Bottom of the Sky

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Later, maybe, it’s one of many possibilities, it depends on me, on my desire to modify History (I’m alone, a camera with almost nobody on the other side watching what I record, I can move around and focus on whatever I like, I’m the last and the only one still functioning, the rest shut down when their operators shut down), that stranger and I will go down into the basement without my husband noticing and he’ll make love to me, or something like that; I don’t think that is really making love, maybe unmaking it. In any case, a sudden and fatal cancer that begins right here—the expansive wave of my orgasm—will erase that man’s satisfied smile within a couple months.

  And I smile back at him because I think he’s welcoming me to this end of the world known as Sad Songs and, no, better not to go down into the basement with him, poor guy.

  Then, two men enter the house carrying the painting. I don’t see them, they carry the painting and are hidden by the painting. I just see their legs poking out beneath the frame.

  I see the painting.

  The painting is one of those paintings that, every time it enters a room—or every time you enter a room where that painting is—you can’t help but look at.

  Look at it.

  The painting is called Yellow and Blue (Yellow, Blue on Orange) and it’s dated 1955 and its painter is Mark Rothko.

  The painting is precisely that: what its title says.

  And so that’s why I say (it was as if I’d called to it and it’d obeyed from the first day I saw it) called and not titled.

  Because the painting is yellow and blue.

  And yellow and blue on orange.

  Some catalogues—in some of the many dimensional wrinkles—claim that the painting hangs in the Carnegie Museum of Art in the city of Pittsburgh and that it was acquired with funds from the Fellows Fund, the Women’s Committee, the Acquisition Fund, and the Patrons Art Fund in 1974.

  But no.

  Here and now it hangs in my house, in Sad Songs, in the early 60s.

  And I stare at it.

  I haven’t been able to stop staring at it since I saw it for the first time.

  I saw the Mark Rothko painting for the first time in a gallery in Manhattan.

  On Park Avenue, I think.

  I’m not sure of the exact place.

  I don’t remember the date either, but it doesn’t matter.

  Dates don’t matter anymore.

  Dates are the first thing forgotten or ignored where I find myself now.

  Now, time has become something else.

  Time—all time—is all times at the same time.

  Time is matter and material out of which I extract multiple variations and use the one that suits me best as I continue my search, as I try over and over to replay my favorite episode.

  There are no limits; there is no control.

  Now—like I said—I’m alone.

  And, for that reason, I can live anything I want. The most unimaginable possibilities. Not what could have happened but what could never have happened. Ways to kill time while I keep trying to go back and bring them back—myself and the two of them, together again—to that night.

  To hang that night on the wall like my favorite painting.

  So that everyone sees it.

  And to make it so that night never ends, so it never goes off air, living and surviving, forever, together in the eternity of those few hours.

  It’s not easy.

  Sometimes it seems that I’m about to make it happen.

  Sometimes I’m able to reunite them somewhere else, in some other moment.

  But the magic—the illusion—doesn’t last.

  Reality—though, like time, reality doesn’t matter one bit—ruins everything. Reality resists modification.

  It’s not easy to rewrite the past without the help of my operators. And my operators are gone. The one for whom I work is still there, on the other side. Sometimes I can even hear the echo of his slow and heavy breathing; but he barely pays any attention to me now.

  He doesn’t watch me watching anymore.

  So the variables are unstable, suddenly, there are issues with the signal, impossible to keep the two of them aloft and everything vanishes into thin air.

  And something happens. Something takes them away long before I can put myself into the scene.

  Sometimes I manage—for a few seconds—to see them separately. And for them to see me.

  And the truth is that I don’t really like how they look at me in those moments: they see me but don’t believe in me, they look at me thinking “I can’t be seeing what I’m seeing right now.”

  They look at me and think the exact same thing I thought when I saw the Mark Rothko painting for the first time.

  “I can’t be seeing what I’m seeing right now,” I thought when I saw the Mark Rothko painting in the gallery window.

  And I went into the art gallery and there were more Mark Rothko paintings. And there were several people looking at them and smoking and, yes, those were the days when you were still permitted to smoke in public and private spaces.

  And the paintings all depicted—with variations in color, going from blazes of light to glimmers of near absolute darkness—landscapes I had already seen, that I couldn’t stop seeing.

  The eternal twilight of another planet that—for reasons of convenience—I have christened Urkh 24 or, if you like, That-Place-Where-The-Most-Disconsolate-Melodies-Can-Be-Heard.

  The planet from where they watch me so that I make them see.

  Central studios or something like that.

  The place where a science-fiction novel called Evasion takes place.

  A fiction of the based on real events variety.

  Real events as the basis for small fictions that, every so often, I insert into what was, the way you thread pearls on a necklace or affix diamonds to the hilt of a sword.

