Bottom of the Sky

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Meanwhile and in the meantime, editors with good noses (previously dedicated to printing noir detective novels and disheartened romances) had descended on us, aware almost immediately that—it didn’t matter if we were good writers or not—we symbolized the reader of the future, so they bought our clumsy first stories for almost nothing and collected them in magazines with long names full of adjectives with big letters and absurd but captivating illustrations.

  I’ve read a couple of books written about those days (Ezra and I barely appear in them; we were barely a blip on the radar screens, few invoked our last names along with their own) and I remember the combination of boredom and astonishment I felt reliving all of that, arranged and narrated like transcendent historical events that changed the face of the planet, like all of it meant something.

  Sure: some of those who marched in the streets and raised their fists or made insane proposals ended up titans of the genre: writers admired by hundreds of thousands of readers, into visionaries, into guests appearing on late shows every time a satellite was launched or the success of a formula made public. Satisfied men smiling at cameras with the all-knowing smiles of those who are convinced they were the first to think or predict something. Because, soon, in an age when everything seemed to accelerate—when progress progressed faster than ever—science fiction had become a combination of meteorological forecast and horoscope and hundred-meter dash. The important thing wasn’t to write well, but to get there faster and before everyone else. The imagination didn’t need to be reflective, but boundless.

  I could write out their particular features here in a long and black list. I could accuse them and list the charges against them. I could point out the one who sold out to Hollywood. Or the one who surrendered to the orgy of writing books of scientific revelation on commission at an astounding speed. Or that other one who ended up a “future consultant” for a conglomerate of companies developing home electronics. Or the one who ended up working on a robotic theme-park honoring the memory of a messianic cartoonist who made a fortune off the primary material of old fairytales.

  But it would be a waste of time and I’ve got no time to waste and, I discover now, I get the faces and aliases confused and, for an instant, I see them and I hear them clearly only to lose them again in a storm of vertical and horizontal lines and white noise, like ghosts on haunted television sets. I can’t—even if I wanted to—tell them apart. They appear to me now, moving through my memory with the weary, martial steps of a crowd of extras in a movie that’s gone on way too long.

  But there is one who stands out among them.

  His features come into focus, suddenly unforgettable after so many decades.

  And with him and his name—a ridiculous name for an absurd man—we get back to the unforgettable part of this story. The story that so long ago and with so much effort I promised myself to never remember, and that now, all of a sudden, in the wake of The Incident, I begin to recall as if I were reading it as I write it.

  A name and a face and a body. All at once. Once again. Materializing without warning. Like the crew of the S. S. Endeavour in the science fiction series I worked on in the 60s, Star Bound. Teletransporting.

  Here it is, here it comes.

  His face like that of an angel bored of hanging in temple rafters, blonde curls crowning a big and too-round head, eyes small and disturbingly blue, pert nose barely peeking out between his cheeks, mouth always fixed in a grimace of disgust or reproach. His body big and tall and oval, the legs and arms short, the feet small, and the hands minuscule.

  Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill.

  The only son of the owner of a prestigious department store. Descendant of a patriarchy so patriotic that their son was condemned to grow up crushed by an avalanche of heroes, a Mount Rushmore of surnames.

  Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill is heir apparent to a father—a mere James Darlingskill, but far more powerful than his son—who dreams that his firstborn will become president and believes that the road to the White House begins with the absurd impetus of famed historical surnames that help you make history.

  “Please, call me Jeff,” Darlingskill would almost moan.

  “Or, if you prefer, J. F. W.,” he added, rubbing his baby-doll hands together in a nervous and frantic gesture that somehow recalled the latent, combustible dangerousness of an obese emperor like Nero preparing to devour a banquet or incinerate a city.

  And how was it that Ezra and I—already Faraways with no chance of going back and joining a different club or association, considered “untrustworthy” by the others—welcomed Jeff? What was it that led us to accept him as the third Faraway?

  The answer is simple: convenience.

  Jeff has money, he comes from a rich family (he makes us swear not to tell anyone), he buys us books and magazines, and takes us to movies as if making us offerings in exchange for our mechanical respect—never affection, much less friendship—for his person.

  Jeff seeks us out because he feels we are—like him—pariahs of a system incapable of understanding its own grandeur.

  But what fascinates Jeff most is that Ezra and I have voluntarily chosen to be pariahs, while he wants so badly to belong, to be included, to be part of something . . . But this has not gone well for him. To his father, it’s clear that Jeff isn’t going to measure up: he’s not the triumphal dolphin, but a kind of slow walrus who, at his best moments (that constant and desperate smile of a dense, unctuous doll, the hair black and moist with pomade as if painted on his skull, the elastic smile of the almost-androgynous stars of silent films, the quasi-reflexive propensity to look at himself in any reflective surface), barely manages to arouse the occasional sympathy in the oldest clients and shareholders. And it’s not like it goes much better for him with the sidereal youth: the few times that Jeff was allowed to read his pages at a meeting of one of those clubs that changed acronym and password every week, the results were nothing short of disastrous. Or, in his own words, hoping to glaze over the truly epic terror of public embarrassment, “apocalyptically noteworthy.” And it’s not just that the poor kid isn’t a good writer: he’s an awful imaginer. His fantasias are febrile, childish, absurd, combining monarchs of Atlantis with mad scientists. His heroes are nothing but masses of muscles shining from the application of exotic oils who always speak with exclamation points. Time and again his ideas insist on the need for world domination via telepathy. His descriptions demonstrate a pathetic lack of familiarity with female anatomy (without this preventing embarrassing descriptions of what a dress ripped to shreds by a superman reveals) and provide a glimpse of a distressing tendency toward racism and revenge. In Jeff’s stories, I recall, there is always someone getting revenge, or about to get revenge.

