The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira by César Aira Page A

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