No World Concerto (9 page)

The screenwriter dined at a restaurant on the island before making his way to the sidewalk café, where he now sits, trying to get down to some writing. The scene he’s working on is set just before dawn. The girl and her mother are getting out of a limousine in front of the hotel with the English name. A doorman with an admiral’s uniform holds the front door open for them. They go through without responding to his greeting. Next, we see the two of them talking in the large living area separating their bedrooms. The mother is standing at the window admiring the city lights, which appear to her to be emerging from under her feet and extending toward the horizon. They’re talking about the neighboring country’s capital. It reminds the girl of her native city, except it’s perhaps ten times bigger. In front of the mirror, she sees a scratch on her face. Her mother goes over to examine it up close. It’s nothing, says the girl dismissively. We then see a shot from outside of the building of the mother returning to the window. All cities have something in common, she says. The camera closes in on her face, her eyes, looking out at the world, or perhaps within, at herself. She’s beautiful, photogenic, and could’ve played the lead role in any other film; that much will have been made clear after the first scene. As with her father, the girl doesn’t know exactly what it is her mother does professionally. She knows only that she has a good job at an international company, that she’s well connected, and that she has friends even in the remotest parts of the world. The girl’s success as a pianist may in part be due to her mother’s connections. A quick phone call or two may have been sufficient to arrange the Little Sinfonietta’s performance at the church, for example. Such beneficence is perhaps typical for a woman of her station: helping to further the careers of talented kids whose families haven’t the means of doing so. The girl has never met any of her mother’s friends. But she presumes she has lovers, it’s only that she’s careful about not being seen with them. Her greatest love is definitely herself, though; and her greatest passion, being the one in charge. She only has an occasional and transitory interest in her daughter’s professional life, which is usually disrupted when they have an argument and stop communicating — except, that is, by telephone, through the cleaning lady, or on the chalkboard in the kitchen. The girl again faces the mirror, watches her mother’s reflection looking down at the city. How’s it going with the young conductor? she asks in a blasé tone, her eyes meandering with the river.

The following morning, the girl is in a bad mood. She’s just finished a phone call with the brilliant composer, who suggested they go jogging in the park. She dismissed the offer out of hand, and asked after the young conductor. He’s with his latest conquest, more than likely, replies the brilliant composer in disgust. The girl finds it harder every day to concentrate, and she therefore keeps increasing the number of pills she takes. It’s going to be a long day, she thinks. Earlier, she visited a children’s hospital. Her mother was annoyed there were so few photographers there. After she got back, she practiced the
5 Pieces for piano
, and then went for a workout in the gym. Finally, after catching up on some reading in the hotel, she decided to go for a walk, and perhaps continue her reading outside. It’s Wednesday, and the sunny weather is at variance with her mood. She’s not hungry and doesn’t intend to eat anytime soon, so she remains where she lies, reading on the riverbank. She can’t grasp how this dramatist of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could’ve been so prolific and wide-ranging, how he could have written so much about so many subjects, created so many different characters. Maybe she lacks the intelligence to understand him, the talent to emulate him. Maybe she has nothing to say anyway. Maybe she’s striving in vain to be a writer. She decides she must persist, that she should perhaps sit down and write for a few hours. She doesn’t do so however, because she needs to do more thinking about her work. Although she knows it’s easy to find excuses, to pass the time staring at reflections in the water, at the buildings on the opposite bank. The sun tickles