Bradley and his old friend did not enjoy the calm of their conversation for very long. For them, too, the rush of fiction came to interrupt the syllogisms of reality. A noise coming from the nylon tubes warned them that they were being attacked by electric weapons. In fact, the young agents who were sleeping were awoken one after the other with hundred-thousand volt charges in their blood and died with their hair standing on end. The two of them organized an emergency rescue mission, which could not save those who were already dead. They connected a portable converter made of optical fibers, booted up the software, and when they turned on the siren (the maneuver took only a few seconds), all the loose electricity in the atmosphere discharged in the generation of inoffensive images. The tents exploded in a cloud of transparencies, but they managed to escape. They ducked and rolled into the darkness, and when they stood up, they took off running desperately through the mountainous terrain. They were chased by gigantic bearded Cossacks shooting streams of liquid fire at them from their sleds. The scientific consultant, who was panting like an overweight Labrador retriever, took the time to tell his friend that the Cossacks’ ammunition was made of exo-phosphorus, the latest hurrah in incendiary fuel, which burned only on the outside, not on the inside, but this made it no less destructive, quite the contrary.
They received unexpected help from the mountain owls, huge phantom-like creatures who, frightened by the noise made by the sled, took off in flight and intercepted the exo-phosphorus. As the fire wasn’t interested in their internal organs, they kept flying, though lower down (the flames must have weighed them down). They were so bright that they blinded the Ukrainian ogres, who crashed into trees, giving the fugitives an added advantage.
By pure chance, Bradley came across the entrance to an ancient and abandoned coal mine. They entered its underground galleries without thinking twice. They used a burning owl feather sprayed with exo-phosphorus to light their way, for it gave off an intense white light. Calm was restored; here, they were safe. It was as if they could pick up their conversation where they had left off, now no longer in the inflatable tent surrounded by espionage equipment but rather in the galleries of an underground coal mine filled with feldspar and old lichen. I liked that touch, because it suggested that in reality conversations are never interrupted, they merely change scenarios, and change subjects, and in order to bring about that change the interlocutors have to risk their lives.
They ended up in a huge cavern, the limits of which they could not even see, and they approached a lake of still water. Along the banks, magnetite dust had formed piles of black foam. A regular “glop glop” in the deep underground silence made them peer out along the surface of the water; there they saw floating medallions made of a viscous substance, which seemed to be breathing. Taking every precaution, they picked one up and examined it in the light of the owl feather. This was the toxic algae, which they had been looking for in vain until that moment and by chance had found where least expected. Excited, having totally forgotten the danger they had just confronted, the scientific consultant analyzed the viscous material, mentally reviewed the bibliography, gasped a “No, it can’t be!” which refused to cross the bounds of rationality, then resigned himself to a perplexed and awed “But it is!” By revealing their secrets, the toxic algae opened up a path until then concealed from science, which gave access to the best kept secrets of the universe, because in reality they were not algae but rather retro-algae, vegetal mutants with nervous systems, which formed a bridge between life and death. He wondered if he was dreaming.
With a little effort on the part of the viewer, I said, the oneiric atmosphere became palpable. I pointed out to my friend and perfected the argument ever so slightly alone in bed, that when one watches movies in the theater, one’s concentration, enhanced by the darkness and the fact itself of going to the theater, takes one into the fiction completely and makes one cease to think of it as fiction. On the contrary, at home, when watching movies on television, one inevitably does not enter it completely. A part of one’s consciousness remains outside, contemplating the game of fiction and reality, and here the emergence of a critical sensibility becomes inevitable. It ceases to be a dream one is dreaming alone and becomes the dream that others are dreaming. It is not so much an issue of finding mistakes in the construction or the logic (that would be too easy) but rather the birth of a certain nostalgia, of partially glimpsed worlds, within reach, but still inaccessible. .
What kinds of worlds? my friend wanted to know.
I didn’t want to tell him that I was thinking about my nocturnal “revisions,” because I kept my little drowsy and solitary theater a secret, and this was not the moment to reveal it (that moment would never come). I squirmed out of it by telling him that I wanted to finish my explanation, and then maybe we could clear things up once and for all and return to a civilized conversation, without retro-algae or exo-phosphorus. .
Or Señorita Wild Savage. .
Ugh! I had forgotten. That, too, and so many other things. So many circles we had to run around in to get to the Rolex!
An entire lifetime, right? my friend said, and when I reached this remark in my memory, and only then, did I remember something else that subtly changed the tone and meaning of our conversation. I just said that I had never told him, nor did I ever plan to, about my habit of recalling at night the conversations we had had in the afternoon. Nor had I told my other friends I met and conversed with, nor anybody else. But I had told each of them, on some occasion brought about by the haphazard nature of conversation, about some of my obsessions or whims or little oddities, because I can say that I am a man without secrets. So, I must have told somebody that ever since I was a little boy, I had dreamed of owning a Rolex. It was completely gratuitous, and I had never taken it seriously, to the point that I had never even considered buying one, or even finding out how much one cost. Moreover, it didn’t fit my personality; and that’s precisely where the idea must have come from: from that vague longing we all have to be somebody else. What I didn’t remember was if I had told this friend in particular. If I had (and in my nocturnal reflection I had no reason to suspect that I had, besides the slight intonation in that “right?” of his), the whole conversation, from the moment I had brought up the movie, began to have a double bottom, and there emerged a new possibility for the interpretation of each remark.
It was a little too obvious for me to start speculating about where this old, never explored fantasy had come from; we all have fantasies, old and new, and that little luxury item was probably, at some moment in my childhood, a good vehicle for my imagination. Whatever the case, I glanced at it quickly and from afar (at the fantasy, at the always deferred work of analyzing myself and trying to understand my life), and with this distraction in addition to the previous reflections, I got behind as far as the movie was concerned. What I mean is: in the real conversation, in the café, I had kept talking about the movie; the entire parenthesis took place in the nocturnal reconstruction. And it really should have been a parenthesis, there was nothing preventing it from being a parenthesis, but, whether because of contamination by movies in general and by particular movies that keep playing while one is distracted and thinking about something else or going to the bathroom, the truth is that it was as if the conversation had continued, and I had been left behind. So, to catch up I had to sum things up and take a leap forward, violating my standard of rigorous step-by-step memory.