The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  The Atom Heart Mother cow was a little bit like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey—it could be and mean anything. That cow could be everything or nothing. That cow might have come to stay or might just be passing through. And Stanley Kubrick had called Pink Floyd because he was interested in using parts of Atom Heart Mother—of the balletic suite from side A—to have it play inside the disturbed head of Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Pink Floyd had assented initially, but changed their minds when they found out that Stanley Kubrick would be “fragmenting” their music. And years later Stanley Kubrick would deny Roger Waters authorization to insert several lines of dialogue from 2001: A Space Odyssey into his solo album Amused to Death (1992). Habitual conspirators, always on the hunt for a secret story between the wrinkles in history, recommend listening to the section of astronaut Dave Bowman’s cosmic trip in synch with “Echoes” from Meddle (1971) to “discover beyond a shadow of doubt” that it was inserted by Pink Floyd as calculated background music, crashing Stanley Kubrick’s party without asking permission.

  Still—true or false, coincidence or misunderstanding—for Tom, Pink Floyd and 2001: A Space Odyssey were two faces of the same body, two clues to the same enigma. And—just as John Lennon once claimed—Tom, since he was a kid (always playing and replaying it) and up to the present day (2001: A Space Odyssey had been the first VHS and the first DVD and the first Blu-ray that Tom had bought), doesn’t let a week go by without rewatching, as if for the first time, that Stanley Kubrick film. A perfect film whose only—and in its own perverse way, also perfect—imperfection was its title, already past tense and out of style. Tom had viewed it, first when he was a boy, as the strangest and most moving film that he’d seen up to that point. And he still viewed it, now, as the best way of relaying the news that mankind had taken a giant and mysterious evolutionary leap elsewhere. But first and foremost and when all is said and done, it’d been watching 2001: A Space Odyssey (which the mother of his son had always considered “almost as incomprehensible as you”) where Tom had met the two people who would become the writer and the writer’s sister.

  So, the third time he saw the movie, an early and nearly deserted showing at Saturday theater for re-releases, Tom, already in his seat, had noticed how a boy his own age, about ten years old, with the whole theater empty, had sat down right beside him, to his right, followed by a girl, around six years old, who occupied the seat to his left. The two of them, flanking him, like a prisoner, so he couldn’t escape.

  When the show was over and on his way home, Tom had sensed, nervous, that the boy and the girl were following him, not even concerned about trying to hide it. Every time Tom turned around, there they were, hands in the pockets of long and old-fashioned winter coats, smiling at him. Tom, more worried all the time, entered his apartment building with the key his parents had entrusted to him and, inside the lobby, he turned and saw them watching him, still watching him after having followed him there, out in the street, on the other side of the door, like astronauts outside the space shuttle, wearing a single smile (there was no doubt they were brother and sister) that began on the mouth of one and ended on the mouth of the other.

  Tom, shuddering, went up in the elevator and just as he entered his apartment he heard the phone start to ring and, frightened, he thought: “It must be them . . . The invaders.”

  And now, so many years later, Fin says: “Papi, the phone is making a weird noise.” And Tom is sure that, in some way, it’s them, once more, again, it’s them all over again. And Tom picks up the receiver of his red telephone, and hears that voice singing in his ear, that line that goes “Remember when you were young . . .

  . . . you shone like the sun.” And Tom listens and remembers when he was young and he shone like the sun. And he thinks about how to explain to Fin a life without him, a life without Fin, a life before Fin.

  To explain to Fin a childhood that’s not Fin’s is even more complicated than educating him on progressive rock and Pink Floyd and Wish You Were Here. Like all kids his age (and though he handles very complex concepts like of parallel and alternate dimensions), it’s hard for Fin to imagine that Tom was once like him, his size, little and a little boy. Fin doesn’t really believe the photos that Tom shows him where he’s sizes Extra Small and Small and Medium, where he already looks somewhat but not much like who he is now. “That’s not you,” Fin says to him with an almost pitying smile.

  And he’s right. That’s not him. Tom can’t even explain to himself the past existence of that other Tom, who still exists somewhere and who returns now and to whom he now returns. Like how that younger Tom returned to that same theater the following Saturday to see that same movie and there they were again and now they come over and introduce themselves and say (the boy): “Let’s stop wasting time and be inseparable once and for all” and (the girl): “Affirmative. All systems are go.”

