Bottom of the Sky Page 11

  She tells me this as if the possibility of a tumor nesting in my brain were a secondary concern and a bit of a bother, like a guest who drinks too much and, throwing drinks and insults into the air, ruins the party.

  She tells me this, I suspect, almost hoping that I’ve got some rare and terrible disease so that brand new machine will get a chance to bestow on me the privilege of detecting it and thereby, with the digital and digitalized seal of a laser, sign my death warrant. The certificate of the beginning of my end with no need for a second opinion because, the assistant explains, the precision and accuracy of the diagnosis would be 99.9 percent.

  The assistant—reappearing now in her more or less futuristic flight-attendant uniform—leaves me alone and there I am, machine at last, robot in part, contemplating the gap-toothed-smile of the Manhattan skyline.

  Tzimtzum . . . tzimtzum . . . tzimtzum . . . the machine breaths.

  And it’s then, just then, that I see it, that I see it happen again. As if it were an old but classic episode of a television series we’ll never tire of watching. The repetition of The Incident on that small screen: an airplane (I see that it is an airplane, I have no doubt, it is a big airplane) crashing into one of the towers and the sound of the impact so close, because the tower is nearby, its shadow falling across the building where the doctor’s office is located. I hear screams too and crying in the corridors, in the waiting room. And doors opening and closing. The terrifying sound of men and women running, so much more terrifying than the sound of frightened animals running. Human beings never learned to run as they should, I think. Or, our mistake, we’ve forgotten how, in the name of civilization. I think about that, maybe, to justify my absolute stillness, my almost reflexive obedience to a woman who, no doubt, is running down the stairs right now. I realize, suddenly, that I’ve been left alone, there inside. And that I should get out. But I don’t want to mess everything up and have to start over from the beginning. I’ve already screwed up so many things in my life to, in addition, screw up my death. So I stay there a while longer, watching, on the small screen, flames bursting from the side of one building. It’s then—I expect it, I know it’s going to happen, but I don’t know how I know—a second airplane strikes the other tower. I stay there a few more minutes. Then, with considerable effort, I pull myself out of the metal cylinder, like a snake shedding its skin, and leave the office.

  The building appears to be completely empty. I get in the elevator and—the kind of thing you think about when you don’t want to think about what’s actually happening—go down to the street wondering why it’s called an elevator and not a de-elevator.

  Down below, people are running and screaming. Everyone runs and screams as if chased by one of those huge monsters whose sleep has been interrupted by a nuclear explosion or who has been blown up to the heights of a nightmare by runaway radiations.

  People run and scream and the air is full of papers.

  Love letters, files, stocks, bills, photos of loved ones whose love is about to be activated more powerfully than ever, with an exquisite and irrepressible sorrow. I can feel stabs of that sorrow spreading through the morning air, encompassing everything like claws caressing faces wet with tears.

  Everything floats.

  Now yes, now it’s real, now it happens, now it’s happening, I think.

  The air is full of things that are not air but are part of it now.

  People fall from above and the ground is strewn with random parts of bodies that’ll never be put back together.

  Sirens mingle with screams and there I am, hands in pockets, thinking about how much I’d like to have a great deal of time to describe all of it. Millimeter by millimeter. How the view has been totally and forever altered. The way the ground shimmers with millions of shards of glass, shining like diamonds in the blue morning, cracking like the thin ice of a lake under the blades of brave skaters. How millions of postcards suddenly become lies, out-of-date photographs of a place that no longer exists.

