Bottom of the Sky

by Rodrigo Fresán

  For Ezra, science fiction was a weapon.

  For me, science fiction was a shield.

  And so, there we are again. Ezra and I. And there we’ll stay.

  After telling me the interplanetary whereabouts of my ill-fated father and pointing up at the sky of his—suddenly our—room, Ezra sat down on one of the beds, rolled up his pants and showed me, with a fiercely proud smile, two abnormally skinny legs wrapped in harnesses of metal and leather, he stood and said something in a strange accent, punctuating each of the two words with a little pant. In that moment, the first thing that occurs to me is that Ezra has a speech impediment, a disability or, perhaps, some other metal apparatus wrapped around his teeth. Or asthma. Or tuberculosis. But then I realize what he’s trying to do: Ezra wants to sound like a stranger from somewhere very far away. Ezra—the imperfect youngest child, arriving on the heels of six perfect sisters who are constantly plotting with their mother to undermine a father who never put up a fight—needed to think of himself as alien to all of that. A spy, an infiltrator in the controlled and toxic atmosphere of planet Leventhal. An extraterrestrial who speaks perfect English but can’t ever—or doesn’t really want to—entirely forget the accent of his home planet.

  “SCIENCE FICTION!” was what Ezra said.

  And I, of course, knew of the celestial vicissitudes of gods and mortals in ancient religions. I’d stumbled across the odd crackpot satires of philosophers and patriots. And I’d read novels with heroes who traveled to the center and the bottom and the highest places of the world and self-styled “scientific romances,” with wise laboratory men driven mad by their own messianic genius. Or with creators of immortality elixirs. Or with adventurers discovering lost continents inhabited by dinosaurs. Or with warriors battling invaders from an exotic ocean Empire. And all of them, always, written by men who had never really traveled anywhere, for whom the simple act of standing up from their desks was a struggle. Men who invented perpetual-motion adventures for young readers who couldn’t easily escape from the orbits of home and parents. Science-fiction writers, on the other hand, made no attempt at illusion or deception: we knew and they knew that they never went and would never go where they said and wrote that they had gone, but they trusted that, yes, we would go. So, all of that—those invisible men and those human animals and those bellicose visitors from the red planet and those flying rockets and those voyages into the future via Victorian apparatuses or hypnotic trances—was, in reality, a collection of instruction manuals, barely hidden inside novels and stories. Instruction manuals to set the future in motion.

  “SCIENCE FICTION!” Ezra repeated.

  And it was then, for the first time, that I heard those two words that at first, to me, seemed impossible to bring together in the same environment. Science and Fiction struck me as irreconcilable and contradictory terms, like polar opposites.

  Two of the greatest novels in the history of literature (two novels not considered part of any genre, instead, each of them a genre that began and ended in itself; the same would occur years later with the polemical Damitax, which follows, throughout the cosmos, the amorous obsession of an old astronautics professor with a manipulative Venusian adolescent whom he clones over and over, hoping that one of the versions will, finally, love him) were, indeed, fantastical and spatial. But more than anything, they were classics. Krakhma-Zarr, Ezra’s favorite, tells of the madness of a captain who pursues a mythical cosmic creature from star to star. And Times Without Time, my favorite, was the obsessive tale of the last Martian, Mars-El: a traveler who, after ingesting a strange drink distilled from the dust suspended in the melancholic rings of Saturn, goes back in time to the confines of his childhood and, from there, passes through his entire life all over again as if contemplating it from outside, as if he were reading it, as if it were a book composed of many books.

  In a way we were defined by one or the other novel (titles that now I can’t find anywhere on my bookshelves and that seem not to appear in the card catalogues of any library), and by dividing us they made us perfectly complementary: Ezra was a man of action and I a man of reaction.

  Or something like that.

  And my reaction to those two magic words—Science and Fiction, suddenly like one word with two heads and a single brain—was instantaneous and perfect.

