Bottom of the Sky

by Rodrigo Fresán

  A disease doesn’t differentiate between the Old World and the New.

  The rules of the game don’t change.

  The board is the same.

  And the game has ended.

  And everyone loses.

  The fifth end of the world . . . I don’t remember which was the fifth end of the world. Something to do with a mass suicide, with a multitude of deranged prophets.

  But it doesn’t really matter anyway.

  What I refer to here are the ends of the world that I’ve seen, of which I’m certain. But there are many I know nothing about, that are like a whisper at the end of a hallway of a last supper whose invitation never came, and yet, I know that it’s taking place, so near and so far.

  Like an echo of an echo of an echo.

  The sixth end of the world was cooked up over a low flame in the laboratories of the talented mad scientists of the Third Reich. Flashes and lightning bolts and electrodes and bubbling beakers and griffins in the form of swastikas and the scenography of sloping rooftops and, just like that, a race of supermen. Giant Aryans nearly three meters tall. Invincible soldiers.

  First the Tristan series and then the Siegfried series.

  And, the ones and the others, magnificent.

  Spotless boots, perfect uniforms, and Cyclopes’-sized monocles that, perfectly synchronized, march on Washington D. C. and throw the wheelchair-bound President Roosevelt down the White House stairs. Soon, bored, having conquered the entire world and eliminated all the inevitably inferior races one by one, the Tristans and the Siegfrieds return from all points around the globe and march on Berlin and execute the pathetic and oh so imperfect Adolf Hitler, throwing him in a cauldron of bubbling lava.

  Soon, almost immediately, there’s nothing left for them to do. And the Tristans and Siegfrieds languish and die out listening to Wagner operas in empty palaces; because the talented mad scientists of the Third Reich forgot to create Isoldes and Kriemhilds.

  And this is a joke, this didn’t happen, I just happened to think it up right now and I swear if there were someone to apologize to, I’d apologize.

  And even invite them to have a drink.

  Two.

  Three.

  The seventh end of the world—and in the twentieth century, the successive ends of the world take place more and more frequently, as if the planet wanted to test all possible goodbyes, as if it didn’t know which bonbons were still in the box—took place that morning in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Trinity Site. Heavy dark sunglasses and the desert sand and the buzz of the cameras recording all of it; because man has learned how to record historical events and it’s this power to record them that, in a way, compels him to provoke them, so he can have something to record.

  And so, Earth has become a dangerous place and Robert Oppenheimer and company (who know him as “Oppie” and who hear him say something about being the destroyer of worlds, something extracted from a sacred and exotic text); and the massive explosion that was thought to be controlled but wasn’t; and the joke-hypotheses of the catastrophist Enrico Fermi turned out to be true but not at all funny.

  The atomic explosion ignites the nitrogen in the air and in the oceans, and the atmosphere is stripped bare like a woman tearing off her dress all at once—one of those dresses that functions more to undress than it does to dress whoever’s wearing it—after a whole night spent dancing fast and fiery dances knowing, fiercely happy, that everyone is watching her and can’t stop watching at her.

  Just like they can’t stop watching that mushroom shaped cloud that climbs into the skies and grows and grows until it blots out the light of the sun with its light of a thousand suns.

  The eighth and ninth end of the world are a lot alike.

  An American satellite that suddenly decides to drop from the sky and that the Russians confuse for a missile coming straight at Moscow.

  And that makes the rapid and ephemeral art of pressing red buttons after shouting into red telephones easy and at the same time oh so complex.

  Before or after that, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy survives the assassination attempt in Dallas and reassumes his duties somewhat changed and erratic. And one night—on a guided and unscheduled visit to the Oval Office, to impress a young university student—he gives the incendiary and terminal and burning order and forgets to turn it off, to cancel it.

  The tenth end of the world that I know of . . .

  I should stop here to clarify that not all the ends of the world I’ve heard about (a voice describing them to me that sounds like a wind blowing in reverse, like those supposed inverted satanic messages on old LPs from back in the sixties) are so spectacular and histrionic.

  There are other ends of the world—or, even though all finality implicitly carries the will and destiny to attain and obtain an end, should I say endings?—that are almost secrets: accidents, blunders, tumbles down the stairway of History.

  Ends—like the previous ones—that I learned of, like I said, reviewing my operator’s files, my antenna picking up lost waves and tuning them in.

  Ends suspended by the action—sometimes subtle and almost secret, other times bumbling and rushed—of those who occupied my role before me.

  I didn’t meet any of them personally, but I knew their existence to be undeniable, because I couldn’t be the only one, because, half closing my eyes, I detected their presence everywhere, their secret as desperate as my own.

  Like when I saw that painting that hangs now—or that once hung—in the living room of my house in Sad Songs; and more details about this coming soon.

  Now, again, another of those ends of the world (ends, like I said, more private, almost domestic) shows a boy of about eight playing with one of those introductory toy sets to the marvelous world of chemistry. You know the kind: small and oh so fragile test tubes, a rudimentary microscope, a harmless burner, and multiple little beakers containing supposedly innocuous substances to which the boy adds a small piece of chewing gum, of the gum he’s chewing, combined with the reactants in his saliva and . . .

