by Tim Wirkus
Madge peered at me in concern, her folded hands resting lightly on a bony knee. To her right, her siblings stared in my direction, the light that streamed in through the window casting shadows on their now inscrutable faces. For a brief, panicked instant, I believed I might lose myself, that my mind might evaporate into the snow sheen that filled the simple room. Oblivion stretched out its gaping maw.
And then, as if some capricious god had snapped its well-manicured fingers, the strangeness passed. Once again, I was Sérgio Antunes, sub-librarian, guest in the home of the Cooper siblings, three senior citizens who had, many years before, pseudonymously written a handful of short stories that had given me inordinate pleasure over the course of my lifetime. They had also written a novel, never published, and I was here because I wanted to read it. The situation was as simple and mundane as that.
I said, “The Infinite Future—and excuse me if I’m overstepping here—would it be possible for me to read it?”
My request elicited a wheezing sigh from Madge.
“I wish you could,” she said, “but I’m sorry to tell you that the manuscript is gone. Lost to the ages, I would imagine—none of us wanted to hold on to that reminder of our greatest collective failure.”
I stifled a despairing sigh of my own. Even though I’d prepared myself for this possibility, I could feel the disappointment seeping into my tired muscles. Not only had Salgado-MacKenzie’s masterwork never been completed, but its one existing fragment was lost. This was the end of the line. Any enlightenment I hoped to obtain from Irena Sertôrian would elude me forever.
All was not lost, though. I thought back to my first encounter with Rex Cooper at that smoky hotel room party—it must have been toward the end of his tenure in Brazil—and if nothing else, I suddenly had a clearer picture of the events he’d so angrily described at the party.
“That’s why I didn’t know who you were,” I said to Rex, who looked back at me, puzzled. I realized what a non sequitur my comment appeared to be, and so I explained. “At the old apartment building,” I said. “That’s one detail from your story—the story you told at the hotel—that I’ve never been able to reconcile. Our names were on our mailboxes in that building, and if Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie had lived there, I’ve always reasoned, then surely I would have noticed his name. But I didn’t notice, because it wasn’t there. Because your mailbox would have said Rex Cooper, not Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie.”
I laughed in triumph, but Rex Cooper only stared blankly at me in response. “But that means . . .” I began. “Or does it?”
Rex’s face remained impassive.
“Did you stop by my apartment that night?” I said. “What I mean to ask is, did I truly slam my door in your face? Is that story really true?”
A pleading note had crept into my voice, and it was Madge and Anne who now sat at the edge of their seats, eager to hear what would come next.
Rex, though, only looked down at his thick-fingered hands and said, “Why would I make up something like that?” Which was both a deft evasion and an apt question, one I’d been wrestling with myself for decades.
I said, “It would mean so much to me—”
“It’s like I told you before,” Rex said. “Whatever did or didn’t happen between us, it’s over now. It’s in the past.”
“But—”
“No,” said Rex, slipping his hands into the pockets of his coveralls. “This conversation is over.”
Nobody, I think, knew quite what to do with their eyes. We all shifted our gazes awkwardly, searching for a comfortable nook where we might rest our uneasy attention.
Then Rex broke the silence. “As for The Infinite Future, though,” he said, his voice gentler now, “I think I have a copy in a box under my bed.”
I didn’t dare speak but instead looked from Madge to Rex then back to Madge.
“Well,” said Madge finally, with a light shrug. “Then I suppose Sérgio’s in luck.”
From her miffed expression, I got the sense she’d known about Rex’s copy all along.
“If you don’t want me to read it,” I began.
“No,” said Madge. “It’s fine. No reason not to.”
“I’ll be right back then,” said Rex, walking out of the room.
Anne checked her watch.
“We should head down the mountain soon,” she said. “Snow’s melting. The road will get soupy.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m ready when you are.”
Anne folded her arms with a satisfied nod.
“In a few minutes then,” she said.
On her wooden stool, Madge, lips pursed, examined her knobby fingers.
“One more question,” I said. “If I may.”
“Go ahead,” said Madge.
It was then (said Sérgio, addressing me and Harriet in the diner) that I asked about your letters, Harriet, if either Madge or Anne remembered corresponding with a young translator about thirty years earlier. It took her a moment, but when she remembered, Madge’s face lit up.
“Yes,” she said. “I do remember. A delightful young woman, by all indications. A friend of yours, you say?”
I explained how we knew each other, and told her you’ve been concerned for years that the anthology had offended Salgado-MacKenzie.
“I wasn’t offended,” said Madge, “because I never read the anthology. Should I be offended?” She waved a hand. “Never mind. No, I stopped writing because Dad died. You see, I was in Idaho because he was sick, and I hadn’t seen him since he left Brazil. We’d never had a formal falling-out; we’d just lost touch. So I wanted to get reacquainted while I still had a chance. I stayed with Anne and Ed at first—they were living down in Fremont Creek then, I think—but then I came up here to stay, to help take care of Dad. This was his house, you know. We rented it out to vacationers for several years after he was gone, but then after Mother died, Rex and I decided to move back to our native land, spend our golden years with what remaining family we had. When was that, Anne, that we moved up here?”
