I don’t express myself here with the same techniques and tools that many stories are written with.
I express myself not in the primitive calligraphy of human beings, but in the sparkling language, the clairvoyant braille of the stars.
Thus, to lift this story up into the heavens and fix it there, as if hung by nails of light, to be read in the same way the constellations were once read, with the childish naïveté of people who needed to see human forms and figures overhead to not get lost, terrified, in the abstract expressionism of the cosmos.
But long ago I realized that it was too great an ambition, an impossible desire.
So that’s why I’ve chosen—not to settle but to aspire to perfection—to focus on one perfect and all-powerful instant.
On the indivisible nucleus.
On the Big Bang of our story.
There they are.
Isaac Goldman and Ezra Leventhal.
My love for them and their love for me.
It’s a winter night and it’s that precise instant when the snow stops, after hours and hours of white falling from the black.
Isaac Goldman and Ezra Leventhal are young and bursting with energy and the disciplined sound of their shovels, up and down, in the snow, is the sound of a new and ephemeral music. Notes that don’t take long to melt, yes, but that then—in a then that I want now to turn into an always—compose the only possible melody, the rhythm of the working of the universe.
Everything is dark but, from my window, looking out from behind the curtain, I can make out the glow of their smiles and the warmth of the vapor rising from their mouths and the sparkle of their eyes that repudiates even their lids’ intermittent interruption.
Isaac Goldman and Ezra Leventhal, splendid and resplendent and united by that rare pleasure of a common cause that they felt before but now know to be an inescapable fate.
And both the one and the other love me so much, at the same time, with the same love, that it wouldn’t even matter to them if I chose the one or the other, because they feel that they are unique and united, inseparable.
The one begins where the other ends so that the other has neither beginning nor end.
The one and the other orbit around me, the gravity of my body pulling them and sending them in perfect circles, in timed intervals of light and dark, in precise seasons. And the one and the other know that they’re so lucky to love each other and to love me that they don’t even really think about the total eclipse of my betrayal, as incomprehensible to them as it was necessary for me, out of love for them and out of love for everything in this world that contains them.
My ambition—like I said—is too great.
I couldn’t save a planet because—contrary to that cliché of the genre—someone from another planet cannot save a planet that never was and never will be theirs.
Sure, I was born here, nearby; but I’ll die so far away . . .
And, sure, I could’ve done something, at some point, for the survival of this rare and random race of which I was conceived; but there was nothing I could’ve done to alter the fate of those who chose me.
And yet, I think, maybe I can allow myself the modest gesture of saving them, the two of them.
Isaac and Ezra.
And so, with what little strength I have left—with the wavering and dwindling energy that still reaches me from my adoptive planet—I begin to tell different ends of the world.
To tell them and to discard them, to turn them off like lamps in an empty house with too many rooms.
To empty my memory and to make room in space.
In that way, inserting slight corrections here and there as I traverse this empty earth, bursting with ruins and antiquities.
To advance and retreat.
To write and delete.
To correct and insert.
Small transcendent modifications in the fabric of History. Some are unwanted (but, like I said, I was always really bad at remembering names, so I renamed many without thinking twice), others are mischievous and poetic ways of administering justice (all those awards my favorite movie never won), and others are unforeseen and secondary outcomes, collateral effects of altering proven facts just for the pleasure of contradicting or improving them.
To force the experiment to bend more toward fiction than science.
To give the future back the grace and excitement it had when any possibility could be projected onto it and to tear away the gray and boring and poorly cut clothes that it always wore in end times. Times when nobody thought about the future anymore, when no one looked up at the sky because all their heads were bent, focusing on their own bodies (mankind, tired of not finding anything or anyone in space, had devoted itself to exploring its own interior space, making aliens of itself, shifting and mutating its own bodies with surgeries and magic remedies and DNA cocktails) or, at best, on the nearby exterior of a blistering and lifeless landscape, whipped by sudden whirlwinds and sand fevers and swollen oceans and wintery summers. Every so often, yes, some incomprehensible best-seller about the incomprehensibility of time, penned by a disabled genius with a mechanical voice, or some kind of televised evangelical sermon about the improbable marvels of the cosmos, delivered by some photogenic astronaut, or some movie featuring a kind but hideous extraterrestrial who only wants to go home, or absurd men with light sabers, made them think about all of that again for exactly as long as it took them to watch the movie or read and discard the book, all of them outside and unaware of the intimate epic of my intent: the secret challenge to recreate a small and private universe.
And I lack the advantage of knowing I’ll be done in six days and rest on the seventh.
And it’s so much harder to correct something when it didn’t turn out right than it is to invent something when you don’t know how it will turn out.
To test and discard varying quantities of so many ingredients and elements and maybe then, some day, to find a way to bring them back together as close as they were on that snowy night, under my window.
