The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Yes: when it was clear governments had no interest in the moon, it was decided to privatize and divide it up. And, beginning in 2017, individuals with too much free time and bulging bank accounts started to go up and come back down. To take things up and bring back things. But, mostly, to take things up. The moon turned into a kind of chaotic attic where they transported theoretically important things (ashes of family members) or practically trivial things (ashes of family members). And to and from there embarked all those echo-space-drones, which had to be guided with skill and precision (in the end, and in exchange for considerable compensation, all those talentless kids with deformed thumbs who in their youth had done nothing but live and kill on the screens of videogames found their calling) to avoid crashing while passing through the ever longer and wider belt of space trash with ever fewer holes wherein to adjust its buckle. Obese tons of satellite and module debris. Metallic cholesterol in the arteries of space. The stratospheric equivalent of things tossed out the car window. The splinters of unforeseen accidents or the calculated entropy of machines in motion. Soon they managed to open gaps and channels through all that floating alloy and (because they couldn’t come up with anything else and because nobody thought of anything better, when it was emotionally and scientifically proven that the moon was a piece of the Earth that broke off after a cosmic collision) they thought again of the moon as it’d once been thought of. But without the sense of adventure or the senselessness of romanticism. Now, pure functionality: the moon as a possible vacation resort, as launchpad/layover for longer, future voyages, as a site for escaped passions (after millennia of staring up at it in the name of love, promising to deliver it but never coming through), like a gallery seat for contemplating the instantly-antiquated novelty of Earth’s eclipses, like a stage for future reality shows and Olympics and movies that take place on the moon and, then, with special effects, movies that take place on Earth. Yes, the advantage of empty spaces where nothing happens: everything fits and anything can happen. And, of course, right away, the most obvious and immediate aspect of the thing, the inevitable idea of being transported to a place once considered an all-powerful deity—Our Lady of the Changing Phases of Powerful Tides and Menstrual Cycles—and, from there, to ask spiritual questions and hope for divine answers, gets worn out. The moon like a “We’ve already taken the first step in your direction. Where are you, Creator? Show us your face. At least one side of it, the dark side, if possible.”

  But it’s known the enthusiasm of magnates is an unstable thing, and their mystical discipline is never that firm or constant. And so it is that, now, the Tulpas are there: on the moon and—as she often tells herself, but in a manner more appropriate to her situation—in God’s hands.

  Just a few buildings resembling Inuit igloos, a preacher-father without a parish who rarely leaves his chamber, writer sisters, a distressed and distressing brother who’s no longer good for anything but inspiring his sisters to come up with alternate and epic versions of his sorrowful sorrow.

  And all the time not in the world, but, yes, all the time on the moon to tell stories.

  “I have something new to read,” announces Eddie, the middle Tulpa sister. And Alex, the youngest, and Charley, the oldest, sigh and look at each other out of the corners of their eyes, their pupils rolling up like those of some virgins. They’re worried about her, about Eddie’s imagination that’s no longer all of theirs, and that seems to be wandering alone across the moors where it’s so hard to insert the figures of Stella D’Or or the little dAlien.

  The things that occur to Eddie are stranger all the time and, they’re sure, cannot be to the liking of the earthlings who prefer adventures and romances and doors that creak and lightning that thunders. And yet they let her do it and let her read; because Eddie eats little and sleeps not at all and says she hears voices not her own, now, over the microphone, sounding like the voice of someone talking in their sleep, of someone reading with their eyes closed, like this:

  In the desert, the days are very hot and, at night, the temperature plummets from vertiginous heights—like that Coyote betrayed time and again by some ACME-brand product, in his eternal, never-ending pursuit of that Roadrunner—and crashes into the rocks and sand.

  Beep Beep.

  The sound inside his spacesuit.

  A call from the base.

  Technical jargon oh so specialized and precise, but, at the same time, so absurd and so out of time and place.

  Simulating he’s somewhere else.

  The base.

  Wanting to make him think he’s not where he is, but somewhere far away.

  Him.

  Very far away.

  Farther still.

  There.

  You can point at it with your fingers but can’t touch it. You can imagine it because there’s so much information about it. Postcards from bygone travelers who went and came back and lived to tell the tale, to tell its tale. All of them smiling, though you can’t see their smiles behind the thick plastic of their visors. Saying “cheese,” thinking at one time they’d thought everything surrounding them now was cheese. There, on the rocky moor where the wind doesn’t blow and where the footprints of footprints are left behind forever.

  There above and then.

  The moon.

  They were on the moon and they were so happy to be there.

  And they’re not so happy now, here below.

  Like him. Unhappy. A fraud.

  The command base not thousands of kilometers but just a few meters away. Behind all those cacti he is approaching, taking small steps for man that’ll never be giant leaps for mankind.

  Here he is.

  In the Sonoran Desert, the hottest desert in the United States. A desert so hot its tongue lolls out all the way to Sinaloa, in Mexico.

