Bottom of the Sky Page 9

  “Don’t say anything. Don’t ask anything. Just listen . . . The date and place don’t matter. The names and context don’t either. It’s all classified. All top secret. That’s how it is, that’s what it’s become, my life. So I’ll limit myself to telling you that it’ll all happen on a small island in the great atoll of the Pacific. Or, if you prefer, in Washington, DC. In one place and the other, the radioactivity is the same. High levels of radiation, sometimes physical, sometimes mental, equally contaminating. Did you know, Isaac, that the creators of the atomic bomb never thought about its residual effects, about what would happen after and beyond the explosion? They only thought about the instant of detonation and not about the consequences of its expansive energy. And maybe that’s the problem: real scientists rarely read science fiction. In any case, the protagonist of this conversation, which I know, I apologize, is a monologue, answers to the codename of Doctor C. The initial of this surname that I’m concealing is, really, an Anglicized version of his true Italian surname which begins with the letter B. Doctor C. is now being interrogated by a special committee and, when they ask him about changing his surname, he responds: ‘I changed my name for a variety of reasons. It was difficult to spell, it was difficult to pronounce, and difficult to identify myself efficiently. I also changed my name because there are some parts of this country and some people who still suspect anything foreign. A foreign name is inefficient. I changed my name as in going from one country to another one changes one’s currency.’ A few days ago Doctor C. told me he was sure that, every morning, a bird alighted next to his window and melodiously intoned his name. Doctor C. is being questioned by a committee of specialists concerned with his increasingly impassioned opposition to any program related to exploration beyond our solar system. Of course the committee members, who aren’t scientists, but bureaucrats or government employees, actually do read science fiction and reveal themselves as more-than-a-little concerned about the advances of foreign nations in these areas. They’re fearful people. Doctor C. explains to them that all of this is foolishness, but he admits that it’d be premature to assume that we’re the only more or less intelligent civilization in the universe. Doctor C. presents various relevant theories. Irrelevant technical jargon that I won’t expand on here to avoid putting you to sleep. ‘Interesting’ signals in Tau Ceti, Planck Constant, optic masses, magnetic storms, things that sound much better when left unexplained and allowed to conserve the pure mystery of the letters that make up their words. One of the interrogating officers decided to reverse the polarity of the questions, referring to Doctor C.’s ‘ungovernable temper’ and to many episodes that demonstrated his explosive temperament. Doctor C. has torn down Venetian blinds, slapped his subordinates, used obscene language with stewardesses on Pan Am Airlines, gone into a church shouting that he knew the exact spot Jesus has been hidden all these years, thrown a heavy glass ashtray at a colleague during a symposium postulating the most appropriate anatomy for a rocket destined to carry human colonists to a star whose name I can’t reveal to you, either, though it doesn’t really matter: there are few things, I think, less revealing than the names of stars. The names of stars are, almost always, like the names of the most expensive medications. Then another officer opens an attaché case and begins listing figures corresponding to governmental funds that Doctor C. hasn’t managed as he should, devoting them exclusively to the development of remote-controlled weapons and, reading from a file, ‘a computer program that will enable us to always defeat the soviet chess players.’ Someone else made reference to an epidemic at the base under Doctor C.’s command caused, supposedly, by microbes—‘a fungus of the genus Loremendrum’—that breed in mid- and long-range missile fuel. Doctor C. smiles and doesn’t object and, when they ask him if he believes in the inevitability of an atomic conflict, he says, yes, and when they ask if, in the event of defeat, he would be in favor of destroying the planet, he answers: ‘Yes, I would. If we cannot survive, then we are entitled to destroy the planet.’ And this is when what I’m most interested in telling you happens, what amounts to a kind of mirrored and codified response to your anecdote about the supposedly crazy millionaire. What happens then is that an old man on the committee raises a shaking hand and asks to speak, his voice is feeble but at the same time seems to reach the farthest corner of the room with intimidating intensity, and he begins to talk about the sunrises in the small town of his childhood, about the five wars that he’s lived through in his long life, and about the irresponsibility of misusing ‘Promethean powers,’ ending with a sob ‘Oh, please, please, don’t destroy our earth.’ The silence that follows this outburst is broken by a new series of somewhat strange questions. Doctor C. admits to only reading short Western Romances and claims to know how to play the violin and, to prove it, takes the instrument in question out of a case and awkwardly plays a very simple Bach air; which excites the old man who goes off on an epiphanic and allegorical spiel aimed at the inhabitants of other galaxies and concludes, before breaking down in tears, with ‘Oh, let us rush to see this world! They have invented instruments to stir the finest aspirations. They have invented games to catch the hearts of the young. They have invented ceremonies to exalt the love of men and women. Oh, let us rush to see this world!’ Then, after an uncomfortable silence, someone asks Doctor C. if he has a son and, his voice cold, he says, yes, and that he’s been hospitalized. And then a housekeeper gets to her feet and offers testimony of the cruelty Doctor C. treated his son with, locking him in closets without food or water for entire days and, all of a sudden, a door opens and a grown man with white hair and mongoloid features comes in yelling ‘Daddy . . . oh Daddy . . . It’s raining,’ and then something seems to snap inside Doctor C., something that’ll never be fixed, and his son says ‘It’s raining, Daddy. Stay with me. Don’t go out in the rain. Stay with me just the once . . . I write you all the time, Daddy, but you never answer my letters. Why don’t you answer my letters, Daddy? Why don’t you ever answer my letters?’ Doctor C. looks straight ahead, not looking at his son, he looks like someone looking at a firing squad or at the sand of a beach after too many weeks at high sea, and says: ‘I don’t answer your letters because I’m ashamed of them. I send you everything you need. I sent you some nice stationery and envelopes, you write me on wrapping paper, you write me on laundry lists, you even write me on toilet paper . . . I’m ashamed to receive them, I’m ashamed to see them. They remind me of everything in life I detest.’ This said, the boy is taken away and the father, Doctor C., sits down and shuts his eyes. And when he opens them it’s as if nothing happened, as if by force of will alone Doctor C. has immediately erased all of it from his memory, as if he’d ordered the dishes cleared away after a long and heavy dinner. Then, after the cries of Doctor C.’s son moving off down the corridors fade away, someone proposes stripping Doctor C. of all his powers, credentials, and security clearance, and the motion is unanimously approved. And this is all I have to tell you today, my friend. Homework: Who is Doctor C.? Goodnight and sweet dreams.”