  It was as if Ezra were a magician—someone who’d just finished announcing that “For my next trick I’ll need a volunteer”—and I, a more than willing spectator, ready to climb up on the stage and submit myself to anything: to be cut in half, to be the body stuck full of swords, to disappear in a cloud of colorful smoke or inside a magic cabinet decorated with oriental characters and dragons with almond eyes, to float and ascend and lose myself forever in the rafters of a vaudeville theater.

  I was—I knew then—someone who had waited for years to succumb to this illusion that soon came to seem truer and solider and stronger than everything I’d experienced previously.

  It’s easy for others—I have no command of that language—to write, and even write well, about the highs and lows of the tides of love. Much more difficult to pinpoint are the ripples on that apparently placid lake that is friendship, at whose center, every now and then, circular and secret storms explode, just for the pleasure of, in turn, being eclipsed by a sudden blue sky.

  Of one thing I’m certain: with the arrival of Ezra in my life (and until his recent and possibly final departure, just a few days ago, again, The Incident) everything seemed to accelerate.

  And, looking back on it, everything I’ve said up until now (all my false starts, repetitions, clumsy statements about the genre, and all my absurd attempts to translate the elusive texture of time and space into writing) changes sign and language.

  Because when Ezra enters my life, I arrive at last, to another planet.

  I say and write Science Fiction and everything accelerates. Walking the way Ezra walked after they removed his metal harnesses: side-to-side but moving forward and, if you watched his legs, producing the curious impression of receding and advancing, laterally, feet barely moving, like he was suspended over phantom wheels a few centimeters off the floor.

  Like he was floating.

  Like the dance moves of that singer of indeterminate color (I don’t remember his name, why’d I think of him right now?) who ended up throwing himself off the spiked crown of the Statue of Liberty.

  Like that interplanetary spaceship on that television show I wrote for called Star Bound (today considered a classic, today almost everything is a classic of something or for someone), that attained absurd velocities when a captain in an absurdly tight uniform gave the order, sitting in an armchair on the command bridge, surrounded by women with short skirts and impossible hairdos, and counseled by logical, unfeeling extraterrestrials who, of course, like I’ve said, spoke perfect English, the universal language of the universe, apparently, and I wanted to be like that: to be from that far away and to feel that small.

  And so the rhythm of what I write accelerates and I accelerate.

  The years pass and run over each other and before long everything shocks me (and I decide I shouldn’t be shocked, one of the many consequences of The Incident, I suppose) and everything happens so fast and there’s so much that happened that I don’t remember and will never write down here.

  The unsettling sensation that the same event happens multiple times, with minimal or massive variations, as if someone were making adjustments, correcting and comparing different versions of the same event without ever picking one. Hundreds, thousands of details that end up defining the fabric of a life, and the unsettling sensation that I’m not the one who determines its direction and deviations, confusing dates, superimposing epochs, until it becomes so difficult for me to pinpoint how old I am, knowing that I’m too old, that there is not much left for me to tell.

  Better like this, I think.

  Better to let go.

  Better to think—better to surrender to the dictates of an unknown entity
—that it is someone else who writes me writing all of this.

  There is a photograph of the way we were back then.

  A photograph taken in that kind of black and white that seems more faithful somehow and to reveal more than all the colors in the world.

  I have it here, I didn’t imagine it.

  It brings me peace that something of what I think I remember—something that happened—can offer physical and incontrovertible evidence of its existence.

  It’s one of the two photographs I would include in this hypothetical dossier regarding The Incident and its circumstances.

  The other photograph is also of me and Ezra; but what makes that photograph special is that she is in it too, and since it’s her photograph (I have it here as well, Ezra gave it to me a few days ago, and it seems to be vibrating ever so slightly, wavering like a nightlight with a bulb so small it serves more to obscure than to illuminate), it is much more difficult to narrate, but soon I won’t be able to avoid the risk of attempting to describe it.