  And from then on, yes, inseparable.

  And they discover that they (the boys) go to the same boys’ school, a school surrounded by ruins of other buildings and soon-to-be demolished itself; but that (Tom and the boy) are in different classrooms and, because of that aberration of space, they’ve never even crossed paths at recess. And that the girl attends a girls’ school a couple blocks away. And that it’s clear that they were destined to meet and to know and to welcome each other aboard the Discovery One, bound for Jupiter, on the hunt for a nonhuman signal broadcast from the Tycho lunar crater by a monolith of extraterrestrial origin. And the three of them are constantly trading theories. And they pretend that one of them is the inhuman and cold and calculating astronaut Dave Bowman (generally Tom), the boy always has dibs on Dr. Heywood Floyd (the one who travels, swaying and weightless, to the bars of The Blue Danube and speaks by videophone to his daughter from the orbiting station), and the girl (something that should’ve disturbed Tom from the very first moment, and that did disturb him very quickly) demands time and again to put a red circle on her face like a mask, and to cause the whole LIFE FUNCTIONS TERMINATED thing to happen, and to play the sensitive and disconcerted machine HAL 9000, and to sing “Daisy . . . Daisy . . .” and to say goodbye with a “My mind is going . . .” in the red room where its hard drive is being erased one memory at a time. But he’s not so disturbed that he stops playing. And the boy already wants to be a writer (and he demands that they call him not by his name but, simply “the writer”). And the girl is the writer’s sister (because she hates her name that “I forbid you not only from pronouncing but also from thinking; and he obeys and forgets that her name is Penelope). And the three of them are and will be—for the next three years—once and for all, yes, inseparable. And bound by the love of Pink Floyd and the love of science fiction. And many years later Tom would read a novel written by the writer—“not of science-fiction but yes with science-fiction”—and he’d discover in it, almost word for word, several of his own theories about the genre and its environs.

  And the three of them read science fiction books and see science fiction movies with Pink Floyd playing in the background. And they go to see Solaris, the Soviet 2001: A Space Odyssey, and “it’s not that good but not bad either.” And they visit each other’s houses as if leaping from one asteroid to another. And Tom’s parents (who are as normal and common as two people who come together to create a third person can be) can’t believe that the parents of the writer and the writer’s sister are that famous pair of models who plow the waters of the world, aboard a sailboat, promoting a brand of cigarettes. So, the two parent-models aren’t model-parents and aren’t home much. And the writer and his sister are cared for by a team of professional servants who, for some strange reason, obeying the instructions left by the absent masters of the house, serve them Patty-brand hamburgers with Maggi-brand mashed potatoes (the powdered kind) over and over. And so Tom starts to spend weekends at his friends’ house after reading the movie listings in the paper to see if 2001: A Space Odyssey is showing. And, if it’s not showing anywhere, they stay at home, and that’s w
here they see The Bride of Frankenstein for the first time and they feel a curious excitement discovering the oddity of its “period” introduction, where Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron and Mary Shelley (“Who are these people,” they wonder) talk about the story of Frankenstein, setting the scene, then without warning or logic, everything leaps into the future, to 1931, when the movie was filmed and first premiered. And then the writer’s sister suggests they read the original novel and they read it and then follow it up with The Last Man and Mary Shelley’s journals (the unnamable Penelope, whom Tom already loves so much, learns by heart that line where the author, carrying with her the ashes, drowned and wet with her tears, of the burning heart of her dead love, moans “feeling myself the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me”) and after, on her own and to take a break from all those light years, the writer’s sister decides to spend some time in the dark years of Wuthering Heights. And she forbids them to read it because “it will be my book, this book will be mine and only mine” (and Tom reads it in secret and without saying anything to her, to feel closer to her, to be the Heathcliff to her Cathy). And they all discover, amazed, the reissue of a sci-fi comic that, for once, doesn’t take place in Metropolis or Gotham City but in the city where they live, surprisingly snowy and deadly; and they feel the pain of those poetic invaders who have been, to force them to invade, injected by their superiors with a “terror gland” that will activate and kill them if they demonstrate the unforgivable debility of being afraid and questioning their mission. And they laugh a great deal at the ridiculousness of David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars and they’re outraged by “Space Oddity,” but somewhat appeased by “Is There Life on Mars?” And this is what the three fantastics are up to when the parents of the writer and the writer’s sister come home from a trip one Saturday afternoon. And just before disappearing for good, not leaving this time but being taken never to return, they bring them the gift of (for all three of them, because they already consider Tom one of them, almost another son, whom they see just as infrequently as the other two) a projector and several film canisters and an imported record. And the record, freshly released, is Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd and the film inside one of those canisters is, of course, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But the one and the other and the other of them know that the one and the other—the record and the film—really belong more to them than to Pink Floyd or Stanley Kubrick. And so, happy (with that kind of happiness that makes you blind to all the unhappinesses that circle around you, like sharks waiting for a drop of blood to be spilled; not even an inkling that very soon they won’t ever see each other again, that pretty soon everyone will be singing “Chiquitita” by ABBA, and that everything will be altered, as if by the action of a black hole devouring all light), the three of them feel like lords of the world and masters of the universe.

