Bottom of the Sky

by Rodrigo Fresán

  “Do you remember her?”

  “A few days—or a few years—ago I saw her again.”

  “In the desert.”

  “How could she leave us? How could [incomprehensible] do that to us?”

  “The palace of memory . . . My memory is no palace. My memory is a space shuttle spinning in dead orbit around the past. There I am, from there I broadcast, in a trance, like a midnight DJ.”

  “All those pages. All those sunsets. I don’t know how, but they came to me wherever I was, everywhere I was. In embassies and bunkers and underground laboratories, and before long I realized that, just as I thought at the beginning, you couldn’t be the author of all of that. You were never that good of a writer. And neither was I. Before long I realized that [incomprehensible] her way of explaining to us the unexplainable.”

  “I’ve seen so much. I’ve seen so many things that the sensation is no longer that of seeing but of uploading. Every new landscape is one more object submitted and deposited at the edge of my eyes and instantly uploaded to my brain and stored in an archive alongside so many other things. Every night I pray, because the space is filling up and soon nothing else will fit.”

  “The really naïve idea of building machines, computers, that increasingly resemble man when, in reality, what is desired, what they want me to find, is just the opposite: for men to be more and more like machines. For them to think in sequential, linear fashion, and about just one thing. For them not to get distracted thinking about what they’ve been ordered to do, but to simply obey orders . . . And it’s obvious that for many of my superiors the results I obtained seemed to them somewhat [incomprehensible] so they claimed [incomprehensible] and I had to look for new . . . let’s call them . . . sponsors, and [incomprehensible] here I am.”

  “Freedom of choice? Free will? What for? Where has that kind of thinking ever gotten us? The ability to choose the best way to destroy ourselves. To kill each other. But always partially, with little efficiency [incomprehensible] putting off the inevitable. So why not make things easy, facilitate the endeavor, and [incomprehensible] once and for all.”

  “Going to the brain and breaking in, smashing everything they find on their way to the memory’s core [incomprehensible] until none of those annoying neurotransmitters—which only distract us from the definitive and absolute objective—functions anymore.”

  “Without feelings. Without distractions. Without doubts. Without fears. Without memories.”

  “Every time I manage to forget her, I don’t know how, she finds a way to come back, to make me remember her.”

  “Remember. You remember so many things I cannot allow myself to remember because [incomprehensible] inappropriate.”

  “Remember. Now I forget all of it perfectly: you and I, working together under the light of the Moon. The storm has passed and it’s not cold. Or maybe it’s the heat of our enthusiasm that keeps us warm and [incomprehensible] to face the [incomprehensible]. We’re the heroes of our own favorite legend. We are, suddenly, thanks to her, legendary.”

  “Remember. You and me in the snow and her watching us from the window. It’s a very romantic image: the beautiful prisoner in the highest tower of the castle and the devoted knights who dare not rescue her. They don’t know how. They’re too young and inexperienced. And the novelty of shared love—brothers of blood and sect who are now, also, brothers of love—makes them feel invulnerable, yes, but they don’t know how to use that strength. There are times they think they might burst. Spontaneous combustion. Detonated by the passion their bodies and minds generate.”

  “Her. The snow. Her hair in the wind. Watching us.”

  “Remember. A few hours have passed since the great quorum. Everyone against everyone. The Futurians, The Cosmics, The Futuristics, The Dimensionals, The Astronomics, The Futurexics. Political debates. Those who believe science fiction should be a tool for the new man, for the heroes of the working class. Fictions of the revolution. The machines working for great change. And those who want to feel like cosmic aristocrats and preserve the stars for the use of an exclusive elite. And then there is us. You and me. And Jeff. Who takes the floor to read something he considers ‘essential and illuminating.’ And the laughter. The laughter.”

  “‘You’ll see! You’ll see!’ he screams.”

  “Remember. That’s when everything began. Since then we’ve lived an eternal ending.”

