Bottom of the Sky

by Rodrigo Fresán

  But none of that happens.

  I prevent it.

  I am science nonfiction.

  I obey orders and, the morning after that night when everyone laughed at him, I run to Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill’s house and fall to my knees before him and tell him that I am his, that I’ve realized I love him.

  Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill accepts with delight and, soon, he takes over his father’s store, opens various subsidiary branches around the country and becomes an admired businessman.

  I become the admired businessman’s enviable wife for whom the years seem not to pass. His trophy. His reward. The strange woman who mistreats him with painful delicacy, who will never give him a child, who barely lets him touch her, who drinks too much, and who always refuses to call him Jeff.

  The strange woman who now has almost nothing in common with that strange girl and with that strange young woman; because being that strange for that long changes someone. Children are much stronger than we think. By comparison, adults are merely tough. As they get older adults realize that they’re not as strong as they once were. So they get tough. Or—like me—they focus all their attention on just one thing. It doesn’t matter if that thing is strange because, after all, we live in the Age of Strange Things. What matters is to not think of other things, of other strange things.

  And that’s all.

  Sometimes, Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill—a good man, an oh so sad man—seems to be listening to voices that arrive from remote rooms, in temples that he never got to build, and he talks in his sleep about ceremonies and subjects and secret messages and absolute powers and gods who are waiting for him to call and order them to cross over to this side.

  Once upon a time there was a strange young woman who decides not to obey the orders that come to her from somewhere, from so far away, and she scandalizes everyone by going to live with Isaac Goldman and Ezra Leventhal.

  She loves both of them, they both love her, why choose just one? why can’t they both love her? why can’t the three of them adopt a single pseudonym and—who is it? where does he or she live? is it a man? is it a woman?—secure their place as the most brilliant and original science fiction writer of all time?

  Later, the young woman isn’t entirely sure what happens.

  Maybe Isaac and Ezra start to hate each other.

  Maybe they can’t maintain balance and harmony.

  Maybe they die on Omaha Beach, Normandy.

  Maybe it’s a baby that dies and which one of them was that baby’s father.

  Maybe I die, far away from them, and with time Isaac and Ezra turn into two gray old men, feeding pigeons and playing chess in Washington Square, thinking about me all the time and talking about anything but me, because talking about me hurts.

  Maybe . . .

  In any case, each and every one of the options that I manage with true difficulty to tune in aren’t any good, all of them end badly. A way of warning me that it’s better to stay where I am, to not alter the order of the movements that they have established for me from so far away.

  Once upon a time there was a planet that—for reasons of narrative functionality—I’ve given the name Urkh 24 or, if you like, That-Place-Where-The-Most-Disconsolate-Melodies-Can-Be-Heard.

  A planet inhabited by superior beings. Beings that have reached the zenith of their evolution, who no longer have anywhere to go, who are so bored of everything being so perfect.

  At some point something happens on that planet: a shift in the composition of its “atmospheric nutrients” or something like that. Or a virus. Or, simply, sooner or later what happens to any place where everything functions perfectly, where no one wants for anything.

  Entropy.

  End of the line.

  Then the inhabitants of Urkh 24 or That-Place-Where-The-Most-Disconsolate-Melodies-Can-Be-Heard begin to search for a planet with characteristics similar to their own. A planet where they could take refuge and start over.

  Then the inhabitants of Urkh 24 or That-Place-Where-The-Most-Disconsolate-Melodies-Can-Be-Heard discover our planet.

  And, over the years, they proceed to pick out human beings to function as antennas, to transmit everything that happens here.

  They create a secret species.

  Strange men and strange women and that strange young woman I once was and still am.

  Every native of Urkh 24 or That-Place-Where-The-Most-Disconsolate-Melodies-Can-Be-Heard—operators or employers or watchers or readers or directors or editors; call them whatever you like—has one at their disposal.

  And they care for them.

  They keep them from breaking down.

  They’re so proud of them.

  Sometimes they break, commit suicide.

  Or end up in a room with padded walls.

  Or enter boring monasteries where nothing ever happens.

  But there are so many of us . . .

  There’s always a new model, a new story.

  And they start observing us with our own eyes.

  Carefully.

  All the time.

  They can’t stop watching us.

  We’re so entertaining.

  And so, hooked, addicted to our stories, they postpone the invasion of Earth.

  They don’t want to interrupt our activities.

  They don’t ever want it to end.

  Every so often, they help us, save us, correct plot lines, and, manipulating us like stringless puppets, prevent so many ends of the world.

