Читать книгу Bottom of the Sky - Rodrigo Fresán - Страница 17

Not this time. To my surprise, my young visitor doesn’t want to talk about Zack and the legend of Zack and the array of rumors orbiting around the persona of Zack, the type of thing one hears at conventions or reads in fanzines. “Zack . . . Overrated,” he says with a twisted smile that I can’t help but silently appreciate.

My young visitor isn’t seeking to elucidate some mystery about Zack, but to discuss The Faraways and the rumors circulating about the modern-day Ezra Leventhal and about Evasion. (Indeed, Zack was one of the few, if not the only person, who ever thought I might be the author in the shadow of Evasion. Zack explained to me, with that tone of voice that never sounded like an insult, but like a strange form of respect or, at least, like the interest of someone confronted with a rare species: “Your imagination is so imaginative . . . Your imagination has a logic and an order that I envy. You don’t know what it’s like to live with an imagination like mine. Inside my head, all the ideas yell and raise their hands at the same time, fighting to get to the front of the line and say their piece. In a way, I write so that I’m able to stop thinking a little.”)

To my amazement, my young visitor wasn’t there to find out about what I’d witnessed, but about something that I’d lived through and taken part in; something that today feels so far away, more shadow years than light years, but descending now at full speed, rolling toward me down the stairs from the attic of the past.

And, at the same time, his questions seemed like veils, concealing answers to other questions he dared not ask or didn’t really know how to formulate.

And yet, I answered all of them.

Why did I answer him?

Why answer?

Because he reminded me so much of myself?

Because of his glasses with thick, black plastic frames (glasses that now, apparently, are in style and that, when he took them off every so often, didn’t reveal the steely-eyed gaze of a superhero, but the fragile, naked eyes of one of those fish for whom the brilliance of the sun and the blue of the sea are nothing but an impossible-to-confirm rumor)?

Because of his crooked teeth (back then all authentic cultivators of sci-fi had bad teeth)?

Because of the impossible-to-hide pockmarks on his cheeks, wreckage of a difficult and still painful adolescence (those lunar, epidermal craters, dead skin where only with great difficulty might there have landed the extraterrestrial visit of a young kiss)?

Why did I feel he was like a ghostly vision of Christmas past, like fugitive spores seeping through a crack in the wall, leaving the damp stains of a distant galaxy?

Why the perturbing sensation that—at times—the same questions were repeated in different words to insure that he not produce a single inaccuracy?

Why when he left did he leave me with the gift of a supernova-intensity migraine?

Why didn’t I resist, why did it feel like I’d succumbed to his sharp and persistent voice, like the buzzing of certain ancient insects?

Why . . . ?

To put it another way—if asked to explain my submissive and voluntary conduct—I was moved by his enthusiasm and respect for me, a person who, for him, wasn’t really a person, but more like a symbol. Someone considered a living souvenir of a dead age that he sensed, or needed to believe, had been glorious and, I thought at the time, I bestowed on him that particular and solemn joy that one only experiences when facing a great ruin. Facing a monument from another age. Facing something you dig up first and decode later, to convince yourself that you understand absolutely everything without knowing practically anything.

His hypotheses, I suppose, were fuel for my vanity, immobile after so long.

For him I was a kind of deity.

One of The Faraways.

The alleged but never confessed co-author (and not mere editor and sincere prologuer, who claimed not to know or even suspect the true identity of the author) of Evasion. The faithful guardian of a thousand pages of a legendary science-fiction novel that’d been coming to me in the mail for several years (without the sender’s name on the envelope, always sent from different offices), which nobody had read in its entirety (because it’d never been finished or it was so open-ended that it failed to meet the protocols of the genre), but about which many had written and theorized, drawing on the various fragments circulating in a way as underground as it was airborne. A science-fiction novel that wasn’t a science-fiction novel and possibly, not even a novel. A science-fiction novel in which—unlike typical science-fiction novels where things happen all the time—almost nothing happened. Just a succession of sunsets—their many differences described in minute detail—contemplated by the last inhabitant of another planet. Little more than loose fragments and scattered extraterrestrial thoughts, which I finally collected and organized under a classical and typographical cover. Yellow background and black letters, dispensing with the illustrations characteristic of the genre that, generally, had little to do with what was said and told inside. A few handmade copies published with my own money (I want to emphasize this, I don’t want there to be doubts about this: not with Zack’s money) so long ago, in another century, in another millennium.

You might also say—I don’t mean it as an alibi or an excuse—that in that moment, faced with the young journalist and his questions, I was still shaken, or more precisely, frightened, by everything that’d happened to me the day before. Which, lacking a better name but needing so badly to be named (because unnamed things produce the most fear) I (availing myself of the conspiratorial language so in vogue, Expedients Z and all that) had come to call The Incident.

But I didn’t talk to the young journalist about The Incident and told him, even better, that I was depressed, but that being depressed didn’t worry me too much: a recent psychological study had proven that the majority of writers had depressive personalities or came from melancholic bloodlines. So I qualified under both conditions, no problem.

I answered him how and as best I could.

I was honest but also partial, incomplete (to be continued . . .).

I kept to myself—as I’ve been doing for years, you should know, wherever you are—the antimatter of your name, or what you told us your name was, and now it slips through my fingers, as if I were chasing a firefly through a forest full of fireflies.

And yet, I believe, I was both generous and selfish: I remembered for him, but also for myself.

I told and answered and, I suppose, filled in or improved or invented some dark zones while simultaneously activating numerous protective shields of varying force and intensity.

Every question, it is known, hides too many possible answers.

And, in a way, all of them are accurate though maybe not correct.

The truth is fractal. It breaks into pieces and scatters in infinite directions. So, how to catch it.

Ah, yes . . .

I know . . .

By being progressively regressive.

Memory like the launch tower for the rocket of the past.

It’s no coincidence, I think, that the countdown required to initiate a rocket launch is exactly the same as the one used by a hypnotist to make his subject, who has volunteered to come up on stage, surrender his will and fall into a trance.