  In another, a deranged rabbi, interned at a psychiatric hospital in Manhattan, discovers, after years and years of research, the exact way to reunite the loose and broken fragments of the vessel that once contained the divine presence of God and he starts to levitate, to float up into the heavens and . . . I don’t really know what happens next. The image is lost. All I know is that his story doesn’t end well, that they say he committed suicide, falling from on high, or that they threw him out a window, who knows . . .

  Another one takes place at a rural airport. A passenger who has already checked his bags doesn’t appear at the gate of departure and an employee calls him over the loudspeaker—the passenger’s last name is complicated, packed full of consonants—and he reads it poorly and, without knowing it, pronounces the name of He-Who-Awaits-On-The-Other-Side-Of-All-Things-And-Whose-Name-Must-Never-Be-Pronounced because, to do so, would free him and—to the joy of Phineas Elsinore Darlingskill—he would come here from his dwelling in a golden hole in time and space to bring about an end of everything and . . .

  The last of the most personal and domestic ends of the world I remember has as protagonist a man who is brushing his teeth in front of the bathroom mirror. His wife has left him, she’s taken his little daughter with her, and he’s just been fired from his job. It hasn’t been a good day. All of a sudden, the toothbrush breaks inside his mouth with a snap. Too much. He can’t take it. The man goes out onto his apartment balcony and jumps off and dies unaware that he is the person responsible for his time, that someone like him is born only every so often, and that the lives of all humanity depended on him. Around him, as the man is dying in the street, everyone starts jumping out of windows. Some of them, from lower floors throw themselves off again and again until, finally, a blow to the head brings an end to their suicidal zeal. Others throw themselves down stairways of subway stations or jump hilariously over ship rails or open the doors to airplanes in mid-flight. All of them, i
n one way or another, fall and fall and keep on falling. People falling from on high, people who one morning find themselves in a lawless world and, as their last and only comfort, embrace the Law of Gravity.

  There’s another variation of the end of the world that is the one that, I suppose, will produce the most pleasure in readers of techno-thrillers, gun collectors, and people addicted to the insomnia of war games in which the white of day melts into the black of night and, when all is said and done, they end up inhabiting that timeless and space-less gray that is the unmistakable and mistaken color of paranoia.

  This particular end-of-world scenario takes place in the final and hottest days of a Cold War that has gone on past its thaw date. The Wall hasn’t come down and now there won’t be time for it to come down and in the White House a man sighs and sweats and descends into the depths of a bunker where other men await him with tense faces and perfectly ironed uniforms and an acute agitation that they barely conceal under grave voices. Screens and files with seals that read TOP SECRET and so much information. American satellites have stopped broadcasting and are now—wounded and fallen—classified as missing in action. Satellites with supposedly clever names like OLD BLUE EYES or SPACEY LOOK OR STAR STRUCK. Then, details and movements of Russian satellites that, all of a sudden, seem to have taken over the frequencies of the MIA satellites, coloring the white noise with inverted and Cyrillic letters. Satellites named VODKA or MISKIN or TOVARICH. And the concise summary of everything that’s been happening, assimilated by the president like a movie projected in fast forward, with the supposedly fun but oh so sad rhythm of vertiginous, silent slapstick. Like one of those short films where everyone falls down and gets up and does it again just for the pleasure of running into another wall, into another cake that comes flying into their smiles.

  And so, the fall of Afghanistan, the homemade atomic bomb blowing up in a Beirut apartment, the fundamentalist groups howling that Allah is great and fighting to earn the reward of heavenly virgins (because there can’t be that many virgins up there), India attacking Pakistan and Pakistan counterattacking and the sky furrowed with nuclear contrails and those red and violet sunsets so similar to the sunsets of another planet, to the colors of certain paintings.

  Then, Iran launches Soviet- and American-made missiles at Iraq—or was it the other way around?—while Africa devolves into machete-blow border wars and the ground is strewn with arms and legs and heads.

  Meanwhile, a group of Mexican narcotraffickers under the command of Moises Mantra, having invested a great deal of their earnings in high caliber weapons, amid blood and fire cross the border at El Paso, resolved to retake the Promised Land of Texas and California.

  And an American pilot aboard a bomber decides the voice that he’s been hearing in his head for weeks—and that the pills don’t silence—is the voice of God telling him that he is the Avatar of the Last Days, and he fires on a flotilla of Russian submarines docked in the port of La Guayra, Venezuela. Several large Caribbean cruise ships disappear en route to Miami and fail to respond to calls and no one even considers the whole Bermuda Triangle thing anymore and confirmation comes in that, near Curaçao, wreckage belonging to the S. S. Sunflower has been spotted. On the round conference table the lights blink and the dates extend across the screen, and the president recalls his youth, his days of training to be an astronaut, the first time he looked down, from the surface of the Moon, at the face of this planet, ready to fall out of orbit, to be forever and irrevocably altered. The president wonders why it has fallen on him, he says to himself that maybe it would have been better not to survive the two assassination attempts, and in the end he convinces himself that there’s no turning back now. All he wants is to put an end to all of it. To rest. To rest in peace. The president breaks the seal of a metal folder and reads and types numbers and letters into a computer. Then he presses ENTER and shuts his eyes and, in a low voice, recites the prayer of a countdown.