  And they’re young.

  And they shine like the sun.

  And don’t ever forget it.

  “Papi, the phone is making a weird noise,” his Fin says. And Tom goes over and brings the receiver to his ear and what he hears is a noise that, yes, is weird but not at all unfamiliar. It’s a sound that Tom knows to perfection. It’s the noisy sound, ascending and apocalyptic, described by John Lennon, when he requested it from George Martin, as “a sound like the end of the world” and some time later, retrospectively, as “a little 2001.” It’s the sonorous noise that comes at the middle and again at the end of “A Day in the Life” on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and it’s, also, the triumphal intro to the voice that comes after it and starts to sing “Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun . . .” and then, with a quick chuckle, continues “I’m calling you after so much time because you’ve got to know where I am and what I’m about to do, what I’m already doing, what I did; because now all times are one for me. Now, I no longer have time, I’m atemporal” and that now proceeds without stopping so that he, the receiver seemingly fused to his ear, can’t help but listen:

  “Yes, yes, yes . . . It’s me, my friend: Ground Control to Major Tom . . . The Ghost of Christmas Past. Ho Ho Ho. Floating through time and space, happily multidimensional. Here and there and everywhere. My God, I’m full of stars!, like the astronaut said, ha, ha, ha. And now I am pure voice, like poor Douglas Rain. Think of it, Tom: years of study and training as a classical and Shakespearean actor. And to end up being universally recognized as the voice of the confused computer HAL 9000. That’s me, now, The Voice. But I’m not confused. And, of course, forgive me these exceedingly brief sentences. Like the ones our favorite supercomputer uttered while shutting down, forgetting itself, singing. The kind of things that my parents said to each other or that my parents said in raised voices after a glitch in one of their fight-loops: Just what do you think you’re doing? . . . I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over . . . I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently . . . I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission . . . And I want to help you . . . I’m afraid . . . I’m afraid . . . Sentences that have nothing to do with those long and sinuous comet tails I always used to write. It’s because I’m just getting started and it’s a little difficult. Adapting to this new life. A life beyond life. But everything will move, will fly, will float. I’m in my own prehistory, I’m like that anthropoid Moon-Watcher, crying for the moon, but already ready to throw my tapir bone into the skies. Everything goes so fast . . . And I’m sure that very soon I’ll have at my disposal all the genres and all the words I desire. At last, my friend: I’ve achieved it. No longer a simple fiction writer. Now, at last, a science fiction character. Billy Pilgrim! Antiterra! Interzone! William Burroughs! Here, there, and everywhere. There’s no time because there’s all the time in the world and, from there, from that eternal then, you can see everything that’s happened. The official versions and the alternate versions. Pink Anderson and Floyd Council held up by their sad Piedmont-sound guitars, yes, but also one Pink Floyd who, after first accusing him of being disrespectful and a drunk, cut the throat of another young man, one Cornelius Snowden, at the exit to mass at a Methodist Church in Abbeville, Philadelphia, a long time ago now, in another end. Now I begin. Racing around to come up behind you again. And my beginning is clear. That’s for sure. It all begins tonight, Christmas night. In Switzerland. Fatherland of Frankenstein. Ideal location for the unleashing of monstrosities. Inside a colossal particle accelerator. Some call it a “collider.” It makes no difference. Surely you’ve read about it. The irrepressible desire to reproduce a presumably controlled environment with the exact conditions of the universe’s Ground Zero, its founding instant, its mysterious lightning bolt, its Once upon a time . . . What was it that Mark Twain said near the end of his life and work? Ah, yes: something about how the only thing that mattered in the reality of how things had come to have time and space was on the order of “a kind of atmospheric connection,” advising “When in doubt tell the truth” and warning “When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.” So, telling the part in which everything is invented and accepting the most distant past as a form of definitive futurism. It no longer matters what’s yet to come, only what was and how it happened. A whodunit more along the lines of the detective novel than the sci-fi novel. Returning to the scene of the crime. Reproducing the beginning of everything while at the same time assuming the risk and responsibility of bringing about the end of all things. The Higgs Boson, the God Particle and all of that. But now I am God. The particle God of everyone. Even you. And you probably already noticed it a little. Me inside you. In your thoughts. Thinking nonsense. Telephonic diatribes. Animated drawings. Radiohead in your head that’s now just a radio that I tune in at will and where I intervene. Whenever I feel like it. I promise not to do it often, in your case. I always liked you. You