  In one of these variations, I see the Mark Rothko painting and read an interview with Mark Rothko where he talks about the “lights that come to me from very far away” and “divine visions” and “ecstasies” and “multiforms” and “breaths of life in blocks of color” and “look at the paintings from only a half meter away to feel as if they envelope you, like a landscape.” And I understand—though he doesn’t know it the way I know it, the privilege of being the last one left—that Mark Rothko is just like me. That he doesn’t entirely understand what happens to him and what it is that makes him, again and again, paint those colors that are skies, the skies of Urkh 24, of That-Place-Where-The-Most-Disconsolate-Melodies-Can-Be-Heard. Interplanetary postcards digging their fingernails into his brain, ever more exhausted from painting such bright colors on such huge canvases where, little by little, night starts to fall and it begins to get dark.

  And, so, I’m the one who opens the door to his studio one night—I’m there to explain to him what’s happening to him, I’m there to tell him everything—and I find Mark Rothko’s body, a still-fresh suicide, both arms cut by the blade of a razor. Everything is red, red is the color and painters are lousy transmitters, they can’t cope well with the bombardment of colors. It happened to that other painter who cut off one ear (I’m no good with painters’ names) and it happened to Mark Rothko (the only painter’s name I’m sure of).

  Writers are better. They suffer imbalances too. Like Zack (Or was it Dick?) or Nostradamus (Or was it Stradivarius?) or so many others who traded ink for liquor to try to sedate everything that happens inside their heads, which, though they don’t know it, actually happens somewhere else. And yet, writers last longer than painters.

  But no—me in Mark Rothko’s studio, on 69th Street, I think, in New York, in an old garage with a cupola and, in its center, a skylight that could be opened with pulleys—that is not what happened.

  That’s just a sketch—a sketch for a never-painted painting—of something that could’ve been but that I break and toss into the fireplace.

  What did happen is that I saw that painting and I knew for sure that I wasn’t al
one, that I wasn’t unique (though it’s possible that I have been unique as far as my endurance and ability are concerned), and I asked the gallery employee’s permission and phoned my husband. My wealthy husband—I never call him Jeff, which is what he wants to be called, what he wants me to call him—and I said: “Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill, I already know what I want you to give me for our next anniversary.”

  And I kept looking at that painting with the same eyes that—years later, barely a second for me, a blink—I look again . . .

  . . . and see Isaac Goldman, looking at me. And he and I are the only two people not looking up, at the towers in flames and the people throwing themselves into the void and falling all around us, on that corner of a city called Manhattan, on September 11th, 2001.

  Another end of the world.

  This is, really, the beginning of an end more than an end itself.

  This is what puts in drive the heavy and slow machinery of this Apocalypse.

  A—yes, now yes—Big Bang that everyone hears and sees far and wide on television broadcasts across the planet. Red-hot antennas—antennas different from the kind of antenna that I am—and there he is: Isaac Goldman looks at me unable to believe that it’s me and I look at him with the eyes of someone who believes in too many things. With the eyes of someone who, from so much believing, no longer even needs to activate that verb: to believe.

  I look at him and he looks at me and we look at each other. We’re frozen in each other’s eyes. He more than I, because it’s been so long since he’s seen me. Everything seems to have stopped for us.

  Klaatu barada nikto.

  Ha ha ha.

  I look at him and contemplate that street corner where everyone is screaming screams that have lost all will to be words and are nothing but noise. The voices have become something purely animal. The sound of horror leaping from mouth to mouth and lending potency and identity to all those who fall from the heights of the two white buildings where the red brushstrokes of flames burst forth. Soon, they will fall. The towers. First one and then the other—taking turns bowing, as if dancing a final minuet—and nobody dares think about that now. They can’t even imagine it.

  But I saw it.

  I saw it already.

  I’ve seen so many things . . .

  I’ve seen this street corner before and I’ll see it again.

  I see it right now before and during and after.

  Past and present and future all at the same time, like three television shows broadcasting simultaneously, in a single timeslot, twenty-four hours a day, nonstop.

  I, right now, am standing here.

  I was here before.

  I will be here.

  I was and am here, one morning many years ago, and I will still be here when everyone is gone.

  I’ll see the empty streets fade away.

  I’ll feel in the soles of my feet the exact instant when the power plants cease to function. The moment when their security systems no longer detect the human presence that keeps them running.

  I’ll breathe the radiation-scented air that’ll contaminate the radiating plants that are abandoned but that—at the last glorious second, a mere seven days without having someone to tend to and water and cool their nucleuses—will open like fragrant venomous flowers.

  I’ll perceive how the water levels in Manhattan basements will rise and how the legendary albino alligators will swim up from the sewers to take over, now phosphorescent and atomic, the subway’s flooded tunnels and stations.

  I’ll breathe in the seeds of plants and trees traveling on the wind to plant themselves in the cracks in the pavement and the concrete that—with the running and crawling of the seasons—will be covered by the shadows of fantastical elms, by the branches of trees pushing through walls and tangling in horizontal jungles.

  I’ll hear the final moans of so many buildings saying “this is as far as I go” and “no more” and “what’s the point of going on like this, empty?”

