“If you don’t mind, we’d like to film you while you work,” and without giving him time to respond, he rushed to explain. “It’s to cover ourselves to the stockholders, just in case.”
Dr. Aira mumbled something, and looking down at the ground, he noticed that there were no cables, which was quite fortunate because otherwise he would surely have tripped on them.
With a discreet signal from the brother who had just spoken, the two cameramen looked through their viewers and switched on the little red lights on their equipment. As if a lever in his body had been released, Dr. Aira stopped feeling natural. From that moment on, what was happening on the surface no longer coincided with the episodes of his psyche, which, now liberated from expressive restrictions, took on their own velocity. In a way, the exterior world could be deemed void: the nurses, the relatives who took their seats as if expecting to listen to a concert, and a small group of teenagers who looked at him with vague disapproval. What did he care! Relieved of naturalness, he felt as if anything was allowed.
He walked over to the bed. The man was lying on his back, his head and upper back propped against large pillows and with an orthopedic brace around his neck. His arms were stretched out on top of a sky-blue sheet, which was folded down over his heart. He was not wearing a watch. A thick gold wedding band was on the ring finger of his right hand.
His features were frozen into a somewhat ill-tempered, irritable grimace. He had not a single hair on his head. He was staring back at him, but his pupils were not moving. Dr. Aira tried to read those eyes that were locked on his, and the only thing that occurred to him was the melodramatic idea that they had the texture of death. Death is always nearby, and its shapes and colors inhabit all drawings of the world, in full view but also hidden, all too visible, acting like a narcotic on one’s attention. One sees only what one wants to see. As if disappearance formed part of appearance. Sometimes one needs a word (the word “death”) to make volumes and perspectives stand out. On this occasion the word had been spoken, and Dr. Aira understood that only through it did he have any chance of success. The only course of action was to take the man for dead, the activities of his life spent; not only could he consider it over, along with all the treatments and spiritual remedies, but he should, then begin from the other side. There was no other way to begin.
An idea was dawning on him, and its phases were cascading toward him. In reality, nobody was rushing him, but he had been thrust upon time. He wondered if he’d have enough space. When he turned his eyes away from the patient’s, where they’d been glued, he felt as if he’d lost some of his strength. Even so, out of inertia, he kept figuring things out. To his right, on the wall facing the street, was a large French door covered with a thick, dark-red velvet curtain. He went over to it and pulled on the cord, which opened the panels sideways. There was a balcony. He didn’t go out (he was afraid they’d think he was going to jump), but he glanced up. Right in front, between two tall building, he could see a strip of star-studded sky. He returned to the bed, leaving the door open. In the room the cold night air began to be felt, but nobody objected. He looked back into the patient’s eyes to recharge his batteries. He needed all his strength for what he was planning to attempt.
It was an old idea, which had remained latent in the depths of his mind all the years he had devoted to the Miracle Cures. He had never kept files with a strict chronology, and his papers had gotten mixed up again and again, a thousand times (his ideas were annotations on his ideas), so he couldn’t be absolutely certain, but he had the impression that it had been his first idea, the original Miracle Cure. In that case, and in accordance with the law of Decreasing Output, it was his best. It was based on the following, if somewhat simplified, reasoning:
A miracle, in the event that one occurred, should mobilize all possible worlds, for there could not be a rupture in the chain of events in reality without the establishment of another chain, and with it a different totality. As long as the operation dealt with alternative worlds, however, it would be an impractical fantasy. As far as facts were concerned, there was only one world, and that was where the insurmountable veto against miracles arose. And the truth is, there were no miracles, as anybody with a little common sense could ascertain. Someone like Dr. Aira, who didn’t even believe in God, could not entertain the least shadow of a doubt in that regard. Just because there had not yet been any miracles, however, didn’t mean they couldn’t happen; superstition, ignorance, gullibility all led one to think that miracles could happen just like that, naturally. On the other hand, it was possible to produce one, create one as an artifact, or better yet, as a work of art. For this, one only needed to introduce the dimension of human time, which was not difficult because time participated, by its very heft, in all human activities, and even more so in those activities that entailed almost superhuman efforts and difficulties. In practical, everyday terms, time is constantly producing a mutation of the world. After one minute, even a hundredth of a second, the world is already different, though not different in the catalogue of possible worlds but rather a different possible-real one, which is the same, because it has the same degree of reality. And “the same” is equivalent to “the only.” It was within this transformational One, otherwise known as “the real,” that Dr. Aira’s idea for the production of miracles functioned.
Under these conditions, a miracle was simply impossible. But it could be created indirectly, through negation, by excluding from the world everything that was incongruent with it occurring. If one wanted a dog to fly, all one had to do was separate out each and every fact, without exception, that was incompatible with a flying dog. However, which facts were these? Here was the key to the whole thing: to make a correct and exhaustive selection. A wide field had to be covered: nothing less than the totality of the Universe. There were no pre-established or thematic or formal limits; the reach of the “compatible” was, precisely, total. The most far-flung fact or quality — or constellation of the two — could form part of the great figuration within which Miracles could or could not take place. Nor were levels a factor, for the line might run up and down (or to the sides) through all of them. The trick was to put into play the greatest of all Encyclopedias and to compile the relevant list from that. Who could do that? The customary response, the one that had been offered since oldest antiquity was: God. And to remain with that meant Miracles would have stayed within his jurisdiction. Dr. Aira’s originality was in postulating that man could do it, too. It had occurred to him once while listening to the casual reflections of his friend Alfredo Prior, the painter. Speaking about paintings (perhaps Picasso’s or Rembrandt’s), Alfredito had said, “No masterpiece is completely perfect, there’s always a slipup, an error, something sloppy.” This might have been a factual observation, but it was also a profound truth that Dr. Aira treasured. Human acts not only contained imperfections but required them as the starting point in their search for efficacy. Discouragement in the matter of Miracles came from not recognizing this. If, on the other hand, this deficiency were accepted, creating a miracle would be as easy (and as difficult) as creating an artistic masterpiece. One simply had to give oneself time. God could revise the entire Encyclopedia and make all the right selections in an instant; man needed time (let’s say, an hour), and he needed to allow himself a margin of error in the selections, trusting that they would not be critical errors. After all, that mechanism had an antecedent in the daily functioning of individuals: attention, which also compartmentalized the world, but which, in spite of frequent errors, achieved a level of efficacy necessary for its bearer to survive, and even prosper.