A title that could be the title of the story of my life: The Colors That Come From Space. Its author is Phineas Elsinore Darlingskill. Or, at least, that’s the name of the writer and title of the book that I transmit now. I’ve never heard anyone mention him. I start reading and I don’t stop until I get to the end. The novel—a short novel—tells the story of a family driven mad by beings that arrive through a tear in the fabric of the universe. The book is written in a pompous and precious style, overflowing with adjectives. But—and this is what interests me most—it’s written by someone who seems to believe in what they’re writing, by someone who, at the same time, seems a prisoner of fevers and visions like mine.
A few inquiries put me on Darlingskill’s trail and it’s easy for me to join his circle of acolytes. The doors of his mansion a couple hours outside New York are always open. They are somewhat absurd individuals. People even lonelier than me, because they’re alone for reasons far more banal than mine: they’re alone because they don’t dare let themselves feel accompanied, they don’t feel confident they can bear such responsibility. For that reason, they prefer to dress up in absurd uniforms, shave their heads “like Ancient Egyptian priests,” burn scented powders, execute childish magical waves of their hands, and convince themselves of anything to the point of autohypnosis.
It wouldn’t make much sense to go in-depth here regarding my conversations with Darlingskill. It would be like transcribing the fantastical conversation between a cat and a lioness. We belong to the same race, yes, but we are so different: Darlingskill envies my colors and I envy his envy, because it’s the envy of someone with the genius to imagine—with no need to suffer—what I experience perfectly.
For Darlingskill, I am like a saint. A virgin. A vestal. One of those sibyls in labyrinthine caves, sitting inside a golden cage, awaiting the trembling questions of Caesars and emperors. My chromatic hallucinations are my stigmas and, in a way, for Darlingskill, the definitive proof that his imagined cosmogony might have about it a glimmer of reality and, so, he feels he’s been elevated from more or less popular novelist to singular prophet and distinguished oracle. The proud host who will help open the door to a new age. A kind of guide of mystic tourism.
Darlingskill explains to me that, most likely, I am a bridge to another universe, that I’ve been chosen to bring visions from one world to another, that sooner or later the true meaning of my visions will be revealed to me, my mission communicated.
And, of course, Darlingskill is a complete crackpot, but this time, for once, he is right.
But Phineas Elsinore Darlingskill doesn’t have long left in “this thankless dimension.” Darlingskill falls ill, his family comes to collect him and take him back to Manhattan. He’s hospitalized with no hope of being discharged and he dies a few days later, the night I meet Isaac Goldman and Ezra Leventhal and Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill.
And, ah, I find that I like this almost telegraphic summary—dry, concise, without frills—of my oh so distant past.
I like that my strange story can be told in a simple and functional language, like that of someone reporting her activities with just the right words, not wasting any time, because soon she’ll have to return to the battlefront.
I recount all of this in the language of science fiction: a style simple by mandate, because it knows it must convince people of complex ideas, believable words for unbelievable situations.
Now, like then, this way of expressing myself calms and relaxes me like, in a way, it relieved me back then to be surrounded by all those aspiring writers discussing with naïve solemnity things far more delirious than my own deliriums.
And I could, yes, try to explain the intensity of the love that I felt for Isaac Goldman and Ezra Leventhal.
But it would be in vain.
Certain nerve endings, certain emotional circuits no longer function.
Material fatigue.
Isaac was right when he said that science fiction and love never went well together. Or maybe they do: because in one way or another we’re all abducted by love, by that extraterrestrial and always different force whose language we try, in vain, to understand. But that’s not all. Love—that benign tumor, but tumor nonetheless—was cut out of me a long time ago, that night when I changed forever, when I became what I am now.
So don’t expect passionate words from me, unbridled emotions, descriptions of bodies on top of bodies.