  And maybe most important of all, beyond the professionalism of his bumbling, what makes Jeff fascinating: Jeff is the nephew of Phineas Elsinore Darlingskill, Ezra’s favorite writer.

  Phineas Elsinore Darlingskill was something like the black sheep of Jeff’s family. A sheep that, on full moon nights, turns into a wolf. Another pariah. He lives a few hours outside Manhattan, near a river of waters so still they look painted. In a nearly ruined Victorian mansion granted to him by his relatives on the condition that he never visit them and that he always stay far away from the businesses and celebrations of the family. Jeff’s father refers to his brother as “The Other” and explains away his eccentricities as the result of a rare form of syphilis combined with numerous psychosomatic disorders he’d suffered since childhood, which had gotten him expelled from school at the age of eight. And, from then on, long nights of ravenous reading, insomniac night terrors, and—translating into a sort of circular scar around his right eye, like a reddish tattoo recalling a monocle—the constant exploration of the heavens with a telescopic device he built in their parents’ attic.

  Darlingskill—it was Ezra who made me aware of his work—wasn’t exactly a science-fiction writer. Darlingskill was something different. Somethin
g else. A mutant version of a science-fiction writer. The missing link between the rocket and the catacomb. And so the young aficionados of the genre read him with a mixture of fear and contempt and distrust. His stories and short novels—which Ezra sought out with patience and desperation in old publications; one of the gifts that Jeff gave him was a custom made, beautifully bound volume containing the complete works of Darlingskill—combined ancient Greek and Arab myths with stellar cosmogony, where primordial, amorphous, tentacular gods danced frenetically, blinded by the fatigue of having too many eyes, worn out by the weariness of long and unpronounceable names, pure consonants, names more screams than names. Gods that know themselves slaves of a fierce and touristic need to visit our dimension to strike up short but impassioned relationships with mortals who’ve made the mistake—with the help of an ancient and dangerous grimoire—of invoking them, without it being entirely clear why and to what end. The only thing that matters is to bring them here, to unleash them, and only later to find out what happens and what has to be done to make them go home.

  Darlingskill’s prose is baroque and antiquated and, often, incomprehensible. But there’s something in it that fascinates Ezra: the reality of an irreal world coexisting alongside ours and slowly growing, little by little, like a demented, damp stain on the walls of our sanity.

  Jeff, on the other hand, was more interested in—considering them “my principal influence”—the classist and racial aspects of Darlingskill’s delirium: constant allusions to superior and inferior orders, the threat and danger of Orientals, the degeneration of bloodlines. Jeff—when Ezra, almost on his knees, begs him to arrange a trip to visit his uncle—warns him that Darlingskill isn’t crazy about “Semites, Africanoids, and those sub-humans living south of the Rio Grande.” On the other hand, Jeff agrees to show him the extensive correspondence that he maintains, in secret, with his uncle. Long letters full of diagrams and instructions and diatribes against “that dangerous Jewish physicist who’s altering the mental composition of our universe with his theories” and containing paragraphs like “the savage descendant of the ape runs through the jungle with mating as his sole objective; but those chosen by the creators must look upward and consider their relation to the cosmos.” Letters dated, always, two hundred years in the past because, Darlingskill explains to his nephew, “that was the best time in my life.”

  Shortly after we met him, Jeff tells us that they’ve discovered his uncle has terminal cancer, which Darlingskill insists on referring to as “not a cancer, but a scorpio: a unique sidereal variant of earthly evil; nothing as banal and commonplace as cancer could finish me off.” Jeff tells us that his family has brought his uncle back to the city after his long exile and that now he is dying in a hospital in the city.

  With great effort we convince Jeff (Jeff is one of those people who seems especially sensitive, always primed to see catastrophic possibilities even in the most inoffensive gesture) to take us and bring us up to Darlingskill’s room. We threaten him with expulsion from The Faraways, with turning him over to The Futurists. Or, worse, to The Futuristics. Denouncing him. Revealing the truth of him as a decadent, old-moneyed rich kid. Jeff agrees and trembles and rubs his hands together. We walk down half-lit corridors (it’s the time of day when hospitals sleep) and arrive at a private room rife with the overpowering smell of incense. Standing next to the door, a group of pale kids in black coats and ankh cross bracelets are talking in reverential whispers, as if praying. A few of them have their heads completely shaved. Ezra and I peer in through the half-open door and we see him. Sitting up in bed, supported by several pillows. A transparent man who reminds me of an elaborate sand castle at sunset on a deserted beach. Its moment of maximum glory and splendor came a few hours ago, under the vertical midday sun. And now the onlookers have gone home and the wind and the stray dogs and the foam flying off waves, coming ever closer, have been erasing its details and softening its angles. Almost nothing left in that vacant façade. Just the hole of a mouth that opens and lets out a shriek making the glass vibrate and bringing nurses and doctors running. Then Phineas Elsinore Darlingskill passes on to another “spiritual plane in the vast geometry of the universe,” and his adoring fans bow their heads in reverence and perform a complex salute with their hands when the gurney carrying their master’s body passes by on its way to the morgue.

