Bottom of the Sky Read online

  And I have forgotten so many things since coming here.

  Even my name.

  I hope it’s not Kowalski.

  Maybe that’s why I’ve forgotten it.

  I’ll never forget you, my children. You’ve never met me, but I’ve never stopped loving you.

  The screen of the mobile phone gives me access to so many things . . .

  I could call some friends—acquaintances more than friends—but I don’t remember their numbers.

  The only phone number I have (scribbled on the last page of Evasion, in the copy he gave me that afternoon when I invaded his house with my questions) is Isaac Goldman’s and I dial it and it takes a long time for anyone to answer.

  And it’s the young voice of a woman (I don’t dare say that it’s the voice of a young woman) who tells me that Mr. Goldman disappeared some time ago.

  I ask when he died.

  “I said he disappeared, not that he died,” the young voice of the woman says.

  She asks me if I’m a relative.

  I answer that, in a way, yes.

  And there’s not much else to say, to talk about.

  The young voice of the woman explains that she’s busy, cooking and looking after her children and she hangs up and it’s as if I, from where I am, were talking to someone from another planet, to a native of a place where people still cook and look after children.

  I see that the battery of the mobile phone is almost dead, that soon it will be nothing but a piece of metal and plastic. An object as sophisticated as it is useless. An instant fossil.

  So I decide to enter a corner of the web and track myself down, locate myself.

  I go to one of those sites that allows you to—live and direct—go up in the skies, to contemplate the world from outside, a view once the exclusive privilege of astronauts and angels, to orbit high overhead until you position yourself above more or less the exact spot where you are down below.

  And, then, the descent.

  Not too fast and not too slow.

  Experiencing the cold acceleration, the warm slap entering the atmosphere and continuing down, closer and closer, over the desert, here I go and here I come and, suddenly, there I am.

  Closer and closer: a man surrounded by the sand dunes of the night.

  Sitting on the diving board of an empty swimming pool.

  I descend toward myself, guided by the faint yet clear light of the screen of the mobile phone and, suddenly, on the screen of the mobile phone I see the screen of a mobile phone wherein the screen of a mobile phone can be seen.

  I’ve abducted myself.

  I’ve swapped this no man’s land—this empty space—for the planet of another.

  I am infinite and I begin and end in myself.

  I am the universe.

  I’ve come home.

  Welcome.

  We wanted so badly to travel . . . We wanted so badly to meet you . . . We could’ve done so quickly and easily. We could’ve done it with the power of our minds alone. Projecting ourselves like light beams through space and appearing beside you without prior warning. And defeating you almost without you even realizing you’d been defeated.

  But it didn’t seem appropriate.

  It didn’t seem right.

  You—who’d dreamed so long of the day of our arrival—deserved far better.

  Something much more science fiction.

  That’s why we built the spaceships.

  We made them big and ominous and elegant and we were so happy imagining you detecting them first with the myopic pupils of your orbiting telescopes, then with your scatterbrained radar screens, and then, finally, seeing us come down from the sky and drift gracefully over your cities.

  Our spaceships—like the flying saucers in your movies—always settling above historical monuments and tourist sanctuaries. We wanted so badly to make all your fantasies come true . . . We had made so many plans: to assume a menacing or absurd or sensual appearance.

  Or all three at the same time.

  Tentacles, huge skulls housing megabrains, beautiful women wrapped in sexy diaphanous-metal outfits . . . Like a costume party. And we even considered destroying something in a ridiculous way. Knocking over the Tower of Pisa or crashing into a pyramid, silly things like that. Then, afterward, we would show ourselves as we really are and reveal our true intentions. To invade, yes. To conquer, also. To subject you, of course. But, also, to make you participants in our perfection, which, with your help, would never be boring again. Because inside of you there would always be something unpredictable, a nucleus of surprise, a potential explosion of the catastrophic.

  And, together, we would be happy.

  But it hasn’t been possible.

  It’s late now, now it’s too late.

  Here comes the last of my sunsets: a fury of colors, a chaos of clouds, shapes shifting across a sky that can’t stay still.

  One of your poets, a poet in the trenches of a war that we followed with such pleasure and that caused us such anguish, once wrote that “soldiers are dreamers.”

  We were never soldiers, but, yes, we were dreamers.

  And you were the dreams we dreamed.

  Now, the dream ends and I ready myself to fall asleep forever.

  That’s it.

  It’s off now.

  No battery left.

  Out.

  Off.

  K.O.