Instead, it would be much easier for me to offer you a detailed portrait of what was done and what was said in those meetings of young fans of the still-young world of science fiction. I could, even, briefly illuminate you regarding the almost visible sexual currents that ran through those environs, contaminated by the smoke of first cigarettes and the fizz of soft drinks, where real women were the occasional girlfriends and imagined women were innocent lunar damsels or mercurial Amazonian princesses or dedicated laboratory assistants (whose primary function was to scream or be taken prisoner so the hero could rescue them) or naughty little sisters with short hair and rude manners who later turned into almost-incestuous beauties.
I could, also, attempt to chronicle the temperamental doctrinarian and aesthetic crises and to create an explanatory diagram of the glut of political factions in which—postulating different possibilities regarding how and by whom other planets should be colonized—the ideological differences and persecutions of the coming decades would ferment.
But I can’t say anything about what I felt when I was with Isaac and Ezra, because long ago I resolved not to feel anything about it. To feel it would be to distract myself from my ultimate goal, to lose myself in the past instead of concentrating on the future. To remember that love would endanger my aspirations to make it immortal.
So how to go about telling this story without pausing too long on them, without staying with them forever.
The answer is easy: Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill.
Much later, on this side of things, one autumn morning, I will find my dead husband, stretched out across the floor of our house in Sad Songs. Face down, one arm outstretched and one leg bent upward, as if he were a swimmer run aground. I won’t feel sorrow, but I will feel pity for that miserable man, who loved me desperately for so many years, convinced that his was an unrequited love. Someone whose only oddity—the only aftertaste of what he could’ve been, something like those useless appendages that remain almost hidden, just hinting at another direction a particular organism might have evolved in—will be that of swallowing too many uppers and complex vitamins in order to make it to the end of the century when “it’ll be possible to transplant a man’s essence into a machine and thereby allow him to live forever.”
He’ll tell it to me everyday (yellow pill and blue pill and yellow and blue and orange) for years. And I won’t say anything. I’ll just look at him in silence, the way you look at something unimportant yet interesting.
I can see myself: I look at the Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill that is and I think of the Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill that could have been.
I think—my mission, the mission that his uncle could never have imagined, the mission that I carried out with great success, the efficient neutralization of one of many possible ends of the world—of the Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill that never was.
Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill ceased to be who he could’ve been on the same night that I became who I am now.
Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill asks to speak in what is the largest meeting of science fictions fans to date. The Futurians, The Cosmics, The Futuristics, The Dimensionals, The Astronomicos, The Futurexicos, and The Faraways Isaac Goldman and Ezra Leventhal who, from a corner of the school gymnasium, watch Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill with embarrassed resignation.
Everyone is there.
And there I am.
I, who have become an unsettling presence for the science fiction fans. “What’s a girl like that doi
ng here? What does she want with us? What can we do to make her never leave and get her to look at us?” they all seem to be asking themselves.
I can’t provide the answer to those questions because it’s one of those answers that would just provoke more questions.
I’m there because I have nowhere else to be.
I’m there, bombarded by inexplicable colors, by sudden explosions of yellow and blue (and yellow and blue on orange). There’s a Mark Rothko painting inside my head. A Mark Rothko who doesn’t paint like the Mark Rothko of that time, dedicated only to small figurative and slightly surrealist paintings.
I am there because, not finding an explanation for what’s happening to me anywhere—my parents have filed me in front of successive specialists who classify me with different shapes and sizes of psychosis, like those stickers stuck on the sides of travel trunks—it soothes me a little to hear those young men proposing and imagining variations of the future with the true passion of early Christians.
My parents don’t complain much about my new activities. They don’t really like it that I associate with people like Isaac Goldman and Ezra Leventhal (my parents are Jews from the city’s upper class), but they fantasize that “something happens” with Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill: an excellent match who might, perhaps, domesticate their lunatic daughter and transform her into a respectable society lady in whom any oddity will be quickly rewritten and understood as an admirable exotic feature.
And my parents—may they rest in peace—will see all their fantasies come true, like everything related to their daughter, for all the wrong reasons. But it’s well known that it’s impolite to ask for too many explanations about wishes granted.
