Bottom of the Sky

by Rodrigo Fresán

  It’s like this—this total lack of knowledge, this obsessive attention to the details of knowing that nothing is known, that the plan is that there is no plan and let’s just see what happens—because this is how high command commands it.

  I don’t know if it’s right.

  I don’t even know if it’s an intelligent strategy.

  I’m referring to this absolute lack of any form of orientation.

  The idea that if we don’t know who we are or where we are it will help to keep the enemy—The Unmaker—and his followers from becoming aware of our existence. Disappearing to make ourselves invisible to them. That’s how our immediate superior explains it to us. Someone who confesses, in a whisper, that the method works, that that very morning he was unable to find his own face in the mirror. I, of course, am not entirely convinced. But failure to obey the rules established and the laws implemented here, so far from home, will be punished.

  And yet, we pass our time dreaming of Grynarya, of spending a few days there, at the colony that we established in this land, at the only more or less safe zone in this place. “Grynarya,” we sigh and one of my comrades says he was stationed there for a couple weeks and tells me fantastic things and high command says we’ll get to go soon enough, during our next period of R&R.

  “The exact spot where, in the Bible, it says Paradise was located,” my comrade tells me. And I let myself doubt him just as another soldier interrupts our conversation and says, indignant, that, “No no no: it’s where Sodomy and Gonorrhea were. And we’re here to exterminate all the sinners in Christ’s name and . . .”

  And—some and others—tell us that we should be proud of Grynarya because it’s ours, it’s part of our home and a piece of our homeland transplanted into these inhospitable deserts (where I discover that there’s no place more fertile for planting ideas and thoughts than a desert; you think so much more in the desert than in cities or in forests or at sea) and that not even the previous expedition to this world, more than ten years ago, could establish or construct a marvel like this.

  “Grynarya,” we repeat to ourselves over and over in steady voices; but it’s the kind of steadiness you only achieve a few meters from the brink of tears.

  Grynarya is the Promised Land and the Compromised Land.

  Grynarya is mirage and oasis at the same time and we advance and recede, who knows, singing that song from that movie about the fine art of following the Yellow Brick Road.

  Grynarya is the way in which I think about Green Area every time I hear its name. Only in that way—the sound of Grynarya has about it a whiff of the sci-fi, combining better with the sensation of feeling more and more like an extraterrestrial—can I bear the idea that all we can do is dream of getting some R&R in that, supposedly safe, Bagdad neighborhood, where every day car-bombs and truck-bombs and man-bombs and woman-bombs and child-bombs of both sexes explode to the scream of “Allah is great.”

  And that’s where we’re headed, to the Emerald City.

  We’re heartless tin men.

  We’re cowardly lions.

  We’re brainless scarecrows.

  We’re munchkins with high, singsong voices.

  And Dorothy has stayed home, in black and white. Here there are colors, yes, but it’s as if they didn’t exist, as if the sun had washed them out until they attained the dazzling and filthy purity of white on white.

  We are lost youths in a horizontal landscape furrowed by vertical tornados and, no, we’re not looking for the Wizard of Oz. No. The Wizard of Oz is coming for us and the Wizard of Oz is all-powerful, great, and terrible.

  Oz is great.

  Oz is greater than Allah and—unlike the actual Wizard of Oz—his powers are real.

  Oz is The Unmaker.

  And nothing would make this Wizard of Oz happier than to test out his powers on us.

  And we have so few powers, we are so weak . . .

  That’s the way things go around here.

  Soon, it won’t be possible to protect you from yourselves anymore.

  Soon, we won’t be able to intervene in your squabbles and conflicts.

  Soon, all I’ll have left will be to watch the perpetual sunsets of our planet, and these memories (it’s so strange to remember everything in the moment it should all begin to be forgotten) will be transformed into an archive of lights and skies and shapes and clouds and stars and colors. Perpetual sunsets that soon will be nightfalls as once they were eternal sunrises or ceaseless middays: here, we don’t enjoy or suffer, like you, the repetition of brief days, here it has always been one long day. And I fear that now we are entering not the hour, but the age of nightfall. It’s a shame not having a window to, at least, watch all of you as if on a screen . . .

  It’s a shame.

  Soon, we won’t be able to watch you anymore, our favorite actors.

  “My name is Lieutenant George Clooney,” the officer tells us. The man who says he’s named Lieutenant George Clooney is, obviously, not George Clooney. Lieutenant George Clooney is very tall, bald, and has an absurdly high voice that gets even higher and more absurd when we fall in and he says:

  “Right, I know, I can imagine what you’re thinking, maggots . . . You’re probably doing all you can not to smile, and that’s the right thing to do. Anyone who smiles will be sent out on patrol in the desert with barely any water or ammunition . . . But just to be clear: I am the true George Clooney. The authentic George Clooney. And I can prove it quickly and efficiently. Listen up, maggots: George Clooney, that mediocre actor to whom, I rush to clarify, I am not related by blood, was born May 6th, 1961. And, you probably already know this: his middle name is Timothy. A ridiculous name. My name, on the other hand, is George Clooney. And that’s it. And I was born on November 1st, 1960. More than six months before George Timothy Clooney would arrive to this world. Which means that I was number one, I was here before him, I am the legitimate, certified, genuine, original, accredited, undeniable, and authorized George Clooney, got it?”