“Ten years ago,” said Anne. “No, fifteen.”
“Right,” said Madge. “In any event, I started corresponding with your friend while I was staying with Anne and Ed, and then I kept it up when I came up here to be with Dad. It can be so tedious, caring for the sick, even when it’s breaking your heart. I needed something to keep my mind busy, and the letters proved a pleasant distraction. I believe they’re the only venue in which I ever committed my famous Filamental Theory of the Universe to paper.”
A groan from Anne.
“Would you like to hear my Filamental Theory?” said Madge, ignoring her sister.
“We have to go soon,” said Anne.
“Well,” said Madge, looking hurt. “Another time, perhaps. You should tell your friend, though, to come see me sometime. I’d hoped to meet her in person, back when we were corresponding, but then, as I said, Dad died here in Idaho and I flew back to Brazil as soon as the funeral was over. So.” She lifted a hand palm up, as if she were handing me her excuse.
“I’ll be sure to pass that along,” I said.
A creak of the old wooden floor signaled Rex’s approach, and a moment later he stepped through the door holding a stack of paper about an inch thick. He handed the manuscript to me and when the old worn paper touched my skin, a shiver ran through my body.
“May I read it?’ I said.
“Take it,” said Madge. “We have no more use for it here.”
And so—
• • •
Sérgio reached for a paper grocery bag he’d brought into the Spud with him, but stopped mid-reach and picked up his napkin instead. In the lull between lunch and dinner, the Spud had emptied out and grown as quiet as an abandoned church. Even the waitress had nipped off for a break at some point, leaving the three of us to bask in reverential silence as Sérgio wiped hi
s hands on his napkin, cleaning each individual finger with care. As Harriet and I watched on, mouths slightly agape, Sérgio set down his napkin, reached into the grocery bag, and withdrew a sheaf of worn, yellowing papers. Holding the manuscript with both hands, he lifted it up before us, and I knew I was not meant to touch it, not yet. The front page of the manuscript read O Futuro Infinito, um romance por Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie.
“The Infinite Future,” I said. “You found it.”
“I found it,” said Sérgio, his face still gleaming with mystical intensity, an unexpected note of sorrow in his voice.
XVII
I didn’t read The Infinite Future myself until several months later.
It was a smoggy February day in Salt Lake during one of those freezing late-winter stretches where all the snow on the ground is dirty and hard, when all the cars are coated with salt grime, when all the smog gets trapped inside the valley, turning the air toxic and gray. It was one of those days when the city looks like the dystopian pictures of the Soviet Union I remember seeing in The Weekly Reader back when I was in elementary school. An ugly day, in other words, although I didn’t see much of it, because the sun hadn’t come up yet when I got to work, and it had been down already for hours by the time I left.
When I got home to my apartment—an old but charming place at the edge of downtown Salt Lake—I saw I had an email from Sérgio. We hadn’t been in contact at all since he’d found Salgado-MacKenzie, or the Cooper siblings, or whatever you want to call the author of all those stories. Sérgio had flown home out of Salt Lake the next day, and Harriet had dropped me off in Provo on her way back to Danesville. We’d all parted ways on friendly enough terms, but with no promises—at least on my part—to keep in touch, or get together again sometime.
Sérgio’s email was brief and to the point. He told me he’d been having trouble finding a publisher for The Infinite Future in Brazil and wondered if I’d be interested in translating the manuscript into English and shopping it around stateside. The Cooper siblings had given their permission. He hoped his email found me well and that he’d hear back from me soon.
That afternoon in Fremont Creek, we’d photocopied the manuscript right away—a copy for me, a copy for Harriet, and a backup copy for Sérgio. I’d slipped my copy, still warm from the old Xerox machine’s clanking innards, into an oversized manila envelope, which had remained unopened during my trip back to Provo and throughout my last few weeks in the storage room beneath the doughnut shop, my move to the apartment in Salt Lake, and my first months of employment as a filing clerk at Craig D. Ahlgren’s law firm.
That same envelope, still unopened, currently sat on a dusty shelf above my washer and dryer, and every time I did a load of laundry, that manila revenant would dredge up feelings of guilt and embarrassment as I remembered the pathetic, flailing version of myself that had first met Sérgio, the version of myself I’d gratefully left behind when I’d been rescued by Craig D. Ahlgren. That was the version of myself that would have cared about the envelope’s contents, but I wasn’t that person anymore.
Still, though, Sérgio had been kind to me, had shared with me the thing he valued most in the world: the writings of Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie. At the very least, I told myself as I reread the email, I should skim through the manuscript before I told Sérgio I wasn’t interested in translating it. I figured I owed him that much.
So I fixed myself a bowl of chicken noodle soup from a packet, pulled the envelope down from the laundry shelf, dusted it off, settled in at the crumb-covered drop-leaf table in my kitchen, and started to read.
Although I had to be at work early the next morning, I read late into the night, pulled through the text by the literary equivalent of highway hypnosis. I just couldn’t stop turning the pages. When I finished reading, it was closer to morning than night, and I leaned back in the kitchen chair, rubbing my tired eyes. My first reaction to The Infinite Future was one of pity, both for Sérgio and the Cooper siblings. The Infinite Future was nothing more than a pulpy space thriller with stunted longings to be something more profound. The text held no arcane secrets, no occult spiritual power.