her skin, and she closes her eyes to fantasize about becoming a prolific and wide-ranging author. It seems impossible, though. Even her fantasies don’t stretch that far. And if she can’t even finish a single chapter, how can she hope to emulate the famous dramatist? She walks to the other side of the island in the river, doing some window-shopping along the way. There’s a little girl sitting in a garden, chewing on some flower petals. Her father hurries over to put a stop to it. She doesn’t know why, but this reminds the girl of a conversation she overheard in a café. When she gets back to the hotel, she takes out her notebook and writes in a direct and unambiguous tone, “1. The No World is everything that is the case. 1.1 We are beings from another world. 1.2 The No World is falling to pieces. Its inhabitants are not from planet Earth.” She believes such precepts would only be adopted by a rather singular character. One who hunts aliens. An alien that hunts aliens. An idea that’s been exploited ad nauseam, she thinks, although in quite different storylines. The girl is trying to make her character unique: a guy who escapes to the City in Outer Space. The idea doesn’t strike her as either good or bad; she just doesn’t know what to do with it. But what if all the inhabitants of Earth actually came from another world? Yes, she feels her narrative could proceed along this line. It wouldn’t be the main plot, but something running parallel to it: the story of a renegade alien hunter. The girl truly believes the Earth is just a colony occupied by beings from another planet, but whether it’s true or not, it’s still not an original idea. She’s read some stuff about it before, although she doesn’t remember reading any stories in which the Earth is a refuge for interplanetary immigrants — beings from another world, as she overheard in the café. She does remember similar stories depicted in the movies, in which aliens assume human form and commingle with us, but she can’t think of any in which absolutely everyone on Earth is an alien. The girl realizes there’s something interesting in this idea of people being unaware of their origins. Some may hear strange voices in their heads, believing they’re being called by a higher power. The way she hears her name pronounced with a “ka.” When she writes, perhaps she’s being actuated by some strange radiation emanating from a distant planet; perhaps it’s her own home planet. But if this is the case, why does she have writer’s block? The screenwriter smiles. He can’t help thinking that such stories are ten a penny for most science-fiction writers. But the young must be allowed to discover the world for themselves. We mustn’t forget that everyone’s been young, that everyone’s made mistakes. For better or worse, the girl must continue working on her No World — with its extraterrestrial voices, its alien hunter who doesn’t know he’s an alien himself — to distract her and help mitigate her jealousy and hatred of the young conductor, her growing hostility toward the brilliant composer — although, when she thinks about it, the brilliant composer isn’t important enough to hate.

“1.3 Space is the ideal location for building the future. 1.31 Space can also be understood as the No World. 1.32 The No World is the ideal location for building the future. 1.4 Notes on triggering a war in the City in Outer Space: loss of contact with Earth; lack of basic provisions; the inability to leave the City; fight for control of storehouses, warehouses, and grocery stores that are stocked with basic supplies, water, and fuel; a single survivor — aged, alone — wanders the streets of the desolate City in Outer Space, observing the universe from behind the windows of a control room in a military base, recording his memories of the old world, the place from which he came, his impressions of the new world, which he suspects is coming to an end, doing so as if he’s writing his will; the only person who managed to survive the war; he can’t trust his own mind, he says it plays tricks on him, but with nothing else to go on he records his impressions as they occur to him. He takes up a paperback edition of W, the margins of every page covered with notes, and picks a passage at random that appears near the very end: ‘6.54 He must transcend these initial propositions, and then he will see the No World aright.’”