  In this one, the first photograph, Ezra and I pose together, shaking hands—with the solemnity of the small who must believe themselves big—as if ratifying a transcendent and indissoluble society. It’s an old photograph and its age is evidenced not just by its date, but above all, by the attitude of its subjects. It is a photograph from a time when getting a photograph taken was a big deal: you had to make an appointment at a professional studio, dress up in your best clothes, select the backdrop motif, leave home to have it taken, and never stick out your tongue at the moment of the flash. A photograph was a serious thing. Photographs weren’t yet instant, easy to correct and retouch. Photographs were slow and permanent and I don’t know if they were stealing our souls, but, yes, they definitely captured an instant forever. Back then, all photographs were historic.

  The photographer—Abraham, one of the Kowalski brothers, specialists in bar mitzvahs and weddings and funerals; his brother had died in the war, his children and grandchildren would die in conflicts yet to come—did not, of course, have any futuristic or interplanetary motif that we could stand in front of. So Ezra and I ended up picking an enlarged engraving of Greek and Roman temples, the closest thing, we agreed, that mankind had to civilizations far away in time and space.

  “Now we’ve got our picture. Now we are somebody. Now we can be who we want to be,” Ezra says and we steal two sewing machines from his father’s workshop (they’re black, heavy, antiques, we slip them out a window at night) and trade them in for a small Kelsey hand press, and within a week we publish the first edition of our magazine.

  We call it Planet—we like the cleanness of its name, no adjective to contaminate it, we like to think that the planet it referred to could be any planet—and it includes a story of Ezra’s whose subject I don’t recall, and one of mine that I’d rather not remember and—almost out of pity—an advertisement for the Leventhal Tailors.

  But Planet puts our names on the map.

  We distribute a few poorly printed issues, slip them under the doors of bookstores and libraries, and before long we get a visitor. And it is then we realize that we’re not alone in the universe, that there are others—too many—like us: kids for whom the present is intolerable, and so they escape to the future, to many futures, because the idea that only one future exists is insufficient, insufferable. Thus, the future as Christmases and birthdays. The future as anticipation of a party of possibilities, of gifts and presents and wishes. But a party where, before being allowed in, you must know how to decipher the invitation.

  If the past is a foreign country, then the future is a distant star. And in those days there were so many of us who longed to get there and to plant the flag of our name. The way others competed outdoors in grunting contact sports, or in student debates, words burning up oxygen until the classroom air was almost unbreathable; we opted to combine action and words, fantasy and logic, and to play our game inside imaginary spaceships bigger than stadiums and amphitheaters. We were bad athletes and got cripplingly nervous in public, so, instead, we flew with our minds.

  And soon, we were marked: our fingers permanently stained with purple ink. The purple ink characteristic of small printing presses, of hectographs and mimeographs, of machines with names like Speed-O-Print or Multi-Printex or Typekto. Simple machines, but so complex to keep running without the paper jamming or the wax tablet cracking or the rollers twisting before copy number fifty, when everything appears to melt down and come to a stop.

  And the kind of ink that never fully dries on the fresh copies, forcing you to handle those few pages with the same care required for the most ancient and noble scrolls.

  And the slow vertigo of pages emerging one after another, with that adolescent velocity that’s neither fast nor slow, but seems to drag along with the slow vertigo of something that needs to go everywhere but has no idea how to get there.

  But Planet is powerful enough to reach nearby colonies.