Isaac Goldman and Ezra Leventhal—who have heard of my problems, of my madness, of my entrances and exits from institutions, of the electricity that’s been sent running through my atomized brain—building me a gigantic planet. An enormous snowball. Shoveling and piling and working all night until the sphere is almost as tall as my house and, when they’re finished, standing beside it are a legion of perfect men of snow—I’m not talking about the classic snowman assembled from three snowballs, but a multitude of statues—that are always the two of them, there, on their feet, watching over that world that they’ve offered me and that will infuriate my father and will end up flooding my mother’s flowerbeds and taking several days to melt and sparking the neighbors’ curiosity and even getting photographed for the front page of the newspaper in that town where some people will come to theorize that such an inexplicable phenomenon and sudden apparition could only be the work of extraterrestrials.
But none of that matters.
All of that happened after.
The important thing is the two of them.
Their love of my love.
The cold air of a night that stretches pleasantly on and on and that—though they don’t know it—will condemn them to appear again and again.
Sometimes separate.
Sometimes together.
Sometimes they aren’t even there and all I manage is to evoke the snow and the men of snow and the planet of snow.
One time that giant snowball appeared at a reception in Buckingham Palace.
One time, the men of snow were formed, in the most frozen of silences, on a beach in Patagonia.
Other times, both of them alone.
The one here and the other there.
Isaac and Ezra.
In mountains and cities, in deserts and jungles.
And even at the bottom of the sea.
Sometimes I manage to bring them together.
But I can’t keep them there long. Something happens, a failure
in the program. Like I said before: reality or one of many possible realities resists bringing them back together, letting them be in the same place.
And everything comes to an end far too quickly.
And then it starts over again
It doesn’t matter.
I don’t have all the time in the world, but I do have all the time in the end of the world (sometimes I need a little help, sometimes I invoke a dreaming soldier or a final insomniac twilight) to pull Ezra Leventhal out of the hell of being Ezra Leventhal and pull Isaac Goldman out of the purgatory of being Isaac Goldman and to bring the two of them to my strange paradise, to the heaven of my consciousness.
And there, at last, make them aware that, after so many failed attempts, they’ve crossed through the gates of the bottom of the sky, that place where I’ve been waiting for them for so long.
Like that, again and again, until I achieve the perfect harmony and acoustics of completely returning them to the fullness of that moment. The closest thing to immortality ever felt by someone who knows that time doesn’t stop, that it runs and sometimes trips and falls so that it can get back up and run even faster and . . .
Like that, again and again, until the materialization of my memory is perfect, complete, finished, and precise and even better than my always-faithful memory of what happened.
To find a way to bring the broken pieces of the divine light back together, to pull them out of the shadows into which they’ve fallen, to recreate that perfect night of a day in the life.
A night that lasts forever and, in it, Isaac Goldman and Ezra Leventhal create a world for me.
A world for me to make my own.
A world far beyond that other version of life that is death.
There, the living ghost of electricity whispering in the cold skin stretched across the bones of our craniums. Happy, because, even underneath the sadness of our faces, our skulls ceaseless smile, showing their teeth to that cold warm-hearted sphere that grows and grows and keeps on growing. And that soon will be so big that it’ll be seen and applauded by aliens from another planet who, in that moment, will abort any plan for invasion; because they’ll know themselves defenseless and inferior in the face of that unfathomable force, confronting that secret weapon that beats in the heart and the mind of my earthly and terrestrial guardians.
And, there and then, now, forever, the last and final end of the world will take place.
Nothing will be left, nothing else will happen after that, after that night.
I won’t commit the hubris of saying that it’ll be an act of compassion—because it might be nothing but an act of absolute egoism—but I can assure you it’ll be a beautiful and emotional final act. And that everything will be all right, everything will be all right, everything will be all right, everything will be all right, everything will be all right, everything will be all right, everything will be all right forever.
There they were, are, there they’ll remain, like constellations that make us strain our eyes, staring up at them, being generous and imaginative, to pick them out and convince ourselves that they couldn’t be called anything else or be arranged in a different way; to be sure that, yes, they have that form and that is what they mean.
There they were, are, there they’ll remain, with me, transformed into pure energy that I, in a final frenzy, before melting down and shutting down from the effort—devout host of this twilight zone—will transmit to every corner of the universe, to the bottom of the sky. In the glorious white and black of the night and the snow after centuries and centuries of colors. To and from precisely there. The bottom of the sky like the bottom of the biggest and most infinite of swimming pools. What ancient Hellenistic astrologers referred to as Imum Coeli. Some said hell was there. Others, heaven. Or they pointed to it as our exact point of origin as well as the precise location where our lives will end. All at the same time. Beginning and ending. The totality of every variation. All possible selves. One me looking at a Rothko painting and another me staring at a Chagall. Diving and falling. Over and over until . . . I’m convinced, then, that there must be a swimming pool that’s mine, the best of all, the swimming pool where I swim like I never swam and whose waters hide all the explanations of all the mysteries and forgotten things and, so, I, from there . . .
