He slept the whole morning, and needed a couple of coffees to bring him out of his stupor. Then he collected his clothes from the laundry place: in the neighboring country’s capital, the price of even getting one’s laundry done is extortionate. He should try harder to stick to his schedule, whatever the circumstances, no matter how tempting the opportunity to deviate from it. He goes to his desk and tries to get down to work. He let himself get carried away, almost to the point of believing the girl’s idea that a universe full of extraterrestrials emerged from a single miniscule point. But she doesn’t imagine just one universe, one point of origin, but many, existing in parallel — stories, some unique, some with alternate beginnings and endings, even some that don’t have a beginning or an ending at all, that don’t have a continuous narrative or identifiable characters, for the literary fashion is always changing, and who knows, perhaps the number of parallel universes is infinite. The screenwriter sets this conundrum aside for the time being, and considers another problem. Perhaps he should’ve made the girl older. Some of the scenes he’s describing won’t be suitable on film. Not that he’s going to rewrite them. Any concessions made for the sake of convenience or to resolve contradictions in the story would make him a liar and a copout. He needs the tender inexperience, the raw sexuality of someone young, very young in fact. He switches on the TV. Three people are having a discussion about television as a medium for quality programming. A fourth person, who must be the moderator, asks them if quality is even possible on TV. Being old gives you a new perspective on things, the screenwriter thinks. The same controversies tend to arise again and again. This debate has been going on since moving pictures were invented. Depending on his mood, he could argue quite well for either position. He’s done so in the past. He’s inclined to believe quality isn’t possible, but right now, since he’s sitting in front of the TV, he doesn’t mind suspending his disbelief, along with his inclination toward debate for its own sake. The discussion doesn’t really matter to him anyway. Perhaps it’s because he’s only an old curmudgeon at heart, someone with no real convictions; and perhaps this is because of the way he’s lived his life. He thinks about this, but can’t ascertain where exactly he went wrong, what led him to become so cynical. Nevertheless, he knows it’s true. He switches through the channels. Nothing worth watching. He looks at his watch. Too early for porn. So he turns off the TV and returns to the typewriter. Those disputes about quality, artistic merit, arise again and again, in each generation. No thinking person can avoid them, including the girl. Although, at the moment, she only thinks about one thing, her one desire in life, perhaps it’s an illusion, unreachable, something so close she can almost touch it, but perhaps it will always be out of reach. She feels like a writer. Being hypnotized instilled an inexorable belief in her. “2.223 To determine if a No World is true or false one must compare it with reality. 2.224 Reality doesn’t exist.” She revisits the idea of aliens from another planet being unaware of their origins. They came from their mothers’ wombs. This fact alone precludes their ever learning the truth about what they really are, and where they really come from. It’s the most extraordinary way to protect a secret. To live their whole lives and never be cured of an unwitting blindness, a disease they don’t even know they have. It’s not likely to be the Earth’s atmosphere that caused them to forget, something she’s already considered, but rather a kind of innate programming. But why make them forget? For their own protection. But protection from what? From something she can’t even begin to fathom. Is there a planet in the universe called Ka? “6.5 If the No World provides questions, it also provides answers.” There is a girl with heightened perceptions who intuits that something isn’t right. It’s undoubtedly a defect in her programming. This girl has a peculiar feeling her name isn’t her real name, in the same way her father’s name isn’t really his. Sometimes, she hears people pronouncing it differently, wrongly; at other times, disembodied voices do so. The phenomenon is so bewildering she can’t share her thoughts with anyone, because no one else understands what’s going on. She hears them pronounce her name with the letter
k, but the difference is subtle when her name is pronounced with a “ka” instead of a “k” sound. And there’s the rub. “4. The thought is the significant proposition.” It seems a crazy person has introduced herself into the novel. She feels strange when she writes “ka,” not knowing if it refers to her name or the name of a distant planet. She stops writing and forces herself to think. She couldn’t say how many times she’s begun writing only to subsequently destroy what she’d written. Now she writes every day, it doesn’t matter what. Perhaps it’s something about the mission she’s been entrusted with, to penetrate the mystery of “ka” or “k.” She knows she’s a writer. She’s heard it said that practice and experience lead to inspiration. No World could be the story of an old professor, an alien hunter, who fled from his hometown and settled in the City in Outer Space. It’s also the story of Cousin Dedalus, at least what she’s written so far, because she’s still afraid to tackle the next part, and would rather take her mind off it and focus on another character. He could be old, as old as the screenwriter, she tells herself, but from whom or what could this character be running? From himself perhaps, or his wife, maybe some people from his hometown. Another alien, she eventually decides, but one who isn’t aware he’s an alien. Slowly, the screenwriter considers the possible options. He used to describe the writing of a screenplay as the reverse of a police investigation. Now he’s trying to remember why. Probably because there’s no difference between the acts of constructing a fictional story from memory and imagination, and reconstructing a crime scene from evidence, at least in the way the mind operates. The screenwriter imagines a voiceover reciting some of the girl’s work, an ideal way to present her writings if he spreads her narration evenly through the script. If he begins with a voiceover, he should use it again periodically throughout the movie, to remind the audience who’s telling the story. Of course, the character telling the story is the girl, and her voice reminds us of the special way she views the world. She continues writing about the alien hunter who fled to the City in Outer Space. A guy who could be her Cousin Dedalus, except much older, perhaps the screenwriter himself, her old literature teacher, except this one teaches philosophy. He went there to reinvent himself, start his life over, even though he isn’t as reliant on place to do so, on being situated somewhere, having a home, as most people are. Then there’s the idea that nothing exists outside the mind, that there’s no external reality, that everything is conceived in the imagination: a hypothesis that allows each individual mind to create its own world, its own universe, from scratch. The kinds of minds that are unable to determine their own origins, she says to herself, minds that tend to sublimate their uncertainty in works of fiction, a book about people who don’t know they’re aliens, for example. This uncertainty could simply be the whim of a creator. To what end, though? she asks herself. Why create worlds at all, why populate them with characters, imbue them with intelligence, make them think they’re alive? And why only one creator, a single being that’s responsible for the existence of everything else, that regards everything else as its own possession? Let’s suppose nothing around us really exists. Could each of these characters’ minds then falsely conceive of millions of other minds, each of them unique, each of them believing itself to be central? Could each of these independent minds organize themselves into a system of networks, each node of which is somehow self-created, self-imagined, and yet at the center of everything? Could each of these minds believe they are God? Yes, replies a voice inside her. They could.