The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira

III

Even for people who lead a routine life without incident, for those who are sedentary and methodical, who have renounced adventure and planned their future, a colossal surprise is waiting in the wings, one that will take place when the moment arises and force them to start over again on a different basis. That surprise consists of the discovery that they are, in reality, one thing or another; in other words, that they embody one human type — for example, a Miser, or a Genius, or a Believer, or anything else — a type that until then they have only known through portrayals in books, portrayals they’ve never truly taken seriously, and in any case have never seriously considered applying to reality. This revelation is inevitable at a certain point in life, and the upheaval it creates (gaping mouth, wide eyes, stupor), the sensation of a personal End of the World, of “the thing I most feared is happening to me,” is tailor-made to the frivolity of everything that preceded it.

There’s no set age, as we know: everything depends on individual variables, which all variables are because the process of living is nothing but their accumulation. But it usually happens around fifty, which these days is the time when one begins to think that everything is over. In the subsequent psychic reshuffling, the horrified victim has an additional reason to feel bitter when he realizes that this discovery will no longer do him any good, that it is now a useless cruelty; if it had happened thirty or forty years before, he would have lived knowing it; he would have boarded the train of the real.

And this happens even when — especially when — the aforementioned subject has spent his life identified with the human type he later discovers he belongs to. In fact, in those cases the surprise turns out to be more disruptive and creates a deeper impression.

This is what had happened to Dr. Aira during this period. It would have happened to him anyway because the time had come, but the fact is that the revelation was unleashed by an incident that interrupted his publishing project before he had had a chance to begin it.

He received a call, which resulted in him attending a rather secret meeting in an elegant suite of offices in Puerto Madero. . and contrary to all his expectations he found himself embarked on the process of a Miracle Cure. Only a few days earlier he would have been able to swear that he’d never do it, that he was already past all temptation, that he had it beaten. His decision to publish installments had emerged precisely from his conviction that he’d left behind the call to practice. But, as we can see, man proposes and God disposes.

The people who contacted him were the brothers of an important businessman, the president of a petroleum holding company with vast influence on industry and finance, who had been unexpectedly stricken with a terminal illness. He was under sixty and of course didn’t want to die, not yet. Nobody wants to. Human beings always cling to life, whatever the circumstances, and whether or not it is worth it. In the case of such a wealthy man, with so many possibilities of squeezing the most out of each day, the desire to prolong life burgeoned. The brothers tried, in their own way, to explain this to Dr. Aira, as if to justify themselves. Circumscribed by their professions and their education, they expressed it in their own terms: the holding company had embarked with great success on a process of privatization; it was one of a select group of local businesses that had managed to broaden its field of operations by reorganizing its assets. They were diversifying without losing strength and were on the verge of realizing the benefits of consolidation, the incorporation of Mercosur, the export stimulus, the retrofitting of their industrial plants with the latest technologies. . They got excited as they were describing it, even though it was obvious they were repeating a speech they had learned by heart, and it was no less obvious that they were reciting it to a total layman. A bit embarrassed, they returned to the subject at hand, suggesting that they were not singing their own praises but rather those of their sick brother, the brains and engine behind the group’s entire operation,

the natural head of the family. What they wanted to emphasize was the unacceptable injustice that he of all people would have to depart before seeing the fruits of his talents, his creativity in the business world, his boundless energy.

Dr. Aira’s head was crackling, as if it were full of soda. He was also slightly embarrassed for having paid such close attention to the explanations, and he wanted to get back to the purpose of his being there. What was the illness? he asked. Cancer, regrettably. Cancer of everything. Large spreading masses, metastasis, the disease’s uncontrollable growth. They pointed to a file on the glass desktop.

“All the paperwork is there, including his clinical history, up-to-date as of today. Though we suppose you don’t work along those lines. It documents the failure of the best oncologists in the country and around the world. They no longer even bother to pretend to hold out any hope at all.”

“How long do they give him?”

“Weeks. Days.”

They had waited a long time to come to him. Anyway, it was impossible. They had probably begun alternative treatments months ago, and all available charlatans and healers must have already filed through. He felt paradoxically flattered to be the last one. They apologized with vague lies, unaware of how unnecessary it was to do so: their brother had undergone the conventional treatments with admirable stoicism; he had not given up even in the face of the most adverse outcomes. . Finally, he had given them permission to try the Miracle Cure, and, as he had done from the very beginning, he was bringing all his faith, all his trust into play: Dr. Aira could count on that.

