Summary
In the final section of the novel, Juan is nearing death. People come to visit him, people who do not explain who they are to nene. He says they start talking mid-sentence. Juan's memory is worsening, and he often experiences long blackouts, which he describes as great nothingness, as nightmares. The visitors come and tell Juan about their lives, about what they have done, and also about Juan's life, about all that he has done. nene stays the whole time, not wanting to leave Juan's side in case he dies. He wants to be there with him in that moment, so that he isnot alone, and also for nene's own curiosity about what a final breath might look like.
nene describes death as slipping below the surface. Juan is right below it; he cannot quite see nene, he cannot seem to stay up above the surface with him. When he resurfaces after his blackouts, nene asks where he has been, who he has seen. Juan is seeing all kinds of people from his life in his dreams, people who closely resemble their real versions, but are not exactly the same. He can hear his mother weeping. When Juan wakes, he is often startled to find nene there, and he asks him about people who have come to visit him, people who have died or whom he has not seen in many years.
Juan dreams of a woman who confesses to him that she loves another woman. nene falls into deep sleeps, too, where he hallucinates the sounds of Juan packing his bag and leaving the room. nene feels himself slipping below the surface, but wakes to find Juan asleep in his bed. Juan grows less and less lucid, launching into long soliloquies in Spanish that nene cannot understand, as his Spanish is not very good. Juan has admonished nene for his poor Spanish repeatedly, and nene feel some shame and resentment around it. As a child, his father spoke at him and his siblings in Spanish, but not to them.
nene sleeps in Juan's bed with him, training himself to sleep when he sleeps so that he will be there if the real Juan resurfaces. He holds his hand and realizes that, besides Liam, he has never held a grown man's hand before. When Juan is silent, no longer drinking water, nene sits down at the desk and looks at the original Masculinity-Femininity test Juan had stuffed in his folder. nene fills out the quiz, jotting down the words that repeat during it. He clips out the questions he has answered affirmatively and glues them on a piece of black paper. He realizes that it is a "terrifying little poem of perversion" (275) that he is quite proud of, and he tucks it into the pocket of Juan's pants that he has been wearing.
The narrative ends consciously, with nene writing, "Better to end here: one of our last good days" (281). Juan asks for the mirror and nene says it is missing, holding up the empty frame. Juan tells him to be his face so nene holds the frame up in front of him, letting the light from the window pool in around them. nene mimics Juan's movements, raising his eyebrows when Juan raises his brows, squinting when he squints. He pulls nene's face to his and nene stays. Juan laments how much he and his face have been through together, and then he says they need a haircut. nene says he can find something to cut their hair, but Juan holds on for another moment, not letting him go.
The narrative then switches to a section called "Blinkered Endnotes" in which nene talks about his process of trying to continue Juan's project. He writes that he still is not comfortable looking at the past, but that he is getting better at glancing at it. The endnotes that follow are less scholarly and more personal, listing out various sources used throughout the project – which, by now, we can see is the book that we're holding in our hands – and nene's impressions of them alongside anecdotes about Juan's tellings.
The very end of the novel is "A Sort of Postface" (295). It says that Blackouts is a work of fiction, and then nene recalls a riddle that Juan once told him about extracting secrets from a dead man; then Juan died, he says, and so nene pulled together what he could recall of their conversations and tried to put it in some kind of order. He left the desert and headed west to LA, always tinkering with the book. He would go through periods of working on it and periods of forgetting about it, and then one day it was done. He showed it to his friends, who asked if it was real, if Juan was real, if all of that had happened, to which nene said "not all ambiguities need be resolved" (296).
Analysis
As the novel ends we return to the present action, to the room where Juan is dying. In this way the novel follows the structural promise it made at the beginning, that nene went to the Palace to visit his dying friend. In Juan's final days we get more blackouts, this time in the form of his slips out of consciousness, which are not quite nightmares but are something like it. Torres continues to demonstrate the deep link between nene and Juan by showing nene's blackouts too, and his battles with what feels like death, even though he is not the one dying.
The figurative language around death comes to the forefront in this scene. While there are several common idioms used to talk about dying, nene describes it as slipping below the surface. Like the doors in Juan's film about Jan, the surface also represents a threshold, a space that is half above and half below. To be on the surface is to be in between zones. The image of the surface often evokes the connotation of something shallow – to skim the surface is to not go terribly deep – but at the same time the surface conjures weight, a downward pull.
It is a gratifying, quietly triumphant moment when nene makes a blackout poem (or really a found poem, as he takes certain words and arranges them elsewhere) of his own from the Masculinity-Femininity test. He wants to take the torch from Juan but he still has his hang-ups around looking at the past. This scene seems to be a moment of private transcendence, of vital solidarity with the participants in the original study, which is going to mobilize him further. The moment is even more significant for the fact that he is wearing Juan's jeans.
The mirror that is not quite a mirror is a clever object containing significance for these two characters. It is not a perfect 1:1 – in fact, it is not even a mirror, but something that used to be a mirror. It had a purpose and now it is being used in a slightly different way, just like Jan's research, just like the Sex Variants book. nene is not showing Juan a perfect reflection of himself, but a collaborative reflection, which underscores the collaboration that has been their entire lives, certainly all that is contained in this book.
The final sections address the meta element of the novel most explicitly. Juan has been telling nene about this project he must complete and nene has been telling us the story of it from a retrospective point of view. By the end, it is clear that the novel Blackouts is nene's finished project. This novel within a novel conceit is a common postmodern move, one that Torres seems to be in direct conversation with as he draws attention to the artifice of the finished work and the slippery boundaries between reality and non-reality.
