César Aira - The Musical Brain - And Other Stories

Nothing ever happened in the street: a car went by every half hour. We had vast amounts of free time: we went to school in the mornings, and the afternoons lasted entire lifetimes. We didn’t have extracurricular activities the way kids do today; there was no television; the doors of our houses stood open. To play the number game we climbed into the cabin of the little red truck that belonged to Omar’s father and was almost always parked just outside the front door. .

Right. Now, the game.

Who came up with it? It must have been one of us. I can’t imagine us taking it from somewhere else, ready-made. Thinking back, I’ve always seen the game as a blend of invention and practice. Or rather, I see the practice of it as permanent invention, without any kind of prior idea. And if I try to work out which of us was behind it, I have to conclude that I was the inventor. There’s something about the thrust of it, a kind of fantasy or exuberance, something elusive but utterly typical of me as I was at that age. Omar was at the opposite extreme. But, strangely, those vertiginous tunnels could be entered from the opposite extreme as well.

There were no rules. Although we spent our lives inventing rules for all our games, as kids always do, this game had none, perhaps because we realized that they were inadequate, bound to fall short, or just too easy to make up.

Now that I think of it, there was a rule, but it was transient and could be revoked at our convenience. We applied it once and forgot it the next time, but for some reason it has remained in my memory, and it must have remained in the game as well. It was pretty inoffensive: all it did was specify that the biggest possible number, the upper limit, would be eight. Not the number eight itself, but any number containing eight: eight tenths, eight hundred thousand, eight billion. It was really an extra accelerator (as if we needed one!) to take the game to another level.

It’s not that there were levels in the game, or series within the series, or if there were such things, we didn’t bother with them. But there were differences in speed, alternations between “step by step” and “leap,” and we could take them to extremes that are not to be found among the mobile, spatiotemporal sculptures of physical reality. These differences were always rushes, even our lapses into the hyperslow. But it never got out of control; even the all-encompassing acceleration was a kind of slowness. Which meant that within the game’s austere monomania, we could use speed to keep changing the subject of the conversation (since subjects are speeds).

“Three.”

“A hundred.”

“A hundred and one.”

“A hundred and one point zero one.”

“Eight hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.”

“Four million.”

“Four million and one.”

“Four million and two.”

“Four million and three.”

“Four million and four.”

“Four million and four point four four four.”

“Four million and four point four four.”

“Four million and four point four.”

“Four million and four point three.”

“Four million and four point one.”

“Half a trillion.”

We never bothered to find out what a trillion was (or a quadrillion, a quintillion, a sextillion, although we used the terms). Whatever it was, we stuck with it.

“Half a trillion and one.”

“A trillion.”

“Eight trillions.”

“Eight trillions and eight.”

We did the same with “billion,” although in that case we knew that it meant a thousand millions. So if a million was “one,” a billion was a thousand of those “ones.” But we never went as far as counting how many zeros it contained and using that to calculate (there should be nine, I think). It would have been tedious, a drag, no fun. And we were playing a game. We were impatient, like all kids, and we had invented a game ideally suited to impatience: the leaping game. Although we spent hours and whole afternoons sitting still in the cabin of the little red truck that belonged to Omar’s dad, we were exercising our impatience. Otherwise, it would have been a sort of numerological craftwork, and I would describe our game as art, not craft.

We didn’t even know if a billion was bigger than a trillion. What did it matter? It was better not to know. We both hid our ignorance, and never put each other to the test. And in spite of this, the game remained very easy to play.

We were attracted by big numbers, inevitably: it followed from the nature of the game. They were the gravitational force accelerating our fall. But at the same time we held them in contempt, as indicated by the fact that we didn’t bother to find out exactly how big they were. Numbers were one thing and big numbers were another: with numbers we were in the domain of intuition (eight could be eight things or eight points; the same with eighty, or even eight hundred million); but when it came to really big numbers we were thinking blind; the game became purely verbal, a matter of combining words, not numbers.

“A billion.”

“A trillion billions.”

“Half a billion trillion billions.”

“A billion billion trillion billion trillions.”

It’s true that numbers reappeared on the far side of these accumulations.

“A billion billions.”

“A billion billions and six.”

“Six billion billions and six point zero zero zero zero zero zero six.”

These were luxuries, embellishments that we allowed ourselves, as if to stave off a boredom that we didn’t feel and couldn’t have felt, but could nevertheless imagine. On the other hand, we both agreed not to accept things like “six billion six billions”: that wasn’t a number but a multiplication. We had more than enough to do with numbers pure and simple. Why make life complicated?

I don’t know how long this game lasted. Months, years. It never bored us, never ceased to surprise and stimulate us. It was one of the high points of our childhood, and when we finally stopped, it wasn’t because we’d exhausted the game, or tired of it, but because we had grown up and gone our separate ways. I should add that we didn’t play it all the time, and it wasn’t our only game. Not at all. We had dozens of different games, some more extravagant and fantastic than others. I have resolved to describe them one by one, and this is the one I happened to begin with, but I wouldn’t want the rather artificial way in which I’ve isolated the number game to give a false impression. We weren’t a pair of obsessives permanently shut up in the cabin of an old truck spouting numbers. A new fantasy would excite us and we could forget about the numbers for weeks at a time. Then we’d start over, exactly like before. . On reflection, the way I’ve presented the game in isolation is not so artificial after all, because various features did set it apart: its immutable simplicity, its naturalness, its secrecy. I think we kept it secret, but not for any special reason, not because it was a secret: just because we forgot to tell anyone, or the opportunity never arose.

The game was very simple and austere, and that’s why it was inexhaustible. By definition, it couldn’t be boring. And anyway, how could we have been bored? It was pure freedom. In the playing, the game revealed itself as part of life, and life was vast, elastic, endless. We knew that prior to any experience. We were austere, like our parents, the neighborhood, the town, and life in Pringles. Today it’s almost impossible to imagine just how simple that life was. Having lived it myself doesn’t help. I’m trying to imagine it, to give some form to that idea of simplicity, putting memories aside, avoiding them as much as possible.

Sometimes, in the plenitude that followed an especially satisfactory session of play, we did something that seemed to depart from simplicity, but in fact confirmed it. We played the same game as a joke, out of pure exuberance, as if we hadn’t understood, as if we were savages, or stupid.