  Two hundred and sixty thousand square kilometers of border/hinge desert divided into an atemporal puzzle—the image to be assembled is that of an hourglass—of desert sub-ecoregions composed and decomposed of irregular pieces, but, even still, of diffuse edges, difficult to differentiate the ones from the others. How to tell where one part of the desert ends so another part can begin? In any case, someone whose name he doesn’t know named them: Colorado Desert, Altar Desert, Lechugilla Desert, Tenopah Desert, Yuha Desert, and Yuma Desert, if anybody out there is interested in such things. Desert pieces, yes, but oh so populated and inhabited: sixty species of mammals, three hundred and fifty of birds, twenty of amphibians, more than a hundred of reptiles, a thousand of bees, thirty of fish in the few streams that escape while they can from the Colorado River, and two thousand of plants you’d never put in your living room unless they were painted by Georgia O’Keefe (and thanks to Wikipedia for all this information, that he uses to flesh out and expand the increasingly synthetic and dehydrated emails he sends to his small and increasingly distant son; and more about all of this coming up).

  A desert where there’s no sound but that deafening sound of absolute silence. A sound that, every so often, makes even more obvious and oppressive its operatic and unfathomable voice, mute and broken, with the click of some kangaroo-rat’s teeth or the flapping wings of some Chihuahua-crow (in the Sonoran Desert names of species melt together and combine, like those ancient bestiaries illuminated in monasteries and so, yes, he would become something like a castaway-astronaut) or, when you’ve already been there for a few hours, the leonine roar of the sun filling your helmet and shaking and shaking your head.

  And, true, the thing about the heat by day and the cold at night can sound—though we’re talking about the singular Sonoran Desert—like pluralistic obviousness. All deserts are really temperamental and bipolar and change mood depending on the time of day.

  But that’s the way things are here.

  Nothing new and the sparkling novelty of the oh-so-easy-to-memorize nothing to see here. The desert is unforgettable because there’s nothing all that memorable in it. The desert is like an unforgettable dream. The desert is the land of the instant
déjà vu. Of something already seen that presents no difficulty when it comes to evoking with precision where you saw it. Where? Easy, simple: what you see right now you saw right here, in the desert, about four or five minutes ago.

  Or two.

  Or one.

  Or zero.

  Which leads him to admit here—to count down—what’s so hard for his young son to accept: his father is an astronaut, yes, gee whiz what pride.

  But it’s more than likely, not to say certain (his father is separating from his mother; and the young son floats now in an atmosphere where, to keep breathing in that zero gravity, it turns out to be vital to believe nothing is definitively ending: neither the possibility of the voyage nor the permanence of love), that he’ll never get to go float in space and much less to bounce off the surface of the moon. His father, for the young son, is like an actor, but his little friends can’t see any of the movies he acts in and, for that reason, they don’t believe him. And, if they do believe you, it’s even worse.

  And for him it’s not something easy to explain to his son.

  Though the reasons for not venturing into space are really easy to understand.

  NASA isn’t what it once was. Drastic budget cuts, it’s true. But the real problem is something else.

  Space is no longer what we wanted it to be. Or it is. It’s still the same space as always: infinite and full of stars and all of that. But the men who stare up at it now regard it in a different way. Men regard space the way one regards a desert. With true resignation, because there’s nothing new to see there. They regard it the same way he regards his wife now (for whom love began as an oasis and ended up a mirage), who’s in the process of detaching from him, as if he were one of those sections the rocket leaves behind as it moves away, bound for the unknown but, nevertheless, the oh so predictable.

  So it is. For a while now, there’s been little desire to, like in Star Trek, think of space as “the final frontier” and there’s less and less enthusiasm for “exploring strange and new worlds and for seeking out new life and new civilizations” and for “boldly going where no man has gone before!”

  It’s all too many gloomy light years away.

  The supposed exoplanets (a few new ones appear every week) that, supposedly, meet the conditions for life like those on Earth are there, yes, but they take on the gaseous substance of myths. Hard to believe in them from here. They’re so far away and no future.

  Like his wife with respect to their marriage. Antimatter and black hole. Little enthusiasm for seeking a higher intelligence and possible savior. No solution appears—like the moon appears overhead, and he blocks it out with his hermetically-gloved hand—to all the planet’s problems or, even, to the problems of his home. A home that’s so far away, thinking about it from here, but feels just as far away when he’s in it.

  And the few meters separating the living room sofa where he sleeps from the master bedroom cannot be crossed even with the help of the beam me up or the warp speed Captain James Tiberius “Jim” Kirk commands from Montgomery “Scotty” Scott or Mr. Zulu during the comings and goings of the USS Enterprise.

  No.

  All of that is already gone.

  Déjà vu again, yes.

  Now, the man has turned into his own alien: cosmic outer space has been replaced by genetic interior space. And the species itself is the voyage, manipulated and modified and conditioned and, if possible, evolved.

  Yes: there isn’t anybody out there.

  Or no: there are many, but we don’t interest them anymore ever since they heard the artistic-geologic-existential synthesis sent (as if it were one of those half-sordid and half-desperate profiles in those sections or sites for, never put better, “making contact”) on one of those golden records, aboard the Voyager space probes. “Is that really all they’ve got to offer?” they might wonder. “And how did they end up picking something by Chuck Berry and not The Beatles or Bob Dylan or by the far-more-astral Pink Floyd? Clearly they’re a doomed species, better to leave them be and let them wipe themselves out,” they’ll reason, clicking telepathic tentacles and all of that.

