Читать книгу Bottom of the Sky - Rodrigo Fresán - Страница 19

Zero.

Childhood is the zero.

Childhood is another dimension.

Childhood is the atmosphere-zero where, looking back, we feel we breathed deepest and best. But maybe this is a distorted impression, a result of too many years of insufficient oxygen and then, of course, there are some adults who are suddenly certain they remember being used in satanic rituals and secret orgies by their loving and, until that moment, perfect parents.

Childhood is pure radiation that refuses to disappear, making the needles of our Geiger counter jump at the most unexpected moments with a glowing, fluorescent green. That unmistakable science-fiction green. Alien green. The color of a particular moment that we thought had vanished but that was actually pulsing, wrapped in an artificial dream, electrodes attached to its head, lying on a stainless steel gurney. There, like I said: in a subterranean bunker only accessible by a magic word or, all at once, with the aid of a fortuitous and capricious stimulus that provokes failures in the previously inviolate and fortified security of our mind.

Childhood is that longed-for other planet that we travel from toward this planet. Toward our so-called maturity, which, we know now, will never be like that other early world where we dreamed of growing up, of stimulating our bodies’ protons, of defying the heavy gravitational laws imposed by our elders, and flying off, breaking the barrier of their warning sounds, overcoming the speed of their lights, which invariably, with scientific punctuality and at a fixed hour, go out. Nine or ten tolls and then the key moment when at first we’d pretend to be asleep (all of a sudden I’m transformed into something else, I pluralize, I’m not just talking about me, but about so many others who were like me, clones fascinated by the same feeling and same longing for the future) and then turn on our flashlights under the covers and keep reading. Reading there, in a cave, living inside the adventures of some galactic guardians, our mouths full of difficult words and a gun bursting with lightning and thunder. And, of course, maybe most important of all, along with the voluptuous anatomy of Martian princesses that they wrapped themselves around, were the green tentacles of beings with thousands of revolving pupils that never tired of devouring those princesses with their eyes, which weren’t, but at the same time were, our eyes. Their scaly skin a metaphor for our acne. Because, even though we never dared consider it even in the lowest of voices, it’s possible that they were what enticed us, the illusion that, on some distant horizon unfit for human life, albeit by the most drastic means, someday someone might end up in our arms. A place where nobody had ever been: cyanide in place of oxygen, too many suns in the sky, and days as long as years. And maybe there women like that would notice us, notice people like the young journalist who has come to pay me a visit and ask me questions.

The young journalist has gone, but his presence and questions have radically altered the atmosphere of my world. His arrival has had an effect similar to that of a nearly undetectable but critical tear in an astronaut’s spacesuit. Little by little the oxygen is escaping and thoughts flow and the sound of the memories is exactly the same as the sound of air seeping out through a tiny opening.

A hypnotic hiss.

A growing delirium.

And I float.

There’s no above or below in space.

And I travel back to the past and, yes, it’s a hazardous voyage. Because any intrusion into the process of transmutation (or whatever you want to call it) by a mosquito-sized quantity of foreign matter, or just stepping on a butterfly, is enough to make you arrive on the other side of the dematerializer (or whatever you want to call it), radically and definitively transformed or in a world that’s no longer ours and that’s been changed forever.

Memories are sensitive material, volatile.

Memories are particles in constant and increasing acceleration.

Memories have made neurons burn.

Memories can make you to forget everything.

So I must handle them with great care. Hermetically seal them in the command room and review the coordinates and controls again and again before deploying them. Touch them with robotic pincers connected to my brain with wires. Move them telekinetically and bring them near my optic sensors and my heavy breathing of a spaceship admiral, almost a ghost, while I wander around the orbit of my memory.

Now I am a machine.

I feel—I feel I am—like a machine.

And I’ve been feeling like this ever since The Incident, since a few days ago when they put me in a machine to try to find out what was going wrong with my machinery.

And, when I came out, everything had changed.

People were screaming and running in the streets.

Buildings were coming down.

Everyone was looking up at the sky or taking pictures of the sky with their little phones.

And there I was, I who’ve not yet gotten used to the fact that phones have won the streets and that people go around by themselves but talking to someone far away, like sane lunatics, plugged into a world where technology has been miniaturizing knowledge into something increasingly small and simultaneously more inclusive and more exclusive. Multiple functions in devices that fit in the palm of your hand. Devices impossible for me. For someone who grew up convinced that computers would be as big as buildings and only operated by wise grownups and not, like it is now, by children who barely know how to talk and who carry them around in their pockets and use them to travel far away, with faraway eyes, with the minute but all-powerful power of their fingers.

Now I’m armored (though stories where computers or robots suddenly humanize have become almost a subgenre in the genre) and I make myself impenetrable and logical and unfeeling.

Or at least that’s what I strive for.

It’s the only way, I think, that I’ll be able to report what happened with any kind of objective indifference, before it’s too late and the hour of my mind is going arrives . . .

To try to separate myself as much as possible from my species: transient and fragile beings and, unlike what we know about other animals, oh so variable and unstable. Men, happy and sad and foolish and wise and yet, maybe for that reason, without the ability to arrive at the collective agreements and accords that other living organisms enjoy. Men who decide to smile or commit suicide, all together, perfectly interconnected, beyond any doubt and men for whom nothing could matter less than the hypothetical existence of an authority embodied in a god who has fled the scene or in an advanced intellect with a more-than-a-little disturbing sense of humor.

I refer here to a scientific god.

A god who sucked down the half-toxic half-ecstatic air of the synagogue for which not even the greatest interstellar traveler was prepared.

A god my father ended up believing in and the god who ended him and everything he’d theretofore believed in.

A god who silenced the Hebrew in my father’s voice, sounding oh so like the guttural, sinuous languages of Martians and Venusians in those early and exceedingly cheap science fiction movies.

A god who destroyed my father with his faith and his love for the expansive wave of an all-powerful memory.

A memory that grew and devoured everything until that memory was all that was left.

The memory of a woman who was his wife and who, for a short time, was my mother.