always caused me a little pain. Falling in love with Penelope. With the madness of Penelope, with a wuthering height. A brave man. A romantic. And from what I see, from what I read inside of you (because now your thoughts are for me like those songs that you learn by heart the first time you hear them), you’re still in love with her. Which isn’t without a certain narrative coherence: because she’s madder than ever, a consummate tourist of white-walled rooms and model of jackets with too many straps. And that’s why I’m here today, Major Tom, to give you the most painful yet necessary of Christmas gifts. Something not to make you forget her but to make you wish you didn’t remember her anymore. Take your protein pills and put your helmets on and away we go. And, yes, remember. And now it’s not that I remember many things, I remember everything. Events, feelings, words that were said or thought. And, suddenly, I see it and I feel it and I hear it and I smell it and I touch it: my sentences grow longer as my memories stretch out from yesterday to reach my today. I recall and I remember the way we were back then, in that school surrounded by demolished buildings. Buildings that were coming down, one at a time, to allow for the expansion of something that would be—and, oh, how those running the show proclaimed it, almost with the voices of ancient Babylonian engineers—“The Widest Avenue in the World.” Soon, only our school was still standing, until the last minute, like a perfectly preserved archeological relic in a world where everything had been destroyed and abandoned. Kolmanskop! But let’s go back: amid cliffs and caves and cables and doors and stairways leading nowhere, you and I and Penelope pretended we were on another planet that was on this one. And, when night fell, before going home, we said goodbye to that great and terrible landscape with a “We finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” surrounded by monkeys and gorillas, in a city on the brink of self-destruction. Complicated times, my friend. Remember? The air was like nitroglycerin and anything could agitate it or cause agitation. Remember our young and quasi-subversive music teacher? The one who liked Pink Floyd too but preferred Joan Baez? The one who, for the closing ceremony at the end of the school year, taught us to sing, a bunch of ten-year-olds, fists in the air, in front of parents and authorities, a fierce song she wrote about standing up to the bulldozers that would be coming to finish off our beloved school? Remember how that teacher was fired in front of everyone, by indignant parents and the school principal, who smoked Virginia Slim cigarettes? Do you remember the absurd pride it gave us that our school, which bore the name of the well-known patriot of independence, Garvasio Vicario Cabrera, was the top primary school in the district? Remember the impossible care we took to keep our front teeth white and that blue and sticky substance, like The Blob, that we used to fix our hair, to hide our pop hairdos that were never to extend more than two centimeters past the tie-ringed necks of our shirts? Remember when they sat a hundred of us students down to watch, in the auditorium, on a single TV, the moment of the moon landing, of the one small step and the one giant leap? Remember that huge covered patio where we ate lunch and where, after meals that were generally forgettable, we were instructed to put ourselves in something that doesn’t figure in yoga manuals and much less the Kama Sutra, but that was called the “resting position”? Remember: arms crossed on top of the table, head seeming to sink into that crater, waiting, surrounded by whispers and if you maintain the most absolute stillness and best behavior, for a voice over the loudspeaker to call the number of your table and you and your eight tablemates (one of whom might even have fallen asleep; like that really unlucky boy, the one with the older brother “with problems”) would be the first to get to go outside for the longest and most digestive of recesses? Remember walking home to our houses? Remember when we walked by that theater and stole the photos of 2001 from its doors? Remember how it all began? I do. And now you do too. Now, the howl of the void is all. Now we’re about to start over and over again and I’m the projector and the screen and the movie that you see, sitting