There was nothing more to say. He looked at the file and shook his head as if to say: I don’t need this; I know what awaits me. The truth was, he would have liked to take a peek, just out of curiosity, though he would not have understood anything because surely every entry was in medical jargon, which was inaccessible to him. Moreover, it was true that he didn’t need it because his intervention occurred on a different level. The case had to be shut in order for him to come on stage; the clinical history had to have reached its end. And by all appearances, this is what had happened with this man.

The next step: he accepted the mission. Why? In spite of all his promises and precautions, he took the plunge. Once again, the well-known saying proved true: “Never say never.” He vowed he would never do it (his interlocutors must not have known about this vow because they took his acceptance as a matter of course), and now he rushed to say yes, almost before they had finished making their proposal. This could be explained a priori by a defect in his personality, which had caused him many problems throughout his life: he didn’t know how to say no. A basic insecurity, a lack of confidence in his own worth, prevented him from doing so. This became more pronounced and more plausible because the people who had requested his services on the basis of his capabilities and talents were, by definition, unfamiliar with his field, and little or poorly informed about his worth and his history. Hence, a refusal on his part would leave them totally blank, thinking, “Who does this guy think he is, playing hard to get like this? Why did we bother to call him?” It was as if he could only refuse those who were fully informed about his system, those who had already entered his system, and by definition such people would never ask him for a Cure, or they wouldn’t ask him for one in earnest.

There was an additional motive, related to the previous one, and the result of another defect, one that was quite common but very pronounced in Dr. Aira: snobbery. This office with its Picassos and its Persian carpets had impressed him, and the opportunity to enter into contact with such a first-rate celebrity was irresistible. It’s true that until that day he had never heard of this man, and the family name was totally unfamiliar to him. But that only magnified the effect. He knew there were very important people who maintained a “low profile” policy. And it had to have been really low to go unnoticed by a snob of his caliber. An unknown celebrity was as if on another — a higher — level.

But before all that, and as if obscured under a leaf storm of circumstantial and psychological motives, his acceptance had a much more concrete cause: it was the first time he had been asked. Like so many other phenomena in our era dominated by media fiction, his fame had preceded him. His own myth surrounded him, and the myth’s mechanism had continually delayed him from going into action, until there came a point when doing so had become inconceivable. These wealthy barbarians had to come along with their ignorance of the subtle mechanism of the esoteric for the unthinkable to occur. In fact, Dr. Aira could have gotten out of it by telling them that there had been a mistake, a misunderstanding; he was a theoretician, one could almost say a “writer,” and the only thing that linked him to the Miracle Cures was a kind of metaphor. . At the same time, however, it was not a metaphor; it was real, and its truth resided in this reality. This would be his first and perhaps last chance to prove it.

They wanted to know when he could begin the procedure. They felt a certain urgency due to the very nature of the problem: there was no time to lose. They managed to include in their proposal a discreet query about the nature of his method, of which they obviously had not the slightest idea (this was obvious, above all, because nobody did).

Swept into the vortex of the blind impulse that had led him to accept the job, Dr. Aira said he needed a little time to prepare.

“Let’s see. . Today is. . I don’t know what day it is.”

“Friday.”

“Very good. I’ll do it on Sunday night. The day after tomorrow. Does that work for you?”

“Of course. We are at your disposal.” A pause. They looked quite intrigued. “And then what?”

“Then nothing. It is only one session. I figure it should last one hour, more or less.”

They exchanged glances. They all decided at once not to ask any more questions. What for? One of them wrote the address down on a piece of paper, then they stood up — serious, circumspect.

“We’ll expect you then.”

“At ten.”

“Perfect. Any instructions?”

“No. See you on Sunday.”

They began to shake hands. As could be expected, they had left the question of compensation for this already marginal moment.

“Needless to say. . your fee. . ”

Dr. Aira, categorical:

“I don’t charge. Not a cent.”

As awkward as his gestures, his facial expressions, and his tone of voice usually were, in this case, and only in this case, he had struck just the right note.

