Bottom of the Sky Read online

  I say nothing. I could tell them who my father supposedly is, which book is my favorite.

  I say that now it’s time to get some sleep

  And before I finish saying it, we are accosted and taken prisoner and our hands are tied and we’re led away in a line, walking into the night and, I’m sorry, I can’t offer more details to anyone who’s wondering how we didn’t see them coming. I’ll just say that what you can’t see in the jungle you can see even less in the desert, because in the desert there’s nothing to see. And yet, at the same time, in the desert, the desert is always watching. You feel its eyes stabbing into your back and your profile and between your eyes and you have no idea where to look. Mecca is always shifting location; and I wonder how the men who hunted us down with no need for bullets and gunshots, who took us out with the kind of perfect marksmanship that doesn’t even need to aim and pull a trigger, locate it and prostrate themselves and pray. I have no doubt that they know and recognize the exact position of that most sacred of places with the same precision and speed with which they can pinpoint the exact spot of their heartbeat. I suppose it must be some kind of reflex, sixth sense, magic without the trick. I suppose that they let go and look into the eyes of the desert and the desert looks back and winks, indicating the exact location of that all-important site.

  And there’s something nice, comforting, about being taken: our captors—unlike us—seem to know perfectly well where they are and where they’re going and the truth is I feel envy but, also, comfort and calm, and I even appreciate the exhaustion of the march. At last, we have a direction, somewhere we’re going.

  Hours later, we stop beside what appears to be an empty swimming pool, surrounded by sand dunes.

  And in the bottom of the swimming pool is an open drain and they make us go down it and descend toward the center of the Earth.

  I climb the mountain. There, on the summit, await the spaceships and the remains of all those who . . .

  They show me the headless bodies of my comrades. If there is anything worse than being shown a head without a body, it’s being shown a body without a head. And now they show me three headless bodies. And there’s nothing worse than knowing that it’s them, but not knowing who’s who, which is which.

  For some reason, they haven’t decapitated me. I have survived again. I am becoming a professional survivor. Maybe, it occurs to me, my three comrades, whose last names I never knew, were all named Kowalski.

  They’ve taken all my gear.

  I feel so light.

  They make me kneel.

  They remove the blindfold from my eyes.

  Facing me, on a kind of throne, is a man dressed in a black tunic and black mask. He looks like the Lawrence of Arabia version of Darth Vader or something like that.

  “Where did you get this?” he asks me and, from his voice, I know that it’s The Unmaker.

  The Unmaker rises and walks toward me. He walks very strangely. As if on a diagonal current of air. Like a cross between a crab and a gazelle. As if he were floating and as if the air around him were made of little lights, as if he were surrounded by an army of fireflies.

  “Where did you get this?” The Unmaker asks again. And he shows me my copy of Evasion. And he holds it with the tips of his fingers, in the same reverential way that other people hold bibles, photos of children, or programs for horse races with notes in the margins. Nobody ever held a science fiction novel that way, I think.

  And when I’m just about to answer, I realize it’s a rhetorical question, and the answer is something that I can’t understand, something The Unmaker knows—or at least senses—perfectly well.

  Then, without waiting for my reply, The Unmaker begins to speak:

