III
“This gentleman is Pontekorvo,” she said. “Nick. An old friend. One of my best friends.”
“Rubirosa? The writer?”
A triangle of knowing looks.
“Sometimes,” he said, and Pontekorvo laughed. Did he know everything? Probably.
“Brilliant,” said Pontekorvo in a serious voice, and looked around him. “Brilliant.”
He didn’t know what to say.
She: “Everybody’s here.” But now she appeared rather worried.
“Xeno wants to talk to you,” the Greek adventurer said, and looked toward the threshold of a door behind him to the right. “Just through there.”
“Xeno? All right.”
She took him by the hand. “Shall we?”
He agreed once again, wrapped in the sphere of perfumed light that seemed to emanate from the woman or from her long white dress, which she held up with both hands to go up or down the stairs, showing her ankles. He went on walking behind her. (A line descended from between her shoulders to her waist and oscillated with her walking.) They stepped over the threshold and took a wide curved staircase down into a much grander hall than the one they’d been in. Here was more food and drink, and a whole troop of waiters and waitresses that came and went among the people. An illuminated sign announced again, “SEA.”
A woman in a blue-and-silver dress was the center of attention. A semicircle of guests gathered around to listen to her.
She whispered to him, “She’s a goddaughter of the museum owner, and its director. I’ll introduce you. But she doesn’t like me. She’s rich, extremely rich. Terrible taste.”
The woman was taller and blonder than anyone else, and her arrogance was a general challenge.
He dared to say, “I don’t want to know her, in that case.”
She smiled. “No? She’s an authority on ancient Iraqi art. In the museum basement, they have storerooms full of artworks. Mysteriously, or maybe not, the art keeps on coming. But let’s go on. We have to find Xeno.”
“Who’s Xeno?” he asked.
They were in an empty salon with very high ceilings. One wall displayed contemporary artworks—abstract paintings fashioned from different kinds of metallic fibers and textiles.
“Expensive tapestry,” she said. “Nothing more. And camouflage,” she added in a very low voice.
In the middle of the room were sculptures made of wire and tubes of all sizes. Some suggested enormous convoluted honeycombs or nets of blood vessels; others, pipe organs or complex exhaust pipes. The intestines of a giant, he thought.
They passed through a rectangular room that featured an installation entitled Negative Quarry, reminiscent of the work of the Korean sculptor Lee Bul. There were hanging pieces, like enormous aluminum candelabra, chains of varying thicknesses, mirrors . . .
“Where did they get all this?” he asked.
He had paused to examine a vast, somewhat frayed golden cloth and, framed by the cloth, a series of ceramic tablets that could have been used to make a gigantic helmet.
“It matters less where it came from than where it’s going,” she joked enigmatically. And pointing to a tower of carbon fiber that reached to the ceiling, she added, “This is from a poet who thinks he’s a sculptor.”
He was particularly struck by a huge steel sphere, in which their two very reduced reflections appeared. (Since when did he have gray hair?) The sphere had a few dents here and there. It was called The Moon. On the other side of the moon, a black monolith suggested the realistic fantasies of Arthur C. Clarke. At the bottom, a little plaque read, “To the Unknown God”—as in the offerings of antiquity—“2016.”
“What does Nick do?” it occurred to him to ask.
“Computer science. He was in charge of a lab at MIT. He knows everything, or almost everything, about cables, rockets, satellites. The slogan “Missiles into Satellites” isn’t his, though. He plagiarized it from the author of 2001, or at least that’s what Nick says. He’s a diver too. Do you know who Alan Bond is? He deciphered a clay tablet from Assyria, dating seven hundred years before Christ. It says that an asteroid that struck Earth caused huge floods in the Tyrol in 3123 BC. He connects this to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. His last project is the Skylon, a new model of a spaceship that will make flights ten times cheaper than they are now.”
“Did you see that film Gravity?”
She didn’t deign to answer.
They had entered a hallway, a tunnel, at the end of which stood a large metal hatch. The hatch opened, and she stopped and invited him to go in.
“Will you wait for me here?” she asked.
“Where are you going?”
“I’ll be back. You go ahead.”
The hatch closed with an electric hum, and soon he was standing in complete darkness. When the light came back on, he was alone in a kind of vast planetarium. He saw above his head the firmament full of stars. He heard a voice reciting—and he recognized the cadence and the Buenos Aires accent—a fragment (albeit distorted) of “The Aleph.”
The voice said, “I saw in a study of Alkmaar a globe of the world placed between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly . . .”
The cupola of the planetarium had transformed itself into an astronomer’s observatory. In the center of the hemisphere where he found himself, he saw a small rocket being lifted upright with steel cables. The whole thing began to seem like buffoonery. The outfit of the person coming toward him could not possibly be a space suit.