There couldn’t possibly be a question of money, not for anybody there! And yet, that’s all this was about. Money had been left out, but only because there was so much of it. In spite of this being the first time he’d ever dealt with such affluent people, Dr. Aira had responded with the almost instinctive confidence that only long habit can provide, as if he had done nothing his whole life but prepare himself for this moment. It must have been in his genes. In fact, someone as poor as he was couldn’t charge people as rich as they were for his services. One simply places oneself in their hands, places the rest of one’s life and one’s children’s lives in their hands. After all, billions of dollars were involved. As it was a question of life or death, it was as if the entire family fortune had been translated into wads of bills and stuffed into a briefcase. The amount was so colossal, and what he could charge, or want, or even dream of, was such a minuscule fraction of it, that the two quantities were almost incongruent. No matter how hard he tried not to think about the issue (he’d have time later, once he’d gone out the office door), he couldn’t help making a quick calculation related to the installments. It was a calculation he made totally “in the air,” in the pure relativity of fantasy, because he had still not asked for a single estimate from a printer; he had planned to do so in a few days, but this now prevented him, or better said, it gave him a good excuse to keep postponing it. Be that as it may, publishing was very cheap, and compared with the business they conducted here, the cost was marginal and insignificant. That’s how he liked to think of it: as if the financial aspect could simply be canceled. This gave real meaning to his publishing business. He realized, in that momentary fantasy, that he could seriously consider things he had been placing in the “fantasy” category, like hard covers made of cardboard wrapped in paper with a satin finish, and full-color illustrations. The leap from the large to the small, from the fortune of these magnates to his trivial dealings with some neighborhood print shop, was so enormous that through it everything became possible: all luxuries, such as folding pages, vegetable inks, transparencies inserted between the pages, engravings. . And it’s not as if he’d abstained from thinking about these options: one could almost say he had done nothing but. But he had done so as an impractical fantasy, even when he deigned to consider the most practical details. Now, suddenly, reality was intervening, and it was as if he should retrieve each and every dream, and every feature of every passage in every dream, and rethink them. He couldn’t wait to be back in his house in Flores, open his file of notes on the installments, reread them one by one, because surely they would all appear marvelously new in the light of reality. He took a taxi so he could get there more quickly. For once he allowed himself the luxury of not responding to the taxi driver’s crude attempts to engage him in conversation; he had too much to think about. Of course he still didn’t have the money, and he had even rejected it outright. And what if these people, with the insensitivity so typical of millionaires, had taken him literally? It was highly probable, the most probable thing in the world. But it wouldn’t do him any good to worry about it now.

That Sunday, at ten o’clock:

“Ding-a-ling-a-ling.”

A housemaid in uniform opened the door. It was an enormous old palatial mansion in the Recoleta neighborhood. They ushered him into a sitting room to one side, where he found the brothers and a woman in a wheelchair, who was introduced as the mother. From the entryway, Dr. Aira had caught a glimpse of dimly lit rooms, elegantly furnished, the walls covered with paintings. This was the first time he’d entered such a distinguished house, and he would have loved to explore it to his heart’s content, without rushing. But this was not the time. Or maybe it was? While he was exchanging banal greetings, he thought that in reality nobody was preventing him from doing just that, from wandering calmly through all those rooms. Because none of them knew what his method was; by definition they didn’t know what to expect, such as him telling them that he needed everyone, including the servants, to leave the house so he could remain alone with the patient for one or two hours. They would think he was going to use some kind of invasive and potentially dangerous radiation; and they would be in a hurry to leave, dragging the old woman out in her wheelchair; and all of them would climb into their Mercedes Benzes and wait at one of the brothers’ houses. Why would they care, anyway? And he would have the house all to himself for that interval, as if he owned it; the possibility of slipping some valuable object into his pocket occurred to him, but he dismissed it as a too-sordid anticlimax.

Be that as it may, the interior of the house suggested an answer to an enigma that only now, upon intuiting its solution, he could formulate. What did his contemporaries do when he knew nothing about them? What did the great writers and artists whom he admired do during the often long periods of time when they were not presenting a book or making a movie or setting up an exhibit? Because of the amount of time he spent with books, he had grown accustomed to thinking of the great figures as dead, for the simple reason that for the most part they were: in order for their works or their fame to have reached him, some time had to have passed, and even more for him to have decided to study them; and this delay, more often than not, was more than enough for a human life to complete its cycle. That’s why he would feel a little shock whenever he found out that this or that famous person was alive, simply living, without doing the things he was famous for doing. This created a kind of blank in which the nature of fame negated itself. He never understood because, truth be told, he’d never really stopped to think about it, but now he saw it all very clearly: what they did was live, though not just live, which would have been a platitude, but rather enjoy life, practice “the art of living” in houses like this one, or not as luxurious but in any case endowed with the comforts necessary to enjoy oneself and spend one’s time without any concerns. Thanks to the link between reason and imagination, he felt at that moment that he could do the same from then on.

