The Infinite Future

by Tim Wirkus

  Many of the colonists are still so rattled by the news of Earth’s destruction that they don’t think to question MacTavish’s decree, but there are a handful of colonists who are understandably skeptical. They send a delegation to Governor MacTavish, asking to see, in print, the protocols he alluded to. They just want to make sure, they explain, that everything is on the level. MacTavish hears them out, and when they finish he says he would love to help them but unfortunately the protocols dictate that only he can see them, and before the delegation can protest he has them escorted out of the government office building—newly renamed the Palace of MacTavish Triumphant—by an armed cadre from the just established Glorious Security Force.

  In the ensuing months, the majority of colonists continue to stand behind MacTavish, and not without good reason. He treats his supporters well, listening carefully to their concerns and suggestions, and granting them a fairly active role in governing the colony. It’s only his detractors who feel the squeeze of his iron fist, although not in the form of imprisonment or secret executions. MacTavish, it turns out, is something of a rhetorical genius, and he thoroughly convinces his supporters of the speciousness of the dissenters’ claims. So effective are the governor’s arguments that his supporters become more aggressively pro-MacTavish than MacTavish himself. Fearing for their safety, then, the dissenters cease speaking out against the MacTavish administration.

  That changes, though, with the unexpected arrival of a spaceship from Earth. The rocket in question touches down in the dead of night, an emergency landing en route to Mars. The five astronauts emerge from the ship and are astonished to discover that the colonists believe Earth has been destroyed. The astronauts tell the colonists that no it hasn’t, that they’ve been misled.

  Initially it seems like the arrival of these five Earth astronauts is going to shatter MacTavish’s carefully constructed illusion, and indeed the colony’s dissidents seize upon the opportunity to expose MacTavish in his lies. They go door to door with the astronauts, explaining to their fellow colonists the falsehoods that MacTavish has been disseminating.

  In spite of the astronauts’ earnest testimony that Earth has not been destroyed, though, MacTavish’s supporters become convinced that it’s the astronauts who are lying, that they’re actually moon colony dissidents in disguise, perpetrating a malignant hoax to unfairly besmirch their honorable governor. So they take the astronauts into police custody, put them on trial for high treason, find them guilty, and execute them. With this development, the dissidents give up hope. Some of them renounce their views and some just keep quiet, but the net effect is that MacTavish reigns supreme.

  Meanwhile, on Earth, the Imperial Space Agency has no idea what’s happened to their Mars-bound mission. For the sake of the missing astronauts, and for the edification of future crews, the ISA launches an investigative mission whose first stop will be the moon colony. This second ship lands in the middle of the colony’s massive stadium just after lunchtime, which makes it difficult for anyone to question the rocket’s provenance. Furthermore, the investigative team consists of over two dozen astronauts, all well armed and prepared for trouble. It’s still an uphill battle, but they convince MacTavish’s supporters that their governor has been lying to them and that Earth is fine, or as fine as it was when they all left it. At any rate, it hasn’t been destroyed by nuclear war.

  By this point, MacTavish has fled the colony, although there aren’t many places to hide on the moon, so the investigative team finds him without much trouble. They place him under arrest and fly him back to Earth, where he’s sentenced to life in prison. A new governor—honest and just—is sent to replace MacTavish, but, to a person, the colonists who survived the MacTavish years find the man’s thoroughgoing decency intolerable, and some months after his swearing-in, an investigative team from Earth finds him bludgeoned nearly to death in a dark, dust-filled crater. The moon colony project is ultimately abandoned.

  Our story was not a very original piece of work, more a collage of elements from some of our favorite stories we’d found in Contos Astronômicos, Argonauto, FC, and Contos Fantásticos. We were inordinately pleased with it, though, and it took great restraint not to show it to our parents as soon as they arrived home from Pernambuco. Instead, we sent it, under Salgado-MacKenzie’s name, to the editor of Contos Astronômicos, our favorite magazine. We used our own address, the only time we would ever do so, and for weeks we were vigilant about checking the mail, careful to bring it in before our parents could see it. And about a month later, in what I recognize now as a stroke of very good fortune, we got a letter back from the editor saying Contos Astronômicos would be thrilled to publish the story.