  I close the mobile phone and open the book, and books never lose their charge, books always function, books are always ready to be read . . . Unplugged machines that connect instantaneously to our brains and possess us and invade us. Maybe, now that I think of it, books are extraterrestrial organisms. Beings that abduct us and take us to other worlds, better worlds, worlds much better written than our own.

  . . . and it’s worth pointing out, once more, that now I think and even write with terrestrial terminology. It’s been so many years (and it’s clear that our years are not the same as terrestrial years, and that they’re not even called years) of watching and learning? that, seeing the situation I’ve ended up in, it makes more sense and is so much more poetic?, ironic?, poetic and ironic? to express myself this way. After all, this isn’t a message for my own kind because there are none of them left, but for the others, the ones I’ve made my own.

  Those distant beings I’ve watched from here, so closely; for in the end it is the eye of the watcher that determines the reality of distances.

  And it’s clear that in the resigned and final calm of my disheartened eyes (that are not eyes, that are not called eyes) also pulses and resides the impossible hope, the absurd dream that someone, some summer night, with fireworks bursting in the sky, will experience the strange sensation of feeling that they’re being watched from far far away, and they will look up and, without seeing me, will watch me watch them for the last time.

  Again, I open Evasion.

  The light is almost gone.

  No nights are darker and yet more luminous than desert nights.

  There’s no light on the ground, but there’s so much light in the sky . . .

  The stars shine brighter and better in desert.

  Out here there’s no Earthly glow to dull the glow of space.

  And so you can read by starlight.

  I open the book to the last page and—though it’s not necessary, because I could remember every word without having to see it—read, I read with my eyes wide open:

  In a way, our wild yet shy and secret love for you was, also, a kind of betrayal. We didn’t get here in time, we missed our moment. And it’s because we like to watch you so much . . . And in that way—without being able to stop watching you as I now watch the eternal sunsets of Urkh 24, of That-Place-Where-The-Most-Disconsolate-Melodies-Can-Be-Heard—time passed and time escaped us like water through our fingers, like sand in an hourglass. Please, forgive us, even though you never knew of our faults and our failure.

  And don’t ever forget us though you never got to know us.
/>   In a way, we were always there, at your side, worshiping you.

  It would’ve been wonderful to meet and speak and exchange stories.

  We had so much to tell each other.

  That’s why I’m recording these thoughts, these last ideas of the last of my kind to disappear, to vanish.

  These are the memories of someone who—though they’re no longer here, though they’re already becoming part of the incommensurable matter of oblivion—will never forget you and will remember you forever.

  The last of The Faraways.

  Always faithful.

  Semper Fi.

  III

  The Other Planet

  And so, sometimes, this planet becomes another planet.

  Thus, we travel from one planet to another without having to cross space.

  It is just a matter of crossing time and not letting it be time that crosses us, that crosses us out, that erases us from the map.

  It’s not easy, no simple thing to achieve.

  And yet, I could do it.

  But—not to confuse you—I’m not especially happy about that.

  I didn’t choose it.

  They chose me.

  If there is anybody out there, please, stay tuned.

  We’ll keep reporting.

  But I know that there’s nobody here and nobody out there.

  There’s nothing left.

  End of the World News.

  And yet I—and nobody is further away from everything than I am—keep transmitting.

  Ghosts, echoes, reflections, traces of voices and landscapes.

  I can’t help it, it wasn’t part of any equation; yet, somehow, I remain turned on, broadcasting all shows at the same time, all episodes of all seasons, trying to find the only one that interests me.

  But it’s no easy task.

  There are many, too many chapters.

  And the one I’m looking for is neither the most interesting nor the most successful.

  But it’s my favorite.

  In that episode, I appear and they appear and it is just one scene. But it is, for me, the best possible scene, the most important moment of my life, of our lives.

  Someday—I swear—I’ll find it, I’ll be able catch it, I’ll get to replay it.

  Over and over.

  Until the end of the world, until the ending of all the ends of the world.

  Welcome to the ends of the world.

  The first end of the world—the first of the many ends of your world, which is also, in part, my world—took place in the very instant of its beginning.

  Which is to say: nothing happened.

  More a Big Crack than a Big Bang.

  Or better yet: a Big Pfff.

  Something like the snap of fingers in a dark bedroom. Just a quick pop of pure energy that found nothing to burn and feed on and grow into a raging blaze, happy to live and to burn. So, merely, an order to be disobeyed; because you simply cannot obey it, no matter how badly you want to.

  Thus, the curtain that is opened or raised to reveal nothing but an empty stage without props or actors, barely illuminated by a small lamp that someone forgot and won’t even come back to find, because it doesn’t matter, because nothing matters, because it doesn’t matter to anybody: not a single ticket has been sold for this dysfunctional function that doesn’t and won’t start when all of you don’t show up.