With a little bit of luck, someone will catch this mysterious beam—this last sigh of my final and eternal signal—and will know how to decode its pulses and convert them into a faithful and incorruptible image.
And will see the three of us.
The two of them looking at me and me looking at them.
And, overcome with feeling, they’ll think that we must have been a great culture that enjoyed the most beautiful and impassioned of endings.
And they’ll see the three of us—together at last, together forever, together in the end—and think “they went extinct, yes, but they went extinct in the highest and most sublime moment of feeling; they went extinct burning with love and not drowning in hate.”
They’ll see me—with eyes that’ll be Isaac and Ezra’s eyes—the way the two of them saw me.
And they’ll see the two of them—with eyes that’ll be my eyes—the way I saw them.
They’ll see the two of them, now and forever, as clearly as I saw them from my window: looking up at me, on that clear night, in the snow, on another planet, on our planet, on a planet that will be ours and only ours.
They’ll see the two of them suspended forever in the time and space of my love.
I’ll remember them like this.
Like this I remember them.
BLACK HOLES, COLORED LIGHTS, AND MARVELOUS MOMENTS:
Explanation and Acknowledgements
First of all: this is not a novel of science fiction.
It is—it was and it will be—a novel with science fiction.
In the end: one of the books I’ve read and reread most isn’t a novel of science fiction but a novel with science fiction.
And it’s a book written by one of the writers I’ve read and reread—that exquisite activity that’s an even better combination of amnesia and sudden recollection than reading something for the first time because it’s like finding yourself back in the company of an old friend instead of with a stranger—the most, and that writer’s name is Kurt Vonnegut.
And one of the books by Kurt Vonnegut that I have reread most is called Slaughterhouse-Five. And one of the paragraphs I reread most from one of the novels I reread most written by one of the writers I reread most—Kurt Vonnegut—is one that goes like this:
They were little things. [. . .] Billy couldn’t read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books were laid out—in brief symbols separated by stars. [. . .] Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message—describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.
I like to think that this paragraph—which isn’t just a great idea marvelously expressed but, also, a perfect and concise explication of Kurt Vonnegut’s work and intentions—contains, distant in time yet nearby in feelings of admiration and gratitude, the origin of The Bottom of the Sky.
I like to think of The Bottom of the Sky as a clump of simultaneously broadcast messages, like a storyline that wants nothing but to be a succession of marvelous moments seen all at the same time.
And now that I think of it: it was Kurt Vonnegut who in an interview said something about how all writers had the obligation, at least once in their career, to destroy a world.
In The Bottom of the Sky I destroy two.
Multiple times.
Mission accomplished, I hope.
John Cheever is the other writer who—along with Kurt Vonnegut—tends to appear, since my first book, since Historia argentina [Argentine History] in 1991, as a protective figure and extraterrestrial friend in each and every one of my books. The one and the other appear again in The Bottom of the Sky, but what surprised me most—around page 575 of Bailey’s Cheever biography—was to discover that Cheever, after the success of Falconer and his living canonization with The Stories of John Cheever, didn’t really know how to go on, what would come next. And that then—depressed and without map or compass—he started clipping newspaper articles about the possibility of life on other planets and fantasizing about writing “a novel about cosmic loneliness.”
As you know, Cheever didn’t write that novel, but a perfect novella called Oh What a Paradise It Seems where you can’t catch even a whiff of other worlds. But, on page 24 of the original edition, at the beginning of chapter 3, he makes the comment, as if in passing, that the narrator of the story is speaking to us from a more or less faraway future, as he prepares to fire a rifle into the heart of a man consciously or unconsciously responsible for multiple planetary catastrophes.
At times when I’m in a really good mood (like right now) I like to think of The Bottom of the Sky as a novel about cosmic loneliness that, I hope, makes good and satisfying company. I like to think of The Bottom of the Sky as one of those novels that—like Slaughterhouse-Five and Oh What a Paradise It Seems—seem so small on the outside, but once you’re inside . . .
And the thing from the beginning, I insist: this is not a novel of science fiction but, yes, it is fed by science fiction and by my love for a genre that, as a reader, I came to young and that I won’t leave until the end. As a writer—you who follow me already know this—I have traveled to Urkh 24 several times, where I went for the first time in the short alien-matrimonial story “La forma de la locura” [“The Shape of Madness”], in 1994, in the disappeared Trabajos manuals [Manual Labors]. And I’m reminded, all of a sudden, of Caras extrañas [Strange Faces], that now unfindable alien-Gardelian serial for the young supplement of Pagina/12. And I’ve even written a couple stories that can be considered laterally sci-fi. And already in Historia argentina—and later in La velocidad de las cosas [The Speed of Things]—there’s an invitation to stroll through a foundation devoted to the maintenance and preservation of the last specimen of the extinct species of writers. And the viral illuminati in Vidas de santos [Lives of Saints], the seismic androids in Mantra, and the space/time bicycles in Kensington Gardens . . .
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