  When our copy of the magazine arrived—along with a check we had no way of cashing—we opened it to the first page of Salgado-MacKenzie’s story and marveled at the sight of it. Seeing our creation’s name in print made us feel like minor gods; we had summoned into existence a human being, or at least the illusion of one. Giddy with the thrill of it, we left the open magazine lying casually next to Dad’s typewriter and waited for the magic to spread.

  When Dad sat down to do some work later that day, he picked up the magazine to set it aside. When he saw the name of the author, however, he did a double-take, and unable to resist, he read through the whole story right there. When he finished, he went and found Mother, handed her Contos Astronômicos, and said, “You’ll never guess who has a story in the kids’ magazine.” Mother was as intrigued as Dad, setting down her brushes to devour Salgado-MacKenzie’s story on the spot. Of course, they shared it with their friends, and over the ensuing weeks, this concrete artifact of Salgado-MacKenzie’s existence made the rounds among São Paulo’s artistic elite.

  The story in Contos Astronômicos not only confirmed he was a real person, but it also added an intriguing new wrinkle to his persona. If he was such a promising young talent, then what to make of this publication? It was science fiction, for one thing, but even judging by the standards of that decidedly unserious genre it was a lackluster specimen, not terrible enough to be fully derided and certainly not good enough to transcend its pulpy trappings. Some speculated that the young émigré must be desperate for money but too proud to ask his friends for help.

  His detractors, Lazaretti most vocal among them, wondered if Salgado-MacKenzie’s talent hadn’t been massively overblown to begin with. Here was evidence of yet another big-mouthed young pretender whose self-promoting reach far exceeded his grasp. It was Lazaretti, in fact, who watched more diligently than anyone for every new story we produced in Salgado-MacKenzie’s name so that he could flaunt its weaknesses before an informal jury of his peers until they came to the undeniable conclusion that he, Lazaretti, was the greater talent, and Salgado-MacKenzie merely a flash in the pan. And so, for some time, Lazaretti’s legendary ego sustained not only himself but also the imaginary rival we had created for him.

  In turn, Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie sustained our family, or rather, held it together over the following decade as diverging interests pulled us each in new and different directions that threatened to tear asunder our sovereign nation of five. Mother, for instance, though less and less active as an artist in her own right, came into her own during this time as an important social connector and an arbiter of taste in the upper echelons of the Brazilian art scene. Her opinion could make or break careers, so young artists sought her out, looking for guidance, approval, and the latest gossip. She could usually be found holding court with her young protégés, either at my grandparents’ fazenda or at the luxurious downtown apartment that she and Dad had acquired a few years after our move.

  Dad, for his part, carved out a role for himself as a kind of gentleman reporter, traveling sporadically throughout Latin America to cover events that caught his interest, wiring the pieces he produced to his newspaper contacts back in the States, who published them with avuncular indulgence, as they all thought the world of our gentle and lovable fat
her.

  As for me, in the late fifties I caught bossa nova fever and moved briefly to Rio, where I pestered the scene’s young movers and shakers—Carlos Lyra, mainly, and Nara Leão—into helping me parlay my classical guitar skills into credible bossa nova chops. I spent some time—a few years, I guess—playing boozy nightclubs in Copacabana for restless crowds of hipsters and tourists until, feeling the absence of my treasured siblings, I moved back to São Paulo, where I continued pursuing my career as a third-tier bossa nova artist.

  Rex, during this time, fell in with a group of ambitious young poets who sought to revolutionize the genre by abandoning language altogether. In the context of their late-night, pot-fueled summit meetings, I believe this decision made very good sense, and if memory serves, they even produced a manifesto for their movement in the form of a manhole cover they stole from a street in front of the newly opened São Paulo Zoo, a manifesto that hung on the apartment wall of one of the young poets until subsequent political developments led to the young man’s imprisonment, as well as the confiscation of the manifesto, although the movement itself had all but died by that point, so the loss of the manhole cover was the least of their worries.