  “I’ve been waiting for you. I knew you’d come sooner or later. I’ve been anxiously awaiting your arrival. And I’m very happy that you’re here . . . You’re the chosen one. Or, at least, you’re the chosen one in this variation of this world. And it’s good that it is so . . . It gives me joy, it makes me happy. I was getting so sick of this variable, of the role I’ve been assigned this time . . . For some strange reason, I’m given the most extreme . . . let’s call them fates. And I can’t forget them. I remember all of them. Comings and goings and arrivals and departures. While my friend gets almost-normal situations, boring and pleasantly domestic. Maybe it’s because his father was a rabbi. Maybe that subtracts a few points in karma’s circles. Or maybe it’s because my friend was always a kind of passive observer. I saw him again not long ago (though it’s hard for me to understand time now) and he’s still pretty much the same. Uncomprehending. Not wanting to comprehend. Just wanting. Pure feeling and no logic. I suppose that’s why things have gone better for him than for me. So little happened in his real life that very little happens in these post-lives either. He is barely aware that he’s being turned on and off and then starting over from the beginning again. Whereas I am so aware of this immortality of deaths . . . Over and over. A perpetual (to be continued . . .). And her, watching, as if she were reading us, as if she were writing us, as if she were discarding some versions in favor of others. She, who hasn’t stopped watching us since that night we went to her house and built all those men of snow and a whole planet in her front yard and . . . Why’d we do it? For love, yes. But also to do something important. Together. Because we felt that there, that night, in the snow, our brief childhood was coming to an end, so that a long, too-long old age could begin. The time of our lives is poorly plotted. The speed of humanity doesn’t match the speed of things very well and . . . I hate this desert. I hate so many things . . . Maybe that’s where the difference lies: my fuel has always been fury in the face of the incomprehensible. Fury in the face of the inexplicable nature of her disappearance and, for that reason, I’m given horrible fates, I end up in the worst places . . . And, I guess, that’s the punishment for my sins: I, who wanted to build a planet of snow, end up on a planet of burning sand . . . Still, it doesn’t seem entirely fair . . . This war. This absurd war. This other absurd war in which man is no longer wolf to man. No: now man is extraterrestrial to man and maybe it would all make more sense if we treated these ridiculous missions as interplanetary voyages, as if we were confronting aliens and not foreigners . . . After all, look at yourself: your uniform already sort of resembles a spacesuit . . . Such suits are needed to go to war, to the outermost space that exists in our world. There’s no gravity here, we float, drifting through the air and the air is unbreathable and . . . Do you understand anything I’m saying? I suppose not. And I’m sorry, but I don’t think there’s enough time to explain it. It’s a little complex. Have you heard people talk about the theory of multiple universes and multiple minds, about quantum and wave mechanics, about the false vacuum, about the relative state of all things in this world? I suppose so, because I see that you’re interested in science fiction. And, after all, a good part of the most revolutionary scientific concepts find their origin in religious texts and ancient folklore. So it’s not a new idea: the original multiverses are the dwellings of different deities . . . And I, without wanting to, have become a kind of deity. Let’s just say that here and now and for the age I am, I should be dead. But that I could have been other. I could have been others. A comic book illustrator of invulnerable superheroes, whose only vulnerability is exposure to fragments of their home-planet—there’s nothing more fatal for them than the radiations of their past, light years away—and who hide their powers behind the masks of bumbling and innocuous humans. Or a science-fiction writer writing under a pseudonym, hiding behind the façade of a government employee while imagining stories in which a police force rules multiple planets with a strict code under the motto of ‘Supervise, but do not execute, preserve, but do not dominate.’ Or someone who died years ago, too young, of a heart attack. Someone who smoked too much and who worked for a while for the military and the Pentagon, but subsequently dedicated himself to the field of physics and postulated revolutionary theories. Theories that nobody entirely
believed. So I was isolated. Me and my theories. And soon my family was also a family more theoretical than practical. Movable. A wife who dies of cancer, a daughter who commits suicide and leaves a note explaining that she was going to look for me in another dimension, and a son who specialized in composing beautiful and depressing songs: lyrics so sad and melodies with that false and mechanical joy of music boxes. A boy who found my body lying on the kitchen floor and, when he tried to resuscitate me, to bring me back, embraced me for the first time; because I would never let him embrace me and I had never embraced him. In a way, here and now, you are the son I never had. Which is why I ask and beg and order you, my son, to embrace me not to resuscitate me, but (nobody will stop you, I’ve left instructions for my followers to take their own lives right here, beside us) to embrace me, and then, with that sword you see there, to kill me.”

  I am here now, way up high. Overhead, the sky contracts and expands and, just this once, it seems to be snowing.

  Behind and down below are the ruins, the smoke, the fire in the entrails of the Earth like the tongue of a dying dragon.

  I am the lone survivor.

  I am the only one—my comrades are dead, the monarch’s subjects self-immolated to be an inseparable part of his end—who came out alive from the drain of the empty swimming pool and climbed the ladder and here I am, sitting on the edge of the diving board.

  In The Unmaker’s bunker I found one of those latest generation mobile phones. Satellite. The telephonic equivalent of a Swiss Army knife. Buttons and letters so small, an object so light and tiny . . . I felt like the clumsiest of giants turning it on. Great technological advances are smaller and smaller in size and, inevitably, seem to strive to resemble complex toys as closely as possible. The best of both worlds, I guess: extreme sophistication with childish inspiration.