So that’s where everything begins.
Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill asks to speak in the name of The Faraways (Isaac and Ezra look at the floor, embarrassed, as if searching for something they dropped but dare not pick up) and pulls out a pile of carefully typeset pages from his inside jacket pocket and starts to read.
And what Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill reads—which starts off as a kind of elegy to his uncle Phineas Elsinore Darlingskill—takes a quick detour into something that sounds very much like a messianic delirium. The coded autobiography, barely dressed up as fiction, of a shy and tormented boy who, really, is convinced that he’s a superior being destined to rule the universe.
First there are a few scattered chuckles, but, then, the gym fills with bursts of laughter and boos and shouts demanding the expulsion of the speaker. Someone yells that he’s a racist. Someone else accuses him, simply, of being “fat and worthless.” Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill starts to stammer and get red in the face and his eyes fill with tears. Isaac and Ezra take him by the arms and lead him away, almost dragging him, and it’s then that, from the door, Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill screams: “You’ll see! You’ll see! Laugh now but soon you’ll be begging for mercy. Who wants to write little stories when you can start a religion? Who wants to be a writer when you can be God?”
Then it happens.
Then: all the colors at the same time.
Then—I can’t know it then, but I’ll never menstruate again or bleed in any way, all bacteria and viruses will die upon entering my organism, from that moment on, it’s not that I become immortal, but, yes unbreakable, my blood could be used to produce a vaccine for all the ills of this world, but no one ever asked me for it—it’s as if I were struck by a lightning bolt. It’s as if I dove into the sea, riding an animal that held the whole world in its jaws. A wild but not exactly fierce animal. An animal whose dangerousness—whose degree of mortal threat—was a direct consequence of the audacity or lack of awareness of the person who risked putting his hand between its fangs. I wanted to grip the hide of its currents, to let go, to sink, to be devoured and drown and decompose slowly until I was reincarnated as one of its waves.
And only then learn to swim.
And I faint.
And I regain consciousness.
And then I turn on.
Then—after so many sporadic tests, brief rehearsals, episodes that the neurologists and psychiatrists of my planet couldn’t explain—I start transmitting.
I’ve been activated.
The next morning I show up at Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill’s house and ask him to marry me.
I tell him I’ve realized that I love him, that last night I understood his greatness, that I can’t live without him.
And like that—obeying instructions—I transform myself into a secret and nameless heroine, into the strange young woman who has prevented one of the many ends of the world and, along the way, into the little Jewish girl who wrote the Bible.
And the name of the Bible is Evasion.
And the time has come to try and offer some explanations. It’s not going to be easy, there won’t be any of that much-appreciated final and clinical cleanness of certain detective mysteries here. There won’t be anything resembling those enigmas solved by a somewhat absurd detective who gathers all the suspects together in a train car or a library to explain to them step by step and second by second, what it was they did or didn’t do. And the guilty, there all along, with a cold smile and a warm cup in hand, waiting, polite and chivalrous, the moment of the accusation, knowing that we’ll never witness the moment of his arrest or entrance into the jail or his exit through the door where convicted bodies are sent, because these things aren’t shown, it’s not proper.
This won’t be the case here.
Interplanetary plots aren’t endowed with the dubious structure of terrestrial plots, even though they also take place in hermetic environments, in pressurized chambers, in rooms always sealed from inside.
There are too many factors to attend to, sudden atmospheric shifts, mechanical flaws, different cultures, suns that don’t necessarily illuminate and cast light across the surface where the corpus delicti lies or where the weightless bodies of those who live to tell the tale walk oh so slowly and, befuddled, discover that they never really know what happened, much less the best way to explain the inexplicable.
Isaac Goldman and Ezra Leventhal can’t comprehend what’s happened, how I could have left them behind, and—they read about it in the society pages of the New York Times—why I’m going to marry Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill in what’s already being considered “next spring’s big wedding.”
