Wandering, by definition, is a going nowhere. And wandering to escape one’s thoughts is as pointless as wandering to escape one’s feet. It’s certainly no analeptic against hypnosis. In fact, it may serve only to exacerbate it. The girl buys a newspaper and sits down to read it at a café in the city center. She reads that the star of her favorite soccer team managed to get back into shape by training alone. She reads about the celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the capital’s liberation, about some battle in the past, part of a war that happened decades ago, in which only old geezers like the screenwriter or the philosophy professor in her novel could possibly be interested. She looks at all the pictures of the celebrations to see if her mother appears in any of them, but the only one that catches her eye is of the Little Sinfonietta after one of their performances. She’s particularly struck by the latest conquest’s new hairdo, which is identical to hers. The girl also notices she’s holding a red clown’s nose out to the crowd, and looks as if she’s at the point of releasing it. She’s not surprised. She reads about her tremendous success at the concerts, about her new recording contract with the same record company the girl’s signed to, and about the Sinfonietta’s upcoming appearance on a famous TV show. She reads all this before repeating to herself: nothing that occurs is certain, truth is only an illusion, it exists nowhere outside the mind. Nowhere outside my mind. And true enough, a little later, the girl finds herself thinking about nothing in particular. There’s nothing else in the newspaper to occupy her thoughts. Nothing about the astrophysicist in the classically-cut suit, say, no more reports on his death. The reply to her comment in the classifieds matches what the agency told her word for word. Why would it be any different? The proposed meeting place is a nightclub. She supposes such places shouldn’t be ruled out, although she’d rather have met at the airport or a church, even a library.
The screenwriter amuses himself juggling all these details around in his head, because at this point her story has become fully his, and he wants to explain to the director, the producer, and script editor exactly how the girl feels. He realizes that, in focusing on the girl, he’s compensating for other, less complete parts of the script, because there’s certainly an imbalance of sorts, every other aspect of his screenplay seeming to give way for the sake of a single character, an imbalance that will more than likely have to be corrected by someone else. But why start making excuses now? He may end up doing it himself, for when he’s seen through his role as screenwriter, he’ll take up the mantle of script doctor. He reads some random passages from the book about screenwriters. One day he’ll start on page one and keep on going till the end. He still intends to use some examples from it to teach any potential students. One of the screenwriters confesses in an interview that only a few of the experiences he’s had in his professional life were truly gratifying. In the majority of cases, almost everything that he felt was good about his work ended up on the cutting-room floor. For the screenwriter, there isn’t much solace in reading this, but at least his misery has found some new company. He flips through the pages looking at all the photographs. There’s only one woman among them: a blonde, leaning back in a chair, an elegant pose, wearing pearl earrings and a necklace. Behind her are shelves filled with videocassettes. Just like all the male screenwriters, she’s shown at an age well past maturity, but just before gravitas has given way to dotage. All the men have gray or graying hair, wear horn-rimmed glasses, and are frequently shown posing next to the poster of a movie for which, we are led to presume, they wrote the screenplay; some others are shown looking up from a desk in an office, and others still are shown having a great time on set with actors, directors, and other film crew. The screenwriter flips through the photos and considers what films he’d liked to have collaborated on. Then he thinks he probably appreciates them more because of his aesthetic distance from them. There is a golden tint coloring them all, he thinks, but faded, as of the epoch to which they belonged. But when he reads about their points of view, what it was really like, this golden age, he wonders whether it was all that different. For there is nothing to suggest that a golden-age screenwriter had it any easier. Perhaps what he really admires, although he doesn’t know it, is the success of the industry in every age, including his own, but for him, only when something has come and gone, and has become irretrievable, does it acquire an aureate aspect. . He closes the book and puts it beside the pile of newspapers. It’s best to focus on the girl, who’s still wandering aimlessly around the city, whiling away her time, because she wants to postpone making a definite decision. She thinks about having to confront everyone, but then changes her mind — perhaps it’s only herself she needs to confront. She goes into a music store and buys one of the first CDs she recorded. She wants to be reassured of its quality, that she’s not just another flash in the pan, just another in the long line of piano prodigies who have come and gone without consequence. The biggest stars in the industry don’t need to be great performers; once they attain a certain level of fame, the blinding aura of their celebrity hides many of their less obvious defects. She listens to the disc as she walks. The performance is good, but there’s something missing. Perhaps, back then, her playing lacked soul. And that’s the difference. If she had the opportunity to record the
5 Pieces for piano, she’d have to bring her performance to a whole new level, a level neither she nor anyone else has yet reached. She sits on a bench by the sidewalk to write for a while. Then she closes her eyes and leans back in the sun, whiling away the hours until dusk. She thinks about visiting the bars and clubs she used to frequent with the others after the concerts. First, she has something to eat in a restaurant. The newspapers report the same news. The only difference is the local papers don’t ever mention the star of her favorite soccer team. She folds it and puts it aside. She thinks of a list of bars and clubs to go to. She has plenty of time to spare before her meeting. It seems to her that aliens must have a lot of patience anyway. Meanwhile, perhaps over a drink in one of those bars, she may be able to resolve the question of her hypnosis. She’s not sure if she remembers the way, but she tries to reconstruct the route she often took while barhopping with the others. Eventually, though, she gets lost walking along streets she doesn’t recognize. She doesn’t find even one of the bars or clubs on her mental list, and not a single member of the group of people who often joined their party over the course of a night. It’s almost as if these scenes didn’t occur in the same city. Even the café in front of the church looks different than it used to. She asks one of the waiters if it’s still frequented by writers and musicians, as it was when she and the group went there before and after the concerts in the church. The man doesn’t seem to recall this ever happening, so she goes off on a new search for all the famous cafés and restaurants she used to visit with her mother, the young conductor, and their retinue. But before long, she gets lost again, and although she asks some people for directions, none are sure of the way. It’s as if the route has been erased, or that it never even existed, or that she only dreamed it. She tires of going around in circles. Then she recalls she still has some of the pills those two pricks used to give her. They should pep her up for a little while, she thinks. Minutes, perhaps hours, later, she finds herself leaning against the hood of a car in front of the nightclub, watching the entrance fixedly. She knows she may be about to have the most important first encounter of her life, indeed of anyone’s life. And yet, something in her gut tells her it’s too good to be true, that anyone could’ve replied to her message, and that the meeting might be a waste of time, which wouldn’t be a surprise, since it’s the running theme of the night so far, of the past few days in fact — days and nights spent wandering aimlessly through the streets, or through her mind, sitting at the laptop, not writing a line, and unable to resolve the question of her hypnosis. When she wrote the ad, she felt she could take on the world, but now she feels tired, perhaps because it’s late, perhaps because she’s been feeling dispirited lately; either way, she’s not very enthused at the prospect of an imminent alien encounter. But might they clarify what exactly her mission is on Earth? Shadowed in the doorway, before entering the nightclub, she hides the gun in her satchel and goes to leave it in the cloakroom, her mind completely blank, like an automaton’s.