Читать книгу Bottom of the Sky - Rodrigo Fresán - Страница 16

. . . like taking a deep breath before diving into that memory and descending into its depths.

Zack, who was crazy, who became a science-fiction writer as soon as he realized that nobody was going to publish his odd, realistic novels about couples who fight all the time.

Zack, who conjured an almost immediate future where nothing functioned properly apart from the invisible yet oh so solid device of paranoia.

Zack (Zack’s always-moist eyes, like those of a sad dog, his docile and canine smile, his face covered in fur, fits of snapping and barking at the most unexpected moments), who survived on canned dog food during his most difficult and impoverished days and who could no doubt recommend for you the best and tastiest brands.

Zack, who married and divorced so many times and Zack’s many children dressed in brilliant rags, filing behind him through the streets.

Zach, who in public would say things like “we science-fiction writers are pathetic beings: We can’t talk about science because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful” or “there is nothing stranger than to write something believing it is untrue, only to find out later that it was actually true.”

Zack, who never stopped dreaming about his telepathic, twin brother who died at birth (and from whom he swore he received messages and commands), Zack, who was sure he was the reincarnation of an ancient Christian saint, lost in a “false reality” that in truth, he asserted, was nothing but a secret wrinkle (“a kind of elaborate curtain”) behind which still pulsed the invulnerable grandeur of the Roman Empire.

Zack, who was involved with West Coast militant groups like the Black Drummers and who reported that his files had been raided “by the CIA and the FBI and a governmental organization so secret that it has no name” because “in one of my books, without realizing it, I revealed the nature of the most absolute and definitive experiment that is being carried out by the most acclaimed and qualified scientists on the planet . . . I ask myself which book of mine it might be.”

Zack, who didn’t believe in other planets or in rockets and whose flight crews always ended up pushing the wrong button while distractedly thinking about some random thing, about Barbie dolls or psychotronic drugs of high voltage and density.

Zack, who died descending a ladder at the most ascendant moment of his career, when headlines and the stories on the evening news were beginning to look a lot like his fantasies.

Zack, who, at one of the only meetings or conventions we attended, smiled politely in response to my call for a return to the classic galaxies of science fiction.

And, yes, Zack was better than I was (Zack was better than almost all of us) and I laughed at Zack. I resented his acknowledged opportunism and the speed with which he wrote novels, novels that, it’s true, I didn’t like and didn’t understand; but they were novels unlike any others.

Zack knew of my resentment and got his revenge in the most elegant and perfect way: at the reading of his will, it was revealed that he’d named me his literary executor and—those were hard times, I had no choice but to accept—stipulated that I receive a generous percentage of the profits any future adaptations of his work might earn. Just a few years prior, that designation would’ve been nothing but a bad joke and an uncomfortable and inopportune ordeal: much of his work was never catalogued and would have impressed no one but his underground followers. But just before he died, Zack’s stock had been on the rise. His works were being rereleased in prestigious collections and his name was beginning to be heard, repeated more and more by the voices of “serious” writers who considered him “a secret prophet” or “someone who dared to look beyond” or “the philosopher who came from the future to help us understand our incomprehensible present.” And what was most intriguing about Zack’s novels wasn’t their plots (difficult to adapt, strange, like a different language that was actually just an exotic variant of our own), but their ideas. Ideas that producers, screenwriters, and directors could distill into movies flooded with digital effects, popular and, on more than one occasion, critical successes.

The first that premiered—the one that turned on the engine of his posthumous mythos—was a noir mutation featuring sentient androids. I was hired in the capacity of creative supervisor and advisor and “specialist” in Zack’s visions, and when the director offered to let me write the final monologue of a dying robot under the acid rain of a retro-futuristic Los Angeles, I thought I’d be able to take revenge against his ghost. I put words in his mouth that, I thought, Zack would despise: elegiac phrases honoring the memory of galaxies, where Zack’s characters—more preoccupied with their place on Earth, or, at most, in a decadent Martian colony too similar to an industrial suburb—would never have dreamed of venturing, because there was nothing that interested them less than traveling far away. The speech overflowed with poetic lines easy to remember and immediately place. Many people found them moving and, I’m sure, there were some who cried during the filming of the scene. I felt that, with that, I’d done right, I’d managed to slip in a particle of restraint and nobility. A call to return to that future that we’d believed in so fervently in the past. My idea of science fiction contaminating Zack’s idea of science fiction.

And yet, it’s true, ghosts can never be beaten.

And my gesture was lost and swallowed up by the blinding light of a dead star named Warren Wilbur Zack: everyone thought he had written that humanoid machine’s farewell under the rain, that it had been extracted from one of his many notebooks and unpublished manuscripts, which were no longer unpublished, but were being bought for astronomical sums that, like I said, I benefited from and that today are my only stable source of income, my means of survival.

The movie premiered, it wasn’t a great popular success, but with time, it became a cult classic, almost a religion, an incessant maker of money and prestige, a masterpiece—there’s nothing more marvelous than a cult artist who also makes money—admired by the young, who soon occupied important positions in the industry and declared themselves fans of Zack and his visions.

So it goes: I’m kept afloat by Warren Wilbur Zack, he pays my bills, my health insurance, he’s turned me into an expert on his life and work, and I even wrote the first of his various biographies and annotated a volume of his eccentric letters and a collection of his “meta-philosophical-religious essays.”

And it is regarding Warren Wilbur Zack that I get invited to speak, to answer questions, to lie.

But no.