Bottom of the Sky

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Praise for Rodrigo Fresán

  “In this latest work from Rodrigo Fresán, the Argentine writer succeeds in offering us a book that closely resembles what he calls an ‘orphan book.’ These are books that come out of nowhere and that probably have no descendants, books like Nightwood by Djuana Barnes or Oh What a Paradise It Seems by John Cheever. They are books that feed on themselves, that are self-sufficient like autonomous machines, and that generally possess immense poetic force. In The Bottom of the Sky, Fresán writes the book that will come immediately after the era of apocalyptic books—the era that began with the Bible and the Aeneid, and culminated with postmodern books about the end of all possible worlds.”—Enrique Vila-Matas

  “The Bottom of the Sky shows us that reality is a kind of science fiction; science fiction has become reality. And while terrorism, invasions, and unending wars have led humans to treat one another like alien species, Fresán asks us to imagine that love, in its purest form, can survive and even triumph over chaos and brutality.”

  —Rachel Cordasco, Speculative Fiction in Translation

  “Rodrigo Fresán is a marvelous writer, a direct descendent of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges, but with his own voice and of his own time, with a fertile imagination, daring and gifted with a vision as entertaining as it is profound.”—John Banville

  “The Bottom of the Sky is an exuberant story transcending both space and time, shaded with hues paying homage to the sci-fi greats (with so many literary [and pop culture] nods along the way: Vonnegut, Dick, Cheever, Bioy Casares, Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, et al.). Fresán’s ambitious tale is, at once, a love story, an enigmatic eschatological puzzle, a book rooted firmly in the present while simultaneously orbiting in a far-off realm, and a genre-transcending work unbound by formulaic construct or conceit. [. . .] Read Fresán. And then tell everyone you know to read him, too.”—Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books

  “A vast Argentinean bildungsroman of reading and writing, Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part . . . offers one form of resistance to encroaching fascism: style.”—Adam Thirlwell

  “A kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room.”—Jonathan Lethem

  “I’ve read few novels this exciting in recent years. Mantra is the novel I’ve laughed with the most, the one that has seemed the most virtuosic and at the same time the most disruptive.”—Roberto Bolaño

  “[The Invented Part is] a tour de force. . . . Invented, and deeply inventive as well, an exemplary postmodern novel that is both literature and entertainment.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

  “The question of whether The Invented Part is a novel was a rhetorical exercise meant to draw out certain aspects of this text. Of course, it is a novel. It is, however, something much more: a resounding refutation of the assertion that the novel is dead, and a statement of how omnivorous and adaptable the form is.”—George Henson, Quarterly Conversation

  “Rodrigo Fresán elegantly balances the strange with the common, the experimental with the traditional, and the result is one of the most satisfying postmodern novels in recent memory.”—Benjamin Woodard, Numero Cinq

  “If Borges and Pynchon fell off a boat, Fresán would be the one to come out of the water.”—Gilles Heuré, Télérama

  Also by Rodrigo Fresán

  in English Translation

  The Invented Part

  Kensington Gardens

  Copyright © Rodrigo Fresán, 2009

  Translation copyright © Will Vanderhyden, 2018

  First edition, 2018

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-79-3

  This project is supported in part by an award from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature

  Design by N. J. Furl

  Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:

  Dewey Hall 1-219, Box 278968, Rochester, NY 14627

  www.openletterbooks.org

  For Daniel,

  in Ana’s arms

  pointing up at the stars

  Contents

  The Bottom of the Sky

  I. This Planet

  II. The Space between This Planet and the Other Planet

  III. The Other Planet

  Explanation and Acknowledgements

  Reality (like big cities) has been extended and ramified in recent years. This has influenced time.

  —ADOLFO BIOY CASARES

  One can be a lover of Space and its possibilities [. . .] I am also aware that Time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors [. . .] Space is a swarming in the eyes; and time a singing in the ears.

  —VLADIMIR NABOKOV

  Distances are only the relation of space to time and vary with that relation [. . .] There are optical errors in time as well as space [. . .] The only real journey, the only Fountain of Youth, would be to travel not towards new landscapes, but with new eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them can see, or can be. . . .

  —MARCEL PROUST

  I don’t think you can stand outside the universe.

  —KURT VONNEGUT

  This notion about each creature viewing the world differently from all other creatures—not everyone would agree with me [. . .] We have a fictitious world; that is the first step.

  —PHILIP K. DICK

  Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling.

  —JOHN BANVILLE

  Oh, let us rush to see this world!

  —JOHN CHEEVER

  I

  This Planet

  Find yourself wherever you find yourself, near or far, if you can read what I now write, please, remember, remember me, remember us, like this.

  Remember us, remember me, remember that in those days the inhabitants of our planet, of our tiny universe, were divided into interstellar travelers and creatures from other worlds.