  A month later, the telephone—a heavy, black Bakelite phone that’s been with me most of my life and which I refuse to abandon—rings again around midnight. It’s December and a thick snow is falling outside and, in living rooms and dining rooms of houses, on the other side of windows, the intermittent glow of Christmas trees makes it seem like the street has transformed into a landing and launch strip for sleighs or something else.

  Ezra’s voice—more distant than usual, in the background I can make out a conversation in a language I’m unable to identify and booms and screams of birds and beasts—says only: “Hello, Isaac. I’m calling now to tell you I won’t be calling again.”

  And this is the last I hear from him until many years later, until a few nights ago, when what I’ve come to call The Incident begins.

  Of all the forms of fear, human beings have produced few as effective as a telephone ringing in the middle of the night.

  There’s no special effect more eff
ective than that: a man alone, in a dark house, not expecting anyone to call because he knows he’s the last living being in his story. And, suddenly, a sound that becomes a noise. So he gets up and walks, almost weightless with sleep, moving through the corridors of a dead spaceship that will never return home because it has become home. When he reaches the phone he waits a few more seconds. Two more noises. Like I said: it’s one of those old and heavy models whose ring sounds more organic than electronic, like the howl of an animal trained to raise the alarm. And he stares at it, as if not entirely believing that it functions.

