Bottom of the Sky

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Back then, I imagine, the air was flammable and sparks flew when lover’s lips touched, for kisses were historic and electric. Static electricity moving everywhere and suddenly anything could trigger combustions both external and internal.

  But I must insist: why do I write these long, serpentine sentences, these blurry images laden with adjectives, why do I think that this, that all of this happened, that all of this happened to me, and yet . . .

  Patience, be patient, is it all right to ask for patience the way one asks for mercy, swearing you’ll put everything in order soon or die trying?

  Here and now—maybe that’s it, maybe that’s why I write this way—I am also like this: the long lines and brief thoughts of someone who has surrendered to the reign of machines, not understanding them, but using them. Using them, but never quite forgetting that he won’t ever fully understand exactly what electricity is (animal or vegetal or mineral?) or how the simplest motor works. Someone for whom airplanes will always be elevators without cables. A man on the edge, a frontiersman, someone who’s not exactly anywhere, but who sees everything from a perspective more shifting than privileged, and yet . . .

  I write all of this amid the inaudible din of a secret battle I know is already lost.

  I write this in an attempt to overcome the forgetfulness that washes over me like a black tide, like something blotting out the stars. Stars going out one by one, like worn out names that have been used and repeated so many times that their corresponding faces have faded. A blackness that hangs over me and drowns me and at first I try to stay afloat, but before long, I understand that there’s no sense in resisting the call of the depths and oblivion and I let myself go, I sink, liquid air bubbles escaping from my lips and out through my scuba suit.

  I write so that all of this functions like the debris of a shipwreck readying to come up to the surface while, on the other side of the river, a column of black smoke rises, dancing to the music of red sirens in a city where, tonight, no one will sleep.

  Diffuse fragments, yes, but pieces of the same hull and from the same head that can maybe offer some idea of what it was that sank or, at least, serve to indicate the more or less exact spot where there lies, motionless, everything that once sailed, guided by charts, compasses, and constellations.

  I write to leave something behind, not to clarify what happened, not to help me remember (I can almost see myself here after a time, as if I’d decided not to go but to stay, reading these pages, understanding nothing of the little they contain and only a little of the nothing they attempt to explain).

  I write like someone saying goodbye.

  I write all of this that I never planned to write. A good part of it I don’t even write, but just think, that elusive and pure form of writing that is unadulterated memory, rare nostalgic energy, its workings incomprehensible until it’s put down in writing, reduced to disconnected words. I write propelled by the reactive fuel of an unexpected visitor.

  I write, opening and closing parenthesis (maybe, borrowing those parenthesis that embrace numbers and letters but not words, to approximate my uncertain language with mathematic precision, with the exactitude that Ezra has surrendered to in order to define the contours of the diffuse), the way I closed my roll top desk when I heard someone knocking.

  And I got up and went down to open the door.

  A young journalist.

  Though I call him a “young journalist,” the truth is I don’t believe he was a journalist in the strictest and most professional sense of the term.

  I don’t believe, as he stated, that he worked for a “specialty” magazine because, as far as I know, magazines “specializing” in science fiction no longer exist and, if one had survived it wouldn’t devote its limited pages to interviewing antiques, but to featuring the exchange of opinions between fans more interested in the special affect produced by the special effects—all that erotic, digitalized technology to dig their fingers into—of the next big, frigid blockbuster of the hot summer.

  I didn’t believe him when he showed up at my home without calling ahead; so I made him swallow the bitter pill of convincing me of the veracity of his alleged credentials.

  I preferred to think of him, simply, as someone who needed to imperiously ask many questions (questions he’d asked himself many times, silent and alone), in order to, if possible, hear the perfect answers in the voice of a stranger he knew—without ever having spoken to him—all too well.

  A young journalist (I don’t think he was exactly “young” either; but it’s also true that I’ve reached an age when nearly all living beings are, or appear to be, quite young compared to me) paid me a visit today and asked many questions about things that happened long, long ago.

  At first I imagined his small notepad contained, written in an illegible hand, words cut in half, more disjointed than abbreviated, a long list of questions revolving—as so often happened back then, on the rare occasions I let myself be cornered and caught—around the figure of Warren Wilbur Zack. His life so different from mine. An opposite life. An anti-life. Everything that happened to him—reading aloud by the light of his last wish—like everything that never happened to me and . . .

  Here, I believe, a pause is in order.

  A pause, like these other empty parenthesis where—paragraph after paragraph—I think I glimpse the true texture of time. Pauses like the antimatter matter between one space-time leap and the next, like the moment when the pieces rotate into place and slide into the grooves of the complicated mechanism of what we decide to remember or what decides to be remembered.

  One more pause before I allow myself to think about Zack . . .

  . . . like taking a deep breath before diving into that memory and descending into its depths.

  Zack, who was crazy, who became a science-fiction writer as soon as he realized that nobody was going to publish his odd, realistic novels about couples who fight all the time.