He had just sat down when he had to stand up again, because the other brothers had come in to tell him that the patient was awake and expecting him. They didn’t sit down, so he didn’t again, either. They told him that they’d given him his injections early so that he would be lucid at ten o’clock. They didn’t know if it was necessary, but the patient himself had requested it.

“Perfect,” said Dr. Aira, just to say something and without giving an explanation such as they must have been expecting.

In the blink of an eye, he didn’t know exactly how, they were climbing the stairs to the bedroom. The moment of truth was approaching.

The truth was, he hadn’t finished deciding what to do. He had spent the last two days considering his options with the same uncertainty he’d had for the last few decades, ever since that day in his far-distant youth when he had intuited the Cures. The idea had remained more or less intact since then, not counting the natural alternation between doubt and enthusiasm characteristic of a genuinely original concept. It had been the center of his life, the pivot around which his readings, meditations, and quite varied interests had turned. Of course, in order to keep it in this central position he had had to endow it with a plasticity that resisted any definition. It had always been right in front of his nose, like the proverbial carrot hanging in front of a donkey, indicating the direction of his prolonged flight forward. He owed his life to it, the life he had, after all, lived, and for this he was grateful. He could not complain about it just because it refused to give him a practical set of instructions at a decisive moment. He didn’t want to seem ungrateful, like those infamous scroungers who spend twenty years taking money from a generous friend, and when finally the friend can’t or doesn’t want to do as they ask, they condemn him without appeal.

Moreover — as he had been repeating to himself throughout that atypical weekend — something would occur to him. It’s not that he trusted his ability as an improviser; on the contrary, he had serious reasons to distrust it. But he knew that for better or for worse he’d manage, because one always does. It’s enough for time to pass, and it inevitably will. It wasn’t strictly a question of “improvising” but rather of finding in the teeming treasure of a lifetime of reflections the one gesture that would do the trick. It was less an improvisation than an instantaneous mnemonic. Evaluating the results was another issue. There would be time for that, too. After all, if it was a failure, it would be the first, and the last.

The door to the bedroom. They opened it; they motioned for him to go in. He entered. . And it was as if he had entered a different world, incomparably more vivid and more real, a world of pure and compressed action where there was no room for thought, and where, nevertheless, thought was destined to triumph in the end.

The first thing that struck him was the lighting, which was very white and very strong; it seemed excessive, though perhaps this was due to its contrast with the gloomy semidarkness in the rest of the house. Even so, it was the last thing one would expect in a sickroom, unless it was an operating room. He immediately turned to look at the bed and the man lying in it, which barely gave him a chance to register along the outer edges of his attention certain elements that contributed to the creation of a high-tech environment and explained the lighting.

The man in the bed warranted Dr. Aira’s most intense interest. Never before had he seen someone so close to death. He was so close that he had already shed all his attributes and had become purely human. By the same token, this shedding had removed him from the human. His first impression was that it was too late. If there was even the remotest possibility of bringing him back to life, it would have to be via one of his qualities. And it looked as if he hadn’t a single one left; perhaps, in the spiritual process of preparing himself for death, he had undergone a “cleansing” that had been set in motion by the illness. But this was not the case. Despite everything he and the cancer had done, one of his attributes remained: wealth. He may have cut all his ties to life, but he remained the owner of this house, and of his lands and factories. And that would suffice, for money had the marvelous property of including everything else. He should definitely start there.

Just thinking about it was enough to re-orient him in reality. He looked around. The room was large, and many people were there, all of them strangers, except for the patient’s brothers. They were all looking at him, but as nobody showed any intention of introducing themselves, he merely greeted them with a nod and turned his attention to the room and the furnishings. There were chairs, armchairs, tables, bookshelves, and a lot of electronic equipment. It took him a moment to notice — even though they stood out more than anything else — two supermodern television cameras each on top of a tripod, one on either side of the bed and each with its respective cameraman: two young men wearing wireless earphones. The spotlights and large microphones with black felt heads placed at strategic spots apparently belonged to the same set-up, as did the echo-reducing panels and a technician sitting in front of a sound board next to the wall. He wondered, intrigued, if this was a custom he had never heard of, to record the final days of important people. That wasn’t it, he found out right away, because one of the brothers, as if reading his mind, said:

“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.

