Bottom of the Sky Read online

  That love that initiates everything and brings you down just so you can ascend, enveloped in the spiraling and invisible revolutions of a ray that makes all the needles of the strange-energy detectors jump.

  That love that makes you suddenly so fragilely invincible, so delicately immortal.

  And then time starts to pass in a different way, in sudden and unpredictable spasms. At the beginning of love there are days that go by in a minute, there are insomniac nights that seem to occupy the space previously reserved for entire geological periods where bygone fantasies (that once we confused or wanted to confuse with true love, all the while wondering if it really was like this, if you really feel so little when you think you’ve fallen in love) were suddenly just dull fossils whose only interest resided in informing us how erroneous and primitive the romantic sentiments of our prehistory—of everything that happened (without which nothing would ever have happened) before her—had been.

  And her arrival makes Ezra and me (and Jeff too, because Jeff felt a version of the same thing, because he was always around, satisfied with being a kind of satellite, orbiting us, waiting to sate our most absurd needs with the green combustible of crisp bills) even more Faraway.

  She arrives and looks at us and says hello and we don’t see her again until a week later, when she shows up at one of the meetings we almost never attend anymore but fortunately happened to attend that time. And she asks to speak and reads a strange story. A story that takes place on another planet where neither the notion of “another planet” nor that of the future exist. It was, in a way, a realist story—a day in the life of someone who knew nothing of us, earthlings, and didn’t really care to. The daily routine of a being who didn’t seem all that different from a human (there was, yes, a single mention of silver pupil-less eyes that “like a mirror, reflected not what they saw but what they thought about what they saw; as if the eyes were a keyhole to the mind”), and who, at the end of the story, fell asleep saying: “Tomorrow will be another millennium.”

  And she finished reading and nobody said a word and she arranged her pages and took off her jacket and put it back on and walked out, and Ezra and I (and Jeff) got up and followed her.

  And reaching this point, attempting to suspend this torrent of memory in the air for a few seconds, I can’t help but wonder how it is that now, after so many years, I suddenly remember so many things that I’d forgotten or didn’t want to remember.

  I can say—and almost be convinced—that the wheels have once again been set in motion by The Incident.

  By my reunion with Ezra.

  By the photograph that Ezra gave me a few (I guess, I’m not sure of anything anymore) days ago.

  By what happened (or didn’t happen) on that morning of sun and fire.

  I can marvel at my never-suspected ability to, at the very least, attempt to understand and describe the workings of love, love being one of the most infrequent emotions in classic science fiction, because love takes up too much space inside spacesuits and cargo holds of spaceships. There is sex in science fiction, yes, and even passion, but love rarely survives long voyages to far-flung solar systems or alternate dimensions. One of the obligations of the genre—like in detective novels, especially early detective novels, where crime is more a hobby and an intellectual art than the result of a brief yet definitive instant when the rational lights of the brain turn off—is that of explaining everything, of not leaving anything out or any loose threads untied.

  And love upsets all of that.

  Better to toss it out the hatch.

  To watch it drift away, floating in space where there’s neither above nor below, no vertigos of the body or depressions of the soul, and love cannot survive.

  And yet, every so often, I remember now, there was the rare miracle. That thing that forever altered the paradoxically rigorous discipline of a genre that liked to think of itself as free, without limits of frontiers.

  And I remember an afternoon more than thirty years ago when I went to see a movie everyone was talking about. At that time (Zack hadn’t died and turned me into the well-to-do guardian of his memory and legacy yet) I was writing screenplays for the series Star Bound and it was considered part of my job to stay up to date on all things future. Science fiction had become, for me, the most earthly of jobs: looking up at the sky knowing that nothing interested me less than ever getting my feet off the ground.

  So I bought my ticket, paused for a few seconds in front of the posters that depicted a space station with Earth in the background. “Winner of ALL this year’s Oscars,” I read under the title. And I went in and sat down in the darkness and understood once again why so many fugitives—that gangster riddled with bullets at the exit to a movie called Manhattan Comedy or that presidential assassin hiding in the half-light of a double feature of Battle in Hell and Cry of War—always choose to disappear for a while in a movie theater, to pass time, to float in limbo, to escape reality, to try to trap themselves in that magical moment when we’re not entirely sure if the lights have begun to come down so the show can start up.

  The air in the theater was rank with a mixture of rancid butter and popcorn and the vegetal smoke of marijuana and the perfumes of the Orient. Most of the seats were empty, but the people there seemed to have been camped out for months. One flashed me the peace sign, another was dressed in camouflage, a freckled girl watched everything from the floor, her legs twisted in a seemingly impossible position.

  The movie opened on a timeless African landscape with apes that were no longer apes, but weren’t yet humans, then an ominous black monolith materialized and a bone transformed into spaceship that danced the mighty blue waltz of weightlessness and then there was Jupiter and the madness of a supercomputer far more sentient than the men who had built it and, in the end, a kind of hotel at the far reaches of the universe and the return home, transformed and better and, definitely, without remorse.

  And the eloquent silence of space.

  And the emptiness of that space so full.

