Bottom of the Sky

by Rodrigo Fresán

  But I didn’t talk to the young journalist about The Incident and told him, even better, that I was depressed, but that being depressed didn’t worry me too much: a recent psychological study had proven that the majority of writers had depressive personalities or came from melancholic bloodlines. So I qualified under both conditions, no problem.

  I answered him how and as best I could.

  I was honest but also partial, incomplete (to be continued . . .).

  I kept to myself—as I’ve been doing for years, you should know, wherever you are—the antimatter of your name, or what you told us your name was, and now it slips through my fingers, as if I were chasing a firefly through a forest full of fireflies.

  And yet, I believe, I was both generous and selfish: I remembered for him, but also for myself.

  I told and answered and, I suppose, filled in or improved or invented some dark zones while simultaneously activating numerous protective shields of varying force and intensity.

  Every question, it is known, hides too many possible answers.

  And, in a way, all of them are accurate though maybe not correct.

  The truth is fractal. It breaks into pieces and scatters in infinite directions. So, how to catch it.

  Ah, yes . . .

  I know . . .

  By being progressively regressive.

  Memory like the launch tower for the rocket of the past.

  It’s no coincidence, I think, that the countdown required to initiate a rocket launch is exactly the same as the one used by a hypnotist to make his subject, who has volunteered to come up on stage, surrender his will and fall into a trance.

  Like this:

  10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . . 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

  . . . 0

  Zero.

  Childhood is the zero.

  Childhood is another dimension.

  Childhood is the atmosphere-zero where, looking back, we feel we breathed deepest and best. But maybe this is a distorted impression, a result of too many years of insufficient oxygen and then, of course, there are some adults who are suddenly certain they remember being used in satanic rituals and secret orgies by their loving and, until that moment, perfect parents.

  Childhood is pure radiation that refuses to disappear, making the needles of our Geiger counter jump at the most unexpected moments with a glowing, fluorescent green. That unmistakable science-fiction green. Alien green. The color of a particular moment that we thought had vanished but that was actually pulsing, wrapped in an artificial dream, electrodes attached to its head, lying on a stainless steel gurney. There, like I said: in a subterranean bunker only accessible by a magic word or, all at once, with the aid of a fortuitous and capricious stimulus that provokes failures in the previously inviolate and fortified security of our mind.

  Childhood is that longed-for other planet that we travel from toward this planet. Toward our so-called maturity, which, we know now, will never be like that other early world where we dreamed of growing up, of stimulating our bodies’ protons, of defying the heavy gravitational laws imposed by our elders, and flying off, breaking the barrier of their warning sounds, overcoming the speed of their lights, which invariably, with scientific punctuality and at a fixed hour, go out. Nine or ten tolls and then the key moment when at first we’d pretend to be asleep (all of a sudden I’m transformed into something else, I pluralize, I’m not just talking about me, but about so many others who were like me, clones fascinated by the same feeling and same longing for the future) and then turn on our flashlights under the covers and keep reading. Reading there, in a cave, living inside the adventures of some galactic guardians, our mouths full of difficult words and a gun bursting with lightning and thunder. And, of course, maybe most important of all, along with the voluptuous anatomy of Martian princesses that they wrapped themselves around, were the green tentacles of beings with thousands of revolving pupils that never tired of devouring those princesses with their eyes, which weren’t, but at the same time were, our eyes. Their scaly skin a metaphor for our acne. Because, even though we never dared consider it even in the lowest of voices, it’s possible that they were what enticed us, the illusion that, on some distant horizon unfit for human life, albeit by the most drastic means, someday someone might end up in our arms. A place where nobody had ever been: cyanide in place of oxygen, too many suns in the sky, and days as long as years. And maybe there women like that would notice us, notice people like the young journalist who has come to pay me a visit and ask me questions.

  The young journalist has gone, but his presence and questions have radically altered the atmosphere of my world. His arrival has had an effect similar to that of a nearly undetectable but critical tear in an astronaut’s spacesuit. Little by little the oxygen is escaping and thoughts flow and the sound of the memories is exactly the same as the sound of air seeping out through a tiny opening.

  A hypnotic hiss.

  A growing delirium.

  And I float.

  There’s no above or below in space.

  And I travel back to the past and, yes, it’s a hazardous voyage. Because any intrusion into the process of transmutation (or whatever you want to call it) by a mosquito-sized quantity of foreign matter, or just stepping on a butterfly, is enough to make you arrive on the other side of the dematerializer (or whatever you want to call it), radically and definitively transformed or in a world that’s no longer ours and that’s been changed forever.

  Memories are sensitive material, volatile.

  Memories are particles in constant and increasing acceleration.

  Memories have made neurons burn.

  Memories can make you to forget everything.

  So I must handle them with great care. Hermetically seal them in the command room and review the coordinates and controls again and again before deploying them. Touch them with robotic pincers connected to my brain with wires. Move them telekinetically and bring them near my optic sensors and my heavy breathing of a spaceship admiral, almost a ghost, while I wander around the orbit of my memory.

  Now I am a machine.

  I feel—I feel I am—like a machine.