In the hotel lobby, he collects the little tape recorder and cassette the girl has sent him. She’s not coming tonight, so she sent him a recording of her voice instead. The screenwriter sits at his desk, smoking as he listens, with one arm resting on the typewriter. She’s describing a scene in the small theater where the Little Sinfonietta rehearses. It’s an interview, she says, for which some chairs have been arranged in a semicircle in front of a journalist. They’re talking about being young and gifted, about how much hard work is required to achieve success, and about why they insist on championing such strange and unmelodic music. They then discuss the girl’s surprising role in the piece about the clown: they mention her declamatory skills, her talent as an actress, and the journalist remarks that they’re not accomplishments for which she’s become well known. This leads to another question about hidden talent, the journalist asking her if there are any links between the brilliant composer’s
No World Symphony
and the work he’s heard she’s writing. At this point, the recording cuts off then begins again with girl: “No World,” she says suddenly, her voice intruding on the momentary silence, is one of those expressions like “Undead” or “Nonliving”—a play on words, or so to speak — something that derives its meaning through what it negates. Something that’s known by understanding what it is not. The screenwriter wonders about this. He associates the term “undead” with something like “the living dead.” He’s not sure whether No World refers to a kind of resuscitated world resembling ours, or to a world that exists in another dimension. Perhaps it’s really only a play on words, as she says. The screenwriter continues listening. She’s been writing her work for quite a while, she lies, and always finds something wrong with it, something that impels her to start over, be it the characters, the plot, the narrative, although never the title. The title is always the same. Her work, she says, is about someone who’s constantly on the run from something, be it extraterrestrials or even the world itself, by which she means this world, this planet. The girl says she writes about these things, about the world and all, because she’s young, and since the young lack experience, they tend to write about stuff they’re familiar with, the things they see around them everyday. The journalist then asks her in jest if she has many alien friends. I hear voices, she confesses, aware that it sounds like a cliché. She says they call her by name, except they mispronounce the first syllable, always saying “ka” instead of “k.” It’s difficult to explain, she adds. Then the recording cuts off again. Some moments later, it starts up with the girl describing what’s going on around her. After he answers each question, she says, the young conductor always looks at my mother for signs of approval. He also hears an oracular statement whose context he assumes was lost the last time the recording cut off. He rewinds the tape again and again, but no matter how many times he hears the sentence, he can’t quite understand it. “2.063 The sum-total of reality is the No World.”

He needs to see her again, but he’s not sure if she’ll keep visiting him in the middle of the night. Something’s changed. It could be the concerts she’s to give every evening, or it could be that her mother’s returned, and she’s being forced to keep up appearances. After transcribing everything in the recordings, as if it were dialogue for a scene in his movie, the screenwriter decides to take a break. He scavenges the fridge and settles for a meal comprised of last night’s leftovers. Then he lights a cigarette and turns to look for his neighbor in the building across the street. He doesn’t see her: the window of her apartment is a rectangular void. He examines the front of the building. It’s really composed of two buildings: one with balconies and the other with just windows. Most of the doors leading onto the balconies have blinds and there aren’t any flowers outside. He scans the storefronts along the street: the real-estate agency on the corner, the lingerie store, the bakery, and the shoe and handbag store that’s closed for the August vacation. The last store makes him think of his wife. He switches his thoughts back to the screenplay. The most important thing, he says, is the construction. The dialogue can be added later on. He might even get someone else to write it. He remembers the most important thing about planning a script is to know the ending before the beginning, to have a good idea of the storyline, and then to proceed by gradual steps toward that ending. Any other approach would be like running around in circles. Despite the fact he knows better, the screenwriter still tends to run around in circles. Perhaps though, he knows the end of his story better than he lets on. He moves away from the desk and sits on the bed next to the telephone. He dials his wife’s number. In all the screenplays he’s written up to this point, he’s always had the same problem: giving enough weight and meaning to each dramatic moment — or, if he manages that, giving meaning and continuity to a series of moments, to a series of scenes, acts, and finally to the whole story. In times of crisis, it helps him to encapsulate the problem as just that. He listens until the fifth ring, then hangs up. He’s surprised, but he would’ve liked her to answer this time. He returns to his surveillance of his neighbor’s window. He’ll go crazy if he doesn’t see the girl. He flicks his cigarette butt into the darkness, grabs his coat, and goes downstairs to hail a cab. The girl’s mother doesn’t know him. They’ve never met because she’s never accompanied her daughter to the Scholastic Institute. In the doorway of the