  And the music of yesterday like the sound of tomorrow.

  And the heavy breathing of astronauts sealed in the void.

  And a new being, floating inside a placenta of galaxies and, again, the inner space that so closely resembles outer space: the same dark light, the same luminous darkness, the same weighty weightlessness.

  I’d be lying if I said I understood all of it. Later I read interviews with the director (who said very strange things) and the writer (who was one of us and with whom I’d crossed paths at some convention; he’d never seemed very friendly, I’d never been interested in his compulsive futurologist zeal, always announcing new inventions and discoveries and, later, the dates elapsed, explaining why and whose fault it was that they hadn’t come to fruition) and I don’t know if I understood better, but I knew there was nothing more to know. All I knew was that, when the projection finished and the lights came up in the theater, my eyes were wet with tears. I knew that what I’d just seen was a rare wonder: a science-fiction movie where the future wasn’t acting like the future. For once, there was no emphasis on it: the future was normal, the future was the present, a present we could feel as it floated off into the past, waving goodbye. Nobody seemed particularly excited—and almost avoiding the temptation to look at the camera, to look at us and give a wink—when they ate synthetic foods or spoke to their little daughter via videophone from the space station. There weren’t any explanations either. You didn’t have to understand everything. Science fiction, at last, freed itself from obligations of detective mysteries. Because, though the explanations were implausible, in science fiction there was always the responsibility to give them, to justify what’d happened with what would someday happen. Not here. Here, everything we’d previously known came to an end. Here, was the beginning of the end. Goodbye to the future as promised land, the total and artificial memory of a machine as something far more sentient than the minimal and cold recollections of an astronaut, and the welcome return trip
—and not the departure—as the definitive form of transcendence. What in the movie was described as, yes, a historic moment waving to us as it drifted off into the distance so that, soon thereafter, it could come back changed forever.

  I left the theater missing Ezra like I’d not missed him in a long time. I suddenly needed to ask him if he’d seen that movie and if it hadn’t reminded him of something. Now I remember, I remember what made me remember that movie named for a year, the name of the same year in which, now, I remember seeing it and realizing the painful paradox that the most forever-young futuristic work suffers the stigma of the most ageable title of all time.

  And now I know that what made me remember it was that story that she read in that meeting of kids dreaming of a better future, not for humanity but for themselves. A future that would look nothing like their present. A future in which the future had stopped being important.

  And above and beyond all of that, that simultaneously young and old ambition and frustration—of knowing that none of them would travel into space, none of those young and zealous mental cosmonauts would be the right age when the time came to climb aboard the rockets, and that the glory of walking on new worlds or, written off for reasons of space, of leaving behind this planet minutes before the Apocalypse, wouldn’t be theirs—her voice shaping each and every one of those words as if she were saying them for the first time, as if they’d just been created and their meanings were still fresh and fragrant.

  I saw myself young again. Old fashioned but bursting with future. I watched myself listen to her read again. Standing, in the middle of a little room. Not having taken off her jacket or scarf, which covered part of her mouth and made her voice kind of strange. If we didn’t love her before (if we hadn’t started to love her the night Darlingskill screamed his last scream or stopped screaming the scream he’d been screaming for so long), it was then that Ezra and I (and Jeff, condemned more and more to being a docile and mimetic parenthesis alongside our names) knew we loved her. And maybe most important of all: we knew that it was okay that both of us loved her, because the love of only one of us would’ve been insufficient, almost an offense in the face of what she generated. We knew that we both loved her and the joy of that reencounter, of growing even closer loving the same person, made us so happy for we were certain that she couldn’t help but love both of us. And that through her love the two of us would be together forever.

  With her.

  But no.

  Then something happened.

  One of those inexplicable phenomena of which I only remember disparate fragments because of the explosion: me and Ezra and her, Jeff getting up and reading and screaming and running out of one of those meetings, and, of course, swearing to get his revenge on everyone and everything.

  And the night of the men of snow.

  Something like those photographs sent from deep space telescopes, images of cold sidereal bodies in combustion, new colors, unprecedented shapes that scientists give a name. Whatever name. Fooling themselves into thinking that, by christening them, they have some idea what they are, what they do, how they came into being.

  Have you seen them? I’m sure you have. They often appear in the Sunday paper. Dispatches not from faraway lands but from distant skies. And, below, captions like “Quintet of Stephan” or “The meeting of NGC7318A and Be, producing bursts of stellar formation” or “Panorama of the galactic nucleus in X-Ray” or “Proto-planetary disc of Alfa Piscis Austrini.”

  Things like that.

  You read the name and look at the photograph again and—like what happens with certain names given to certain people, like the name she claimed was hers and, I get it now, I don’t say or remember it here because it adds nothing, because it doesn’t define or explain her at all—you don’t get how something like that could be given that name.

  You don’t get how there could be something like that out there.

  You really don’t get the certainty of living in the center of something that, from the outside, looks like that.

  You suspect that all of that—shapes and colors—was put there for but a moment, for the blink of an eye, by someone who knows that we’re taking photographs a place where there is nothing, where there’s only emptiness, and they don’t want to deprive us of the joy and the wonder of seeing and thinking “Oooooh” and “Aaaaah.”