  “Remember. It’s a night like no other. It’s a night like you see in certain paintings. Her. And you and me. The two of us building snowmen. One after the other. And not typical snowmen, that stupid pyramidal accumulation of snowballs. No. We used branches and a handrail we stole from a neighboring house. Our snowmen are men of snow: shaped like men. One and another and another until we lose count, and the whole time she watches us from the window. It’s dark and we can’t tell if she’s crying or smiling. Probably both. At the same time. I already told you, Isaac: all times at the same time. And when we finish with the men of snow, without exchanging a single word, because suddenly it’s as if we knew exactly what the other was thinking, we start to shape a huge snowball. A planet. A planet for her. Suddenly it’s daybreak, the metallic light of daybreak, and there we are. Standing next to our men of snow. We feel so small, so small. We feel insufficient and unworthy of all that love we feel for her. And so, like small and humble gods, we created and made others. A legion to help her understand that we did it all for her. That we felt that [incomprehensible] together, forever. And that all those worshippers we created for her—all those inhabitants of that planet that was hers, ours, and who had come from so far away, undaunted by the knowledge that soon they would start to melt, faster all the time, as the sun came up—were our witnesses.”

  “Don’t ever forget. The moment has arrived to remember forever.”

  “Look at us.”

  And Ezra reaches one hand into the interior pocket of his briefcase and takes out a photograph and gives it to me and when I take it a tingling runs through the tips of my fingers, and I look, and there we are: Ezra and me and her. Ezra and I are staring seriously at the camera, but she’s laughing. She’s laughing without inhibition. She’s laughing as if she were the true and undeniable inventor of laughter. The owner of the patent, showing her invention to the world with pride, with all her teeth. Seeing her—and, suddenly, remembering her and remembering the force of her love for us and our love for her—I remember everything.

  Then something strange happens. And it’s not as if what happened previously isn’t strange; but what happens now is stranger still. Then, there inside, in the tower, despite the clear and sunny day rising outside, it starts to snow. And I look at Ezra and Ezra is the Ezra he once was and I don’t need to see myself—I feel a vibration across my whole face, as if someone were correcting lines, retouching details—to know that I am who I once was too.

  We’re young again with all the snow before us.

  Ezra smiles.

  “Until next time, my friend.”

  I smile.

  And, all of a sudden, a horizontal roar shakes the windows and Ezra and I look at the sky just in time to see the airplane, first in one edge of the sky and suddenly so close, crashing into the tower, into us.

  Ezra speaks:

  “Remember, Isaac: marvelous moments.”

  And I felt happy. I felt new. I felt at peace. Everything was disappearing around me and I, at last, was part of that everything. All of a sudden I had an explanation for what had happened. In the final second of my life, I was conscious of everything. Of the multiple, oh so many, variations. Of the infinite encounters across all that time. Of all the possible endings that did or did not happen—a hunting accident, crossing a street and not making it to the other side, a snap in the chest while eating a slice of cake in a museum cafeteria, going down in a fishing boat in an unexpected squall—and of this ending that was happening now.

  I thought that, at last, it was time to rest, to die, to travel far away, to ascend into the sk
y.

  The sky is full of the dead because the living, when they die, go into the sky. Or at least that’s what—again, science fiction—they teach us and want to make us believe when we’re little. We die and we go elsewhere, to live our death in the highest of high places.

  And then I understood that death was the most beautiful thing that had happened to me in my life.

  Death wasn’t a light at the end of a tunnel.

  Death was the end of all tunnels.

  And my death was so much shorter than my long life.

  All of a sudden I was at home; I don’t remember getting there. I do remember the roar of the airplane and the fire. And I remember, as well, that there is a part in Evasion that talks about falling towers.

  I walk to the river and nothing appears to have changed. It’s a bright morning, the sunlight reflects of the white surface of the towers. A mime persists, with his deafening silence, in walking against a nonexistent wind. He looks at me and smiles and I think, I’m not sure, that I insult him with words I don’t often say, words that are like an exotic taste in my mouth.