  It’s been a long time since it rang (every so often the man lifts it to his ear, checking that it still works and, as such, the absurdity of its existence in that place) and now it rings again and finally he picks it up and hears a voice that is close now and sounds even closer.

  “It’s Ezra,” the voice says, “I need to see you.”

  I didn’t go back to bed after Ezra’s call. It wouldn’t have made any sense: his voice on the phone had shaken the sleep out of me (I’ve always been proud of being an old man who sleeps like a baby), and I made a pot of coffee and sat down to look through some old documents, as if I were preparing for an exam, worried I’d forget some important detail or be unable to answer a decisive question. I was surprised by how little I had. Just a few objects and documents capable of provoking an echo, of bringing back something from so far away.

  Inside a box I found a notebook on whose cover was written MANUAL OF A YOUNG SPACE TRAVELER/INSTRUCTIONS FOR HOW TO OPERATE, INTERACT, AND PROSPER ON THIS AND OTHER PLANETS ACCORDING TO THE PRECEPTS OF EZRA LEVENTHAL (REX ARCANA OF THE MILKY WAY) and when I turned its pages, they crumbled between my fingers. I felt dizzy and decided the best thing to do was to stay still, to sit by a window. But before long, the almost sadistic slowness of the rising sun made me feel the weight of each minute of the hours remaining before my meeting with Ezra.

  There’s nothing more unbearable than the sudden proximity of something we’ve been waiting for a long time: we can accept its remoteness, but its sudden proximity is unbearable.

  I went to my library and decided that the best thing to do was to read something. I looked for my copy of Times Without Time, but couldn’t find it. The same thing happened with Damitax and Krakhma-Zarr. They weren’t in their places, in the places I was sure I’d seen them and flipped through them a few days before. None of my books were there. All of a sudden my library was full of books by authors I had no memory of reading. They were—it was easy to tell from their covers adorned with rockets and robots—science fiction books. But who were these authors? Asimov, Clarke, Lovecraft, Bradbury, Sturgeon . . . Where had they come from? What were they doing there?

  Something strange was happening and I preferred not to think that something strange was happening to me. All of this, I thought, must just be the effect of the emotion of hearing from Ezra again, of knowing that soon I’d see Ezra again.

  I decided not to think about it anymore, I attributed the episode to sleep’s final spasm, I left the unfamiliar books where the familiar books should have been, I told myself everything would return to normal and, without being interested in confirming this, trembling, I walked to the bathroom, took a shower, went out into the street, and started walking toward the subway stop.

  It was that time of day when the air is full of flying newspapers.

  Then, the thrilling fright of seeing someone you haven’t seen in a long time. Seeing someone we haven’t seen for years is like seeing time. The time that passed, the time that never stops passing.

  The same impression you get when you see, for the first time, the credible miracle of an open clock. I’m talking, of course, about classic clocks—far more expressive than the cold red and electric light of digital devices—whose hands are pins that end up fixing you with an epitaph that, if you’re lucky, will mark you for posterity. There, all those miniscule pieces, those gears and springs and turning screws, inside such a small and fragile space, the solid immensity of the centuries.

  So, seeing someone after so many years is like looking at another part of that same mechanism. A part that’s invisible, but there, that wasn’t there to start with but that never stopped growing: the part that shows what time has done to that mechanism. The brutal erosion of the caress of the years, a caress that ceaselessly caresses a face and a smile.

  Ezra smiles.

  I’ve crossed a bridge and I’ve returned to this city and I’ve ascended to the heights of this tower and the elevator doors opened and I walked to the door with the number Ezra indicated and I knocked and nobody answered. So I turned the knob and entered an immense, empty room, a room occupying the entire floor, that opened to the full circumference of the building. An empty room with views of the city and a clear blue sky. Then I saw him. At one end of the space, on a red rug whose brightness produced an immediate irritation in my eyes, there was a desk and two chairs and in one of them sat Ezra. And Ezra seemed to possess that quality between liquid and gaseous that you see on the most distant point of a highway or at the end of airport runways. Ezra as something not entirely solid. Ezra as if painted in the aquarelles and colors of a mirage.

