there was, always, a frustrated scientist.
I am not entirely sure this is true; then there’s Ezra: first a successful scientist, then an agent of classified documents, and—when the future only interested him as a launch pad to a past in need of modification—forever a frustrated science-fiction writer.
Ezra, who—when you disappeared without logical explanation, after the night of the great snowstorm, without even leaving a goodbye note, an amazing story or weird tale or astonishing travel—decided to give it all up in the name of exactitude.
But I’m getting ahead of myself without clarifying the trajectory of this story: where its head is and where its tail—bleeding from so many wounds inflicted by its own fangs—ends.
The Faraways, on the other hand, maintained that behind every physicist and astronomer there lay the inert but not dead—just in suspended animation—body of a storyteller who’d succumbed to the cosmic temptation of calculations and formulas. And yet, beneath all of that, barely hidden, top-secret, the true possibility of a writer waiting to be activated by a nervous password not on the tip of the tongue, but in the tips of the fingers. Someone who, impotent and unable to attain the ecstasy of limitless speculation, ends up settling for—simulating that tentative pride of those who want to believe themselves special—the stainless steel walls of a controlled-climate laboratory.
A code. A combination of numbers and letters. A formula. A heavy metal door that opens like a book onto facilities whose core can only be accessed via the repeated use of successive passwords implanted in the magnetic bands of steel cards that guide you down white corridors watched over by unblinking soldiers and sleepless cameras. The eyes of both rigidly fixed on a pure present, fed by the paranoia that a more evolved and efficient Apocalypse is being invented and set in motion in some other laboratory or in a cave where a special button is being pushed to kick off the end of everything in this world.
And the challenge always lies in knowing who will be first to begin the end.
But my story, the story of The Faraways, is just beginning or, better, I am, here and now, beginning to begin it. Forgive all these preliminary words. I justify them saying they are the cautious whispers of someone who doesn’t dare flip certain switches known to activate certain memories.
Memory like that inexplicable time-machine and the past like a fourth dimension and an alternate planet containing life slightly more intelligent than the life inhabiting the present.
For in the past (arriving there so much later—the horrifying thing about the past—because we can only see it from the future) we’re all wiser.
Traveling to what already was, we comprehend effortlessly and contemplate with clarity, errors that, in truth, we cannot and won’t ever be able to correct. But at least we get the consolation prize or the agonizing punishment of knowing exactly how we could’ve done better, how we could’ve changed to improve the results, altering certain factors or making different decisions. Looking back, there are many who, before using and, maybe, getting hooked on the powerful drug that is the past, opt instead for another drug: oblivion.
And then, I suppose, they inhabit an eternity of sunsets, always new and unique.
Thus, life lasts but a day and then starts over.
That isn’t, hasn’t been, and won’t be my case.
The acute perceptions of memory’s disruptions, of irregularities of the heart—the palpitations of time that now crawl, then run, and later fly—have always been my pleasure, my privilege, and my condemnation.
Memory is an astronaut struggling to establish lasting connections between the stars, many of which are dead; but the act of remembering them lights up points in a space that, though distant and out of reach, still form part of the proximal yet elusive nebulas of our thoughts. To remember is to discover without ceasing to search. We don’t know if a memory is something we give up for lost just as we remember it, or, if it’s something lost that we suddenly recover.
And perhaps the oddest part of all (or maybe most normal, because distortions of space-time are one of the genre’s most recurrent clichés) is that now, when my memory aches with the acute, throbbing pain of its own loss, I am trying to remember through writing what I no longer remember unless I use my hands.
And I don’t do it with the utilitarian and almost telegraphic language of science fiction.
I am referring to that style that is really an absence of style, where what actually matters is plot, a good idea, a new prophecy. Perpetual interest in the future but such primitive writing.
No: my lines are long and sinuous (parenthesis functioning like the pincers of crustaceans made hubristic and swollen by Epsilon Rays), more like those of an experimental yet inexperienced nineteenth-century gentleman at the turn of a new century.
Once again, the past.
How they wrote in the past when books could count on all their reader’s time and all the time in the world fit inside those books that were so difficult to escape from; because so much more took place inside them than outside them. Books for a reader from an era that was ending so another era, ready to establish the idea and the theory of a distant future, could begin.
And, so, a new and paradoxical conviction that, by prolonging our lives, the future would not only stay far away, but we would be able to arrive there.
So, a mutating reader, suspended between two phases.
A removed reader with access to everything.
Someone who would soon discover—amid the explosions of a Great War, supposedly unique and final—not only that the future was expanding, but that time was accelerating.
Someone who—despite never having had the right tools to imagine complicated teletransportors or galactic highways wrecked by black holes—was soon flung onto the continuum of an age of gears and levers and inventions, ready to do what’s necessary in reality in order to disobey and rebel in fiction.
Back then, I imagine, the air was flammable and sparks flew when lover’s lips touched, for kisses were historic and electric. Static electricity moving everywhere and suddenly anything could trigger combustions both external and internal.
But I must insist: why do I write these long, serpentine sentences, these blurry images laden with adjectives, why do I think that this, that all of this happened, that all of this happened to me, and yet . . .
Patience, be patient, is it all right to ask for patience the way one asks for mercy, swearing you’ll put everything in order soon or die trying?
Here and now—maybe that’s it, maybe that’s why I write this way—I am also like this: the long lines and brief thoughts of someone who has surrendered to the reign of machines, not understanding them, but using them. Using them, but never quite forgetting that he won’t ever fully understand exactly what electricity is (animal or vegetal or mineral?) or how the simplest motor works. Someone for whom airplanes will always be elevators without cables. A man on the edge, a frontiersman, someone who’s not exactly anywhere, but who sees everything from a perspective more shifting than privileged, and yet . . .
I write all of this amid the inaudible din of a secret battle I know is already lost.
I write this in an attempt to overcome the forgetfulness that washes over me like a black tide, like something blotting out the stars. Stars going out
