That’s as far as the idea had come, and it was enough. The entire deduction of the reality of Miracles was there. Still pending was the elaboration of the historical aspect of the question (but this would be left for the installments), that is to say, why, in light of these discoveries, certain periods of history and modes of production were rife with miracles, and others had none.
Also left hanging, until now, was the practical aspect per se, that is, how to do it once it had been proven to be possible. When the theory is solid, the practice comes on its own. He simply had to dig in, and if he hadn’t done so before now it was because he hadn’t had the opportunity. Now the moment had arrived, and it was futile for him to reproach himself for having left the delicate question of the practice, in its entirety, to be improvised at the scene of events, especially considering the long stretches of free time he’d had over the years; because experience had taught him that practice couldn’t be thought about like theory, or if it was, its nature changed, it became theory, and practice itself remained un-thought about. It was futile to have regrets, above all because he was already seeing the solution arrive on time for its appointment, and although it was very complicated, it appeared to him all at once, in an avalanche whose movement he knew well. Like a philosophical handyman, he carried ideas and fragments of ideas from other fields around in his head, and the way they instantaneously adapted to his needs elated him, as if all his problems had come to an end.
The operational tool came from the field of publishing. It was the “foldout” we’ve already mentioned, which had figured on his list of luxurious and unrealizable fantasies for his installments. Here the page foldout turned into the form of a foldout screen, with indefinite though not unlimited panels. Using the “foldout screen format” he could quickly and easily compartmentalize the Universe: thin and made of a very fine plastic film with wire stays, the screen could pass between two contiguous elements that were almost touching; flexible, it could make all the turns necessary; and its ability to continue to unfold made it possible to connect the most remote points as well as the closest one, and to divide up immense as well as tiny areas. All he had to do was pull the panels, this way and that, excluding areas of reality that were incompatible with the survival of this man. In other words: the Universe was now a single room, and the direct and indirect causes of his inevitable death were flocking indiscriminately toward the sickbed. All he had to do was raise the screen and stop them in their tracks. It was doable because these causes did not include everything that constituted reality, only a small part — well chosen, that’s true — of the totality, which is why no sector could be excluded a priori. Once a “security zone” had been configured, the patient would rise from his bed, cured and happy, ready to live another thirty years. In the “open” world, such as it was now, he couldn’t live; all the factors contributing to this impossibility had to remain on the other side of the screen. Or better said: not all, because that would be to fall once again into the divinity requirement; “all” that were humanly possible to find and isolate, those necessary to obtain the desired result, which, after all was said and done, was fairly modest: an individual cure.
He began to unfold the first screen without knowing where to put it. .
But I don’t think I’ve explained myself well. I’ll try again using other words. The work he was undertaking was nothing less than the identification of all the facts that made up the Universe, the so-called “real” ones in the narrow sense as well as in all the others: imaginary, virtual, possible; as well as groupings of facts, from the simplest pairs to the multitudes; and fragments of facts, that is, a thousand-year-old empire as well as one’s first attempt to drink a beer. Facts had to be considered one by one; when they were grouped together it was to constitute another fact as particular as any one of its individual components and did not exclude the separate consideration of each of these; they were not grouped by genre or species or types or families or anything else. You could not take “a dog wagging his tail” but rather “this” dog wagging his tail at a specific hour and minute of a particular day, month, year, “this” particular instance of tail-wagging.
It was the complete Encyclopedia of everything, not only of the particular (the general was also included as a fact, made particular in order to appear on the list, on the same level as everything else). Nothing less than this would work. Because if the goal was to prevent from taking place an event that the entire order of the Universe threatened to make happen, he had to search through the farthest-flung folds of the Universe for every concomitant fact.
Granted, it would be impossible to compile such an Encyclopedia. This is a typical divine idea. But the originality of Dr. Aira’s idea resided precisely in the passage to the human along the road of imperfection. He was not compiling it because he felt like it, or out of vanity, or emulation, but rather due to an urgent practical necessity: to produce an immediate and tangible result; and to do this, much less than perfection would suffice (at least: could suffice). It wasn’t a question of giving the patient perfect health but rather of extricating him from his death trance.
Even so, it was a titanic task, for the listing of the facts was merely the qualifying round before carrying out the operation itself: the selection of the concomitant facts, those that have to be set aside in order to create a provisional new Universe in which “something else” could happen and not what was supposed to happen. By the way, these exclusions and the resulting formation of a field that would serve as a different universe had an antecedent: nothing less than the Novel itself. In fact, it could be said that to write a novel one must make a list of particulars, then draw a line that leaves only some of them “inside” and all the rest in an absent or virtual state. Which constitutes a kind of exclusion sui generis. There are many things a novel does not say, and this absence makes it possible for action to take place within its restricted universe. Hence, the novel is also an antecedent of Miracles, precisely because the events the novel recounts can happen as a result of what it excludes. Admittedly, here we are not talking about Reality but rather its Representation, but if the novel is good, if it is a work of art and not merely entertainment, it takes on the weight of reality as well. Then the cliché that states that a good novel is a true miracle becomes warranted.
We have divided up the work (first, the identification of all the facts, then the selection of the relevant ones) for the purpose of clarifying the explanation. In practice, it was all done at the same time. So that when Dr. Aira took off, he did so in a block, and his uncertainty included everything.
The foldout screen began to trace its white zigzag through the inextricable confusion of everything.
Yes. . Indeed. . The places it would have to pass through would appear on their own, almost without searching for them. To speak of a “search” was a contradiction in terms; as all places were being dealt with, it was enough to encounter them. In any case, what had to be sought were the paths that led through the overabundance of encounters. And within the action, which had already begun, within the miracle of the action, he was already dodging global cells, and in a matter of seconds he had become extremely busy. The elements came, magnetized by the capricious laws of attraction as well as the rigorous law of laws, and also by the lack or absence of any law. Hence, at the precise moment the screen was initiating its trajectory, the first elements appeared with clear outlines between which the lines of exclusion were drawn: those initial elements were none other than journeys and displacements: comings and goings in airplanes, taxis, shuttles, ships, subways, Ferris wheels, on foot, on skates. . Suddenly, Dr. Aira had a lot to do. The bar of exclusion in the form of panels of an elegant white foldout screen was already dividing up vast portions of the universe. Of all the airplane trips contained in the Universe, about half were left “outside,” this to provide an acceptable margin of error; of course he couldn’t know which were compatible or incompatible with this man’s life, so he unfolded the screen in a zigzag, which anyway happened naturally, in order to increase the probabilities. If just one airplane trip belonging to the Universe in which the patient was dying of cancer remained “inside,” everything would be ruined; but it was better not to think about that; defeatism was a poor counselor, and anyway defeatism, all defeatism, was also an element of the world that had to be sorted into the reconcilable and the irreconcilable; soon it would have its turn.