The Conversations (New Directions Paperbook) by César Aira

inexorably, and on the plateau left behind stood the only survivors, Bradley and the professor, watching anxiously as the helicopter rose with the goatherd dangling from it. But he did not dangle there for long, for by sheer dint of strength, he hoisted himself into the cabin and came to blows with Larionov. The spectacle, visible from the top of the mountain, was quite odd: silhouetted against the black star-studded sky floated a constellation of phosphorescent goats and a parliament of burning owls. One of the owls touched one of the blades of the helicopter and broke it. The helicopter exploded, but not before the goatherd had jumped. His freefall was interrupted by one of the floating goats, which he mounted and rode away on, carried by the wind, toward the horizon, or perhaps to the Moon.
    The time lag in my memory persisted, so much so that while I continued to enjoy the somewhat surrealistic spectacle of the starry heavens and the luminous travelers from my bed, my friend was already asking me, in the conversation, what I was trying to prove.
    Nothing! was the response I blurted out automatically. At this point, the lag was erased, and again I was in the step-by-step of our conversation and its nocturnal representation, with no images in front of me besides my friend’s face and the café in the background. Nothing! I was recounting it to prove to him that it didn’t prove anything. It couldn’t. What could it possibly prove? Th e end of the epic in a world that had sold the legacy of the word for the lentil soup of the image? And this was nothing new, everyone knew it, everybody agreed, the two of us included. I had only wanted to remind him, in case he had forgotten.
    My friend, with a complacent smile, thanked me for reminding him, because in reality, more than remind him, I had filled him in on a lot of details he hadn’t known. I had filled in the panorama, he said in a teasing lilt, because he had to admit that he had paid only partial attention to the movie: he had had to answer two phone calls, one long and one short. Even so, something told him that the story had not really come to an end, that there were still a few loose ends . . .
    I also had to admit that my viewing had been partial. Not only because of the telephone, which I also had had to answer, but because I had watched all, or almost all, of the part I had just recounted without sound. I had pressed the “mute” button on the remote control because my wife, going in and out of the kitchen, had started talking to me. So, I had had to imagine the “sound,” or rather, the dialogues.
    It was pretty amazing — about this we were in total agreement — that so much could happen in a two-hour movie. The word that explained it was “condensation,” but words also had to be explained. Moreover, in a movement that was inverse to that of condensation, there seemed to be a multitude of events because of the fragmentary nature of one’s perception.
    My friend, surely taking into consideration what I had just told him about the button that muted the television — suggesting that I was constantly manipulating the remote control — asked me if by fragmentation I was referring to the curse of channel surfing. Without waiting for my answer, which he must have taken for granted, he asked me if I had noticed that the movie was shown on two channels at the same time. Though not precisely at the same time, he corrected himself, but rather, he figured, with more or less a half-hour time lag. He flipped back and forth between them a couple of times, without reaping any benefits other than seeing some scenes twice and entirely missing others.
    No, I had not realized that, but now that he mentioned it I was less amazed by the coincidence that with sixty-four channels, we would have both independently tuned into the same one. We could have easily not tuned into the same channel but rather into two different ones, and still seen the same movie. Anyway, I didn’t