  The rest were just secondary characters.

  The anonymous builders of the rocket.

  Or men and women enslaved by distant creatures of impossible anatomy that, nevertheless, a great mystery, always spoke our language perfectly.

  Or humans who practiced an extraterrestrial tongue that, an even greater mystery, was so similar to the English spoken by a foreigner of a not-too-distant country.

  And astronaut or alien weren’t yet terms of common use.

  They weren’t, like today, present equally in the mouths of children and the elderly. Those words, like a familiar flavor, easy to identify at first bite for teeth both young and new or old and fake.

  It wasn’t like now (think of technological jargon as a new form of pornography, of the production of military and domestic gadgets of all size and utility, of faces and bodies modified by laser procedures, of a life after life, and of alternate realities tangled in a web of small computer screens), when there are days that I’m invaded by the suspicion that all the inhabitants of this planet are, without being aware of it, science-fiction writers.

  Or, at least, characters created by science-fiction writers.

  Back then, in the beginning, it was different.

  Back then, in that now-old New Age, space was truly dark and, at the same time, a blank page to be filled with the flashes of our prayers and promises and supplications.

  Back then we
were paid to imagine the unimaginable and the future was always so remote, at a distance of centuries, of millennia.

  And there were those who liked to write about earthlings climbing aboard rockets to climb ever higher.

  And there were others who opted for the inverse approach, preferring to write about extraterrestrials who come here to lay waste to everything, sparing a lone witness to put it all in writing. Thus, the ending of their story superimposing and anticipating itself in the beginning of our story, its pages left behind to instruct those who, with luck, would come after and start over. A new tribe of individuals of scientific aspect—lab coats and glasses and always-lit pipes under spacesuits and helmets—building amid the rubble and ruins and trying to understand who all those armless, headless statues of onetime heroes or villains were. Future men, amnesiac from centuries of walking through immortal ruins, unable to specify what took place, but imagining so much about what might have happened to the ancient denizens of those palaces and mausoleums and thereby creating, without wanting to but maybe with an inkling, a new form of reverse science fiction. A science fiction that would be nothing less than the myths, the events, and, finally, History. Because the History of what was—every new theory, every historical essay—is also a science-fiction novel.

  What has happened is as fantastic as what is to come.

  The past never stops moving though it appears motionless.

  Like snow.

  And yes, there was snow and there were snowmen, men made of snow.

  And there we were—Ezra and I—in the snow.

  And our planet is never more another planet—never does it feel more alien and distant, never so new and so different—than after a long and heavy snowfall.

  And that year—remember it, remember us, like this—it snowed like never before.

  And the two of us there, in the snow, standing in front of all those snowmen and that huge sphere. And it was as if we—Ezra and I—were ascending through the snow, motionless but alive in the pale light of the new day. And it was as if each snowflake—distinct from all the others—were a singular star. And snow—see the snow, feel the snow—makes everyone more poetic and makes me a bad poet.

  And a gust of wind and you in the window.

  And it was as if the wind had been invented to blow through your hair and proclaim that, though invisible, it too had a shape: the shape of your hair in disarray, in the air of that dark daybreak, was the shape of the wind.

  And the snowflakes moved, pushed by a rush of energy, and the two of us, there, like the inhabitants of one of those glass and plastic globes that a higher power, or a giant, shakes to create a white and imprisoning storm.

  A storm that fits in the palm of the hand that summons and sustains it.

  And the two of us—Ezra and I—there inside, happily trapped, in your hands.

  We, the two of us, who called ourselves The Faraways and who began and ended in ourselves.

  And yet, true enough, there were others who considered themselves Faraways—in the vicinity of our barely plural singularity, a singularity of only two—simply out of proximity. Orbiting around us until, inevitably, they grew tired of it and of our indifference, and went off in search of more interesting attractions and bigger groups of friends.

  And it was because the two of us—Ezra and I—felt we were so different.

  And we liked to consider ourselves distant beings, of a familiar configuration but driven by a decidedly alien will. The will to know ourselves intruders and subjects of a private mandate to travel great distances, to cross space, to arrive at the bottom of the sky, and, once there, to turn around and go back to the point of departure. And, only then, return to a home we didn’t recognize and that didn’t recognize us.

  Then we would wander aimlessly through streets and parks.

  Our bloodline would be dissipated and impossible to detect in the mix of new bloods.

  We would have become foreigners whose only comfort would be to write about precisely that: about belonging nowhere after seeing everything.

  And we would be happy.

  Someone once said that behind every science-fiction writer (at least behind the first, the original, science-fiction writers) there was, always, a frustrated scientist.