  I’ll see the skyscrapers on their knees, the gargoyles on their cornices sinking their claws into the pavement of broken streets where wild animals run with no respect for blinded stoplights and speed limits.

  I’ll perceive the satisfied delight of that artificial hole, of that invisible and concave ruin that—finally, after so many negotiations and models and advances and retreats—nobody will dare to fill with anything. And, so, nothing but water and mud and plants with thick and serrated leaves and at last reaching the category of crater and almost-natural wonder. And I wonder if, with time, I might not build myself a home there and live as the last specimen of the species . . . Or maybe it would be better, a few millennia from now, to install myself in one of the displays of the Museum of Natural History. And put myself on exhibit for the nothingness.

  I’ll feel the quivering and impressionistic multiplication of abstract larvae and figurative insects nesting in works of art and I’ll witness the collapse of once-modern museums that’ll have attained the paradoxical condition of being antiquities themselves.

  I’ll record the fall of those mausoleums of memory, sinking into their own basements, in the same way that I now record the fall of the towers under a sky empty of eagles and falcons, of all those birds that one day will reign here again, nesting in the collapsed girders of bridges that nobody will cross anymore.

  There’s nothing sadder than a bridge that’s there, suspended, leading nowhere.

  And I am a bridge.

  Come on over to this side and consider yourselves welcome to the beginning of the end of my world.

  A sad beginning that—if all goes well—will function as the eternal and invulnerable bridge to the happiest of endings.

  But it’s well known that the right and the privilege of a happy ending require, beforehand, in general, certain explanations.

  And some bridges require a toll before we’re allowed to cross them.

  And the explanations that precede happy endings tend to be unhappy explanations and, sometimes, the impulse to cross a bridge just to throw ourselves off the middle.

  I’ll take the risk, try to resist that impulse.

  It won’t be the first time.

  It won’t be the last.

  There we go.

  There I am, there I’ll remain, there she is.

  A strange girl whose parents regard her strangely.

  A girl who doesn’t really understand what’s happening to her, but who does understand that the thing she doesn’t understand happens only to her.

  Sudden trances, recurrent dreams in which she gets in and out of swimming pools and each swimming pool is a world unto itself and there are so many swimming pools in the world. Migraines like earthquakes where everything seems to burn with strange colors that don’t figure in the pages of the books that teach the names of normal colors. These strange colors—these other colors—have no name, they don’t answer when you call because you don’t know what to call them.

  And yet, that strange girl attempts to explain them and get them out of her head in order to put them on a page in a combination of colors that everybody knows.

  She can’t.

  There’s no way.

  They don’t come out of her.

  The strange colors stay inside her and scream her awake in the night and the strange girl wakes up screaming, eyes rolling and speaking in tongues.

  One night the house goes up in flames and the investigators say that it was arson and the strange girl’s parents look at the strange girl in an even stranger way than before.

  One day the strange girl goes out walking without any clothes on.

  One afternoon the strange girl neglects her normal little brother and he almost drowns in the bathtub.

  Medications and treatments and electric currents and “natural remedies” at houses in the outskirts of the city, and the strange girl gets even stranger, almost stranger than all the strange colors.

  And the strange girl turns into a strange adolescent.
/>
  It doesn’t matter that, in addition to being strange, she’s the most beautiful young woman many people have ever seen. The word has gotten out and nobody dares ask her to dances, let alone court her. “Damaged goods,” someone says. And the hate of the other girls, the normal girls, the girls who take comfort in their shared ugliness or their own graceless charms and say that only someone truly crazy could be that beautiful.

  The strange young woman who, at parties, removes her shoes and sits on the edges of swimming pools and, sometimes, jumps in with all her clothes on and from that point on is known as “the girl who fell in the pool that one night,” because nobody can believe that she jumped in on purpose, because they’d rather think that she tripped, that she was drunk.

  The strange young woman becomes the one who doesn’t dance at dances and the one who lets herself be groped in the bushes by boys who, in the shadows, suddenly shy, recoil in fear, impotent confronted by her smile and naked beauty.

  The strange young woman discovers that orgasms (like alcohol) calm, for a while, all those colors blazing in her head and so she becomes a serial masturbator. If the orgasm is a little death, then each of those orgasms is like a little suicide; and the strange young woman commits suicide so many times a day that before long she doesn’t even have to touch herself to die.

  And, all the time, from when she gets up until she goes to bed so she can keep on committing suicide, the strange young woman thinks that maybe the best thing would be to experience a great death.

  To go.

  To not be strange anymore because—therein lies its greatness, it makes all of us small—death normalizes everyone.

  And, maybe like that, dead, everyone’ll finally love her.

  The strange young woman was me, and before long I realize that, if I’m going to commit suicide, a small death won’t do. No, I want a great death, suicide on a grand scale.

  So I decide to do my research and I go to the library and—coincidences do not exist, but we believe in them to keep from going mad when we learn that everything is connected to everything, so we don’t realize that there are organisms whose sole function in the universe is the serial production of earthly coincidences—a book someone left out on a table catches my eye.