Читать книгу Bottom of the Sky - Rodrigo Fresán - Страница 26

I say and write Science Fiction and everything accelerates. Walking the way Ezra walked after they removed his metal harnesses: side-to-side but moving forward and, if you watched his legs, producing the curious impression of receding and advancing, laterally, feet barely moving, like he was suspended over phantom wheels a few centimeters off the floor.

Like he was floating.

Like the dance moves of that singer of indeterminate color (I don’t remember his name, why’d I think of him right now?) who ended up throwing himself off the spiked crown of the Statue of Liberty.

Like that interplanetary spaceship on that television show I wrote for called Star Bound (today considered a classic, today almost everything is a classic of something or for someone), that attained absurd velocities when a captain in an absurdly tight uniform gave the order, sitting in an armchair on the command bridge, surrounded by women with short skirts and impossible hairdos, and counseled by logical, unfeeling extraterrestrials who, of course, like I’ve said, spoke perfect English, the universal language of the universe, apparently, and I wanted to be like that: to be from that far away and to feel that small.

And so the rhythm of what I write accelerates and I accelerate.

The years pass and run over each other and before long everything shocks me (and I decide I shouldn’t be shocked, one of the many consequences of The Incident, I suppose) and everything happens so fast and there’s so much that happened that I don’t remember and will never write down here.

The unsettling sensation that the same event happens multiple times, with minimal or massive variations, as if someone were making adjustments, correcting and comparing different versions of the same event without ever picking one. Hundreds, thousands of details that end up defining the fabric of a life, and the unsettling sensation that I’m not the one who determines its direction and deviations, confusing dates, superimposing epochs, until it becomes so difficult for me to pinpoint how old I am, knowing that I’m too old, that there is not much left for me to tell.

Better like this, I think.

Better to let go.

Better to think—better to surrender to the dictates of an unknown entity—that it is someone else who writes me writing all of this.