  I am not entirely sure this is true; then there’s Ezra: first a successful scientist, then an agent of classified documents, and—when the future only interested him as a launch pad to a past in need of modification—forever a frustrated science-fiction writer.

  Ezra, who—when you disappeared without logical explanation, after the night of the great snowstorm, without even leaving a goodbye note, an amazing story or weird tale or astonishing travel—decided to give it all up in the name of exactitude.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself without clarifying the trajectory of this story: where its head is and where its tail—bleeding from so many wounds inflicted by its own fangs—ends.

  The Faraways, on the other hand, maintained that behind every physicist and astronomer there lay the inert but not dead—just in suspended animation—body of a storyteller who’d succumbed to the cosmic temptation of calculations and formulas. And yet, beneath all of that, barely hidden, top-secret, the true possibility of a writer waiting to be activated by a nervous password not on the tip of the tongue, but in the tips of the fingers. Someone who, impotent and unable to attain the ecstasy of limitless speculation, ends up settling for—simulating that tentative pride of those who want to believe themselves special—the stainless steel walls of a controlled-climate laboratory.

  A code. A combination of numbers and letters. A formula. A heavy metal door that opens like a book onto facilities whose core can only be accessed via the repeated use of successive passwords implanted in the magnetic bands of steel cards that guide you down white corridors watched over by unblinking soldiers and sleepless cameras. The eyes of both rigidly fixed on a pure present, fed by the paranoia that a more evolved and efficient Apocalypse is being invented and set in motion in some other laboratory or in a cave where a special button is being pushed to kick off the end of everything in this world.

  And the challenge always lies in knowing who will be first to begin the end.

  But my story, the story of The Faraways, is just beginning or, better, I am, here and now, beginning to begin it. Forgive all these preliminary words. I justify them saying they are the cautious whispers of someone who doesn’t dare flip certain switches known to activate certain memories.

  Memory like that inexplicable time-machine and the past like a fourth dimension and an alternate planet containing life slightly more intelligent than the life inhabiting the present.

  For in the past (arriving there so much later—the horrifying thing about the past—because we can only see it from the future) we’re all wiser.

  Traveling to what already was, we comprehend effortlessly and contemplate with clarity, errors that, in truth, we cannot and won’t ever be able to correct. But at least we get the consolation prize or the agonizing punishment of knowing exactly how we could’ve done better, how we could’ve changed to improve the results, altering certain factors or making different decisions. Looking back, there are many who, before using and, maybe, getting hooked on the powerful drug that is the past, opt instead for another drug: oblivion.

  And then, I suppose, they inhabit an eternity of sunsets, always new and unique.

  Thus, life lasts but a day and then starts over.

  That isn’t, hasn’t been, and won’t be my case.

  The acute perceptions of memory’s disruptions, of irregularities of the heart—the palpitations of time that now crawl, then run, and later fly—have always been my pleasure, my privilege, and my condemnation.

  Memory is an astronaut struggling to establish lasting connections between the stars, many of which are dead; but the act of remembering them lights up points in a space that, though distant and out of reach, still form part of the proximal yet elusive nebulas of our thoughts. To remember is
to discover without ceasing to search. We don’t know if a memory is something we give up for lost just as we remember it, or, if it’s something lost that we suddenly recover.

  And perhaps the oddest part of all (or maybe most normal, because distortions of space-time are one of the genre’s most recurrent clichés) is that now, when my memory aches with the acute, throbbing pain of its own loss, I am trying to remember through writing what I no longer remember unless I use my hands.

  And I don’t do it with the utilitarian and almost telegraphic language of science fiction.

  I am referring to that style that is really an absence of style, where what actually matters is plot, a good idea, a new prophecy. Perpetual interest in the future but such primitive writing.

  No: my lines are long and sinuous (parenthesis functioning like the pincers of crustaceans made hubristic and swollen by Epsilon Rays), more like those of an experimental yet inexperienced nineteenth-century gentleman at the turn of a new century.

  Once again, the past.

  How they wrote in the past when books could count on all their reader’s time and all the time in the world fit inside those books that were so difficult to escape from; because so much more took place inside them than outside them. Books for a reader from an era that was ending so another era, ready to establish the idea and the theory of a distant future, could begin.

  And, so, a new and paradoxical conviction that, by prolonging our lives, the future would not only stay far away, but we would be able to arrive there.

  So, a mutating reader, suspended between two phases.

  A removed reader with access to everything.

  Someone who would soon discover—amid the explosions of a Great War, supposedly unique and final—not only that the future was expanding, but that time was accelerating.

  Someone who—despite never having had the right tools to imagine complicated teletransportors or galactic highways wrecked by black holes—was soon flung onto the continuum of an age of gears and levers and inventions, ready to do what’s necessary in reality in order to disobey and rebel in fiction.