  Zack, who conjured an almost immediate future where nothing functioned properly apart from the invisible yet oh so solid device of paranoia.

  Zack (Zack’s always-moist eyes, like those of a sad dog, his docile and canine smile, his face covered in fur, fits of snapping and barking at the most unexpected moments), who survived on canned dog food during his most difficult and impoverished days and who could no doubt recommend for you the best and tastiest brands.

  Zack, who married and divorced so many times and Zack’s many children dressed in brilliant rags, filing behind him through the streets.

  Zach, who in public would say things like “we science-fiction writers are pathetic beings: We can’t talk about science because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful” or “there is nothing stranger than to write something believing it is untrue, only to find out later that it was actually true.”

  Zack, who never stopped dreaming about his telepathic, twin brother who died at birth (and from whom he swore he received messages and commands), Zack, who was sure he was the reincarnation of an ancient Christian saint, lost in a “false reality” that in truth, he asserted, was nothing but a secret wrinkle (“a kind of elaborate curtain”) behind which still pulsed the invulnerable grandeur of the Roman Empire.

  Zack, who was involved with West Coast militant groups like the Black Drummers and who reported that his files had been raided “by the CIA and the FBI and a governmental organization so secret that it has no name” because “in one of my books, without realizing it, I revealed the nature of the most absolute and definitive experiment that is being carried out by the most acclaimed and qualified scientists on the planet . . . I ask myself which book of mine it might be.”

  Zack, who didn’t believe in other planets or in rockets and whose flight crews always ended up pushing the wrong button while distractedly thinking about some random thing, about Barbie dolls or psychotronic drugs of high voltage and density.

  Zack, who died descending a ladder at the most ascendant moment of his c
areer, when headlines and the stories on the evening news were beginning to look a lot like his fantasies.

  Zack, who, at one of the only meetings or conventions we attended, smiled politely in response to my call for a return to the classic galaxies of science fiction.

  And, yes, Zack was better than I was (Zack was better than almost all of us) and I laughed at Zack. I resented his acknowledged opportunism and the speed with which he wrote novels, novels that, it’s true, I didn’t like and didn’t understand; but they were novels unlike any others.

  Zack knew of my resentment and got his revenge in the most elegant and perfect way: at the reading of his will, it was revealed that he’d named me his literary executor and—those were hard times, I had no choice but to accept—stipulated that I receive a generous percentage of the profits any future adaptations of his work might earn. Just a few years prior, that designation would’ve been nothing but a bad joke and an uncomfortable and inopportune ordeal: much of his work was never catalogued and would have impressed no one but his underground followers. But just before he died, Zack’s stock had been on the rise. His works were being rereleased in prestigious collections and his name was beginning to be heard, repeated more and more by the voices of “serious” writers who considered him “a secret prophet” or “someone who dared to look beyond” or “the philosopher who came from the future to help us understand our incomprehensible present.” And what was most intriguing about Zack’s novels wasn’t their plots (difficult to adapt, strange, like a different language that was actually just an exotic variant of our own), but their ideas. Ideas that producers, screenwriters, and directors could distill into movies flooded with digital effects, popular and, on more than one occasion, critical successes.

  The first that premiered—the one that turned on the engine of his posthumous mythos—was a noir mutation featuring sentient androids. I was hired in the capacity of creative supervisor and advisor and “specialist” in Zack’s visions, and when the director offered to let me write the final monologue of a dying robot under the acid rain of a retro-futuristic Los Angeles, I thought I’d be able to take revenge against his ghost. I put words in his mouth that, I thought, Zack would despise: elegiac phrases honoring the memory of galaxies, where Zack’s characters—more preoccupied with their place on Earth, or, at most, in a decadent Martian colony too similar to an industrial suburb—would never have dreamed of venturing, because there was nothing that interested them less than traveling far away. The speech overflowed with poetic lines easy to remember and immediately place. Many people found them moving and, I’m sure, there were some who cried during the filming of the scene. I felt that, with that, I’d done right, I’d managed to slip in a particle of restraint and nobility. A call to return to that future that we’d believed in so fervently in the past. My idea of science fiction contaminating Zack’s idea of science fiction.

  And yet, it’s true, ghosts can never be beaten.

  And my gesture was lost and swallowed up by the blinding light of a dead star named Warren Wilbur Zack: everyone thought he had written that humanoid machine’s farewell under the rain, that it had been extracted from one of his many notebooks and unpublished manuscripts, which were no longer unpublished, but were being bought for astronomical sums that, like I said, I benefited from and that today are my only stable source of income, my means of survival.

  The movie premiered, it wasn’t a great popular success, but with time, it became a cult classic, almost a religion, an incessant maker of money and prestige, a masterpiece—there’s nothing more marvelous than a cult artist who also makes money—admired by the young, who soon occupied important positions in the industry and declared themselves fans of Zack and his visions.

  So it goes: I’m kept afloat by Warren Wilbur Zack, he pays my bills, my health insurance, he’s turned me into an expert on his life and work, and I even wrote the first of his various biographies and annotated a volume of his eccentric letters and a collection of his “meta-philosophical-religious essays.”