  And, of course, we all smiled. One of us, even, let slip a chuckle.

  And out into the desert we go.

  And as you already know: this is the kind of person who is in command, watching out for our well-being.

  Let us pray.

  Now I pray.

  Now I bow my head and pray, facing away from our planet’s two suns. The dead sun (it’s as if the sky were left with only one eye) and the dying sun that barely warms and illuminates everything down below from so high overhead.

  Now I pray, but what I do or what I think isn’t exactly praying the way all of you understand it.

  I don’t pray—we never do—to a god or a higher power.

  We pray to it’s absence.

  And the only thing we ask of that absence is that it endure, that it stay like that, absent, so we can continue to pray to it.

  In our prayers we say we don’t need it, we pray that it never come, we cry out for its eternal abandonment. We say that everything is fine and that we’ve been managing everything perfectly without its divine intervention. We explain that we have become our own gods and that we like it that way, that after a miracle like that there’s no other miracle we could hope for.

  So, in our prayers, just for fun and out of curiosity, we imagine what our god would be like if it appeared and manifested and filled that absence with its presence. We fervently believe in that absence, which, it’s understood, is not exactly nonexistence or a void. It’s something else: it’s like the faithful memory of something that we don’t remember and don’t want to remember, it’s like the vibration that someone leaves behind in a room when they leave. We kneel down and prostrate ourselves before that mystery that will never be solved and it’s good that it is so. That’s why each of us had a god all our own, different and unique.

  The personal god, the god that lives and resides within you.

  That’s why we never fought or killed each other in the name of god.

  Because that would be an absurdity. />
  Because there were never two of us who believed in the same thing, in the same divine variable.

  Because there were many, so many, too many gods. And they were so different and independent and private that—the territories of the invisible have neither limits nor frontiers—there was always room for all of them.

  Now, mine is the only one left.

  The holy and imminent absolute absence of my god.

  Because it’s still here, inside me; but I won’t be out here much longer.

  We kneel and say an Our Father.

  “Who art in Heaven,” we say.

  “Forever and ever,” we say.

  The voice of the chaplain, dressed in a combat uniform, reciting that part about “Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

  No.

  It’s hard to believe that the will of a higher being and all of that is being respected and obeyed here.

  There is no plan.

  We don’t even know exactly where the hell we are.

  We know, yes, that it’s a desert and that it’s hot and that the unanesthetized light of the sun illuminates and burns everything and ends up evaporating even our shadows.

  It’s a terrible light.

  A blinding light.

  A divine light, yes, but also an infernal light.

  “Amen,” says the Chaplain and his words, almost without vowels, are barely intelligible in his dry mouth.

  We get to our feet and look at each other and the landscape is colorless.

  It’s not even a landscape in black and white.

  It’s a landscape in white on white.

  And white again.

  Even more white.

  Then comes the, let’s call him, the Manager of Chemical Matters to distribute the pills.

  As if they were communion wafers.

  Today, he says, what we’re going to dissolve in our saliva is not what we call Exterminating Fury (the reports from the scouts in the mountains aren’t warning of any sudden activity by The Enemy), but what we called Contemplative Joy.

  We fall in line and arrive in front of him and open our mouths and an acidic flavor of a complicated name—pure consonants and a dash and a number—settles on the tips of our tongues and drops into our stomachs and bounces back up, lighting up different centers of the brain like someone going through, one by one, without any hurry, turning on the lights inside a house in flames.

  Then, the head of the soldier praying next to me—I’m almost certain it was Lieutenant George Clooney, who was already smiling with the false happiness of the artificially enlightened—explodes into hundreds of pieces.

  Splinters of flesh and bone.

  And for an instant, all those suspended fragments of what once was a face seem beautiful to me. I’ve also started feeling the effects of the medication, a kind of slow bliss, and suddenly I have all the time in the world to think how happy I am to be right there. Fragments floating in slow motion, as if tempted to come back together, like parts of one of those anatomic transparent-plastic models that we’re given when we’re kids, when nobody knows yet what to give us, when we hope for anything but that.

  But the illusion lasts less than a second and everything falls to the ground and now nobody will be able to put back together the brainteaser of that broken brain.

  A shower of red liquid—we learned months ago not to think of it as blood—covers my face and I’m almost grateful for that red; because it alters the white on white horror of our surroundings.

  And we throw ourselves to the ground and start firing at the dunes, at the air, at anything, and the noise of the gunshots mingles with the noise of the voices. Bang, crack, kapow, stuk-stuk-stuk-stuk, swap, kaboom, we all scream in the international language of metal and gunpowder, the Esperanto of war.

  I fear that it’s going to be another one of those unforgettable days, I say to myself.

  Rat-tat-tat.

  Yesterday was an unforgettable day.

  Yesterday, for a few seconds, I picked up your signal again.

  Yesterday I saw all of you again.