  I walk over to him and those few meters feel like kilometers. I tremble. I haven’t stopped trembling since I left my house this morning without really understanding why I was trembling. Now, at least, I know that I’m trembling with the excitement and fear of understanding how something known can also be unknown.

  I look at Ezra and I recognize him, but as I get closer, I see him, and I’m no longer entirely sure that it’s the same Ezra I used to know. And my surprise isn’t just due to the years that have passed, to the distance of decades suddenly reduced to the seconds that now separate me from Ezra. Ezra stands up and walks toward me, not with the difficulty that encumbered him as a child, but with a strange grace. Like before, he seems unable to move in a straight line, still weaving back and forth. Like before, again, the impression is still that he’s moving on wheels, as if he were suspended a couple centimeters above the floor. But now the effect is more convincing because it no longer depends on the considerable muscular exertion that deformed the muscles of young Ezra’s face. Now—a mechanical whirr coming from his legs—Ezra moves immutably forward, his smile perfect. I open my arms and go to him and Ezra pulls back and says: “Careful, Isaac! I’m not really sure it’s a good idea for us to hug . . . Our interdimensional compositions might be incompatible and contact could cause a cosmic cataclysm . . . And, yes, this terminology sounds a little absurd, like something taken from something Jeff wrote, if you can call that writing . . .” Then, seeing my confusion, Ezra smiles again and looks at me, tilting his head slightly. I would rather not imagine what he was thinking when he looks at me. My good health hasn’t been accompanied by—paraphrasing in lingua sci-fi, no other way to think of it or say it occurs to me—“an adequate conservation of facial tissues” or something like that. I suppose that a weather-beaten traveler from the past might recognize, in the now devastated panorama of my face, something of the meticulously designed gardens of yesteryear. Good luck and thanks for trying. I can’t do it anymore.

  What had happened to Ezra, on the other hand, was even stranger. Ezra had not aged. What had happened to him recalled something more like the process of fossilization. Everything—his skin had that perpetual tan of someone who’s flown too close to the sun too many times without taking precautions—was the same as before but, at the same time, desiccated somehow, as if reduced or distilled to its minimal and most expressive expression. I’d seen faces like Ezra’s in museums, in the immortal remains of pharaohs and emperors. Skin stretched over bones, taut as a canvas where for years everything in the world has been painted and, when there’s nothing left to paint, all that’s left to do is apply a final coat of white that fails to conceal or contain what lies underneath. Like this, close up, Ezra appears to be all ages at once. His features do not seem to want to sit still and flow back and forth, and give
the unsettling sensation of watching an insecure skull unable to decide what clothes to go out in. More than Ezra himself, I realize, what I’m seeing is a projection of Ezra. Something that gives off a crackling hum of energy: the ghost of electricity howling in the bones of your face. Ezra smiles and it’s one of those smiles that bites.

  I want to say something—Ezra raises his hand—and I discover that I cannot speak, that I don’t have anything to say, someone has decided to turn down the volume of my voice.

  Ezra speaks.

  Ezra speaks, and when he speaks I’m reminded of one of those foreign films that’s been poorly dubbed into English: the movement of his lips out of sync with the sound of his words. Ezra speaks and I don’t understand everything he says, at times waves of static drown out his words. But I listen to him as if reading him, subtitles at the level of his chest, and memorizing as I go, the first time, not having to go back and reread a single line. I’m his best possible student. More than hearing, I see his words and write them down across the suddenly hospitable surface of my memory.

  Ezra speaks and at first his sentences are short but, as he goes on they get longer and longer.

  Ezra speaks:

  “Very strange things have been happening.”

  “Welcome to the Age of Strange Things, Isaac.”

  “The cold.”

  “How could she leave us?”

  “A world without her is a destroyable world.”

  “Evasion.”

  “All times at the same time, Isaac.”