  I remembered my father, his voice, telling me about the Divine Light that broke into innumerable fragments and fell like a crystal rain across the face of the earth. I remembered my father and felt like I saw everything all at once: the totality of the devastating view and, simultaneously, each of its smallest and most secret details. Something like turning the pages of those books devoted to the classic paintings. First, a double spread with a full reproduction of a painting, full of characters and situations. And next, several pages devoted to specific details. Enlargements. The smile that, close up, seems constructed with the patience of a mosaic. The false proximity that makes us feel like proud masters of ephemeral superpowers that almost give us a glimpse of the artist’s first rueful sketch or the inevitable and playfully hidden signature (the dog’s paws marking the initials of a patron in the dirt, the maiden’s hand pointing to a cloud in the shape of a royal crest). The cracks in the oil, fine as hairs (I bend down to look at what I believe is a wounded bird and, no, it turns out to be the scalp of a head that’s nowhere to be seen), like incriminating evidence for the scholars, who will try to explain to us how it was that something like this could happen without our anticipating it, like damning clues for the experts already arriving, already here, already coming to show us everything we always looked at but never saw.

  Then I see her.

  Then I see you.

  And the sight—the sight of you who, without a doubt, see me too, that slight discomfort of eyes meeting—lasts only seconds. Because, then, something blows up. And a new dust cloud and the crush of flaming ruins covers everything. And covers us—me and her and I can’t see her anymore—as if it were the curtain running and falling across the stage, without warning, before the actors can bow, before the end of the show.

  And when does this show take place?

  Because it’s clear that something has come to an end. Not with a bang but a bang . . . bang . . .

  And so many tears.

  Because it’s clear that we’ve entered a new era, that this is the beginning of a new act in History.

  This is the Age of Strange Things.

  Welcome.

  Once, many years ago, I cut out an illustration from a science fiction magazine—I don’t remember which one, I’m not sure if it was Amazing or Fantastic or Astounding or Thrilling or Marvel or Startling Stories, it’s all the same—that, at the time, I couldn’t stop staring at. I brought it everywhere with me. I took it out of my wallet on the subway, or in the bathroom, or when I woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep.

  I don’t remember what the story that went with the drawing was about (it doesn’t matter, it probably had nothing to do with it; a lot of the time the illustrations were inserted in the pages of the magazine at random with no attention to what they depicted or to the story being told), but before long I knew every detail by heart and I think, if asked, I could’ve drawn it with my eyes closed.

  The illustration had a caption that said: “The return of Halley’s Comet in 1986.” And it showed the comet—one of those omen-bearing comets of antiquity, one of those comets that would justify the mass suicide of cultists toward the end of that century—trailing across the dark sky above a city of the future. A city of the future like cities of the future would never be and like they were imagined in times when 1986 was as distant as another planet. Details of tall and spherical buildings and people, ready to embark on their voyage, climbing aboard a rocket and, in the foreground, looking out from a sort of curving balcony, a man and a woman in space suits, holding helmets in their hands, looking up at the heavens, watching the comet as it passed. And I looked at them, and imagined I was the man and she was the woman.

  But I told myself that it would be all right if the man were Ezra and not me, if that would make her come back, and make him come back, and I could see them again.

  Even if it was only at a distance and for but a brief instant.

  As if I were just passing overhead and waving to them from on high

/>   Like a smile of ancient cosmic dust.

  Like a passing beam of light in the immense darkness, illuminating their love.

  Like a comet that had come back just to see them.

  What comes next is the end.

  It’s not really clear to me how I got home.

  Walking?

  Did I cross the ash-covered bridge with a crowd of statues come to life, dragging their feet and speaking in clipped phrases and never closing their eyes, with men and women and children who couldn’t and didn’t want to close them, aware that they were living through and taking part in an event that was plunging now and forever like an impossible-to-remove sword into the stone of the planet’s memory?

  Did I open the door to my house as the sun was starting to set?

  Did I shower to rid myself of a smell that wasn’t the smell of death, but the smell of the dead?

  Who knows?

  Does it matter?

  All that matters is that I am calm.

  And that it be the terrible and consoling calm that only comes when we accept that History, our History, the History of our History is coming to an end.

  It’s then that we like to think and feel that, with our departure, everything will end.