  Oh.

  Ah.

  Then we were separated.

  She disappeared.

  (Jeff disappeared too, probably crushed by his parenthesis.)

  I stayed, but I suppose that, for the others, by staying, it was like I disappeared.

  Life went on like in those old movies where, to give the impression of time’s passing in just a few seconds, calendar pages turn, seasons change, newspapers spin out from the center of the screen and stop in front of the spectator to reveal big headlines, the news that makes an age.

  Ezra and I communicated every so often.

  To tell the truth, it was always Ezra who found me. Always. I guess I was easy to find.

  I went back to Brooklyn like someone returning to his home planet.

  I adapted quickly.

  I became a simple being, easy to categorize. My species was so numerous it ran no risk of extinction. And so, for that reason, no one was all that worried about it.

  As for Ezra, I knew nothing of his whereabouts apart from increasingly bizarre rumors regarding his life and career. And so, every so often, a telephone ringing in the middle of the night, a package containing an assortment of objects, a postcard like the one I found slipped under my apartment door that evening when, my eyes full of stars, I came home from seeing that movie.

  The postcard, bearing a stamp of the Eiffel Tower, was a still from a different film (a French film) in which two boys ran across a bridge after a girl.

  The postcard demonstrated, once again, Ezra’s strange ability to understand everything I was doing or feeling irrespective of time and distance. On the back of the postcard, in the microscopic and precise handwriting acquired, perhaps, by those who write more numbers and initials than words, it read: “Cher Isaac, the French change the name of everything. Fortunately, they’ve kept the number. But here HAL is called CARL: Cerveau Analytique de Recherche et de Liaison. You have to see this movie. See what it makes you remember. Your space brother of blood and oxygen, floating, always. Ezra.”

  Now, looking back, I get it: I’m but a humble astronaut, descendent of an ape, dreaming of evolving; Ezra is a disorganized and confused computer trying to comprehend the secrets of the universe.

  She is our monolith.

  I said it already, I’ll say it again: my space brother of blood and oxygen disappears.

  And Jeff disappears.

  And she disappears.

  And everything seems to indicate that I’m the only one left to tell of their disappearances. To tell what happened and where they went.

  But my role isn’t that simple.

  All of a sudden, I’m an actor whose cast members have left him all alone on the stage with no lines to recite, no prompters to tell him what to say, and yet . . .

  A few days ago it was the reappeared Ezra—during The Incident, on the top floor of a tower of steel and glass and wind—who asked me, pleased with himself, his twisted smile that hadn’t straightened with the years, whether I didn’t find it a little strange that I’d forgotten . . . no, not forgotten, but that I didn’t remember “because no one forgets the exact moment that innocence ends and they realize that, from then on, life will be a succession of more or less well administered transgressions.”

  I looked at him without understanding and understood, suddenly, that I’d never understood anything.

  And then his strange voice and his strange explanations.

  The roar of thunder ever nearer.

  And the flash of the impact and the fire and the nothingness and home again—and I’ll be getting to that part of my story very soon.

  Before, long before, right before h
e disappeared, an Ezra, so young, crying with fury, not understanding why she’d gone and left us behind.

  An Ezra that is a new Ezra.

  An Ezra who was always there, waiting in the shadows, for the right moment, the perfect reason, to unleash his fury. His wrath so long held in check. The bestial eruption of a long-contained rage at not being able to run like everyone else, trapped in resentment, hidden under a thin veneer of irony, of knowing he was different and, according to many, inferior. The need to seek justice, to demand explanations. For Ezra, mentally fleeing to far-away planets was no longer sufficient. Now Ezra would focus on the destruction of the world that surrounded and constrained him. What’s the point of dreaming of other worlds when you have at hand the possibility of turning this world into a nightmare?

  I see and hear Ezra again and it’s like hearing the invisible moment when the wheels of a tornado start to spin.

  “Enough fiction; now science will be all,” Ezra tells me. And then he explains that he’s enlisting in the army, “where true power lies.”

  I can’t help it, almost reflexively my eyes are drawn to his metal wrapped legs. Ezra catches my glance and, for a second, I perceive and appreciate the enormous effort he makes not to hate me forever (though it’s clear that there is a before and an after to that glance). And Ezra says to me with words that barely escape his mouth through the small gaps between the two rows of tightly clenched teeth: “Isaac: they won’t care how my body marches or files. What they’ll care about is the vertiginous velocity at which my mind runs and flies.”

  Then Ezra shuts himself in the basement and reads books and discovers formulas and barely speaks to anyone and, a few months later, mails out an envelope crammed with his notes to some branch of the military. And a few days later they come for him. And they tell him that he doesn’t even have to pack, that everything will be provided in the place he’ll be living from now on. His parents and sisters don’t really understand what’s going on, but say nothing. Over and over they read a letter signed by the president. A letter they have to give back after reading it so many times in so few minutes. And, with difficulty, Ezra gets in a big black car. And, with an odd smile, he waves to us through the window.