  There are no seats left because there is no theater.

  The second end of this world was duly recorded. The second end of the world that I’ve heard of had at its center the small island of Santorini—Aegean Sea, about one hundred fifty kilometers from Crete—christened thusly in honor of Saint Irene of Thessaloniki, who burned, ecstatic, at the stake in the year 304 AD for refusing to renounce her Christian faith. The Greek nationalists refer to the place as Thera, in homage to the first Spartan commander to come ashore after the great disaster.

  It’s approximately the year 1500 BC—I’m using, so you can understand better, this banal and inexact temporal notation—when the inhabitants of the island who didn’t refer to it as Santorini or Thera but, indistinctly as Kalliste (the most beautiful island of all the islands) or Strongili (better known as “the circular island”) wake up to a roar that seems to burst from the throat of a thousand sea lions.

  The island’s volcano has opened its eye.

  Some of them run to the beach and there they see it: a wave that comes rushing toward them as if driven by the love of a mother who longs to drown her children in an embrace. And the great wave drowns them and embraces them and never lets go. And not satisfied with that, the great wave completely covers the island (they’d never seen anything like this, but it’s not like they had much time to think about what a terrible marvel it was either) and then recedes in search of a new destination, and in that way goes on to sink, one by one, all the islands in the Aegean. And when it finishes with them, the wave continues on its way toward new seas and new lands and new civilizations. That wave is like a razor slitting the throat of the world from one side to the other and, somewhere, in this version of the story of History, that same wave, so many years later, keeps rolling around, always on the prowl, ready to wipe out with its foam any sign of solidity, of solid ground.

  That wave is the same wave that shakes my bed night after night and turns me into a raft that someday, with any luck, will run aground and turn into an island where one solitary palm tree will grow. And there I am, writing messages like this one, waiting for the tide to bring me a bottle I can slip them into.

  Here it goes, here I go.

  Then—I miss my island so much—I wake up so the nightmare can continue.

  The whole world is made of mud and is surrounded by the water that the ice cubes become as they melt in my glass.

  Another whiskey double for me, please, and there’s nothing more unsettling than the light on in an empty kitchen, in the middle of the night, and someone rummaging through cupboards, trying to remember where she hid that bottle that now she can’t find anywhere.

  The third end of this world that I’ve managed to tune in (now, all alone, I pick up glimmers of the old transmissions of ancient transmitters, of those who preceded me in this task) took place at some point during the Roman Empire.

  The gods—angry or happy over one of those oh so capricious and childish matters that tend to make the gods angry or happy—descended from the heights, all together, all at once. So many gods on the surface of a planet that, weighed down by such divine weight, shifted in its orbit and got too close to the Moon and . . .

  . . . forgive me, but I’m going to pour myself another drink. A long and deep drink. A drink almost as deep as my thirst and, of course, almost being the operative word here, because nobody drinks to feel satisfied. You drink to be able to keep on drinking. Everyone gets a turn (though there’s nobody left to take a turn) and here I am taking my turn, like a glove, like a costume you take off and let fall to the side at a party, in a room on the top floor, in a house that isn’t yours. And suddenly you’re cold and, so, another drink to warm you up and to keep you here a little longer, to dream more dreams of glasses full of floating ice cubes. To dream of drinking down one of those long and tall drinks in a glass made to accommodate about a fourth of the bottle.

  Now I enter—soon I will enter—markets empty of people but full of bottles to empty. I empty bottles—I’ve found that alcohol lets me feel, at least for a while, that I feel nothing but what I feel—just so I, the perfect excuse, can fill them with messages that read “I empty bottles just so I, the perfect excuse, can fill them with messages and . . .”

  . . . the fourth end of the world took place when the Knight Templar Enric Coriolis de Vallvidrera returned home—near the Pyrenees, on a rocky hillside, in a place where centuries later the luminous scepter of a very tall communications tower would rise—from the Crusades clutching a piece of wood that, he’d been told, originally belonged to the supposed cross that a supposed Messiah had been nailed to.
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br />   The piece of wood was, in reality, the abode of toxic and exotic spores. A virus as old as the world.

  Enric de Vallvidrera falls ill—fevers and deliriums slipping through the rusted cracks of his suddenly softened and disarmed armor—and infects first his family and then the village at the base of his castle. Soon the virus is traveling in the coughs of travelers and before long, when it clings to the wings of birds and the backs of fish, the die is cast.