  Reaching this point, the worst people go to bed every night, crossing their fingers, to dream that the exact moment of their last breath will magically and justly coincide with the universe’s last sigh. You know the ones I’m talking about, they tend to appear on the eight o’clock news: those exalted prophets who, from on high, threaten Apocalypse of diverse sign and form. Everyone else—let’s call them normal people—lack such aspirations and settle for the fantasy that someone will still think of them, that their memory, snuffed out so suddenly, will ignite a spark in the memories of those who survive them and that their faces and actions will live on in the actions of younger faces.

  I understand that, for me, this won’t be the case.

  I have lived too much. More than you’re supposed to. So much that—without certain adjustments—I would have caused problems with the natural cycles of the system. I would’ve ended up remembering dead younger than myself. It would’ve been sad and uncomfortable, so I can’t complain.

  I’m the only one left to remember me and there’s not much time left.

  My work, like I said, hasn’t been important. My last name has never managed to impose itself onto my work. My last name never mutated into a personalizing and qualifying adjective; so the only thing left of my work are plots, stories, moments that some will remember but won’t ever associate with a Goldman and much less with an Isaac and I suspect that—given what has happened in recent days (days?)—the young journalist who came to visit and question me was nothing but a glimmer of optimism, a desperate illusion of my imagination.

  One ghost visiting another.

  I’m all that’s left, here, under the sky.

  Under the vast indifference of a sky that poets and religious people insist on pluralizing (the skies, the heavens, they say and recite, romantics, idiots) but that actually is one and indivisible.

  That sky that’s inside the sky and that stretches all the way up from the horizon.

  That place to which, when we were shiny and new, we looked with the peace of knowing it unreachable, happy because we had all the time in the world, never suspecting that—now I know, now I feel it—it is the horizon that comes unhurriedly and inexorably toward us. The horizon that approaches from the horizon and finally reaches us and enters us and, all of a sudden, we are the horizon.

  The other night while I was starting to write all of this down—when?—I watched an interview on television with a writer of children’s books. Best-sellers about a boy who travels back in time on his bicycle, searching for his mother. Something like that. The man answered questions with his face hidden in darkness, because he said he didn’t want to be known or recognized in the street. He insisted that it was his stories, not him, that mattered. At one point he said something unforgettable: “We write to take revenge against reality.”

  To me those words seemed spot on and true and even undeniable.

  But I’m not sure if that’s been my case.

  For me it had more to do with the fact of writing first in order to feel more or less real later.

  But I don’t think that is a better option.

  Nor do I think that there is one that is better than another.

  Everyone—Ezra, myself, Zack, whoever—writes for reasons that are entirely distinct but connected by the same impulse: we can’t stop writing and, even when we’re not writing, we feel that we are or that we should be writing.

  Like a computer at the far reaches of the universe singing its last words that were also its first words.

  Like an android that shuts down under the rain in the middle of a monologue about everything he has seen and that no one else will ever see.

  Like the last inhabitant of a faraway planet who, surrounded by sunsets, evading himself, can’t stop watching us until the last moment of his life.

  Like original beings in the genre who sought to recover that lost and broken Divine Light that my father used to talk about. Tzimtzum . . . tzimtzum . . . tzimtzum . . . the sound of the insect of electricity wearing itself out in the cables of machines far more sentient than their creators. Ingenious geniuses who, in the beginning, resigned themselves to being misunderstood because they were aware that it wouldn’t be long before they’d be elevated as classic entities, quotable, invoked over and over.

  Thus, as they went in a future past, so I wish to go.

  Of course, that’s not possible.

  My role has been different, but it’s always been something: a humble extra in an extraordinary thing, a shy and fleeting walk-on in the screenplay of a story whose importance isn’t entirely understood but, at least, in the end, is felt.

  Now it is night, now I write my own ending, which is an open ending.

  Of course, the temptation exists to close it, to have it be me who closes it, to balance myself out.