  And I’ve been feeling like this ever since The Incident, since a few days ago when they put me in a machine to try to find out what was going wrong with my machinery.

  And, when I came out, everything had changed.

  People were screaming and running in the streets.

  Buildings were coming down.

  Everyone was looking up at the sky or taking pictures of the sky with their little phones.

  And there I was, I who’ve not yet gotten used to the fact that phones have won the streets and that people go around by themselves but talking to someone far away, like sane lunatics, plugged into a world where technology has been miniaturizing knowledge into something increasingly small and simultaneously more inclusive and more exclusive. Multiple functions in devices that fit in the palm of your hand. Devices impossible for me. For someone who grew up convinced that computers would be as big as buildings and only operated by wise grownups and not, like it is now, by children who barely know how to talk and who carry them around in their pockets and use them to travel far away, with faraway eyes, with the minute but all-powerful power of their fingers.

  Now I’m armored (though stories where computers or robots suddenly humanize have become almost a subgenre in the genre) and I make myself impenetrable and logical and unfeeling.

  Or at least that’s what I strive for.

  It’s the only way, I think, that I’ll be able to report what happened with any kind of objective indifference, before it’s too late and the hour of my mind is going arrives . . .

  To try to separate myself as much as possible from my species: transient and fragile beings and, unlike what we know about other animals, oh so variable and unstable. Men, happy and sad and foolish and wise and yet, maybe for that reason, without the ability to arrive at the collective agreements and accords that othe
r living organisms enjoy. Men who decide to smile or commit suicide, all together, perfectly interconnected, beyond any doubt and men for whom nothing could matter less than the hypothetical existence of an authority embodied in a god who has fled the scene or in an advanced intellect with a more-than-a-little disturbing sense of humor.

  I refer here to a scientific god.

  A god who sucked down the half-toxic half-ecstatic air of the synagogue for which not even the greatest interstellar traveler was prepared.

  A god my father ended up believing in and the god who ended him and everything he’d theretofore believed in.

  A god who silenced the Hebrew in my father’s voice, sounding oh so like the guttural, sinuous languages of Martians and Venusians in those early and exceedingly cheap science fiction movies.

  A god who destroyed my father with his faith and his love for the expansive wave of an all-powerful memory.

  A memory that grew and devoured everything until that memory was all that was left.

  The memory of a woman who was his wife and who, for a short time, was my mother.

  I don’t remember my mother.

  My mother—known as “Fair Sarah”—died during the great influenza epidemic, when I was less than a year old. I got sick too. And against all prognoses, condemned by the doctors, I survived, and no one dared call it miracle: there had been so many victims that my modest resistance was more an unrepeatable statistical anomaly than a singular divine gesture.

  My name was Isaac, which means laughter in ancient Hebrew; but I wouldn’t say I laughed a lot as a child; there weren’t many things to laugh about in my childhood.

  And I can’t remember what my father was like before my mother’s death either. But I do remember how he was after she died. And how my mother seemed to have replaced his shadow, sewing herself to his heels and accompanying my father, Rabbi Solomon Goldman, at all times, everywhere.

  I remember my father crying, reading right to left, looking for explanations in the paper and ink voices of ancient prophets. Words filling his throat that only housed pained groans, hushed screams: the sound of one catastrophe produced by the echo of another catastrophe.

  Hear it now as I still hear it.

  My father chasing an explanation for the end of his world in the forms of the world’s beginning.

  Before long, my father begins to detest the false comfort of other religions (the multitude of Eastern gods and Western saints and that oh so sci-fi notion of Paradise, that other utopian “planet” that comes after this planet, I think now) and to rage in front of churches fuller all the time with the Great Depression. Dumps run by fake-orgasmic priests swearing, with a regularity beyond irritating, to have been “touched by God,” as if God were some kind of specially endowed, all-powerful playboy. And so, all of sudden, everyone is claiming they’ve witnessed something or someone and my father ceaselessly condemns this socialization of miracles. Visions like a plague, for someone who thinks that miracles shouldn’t be massive and popular, but individual and occasional and capable of carefully selecting the site and eyes and body where they come to rest.

  That clamor of lies and the incontrovertible truth of the Jehovah’s absence. It’s then that he reads what the Spanish cabalist Abraham Abulafia wrote about something called Tikkun Ra, or “the reappearance of the world,” and disclaimer: I’m not entirely sure about the meaning of this term or of the other cabalistic ideas I refer to here. I cite things from memory that I don’t remember precisely but won’t ever be able to forget.

  I remember perfectly, yes, my father studying those symbols. The furious intensity of my father staring at a book. The energy that seemed to enter through his eyes and shake his entire figure, which a pulp illustrator of the day would’ve drawn as a mad scientist with sparks and lightning bolts emanating from his burning brain.

  I remember my father telling me what the books told him.

