Bottom of the Sky

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Someone told me that now there even exists a Sci-Fi Channel. But there’s no way it could be all that different from the History Channel: versions of what’s to come based on models of what’s already been. Or—each and every one of its ingredients perfectly and predictably calculated—one of those channels dedicated to gourmet cooking where short little chefs move around with the pomposity of alchemists.

  Later, everything else, you already know it: kindly dragons, wizard teachers, and sexy vampires. As if now young people preferred to inhale the ochre perfume of extinct species instead of the chrome aroma of wonders yet to come. What might come to pass doesn’t interest them or makes them feel a kind of mistrust. And it’s not that the past has always been better, but at least you can know where it’s going and how it ends. The future, they think, is overrated. And even less trustworthy than one of those card sharks shuffling cards like a juggler.

  There are exceptions, of course, who rely on and stick to the immobile and monolithic will of the classic and irrefutable: the ending of that movie I saw once, the one with the title that coincides with this year and that’s already starting to be dated. That movie with an old and moribund and reborn and evolved astronaut who returns home in order to, maybe, put things in order or, perhaps, to bring about the end of everything, to wipe us off the face of the planet and start again with a better beginning.

  But that is and will be another story and I won’t be in it and it seems appropriate that my story ends here, in this year, or in something that claims to be the same year in which that movie takes place. In that number that denies us the round numeral with a small and slight irregularity that alters everything forever. The year, yes, when there would supposedly be colonies on the Moon, floating flight attendants, and we’d make contact with a superior and alien intelligence.

  And yet nobody appears to have come to our aid. It’s possible that we’re not alone, but now nothing interests us less than being accompanied, and the fact that there are guidebooks named Lonely Planet doesn’t seem like a coincidence at all. We’ve become extraterrestrial terrestrials, and we crash into each other, and on the other side of the river I can still perceive the warm glow of underground fires, the black smoke a different black than the black of the night.

  Now—last regressive story, everything set for take off—I’m on my way out.

  I go out into the garden and the stars have yet to appear, but it won’t be long. I lie down on grass the color of shadow that won’t be green again until tomorrow.

  I’m still not entirely sure that I write, just before living them—minimal and brief poetic license—certain details. I write now, in what will soon be past, everything I will do in the next few minutes with the certainty that little or nothing can change, that I’m not lying and won’t be lying, that I can see the future and write about it without this being part of a science-fiction story.

  Because my future is so brief.

  My future is now shrinking toward the present, like a boomerang coming back to its point of departure.

  My future already passed.

  My future, like many things, extends until tonight.

  That’s it.

  It’s such a small future that the only thing I wish is for the night to close in over it so that later it can open to the immensity of my past.

  It’s an unusually cold night for this time of year.

  It’s a night that reminds me a lot of that other night, but without the snow and Ezra and her.

  The ground is already covered with dry leaves, I’m naked and I’ve poured myself a generous glass of whiskey, a couple is arguing next to an open window, a few dogs of distinct breeds sing different parts of a single opera that men never learned to understand, the blue eyes of all the channels of all the televisions broadcasting the same images over and over and the same explosions and the same fallings and the same collapse (nothing makes us more similar, nothing brings us closer together than bad news) and, from the city comes the scent of burned metal and of so many other things that are still burning in that inverted pyramid of smoke that now rises where two steel towers once stood. Just beyond, that metal statue destroyed so many times in so many movies, remains standing, with its arm and torch held aloft, illuminating brutal humans and intelligent apes, as if nothing had happened, as if nothing else could happen.

  And I open my arms. Arms open like my father once opened his (Solomon Goldman, my father flying, my father falling, my father suspended and trapped forever in the weightless amber of my memory, in that monster that came aboard like a sidereal cop, inside my body, and left, bursting out of my chest and breaking my heart, and that now wanders the corridors of a defunct spaceship where everyone else is dead) and I look up.

  Higher still.

  And even higher.

  There.

  There, appearing now though they are always there.

  Here they come.

  The light goes out so they can turn on.

  The stars, the stars.

  How did it go?

  How did it all end?

  The verses of an ancient poet. I’m sure he was Italian because I remember his words in Italian. But I don’t dare think his name for fear that he never existed, for fear of not finding him in my library.

  Better like this.

  Settling for the image and the language of he who, leaving the Inferno behind—“E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle”—rediscovers a sky pulsating with stars. Ah, yes, the last lines of the rhymed comfort of a just order based on crimes and sins, where the polarity of acts is easily translated into rewards and punishments. Hell and Purgatory and overhead, enclosing everything, Heaven: “A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa; / ma già volgeva il mio disio e’l velle, / sí come rota ch’igualmente é mossa, / l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.”