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.

This first operation was already getting complicated. The screen’s sinuous path was not one-dimensional, because along with the element “airplane trips,” there also arose geographic places that connected these trips, and the various airplanes, the food they served on board, flight schedules, the faces of the stewardesses, the people sitting next to one another, the clouds, the reasons for having boarded the plane, and a thousand others; so the zigzag of the screen was magnified on various levels and in all directions like an enormous pom-pom. Dr. Aira attempted to draw the same zigzag along all its different routes while varying the proportions between the included and the excluded.

He did this because even though it was a question of humanity, and the theory considered the human as it was manifested in the real, he was fashioning a personalized cure. So he had to take into account — even if with broad brushstrokes and divinations — the man’s lifestyle. Already he was operating in “lifestyle” and concomitant elements. He did not have a very clear idea (nobody does) of a millionaire’s daily routine, but he could imagine it and complement his fantasies with common sense. For example, he needed only simple logic to determine that this subject must have traveled little or not at all by bus, in the world where he was dying of cancer as little as in the one he was in the process of creating, where he would be saved. But he knew he shouldn’t rush to conclusions based on that fact, for his employees took buses, as did the friends and families of his employees, as did a waiter in a restaurant who had once served him, and the mother-in-law of that waiter, and people in general, all of whom became part of the system through its near and far-flung ramifications. Here the line of screens also turned into a pom-pom, and it was enough to think about the virtually infinite complications of the bus lines in Buenos Aires through any slice of time, any slice of the map, or through all the slices of all the moments since the invention of buses, to conceive of the number of turns the separator had to take. The screen cut through possibilities like sheet metal through a cube of butter, as if the material were made for it. Those who wanted to take the 86 bus to work tomorrow would have quite a surprise when they discovered that in the new universe the 86 didn’t go down Rivadavia but rather Santa Fe, or that it didn’t exist, or that it was called the 165! But no, nobody would be surprised because the “surprise” and every individual surprise, as well as every work routine (not to mention the names of the streets and the layout of the city map), were also objects to be sorted, and the resulting new universe, however it ended up, would necessarily be coherent. And, of course, public transportation in Buenos Aires would not be the only thing affected, far from it.

After journeys, it was time for light, an element that included everything from photons to chiaroscuros depicting the volume of an object in a seventeenth-century copper engraving. . It was a broad heading because there has not been a single occasion not swathed in light — for example each one of the journeys previously processed had lighting, and a whole series of lighting possibilities existed for each one, as there did for every conceivable or manifest occasion. In fact, this “generalization” characterized every heading; also the journeys or displacements, because could there possibly be an occasion that didn’t imply, somehow or other, some displacement? So, everything was a journey, just as everything was light. . The screens’ trajectories doubled back upon themselves to make it possible to update a previous trajectory and allow it to serve a new function.

Light presented an additional difficulty, because light, or rather lighting, occurs at a determined intensity, which is the manifestation of a continuum of intensities that can only be arbitrarily calibrated. But was this a difficulty specific to the element “light,” or was it an attribute of all headings? Still within the heading already discussed, of journeys, there was also a continuum: the extension of the trajectory traveled. Or many continuums: of velocity, of the pleasure or displeasure with which the trip was made, the sum of the perceptions experienced en route. . And just as in the case of light, intensity was not the only continuum in play, for there was also the temperature, atmospheric resistance, color. .

Things were happening in less time than it would take to explain them. If Dr. Aira could have stopped to think he would have asked himself about the sequence “journeys-light.” Why had he started with the first? Why had he continued with the second? What kind of catalogue was he consulting? Where did the directory come from? From nowhere: there was no catalogue, no order. The entire operation of the Cure had the perfect coherence of the plausible, like a novel (again). It wasn’t like in the theater, where anything can happen, even something completely disconnected from all the rest; in that case, one could resort to a list of themes and proceed to remove each one using aesthetic criteria; in any case, if we wish to hold on to the theater metaphor, we would have to think about bourgeois theater, full of weighty psychosocial assumptions pretending to be plausible.