  I remember my father explaining to me that the mystics believed that in the beginning, the Divine Light of God, keeper of all things good, was preserved inside one or multiple sacred vessels. But, as the glimmers and cracks of evil had also already appeared in the world, the vessels couldn’t contain that splendor and they shattered. And the beneficent Divine Light broke into countless fragments that fell like crystal rain across the world. And, as they spread, swept by the winds and the slow but inexorable inertia of the planet’s rotations, those divine fragments changed sign and transformed into all the horrible and monstrous things that have happened ever since. Diseases and wars and cataclysms. The mystics, my father tells me, maintain that the task of mankind is to reunite all those malignant fragments by doing good deeds. Transforming them back into benevolent material and reassembling them, like restoring a broken statue to its original whole. The perfect good. The indivisible splendor of the creator.

  Tikkun Ra, thought my father.

  And it’s then, I believe, that my father decided that I’d be one of those small, lost pieces: something evil only in appearance (because he was unable to avoid associating my arrival with my mother’s departure), but in whose fate and origin lived, barely hidden for those who knew how to look, part of the original and absolute root of the best and first good news.

  My father also read (and only then did he feel he’d grasped its true significance and importance) about Tzimtzum. That constriction—the Kabbalah explains—experienced voluntarily by God. God contracting and compressing himself and renouncing his own infinite essence to allow for the existence of a conceptual place: chalal panui, a space where a world could exist independent of Him. In a way, God made Himself into the perfect reader so that we’d be imperfect yet fertile writers.

  Tzimtzum means, I believe, “to conceal Himself from the beings He created, to let them exist as tangible creatures, instead of overwhelming them with His perpetual and infinite presence.” So God limits Himself—puts boundaries on His divinity—withdrawing without disappearing so that there might be something outside of Him. What Solomon Goldman was never able to fully understand was if God’s diminished size implied a relative reduction of His power or, to the contrary, turned it into a far more potent concentrate. If God’s self-limiting weakened Him, then maybe man’s corresponding role was to occupy that chalal panui and attempt to resemble God. Or, perhaps, to the contrary, to commit human errors over and over to emphasize the imperfection resulting from the partial yet decisive withdrawal of the Lord and Master of all things and thereby provoke Him to come back to make order of the chaos. Solomon Goldman didn’t know what to think. Both possibilities seemed logical. That’s the problem with the Kabbalah: unlike other sacred texts, it doesn’t offer answers, just pieces with which to assemble an answer. It’s not a compendium of infallible instructions. In the end, the true manual is mankind, the reader, the interpreter and assembler of all the loose pieces. Man approaches God through reading. And God—this god—is a man with deep faith in mankind. That’s why He’s left them alone and only in certain moments does He reappear, proud, to punish some blunder He deems incomprehensible. Some ignorance unjustifiable in creatures as magnificent as His, in beings artificially designed in His image and semblance. At times, the reason for His presence is easy to comprehend. Floods, commandments, and sharp shadows that cut off the lives of firstborn children and sacrifices that, sometimes, at the last second, are halted or neutralized. Events and marvels woven with the transparent texture of legends or fables.

  But Solomon Goldman felt that he was the protagonist of something else, something far more complex. Something only accessed, or suffered, by the enlightened. Because God didn’t halt the rhythm of Fair Sarah’s death. God allowed Fair Sarah to cease existing and allowed him to survive her.

  So would his mission be to reunite the pieces of the broken vessel, to reunite the lost exhalations of the Divine Light?, my father wondered. One night, after explaining all of this, he asked me that terrible question, and I really didn’t get it. I didn’t even realize that my father was in trouble, that
his was another kind of illness. But I intuited how all of that would seem curiously similar to what I’d read later in science fiction magazines.

  Religions are, all of them, early forms of science fiction: sudden flashes, flying, above and below, visitors from galaxies on the other side of infinity, appearing and disappearing. It doesn’t matter which planet: the story is always the same and it’s powered by the volatile fuels of love and death and an inferior faith in something superior: man creates God so that God creates man. And then they discover they cannot deactivate each other and that both, in a way, have turned into each other’s Frankenstein’s monster. Thus, man believes in God so he can do as he pleases in His name and God believes in man so He can blame him for all His mistakes.

  At some point (I realize now that I refer to him, indistinctly, as my father or as Solomon Goldman, as if I were trying to divide him in two without having to break him into pieces more dark than light; as if in the one or the other I might find, barely hidden, the explanation for his madness) my father Solomon Goldman begins to talk to me about “aerial beings,” about “stellar powers,” about “portals,” and about “dimensions.” And about how I—having been on the threshold of death without being wounded too deeply, having almost come back from the other side—was the key that’d open the cell where he’d find my mother, Fair Sarah, a prisoner.

  And it’s not that I believe him, but some part of me wants to believe him. Some part of me needs to believe him, because his visions are so much brighter and livelier than reality’s faded hue. And because, for the first time, in his delirium, in the magical properties he confers on me, I feel that my father loves me as a son, that he’s proud of me.

  So, one night I clearly hear the whirr of a machine outside my window and believe I see them, just landed, with fierce smiles and tracing symbols in the garden soil with swords of light. Timeless angels held aloft by the wind of other “planes of existence,” their wings exuding a strange, immaculate glow. The next morning I wake up possessed by terrified happiness. Thinking I’d come to believe in what my father believed, convinced that from that moment on a new life would begin for me.