It was Abdelkrim who said, “Salaam aleikum,” from the other side of the glass, which reminded him of a diving mask. “Are you there?” he was about to ask. Instead he said, “I knew somehow that you would be here.”
Behind Abdelkrim was Xeno.
The voice of Borges had stopped.
“That’s the signal.”
“What signal?”
“That after this there won’t be any more signal. Look.”
Xeno showed him the screen of his iPhone.
Nothing.
They invited him to get into the rocket, which now stood at a sixty-degree angle.
“Let’s go.”
He stopped. “And what happened to Boujeloud?” he suddenly wanted to know, with an abrupt recollection.
Abdelkrim’s gloved hand squeezed his arm.
“He’s all right. Let’s go.”
He wanted to resist. “Can you give me proof?”
“You have my word, my friend.”
Xeno shook his head. “He had some bad luck,” he said. “It wasn’t our intention. AQMI let him go. But then the Americans got him—”
“It’s all right. It was for Allah,” the Moroccan cut him off.
Driss, Mohammed’s other son, appeared on one side of the spaceship. He was dressed in immaculate white overalls and held a large monkey wrench in one hand.
“Are you afraid?”
Where is she? he wondered.
Looking at Xeno, the Mexican realized that he looked a lot like the woman. Xeno said,
IV
“Joyride?”
They can because they believe they can, he thought. He realized then that he was being used. “Why me?” he said very quietly.
She moved her head. But where had she come from?
“You seemed predestined,” she told him. “Your stay in Morocco. And that article certainly helped. ‘An Asian Fable.’”
“Predestined?”
“You don’t see why?”
“Maybe,” he said, not at all convinced. “But what if it hadn’t worked?”
“That, my dear,” she said, “is a futile question.”
A siren began to sound, not very loud.
“We should hurry,” she said. “Don’t forget that they’re looking for you.”
“Looking for me?”
“You disappeared in Tangier.”
“Who’s looking for me?”
“A lot of people—Singer’s friends, the bearded ones, your ex-wife, your god
daughter.”
“Why?”
“They all have their reasons. To begin with, you infected, or helped to infect, the internet. In effect, the internet crashed, or began to—and it’s still crashing—once you put Abdelkrim’s memory card in those PCs.”
“Are you serious?”
“Bad—very bad—code. Designed at MIT. That was brilliant,” she said.
“How did I get here?”
“On a yacht, darling.”
“From Tangier?”
She nodded and said, “Pity that you weren’t able to see the scenery.”
“You think it’s funny?”
“It’s a question of time,” she said, “like almost everything. You’ll be able to laugh too, in time.”
“When did I get here?”
“Barely half a day ago.”
But, he thought, he had gray hair; he didn’t remember having gray hair in Tangier. Canities subita? Another kind of camouflage? Part of his new identity?
They were standing in front of the ship. On one side, diagonally, the name read, “Osiris.”
“It was made to scale. With SABRE engines and everything. Can it fly? Supposedly it can take us up thirty-six thousand kilometers and even a little beyond that.” She laughed—mischievously? “It’s a compact Skylon, if you like. Sound familiar? An aluminum sculpture, some two hundred feet tall that they once put up on the shores of the Thames. But I was speaking of the ship, dear. Powell and Moya, the architects, would be very proud. Bond baptized his baby in honor of those men.”
“Ridiculous,” he said.
“Well, yes.”
“This is art? We’re in an art museum, aren’t we?”
“As art per se, of course, I don’t have any comment. But I think this is also something else. There’s a message.”
“What message?”
“Shall we board?”
They began to climb the aluminum ladder through a tunnel between the thrusters, the bowels of the ship.
“It’s a game,” she said.
“What’s the object of the game?”
“Knocking out a few satellites,” she explained. “Child’s play.”
They squeezed through a hatchway. The interior looked primitive. The control cables and the air hoses were exposed, and there was barely space for two reclining seats.
“Are we going to fly?”
“Well, of course.”
“Who’s the pilot?”
“An automatic pilot will do almost all the work. Abdelkrim will have to press a couple of buttons for liftoff and landing, nothing more.”
“Didn’t they kick him out of NASA?”
“Et bien voilà,” she said.
V
“And the space suits?” he asked, half-serious, half-joking, before sitting down.
“We’ll reach a final speed of ten kilometers per second. We’ll leave the atmosphere and continue until we go beyond the orbit of almost all the satellites that we must . . . neutralize.” She looked at her watch. “The trip will take between fifty and a hundred hours. What’s that? We put on the suits down here. They’re very heavy. Neither you nor I are trained for this, but don’t worry. You can wear diapers. Here they are. Of course, you can strip; I’m not going to look. When we pass a hundred kilometers in altitude—just a few minutes after liftoff—you’ll feel better. You’ll weigh less. Shall I go on?”