  And among the young acolytes—Ezra and Jeff and I see her at the same time—is a girl our own age.

  And we’re so young, so many years left to live we almost think we’re immortal, but we all feel ourselves weaken a little.

  Suddenly, here, in the hospital where a cursed writer has just died, his body already cooling so the engines of his legend can start firing up, Jeff and Ezra and I experience another far subtler, yet equally powerful form of the finite.

  A death that’s not the little death of orgasm, but the limitless death of ecstasy.

  And none of us say a word; but I’m sure that all three of us, each in our own way, thinks precisely the same thing: you can survive the certainty that a particular woman is the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen; but it’s a lot harder to go on living after experiencing the absolute certainty that that woman is, also, the most beautiful you will ever see.

  Her face—the face of her—is the light that illuminates and lays waste to everything.

  Years later, watching footage of atomic tests in the desert, observing with delighted terror the way that phosphorescent wind leveled entire towns always populated by smiling mannequins, I said to myself that I’d already experienced something similar, but couldn’t remember where or when.

  And a few days ago, in the middle of The Incident—Ezra, handing me that photograph where the three of us appear together, the two of us serious, and a burst of laughter moving and blurring her face—it all came back to me.

  All of it but her name.

  Or maybe it’s not that I’ve forgotten or can’t remember it.

  Maybe, what happens is that I don’t want to think it, much less speak it for fear that all of it would disappear again, that the light would go out again, and I’d return to the darkness where I’ve been living, surviving, for far too long.

  I suppose that here (to distract myself from her reappearance, to resist the impulse to fill pages upon pages with her smile or her voice or her eyes or the way she seemed to be elsewhere when thinking about things we didn’t dare to think about for fear of discovering we weren’t part of her thoughts) a short but necessary parenthetical is required addressing the role that young women occupied in the nascent science fiction of that time.

  The role that young women occupied in the science fiction of that time was no role at all.

  Science fiction, in its beginnings, was a masculine enclave, and women were no more than veiled princesses, lab assistants, girlfriends there to let out the perfect scream when the creature from beyond the stars appeared.

  And in reality, the truth is there weren’t many girls at the meetings of our galactic clubs and associations. They had nothing to do there and there were so many other, better planets than ours. Because—above and beyond the more or less controlled atmosphere and the toxic and exhilarating battles we unleashed among ourselves to resolve whether Venusians would necessarily be more intelligent than Martians or things of that nature—in the dark of our nights, when there was nothing left to read or write, we knew that we were very much alone. That ours was a cold, sad world where the light of the sun barely arrived from the world where the athletes, cheerleaders, and class presidents lived: those popular and perfect kids who spent their weekends spinning the latest cool dance moves and not orbiting around dead stars.

  So—without wanting to offend anybody—the girls who hung out with us were, obviously, not the most attractive. They were “nice” and “interesting” and “smart.” And possibly a little crazy, as their theories were, always, so much more hallucinatory and hallucinated than our own.

  For some of them, the space fever soon abated.
They attributed it to a brief hormonal imbalance and returned, without understanding entirely what had happened, to Home Economics classes and to wondering who’d be brave enough to ask them to prom.

  Some turned into girlfriends and, later, writers of strange pages always penned under absurd masculine aliases.

  Others—the few—as the years passed left behind the chrysalis of their false male names and became feminist writers who at conventions condemned the proliferation of female robots destined for domestic tasks or denounced those early transgressive narratives where an earthling coupled with a giant, sweet-voiced insect or succumbed to the charms of an alien maiden who, weary of the mega-power of her brain, realized that she only wanted to love and be loved by the man who told her about his ranch in Nebraska.

  None of them looked like her.

  She began and ended in herself.

  She—the sound of her laugh, the way she widened her eyes when you told her something, the way she grabbed your arm when she had something to tell you—drove me and Ezra crazy. And, of course, Jeff too; but Jeff was so easy to drive crazy that I don’t consider him a victim of the expansive wave of her joyful explosion in the theretofore indivisible nucleus of our lives.

  And I wonder if there is anything more sci-fi than the sudden outbreak of the virus of love in the hospital of youth, of that extraterrestrial presence that suddenly and without warning seizes you and turns you into a hypnotized cosmonaut.

  That first love that will forever be the first. And that found a way to perpetuate itself in future loves, like a voice at the bottom of the black hole of a well in whose waters, sinking, drown the reflections of the stars, high in the sky.