in the shadows, in the most restful of restless positions. Now my sci-fi life begins; and when is it that science fiction, my new home, begins? Just thinking this floods me with possibilities. Some said One Thousand and One Nights. Vladimir Nabokov claimed that the beginning arrived with The Tempest. It could also be said that science fiction is not strictly a genre but a defense mechanism: the mendacious comfort of telling a thousand variations of the future, because we have no way of knowing the unique and singular truth of what will happen to us once we’re there. So, putting the future in writing or filming it time after time, we deceive ourselves into thinking we possess the power to remember it . . . I don’t know . . . I really like the writer Damon Knight’s definition: “Science fiction is what I point to when I say science fiction.” But consensus and diplomacy have sought and found the comfortable and practical accord of affirming that the lightning bolt and the let there be life of the matter are in Switzerland, where I was until a short time ago. In Switzerland, but in 1818, where I could go with a snap of the fingers I no longer have. On the stormy night that brings to life Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, imagined in a time of occultists and grave robbers and resurrectionists and worshipers of electricity, delving into the previously forbidden interior of dead bodies. Touching organs and reading the almost unknown map of intestines to trace new navigational charts. The electric body, yes. My body now. And here. A while before eternity. All I had to do was subdue the guide who never imagined that I’d subdue him. (I had to subdue him, reduce him, first—Mishima Banzai Bushido!—so I could, yes, expand myself later.) And grab his gun and lock myself in a room that can only be opened from inside and push the modern red button (as red as your old telephone, yes, I can see it) and presto! Have you seen pictures of the particle accelerator/collider? Do you know how it works? It’s like the childhood fantasy of a writer in the golden age of sci-fi or like the childish fantasy of a writer like myself who—in case you don’t know—always inserted sci-fi into his books that weren’t sci-fi books. The realized fantasy in which science, for once, imitates fiction and does something extraordinary and worthy of the cover of Amazing Stories or Astounding Stories. A BIG machine in times of miniaturization. Something colossal. The story, finally, made History. And I—who was well-informed, who’d read treatises on quantum physics and dark matter and the great luminous successes of Marvel Comics until I knew them by heart—arrived here in my journalist disguise, concealing the of a crazy mutant. And I’d learned what could happen if you did things really badly. Something like the cover of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma. The band members switching positions in ever-smaller photographs, one inside the other. Ad infinitum. Like in a mise en abyme. Like a Droste Effect. Fractal geometry. Disturbances of reality. You’ll already know all of this. Like the “infinite regression” that Dr. Otto Hasslein proposes in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, in order to explain the appearance in the present of the intelligent monkeys of the future. So I was even able to distract the person in charge of my visit, one professor Timofey Ardis, with my astounding knowledge of all of this and that and . . . You’ll hear all about it on the news, but I don’t think you’ll have time to musicalize me. If possible, if my total transformation is delayed until Monday, I’d appreciate something with theremin, you know what I mean: elastic sinuous sounds from a movie about a man who feels himself changing. But mine, of course, has much better special effects than the ones in those films from the fifties. Mine has nothing to do with those hollow machines with antennae. Mine isn’t even the hard science fiction advanced by Arthur C. Clark, who, preoccupied because 2001: A Space Odyssey hadn’t been clear and transparent, spent the rest of his life and work (2010, 2061, 3001, and that other absurd alternative trilogy that he sold as an “orthoquel” and, fortunately, he died before something new, something more, another unhappy new year, occurred to him) trying to clarify a mystery that required no explanation. Paradox: the science-fiction that attempts to explain everything—like some adults—is so childish; while the inexplicable science-fiction