  And so, in the end, they forget to initiate that end of the world in which they would be the ultimate and decisive protagonists—charged with uttering the last words in the script.

  So they never come.

  They stay at home.

  Watching us.

  The spaceships they’ve built never lift off and are left atop a mountain and before long become part of the landscape, metal geological formations covered in rust, with branches and roots wrapping all around them.

  They’re so intent on watching us and saving us that they forget about themselves.

  They evade themselves, yes.

  And soon, they begin to die.

  And so, protecting us from ourselves, they go extinct.

  And as they die, the observer they’ve chosen here—the camera, the antenna, the viewfinder; whatever you like—also dies.

  Some of them close up like those demented flowers that only open at night, to give off their scent when almost everyone is asleep.

  And—even though I close my sad eyes to not know how it will all end—I like to believe, it’s not hard for me to think, they died happy.

  Once upon a time there was a native of Urkh 24 or That-Place-Where-The-Most-Disconsolate-Melodies-Can-Be-Heard.

  Mine.

  Or, better, the one to whom I belong.

  The last native of Urkh 24 or That-Place-Where-The-Most-Disconsolate-Melodies-Can-Be-Heard.

  The last and true Faraway.

  The protagonist of Evasion.

  He has not died yet.

  But it won’t be long.

  Of course, it is still a great deal of earth time that he has left (and that I have left), but it’s not too much for what I want and need to do.

  I don’t feel that close to him anymore and—I think this is proof of his quiet and drawn-out death—I can see more clearly, from here, the planet from which he watches us. It’s not like at some point point, throughout all these years, I have felt him close to me. I never saw him, never heard his voice, which I imagined across so many pages. But I would experience a certain excitement—a characteristic vibration, an intensification of certain tastes and smells and sounds and textures and sights—every time I looked at and transmitted something that, I suppose, gave him a special pleasure.

  But not anymore.

  Now it’s almost as if he weren’t there.

  Now there’s nothing but my perception of something slowly fading away and a ceaseless succession of sunsets.r />
  The days are always different on other planets. The texture and even the shape of the days—their colors and light—change depending on the composition of the air and the look of the clouds and even the mood of the people who inhabit and work them.

  The nights, on the other hand, are the same everywhere.

  The nights obey the same design and identical style of a single unknown creator.

  And yet, the nights—so like the nights on Earth—are what I miss most of my other planet.

  That planet where I was born and to which I’ll never return, but that travels with me now everywhere I go.

  That planet where I never was but always am.

  That planet with a sky like a swimming pool, dark and deep. Bottomless. A sky that’s this sky—because every sky is the sky—but that in a way, through the pure power of distance, is also another sky. A place in which to sink until you reach the bottom.

  Illuminated by the diffuse light of that sky—little by little, page by page, without any hurry—I wrote Evasion. In cars, on trains, on ferries, in funiculars ascending a mountain, at parties. Portrait of a woman writing. Elsewhere. Never at home. So, in places of perpetual motion, the most motionless book ever written. And so—large envelopes, ordinary stamps, without return address—I made my book-in-transit reach the two of them.

  I knew—all the time, at all times—where to find Isaac and Ezra; because it was I who put them wherever they were, I who tried, little by little, to bring them together, without my operator noticing or now, on his way out, without him caring all that much.

  Maybe it was his way of repaying me.

  Maybe he liked how I wrote.

  Who knows.

  Evasion was the way to tell Isaac and Ezra that I hadn’t forgotten them, that I was with them, that I was still doing everything I could to bring us back together, to keep us together forever, until the end of the world and beyond.

  The last end of this world—the ending of its ends—will occur within the next 7,590 million years and it won’t be a result of variations or adjustments in the script of its history.

  There won’t be anyone left to deal with such things.

  Or that’s what I hope.

  I hope I’m not still here, waiting.

  I hope that by then my operator has taken his last breath—end of transmission—and that I have achieved my goal long before.

  And that at that point I’m enjoying—that being’s energy which is, at the same time, the energy that keeps me functioning—the just deserts of a deserved and endless rest where even the idea of time will have ceased to exist.

  Does the idea of an end even make sense if there’s nobody left to verify it as such? if there’s nobody there to think or mutter to himself that “ah, everything came to an end, this is as far as we go?”