  Happy?

  Had enough?

  Having fun?

  Want some more?

  But in the episode that repeats now—so that nobody sees it but me, my memory like an immense vault or archive where everything that happened is stored, so that what might have happened does not happen—we depart and travel and arrive to Sad Songs.

  To one of those shiny-new residential neighborhoods in the suburbs of a big city.

  All the houses are new and impeccable and virtually identical. And all that distinguishes one from the next are the different last names on the mailboxes, the kinds of toys on the front lawn, the various plant and flower species, the styles of furniture in the living and dining rooms visible from the street, the many breeds and models of dogs and automobiles.

  We pull up and the moving truck is already parked in front of our new home and the movers are removing boxes and carrying them into the house through the kitchen door.

  I go inside and light a cigarette and look out the window. More than lighting the cigarette, I burn the cigarette: I fully submerge it in the lighter’s flame, which consumes half of it before dwindling to a little ember. I smoke it in a couple deep drags. For a while now, I’ve been smoking cigarettes the way I take shots of whiskey. Sucking them down in one or two swallows, mouth wide open, like a swimmer who, all of a sudden, decides to drown.

  My husband doesn’t like to see me drink.

  He doesn’t like to see me smoke either.

  And yet—apart from the minor detail of being convinced that his wife is completely and totally and absolutely mad—my husband still likes to see me. I don’t think it has anything to do with love.

  At least not anymore.

  No, my husband looks at me like a trophy won on the most unforgettable day of his life. A day that will probably never come again. But, luckily, he’s got the trophy there to prove that it happened.

  The trophy like an unnecessary reminder of something unforgettable but, at the same time, like an object that is indispensable when it comes to convincing incredulous second and third parties, all those people who come up and talk to him at social events and business meetings.

  And, yes, I already perceive them preparing the invasion, peering over the fences and hedges of neighboring houses: looking out to see who the new neighbors are, whether they have kids, whether they make more money or have more expensive jewelry, whether their bomb shelter is equipped with more and better conveniences.

  Here they come, they’ll be here soon.

  Welcoming us with dishes of food wrapped in tinfoil, inviting us to the dance on Saturday at the social club, asking me if I want to join the church choir or to take riding lessons or to participate in reading groups or to tell them what my secret for staying so young is or . . . The rites of the natives who are actually colonists; because none of them were born here, because until recently there was nothing here but hills and forests and wild animals—deer and wild boars—that, every so often, approach trash cans in search of food and get caught in the headlights of a car that, drunk, is coming home after a party where V went up to the children’s room to kiss W in secret (the children will tell their parents—moving in the slow motion of a hangover—this the next morning at breakfast, their parents will yell at them that they dreamed the whole thing), X unexpectedly burst into tears, Y got naked and jumped in the pool, and Z started shrieking that it was time to drop The Bomb “over there and there and there too.”

  The unmistakable sensation of being on another planet.

  The sensation that’s been with me almost all my life and will accompany me throughout eternity.

  Now, here, it’s the early 60s.

  My favorite time period.

  I live all times at the same time; but this is my favorite, the one I tune in most often, the time where I feel most comfortable when it comes to talking about my life, my lives.

  The period when everything becomes slightly more tolerable for me, and there are times when I’m almost sure I hear, in the background, the laugh track of the watchers watc
hing me from afar.

  But now they’re all gone, almost all gone.

  And yet I can’t stop acting and transmitting.

  Like right now, here again, coming back, toward the end of 1962.

  I hear my husband’s voice telling one of the men to “be careful; that’s a very fragile device.” I think that he’s referring to me, but no: the man—I decide his name is Kowalski—is carrying, as if it were a huge, overweight infant, our television in his arms. He sets it on top of a little table, plugs it in, and turns it on. The image isn’t good, but there’s not much to see: a man holds a few papers and looks at the camera and says that no agreement has yet been reached with the Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev regarding the missiles in Cuba and the turning back of the soviet ships, which are still advancing toward the port of Havana. “The situation is more and more tense,” says the news anchor, who anticipates that “in a few hours President Kennedy will address the nation and . . .”

  It never fails, the same thing always happens: someone just has to say the word Kennedy for me to see, vividly, far clearer than on television, his head blown to bits, a few months later, on a September day in Dallas. The problem is that someone is always saying Kennedy, and the image of his head bursting apart always gives me an explosive headache. And I don’t have any problem with the name Kennedy. I never forget it. Now that I think of it, I tend not to forget names that start with the letter K. Kennedy, Kowalski . . .

  And there are even days—days when I’m particularly receptive—that I can see his brother shot down too, not long after, and his son falling from the sky so many years later.

  The man who plugged in and turned on the device looks up at me and looks back at the screen and looks at me again. “Welcome to the end of the world,” he says.

  And I smile.