  The end of the elevated fantasy that no longer has the strength to continue its ascent to the bottom of the sky. Out of breath, almost blind from so much seeing, and yet, it insists, fights on a little further. Because at the finish line, at that goal that is the ending, awaits the revelatory reward of being able to remember your name, her name. Until then, the longing that spins and the will that rolls remain. One and the other lifted up by the impulse of love’s inertia, hovering over the red and burning lust of celestial bodies. Not the stars in the sky, I discover now, too late, but the sky in the stars.

  I start to count them.

  Right to left.

  One by one.

  They are many, they are so many, they are too many.

  I swear I won’t get up until I finish counting them, until I’ve counted all of them, until there are no stars left to count.

  II

  The Space between This Planet and the Other Planet

  The space between this planet and the other planet is small enough for us to be able to watch you from our own forgotten world and, at the same time, big enough so that you, in your unforgettable world, so busy looking at one another, can’t know that we’re watching you.

  That we’re always watching you.

  And that it’s good, that it makes us happy that it is so.

  One of the ways—maybe the only way—not to collapse from the pain of realizing that nobody will remember you, not to break when you become aware that from here onward nobody will ever wonder even once what became of your life, is to forget about yourself before anybody else forgets you, that’s how you achieve a kind of immortality. You become, in a way, paradoxically, unforgettable.

  My case.

  And—hey hey hey, fire in the sky and death on earth—here I come and there I go.

  Again.

  Talking to myself.

  Have you ever talked to yourselves in the desert, in that place where your self is the only one you can talk to?

  Here I am, somewhere inside nowhere, talking to myself, as if I were that last extraterrestrial who disappears in the pages of my favorite novel.

  Now I disappear. Or, better, now I vanish. To vanish is
to disappear slowly, without hurry, without drama, without thinking about the fact that you’re disappearing.

  I am the last of my species.

  So, not only do I vanish, but the history of my kind vanishes as well. I guess that’s a little dramatic. But I don’t get too worked up about it. I’ll miss you all so much, but I don’t think anyone will really miss me. There won’t be anyone left to miss me and I don’t think our voyage through this universe has been especially interesting to the inhabitants of other planets.

  Perfection isn’t interesting.

  So here I go—here I go—and here goes the past and the present and the future (though those are temporal categories that we never conceived of or understood in the way you do) of all those who once dreamed of surviving by invading another planet and, all of a sudden, awoke from their dream understanding, too late, that they are the ones who have been invaded.

  This is the story of one of the most triumphant failures (I’ll use, from now on, the space jargon of earthlings so you understand me better; though I’m actually talking to myself) that ever took place in this or any galaxy.

  This is the story (to tell it I’ll also use earthly names when it comes to measurements, colors, distances, and even sentiments) of what happened. Or, better yet (again, out of respect for the origin of the readers of these pages, which don’t take the form of pages but of light, transparent spheres, out of fondness for your hospitality, no doubt incredulous, but hospitality nonetheless, here I’ll invoke the way we figure in your childish astral charts, courtesy of telescopes that will never return home), this is the story, I insist, of something that stopped happening in a place known as Urkh 24.

  A place whose true name (in a rushed and imperfect translation battered by the eons, based on our symbols that were never meant to be rendered in your written and read letters) would look and sound more or less like That-Place-Where-The-Most-Disconsolate-Melodies-Can-Be-Heard.

  Now I read; but it’s as if I were listening. Because I could read all of this with my eyes shut and my mouth open. To read with my teeth, chewing the sand that gets in my open mouth and swallowing the exact memory of the words, which is much more precise. Because I don’t even have to follow the curved and straight lines of the letters or make the effort to hold up my book. Better to read remembering and reciting each and every word, as if they were just occurring to me or, better, as if they were being transmitted to me from a faraway planet. A planet that doesn’t appear on any maps of the sky because there aren’t yet maps that great, maps that encompass that much, maps that look that far.

  If someone were to spread a map of the hitherto known universe across the burning sand of this desert, the planet where this message originates—the planet that I’ve read over and over until I’ve memorized it—would sit at one of the poles: surrounded by ice once thought and believed eternal and that has begun to melt in the way of certain ideas, certain feelings, certain questions.

  And so, suddenly, you ask yourself how you got here and what it is you’ve come to do, and you don’t get any answer.

  So—maybe there, who knows—I open the book and close my eyes and read and discover that, for a while now, like I said, I talk to myself and think to myself, in a way that increasingly resembles the manner of speech of certain extraterrestrials in certain books. Slowly and with great care, as if rehearsing an autopsy of words and ideas, as if assimilating them in the very act of learning them, like those heartless blond children who have arrived from a distant star to conquer us, staring at the schoolmaster who, all of a sudden, understands that the hour is approaching of a final exam that nobody has prepared for.