—like some children—is so adult . . . And, hey, your son is great and, yes, you’re right, he knows something, your son, like David Copperfield, was born with his head wrapped in his placenta and . . . And, ah, Arthur C. Clark, a pity he’s no longer with us or, better, with all of you: I’d like to pay him a return visit now, in Sri Lanka, to explain a couple things to him. To request an explanation for what he did and undid to my beloved Dr. Heywood Floyd, my favorite character. The character who was just right in 2001 and who Clark elevated into an absurd action hero in 2010 and who he made fall from a balcony in 2061, breaking all of his bones and finding himself forced to live in orbital exile in a weightless and anti-aging hospital and . . . And I liked the first Heywood Floyd so much: the dedicated scientist who flew for Pan Am and the devoted father who spoke to his daughter and who—nothing and no one is perfect—read, weightless, on a kind of iPad. And this last thing—though it isn’t the first or the only thing—brings me to why I did what I did. Major Tom: until a few minutes ago I was a disillusioned writer. And there’s nothing sadder than a disillusioned writer, Major Tom. A disillusioned writer has that sadness that makes no one sad but himself. And it’s just that the world (I allow myself to speak of that world already in the past tense, the new world, my world, will be so different, in the new world there will no longer be people or characters) had become so hostile toward writers and toward what writers produce . . . It’s kind of funny: in the middle of last century, Ray Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451, warned us about a tomorrow (ours) when books would burn. He said nothing (science fiction, like horoscopes and politicians, doesn’t tend to be precise) about electrified readers. That “body electric” to whom Walt Whitman sang was all of a sudden, merely, the mental blackout we’re all bound for, in the darkness, blind, tripping over all the furniture, except for the bookshelf—that furniture over which you cannot trip. In one of his last interviews, Bradbury pointed out that you shouldn’t call something an “electronic book” that is, to put it bluntly, nothing more than “photos of pages.” Sure. And, yes, remember the unforgettable thing, Major Tom: in Fahrenheit 451, that mechanical hound sniffing out the offenders who insisted on continuing to read ink on paper; but, earlier, interactive TVs occupying entire rooms, husbands informing wives of their whereabouts minute to minute via wrist radios, the “almost toys, to be played with, but people got too involved, went too far,” the “newspapers dying like huge moths, nobody missed them,” and something else that almost nobody evokes at the hour of the holocaust of literature. There, in the Bradbury novel, the fire chief explains to Montag, increasingly insecure in his convictions: “And because they had mass, they became simpler. Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of paste pudding norm. . . . Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending. . . . Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a tenor twelve-line dictionary resume. . . . Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more. . . . Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought! . . . School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts? . . . Life becomes one big pratfall, Montag; everything bang, boff, and wow! . . . The mind drinks less and less. . . . The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! . . . No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. . . . There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.” In summary, open question, the one I asked myself, the one that occurred to me to ask myself when nothing occurred to me anymore: could all these sophisticated and multifunctional machines really be creating the kind of reader who, sooner or later, wouldn’t be able to read much less write? A reader who moves his increasingly deformed thumb increasingly quickly (I’ve read that in Japan the excess of typing has already given rise to deformities of that finger) to, later, bring it to his mouth. And suck it. Like a sleepy newborn waiting to be told a story. And that that story, please, be brief and simple and fun and no long sentences and parentheticals and parentheses, right? . . . Bad news for all of them, for all the addicts of electronic apparatuses inside of which they live their lives. While I speak to you, one after another, they begin to melt and to be erased and to turn into dead plastic impossible to reanimate. Soon I’ll be their one and definitive gadget, their Godget. And do you remember that episode of The Twilight Zone that you and I and Penelope watched together? My favorite: “Time Enough at Last.” I think of it and as I say it to you I see it again, an accelerated particle that I capture like a diamond: broadcast for the first time on November 20th, 1959, during the first season of the series, and, in just over twenty minutes, telling the immense story of a poor man named Henry Bemis. A gray and myopic office worker who only achieves happiness when he reads. But his despotic spouse doesn’t let him read at home and, much less, his despotic boss at