It wasn’t easy to get his pants off in that position—the position of King Pacal of Palenque, he thought, the Mayan cosmonaut—in a fully reclined seat, but he was managing.
“The truth is, there are no rules,” she continued.
“Naturally,” he managed to say.
“Satellites compete for space at high velocities; this is why the fastest, but also the dirtiest, way to bring them down is simply to send something into their path. The impact of an object as small as a marble can deactivate or destroy a satellite worth a billion dollars.”
“Perfect!” he exclaimed.
“We could generate a chain reaction that would transform Earth’s orbit into a demolition derby,” she explained mechanically, while she finished fastening her suit.
He let out a first, tentative spurt of urine; he felt neither cold nor heat. He then released it all, with great pleasure.
“Once the satellites are neutralized,” she said, “we will transmit our message. Nick and the rest of the team are taking care of the transoceanic cables and those of AT&T, GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft), and their rivals, who constitute the biggest enemy in this regard. We pay for them to spy on us, right? Enemies on a payroll, like most servants. But that’s another chapter. When we’ve completed the task, we’ll return to the island of Leros to help the immigrants, who don’t stop coming, in spite of the new laws. What do you think? Nobody will look for us there. We could also go to Qamishli, the secret capital of the Kurds in the Taurus Mountains, if you like. Or to Lalish, the sanctuary of the Yazidi, on the plains of Nineveh.”
He didn’t believe a word of it, but he said, “Sounds good to me.”
“We could fail. We’ll know soon enough.”
They were sitting, shoulder to shoulder, in the little cabin of the built-to-scale spaceship, each looking at the starry sky through a separate porthole.
“Who am I running from?” he insisted.
She turned in her seat to look at him. She laughed.
“Well, who do you think you are?”
He thought, I’m a prisoner.
“Nothing,” he said out loud. “Nobody.”
He felt a tremor, but it was not the earth moving; it was the ship lifting off. He closed his eyes. He opened them. She was still there. Everything was all right.
On the terrace of the magnificent museum, everyone—from Asia, Europe, Africa, America, perhaps even from Oceania—fixed their eyes on an extraordinary event. The spaceship, no bigger than a small airplane, shooting up into the air, appeared to ignite, traced a furrow of flames, and then vanished into space, leaving behind a long, luminous tail. Everyone shouted. Exultant, Xeno turned to Nick, who was watching the sky with a flute of champagne in one hand, and embraced him joyously—as Aeneas had embraced Acestes, the lucky Mexican would write months later, at peace (without telephone, without internet), on Patmos, when the horrors and portents narrated here had already become, for the time being, things of the past.
EDITOR’S NOTE
The Skylon, an aluminum and steel sculpture in the form of a cigar, designed by Moya, Powell, and Samuely, was the symbol of the Festival of Britain in 1951. At a height of ninety meters, it was held in place by guy wires attached to the banks of the Thames in London’s South Bank district. The following year, at Churchill’s direction, it was sold as scrap and made into ashtrays.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe the writing of this book to the hospitality of my friends:
Claude Nathalie Thomas, Cherie Nutting, and Mohammed Mrabet in Tangier; Alexis Protonotarios on the island of Sifnos; Xenia Geroulanos in Patmos; and Ergin Iren in Istanbul. My thanks also to Magalí Rey Rosa, Alexandra Ortiz, Guillermo Escalón, and Horacio Castellanos Moya, who kindly read the manuscript; to Eduardo Rubio, the first Guatemalan astrophysicist, who enlightened me on orbital matters such as the Lagrangian Points; to my patient editors María Fasce and Lola Martínez de Albornoz, and to my agents Jessica Henderson and Cristóbal Pera for their advice and commentaries.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rodrigo Rey Rosa was born in Guatemala in 1958. He immigrated to New York in 1980, and in 1982 he moved to Morocco. American expatriate writer Paul Bowles, with whom Rey Rosa had been corresponding, translated his first three books into English. Rey Rosa has based many of his writings and stories on legends and myths indigenous to Latin America and North Africa. Of his many works, seven have been translated into English: The Beggar’s Knife, Dust on Her Tongue, The Pelcari Project, The Good Cripple, The African Shore, Severina, and now Chaos, A Fable. He currently lives in Guatemala City.
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sp; ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © Christina Mojica
Jeffrey Gray, a professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, is the English translator of Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s novels The African Shore (Yale University Press, 2014) and Chaos, A Fable. He is the author of Mastery’s End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2005), as well as many articles on literature and American culture. His poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Atlantic, the Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Notre Dame Review, and other periodicals. He is a coeditor (with Ann Keniston) of The News from Poems: Essays on the New American Poetry of Engagement (University of Michigan Press, 2016) and The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st Century Anthology (McFarland, 2013). He was born in Seattle, Washington, and has lived in Asia, the South Pacific, Europe, and Latin America.
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