  To look for and find the moon rocks, to contemplate for a second their pale and waning phosphorescence. I saw them again not long ago, when I reorganized a closet, and they looked worn out and banal, like just some random terrestrial rock and they barely glowed, as if they’d already gotten used to living here and to not being recognized as anything special, spatial. I thought about taking them one by one and filling my pockets and going to an artificial lake at a nearby reservoir and letting myself sink, like a romantic writer from another century, until my lungs filled with water and my brain ran out of thoughts.

  Or maybe a hot bath and a glass of cold wine and slowly draining myself of blood, like an ancient Roman tribune.

  Or to burn atop my books like a Viking funeral—the smoke of my pages mingling with the smoke of the towers—before those who’ll burn books for the pleasure of burning books arrive.

  Or to carefully draft my suicide note (the best I know of is that of an Englishman who simply wrote “This is my last” and, on the next line, “word”), but I don’t think anyone would be interested in reading it; my body would be discovered days later and would spoil any patrician or classical intention. And the news of my sacrifice wouldn’t cause anybody sorrow or joy. It wouldn’t even make anybody think of their own death, learning of mine, by my own hand, writing my own ending, waiting for that other open hand, used for the first and only time, to cut off that last look that no longer sees.

  Besides, it seems to me that disappearing would be more a matter of convenience than of cowardice. And convenience isn’t a privilege I deserve.

  And so no.

  My fate is elsewhere and it is an uncertain fate. My final pages have nothing of the solid conclusions that tend to characterize the most popular science fiction: futuristic pages with rarely a doubt regarding what now won’t ever come.

  Because today—unlike in its early days (will I be able to stop thinking about all of this, my genre and my profession, so
meday?)—science fiction has no desire to anticipate what will happen here but, instead, what could happen out there, as far from this place as possible.

  Or to toy with an alternate almost-present.

  Besides, for a while now, readers of this genre seem to have migrated to other territories, to alternate worlds governed by myths more fantastical than scientific. The supposed innovation of recent years—the megalopolis like a sour and spilled Milky Way, outer space supplanted by computer wiring and neon lights and digitalized drugs; the hacker occupying the role of intrepid tamer of meteorites—never really compelled me. All those people in front of screens, barely moving, almost never leaving home and, in the best of cases, watching on their televisions, with nostalgia for what once was (with respect to the parameters of the genre) and (in reference to a possible tomorrow) will never be again: the odyssey of a galactic and colonial spaceship that can’t find its way back to earth and, meanwhile, lost, battles against a race of human-made androids who got tired of not being human. And I’ve never really been convinced by those theories regarding visits from other worlds. It doesn’t seem logical. Who would want to come here? What for? I don’t think anyone has ever been interested in traveling to our world and, if some came, it’s easy enough to imagine that they were something akin to mischievous kids. Like boys dressed in black leather jackets riding motorcycles too big for their bodies, popping wheelies (all those reports of commercial airline pilots with too many of those little bottles in the fuel tank), terrorizing and taking advantage of the residents of a small town (all those absurd stories of astral coitus), and ending up crashing on the first tricky curve (oh, the Roswell blues), or more or less clever boys who came down here, to the edge of the galaxy, and built a sand pyramid or two and then went home to their parents when the suns of their planet set. And that’s it. Nothing more. I feel it, I don’t feel it at all, I don’t feel anything anymore: there were never black men with silver pupils, or triangles devouring ships and planes in the Caribbean. Earth isn’t hollow and nobody helped us erect sacred temples and their derivatives. No messenger came here to guide or paralyze us and the halo of the Messiah isn’t a spacesuit or an energy shield. We don’t need a death ray to melt the poles and drown us: we can and are doing it on our own, we don’t need the help of extraterrestrials to destroy our planet. The Sun and the Moon were never gods; and why worship an eclipse overhead when eclipses abound here down below, all the time, day after day . . . What time is it? Time to eclipse myself, to turn myself off like a television that’s been on for too long with nobody watching or having the remotest control over its programming.