  And yet, every so often and as the rules stipulated, he and his coworkers are sent back to the Sonoran Desert.

  Where at one time the astronauts who really were astronauts trained.

  The “true” astronauts of the Apollo missions.

  The missions aborted at the last minute or already in the air or, perhaps, falsified in a top-secret film studio (which for him and, probably for his son, would be better than anything) though, to tell the truth, if you’re going to lie, lie better and in a more exciting and dramatic way. And the truth is nobody could really think something as visually dull as that first moon landing was faked or simulated.

  And the missions of the astronauts who went and came back (and who, probably, smuggled small samples of moon to give to their kids).

  And even the missions of astronauts who died in the moment of the launch (which, he thinks on some long nights, would be better than nothing and better, just in case, not to know what his son would think of such a possibility).

  Here they are now where once all those unforgettable and legendary names were.

  The savage astronauts.

  Their names—if you were to look for them or find them as soon as you stopped looking—etched into the rock of the Sonoran Desert, which doesn’t even offer the comfort of that soundless desert from where you can look down at the noisy Earth. He’s here, but he doesn’t like it: in a landscape more lunatic than lunar and where, at one point, they created craters with the help of (ACME brand?) explosives, to increase its resemblance to the surface of the Moon.

  And here, so much time later, they put on suits whose design and comfort have improved greatly but pointlessly.

  And they go here and there, “enduring extreme conditions.” Even more extreme than those prevailing in that Mare Intranquillitatis above which orbits the Mother-Wife Ship, with a tendency to undergo turbulences and lurches: like the ones in those cheap sci-fi scenes where the whole crew slides from one side to the other, rolling across the floors of the control room.

  So better to stay here for a few more days and a few more nights.

  Better—he thinks and tells himself and convinces himself—the burning days of frustrated terranaut than those of failed crewmember about to be shot off to some kind of hotel beyond Jupiter. Growing old and dying and, in his case, never being resuscitated and never returning home corrected and enhanced and reborn.

  Better—he convinces himself and thinks and tells himself—the sunsets of sharp shadows and the sunrises dancing across the rusted and poetic skeleton of a Chevrolet Impala or a Camaro.

  Better—he tells himself and convinces himself and thinks—the freezing nights under a sky with so many more stars than the skies of cities, but where, at the same time, it’s harder to believe those stars will ever grant you a fleeting wish.

  In the desert, the stars don’t look at you. In the desert, the stars turn their backs.

  And who knows: maybe his fate will be the same as that Mexican, face tanned by UFOs, in the opening scene of that movie, right here and not so long ago, repeating over and over, like a mariachi mantra, that thing about how: “The sun came out last night and sang to me.” With the difference that he would beg the extraterrestrials to, please, not sing to him so much in the beginning and, like at the end of that same movie and without waiting so long, to take him with them. That they do with him as they please. That they study him from top to bottom and inside and out. The only thing he would ask them in return—at some point, between one invading and invasive test and the next—is that they let him speak to and see his son.

  And that his son see him and hear him on a liquid screen and, at last and forever, that he feel unconditionally proud of him.

  A brief communication in which he would tell him that he was there, floating in a place without map or sounds, lost in space, but having found himself at last.


  And that he’s seen things his son wouldn’t believe and that he’ll never let them be lost, like tears in rain.

  But, again, he doesn’t think he’ll ever see anything like that or have anything like that happen to him.

  Or that it’ll ever rain.

  The desert is the desert.

  The desert is deserted, with everything in view and nothing hiding.

  The desert is the most exhibitionist of all landscapes though it has the least to show off. “This is what there is, I never lied to you,” the desert seems to say; and that’s why few are those who fall in love with the desert, with its stark and dry sincerity, forever and ever.

  The desert doesn’t deceive.

  The desert stretches out as far as the eye can see, to the horizon, which begins much closer than in other places; because the desert—beyond the irregularities of the terrain—is horizontal. Horizontal above and beyond all those things that are not many, though what few things there are are vertical. Like all those tumultuous tumulus of tall and narrow stones with another flat stone atop them, as if a giant hand had gotten bored of playing with them, millennia ago, and hadn’t picked up the pieces before being sent to bed, punished and without dessert, never to wake up again.

  And, in addition, this is a desert with very little history or epic.

  No rebel T. S. Lawrence here saying he likes this desert because “it is clean”; no philosophical Wittgenstein thinking now that “I can well understand why children love sand”; no replicant bidding farewell with an “I’ve … seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. I’ve seen sand storms whipping through the Sonoran Desert … All those moments will be lost … in time …”

  The Sonoran Desert is a desert unfit for minors and it’s blurry and dirty and full of emptiness. A nothing replete with everything. With so many things he pretends to ignore to keep from losing hope, which is the last thing you lose. And it’s so easy to lose things in a desert. All you have to do is drop them anywhere and the desert swallows them and then they become part of the desert.