to think—better to surrender to the dictates of an unknown entity—that it is someone else who writes me writing all of this.
There is a photograph of the way we were back then.
A photograph taken in that kind of black and white that seems more faithful somehow and to reveal more than all the colors in the world.
I have it here, I didn’t imagine it.
It brings me peace that something of what I think I remember—something that happened—can offer physical and incontrovertible evidence of its existence.
It’s one of the two photographs I would include in this hypothetical dossier regarding The Incident and its circumstances.
The other photograph is also of me and Ezra; but what makes that photograph special is that she is in it too, and since it’s her photograph (I have it here as well, Ezra gave it to me a few days ago, and it seems to be vibrating ever so slightly, wavering like a nightlight with a bulb so small it serves more to obscure than to illuminate), it is much more difficult to narrate, but soon I won’t be able to avoid the risk of attempting to describe it.
In this one, the first photograph, Ezra and I pose together, shaking hands—with the solemnity of the small who must believe themselves big—as if ratifying a transcendent and indissoluble society. It’s an old photograph and its age is evidenced not just by its date, but above all, by the attitude of its subjects. It is a photograph from a time when getting a photograph taken was a big deal: you had to make an appointment at a professional studio, dress up in your best clothes, select the backdrop motif, leave home to have it taken, and never stick out your tongue at the moment of the flash. A photograph was a serious thing. Photographs weren’t yet instant, easy to correct and retouch. Photographs were slow and permanent and I don’t know if they were stealing our souls, but, yes, they definitely captured an instant forever. Back then, all photographs were historic.
The photographer—Abraham, one of the Kowalski brothers, specialists in bar mitzvahs and weddings and funerals; his brother had died in the war, his children and grandchildren would die in conflicts yet to come—did not, of course, have any futuristic or interplanetary motif that we could stand in front of. So Ezra and I ended up picking an enlarged engraving of Greek and Roman temples, the closest thing, we agreed, that mankind had to civilizations far away in time and space.
“Now we’ve got our picture. Now we are somebody. Now we can be who we want to be,” Ezra says and we steal two sewing machines from his father’s workshop (they’re black, heavy, antiques, we slip them out a window at night) and trade them in for a small Kelsey hand press, and within a week we publish the first edition of our magazine.
We call it Planet—we like the cleanness of its name, no adjective to contaminate it, we like to think that the planet it referred to could be any planet—and it includes a story of Ezra’s whose subject I don’t recall, and one of mine that I’d rather not remember and—almost out of pity—an advertisement for the Leventhal Tailors.
But Planet puts our names on the map.
We distribute a few poorly printed issues, slip them under the doors of bookstores and libraries, and before long we get a visitor. And it is then we realize that we’re not alone in the universe, that there are others—too many—like us: kids for whom the present is intolerable, and so they escape to the future, to many futures, because the idea that only one future exists is insufficient, insufferable. Thus, the future as Christmases and birthdays. The future as anticipation of a party of possibilities, of gifts and presents and wishes. But a party where, before being allowed in, you must know how to decipher the invitation.
If the past is a foreign country, then the future is a distant star. And in those days there were so many of us who longed to get there and to plant the flag of our name. The way others competed outdoors in grunting contact sports, or in student debates, words burning up oxygen until the classroom air was almost unbreathable; we opted to combine action and words, fantasy and logic, and to play our game inside imaginary spaceships bigger than stadiums and amphitheaters. We were bad athletes and got cripplingly nervous in public, so, instead, we flew with our minds.
And soon, we were marked: our fingers permanently stained with purple ink. The purple ink characteristic of small printing presses, of hectographs and mimeographs, of machines with names like Speed-O-Print or Multi-Printex or Typekto. Simple machines, but so complex to keep running without the paper jamming or the wax tablet cracking or the rollers twisting before copy number fifty, when everything appears to melt down and come to a stop.
And the kind of ink that never fully dries on the fresh copies, forcing you to handle those few pages with the same care required for the most ancient and noble scrolls.
And the slow vertigo of pages emerging one after another, with that adolescent velocity that’s neither fast nor slow, but seems to drag along with the slow vertigo of something that needs to go everywhere but has no idea how to get there.
But Planet is powerful enough to reach nearby colonies.
And one afternoon a group of kids comes calling. They stare at us and—as a sort of universal greeting requiring no words—reach out their hands and show them to us. And their fingertips are stained too with what the mother of normal children would probably identify, erroneously, as raspberry juice. And with reverential silence, they pass us copies of Phantom Universe and Time Traveling and X-Rays and suddenly Ezra and I are trapped in the tribal orbit of boys who meet in basements or on school stairways or in rooms reserved for “recreational activities,” to discuss whether or not it all began with the gothic fantasies of that drunk from Baltimore; or whether that radiobroadcast false alarm announcing the invasion of those exceptionally exhibitionistic Martians might not have been, in reality, a clever tactic designed to distract us from a real and much subtler invasion of Martians who “are just like us . . . And maybe our weird Latin teacher is one of them!” We read comics about interplanetary and immortal superheroes whose only vulnerability was to colorful fragments of their home planet and we build rockets with materials stolen, little by little to avoid attracting attention, from Physics and Chemistry labs. And—one of our principal “experts” would wind up working in the space industry and another, after combining flammable elements with satanic invocations, would end up getting killed in an explosion in Pasadena that was never entirely explained—we launch them with mixed results: some blow up on the ground, some fire off on furious horizontal trajectories and start small fires, in the best cases they go up some twenty or thirty meters and we celebrate as if they’d attained cosmic heights above the vacant lots and fallow fields of the Bowery.
Before long, almost without realizing it, we were a group, a generation. And one of our principal activities—as so often happens—was dividing into smaller groups, unleashing small and clandestine but exceedingly bloody battles, uniting with one faction for a few days only to double-cross them and join another. All in the name of the future and of outer space: two things—the yet to come and the great beyond—that we had no access to but thought about nonstop, because, if we thought about them all the time, it was like they were ours, like they were holding on to never let go.
Soon, fully aware of it, Ezra and I start to feel outside all of that, distant from everyone. Far away, yes. We become a two-person movement. The Faraways. We move stealthily between the different factions, we listen and gather information. And pretty much all of it seems absurd and childish to us. And when night falls we walk home under the falling snow. I remember us so much better in winter, wrapped in heavy jackets, vapor spilling from the volcanoes of our mouths, the eruption of conversations where we can’t stop cracking up at what we’ve seen and making fun of what we’ve heard. We go up to our room and we write, and it’s like sledding