  What was it that my mother sang to me as a lullaby? Yes: “Having read the book, I’d love to turn you on . . .” And after, the sound of the beginning of the end of the world. A sound that comes from nowhere because, all of a sudden, it seems to be everywhere, right here too.

  I think I’ve input my position correctly. But the coordinates are vague, barely an approximate, disorienting. It’s hard to believe that high command—or more or less high command—will deem it worth-while to put a whole operation in motion to rescue one man, someone who lived to tell the tale of a secret mission that, no doubt, nobody wants told anyway.

  And, besides, what I have to tell is implausible, complicated, uncomfortable.

  It’s hard to imagine that someone would be all that excited to transcribe my words, to put in writing how I obeyed The Unmaker’s order or plea and cut off his head with a single blow of that sword. Actually, I didn’t cut off his head: I raised the sword and brought it down—The Unmaker was on his knees offering me his bare neck—and I couldn’t be certain that the blade had cut anything; because in that instant, the precise moment of impact, the room was flooded with light and, after, there was neither body nor head. His body—though I never saw him die—vanished, as if someone had suddenly opened a door and let in one of those winds that erases and sweeps away everything. Better, I suppose, for that same wind to erase me too, for no traces or loose ends to be left, for my file to be lost forever and, with any luck, turn me into some kind of urban legend. A barracks and regiment legend. A rumor tiptoeing through the mess halls and bars and offices of military bases. A ghost story and the ghost will be me because, now, sitting on this diving board, I am a ghost already. The ghost of the ghost swimming pool in the middle of a haunted desert.

  Better to forget me, decorate me, and move on.

  Yes, here I am.

  Yes, I knock three times on the wood of the diving board, but no one asks “who’s there?”

  “To travel, to get out of my shitty hometown, to see the world,” is the standard answer soldiers tend to recall, laughing nervously as everything blows up around them, unable to believe that at one time they were dumb enough to say that, whenever someone asked why they had joined the military, why they had gone to war.

  They also recall that at one point they lied to themselves and to others and even kind of believed the lie that goes “I wanted to defend my country.”

  But it’s harder and harder for them to remember it and—when they’re already long gone, when the air they breathe seems clad in the lead casings of bullets and everything tastes like gunpowder, after they struck out and left behind everything they could no longer bear to face, because nothing was more frightening than the dead-end peace of becoming replicas of their parents—all they can think about is going home to that place they left and swore they’d never return to.

  To return home to those sweeping small-town landscapes where nothing happens but the calm contentment of knowing exactly what tomorrow will bring, because it won’t be all that different from what yesterday and today brought. To walk those short streets you know down to the last stone and, worst case, to arrive in a coffin wrapped in a flag, to be buried in the cemetery beside the drive-in movie theater, one of the last drive-ins in the universe where, every so often, they show old movies with radioactive monsters and giant women and robots who paralyze Earth as soldiers point and scream and shoot with useless weapons and, when I was a kid, I always wanted to work as one of those actors who runs away and turns back and looks up and screams and is squashed by a giant paw or struck down by a deadly bolt of lightning.

  To rest in peace.

  Rocked to the cacophony of those old movies.

  Anything would be better than getting lost forever in the desert.

  That is not my case, those were not my reasons.

  I don’t have a home.

  I don’t have an X on the map to return to and dig up a treasure that was always buried there.

  I’ve spent a long time wandering and running.

  So much time that I don’t remember where the starting line was.

  I remember, it seems, only what’s essential; as if someone decided how far back I should remember, as if someone had assigned me an exact quantity of memories: limited but enough to keep me moving.

  I remember, yes, the pistol shot that sent me out to track down two men I’d never met. I remember, yes, the photocopies of a strange book in my mother’s even stranger library.

  My mother—once an all-out hippie known, under one of those absurd Aquarian aliases, as Mothership Rainbow—crashed years ago into the asteroid of one of those illnesses with two last names.

  My mother—like many of her lysergic friends—was a devout consumer of science-fiction novels (especially the trilogies, tetralogies, pentalogies . . .) and wanted to name me Sandworm and, luckily, the employee at the civil registry refused to do it.

