The Invented Part
Page 37
It’s night now. The dead of night. Closed in with multiple locks and chains. Now the red telephone no longer rings and Tom doesn’t even remember having hung it up. Or when he lowered the blinds, like those old Cold War documentaries advised, trying to make you believe that that alone would keep you safe from the radiation outside. Or when he put Fin in his rocket-shaped bed (after Fin put on a performance by Pésimo Malini revolving around Galactuses who disappear as if by the art of magic, provided, of course, that you close your eyes and do not open them until the worst magician in the world tells you to). Or having heard on the news about what had happened in Geneva, Switzerland, in the particle accelerator, with a madman of whom they show recent photos in which Tom can make out the shadow of the shadow of the shadow of a boy in the darkness of a movie theater, reaching up his hand and stretching out his index finger to touch that monolith and, transfigured, return home to be reborn.