  Yesterday I read—as bombs exploded in a hitherto-peaceful city, and the canals overflowed with the rising tide of an expansive wave, and the fragile palazzos sank into the turbid and ancient water—that when all is said and done, this planet will be yanked out of orbit by a red and swollen Sun. And that then it’ll plummet in an interminable spiral trajectory, first breaking into pieces and then vanishing in languid sighs of vapor, leaving behind no trace of its existence.

  Other specialists in Apocalypse insist that no, that it won’t be like that, that what will happen is the Sun will go out with a click, like a door closing for the last time; and then it’ll be night, night without day, and a cold for which warmth will be like an impossible legend.

  Who knows, who cares, it’s all the same.

  What’s the point of an end if there aren’t any witnesses? An end without audience is nothing, it’s not an end.

  But before this grand finale without audience, another end will take place.

  The strange end of the Age of Strange Things.

  The end of the species.

  The end of the end of this world, our world, the how it all ended, the what happened to make everything stop happening.

  The end that they could no longer stop or keep from ending.

  As with all the best endings—with endings that are true, with true endings—nobody saw it coming, nobody could have predicted it.

  No one heard the grave voice of an oracle, there were no ominous signs at the bottom of a coffee cup or among the tarot cards, no scientist predicted that it would happen because—simply and complexly—it happened all at once.

  And this was what happened.

  So many years of so much invisible electricity energizing the air transformed—one unforgettable winter morning—into a colossal spark that provoked a definitive short circuit in the privileged brains of men and women.

  There was a sound like the sound of a book slamming shut, like a slap in the face of humanity.

  The sound of cancel your bets and forget that your number might be up.

  A sound like an orchestra crashing against the highest place, in the finale of a final song at the end of a record, a day in the life.

  A sound like the sky falling from the bottom of the heavens and crashing into the ground.

  A sound that, really, ends up being impossible to describe—and so you have to take refuge in imprecise or overly absurd similes—because it’s a sound that sounds for the first and last time.

  Debut and farewell and bow and curtain.

  Many classes of animal—excluding cetaceans and simians—will be saved from the invisible holocaust, thanks to their unsophisticated intellects. For a few seconds—saturated with waves from mobile phones, from television channels, from satellites falling out of orbit, and with accelerated particles—the oxygen burst into flame like a household appliance and entered through lungs and touched hearts and minds and that was that. Across the world, men and women and children and whales and dolphins—suddenly fossilized from inside—collapsed in houses and parks and cars and on beaches and airplanes and boats and in gymnasiums and schools and marine depths, never to rise again.

  And slowly they were devoured by the survivors.

  I can see them here and now as if I were there, because I will be there, the lone witness, living to tell the tale.

  I raise my glass and drink a toast to them and I won’t say here the number of the day and year that this thing will happen that causes everything to cease happening.

  I’ll just say that it won’t be long now.

  But that, before then, I will endeavor to alter that ending.

  Not to prevent the end.

  I’m not that strong or powerful.

  But maybe I can trade it in for, yes, a better ending.

  An ending that won’t cease to be the end of all the news in this world, but that, if everything goes well, will, at least, be a happy ending.

  This is not my last transmission from the planet of the monsters.

  But it won’t be long now.

  And, with the nearness of the end, I understand that this is not a science-fiction story.

  It’s not a science-fiction story because the only thing this story does is look back, remember, fabricate memories in the memory machine.

  No: actually, this is a love story.

  It might not be the greatest love story, but it is, yes, without a doubt, the longest love story.

  A story of love that—if you put an ear to the cold ground, against the glacial earth, against the pillow next to you where for too many nights no head has rested—is still breathing and waiting for someone to drag it up from the subterranean darkness and bring it back to the surface.

  One of those romances that obeys one of the most frequented and feared precepts of the gothic-romance genre, in that barely-futuristic nineteenth century, where the future was nothing more than a nightmare of lunar craters or centers of the Earth or dead creatures resuscitated piece by piece with the aid of lightning bolts: this is a story of love buried prematurely, a story of love buried alive.

  And sometimes I wish this story, if it were a book, had more pages.

  Many more pa
ges than Evasion.

  That it had more than a thousand pages.

  Three thousand, maybe.

  One of those great sagas where, when we come to the end, when we walk through the door of the last page, we find that we know more about its heroes than we do about ourselves, but that, in a way, those heroes are also us.

  But writing long is like reading, while writing short is like writing.

  And what interested me here—what still interests me, because I haven’t finished, because I am nearing the end, because I could touch it with my hand if I wanted, but I don’t want to—was to put it in writing; but I’m not exactly a writer nor is all of this is, exactly, writing to be read.