Читать книгу Beat Space - Tommaso Pincio - Страница 5

2.

It’s me that’s done all this and come and gone and complained and hurt. One day at the beginning of summer in 1956, Jack Kerouac, having said these words to himself, decided that the moment had finally arrived to come face to face with the Void. On that same day the average price of a hamburger broke the 99-cent barrier, and an unusual atmospheric disturbance originating in Mediterranean Europe seriously undermined the credibility of meteorologists.

Many years later, convinced they could tell the story of the past once and for all, historians would reconstruct the events of that long-ago day, breathing life into the figure of Jack Kerouac as he was about to pass nine weeks as an Orbital Inspector on behalf of Coca-Cola Enterprise, Inc. This particular Jack Kerouac would live for sixty-three days on board one of those minute spaceships circling the planet Earth at a height of approximately thirty-six thousand kilometers, scouring the orbital spaces of big-name companies. All this, however, would not help him find the meaning of life.

Like many other drifters before him, all Jack Kerouac had to do was verify the functionality of the ship’s detectors. If the LED lights on the central panel were lit up according to the pattern they had shown him before departure, the detectors were in working order and he shouldn’t do anything. If, on the other hand, the lights were illuminated in an unanticipated pattern, it meant that there was some problem with the detectors and he should make contact with the base. If at any point the lights turned off, Jack was to deduce that the detectors no longer functioned, period, and it was all the more advisable he contact the base. Contacting the base was the maximum effort they expected of him—nothing else was asked. He’d contact them down at the base and they would look after the rest. How precisely they could look after it remained a mystery, but look after it they would. Jack didn’t need to know anything else and, more importantly, he didn’t have to do anything else.

It might happen that the small monitor situated over two blue buttons would detect an intrusion into the orbital space owned by Coca-Cola Enterprise, Inc. Intruders might take the form of debris of stellar matter originating from some desolate corner of the universe, but most likely they were metal cylinders of garbage that had been surreptitiously abandoned in Space. Verifying the actual nature of the intruders was not among Jack’s tasks. An Orbital Inspector simply had to record the presence of the intruders and contact the base to communicate their locations. That was all it took, they did the rest.

Basically, the possibility that Jack would need to contact the base was remote to say the least, if not entirely impossible. By this time, in 1956, technology had perfected the detectors to the point of such indestructible efficiency that the orbital spaces of the big-name companies were well-controlled beyond every reasonable need.

Climbing aboard his tiny Orbital Inspector’s shuttle, Jack embarked on a new period of his life—nine weeks which he would pass doing nothing, save for being completely alone, looking out at Space from his porthole, trying to understand that the Void he had seemed to recognize in his solitude was, in fact, the Void outside and that he had not gone back and forth for nothing. Because in reality he wasn’t so different from the Stars that pulled away from everything else in the universe without rest, Stars that would be extinguished just as he would be extinguished... one day, far away from everyone and from the Void.

Jack Kerouac had decided to confront the solitude of those weeks head-on, without help. No weird pills, no alcohol, no music. Just him and the Void, symbolically materializing out of the immensity of Space and in the light of the Stars.