But then, as I was sliding the manuscript back into its manila envelope, a thought occurred to me: What if Madge Cooper had been lying when she’d told Sérgio that this text was a botched attempt at something greater? What I mean is, what if this text was exactly what the Cooper siblings had meant to produce—a magical gateway to some ethereal realm of higher understanding? Maybe Madge’s claim that it was a failure was merely a distraction to throw the unworthy and the incredulous off the scent. Maybe she had created a ruse that a true devotee of Sertôrian would deftly sidestep and thus be led into the sanctum sanctorum of The Infinite Future.
With that possibility in mind, I reconsidered what I’d just read—a gripping and bizarre adventure of Irena Sertôrian embedded within a larger story of a nun in a futuristic convent under siege. As I contemplated that movement from the Sertôrian tale to the nun’s frame story, and then followed that movement out to me sitting at my kitchen table reading, I had what I can only describe as a mystical experience.
What happened was this: As I sat at my table, manuscript in front of me, the room took on a shimmery, unstable sheen, like everything might just disappear around me. I felt such a profound sense of instability, in fact, that I had to grab the seat of my chair with both hands to anchor myself in place. That feeling of instability intensified into a primal terror, a certainty that my own existence was not as stable as I’d always believed it to be. A tingling sensation ran through my arms—was I having a heart attack?—and I fought back an urge to vomit. Flexing my fingers against the wood of the chair, I squeezed my eyes shut and hoped for the best.
Then, just as suddenly as the feeling had arrived, it passed.
The experience unsettled me for days, instilling in me an unshakable urge to return to the text. The following weekend, then, I sat down and read it again.
On the second time through, I found a more compelling explanation for why the novel might have affected me so powerfully a few nights earlier. How I’d missed it the first time, I’m not sure, but as I turned the pages of the manuscript, I saw—in this melancholy adventure of Irena Sertôrian—unmistakable shadows of my recent escapade with Sérgio and Harriet. Or I guess, since the manuscript was written decades before I was born, I saw in my own recent experiences shadows of The Infinite Future.
To be clear, I’m not talking exact parallels here—no “this person equals that person” kind of stuff. Instead, as you’ll see soon enough, it’s more the broad narrative strokes that overlap, as well as a smattering of more specific details that get chopped up and transmuted between one story and the other. Three travelers questing for an elusive prize, for instance, though the searchers themselves differ vastly from one story to the other. Or a shared interest in inconvenient religious histories, though again the details bear only a shadowy resemblance to one another.
You’d think I would have been more astonished by these fuzzy reflections than I was, but given the oracular weirdness of the rest of Salgado-MacKenzie’s work, I would have been more surprised, honestly, if something like this hadn’t happened. I’d been prepared for it, in fact, by one of his own stories, “A Metallic Flutter of Wings,” in which the mad despot of a glassine cloud city proclaims that “there exists in the universe a finite, though vast, repertoire of narrative forms. Consequently, at this late stage in human history, the experience of every woman and man becomes a loose, unwitting translation of lives already lived and stories already told.”
And so, this fragment of The Infinite Future functions (for this reader, at least) both as another charmingly strange tale by the elusive Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie and as a scrambled, anticipatory quasi-memoir of my life written by a trio of authors I have never—and will never—meet.
How could I resist?
Before I knew it, then, I had unearthe
d my multivolume Portuguese dictionary and was spending my evenings translating The Infinite Future into English.
Now, with the project complete, I’d like to be able to tell you that all the time I spent with this eerily reflective manuscript has helped me understand my own life better, or even that my own experience illuminated, in some rare and valuable way, hidden nooks and crevices of The Infinite Future. Instead, every time I tried reading the events described in this translator’s note as an uncanny iteration of Salgado-MacKenzie’s novel fragment (or vice versa), I felt like I was shooting at someone in a Magic Mirror Maze, the multiplied images only confounding my aim and leaving me dizzily vulnerable.
But that’s enough from me. You’ll be reading The Infinite Future yourself in just a few pages, so I’ll let you come to your own conclusions about the book, and I’ll use the rest of this translator’s note—which has already run much, much longer than I’d intended—to address a few considerations that might interest you.
First: The Cooper siblings, though on board with the translation, made it very clear that they didn’t want to be bothered with questions about the manuscript’s preparation. So I didn’t bother them, and all translation and editing decisions were made following my own best judgment.
Second: I’m not a scientist, but it’s clear to me that many details in the story do not conform to accepted principles of astronomy, physics, medicine, etc. Many of these departures don’t seem especially deliberate, and I considered footnoting all the errors I could catch, as I understand that many SF readers do care about the scientific principles at play in a story. Ultimately, though, it seemed untrue to the spirit of the original work, which blazes proudly forward through its delirious conjectures, treating all accepted wisdom as mere inconvenience on the route to enlightenment. Annotating such oversights felt like publicly correcting the false but harmless utterances of a distinguished elderly relative.
