telling me the interplanetary whereabouts of my ill-fated father and pointing up at the sky of his—suddenly our—room, Ezra sat down on one of the beds, rolled up his pants and showed me, with a fiercely proud smile, two abnormally skinny legs wrapped in harnesses of metal and leather, he stood and said something in a strange accent, punctuating each of the two words with a little pant. In that moment, the first thing that occurs to me is that Ezra has a speech impediment, a disability or, perhaps, some other metal apparatus wrapped around his teeth. Or asthma. Or tuberculosis. But then I realize what he’s trying to do: Ezra wants to sound like a stranger from somewhere very far away. Ezra—the imperfect youngest child, arriving on the heels of six perfect sisters who are constantly plotting with their mother to undermine a father who never put up a fight—needed to think of himself as alien to all of that. A spy, an infiltrator in the controlled and toxic atmosphere of planet Leventhal. An extraterrestrial who speaks perfect English but can’t ever—or doesn’t really want to—entirely forget the accent of his home planet.
“SCIENCE FICTION!” was what Ezra said.
And I, of course, knew of the celestial vicissitudes of gods and mortals in ancient religions. I’d stumbled across the odd crackpot satires of philosophers and patriots. And I’d read novels with heroes who traveled to the center and the bottom and the highest places of the world and self-styled “scientific romances,” with wise laboratory men driven mad by their own messianic genius. Or with creators of immortality elixirs. Or with adventurers discovering lost continents inhabited by dinosaurs. Or with warriors battling invaders from an exotic ocean Empire. And all of them, always, written by men who had never really traveled anywhere, for whom the simple act of standing up from their desks was a struggle. Men who invented perpetual-motion adventures for young readers who couldn’t easily escape from the orbits of home and parents. Science-fiction writers, on the other hand, made no attempt at illusion or deception: we knew and they knew that they never went and would never go where they said and wrote that they had gone, but they trusted that, yes, we would go. So, all of that—those invisible men and those human animals and those bellicose visitors from the red planet and those flying rockets and those voyages into the future via Victorian apparatuses or hypnotic trances—was, in reality, a collection of instruction manuals, barely hidden inside novels and stories. Instruction manuals to set the future in motion.
“SCIENCE FICTION!” Ezra repeated.
And it was then, for the first time, that I heard those two words that at first, to me, seemed impossible to bring together in the same environment. Science and Fiction struck me as irreconcilable and contradictory terms, like polar opposites.
Two of the greatest novels in the history of literature (two novels not considered part of any genre, instead, each of them a genre that began and ended in itself; the same would occur years later with the polemical Damitax, which follows, throughout the cosmos, the amorous obsession of an old astronautics professor with a manipulative Venusian adolescent whom he clones over and over, hoping that one of the versions will, finally, love him) were, indeed, fantastical and spatial. But more than anything, they were classics. Krakhma-Zarr, Ezra’s favorite, tells of the madness of a captain who pursues a mythical cosmic creature from star to star. And Times Without Time, my favorite, was the obsessive tale of the last Martian, Mars-El: a traveler who, after ingesting a strange drink distilled from the dust suspended in the melancholic rings of Saturn, goes back in time to the confines of his childhood and, from there, passes through his entire life all over again as if contemplating it from outside, as if he were reading it, as if it were a book composed of many books.
In a way we were defined by one or the other novel (titles that now I can’t find anywhere on my bookshelves and that seem not to appear in the card catalogues of any library), and by dividing us they made us perfectly complementary: Ezra was a man of action and I a man of reaction.
Or something like that.
And my reaction to those two magic words—Science and Fiction, suddenly like one word with two heads and a single brain—was instantaneous and perfect.
It was as if Ezra were a magician—someone who’d just finished announcing that “For my next trick I’ll need a volunteer”—and I, a more than willing spectator, ready to climb up on the stage and submit myself to anything: to be cut in half, to be the body stuck full of swords, to disappear in a cloud of colorful smoke or inside a magic cabinet decorated with oriental characters and dragons with almond eyes, to float and ascend and lose myself forever in the rafters of a vaudeville theater.
I was—I knew then—someone who had waited for years to succumb to this illusion that soon came to seem truer and solider and stronger than everything I’d experienced previously.
It’s easy for others—I have no command of that language—to write, and even write well, about the highs and lows of the tides of love. Much more difficult to pinpoint are the ripples on that apparently placid lake that is friendship, at whose center, every now and then, circular and secret storms explode, just for the pleasure of, in turn, being eclipsed by a sudden blue sky.
Of one thing I’m certain: with the arrival of Ezra in my life (and until his recent and possibly final departure, just a few days ago, again, The Incident) everything seemed to accelerate.
And, looking back on it, everything I’ve said up until now (all my false starts, repetitions, clumsy statements about the genre, and all my absurd attempts to translate the elusive texture of time and space into writing) changes sign and language.
Because when Ezra enters my life, I arrive at last, to another planet.
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.