  Anne, as I believe I’ve already mentioned, was the only one of us to have inherited any natural talent for visual art. Recognizing this for the rare gift it was, Mother constantly had her apprenticed out to this or that painter or sculptor in hopes that one day Anne might become a truly great artist, someone with global, historical significance. The potential was there, Mother always insisted; Anne just needed to catch the right spark. As is sometimes the case with savants, though, Anne had little interest in the gift that came so easily to her, so she seized upon every excuse not to paint or collage or sculpt or photograph—student government, volleyball, camping.

  • • •

  Madge looked affectionately at Rex and Anne, their younger selves now buried deep within their wrinkled faces. She turned back to me with a sad smile.

  • • •

  As I said before (continued Madge), we most likely would have drifted apart entirely during this time if it hadn’t been for Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie. Amid all our other pursuits, Anne, Rex, and I always found time to keep our invented author alive. Whenever we were together—during holidays or family events—we’d find a quiet room where, over the course of a few days we’d hash out a new story to attribute to our secret creation. Sometimes we’d even collaborate by mail if one of us had an idea that couldn’t wait. We’d set up a post office box and a bank account for our melancholy Scots-Brazilian author—we split all the money three ways—and it was with great glee that we received each sporadic acceptance letter. By the early sixties, his publication history had grown robust, at least for a writer who didn’t exist. The stories we wrote had grown increasingly elaborate and had been greatly enriched by the introduction of the intrepid Captain Irena Sertôrian, a fictional alter ego for our fictional alter ego. We found this layering delightful, and in a way Irena Sertôrian felt more real to us than Salgado-MacKenzie ever had, or if not more real, more vivid somehow, as if some deep mathematical principle were at play by which a fraud multiplied by a fraud produces something unshakable and true.

  In spite of this potency, and in spite of the project’s longevity, we never stopped thinking of it as a joke, although on whom we really couldn’t say. Our parents’ crowd had long since forgotten about Salgado-MacKenzie, even Lazaretti, whose grudge, starved of fresh insults from its target, had slowly withered and died. What was the point of the whole charade then? All we knew was that we found continuing hilarity, even as Rex and I passed from our teens into our early twenties, in maintaining the illusion that Salgado-MacKenzie existed as a living, breathing person, a charming mutual friend who bound the three of us together.

  However, that bond, arising as it did from a fictional entity, could not hold forever. Even the powers of Irena Sertôrian couldn’t prevent the utter dissolution that visited our family in the late 1960s.

  Ever since we’d moved to Brazil, there’d been a running joke among some of my parents’ friends that, given his nationality and his penchant for solitary travel, Dad must be a CIA agent. Whenever he returned from one of his trips, these friends would laughingly ask him how many democratically elected heads of state he’d helped depose this time. Of course, none of these friends really believed that Dad was a shadowy agent of US imperialism—not at all. That was the joke: Dad was such a sweetheart, such a gentle soul, that he’d be the last person who might work for the CIA.

  During the years of the military dictatorship, however, the jokes stopped. Given the USA’s involvement in the coup of ’64, the CIA had ceased to be funny, and anyway, many of the people who had made the joke in the first place were now fleeing the country to avoid imprisonment or worse, and no one who remained wanted to accuse my father, even in jest, of something so ugly. They liked Dad. A sweet, sweet man, they always said.

  It was about six months after President Costa e Silva shut down the National Congress with the AI-5 when Mother discovered that Dad actually did work for the CIA. Even now, none of us is quite sure what the damning bit of evidence was, or if instead the discovery came about after years of accumulating suspicions. What we do know is that one night in July they had a spectacular fight behind closed doors after a family dinner at the fazenda celebrating Anne’s first one-woman show: Abstractions and Apologies. Their private conversation escalated in volume very quickly, so that the three of us, still sitting in the dining room, could hear every word.

