Bottom of the Sky

by Rodrigo Fresán

  A life of true lies.

  A false existence where I’d find myself forced to remember everything I said because—if I were to tell someone what I was almost certain I’d seen the night before—I’d be instantly written off as a liar. And liars have the terrible obligation of remembering everything they’ve said. Each and every lie. And that’s how they wind up arriving at that crystalline instant where the lies are enough to completely cover the surface of the planet of their true lives. The lies cover everything like a deadly virus imported from the far reaches of the universe, and for which there’s no cure or comfort. And when there’s nothing left to infect, when everything has been devoured, the lies begin to devour each other.

  My lies, I realize, will be very different from the lies of other children. Children who lie to cover up a naughty deed.

  I, on the other hand, will lie because, for me, all truth will seem far worse than any falsity.

  For me, all truth will be unbearable.

  I’m not at home when they come looking for my father and find him and take him away.

  When I get home from school, they tell me that Solomon Goldman climbed up on the roof of the synagogue, that he was naked or dressed (there didn’t seem to be an agreement on this particular point) in a strange silver uniform or with his body covered in gold paint.

  And that my father howled alchemical formulas and cabalistic prescriptions and desperate curses at the heavens.

  And that he waved his arms, over his head, repeating again and again the gesture of someone drawing the blinds or opening the curtains.

  Months later, a letter informed me that my father had died when he jumped from a terrace at the Bellevue Hospital Center.

  The specialists’ final verdict was of sudden, unpremeditated suicide: they explained that my father was a “model patient,” whatever that means.

  Years later, during a book signing at Andromeda Books—a specialty bookstore on Bleecker Street where one of my novels was being launched—a stranger with shrunken pupils approached me. Pupils the size of pills. He told me he’d been institutionalized with my father, but now was “completely cured and probably saner than you.” And he told me—presenting a copy of Remote Universe for me to sign—that my father hadn’t committed suicide, that that was a sham.

  He told me that my father “had finally comprehended the secret language of the clouds . . . Clouds, immense and complex like ice cream sundaes in the summer, clouds as powerful as castle armies.”

  He told me too that my father had attempted to fly and that, for few meters, he’d succeeded. He told me that he saw it, that he witnessed the deed, but that “the nurses’ cries made him lose focus and the poor and saintly Solomon ended up falling into the void.”

  And he concluded: “Believe me: your father, Solomon Goldman, died happy—knowing he was right.”

  And he handed me a notebook.

  All the pages were blank except the last one. There, in Solomon Goldman’s familiar handwriting—but shrunk to microscopic size; I needed the help of a magnifying glass to read it—I made out words that I was quick to memorize because, despite their complexity and scope, I understood them to be my father’s last words. The final destination of his last voyage and, consequently, something worth preserving. In a way, I thought, these words were my inheritance, a legacy that had finally come to me:

  “The only true essence of magic resides in the ability to exist in a state of consciousness where the past and the future long to trade places. Classical Hebrew, without going any further, has two verbal tenses: the present and another barely discernible time between the past and the future. Thus, to denote something that already happened, it’s enough to say I went. To refer to the future, however, one only need add the participle already as in I already went, which is understood as an I will go in a perpetual motion of coming and going. Thus, it suggests a kind of primitive understanding of existence. An understanding that would transgress our mode of separating, in actuality, the real from the imaginary. But in that ancient grammar, facts are not seen as facts that have already occurred, but as instructions from tomorrow. That is to say, as premonitions that visit us in dreams and nightmares. In the primitive world, yesterday’s facts mingled with the wonders and adventures of last night’s dreams. So saying that you have done something that you didn’t do is the initial and essential step to take in shaping what will be the future. Facts arise from premonitions. It’s as if the future couldn’t exist without the existence of its a priori delineation. A pencil sketch of what someday will become an oil landscape. The childish exercise that grows into the wise and mature symphony. God (or whatever you want to call Him; I know His true name, but I’m not allowed to put it in writing or say it or even think it) conceives of the world first and only then creates it. Thus, the cabalistic perception of this kind of miracle passes not through the magnitude of the enterprise, but through the fact that, in the act of imagining how the world will be, God has already created it before making it.”

  Yes: my father had been and had already been and would already be.

  Something like that.

  But years before all of this (and just after they took Solomon Goldman away, tightly wrapped in a straight jacket) a man and a woman belonging to one of those organizations charged with the protection of minors told me to pack up what few belongings I had in my small suitcase.

  My magazines, my notebooks, my books, some clothes, two or three photographs. I didn’t have any toys, I never did, they never interested me.

  I made the short but transcendent journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan where I was taken to the house of an aunt and uncle—my mother’s brother—whom I’d never met before.

  And there, in a house on 7th Street, where I thought I’d be cured of my evil secrets, I met my cousin Ezra Leventhal.

  I remember that moment perfectly.

  I remember it as if it were happening again right now.

