Free The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira by César Aira Page B

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.
    After journeys, it was time for light, an element that
included everything from photons to chiaroscuros depicting the volume of an
object in a