church, he introduces himself as her literature teacher, telling her he’s on vacation and was reading about the concerts in the local newspaper, so he decided to drop by and say hello. The girl’s mother lets him through. He won’t be allowed meet the musicians until after the concert, but he agrees to join her in the reserved seating area. During the girl’s performance, the screenwriter occasionally jots in his notebook. He waits until the intermission to inform the girl’s mother that he’s writing a screenplay about talented young musicians. She thanks him for encouraging her daughter to read that actor cum dramatist cum impresario from the end of the sixteenth and beginning of seventeenth centuries whose works she now devours like a cormorant. The screenwriter chalks it up to his duties as a teacher, and justifies the girl’s excesses by arguing that literature can take possession of the soul, has the power to render one positively demoniac. Her mother asks that he recommend another author now, as the girl’s possession by this particular demon is taking its toll, She hints specifically at a contemporary of the dramatist, a novelist who lacked the use of one arm. The screenwriter applauds her choice, says there is much to be learned from him about the human condition: he writes about love and deceit, madness and sanity, dreams and wakefulness, life and death — the whole gamut basically — giving us a veritable portrait of the world. We take it for granted now, but no one had written about these things before, described them so exhaustively and in so much detail. People haven’t changed much in the last three thousand years, and perhaps this writer’s greatest accomplishment is that he managed to etch all our absurdities into a single novel, transformed all our frailties into a work of fiction. Despite his encomium, the screenwriter doesn’t mention his reservations about this novelist’s greatest work, for he doesn’t want to contradict the mother, because, in fact, he believes the novelist’s most famous protagonist is something of a wastrel — what with all his pointless wanderings about and endless searches for new adventures. Perhaps he feels slightly embarrassed about voicing such criticisms, considering some of the sillier aspects of his own script. But the screenwriter shrugs away his insecurity. His conversation with the mother has come to an end anyway, and his blushes have gone unnoticed. After the concert, the girl’s mother takes the screenwriter to meet the musicians. The young orchestra conductor and brilliant composer greet him warmly. The girl, on the other hand, goes pale. He turns to look at the young men’s smiling faces, and notes the contrast with her cold and distant aspect. The screenwriter gauges their reactions and starts wondering if the young men even knew he was in the neighboring country’s capital. They discuss the concert, most notably the affect on the audience of a well-known pianist reciting verses in a clown suit. The girl is the star of the show, although she barely takes any notice of the fact. Maybe this is what captivates the audience, the screenwriter thinks. The discussion moves on to poetry, the kind that’s subversive, irreverent, and needless to say, unrhymed, but which nonetheless has an energetic rhythm that sustains itself through the work. What a fine poet the clown’s creator was! although he’s completely unknown to the laity. They discuss experimentation, for which the brilliant composer has a stronger predilection than the rest. Composers, it would seem, have a natural bent for trailblazing, and true artists must experiment with new approaches, investigate new ways to advance their vision. Since the screenwriter was once a teacher at the Scholastic Institute, he knows a thing or two about music, about the importance of certain musical parameters such as volume, pitch, and tempo, and he tries discussing them with the brilliant composer whenever he has his ear. The composer complains about the difficulty of premiering a new work. The screenwriter proposes he imagine twelve-tone music was never invented — no serialism, or any of it. But the girl’s mother interrupts the discussion by suggesting they all go to dinner. During the meal, the screenwriter continues taking notes, and accompanies the group afterward when they head to a trendy café. They are joined by some people that are unknown to the girl and the rest of the group as well. They’re probably friends of the concert promoters, says her mother, unconcerned. Among them are patrons, musicians, variety acts, a hypnotist, and the young conductor’s latest conquest. The girl waits until her mother’s back is turned, then approaches the screenwriter. If you intrude on my life one more time, you’ll never see me again. The hypnotist puts a young man into a trance — a circus performer who said he’s been having trouble with one of the numbers in his show. She commands him to make no more mistakes, snaps him back to reality, and then requests he perform the routine. Although he doesn’t have his equipment, he tries to improvise with some coffee spoons, performing a juggling act while blindfolded, which everyone applauds. The young conductor of the orchestra proposes the girl be hypnotized next, because she’s under a lot of pressure to achieve great things in her life. The girl goes along with it, since everyone’s laughing and having a good time. She tells the hypnotist she wants to be a great writer. So the hypnotist puts her in a trance, and while in that state, assures her and everyone present she’s going to be a great writer. This in spite of the fact she’s not yet written anything of note. The girl awakens and asks what happened. Nobody responds, except the young conductor who tells her she had a little fainting spell, nothing more.