Bottom of the Sky

by Rodrigo Fresán

  A few years later, the phone in my house rings and I answer it and, there in the receiver, is the voice of Ezra:

  “Don’t say anything. Just listen,” he instructs.

  And what I heard then was a new sound, something I’d never heard before. The sound of something that, until then, had been kept behind a door for whose lock nobody had found the key. The sound of light and shadow, of a thousand suns proclaiming the arrival of darkness.

  “If you could see what I’m seeing, Isaac,” Ezra said then, and his voice seemed to come from very far away. It was a long distance call—I clearly heard the crackle and echo of successive switchboards passing along the voice of my friend, one to the next, like a ball, across hundreds of miles—but also a call that arrived from the far side of history, from a future suddenly lassoed by the present. And then, all of a sudden, the connection was cut.

  Later I learned that Ezra had called me from Alamogordo, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Trinity Camp, Manhattan Project, New Mexico, at the exact time on the precise day when the first atomic bomb was detonated.

  Soon the rest of the mortals—suddenly so mortal; so defenseless and at the same time so capable of bringing about the end of everything in the world and of the world itself—found out about that thing of which someone said, “I am become Shiva, the destroyer of worlds” to which someone else added “Now we all have become sons of bitches.”

  But I knew about it before all of them.

  And days after the first explosion, another explosion, and I received in the mail—the first eternal sunsets of a faraway planet that couldn’t stop watching our planet—the first pages of a novel called Evasion.

  And yes: the dates don’t line up, the locations are imprecise, the faces are confused one to the next, and I appear and disappear in multiple places at the same time.

  You’ll forgive, I hope, these exact inexactitudes.

  The small print on that certificate, its pages so wrinkled it has almost made me a centenarian, I suppose.

  Into a man old as the century.

  Into a part of history.

  Into the footnote that, nevertheless, is still on its feet for so many events. It wasn’t my plan; but it’s clear that someone has planned and decided it for me.

  Someone or something must be responsible for this inexplicable vitality, this lack of ailments, for the fact that sometimes, in the mirror, I look the same as I used to, so long ago.

  Something or someone has arranged it like this. So that Ezra—and I’ve known it for a few days now—and I survive and live to tell the tale.

  So—trying in vain to put it all in a particular order more for me than for him—I answered almost every question the “young journalist” posed as best I could, and, a few times, did not answer as best I could what I couldn’t and didn’t want to answer.

  At times, I opted to answer just to myself, in the low yet deafening voice of my thoughts. At times, it terrified me to discover that I didn’t have an answer to his questions and that, in a way, I’d lived tranquilly, never wondering how it was possible to have lived like that.

  True, I must admit: I was touched and flattered that his photo-copied version of Evasion was underlined as if it were a bible (I offered and he accepted one of my copies, one of the originals, moved like a crusader before the Holy Grail). I was excited (and I felt a spark of jealousy at having been so quickly ruled out) by his questions about the theory that Ezra Leventhal was the mysterious and anonymous author behind those pages. Then I was made uncomfortable by his insistence regarding the dark rumors circulating about Ezra’s participation in even darker episodes of recent military history.

  Ezra—the first admired and later disgraced Colonel Ezra Leventhal—participating not in great world wars but in small planetary conflicts with the rank and occupation of “guest.” Ezra—they say—uniformed under multiple aliases in China, in Korea, in Moscow, in Vietnam, in Africa, in Latin America. Ezra as one of the Office of War Information ideologues and as the principal designer of the Operation Planning and Intelligence Board. Ezra as the author of an admired and—I’m led to believe—still operational manual for uses and applications of “psychological warfare.” I saw a copy once, I recognized his prose, his particular sense of humor, and clear echoes of the 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) when he recommended “a) convince the prisoner he’s on different planet, b) tell him that if he doesn’t cooperate with the interrogators, he’ll never return home, c) explain to him that here he’ll inhabit a world very similar to Earth, that he’ll be set free to live with perfect replicas of his friends and relatives but that d) none of them will ever truly love him.”

  Stories about Ezra that weren’t entirely reliable but immediately plausible.

  Ezra helping to oust presidents in devastated nations.

  Ezra who—I ended up reading it somewhere or someone told me—was a key figure in deescalating (or, according to some, active in activating, as a double or triple agent) the Cuban missile crisis.

  Ezra drinking drinks and chewing shellfish with absurd names (that he orders from the waiters in a robotically perfect Spanish) on South America terraces with views of the Pacific while, behind him, columns of black smoke rise and rivers of red screams overflow their banks.

  A photograph of Ezra on the front page of a newspaper. Blurry, out of focus, almost impossible to make out. Afghanistan, it says. The upper part of his body obscured by the shadow of a tent. An Arabic name misidentifying the blurry man in a caption at his feet: “The Master of War in the heat of battle in the Panshir Valley.” And yet I recognize the shape of that head that seems to levitate without the help of a neck, the strange legs once wrapped in metal and now, in the photo, inside a pair of aerodynamic boots full of cables.