  And one afternoon a group of kids comes calling. They stare at us and—as a sort of universal greeting requiring no words—reach out their hands and show them to us. And their fingertips are stained too with what the mother of normal children would probably identify, erroneously, as raspberry juice. And with reverential silence, they pass us copies of Phantom Universe and Time Traveling and X-Rays and suddenly Ezra and I are trapped in the tribal orbit of boys who meet in basements or on school stairways or in rooms reserved for “recreational activities,” to discuss whether or not it all began with the gothic fantasies of that drunk from Baltimore; or whether that radiobroadcast false alarm announcing the invasion of those exceptionally exhibitionistic Martians might not have been, in reality, a clever tactic designed to distract us from a real and much subtler invasion of Martians who “are just like us . . . And maybe our weird Latin teacher is one of them!” We read comics about interplanetary and immortal superheroes whose only vulnerability was to colorful fragments of their home planet and we build rockets with materials stolen, little by little to avoid attracting attention, from Physics and Chemistry labs. And—one of our principal “experts” would wind up working in the space industry and another, after combining flammable elements with satanic invocations, would end up getting killed in an explosion in Pasadena that was never entirely explained—we launch them with mixed results: some blow up on the ground, some fire off on furious horizontal trajectories and start small fires, in the best cases they go up some twenty or thirty meters and we celebrate as if they’d attained cosmic heights above the vacant lots and fallow fields of the Bowery.

  Before long, almost without realizing it, we were a group, a generation. And one of our principal activities—as so often happens—was dividing into smaller groups, unleashing small and clandestine but exceedingly bloody battles, uniting with one faction for a few days only to double-cross them and join another. All in the name of the future and of outer space: two things—the yet to come and the great beyond—that we had no access to but thought about nonstop, because, if we thought about them all the time, it was like they were ours, like they were holding on to never let go.

  Soon, fully aware of it, Ezra and I start to feel outside all of that, distant from everyone. Far away, yes. We become a two-person movement. The Faraways. We move stealthily between the different factions, we listen and gather information. And pretty much all of it seems absurd and childish to us. And when night falls we walk home under the falling snow. I remember us so much better in winter, wrapped in heavy jackets, vapor spilling from the volcanoes of our mouths, the eruption of conversations where we can’t stop cracking up at what we’ve seen and making fun of what we’ve heard. We go up to our room and we write, and it’s like sledding down the slope of a fever that leaves us delirious with happiness, reading our pages aloud to each other almost as we write them. We’re happy and we’re unique and we’re the best and we need the others only and exclusively so that, with their unconscious and voluntary and oh so proximal mediocrity, they confirm our mastery and o
ur unattainable distance. A distance so great that it’s not even necessary for us to act cruel or proud with all of them. It’s more than enough for us to be invisible.

  We are, yes, The Faraways.

  And we’re different.

  Our stories aren’t made public. We don’t read them aloud with tremulous voices at meetings. Our stories have little or nothing to do those of the others: space is there, yes, but Earth doesn’t figure into our plots and when it does, on occasion, get mentioned, it’s only as an impossible-to-confirm rumor, a space legend no one is all that interested in verifying. Our magazine, Planet, soon goes out of circulation and is printed only for private consumption. We don’t want to be just more faces in the crowd, amid so much space trash floating in the atmosphere.

  Ezra and I observed all of this as if through a telescope but with microscopic malice, as if it were a virus or bacteria. The abundance of fanzines, the dreadful but enthusiastic stories, the absurd and impassioned theories, our sects’ epithets: The Futurists, The Cosmics, The Futuristics, The Dimensionals, The Astronomics, The Futurexics. Each of them corresponding to the different Manhattan boroughs we were from and organized according to a ranking system more complex than those of many armies and businesses and families where everyone despises everyone else with cordiality and courtesy. And, soon, the different political stances: those who understood that being devoted to the future should inevitably be linked to the birth of a better and more just world, where science would be of everyone and for everyone; and those who thought that what was to come should be privileged material, that a chosen race would have to write better and better what they imagined, turning themselves into laser beams for the never servile but always obedient masses. Some time later, several of the former were accused of anti-American activities by devout patriotic organizations. And, from the newspapers, I learned about suicides in hotel rooms in Miami, about small-town jails and alleyway beatings, about those who emptied bottles to try to feel full, and about a man with a worn-out face whom I saw later behind a supermarket cash register and who pretended not to recognize me in hopes that please, please, I’d pretend not to recognize him.