Alone in the room, the girl tries to continue writing. Her father’s on his vigil in the Grand Central Station, or perhaps he’s somewhere else entirely, on a date, say, with the young college chick. The screenwriter is outraged her father doesn’t look after her, as any half-decent father would, but that he’d rather be out dallying with a jumped-up prostitute. He can’t care for his daughter at all, he can’t love her, the screenwriter concludes. Alone in the room, the girl wonders whether the world seems so real because it’s created by a single, immense, and unfathomable intelligence, or by many intelligences working collectively. Did a single consciousness create the world she lives in, or are there many consciousnesses, many different minds, responsible for its existence, and for the existence of each individual in the world — one for her, say, one for the screenwriter, another for her father? It may be that this scattering of minds, being held in a loose conjunction with billions of others, each of which believes itself the center around which the rest of them turn, is really a single powerful collective mind that purposely fractures itself into smaller pieces in order to exist more thoroughly, more intensely. Is that possible? Sometimes, the girl imagines a structure resembling a glass honeycomb, each of whose cells contains a separate brain. At other times, she imagines billions of small, cloudlike structures drifting aimlessly in infinite space. If nothing exists outside these minds, where in space are the minds themselves located? Perhaps it’s more sensible to imagine either a loose collective of minds, or just a single mind, like her own, that creates itself and everything else around it. She remembers having reached this same conclusion before. She goes out onto the balcony. But in what material is this single or collective mind suspended? The girl doesn’t quite understand it. She touches her hand, touches the balcony rail, closes and opens her eyes. Does the Grand Central Station really exist? And where are the aliens, or where is the so-called guardian angel the screenwriter keeps talking about? There must be something linking them, some secret connection between the voices, the aliens, and the guardian angel. She wonders how she can tell if those beings that are supposedly born with us, that then accompany us throughout our lives, listening to our voices, inner and outer, our conversations with others, with ourselves, beings that ultimately outlive us, but will preserve our memory after we die — she wonders how to tell if they’re angels or aliens from outer space. How can a girl of sixteen believe in angels? It makes more sense to believe in extraterrestrials, she says while watching the traffic of people and vehicles in the plaza. And what if there’s only one place in the whole world where we can make contact? She supposes something as important as that would have to be located in a city somewhere, and not some secret location in a rainforest, say, that no one can find. Besides, there are many places to hide in the city. The contact point could be in a bookstore by the river, for example, the kind that sells old books. Then she thinks, what if this actually turned out be the case? She touches her hand, touches the balcony rail, closes and opens her eyes. Does the Grand Central Station really exist? Is it another illusion? She suddenly has an empty feeling inside. Did you say something? she hears her father ask as he walks in the door.
That’s probably it, says the girl to herself while sitting in a half-empty restaurant, still thinking about the old bookstore she imagined could be the place in which she finally makes contact with the aliens. From a distance, we wouldn’t recognize her, but as we approached, we’d see it was the girl, and that she’s undergone a significant transformation, cutting her hair quite short, and dying it metallic blonde. She’s anxious, breathing quite heavily, filling her lungs with air, her veins and arteries with oxygen, and yet there remains an empty feeling inside her. Maybe she’s just hungry and impatient for the food to arrive. At the table next to hers, a recently married couple is flirting. A little farther away, a husband and wife, with a daughter not yet old enough to walk, are having dessert. Some of the empty tables in the restaurant don’t have a tablecloth or any such covering at all. One of the waiters is watching her intently. It’s late, but if she must eat alone, the girl prefers the restaurant to be empty; the solitude is less overwhelming. She’s always more lonely in a crowd. Nonetheless, the girl listens to people’s true voices: the recently married couple’s, the older couple’s and their daughter’s — voices they can’t hear themselves, but which the girl hears clearly. She even listens to the voices of the people who were once sitting at the empty tables, people who’ve long since left. There’s a movie in which we listen to other people’s voices. These aren’t like the ones the girl hears — which are like the voice of the multitudes speaking in unison, as if all humanity was speaking with a single voice. What does it signify? she wonders. Nothing happens by chance. They’re voices informing her of a task, a mission she has to complete; whispers she’ll eventually understand. So there’s no need for her to lose heart. Sooner or later, it’ll all start making sense. Suddenly, the recently married woman interrupts her musings to ask for an autograph. She just happened to have a magazine with a picture of the girl inside. It’s better with a picture than on blank paper, the woman says. The girl signs it, but not without scanning the article first. She then apologizes for the delay, saying she hadn’t been aware of its existence. The world must be conspiring against her. How did the woman recognize her even though she cut and dyed her hair? Should she start dining with sunglasses on? When her cell phone rings, the recently married couple and the couple with the daughter have long since left. On the other line, the brilliant composer is praising the design and acoustics of the concert hall in which the Little Sinfonietta are performing tonight. The girl isn’t impressed either by the hall’s architecture or the number of people it can accommodate. The brilliant composer is about to begin a short rehearsal, but he took the time to call her anyway — as if to say, look at what you’re missing with all your silly scribbling. She listens in silence, considers an adequate response. Perhaps something like: Oh, but haven’t you premiered in this or that concert hall yet? No? Well, wait until you see it. It’s far better than the one you’re describing. If you ever perform there, don’t forget to call me. Or maybe, instead of irony, she should wait until he’s in mid-sentence then hang up on him. In the end, she decides against playing either card, chooses instead to listen, in case she needs the information to finish her novel. She also wants to find out how far his malice will stretch. He asks if she’s planning to make her novel autobiographical, as he suggested she should do. The girl stops talking. She doesn’t want him to know how she really feels. She’d gladly shoot him dead, but she pretends everything he says rolls off her as water off a duck’s back, as if the interview she heard on the radio hadn’t fazed her at all, as if she didn’t mind the latest conquest pretending to be her, as if she wasn’t enraged at her boasting about hearing voices and writing novels. No, she wouldn’t stoop so low.
If nothing exists, writes the girl in her diary, the dead are nothing more than products of the imagination: a corollary of the theorem that a single mind is responsible for conceiving everything. And reinforced by the lemma: the single creative mind must somehow exist outside its creation. It must exist in another dimension. So why not bring the dead back to life? Why not create life in other galaxies? She has to think of a mechanism that connects aliens and the dead, nothing too simple, or others would’ve already thought of it. It has to be something like those gateways connecting far-flung regions of the cosmos, through which one could traverse vast distances of space and time. She can’t rely too much on the personal ads in the newspaper. She once believed the No World Symphony was the place to have an encounter, a place from which she’d be transported to another world. She once believed they shared a common language with us, but she never managed to discover it. Not even the brilliant composer, with all his mathematical casuistry, and those compositions that are more like secret messages for cabals of code-breakers than music to delight a listener, no, not even he had managed to discover a common language between humans and aliens, between the living and the dead. He may not even believe that such a common language is possible. He may only believe in the game. Now the girl considers the possibility of a single creative consciousness again, wondering if, in her eagerness to know it better, she might begin by asking a completely different question. Would a mind that creates itself and everything else still have need of success and recognition? It would require a superhuman effort at self-deception.