  But, maybe, everything I describe here, all these different sightings of Ezra were nothing but the expression of a desire, a need to see him and to be reunited with him.

  Because I thought I saw Ezra everywhere.

  In the video of that terrible morning in Dallas, 1963 (Ezra watching from one side of the street as that car passed by), or, in the black and white of my television set, my face frozen in a proud, childish smile, watching those men in short-sleeved button downs and loosened knots of identical ties (was Ezra the one with the thick-framed glasses and the buzz cut?) applauding the words of an advance in the heavens arriving, light and weightless, from the surface of the moon. Words so rehearsed. The first great space slogan. Everyone celebrates that “small step and giant leap” and overlooks what came next. A spontaneous comment, almost childish and, for me, moving, because it reminds me of that boy I once was, so many lives ago, staring at the sky: “It’s different, but it’s very beautiful out here,” says the astronaut.

  I told myself no, it couldn’t be, Ezra couldn’t be everywhere, involved in every historical moment. But then, a few weeks later, someone knocked on my door with a special delivery, a box with my address written in Ezra’s unmistakable handwriting and, there inside, a handful of gray rocks and a card that read “Guess where these are from, Isaac. Yeah, you guessed it.”

  My life, I insist, has not been what you’d call entertaining. Little has happened, and most of it’s been banal and predictable. A life that didn’t shrink in on itself like in that classic The Shrinking Man because it couldn’t: it couldn’t shrink any smaller than what it already was: small, miniscule, almost invisible.

  A few nights ago, I saw again that mediocre movie adaptation of a classic of the genre: the story of a traveler projecting himself into a distant future without ever having to leave his laboratory. You know the one: the place was always the same, it was time that changed. And, amid lame special effects and nothing-to-write-home-about performances there was, yes, an ingenious detail, I don’t remember if it appeared in the novel that inspired the film: the protagonist—sitting in a time machine of
elegant Victorian lines that’d been converted into something like a super-chrono-armchair—assimilated the passing decades, contemplating the successive metamorphoses of a mannequin in a boutique storefront facing his house. The mutations of clothes and hats on the cold skin of a mannequin that remained immutable, not aging, maintaining the same pose, only changing in how it was dressed. That was all, and it was better than trees losing leaves and calendars turning pages and newspapers adding words.

  That’s kind of how my life has been. The life of a mannequin for whom the passing of the years has been like a leisurely stroll, with many high-velocity things flying vertiginously by.

  I look at myself and I see a writer who published a few decent, forgettable books, who edited several anthologies more or less well received by his colleagues (would I be committing the sin of vanity if I attributed to myself the discovery of a young English doctor who later ended up enjoying a certain fame, first as an imaginer of environmental catastrophes and later as a narrator of terminal landscapes and dried up swimming pools and wild social choreographies where, all of a sudden, everyone discovers that there are no longer any rational reasons to not lose their minds?). Someone who—with the arrival of television—became one of the most respected screenwriters on the now legendary series The Gray Area (“You are the greatest adapter I know, Isaac,” the host of the show said over and over; and I never could tell if this was cold praise or a hot insult; I kept reading fantasy and science fiction stories and I suggested candidates and even signed on one little-remembered screenplay: “The Traveler,” something about a sick man who travels back to the final days of the Aztec Empire) and who later assembled the team of writers for Star Bound (I, though nobody acknowledges it, had the idea to create the cold and logical Lok, the most interesting member of the crew of tight-pajama-clad space officers; I’m also the verifiable author of one of the most admired episodes of Star Bound: “A Message from Urkh 24,” a title that—is there anybody out there?—is a mischievous wink at the author of Evasion) and, it’s true, I must confess: I was also involved in some of those teen movies, featuring young actors with aerodynamic hairdos and young actresses with tight sweaters and even more aerodynamic breasts, whose opening scenes always took place inside an automobile with the silhouette of a spaceship parked along the side of the road, amid kisses and caresses and panting, all of a sudden, a glow in the sky and a meteor crashing into a nearby forest and the rest, you already know it, you’ve seen it all so many times . . .

  I look at myself the way you look at a relic and I realize that I was a lousy tourist (I stared at a colossal pre-Columbian calendar, a steel tower, a fresco where God reached out His hand not quite touching the hand of man with the same eyes) and a lover who never wanted to love (the names of some women, including that of the one who accompanied me during a very brief marriage—a minor actress who played an “ambassador from Epsilon” on Star Bound and who, before long, told me that she had “mistaken your deep silences for intelligence, but now I realize that really you’ve got nothing interesting to say”—are less important to me and just as distant as the names of nebulous constellations).