  And I watched you watching the towers fall.

  They say that in the mess hall, in Grynarya, there’s a huge enlargement of a photograph showing the towers how they were before that morning in September.

  They say that it’s strange to eat next to that photograph, that it’s like eating next to a picture of Atlantis, a place that no longer exists and that, sooner or later, will grow and grow until it attains the dimensions of a legend whose origins and veracity have become impossible to verify.

  They say that—when morale is low—high command recommends repeated viewings of footage of the towers falling, from different angles, so we comprehend why we’re here and what it is we’re doing.

  They say that in the theater for the troops, in Grynarya, they show the fall of the towers as a kind of variety preview before the latest blockbuster, full of special effects and explosions and all of that.

  They say that, in the beginning, the troops maintained a respectful silence but that, as the days and weeks passed, they stood up and released howls of vengeance.

  They say that now, so many years later, the troops laugh as they watch the fall of the towers.

  They say that they watch it like a cartoon. Like one of those Coyote and Roadrunner bits, one of those ACME-brand accidents.

  I saw the planes crash into the towers, I saw the towers in flames, I saw the men and women falling from the towers, and I saw the towers fall just as I once saw the sinking of that transatlantic, those men dragging themselves through the trenches, that Russian family shot in front of a soviet wall, that blond actress dying with the telephone in her hand, those earthquakes bringing down churches full of believers, heard someone say for the first time “To be or not to be . . .,” saw all those men marching in front of flags with exotic crosses, that astronomer on his knees in front of a man who claimed to be God’s representative on Earth, those heads chopped off by the guillotine, those people singing “All You Need Is Love,” that space shuttle exploding in the sky.

  I saw the planes crash into the towers, I saw the towers in flames, I saw the men and women falling from the towers, and I saw the towers fall, and it made me so sad to know that, very soon, I’d no longer get to see all those marvelous things.

  We fell like towers. Struck down. And there I was, surrounded by dead men, by open-eyed bodies. I closed my eyes to keep from seeing, but that solved nothing: the less I looked at them, hiding inside that dark whiteness that grows behind the eyelids, the more I knew they were looking at me, that they would keep looking at me, that me looking at them was the last thing they had seen. And that they would never let me forget that. All that blood and all those holes and all that blood spilling from all those holes. The holes that shrapnel makes. Hole-riddled bodies, all of a sudden, acquire the texture of comic strips that when enlarged—I remember how much I liked to look at them like that as a kid, magnifying glass in hand—we discover are composed of dots. All those red dots and all that spattered blood and I wonder if the most logical thing wouldn’t be for, when somebody dies, the blood to stop flowing, spilling out, turning red. If everything stops, I say to myself, then the blood should stop too.

  The blood should stop running.

  Today I noticed that my vital fluids are circulating more slowly. I can see it. Our bodies are transparent. Just by looking at our organisms we could tell, perfectly, how they were working. Structures complex in their simplicity. Something you only achieve after millennia of constant evolution. Nothing like your structures, so full of parts that can stop functioning, of unresolvable problems, of impossible-to-predict accidents. Nothing so thrilling and absurd and magic as the notion of the same blood circulating, coming and going, above and below, unceasing, between the opposite planets of the brain and the heart.

  We never considered what might go wrong.

  We never needed professionals to name the horror of the unknown, wanting, in vain, to make it l
ess horrible.

  There was never any fear.

  There was never any mystery.

  So it was that we perceived how a slight shift in the atmosphere began to affect us.

  First, something like a slight cold, then a slight fever.

  So it was that, for the first time, we got sick.

  So it was that we started to vanish.

  So it was that we decided that the moment had come for us to leave our world, to leave Urkh 24, That-Place-Where-The-Most-Disconsolate-Melodies-Can-Be-Heard.

  So it was that we searched and found you.

  So it was that we began to watch you.

  So it was that we became fans of you.

  So it was that we got hooked on Earth-Fiction.

  Later, in Grynarya, they say that the thermal readings and satellite images reported that everyone fired into the air and that the air filled with holes that immediately filled with air and that then we fired more bullets into that air that entered those bodies.

  They say that the first person to fire was Lieutenant George Clooney, who lost his mind, that he’d been under observation for a while, that his recent coded reports were nothing but lines from Ocean’s Eleven, and that as soon as he got back to Bagdad he was to be relieved of duty.

  Friendly fire, they say.

  Friend fire.

  Fire that is the best friend you’ve ever had, my friend.

  Fire that, when it enters your body, makes you feel a cold you’ve never felt and will never feel again because this fire, once inside you, is the last thing you feel before feeling nothing, before no longer feeling anything.

  And so, they say, tired of firing into the air, we started firing at each other, at friends who we barely knew but with whom we shared fire and uniform and flag and this is the kind of thing that happens when too much time has passed without seeing the enemy who is always there, but invisible: you fire into the air and at anything in the air or on the ground.

  And, as they strap me to a stretcher and lift me into a helicopter, they say—to me, whom they don’t blame for anything because I acted in self-defense; to me, whom they admire for my marksmanship—that I was the only one who lived to tell the tale.