The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira (7 page)

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.