  A thing that had been and had already been, but that would already be and will be again: Ezra shakes my hand, he shows me our room which until then was “just my room,” he explains to me, arching an eyebrow while—feigning a reflexive pose, hand on chin, thinking I won’t notice—squeezing a pimple. And, raising his voice to make himself heard over the relentless clamor of the sewing machines in the shop downstairs, Ezra tells me, in a serious tone of voice, suddenly broken by uncontrolled, high-pitched adolescent hormones, that my father “has probably been kidnapped by beings from a planet called Omikron.”

  And with a conspiratorial gesture—almost nonexistent in its efficiency, as if it were a secret embodied in an object, in something palpable and true—Ezra hands me a notebook with a black oilcloth jacket and a cover where, on a white label, in precise caps, it reads: MANUAL OF A YOUNG SPACE TRAVELER/INSTRUCTIONS FOR HOW TO OPERATE, INTERACT, AND PROSPER ON THIS AND OTHER PLANETS ACCORDING TO THE PRECEPTS OF EZRA LEVENTHAL (REX ARCANA OF THE MILKY WAY).

  Then Ezra points dramatically upward, toward the room’s ceiling, toward something beyond the sky, toward the other side of everything and the end of everything on this side.

  He looks at me, smiling.

  And looks up again.

  And I look exactly in the same direction that he’s looking and pointing.

  And I see.

  What I remember most about my first days in Manhattan are the nights. So different from those of Brooklyn. So much noisier. More alive. Nights that walk and talk in their sleep. It wasn’t like Brooklyn was rural, but compared to the incessant and aggressive electric pulse of the metropolis, Brooklyn’s voice was much closer to a whisper, acoustic and loving.

  And the sky of the great city—because it’s at night that we’re most aware of the immensity of space, of its infinite possibilities, as during the day the sun’s blinding presence blots out everything—seemed, to me, to have shaken loose the stars so they fell across an always burning skyline. A city in flames, phosphorescent and trembling with subterranean gasps of subways and moans of eleva
ted trains.

  I remember that I could barely sleep, that I heard the voices of nearby skyscrapers as if they were talking to each other in that language of steel and cement that buildings communicate with. There they were, all of a sudden, all those immense skyscrapers, like rockets condemned never to fly, having to settle for being signposts of girders and windows indicating the path to follow. Thinking about it now, from here, from this present, for me, at that time, Manhattan was the future. A science-fiction city. A tomorrow and—once again—an and already was in the present. And there I was—recently landed in Manhattan—like a caveman lost in that space where for me everything was new and at the same time as ancient and primitive as matters of family tend to be. “Family” understood as that thousand-headed organism where stories—situations—repeat themselves over and over with slight variations and dissonances that are surprising at first, but find their original aria before too long. Because inside a family—though it goes unsaid, a deafening silence—nobody hesitates to pinpoint the exact situation of that original and now-dead star whose sickly light still reaches us.

  In other words: my father wasn’t the first Goldman—nor will he be the last Leventhal—to go mad. But it was clear that, for me, neither the certainty of a past lunatic nor the possibility of a future madman was any comfort at all.

  They stuck my father in a straight jacket, inside a room with padded walls, cursing a nameless creator. And I was alone, far from home, sharing a room with a cousin of exceedingly peculiar habits, who was convinced that our world, as we know it and as it is shown in the history books, wasn’t really ours.

  But really—I realized almost right away—Ezra’s ideas, his histrionic poses, the borrowing of revelations written, in letters that looked more printed than handwritten, all the same height, repeating the same curves and straight lines, in the pages of his MANUAL OF A YOUNG SPACE TRAVELER/INSTRUCTIONS FOR HOW TO OPERATE, INTERACT, AND PROSPER ON THIS AND OTHER PLANETS ACCORDING TO THE PRECEPTS OF EZRA LEVENTHAL (REX ARCANA OF THE MILKY WAY), were just my cousin’s way of welcoming me. His way of helping me feel less alone. A way of telling me that he and I belonged to the same rare and privileged species. Because Ezra would say to me the day after my arrival, in the morning following that first terrible night, looking me in the eyes, his hands on my shoulders: “To be an extraterrestrial it is enough, cousin Isaac, to feel that you’re an extraterrestrial.”

  And I knew right then that Ezra would never lie to me, that he’d always tell me the truth, and that he’d devote the rest of his life to searching for and discovering new truths. Truths that could only come from the new order of a still-faraway future, yes; but one that was approaching faster and faster all the time. Running toward our shadow years, huffing and puffing—as if they were the little candles on a birthday cake—the ageless light of light years.

  I write this as if it were a science-fiction story suspended in space with little chance of ever coming home.

  A science-fiction story that wants to be something else—speaking a language not of the genre—but can’t stop being what it is.

  I can’t help it.

  Dubious automatic reflex.

  Something that is, I fear, more existential degeneration than occupational compulsion.

  Entertainment of a writernaut, sitting, fixed to desk and chair.

  Static centrifugal force but his face still deformed by the acceleration of paragraphs in whose lines nothing ages and everything seems new.

  There’s a moment in any life (maybe the moments that we start to sense as our last moments, after looking at and not recognizing ourselves in the morning’s first reflection, because you always think of yourself as younger than you really are) when the past becomes something paradoxically futuristic.