  Dad denied everything at first, laughing off the accusation, but then Mother said if he had any respect for her and for all the years they’d been together, for all the trust they’d built during that time, he would tell her the truth. From the dining room table we strained to hear his response, which apparently was too quietly spoken for my mother as well.

  “Say it so I can hear you,” she said.

  There was a long pause, and then he said, “I work for the CIA, but it’s not what you think.”

  Another long pause. When conversation resumed, our parents—likely remembering our proximity in the dining room—spoke with discreetly lowered voices. According to the terse report Mother gave us two days later, she’d told Dad that their marriage was over, that he was no longer part of the family. Stung less, perhaps, by the political implications of what Dad had done—Mother was always considerably more conservative than she let on—and more by the personal betrayal, Mother demanded that Dad leave the house immediately, that he return to the States on the first flight he could catch. There had been pleading and cajoling, but Mother stood firm. Finally, Dad said he’d move out, if that was what she wanted, but he couldn’t leave the country. It just wasn’t in the cards. Mother said that if he didn’t leave, she’d blow his cover, telling everyone she knew who he really was and what he’d secretly been up to for all these years. Whether he liked it or not, Dad was finished as a spy in her homeland.

  So he left. Before we had time to process any of this, rumors of Dad’s nefarious CIA involvement began circulating among Brazil’s artistic elite. I don’t think Mother ratted him out. I think instead that their friends merely put the same pieces together that she had. The talk was ugly, though, and we as his children weren’t shielded from it in the least. At poetry readings and gallery openings, our own contemporaries and those of our parents spat vile tales of Dad’s espionage directly in our faces.

  Our father, they said, had slipped like a shadow into the private chambers of left-wing activists and government leaders and murdered them by means as sinister as they were undetectable—exotic poisons, impossibly thin knife blades, complex strangleholds. These methods, as well as the latest CIA torture strategies, he’d taught to local police forces throughout Latin America so that they could interrogate, and when necessary eliminate, factions the US government found undesirable. And with a voice like the buzzing of carrion flies, our father had sp
oken out via pirate radio stations to rural villages across the continent, urging them to embrace their basest impulses, fomenting chaos so the United States could step in and set things right. In essence he’d been an imperialist vampire drinking the blood of nubile young republics and turning them into unstoppable fascist monsters just like himself.

  Years later, we would discover—or I should say, Anne would discover, as she was the one who dug through declassified records in drab government buildings—the truth about our father’s career as a spy. During World War II he’d done intelligence work with the OSS. Not long before we moved to Brazil, he had been recruited by some wartime colleagues who’d found their way into the administration of the fledgling CIA. Dad’s specialty was disinformation and psychological warfare. So, in regions the agency hoped to destabilize, Dad had actually, as some rumors went, launched pirate radio stations from forested hillsides, disseminating alarming false reports of local government plots to imprison large swaths of the populace or burn whole villages to the ground. On more than one occasion, according to the dry, bureaucratic language of the official reports, he had “successfully destabilized Soviet-friendly regions,” providing his superiors with sufficient justification to “tactically intervene.” Dad was very good at his job, from what Anne could surmise, and when the agency lost him it must have come as quite a blow. Because, thanks to Mother, they did lose him, at least as a Latin American operative.

  With some distance, all three of us have been able to forgive Dad for what he did and even, to varying degrees, understand why he did it. At the time, though, we were as revolted by his alleged actions as anyone, if not more so. Should we have seen it coming, we wondered? Did we see it coming? Rex pointed out a handful of parallels between Dad’s shadow career and the stories we’d published as Salgado-MacKenzie. The first one, for instance, about MacTavish and his great campaign of disinformation—had we intuited our father’s secret vocation and, unable to confront it directly, channeled it into these ridiculous stories? Who could say. In any event, it wasn’t long before none of us could stand to show our faces in public, and so, in shame and horror, we all retreated to our grandparents’ fazenda.