  I pick up a newspaper someone left on a bench and I discover that today is not today.

  Today is a few days before today.

  I wonder if this dizziness I feel, this nausea, is the effect of having been projected backward, if this is what it feels like to travel back in time, when the mannequin in the storefront displays, suddenly, a more or less outmoded style.

  I return home and go into my library and pick out a book at random and open it to a random page and read: “A hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain.”

  I look at the cover. I haven’t the slightest idea who Philip K. Dick is, but his writing seems a lot like that of Warren Wilbur Zack.

  I return to the city a couple days later. I return to the city the morning after being visited by the not-so-young young journalist.

  The same day a few days later.

  The same date, the same weather.

  I wear the same clothes.

  Again.

  But I’ve set off multiple variations.

  I want to know what happened to me, what is happening to me.

  I’ve made an appointment with a doctor, a specialist.

  I can’t remember any of what I’ve done these last two days, other than the phone call, a short conversation with a secretary, scheduling me an appointment for something called “brain mapping,” and a furious but resigned exploration of news broadcasts and papers.

  There is no news.

  It’s a clear and normal September and the last measures of summer have taken on that reddish and golden aura that unhurriedly heralds the yellows of autumn.

  I get in a taxi and, as usual, almost without thinking, find the name of the driver hanging from back of the front seat. His last name isn’t Indian, but European, Spanish actually, with an Anglo-Saxon first name. On the radio a singer repeats over and over “I’ve got you, babe . . . I got you, babe . . . I got you, babe . . .”

  The taxi driver smiles at me in the rearview mirror. “Isaac Goldman, right?” he says. It disturbs me that he knows my name, he says it like he’d guessed it or read my mind. I glance nervously at the thin cardboard folder that contains my medical history that I’m holding against my chest like some sort of protective shield, checking if my name appears on it somewhere, then I remember that the operator at the taxi company asked my name in order to schedule the day and time of the reservation and I relax.

  Then the driver says, “Isaac Goldman, the greatest science-fiction writer of his day.” And I start to tremble. And the driver keeps talking as we move down tree-lined streets toward the bridge and I confirm that, yes, the towers are still there, that everything appears normal, that the only oddity is this taxi driver who’s saying: “My father was a great fan of yours. He read all your stories. And he even recorded videos of the episodes you wrote for that great television series . . . My father was crazy about robots and rockets and stuff like that. That’s why he named me Ray. My dad wanted me to go into space. But asthma, you know . . . He never got over the frustration and that’s why he offered to be one of the first volunteers to try that drug . . . the one that makes you forget undesired, sad, unbearable memories. My father wanted to forget that at one point he’d dreamed of a stellar future for me, a future in the stars. But those were the drug’s early days, it was still being developed. He forgot me completely. And now that I think of it . . . That’s a lie . . . I’ve thought about it many times since then: maybe he found everything around him, his whole life, intolerable. Afterward he was totally blank. Like a blank page. We had to hospitalize him. Fortunately, the damages paid by the laboratory were enough. I could even afford to come here and buy this cab . . .”

  I wondered what drug this man was talking about. Could I have taken this drug? Could that explain the increasingly deep and dark lagoons in my memory? I don’t remember taking it, but maybe not remembering was undeniable proof that I had indeed submitted myself to a now-forgotten treatment to keep from remembering so many things because, when it comes to forgetting unpleasant things, I don’t think there’s anything more worth forgetting than having reached the point of taking such a drug. Maybe The Incident was just a side effect. A glimmer of rebellion, my brain rattling its chains. Or a sign that I’ve been medicating myself for too long without remembering my medication or remembering it just long enough—for no more than a few moments—to take another dose. Or maybe my own body is already producing the compound, which it can’t forget. I open the folder containing my records, looking for the analysis and conclusions from my last checkup. There’s nothing there. No strange names of sophisticated drugs. Just the familiar analgesic for my rheumatism. An old medicine, from a time when medicines felt obliged to explain their purpose, even with their name: Outpainex 600mg.