  So, as I’ve said, the act of remembering has something about it that’s as technologically inexplicable as any of those miracles of extraterrestrial cultures so advanced they end up unattainable.

  And so, pretty soon, we find ourselves wondering what happened, what took place, what is truth and what is lie in everything we see again when we go back in time.

  Memory is a reverse time machine that’s as powerful as—always moving forward or in multiple alternate directions—that other time machine: imagination.

  And so—in the same way that all realist and contemporary novels would be science fiction for a reader in ancient times—the novel of our current and past existence, viewed mechanically and organized artificially, always strikes us as fantastical. Something that—to keep from getting depressed or feeling like a device on the verge of breaking down beyond all repair—we prefer to conceive of as happening in another galaxy. Foreign customs. Exotic vistas, often in black and white or sepia. Words whose meaning we don’t know. Cleaner air and a simpler life that, also, we like to think of as more civilized or at least more peaceful.

  And—beyond certain fixed dates and common coordinates—this implies that each person’s past constitutes, in and of itself, a different world. And so, every time I went to one of those now-bygone conventions of science-fiction writers, someone would ask me a question that nobody asks anymore (because no one is interested in the answer to this question, it’s passed its expiration date): “Do you believe in the existence of intelligent life on other planets?” And I answer: “Yes of course, just look back and think about what was and reflect on everything that’s been. That’s also the explanation for why, inevitably, day after day, life is extinguished on several thousand other planets that are on this planet: people prefer not to remember and to not draw useful conclusions with respect to why it was that this or that catastrophe occurred. People prefer to live on a planet called Present without realizing that that is the planet whose civilizations have the briefest history and least posterity. People prefer not to think.”

  I write this and I do so by hand, slowly, not trusting machines and knowing that none of these pages will degenerate into that supposed and rapidly failed novelty of electronic books. Knowing, as well, that its writing and its reading are already futuristic in their own right: when mankind hadn’t yet set in motion the mysteries of cables and keys, we were already functioning—and already reading and writing—on the basis of that internal and mysterious electricity leaping from neuron to neuron and bouncing off the more or less well-painted and well-appointed walls of the caverns of our brains.

  I write exactly like this: outside time and space, weightless, beyond any communication from the control center.

  I’m a solitary cosmonaut of my own life, lacking sufficient oxygen to return home, somewhat disturbed by what’s happening to me, but without that meaning that I’m upset that I don’t entirely understanding something that’s just happened.

  Or that always has been and won’t stop happening.

  The Incident and all of that.

  I write this like a shipwrecked writer of messages in bottles, who casts them into the sea with the naïve hope that maybe she will find one of them. And that she’ll break it open and remove the glowing and sacred green crystals of these pages, and Tzimtzum, she’ll unfold them and read them. And I hope that she feels something like pity, or, maybe, a trace of tenderness, and that she comes back to me, not to love me, but—because I don’t believe there exists a more noble and sublime way of loving someone—to explain everything to me.

  To explain everything to me as my cousin Ezra Leventhal once explained everything to me.

  And friendship is a strange force that strengthens us while simultaneously negating us with the need to feel ourselves as close and as similar to the other as possible. When this friendship also involves the unifying and homogenizing force of blood, then the whole thing becomes far more powerful.

  But, of course, the final result is that of a false similitude; because there was nothing more different, between me and Ezra, than our reasons for being interested in science fiction.

  While Ezra sought the comfort of other worlds to try to escape a future that would force him to carry on the
family tradition amid rolls of fabric and mannequins, I, for my part, needed to travel to planets that were as far away from my past and my family’s past as possible.

  Ezra was a rebel who had to overthrow a galactic tyranny that turned men into androids, defeated and subjugated by sewing machines. Beings who only rebelled, within the labyrinth of the tailor shop, by organizing clandestine poker games, cards dropping from their hands onto the same long tables where by day they trimmed fabrics with the irrevocable slowness of the autumn leaves at Central Park and Fifth Avenue. That almost-forbidden territory where the most exclusive women walked about, wearing the heavy winter coats they had sewn, and where they—the coats’ anonymous and servile creators—sometimes ventured with their families, braving the the city above to point out to their wives and children, with a mix of pride and sadness: “I made that coat . . . And that one . . . And that one over there.”

  For Ezra, I belonged to an even stranger yet equally tormented race: I was the orphan of a mother annihilated by forces from another dimension and a father who had lost his mind and—getting too close to the absolute and radioactive truth of the universe—his life.

  For Ezra, in a way, we were all victims of higher powers, of despotic cultures, of galactic tyrannies to be overthrown.

  For Ezra, science fiction was an escape hatch, a door opening onto a better world, a shadow he had to illuminate so it would come to life and he could see it.

  For me, on the other hand, science fiction was something to believe in: the only way I had to understand my life and the planet where my life had landed. It gave me the power to see myself from outside, to feel foreign, alien, and, yes, Faraway.

  Science fiction—unlike the uses Ezra gave it—not as something to attack with, but something to hide behind and defend yourself with.