his desk. Neither she nor he will let him read. One day, Bemis—at lunch hour—goes down to the vault in the basement to read in peace. Suddenly, everything starts shaking and, upon returning to the surface, Bemis discovers that the world has been destroyed by the, at the time exceedingly popular, H-bomb. Bemis realizes that nobody is left alive on Earth and—overcoming the initial anxiety that makes him contemplate suicide—he realizes that, at last, at the end of the world, after the briefest war in History, he’ll have all the time in the world to read in peace. Bemis goes to the ruins of a library and, happy, he begins to gather novels and essays and encyclopedias and dictionaries and to organize them into piles, into his future of books, into his books of the future. Then, all of a sudden, Bemis trips, and his glasses fall off his face, and break. Just like an iPad or a Kindle or whatever, whatever it might be, would break. The last scene shows an almost blind Bemis, defenseless, his eyes wide open, but no longer able to read anything. That’s how I felt, Major Tom. That’s why I did and do and will continue to do what I did and do and will continue to do. On the flight here, before landing in the Geneva airport, I watched a science-fiction movie. It wasn’t very good. Just another one of those movies produced by a cruel and unjust world where Avatar and not 2001 is the most watched sci-fi movie of all time. Nothing more than technology so the most mechanical of actors can shine. And yet, however mediocre and predictable, the movie had one charming detail. Near the end, a human explains to an artificial and synthetic clone that he realized that there was still hope in and for him when he saw him pause and pick up a book and take the time to flip through it. I almost cried, seriously. And now I’m reminded of my favorite part of Frankenstein. That chapter where the creature—who has already learned to read in French—discovers a suitcase with clothes and books: a selection of Plutarch’s Lives, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Milton’s Paradise Lost. A whole education in three volumes—an ancient story, a romantic story, a story of faith. And that’s all the creature needs to be transformed into a better monster, a beautiful monster. He doesn’t need any downloads or new programs to update within twenty-four hours and for centuries of centuries and . . . Major Tom: now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare and, floating in the most peculiar way, to discover that the stars look very different today. Here comes the message from your Action Man. My surprise gift coming do
wn the chimney and crossing the space elevator of the years. I’m sorry, you’re trapped with this dear friend, that guy who appeared in a very old song. Sordid details to follow . . . You’ll know some of this, you’ll have inferred it: after our model parents’ disappearance, Penelope and I were sent to the south of France, to live with a kind of benefactor . . . Later, my life as a writer, my pleasant fifteen minutes of fame and the hours of painful infamy after that one episode . . . you must have seen it . . . you saw me . . . did you musicalize me? Me alone among many, on a beach and in a forest, by the light of flashlights and torches, not searching for Frankenstein’s monster because we were the monsters—Penelope wailing and me repeating a name over and over. A little name that I’m afraid to even say. The name that not even this new, all powerful, version of me can bring back, except as a sketch in another dimension, in the first draft of my final forthcoming manuscript . . . So I write it as if it were the story of one madwoman in the voice of another madwoman. Penelope by Zelda. The kind of thing I liked to write when I wrote. Mashup, they call it, they called it, they won’t call it anymore. Now I send it to you, implant it in you like a terror gland. This weird noise. So that you know what true terror is, so that you never have to experience it. Year after year, the same fears, my friend. Now, since I can’t be happy, I hope that you, that you can—that you are happy. I promise to see to it. I swear I won’t forget. Now, I see things you wouldn’t believe . . . I wish you were here. And that you could see them. Laughter in the rain instead of tears in the rain. LIFE FUNCTIONS REINITIATED instead of LIFE FUNCTIONS TERMINATED. That nothing I saw and see and will see be lost (I’ve got a color TV, I’ve got a refrigerator) but that all of it remain in my memory, which will soon be the memory of the universe. Don’t Drop the Bomb. Exterminate them all! Regenerate them instead, rewrite them. I am the Bomb. I, who won’t drop, but will remain forever overhead. In the air, on a steel breeze. Threatened by shadows at night, exposed in the light, with perilous precision, seer of visions. Merry Christmas. Peace on Earth. Hasta la vista, baby.