  The taxi driver is still talking: “. . . a Mexican girl. The other day. And it turns out she was the sister of Manolo ‘Muñequito’ Mantra. You know, the first Mexican astronaut. The tiny one. Like a muñeco, a doll. The one who decided to stay on the Moon, remember? The one who sang Mexican songs until his oxygen ran out . . . ‘How far I am now from the ground where I was born . . .’ the little bastard sang. The Mexican girl also told me that her boyfriend had been torn to shreds by the steel blade of an industrial ventilator and that she was pregnant. And she asked me if I could get her some ‘forgetting powders.’ Then we went to her hotel and she swam in the pool and I’d never seen anyone swim like that. Let’s see if I can describe it: it was like, instead of her swimming in the pool, the pool was swimming in her. Then we went to bed and she cried and told me she wanted to forget so many things, that she even wanted to forget her desire to forget. Then she said something that made an impression, a phrase so lovely that I wrote it down so it wouldn’t escape. I have it here. Listen: ‘Memory is like the most stupid dog, you throw it a stick and it brings you any old thing.’ Isn’t that beautiful?”

  I tell him yes, and leave him a generous tip.

  In the street, sitting on a curb, there’s a bum holding a sign that reads: “Unemployed science-fiction writer recently returned from the colonies on Urkh 24. Please, for pity’s sake, I need a few drahleks so I can eat and recharge my androids.”

  It’s then that—with the sudden image of my father, imagined after so much time, as if, like him, I were floating just so I could fall—I think something like “Oh, absent God, please send one of your exterminating angels. Send an implacable robot of steel and muscle back from the future, I beg you, program it to erase me from this story forever. Or if not, make the fiercest wolf hatch from an egg and enter me through my mouth and grow inside me and burst out through my chest and bring an end to everything that moves in this worn-out spaceship of my life. Or, better, order the sun to rise at night and sing to me. Sing to me until my dazzled eyes burn with its voice that is yours. Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” I say. And I don’t know why
. I guess it’s one of the automatic reflexes of getting old: when you reach my age, you thank everyone for everything, just in case: thanks, it was nothing, you’re welcome, no problem.

  They have put me in a metal cylinder.

  The assistant left me here inside and has gone to the other side of a transparent panel.

  First she looked at me with that mix of admiration and distaste that I’ve grown accustomed to: I’m so old and yet so functional (I walk, I speak, I eat on my own) that instead of being admired I provoke a kind of mistrust. I suppose they’d like me better if I went around in a wheelchair and needed help using the bathroom. The idea that I’ve received a rare reward—an almost youthful old age—arouses the same suspicion in young people as Wall Street swindlers or a Vegas cardsharp.

  Then, she told me—ordered me—not to move and that, if I do, the whole process would have to start over.

  It’ll take, they warn, forty-five minutes of absolute stillness, rocked to the music of whirrs and clicks.

  She asks me if I have any type of metal implant. I tell her not that I remember, but it’s possible that I’ve somehow forgotten my involvement in some war or traffic accident. The assistant gives me an odd look and keeps on reciting rules and instructions.

  She tells me I’m lucky, that this scanner is a latest generation model and that inside it features a small video monitor that allows me to contemplate, in real time, Manhattan’s adjacent skyline.

  She tells me the engineers added this innovation because of the number of claustrophobic patients who insist they’re not claustrophobic until they’re inside and discover that they always were, that claustrophobia is something else entirely, that it’s got nothing to do with an elevator stuck between floors or a jam-packed subway car.

  She tells me that I’m going to debut it, that I’m the first one to go in and see.

  She tells me this as if it were a special honor, as if they were giving me the key to a city or the scissors to cut the tape at the inauguration of a stadium.