The plausible in its pure state, which was at work here, was characterized by simultaneity. Therefore, saying that after light came flags is just a figure of speech. The flags of all the nations of the world, those that had once flown and the possible ones that had accompanied them during their passage through History, with their colors and symbols, their silks or paper or retinal impressions, were underpinned by light and journeys. A luxuriant pom-pom of foldout screens cut through the entire sphere of the Universe, leaving some flags in and others out. Immediately, it turned to the cutting of hair. Screens. Hundreds of millions of barber shops, hairdressers, and scissors were excluded from the Cure’s New World, while others remained inside.

Collaborating with this simultaneity was the fact that throughout the process the screens that were doing the sorting continued along their trajectory a little farther (there were no established boundaries), and a bit at random, tracing lines of division through other, contiguous categories, on other planes and levels. Dr. Aira accepted these random contributions because he was in no position to reject any help he could get. By the same token, he began to notice that the same screen could function as more than one partition through the effect of the overlapping of fields of meaning.

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

relaxing because it gives license to do anything. Nevertheless, what he was doing was deeply human, and given the mechanism of automatic re-absorption the Cure enacted, his exhaustion approached rest; pressure, relaxation.

In fact, the hinges on the last panels of each screen began to get welded to the other screens whose last panels were nearby, and with this the process of exclusion and inclusion was concluding. These welds happened on their own, one after the other, in cascades of billions that burst the heart of a second, of the final seconds. This produced a greasy white spark in the black depth of the Night. It was something like a nightmare, that “schluik. .” Dr. Aira’s utter exhaustion also contributed to this sense of feverish delirium, for at the very end of his strength he felt nauseated, as if he were suffocating; his ears were ringing, and there were red spots in front of his eyes.

But the important thing was that the siege had been laid, and the new Universe had been formed, as unfathomably complex as the old Universe had been until then, but different, and just right for the cancer of that man in that bed to never have been. . The work of the Cure had been completed right in front of his own eyes, half-closed from fatigue; his arms fell to his sides, flaccid, his legs were barely able to hold him up; the room, which he was now seeing again, was waltzing before his dizzy eyes; and in it the patient’s bed, the spotlights, the cameramen, the nurses, the relatives. . The next time, he told himself in a state of exhaustion that rendered him idiotic, he would have to think up a machine that could spread out the screens for him. Compared with an automated system, more appropriate for the times in which he lived, the dance to which he had surrendered would seem like some kind of imperfect, handmade prehistoric Cure. But before thinking about an improbable second time, he had to wait for the results of this one.

It was a wait truly laden with unknowns. Already, when he witnessed the welds, and in the sudden passivity these allowed him after such dense, nonstop action, he perceived that with each “closure” the plausible had changed, only to change again with the next one; the closures, of course, didn’t just happen; they were cumulative until they had formed one definitive closure. It was an extreme case of “doing something with words.” The transposition of plausibles was vertiginous, and Dr. Aira had no way of knowing where things would stand in the end. That’s what mattered, when all was said and done.

It didn’t take long for him to find out. In fact, in the overdetermination of the present, waking up was accompanied by guffaws. . which was part of the nightmare, but on another level. Laughter was increasing around him, reordering and giving substance to the space of the bedroom, and from there to the house, the neighborhood, Buenos Aires, the world. He was the last to sort himself out and to understand what was happening; he knew himself and was resigned to such delays. In the meantime, the only thing he knew was that from that moment on whatever happened in reality depended on the angle some panel of the screen was hung, no matter how far-flung it was; for example, the one that had excluded from this new Universe of reality a bonfire, or the flying sparks of a bonfire, in the prehistory of the Maori people. . Amid the laughter, his eyes opened onto a New World, really truly new.

And in this new world, those present were laughing heartily; the cameramen were turning off their cameras and lowering them, revealing themselves as the two fake doctors from the ambulance on Bonifacio Street; and the patient, choking on his laughter, was sitting up in bed and pointing a finger at him, unable to speak because he was laughing so hard. . It was Actyn! That wretch. . Everything had been staged by him! Or at least that’s what he thought. The truth is that he wasn’t dying, he didn’t have cancer nor had he ever, and he wasn’t a very wealthy businessman. . The plausible had completely changed. Laughter was justified; happiness needed no other motive. After years of trying in vain, Actyn had managed to get Dr. Aira to commit the biggest blunder of his career, the definitive one. . And in reality it was: the blunder as the transformation of the plausible, that is, as a visible trace — the only one that could remain inscribed on memory — of the transformation of one Universe into another, and hence of the secret power of the Miracle Cure.

PRINGLES, 6 SEPTEMBER 1996