  Maybe, now that I think of it, I was a man who—consciously or unconsciously, today, after The Incident, I realize this with a mix of relief and sorrow—decided not to live or to feel all that much, but to spend his time trying to recall the most transcendent days of his life. A man who, every so often, at the most unexpected moments and in a not-entirely-clear way, received intermittent news and irrefutable proof of intelligent life from a remote and—I can feel it, the ping of its echo already resounding on the radar screen, I almost see it now—fast-approaching planet called the Past.

  But before descending to its surface, blooming with wrinkles and craters and catacombs, here come the initial sightings, the diffuse transmissions, the imprecise yet revelatory photographs of an undeniable presence, of a body floating in the dark.

  And what our communications—contact between me and Ezra—were like over time.

  How to see an invisible man who, in his undeniable absence, always seems to be right there, breathing over our shoulder, reading what we’re writing.

  Technology that advanced doesn’t exist.

  So the means we used to communicate with each other were quite primitive.

  Ezra had given me a PO box address where I, every so often, sent messages of varying length and intensity. Pages that ranged from midnight insomniac confessions to costumbrist sketches, updating him on the battles and truces of the shrinking and moribund planet of science fiction, as well as the inevitable, but ever more infrequent, noteworthy event.

  Like what happened one day when a renowned and troublesome magnate had, without warning, stormed a convention of fantasy writers in Milford, Pennsylvania, and had walked up on stage and delivered, with delusional passion, a speech as heartfelt as it was terrifying; because suddenly for us there was nothing worse than learning that someone who might have been our most devout follower was possibly insane. His words, though unhinged, were probably far more evocative and powerful than any of our own pronouncements, ever more weightless and apathetic in those days. We gathered together, our faces embalmed in yawns, in university amphitheaters too large for the audiences we managed to draw. Our voices reverberating off walls of immense rooms that sent back the sad echoes of our own despondency. Many attendants showed up dressed as their favorite character from their preferred television series: pointy ears and eyes on the foreheads of desperate beings who needed to believe for a while that they were extraterrestrials in order to tolerate their excess days here on earth. Beings with no interest in writing but who, nevertheless, desperately needed someone to read them. And, in the meantime, no hurry, they were pacifying their insatiable addiction to merchandise and spending their savings on toys that they never even removed from their packaging so they wouldn’t “lose value.” They fought clumsy duels with buzzing light sabers. And almost wept in front of duplicates of those two annoying robots, you know the ones, I can never remember the digits of their names—better that way.

  And worst of all weren’t our absurd followers (endowed with a patheticness that in no way resembled the patheticness of our beginnings, a patheticness that to us seemed epic, because we were children of the Great Depression and our love for the future came from an absolute absence of a present and not, as was the case decades later, from the presence of a now, seemingly invulnerable and eternal in its stillness and permanence), but the new writers who came to the conventions. Strange individuals. Fourth generation Darlingskill cultists and addicts of novels that anticipated, swept away with the excitement, the arrival of a Fourth Reich that would exterminate “all the sub-races” as well as the coming and ascension of a new psychedelic messiah. Things like that. Science fiction as pollution and catharsis. Science fiction as a space that would include and dignify them, many of whom, I thought, as I watched them, would end up killers or killing themselves trying to follow the partially- or totally-eclipsed brains of people like Zack—already beginning to be deified in France—once again present at our conventions, babbling about the present as a fleeting gleam in the deforming mirror of the Roman Empire, which never ended, which was still here, standing, watching over us with that combination of admiration and respect accorded weary gladiators in the increasingly blood-soaked arena.

  Yes, we gathered together, almost out of inertia, to discuss solar systems and distant races while the youth raged outside, refusing to fight in exotic, foreign wars. Many of us, on the other hand, were veterans of more intimate battles and it made us uncomfortable to find ourselves, after so many years without seeing each other, in those rooms plastered with posters for the latest movie about invaders, like something abducted from inside our own bodies. Bodies that to us were old and familiar, but newly eroded to those who remembered us differently and how we once were and how we would never be again and—suddenly I understood—how they would never be again either.

  The words of the milliona
ire with the rose-scented family name had been faithfully recorded by multiple recorders and I transcribed them and sent them to Ezra preceded by the words: “All is not lost: the extraterrestrials appear to love us.” And this is what the crazy philanthropist—who, I soon learned, was about to be declared insane by a law firm interested in assuming control of his fortune—had said:

  “I love you sons of bitches. You’re all I read anymore. They’re my nourishment and my raison d’être. My destiny. You’re the only ones who will talk about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage. And not a short one either, but one that will last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, accidents, and catastrophes do to us. You’re the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be heaven or hell.”

  I transcribed all of this and, yes, I felt shame and pain that I couldn’t recognize myself in these words. For me, the future had turned into a profession, a way of life. That’s all. Nothing interested me less than the future, which was increasingly small compared to my increasingly large past.

  Communiqués from Ezra, on the other hand, didn’t come in writing, but at the speed of sound and usually in the middle of the night, via telephone. I heard the ringing in the dark and answered and there, undeniably far away, crackling with interference and the sound of electronic bugs with their stingers stuck in the line, was his voice: