The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira by César Aira

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