So, the night of the winter’s final snowstorm, they come to my house and they work all night.
Men of snow and a whole snow planet.
A planet that includes all three of us and excludes the confusion of my sudden rejection of their love, and I watch them from my window without being able to say anything to them. Without explaining to them that it’s been decided—very far away, so nearby—that Isaac’s sadness and Ezra’s fury will be far less complicated for our world than the hate of Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill.
That’s where I come in.
And here I am to give explanations, closer to a victim than a detective, and so aware that, strictly speaking, the parameters of detective fiction, as I’ve already noted, don’t apply here, nothing is resolved, no guilty party is found guilty.
Which is maybe why, I decide, it’s better not to aim for the clarity of a closed ending, but to repeat, again and again, so that even the children understand, that simple magical line: the key that opens the lock of all the fairytales.
Once upon a time . . .
Once upon a time there were two young men named Isaac Goldman and Ezra Leventhal and I think I’ve already told you too much about them.
You’ve already watched them and listened to them.
You’ve already seen and heard the things I make them do, the words I make them say.
Once upon a time there was a young man named Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill who one night, many years ago, is humiliated in public (everyone laughs at him, Isaac and Ezra and I laugh at him too)
, at a meeting of science-fiction fans, and he leaves swearing that he’ll have his revenge. He leaves an insulted mortal and promises to return a vengeful deity.
And he’s true to his word.
Somewhere else, in another corridor of a reality that never was, there is a great deal of bibliography and documentaries about his life and work. But none of those books or films would be able to cover the final chapter of his life because there was no time to write it or film it. The final chapter of Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill’s life would also be the final chapter of all our lives.
Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill leaves the meeting and—by means of a generous bribe—manages to get the essay he was unable to finish reading that night published, not as fiction but as nonfiction, in the pages of Tantalizing Episodes. It’s the first of several writings that proclaim the good and strange news of a system that puts him at its heart and makes him the master of a “Supreme Power,” a power that he alone can teach, to all those who bow before his greatness and proclaim themselves his humble and devout disciples. There are many members of the sci-fi community who write off the whole thing as “a demented revision of Freud.” But there are many others who begin to pay attention to and believe in Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill and his teachings, which combine faith in the terrestrial superman as vehicle to attain the power of the stars and the ability to create and destroy entire universes, provided that you ask his permission and get his blessing first.
Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill collects his writings in a book (whose dedication reads “For those who laughed at me: I’ll be the one laughing soon”) that becomes a best-seller (few things are more attractive than a book written by a lunatic), and soon indoctrination centers sprout up all over the world. Sanctuaries that impart his methods and teachings and technologies and submit new members to absurd initiation rites that they rarely ever discuss, because they’re forced to take vows of absolute silence, because the rest of the vulgar mortals have no cause to participate in the “Great Secret.” There are, yes, rumors of machines that only function via psychic powers, of regressions in time, of complex hierarchies and rankings that go up to “Maximum Wisdom,” which “can’t be explained to the uninitiated, because they’d never be able to understand it,” and of being one with Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill, who rarely leaves his mansion in the Nevada desert. All of it in exchange for generous donations to the cause. Soon, an array of Hollywood actors join the movement and say they’ve understood everything with perfect smiles and pupils fixed and dilated from the passion of their love for the “Absolute Master.” Soon, in addition, the Cosmic Church of Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill comes under investigation by governmental organizations. But they can’t do anything, they don’t find anything. And then something terrible happens: the president of the United States survives an assassination attempt in which his wife and daughter die. An aide and member of the Church of Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill puts the president in touch with his master. And there’s nothing more fragile and malleable than a man wrecked by pain. The president declares himself “purified” by Jefferson Franklin Washington Darlingskill, whom he names Secretary of State and Advisor of Mystical and Spiritual Matters, and together, one unforgettable summer morning, they press all the buttons and fire all the missiles and bring about the end of our world as we know it.
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