  In any case, my mother managed to infect me with her passion for those books that launched you into orbit, those books that sometimes were like a trip.

  I never knew my father, but before she died my mother showed me a photograph and gave me a letter he had left. The photograph showed a round man with a black and white beard and a shy smile surrounded by dogs. The man had the unmistakable air of someone for whom every day is Sunday. The caption—the photograph was cut out of the newspaper, it was an obituary—stated that it was “W. W. Zack, explorer of impossible possible worlds.” And then I felt something strange happen: the letters seemed to slide across the page, like they were dancing. And that man wasn’t named, as far as I could tell, W. W. Zack anymore, but Philip K. Dick.

  My mother said that she barely knew him, that he spent just one night at her house in the early 80s, that they drank a couple bottles of Californian wine while discussing the arrival of benign extraterrestrials, guided by minds of the young, all together now, sliding down the highway in spaceships designed through hours and hours of transcendental meditation. But the only one who arrived was me, that’s where I come from, my mother smiled a smile full of freckles.

  I opened the letter and inside there were just a couple lines, written in a twisted handwriti
ng, down toward the bottom, as if they were trying to hide away in the deepest depths of the page: “The key is in Evasion.” And two names: “Isaac Goldman & Ezra Leventhal.”

  And that was it.

  It wasn’t a great inheritance, but it was something.

  A sign.

  A star to be guided by.

  Something pointing in some direction.

  My mother told me that Zack (Dick?) had shown up on the run from the FBI, or something like that, looking for a woman, some other woman, but that he found her and seemed to make due for the time being. He told her that the woman he was looking for was a “strange woman.” Someone had told him she might be living nearby, in a suburb called Sad Songs. And Zack talked about Evasion the whole time. And my mother realized that Zack really was running from someone or something. That he wasn’t lying or hallucinating. Zack wasn’t running from one of his many ex-wives, but from something that he had discovered and that, he thought, nobody else could understand.

  Zack talked about his idea of reality (“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”) all the time and about things that to my mother were completely irreal: about androids that weren’t aware they were androids, about Disneyland as “an evolving organism,” about the message he had found in a fortune cookie from a Chinese restaurant (“Deeds done in secret have a way of becoming found out,” the little roll of paper said) about Parmenides who “taught that the only things that are real are things which never change” and about Heraclitus who insisted that “everything changes,” about the many applications of the I Ching, about “the many truths that tend to be considered science fiction,” about the supposed “plot coincidences” between his novels and parts of the Bible, and, again and again, about the morning when a strange young woman—the woman he said he was looking for—had knocked on his door:

  “Days before her arrival I’d had two wisdom teeth removed. I couldn’t write from the pain, so I called a nearby drugstore and asked them to send me painkillers. The strongest they had. A half hour later, the doorbell rang and I opened the door and there she was. A woman who was young, but who seemed far older than her years. There are people like that: people who seem to have been living for far too long inside the mausoleums of their own secret grandeur. I saw that she wore a shining gold necklace in the center of which was a gleaming gold fish. I don’t know why I asked her what it meant and she answered that it was a symbol by which ancient Christians recognized each other. All of a sudden, I stopped feeling pain and, as I stared at the gold fish, I experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, ‘loss of forgetfulness.’ I remembered everything. I didn’t just remember it, I saw it too: I saw flaming gothic sunsets over lands that couldn’t be of our Earth, I heard conversations in a nameless language, I wondered if that was the voice of God talking to Himself, and I remembered the words of Xenophanes of Colophon: ‘God is one, supreme among gods and men, and not like mortals in body or mind. The whole of god sees, the whole perceives, the whole hears. But without effort he sets in motion all things by mind and thought. He always abides in the same place, not moved at all, nor is it fitting that he should move from one place to another.’ Maybe, the key lies in, one of these nights, jumping the fences of Disneyland and replacing all the robot birds with real birds. Maybe then . . . But it is her I must find. After she left, there I was, in front of the open door, not knowing what had happened, as if I’d been singled out by the finger of a lightning bolt of absolute knowledge . . . I called the drugstore and they told me that nobody worked there who fit my description of the woman. I thought I saw her once in New York. I followed her out to Sad Songs. I lost her trail. I found you. Everything means something. And all I want is to recover that unique and definitive moment. To remember everything again so that there’s nothing left to forget.”