He was a gangster and a philosopher. Oriental traditions, Junior thought, martial arts and Zen Buddhism. He is in mourning over the emperor’s death and leaves the girl locked up in the hotel as if she were a cat. On the other side of the glass, in the greenhouse, a man was strolling through the flowers with a lantern in his hand.
“Have you seen the blue roses?” the jockey asked. “They make them in Temperley, there are three in the Museum, they are very difficult to preserve. You have to use liquid ice and silver nitrate. First came the bronze rose, but you cannot get them anymore, that site has been closed down several times by the police. They use a different excuse every time. If it were up to them, they would show up with a new search warrant each time just to stroll through the nurseries with the carnivorous plants and the poppy plants.”
They went down together in the pneumatic elevator, the jockey balancing on his right leg. In this manner he avoided setting his left one down, which he had injured in a straight-line race in Isidro Casanove. He had been riding a horse named Small Wolf, with a white spot on its forehead, in a historic meet with the undefeated horse of the widow of an Englishman who had been the director of the Argentine Central Railroad before it was nationalized. He had driven the horse as hard as he could, because the widow bet like a gypsy, and as soon as they started Small Wolf began to pant in a bloody whine, but he kept him going straight and stayed in the lead for nearly a mile, until the horse collapsed, its heart failed, and it rolled over its rider. Fuyita’s left leg was crushed by the horse’s body and there was no way to repair the tiny broken bones in his ankle.
“I don’t use a walking stick,” the jockey said affectedly as he crossed the circular room where the machine was displayed, “because I believe that medicine will be able to cure me, and I don’t want to get used to being an invalid.” Junior thought the jockey had a smooth gracefulness that was accentuated by his limp. When they stopped at the ramp that led to the exit he tried to clear his mind and not think of anything.
“A woman sent me to see you,” he said then.
“She calls you, too?” Fuyita asked. “At night? And talks to you about her son?”
“Her husband,” Junior said.
“It’s the same thing,” Fuyita said.
“You know her?” Junior asked, showing him the photograph of the young woman.
“That’s Elena,” Fuyita said. “She was the girl of his dreams. These women,” he said, “we follow them around and chase after them as if we were dumbstruck cops.” He turned toward the Museum entrance. All the lights were on, people were waiting in line to get in. “Take this,” he said, “be careful.” He handed him a manila envelope, then smiled and flagged a taxi. Junior got into the car, but after he had settled in he thought Fuyita had wanted to say something else to him, because he saw him gesturing with his arms and his lips moving. He stuck his head out the window, but the jockey waved him off because the roar of the city drowned out his voice. Besides, the cab took off down the avenue just then, and disappeared along the park heading west.
Junior laid down in the backseat. The Museum clock read three P.M. He opened the envelope. The story was called “The White Nodes.” An explosive story, the paranoid ramifications of life in the city. That’s why there’s so much control, Junior thought, they’re trying to erase what’s recorded in the streets. A light bright as a flash on the ashen faces of innocent people in the photographs of police dossiers.
THE WHITE NODES
She knew the Clinic was a sinister place. When Doctor Arana came in, he confirmed her worst fears. He seemed to be there just to make every single paranoid delirium come true. A glass skull, the red windows facing out, white bones shining in the artificial light. Elena thought the man was a magnet that attracted and drew the iron shavings of the soul to itself. She was already thinking like a madwoman. She felt her skin release a metal dust. That is why her body was completely covered, including gloves and a long-sleeved blouse. The only part exposed was her face, the rusted skin of her external gears. It made her sick to think about the metal container from which they would put the drops of oil on her. She closed her eyes so she would not see anything, and began to go over what she knew about the doctor. Arana, Raúl, Ph.D. in Psychiatry. Disciple of Carl Jung. Studies undertaken in Germany and Switzerland. The treatment consisted in converting psychotics into addicts. The drugs were administered every three hours. The only way to normalize a delirium was to create an extreme dependency. He had just returned from giving a seminar at MIT on “Hypochondria and the Fantasies of Pregnancy.” Elena had herself committed with the double purpose of carrying out an investigation and of controlling her hallucinations. She was sure that she had died and that someone had transferred her brain (sometimes she said her soul) into a machine. She felt she was completely alone in a white room full of tubes and cables. It was not a nightmare, it was the certainty that the man who loved her had saved her from death and had incorporated her into an apparatus that transmitted her thoughts. She was eternal and cursed. (You cannot have one without the other.) That is why the judge had chosen her to infiltrate the Clinic. A male nurse met her at the entrance. As soon as she walked through the bars she decided she would tell them the truth. She was a madwoman who believed she was a policewoman who was forced to be hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic; and she was a policewoman trained to pretend that she was in a machine exhibited in a room of a Museum. (The only thing she had to do was not reveal the name of a certain man, whom she would call Mac from now on. Anything else, including the truth, would be an invention in which to hide and keep him safe.)
“That is why you say that you never lie,” Doctor Arana said, smiling.
“I did not say that,” Elena said, “do not play dumb. I have been asked to investigate you, doctor, that is why I am here.”
He turned around and smiled again.
“Very well,” he said, “come with me.”
The hallway led to the operating rooms. The rubber carpets prevented all electrical contact and negated the friction from the aluminum wheels. The trees in the garden could be seen through the tall windows.
“And who gave you this assignment?”
“A judge,” she answered.
There were bars in front of the windows, and a portrait of Doctor Arana on the wall. Many of his patients were painters who paid him with their own work.
“They are going to flatten this pigsty.”
“What does it mean to be a machine?” Doctor Arana asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “A machine does not exist, a machine functions.”
“Very ingenious,” Arana replied.
The Clinic was a large rectangular construction, divided into zones and pavilions, like a jail.
“In this first room you have the catatonics. They are completely gone,” Arana explained; “technically, they have gone over to the other side and cannot return.”
The beds looked as if they held embalmed bodies, a series of white mummies wrapped in sheets and blankets. A woman sitting in a metal chair was staring at the light in the window. Elena tried to take note of the layout of the alarms and the side doors. She was going to escape as soon as she managed to see Mac, she thought they had him locked up in one of the wings by the end of the garden. She had drawn up a map in her memory and was completing the diagram as they went along. She worked with a scale of 100 to 2, to make the information easier to transmit. Each zone had its own control unit and surveillance system. The small cameras were mounted on the ceilings. Elena imagined the closed-circuit and the control room. She had once seen the intelligence center for Penn Station in New York. All the passengers were recorded in the hallways and the platforms, and a policewoman (a real policewoman) — fat, with makeup, black glasses, and dressed in blue — sat on a rotating chair, alone in a white basement, surrounded by TV screens, watching the images that covered the walls. She had a microphone attached to her blouse that captured her voice and her breathing. In the bathrooms, men addicted to vices pursued those vices. She spied on them and relayed the information to the patrols working on the surface. Three policemen were kicking a junkie on the floor of the hallway that led to platform number six (the exit toward Jamaica Station, in Long Island). They were in the section of the Clinic that contained the Carson Café. A bar that looked as if it were from the fifties, with dim lights and tables against the walls. A place where expatriates, spies, foreign journalists, and married women looking to hook up spent their time.