age, the seizures coming minute after minute.
María phoned the neurologist to confirm the appointment and it was then that the neurologist said that he wanted to bring the appointment forward to the following day because he had something important to tell us. Mariana nodded; whether it was one day or another did not matter to her. Fine by me, Diego said. No problem, I said, we will go tomorrow. OK, Doctor, we’ll be at the hospital first thing tomorrow morning, María said.
If we are going in the morning, I think I’ll go to bed now and rest up before the drive, I said. Is there gas in the car? María asked. I filled the tank this morning, I said. Make sure you use all the gas before you give it back, Diego said, don’t give them anything that belongs to you. I didn’t respond, I was too embarrassed. Whatever happens, happens, I thought. I drank a glass of water, emptied my bladder, and lay down on the left side of the bed. For the first time in years I wondered whether I too might not be sick. Everyone falling ill, everyone falling to pieces, and me hale and hearty? So began the ordeal.
I don’t know whether that night I fell asleep instantly or whether I didn’t sleep a wink. Nothing like it had ever happened to me. We know that babies in the womb can cry. It doesn’t matter that there is no air, that their lungs are full of amniotic fluid, and that all this means they cannot produce a sound akin to crying. They still cry there, inside, silently, howling and sobbing without anybody knowing.
I couldn’t move, couldn’t open my eyes. No one could hear my voice, my cries for help. I was trapped in limbo, a sleep paralysis where the mind is awake and the body still asleep. I wanted to wave but my hands would not move, and this constant immobility was more exhausting than a marathon. What am I missing? I thought. Gas, maybe? Am I a car trying and failing to start, running on empty, sputtering?
Keep a cool head, Armando, I told myself. Concentrate, move slowly, creep out of this limbo, I said to myself. And it seemed to be working. At some point I saw myself sitting up in bed. Everything was in darkness, and lying next to me, in the grip of a seizure, Mariana’s entire body was being shaken like a rattle, the brawny arm of her temporal lobe jerking her up and down. I saw myself in slippers, making as little noise as possible, padding into the kitchen, opening the door of the fridge, eyes half-closed, running a hand over my potbelly, feeling the weight of years on my shoulders, a chronic exhaustion, taking out a bottle of water and pouring myself half a glass, the frozen light from the fridge stabbing at my eyes, the sound of my own throat swallowing, the sound of the glass being set down on the counter.
I went back to bed, buried myself under the sheets, and only then realized that I had never left, that I had been asleep the whole time, that it was just a dream, though an incredibly vivid dream, with one eye open and one eye closed, shall we say. Seen from within, the dream was like a highly realistic painting, by which I mean it wasn’t mysterious or intricate or cryptic, it wasn’t a dream full of riddles or one that transported me to strange places of forgotten memories of childhood or early infancy. It was a series of innocuous events, the sort of things no one would dream about.
Who dreams about waking up? Who dreams about getting up and going into the kitchen? Obviously, I was terrified that it might be a delusion, that I was desperate to wake up and my brain was making me believe I was awake. All this I discovered when I got back into bed, because as I did so, I dreamt about getting back into bed, dreaming that I was dreaming, and so it carried on for endless hours, with nothing happening, dreaming that I was asleep, dreaming about a man, about myself, about lying in this same bed where I had been sleeping for who knows how many nights.
The dream was not boring, despite the fact that almost nothing happened except for the involuntary movements of the sleeping bodies of Mariana and me. A shifting torso, a hand gliding from one place to another, the breeze of the fan ruffling the sheets. It was not boring because these were things I had never seen, precisely because I had been asleep. What did I look like when I was asleep? What did my wife look like? And what did my bedroom look like in the early hours, when there was no one to see?
I thought the night would carry on in this vein until eventually I began to dream about light streaming through the windows, and then about waking up, for real this time, then everyone else waking up and all of us driving to the hospital in the Nissan and later coming home with good news about Mariana, the doctor had said he had noticed a steady improvement in the patient, a positive reduction in focal seizures, and then we carried on with our day, without celebrating but without quarreling either, me and my son talking the way we used to do, then giving back the Nissan, the keys to the office, and all the material comforts that made me a manager, then me accepting the new post assigned to me and spending the rest of my days there, watching the world flash past, understanding everything, not getting involved, not lifting a finger, a mere spectator, just the way it is in dreams.
But no. At some point during the night, the dream divided into a split screen; on one side I could still see myself sleeping, and on the other, the old nightmare began to play out. In a parking lot, a man standing with his back to me carefully opened the door of a car. A car that, when it roared into life, moved like fear along the black motorway, slowly at first, forty, then eighty, and then a hundred fifty, accelerating to over two hundred. By the side of the road, as always, were the ideological fathers and godfathers. Except that this time I was not traveling in the car, because I was still lying in my bedroom, dreaming that I was asleep.
The car pulled up outside a dark, deserted house in the middle of a field. The driver got out and knocked on the door, which was opened by a man. Though nothing was visible, just shades of black on black, I knew from his hat that he was a farmer. They got involved in some sort of transaction and then the farmer closed the door and the driver loaded several sacks and boxes into the trunk of the car. Then we began the long drive back, and just when we had almost reached the parking lot, the dark dream that had been plaguing me for months suddenly changed, and what happened next was brightly illuminated. There came a wail of police sirens and the flash of red and blue lights as a squad car appeared behind the black car, which was not so black, being strobed by lights and sirens, and the black car, which had not once stopped in response to the pleadings of the ideological fathers and godfathers, meekly pulled over to the curb.
Two officers approached the driver’s door; they seemed to be asking to see his documents. The driver did not appear to have them and the officers gestured for him to step out of the car. The driver complied. A few words were exchanged; the officers went around to the trunk, checked the boxes and the sacks. What was in them? What was the driver transporting that—judging from the angry expressions on their faces—so outraged the officers?
They slammed him, spread-eagle, against the car door, frisked, handcuffed, and bundled him into the back of the squad car. Then the officers took some of the boxes and sacks and transferred them to the trunk of their own car. While the car that had haunted me through so many nightmares remained parked by the curb, the dream moved away and followed the squad car, its flashing lights piercing the vast darkness for the first time. Some minutes later, the squad car roared into the pueblo and eventually pulled up outside my building, something that, until that last minute, I had not known would happen. One of the officers climbed the steps and knocked on the apartment door, and realizing they were looking for me, and not wanting to wake anyone, I hurried to answer.
The split-screen dream once more merged into a single image. By now, I didn’t know where I was and I didn’t care. The officer apologized for waking me at such an ungodly hour. The official formalities completed, he informed me that he had arrested one René González in a ’95 Nissan belonging to the State, that the individual in question claimed that it was my car, that he was my driver and was acting on my orders.
Why did they arrest you? I said. I don’t know, you tell me, the driver said, standing in the doorway of my home, but acting as though it were his. At any other point in my life I would have known what to say, but right then I didn’t. Is he or is he not your driver? the officer asked, his face suddenly that of the devil. In that instant, everything changed.