He was moderately concerned about the fact that every “heading” coincided with a word. He was not unaware that the Universe cannot be divided into words, even less so those of one language. He was also using phrases (“the cutting of hair” was one example), and in general he tried to turn a deaf ear to words, to inhabit a space beyond them. But words constituted a good point of departure because of their connotations and associations, their so-called “like ideas.” Thus with the word “sex.” He traced a crazy zigzag with the screen, leaving outside half of all sexual activity, past and future. The bundles of panels that rose and fell according to the participant, the pleasure, the modality, et cetera, again formed the familiar pom-pom. This was particularly delicate material, so he divided it up with particular brutality. The patient might get out of bed only to discover that he had not had a particular lover, or that he liked boys, or that he had once slept with a Chinese woman, but it was all worth it, if the tradeoff was life. That the same thing would happen to the rest of the planet’s inhabitants, including the animals, was less important, because individual memories, which could only function with the parts that remained within the new universe, wouldn’t remember anything. Many beautiful love stories would vanish into the ether, or would never have been.
The ends of the screen continued to exceed the fields of meaning and create others that immediately, and almost through the impetus of their unfolding, cut huge and savage zigzags. Astronomy. The ability of parrots and blackbirds to speak. The diesel engine. The Assyrians. Coffee. Clouds. Screens, screens, and more screens. They were proliferating everywhere, and he had to pay close attention to make sure that no sector failed to be sorted. Fortunately, Dr. Aira had no time to notice the stress he was experiencing. Attention was key, and perhaps no man had ever brought as much of it to bear as he did for that hour. If the circumstances had been less serious, if he had been able to adopt a more frivolous perspective, he could have said that the entire procedure was an incomparable creator of attention, the most exhaustive ever conceived to exercise this noble mental faculty. And it did not require an extraordinary person; a common man could do it (and Dr. Aira would have been quite satisfied to become a common man), for the Cure created all the attention it demanded. It wasn’t like those video games, which are always trying to trick it or avoid it or get one step ahead of it; to continue with this simile, it should be said that the operator of the Cure was his own video game, his own screen, and his own decoys, and that far from defying attention, they nurtured it. Despite all this, the effort was superhuman, and it was yet to be seen if Dr. Aira could hold out till the end.
His depletion was physical as well as mental. For although the screens were only imaginary, the effort needed to unfold them and stretch them across the vast teeming terrains of the Universe was very real. He held them along their upper edges between the index finger and thumb of both hands, and he opened them by stretching his arms out wide, and since he could never quite reach, he had to move around, taking little leaps from side to side. . then he would return to touch up the line, expand or contract the angles. In general he avoided straight lines, which were drawn when he stretched the screens out too fully, because the straight line was too categorical and the selection had to be more nuanced: a fact could be included or excluded at the beginning or end of a folded panel — a singularity, which, however small, could turn out to be crucial; anything could be.
And there were screens that extended upward, or downward. . To stretch them out he had to stand on his tiptoes, or jump on a chair; if it descended, he threw himself on the floor or scrambled under the bed, under the edge of the rug — as if he were trying to bore a hole through the floor. He retreated and advanced as he stretched the screen overhead, all the while adjusting the angle or the direction of another one under him with the tip of his toe. As he could see nothing besides his screens, and the jungle of iridescent elements they were cleaving through, his movement around the room always ended with him banging into the walls, the furniture. . He stumbled frequently, and he was down on the floor more than he was standing up. Depending on how much impetus he had, he was either stretched out or rolling around doing spectacular half somersaults; but he took advantage of these involuntary plunges to hang the screens in places he couldn’t have reached otherwise. Everything was useful.
He never stopped moving. He was bathed in sweat; it was streaming through his hair, and his clothes were stuck to his skin. He went back and forth, up and down, every cell in his body shaking, arms and legs stretching and contracting like rubber bands, and he was leaping around like an insect. His face, usually so inexpressive, churned like ocean waves during a storm, never pausing at any one expression; his lips formed all kinds of fleeting words, drowned out by the panting, and when they opened, his tongue appeared, twisting like an epileptic snake. If it had been possible to follow, with a stopwatch, the rising and falling of his eyebrows, one could have read millions of overlapping surprises. His gaze was fixed on his visions.
From the outside, and without knowing what any of it was about, the practice of the Cure looked like a dance without music or rhythm, a kind of gymnastic dance, which might appear to be designed to shape a nonexistent specimen of the human. Admittedly, it was pretty demented. He looked like Don Quixote attacking his invisible enemies, except his sword was the bundle of metaphysical foldout screens and his opponent was the Universe.
Thud! He crashed into a chair and fell headfirst to the floor, both his legs shaking; the crown of his head left a round damp mark on the rug; but even down there he kept working: his right hand was tracing a large semicircle, placing a screen that divided up the joys and sorrows of Muslims; his left was pulling a little on another screen that had excluded too many apples. . Now he was on his feet again, lifting the white accordion of a vertical screen that was crossing levels of reality as it sorted through “latenesses” and “earlynesses”. .! And what looked like a tap dance meant to recover his balance was him hanging two screens that would exclude certain rickshaws and particular conversations. With his chest, his rear end, his knees, his shoulders, and head-butts, he corrected the positions, angles, and inclinations of the panels, enacting a true St. Vitus dance in the process. And to think that this grotesque puppet was creating a New Universe!
And so it went. One might have thought that the space of representation at his disposal was going to get overcrowded, that it was going to start to get difficult to keep inserting more screens. But this didn’t happen because the space wasn’t exactly the one of the representation but rather of reality itself. In this way, miniaturization led to its own amplification. Like in an individual big bang, space was being created, not getting filled, through the process, hence within each pom-pom an entire Universe was being formed.
In honor of reality, he had left the door to the balcony open. Through it long strips of screens were swept out into the heavens. He couldn’t even see what some of them were excluding, but he trusted that in any case they would leave at least one particularity in each arena on this side. As often happens with difficult jobs, a point came when the only thing that mattered was to finish. He almost lost interest in the results, because the result that included all the others was to finish what he had started. He had really had to dig in to find out how demanding the problem of Everything was, what brain-racking pressure it created. . Only by living it could he find out; all prior calculations or fantasies fell short. Even though he didn’t have the time, he fervently longed to return to human mode, which was so much more