  I speak in the liturgical language of faraway beings. I think like beings whom, were we to meet them, we’d worship without hesitation like gods. But—and this is the interesting part—they were the ones who worshipped us, believed in us. When there is nothing left for them to accomplish, having attained absolute perfection, all they have left is the pleasure and comfort of marveling at the unpredictable imperfections of others. All perfection is equal, identical, no surprises. On the other hand, there are so many entertaining and different and oh so interesting ways to make mistakes . . . I remember those movies from when I was a kid, Ulysses, Jason and the Argonauts . . . The parts I liked best weren’t when the adventurers confronted dangers and monsters, but those almost placid and Olympic interludes when the gods were shown contemplating everything from their heavenly abode, playing chess with figurines that represented the heroes and villains, intervening in the action when they deemed it appropriate, enjoying themselves, passing time, passing eternity while, down here, on Earth, men and women sent up their prayers and offered offerings, never suspecting that what the gods wanted wasn’t their riches, but their stories, their unpredictable stories.

  And that the gods believed in them, that they prayed they would never end.

  Now is the moment for prayer and for me to reflect on all of this.

  Now. I imagine the space that separates and connects us, as I pray. And my ideas penetrate my prayers that aren’t praying or giving thanks to anything: they are merely affirming. The prayers that sustain our religion aren’t rigid and fixed structures, rather they allow themselves to be governed by everything we choose to believe in. A dogma that’s liquid and intangible in appearance, but immense like the oceans that once were and are no longer, like the immortal memory of those oceans.

  We believe in everything and there’s nothing to believe in, and maybe, in that absolute and yet impossible mode of preaching and proselytizing resides the beginning of our end. We believe—we believed, I believe, because I am the last of us—in ourselves. Weary gods, we resigned ourselves to being ineffective and idle divinities. And so Time—that true God that isn’t late or early, but simply is, in the here and now, opening its arms to what has been and what will be—passed, and we passed along with it. We—a false and deceitful plural that I use to try, in vain, to deny the fact that I am all that’s left and that, soon, there will be nothing—who have nothing left now but to watch all of you from the opposite side of the space that separates one planet from the other.

  The man who said he loved the desert “because it is clean” was a madman. Or he had the luck of drawing a different desert in the raffle.

  The desert—at least this desert, this exceedingly populated desert—is full of trash. Trash that doesn’t appear on the maps of the desert, but there it is. Pieces of various wars, wreckage of armored vehicles, tatters of uniforms, bones difficult to identify as human or animal, flags long past their expiration date snapping in the wind, food containers and empty bottles, little pools of burning oil, folding chairs like the ones you sit on at the seashore or the sidelines of a sports field, various oases closed for a change of ownership, loose magazine pages with pictures of naked women, dismantled weapons, a pair of ownerless camels roaming around with the disoriented air of someone who has survived a catastrophic party and now can’t remember how to get home, random pieces of the puzzle of a helicopter, a tent with a red cross on the roof and nobody and nothing inside, skinny dogs that seem to waver like mirages . . .

  Come and look.

  And, yes, the touching need humans have for knowing exactly where they are so they can, almost immediately, get lost. Their incredible, irrepressible desire to believe in almost anything. Where am I? Does it matter? Would you like it if I expressed myself with the obsessive logic of your science fiction novels and buried you under an obsessive onslaught of irreal details in an attempt to gain verisimilitude? Would you be happier if I indicated a point in the sky and said, “There . . . Right there”? Would you rather I filled pages with the dimensions and luminosity of the celestial body where the stardust of my thoughts originates, that stardust, swept by the solar winds, that we’re all made of? Would it please you to be almost sadistically subjected to numbers and vectors and quadrants and geologic compositions, and maybe even a broad summary of our history and science?

  Sorry, can’t help
you: millennia ago we renounced certain notions and ideas that we deemed useless. Dead matter. Long ago we decided that the act and effort of remembering made no sense. It was then that, better, we decided not to forget. To know that we know everything, that we’ve missed nothing, and that, for that reason, it makes no sense to search for it over and over, to store it away and, later, to pray that we don’t lose it again. Each of us the perfect museum of our species. And I am the last museum. One of those museums where now, over the loudspeakers, you hear a polite but firm voice informing the visitors that in fifteen minutes the doors will be closing and the lights will be turned off and to, if you please, proceed in an orderly fashion to the exit.

  The past and the present are the same for us.

  The future doesn’t exist.

  The future is for cowards and madmen.

  Then, of course, we found you.

  And nothing was ever the same.

  Without names for people or places.

  Without geographical coordinates.

  Without dates.

  Without space or time and the time of war—spasmodic, inconstant—is so different from the linear time of peace or the suspenseful time of truce when everything is known, when there is time to know everything.