  And it is regarding Warren Wilbur Zack that I get invited to speak, to answer questions, to lie.

  But no.

  Not this time. To my surprise, my young visitor doesn’t want to talk about Zack and the legend of Zack and the array of rumors orbiting around the persona of Zack, the type of thing one hears at conventions or reads in fanzines. “Zack . . . Overrated,” he says with a twisted smile that I can’t help but silently appreciate.

  My young visitor isn’t seeking to elucidate some mystery about Zack, but to discuss The Faraways and the rumors circulating about the modern-day Ezra Leventhal and about Evasion. (Indeed, Zack was one of the few, if not the only person, who ever thought I might be the author in the shadow of Evasion. Zack explained to me, with that tone of voice that never sounded like an insult, but like a strange form of respect or, at least, like the interest of someone confronted with a rare species: “Your imagination is so imaginative . . . Your imagination has a logic and an order that I envy. You don’t know what it’s like to live with an imagination like mine. Inside my head, all the ideas yell and raise their hands at the same time, fighting to get to the front of the line and say their piece. In a way, I write so that I’m able to stop thinking a little.”)

  To my amazement, my young visitor wasn’t there to find out about what I’d witnessed, but about something that I’d lived through and taken part in; something that today feels so far away, more shadow years than light years, but descending now at full speed, rolling toward me down the stairs from the attic of the past.

  And, at the same time, his questions seemed like veils, concealing answers to other questions he dared not ask or didn’t really know how to formulate.

  And yet, I answered all of them.

  Why did I answer him?

  Why answer?

  Because he reminded me so much of myself?

  Because of his glasses with thick, black plastic frames (glasses that now, apparently, are in style and that, when he took them off every so often, didn’t reveal the steely-eyed gaze of a superhero, but the fragile, naked eyes of one of those fish for whom the brilliance of the sun and the blue of the sea are nothing but an impossible-to-confirm rumor)?

  Because of his crooked teeth (back then all authentic cultivators of sci-fi had bad teeth)?

  Because of the impossible-to-hide pockmarks on his cheeks, wreckage of a difficult and still painful adolescence (those lunar, epidermal craters, dead skin where only with great difficulty might there have landed the extraterrestrial visit of a young kiss)?

  Why did I feel he was like a ghostly vision of Christmas past, like fugitive spores seeping through a crack in the wall, leaving the damp stains of a distant galaxy?

  Why the perturbing sensation that—at times—the same questions were repeated in different words to insure that he not produce a single inaccuracy?

  Why when he left did he leave me with the gift of a supernova-intensity migraine?

  Why didn’t I resist, why did it feel like I’d succumbed to his sharp and persistent voice, like the buzzing of certain ancient insects?

  Why . . . ?

  To put it another way—if asked to explain my submissive and voluntary conduct—I was moved by his enthusiasm and respect for me, a person who, for him, wasn’t really a person, but more like a symbol. Someone considered a living souvenir of a dead age that he sensed, or needed to believe, had been glorious and, I thought at the time, I bestowed on him that particular and solemn joy that one only experiences when facing a great ruin. Facing a monument from another age. Facing something you dig up first and decode later, to convince yourself that you understand absolutely everything without knowing practically anything.

  His hypotheses, I suppose, were fuel for my vanity, immobile after so long.

  For him I was a kind of deity.

  One of The Faraways.

  The alleged but never confessed co-author (and not mere editor and sincere prologuer, who claimed not to know or even susp
ect the true identity of the author) of Evasion. The faithful guardian of a thousand pages of a legendary science-fiction novel that’d been coming to me in the mail for several years (without the sender’s name on the envelope, always sent from different offices), which nobody had read in its entirety (because it’d never been finished or it was so open-ended that it failed to meet the protocols of the genre), but about which many had written and theorized, drawing on the various fragments circulating in a way as underground as it was airborne. A science-fiction novel that wasn’t a science-fiction novel and possibly, not even a novel. A science-fiction novel in which—unlike typical science-fiction novels where things happen all the time—almost nothing happened. Just a succession of sunsets—their many differences described in minute detail—contemplated by the last inhabitant of another planet. Little more than loose fragments and scattered extraterrestrial thoughts, which I finally collected and organized under a classical and typographical cover. Yellow background and black letters, dispensing with the illustrations characteristic of the genre that, generally, had little to do with what was said and told inside. A few handmade copies published with my own money (I want to emphasize this, I don’t want there to be doubts about this: not with Zack’s money) so long ago, in another century, in another millennium.

  You might also say—I don’t mean it as an alibi or an excuse—that in that moment, faced with the young journalist and his questions, I was still shaken, or more precisely, frightened, by everything that’d happened to me the day before. Which, lacking a better name but needing so badly to be named (because unnamed things produce the most fear) I (availing myself of the conspiratorial language so in vogue, Expedients Z and all that) had come to call The Incident.