have faded. A blackness that hangs over me and drowns me and at first I try to stay afloat, but before long, I understand that there’s no sense in resisting the call of the depths and oblivion and I let myself go, I sink, liquid air bubbles escaping from my lips and out through my scuba suit.
I write so that all of this functions like the debris of a shipwreck readying to come up to the surface while, on the other side of the river, a column of black smoke rises, dancing to the music of red sirens in a city where, tonight, no one will sleep.
Diffuse fragments, yes, but pieces of the same hull and from the same head that can maybe offer some idea of what it was that sank or, at least, serve to indicate the more or less exact spot where there lies, motionless, everything that once sailed, guided by charts, compasses, and constellations.
I write to leave something behind, not to clarify what happened, not to help me remember (I can almost see myself here after a time, as if I’d decided not to go but to stay, reading these pages, understanding nothing of the little they contain and only a little of the nothing they attempt to explain).
I write like someone saying goodbye.
I write all of this that I never planned to write. A good part of it I don’t even write, but just think, that elusive and pure form of writing that is unadulterated memory, rare nostalgic energy, its workings incomprehensible until it’s put down in writing, reduced to disconnected words. I write propelled by the reactive fuel of an unexpected visitor.
I write, opening and closing parenthesis (maybe, borrowing those parenthesis that embrace numbers and letters but not words, to approximate my uncertain language with mathematic precision, with the exactitude that Ezra has surrendered to in order to define the contours of the diffuse), the way I closed my roll top desk when I heard someone knocking.
And I got up and went down to open the door.
A young journalist.
Though I call him a “young journalist,” the truth is I don’t believe he was a journalist in the strictest and most professional sense of the term.
I don’t believe, as he stated, that he worked for a “specialty” magazine because, as far as I know, magazines “specializing” in science fiction no longer exist and, if one had survived it wouldn’t devote its limited pages to interviewing antiques, but to featuring the exchange of opinions between fans more interested in the special affect produced by the special effects—all that erotic, digitalized technology to dig their fingers into—of the next big, frigid blockbuster of the hot summer.
I didn’t believe him when he showed up at my home without calling ahead; so I made him swallow the bitter pill of convincing me of the veracity of his alleged credentials.
I preferred to think of him, simply, as someone who needed to imperiously ask many questions (questions he’d asked himself many times, silent and alone), in order to, if possible, hear the perfect answers in the voice of a stranger he knew—without ever having spoken to him—all too well.
A young journalist (I don’t think he was exactly “young” either; but it’s also true that I’ve reached an age when nearly all living beings are, or appear to be, quite young compared to me) paid me a visit today and asked many questions about things that happened long, long ago.
At first I imagined his small notepad contained, written in an illegible hand, words cut in half, more disjointed than abbreviated, a long list of questions revolving—as so often happened back then, on the rare occasions I let myself be cornered and caught—around the figure of Warren Wilbur Zack. His life so different from mine. An opposite life. An anti-life. Everything that happened to him—reading aloud by the light of his last wish—like everything that never happened to me and . . .
Here, I believe, a pause is in order.
A pause, like these other empty parenthesis where—paragraph after paragraph—I think I glimpse the true texture of time. Pauses like the antimatter matter between one space-time leap and the next, like the moment when the pieces rotate into place and slide into the grooves of the complicated mechanism of what we decide to remember or what decides to be remembered.
One more pause before I allow myself to think about Zack . . .
. . . like taking a deep breath before diving into that memory and descending into its depths.
Zack, who was crazy, who became a science-fiction writer as soon as he realized that nobody was going to publish his odd, realistic novels about couples who fight all the time.
Zack, who conjured an almost immediate future where nothing functioned properly apart from the invisible yet oh so solid device of paranoia.
Zack (Zack’s always-moist eyes, like those of a sad dog, his docile and canine smile, his face covered in fur, fits of snapping and barking at the most unexpected moments), who survived on canned dog food during his most difficult and impoverished days and who could no doubt recommend for you the best and tastiest brands.
Zack, who married and divorced so many times and Zack’s many children dressed in brilliant rags, filing behind him through the streets.
Zach, who in public would say things like “we science-fiction writers are pathetic beings: We can’t talk about science because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful” or “there is nothing stranger than to write something believing it is untrue, only to find out later that it was actually true.”
Zack, who never stopped dreaming about his telepathic, twin brother who died at birth (and from whom he swore he received messages and commands), Zack, who was sure he was the reincarnation of an ancient Christian saint, lost in a “false reality” that in truth, he asserted, was nothing but a secret wrinkle (“a kind of elaborate curtain”) behind which still pulsed the invulnerable grandeur of the Roman Empire.
Zack, who was involved with West Coast militant groups like the Black Drummers and who reported that his files had been raided “by the CIA and the FBI and a governmental organization so secret that it has no name” because “in one of my books, without realizing it, I revealed the nature of the most absolute and definitive experiment that is being carried out by the most acclaimed and qualified scientists on the planet . . . I ask myself which book of mine it might be.”
Zack, who didn’t believe in other planets or in rockets and whose flight crews always ended up pushing the wrong button while distractedly thinking about some random thing, about Barbie dolls or psychotronic drugs of high voltage and density.
Zack, who died descending a ladder at the most ascendant moment of his career, when headlines and the stories on the evening news were beginning to look a lot like his fantasies.
Zack, who, at one of the only meetings or conventions we attended, smiled politely in response to my call for a return to the classic galaxies of science fiction.
And, yes, Zack was better than I was (Zack was better than almost all of us) and I laughed at Zack. I resented his acknowledged opportunism and the speed with which he wrote novels, novels that, it’s true, I didn’t like and didn’t understand; but they were novels unlike any others.
Zack knew of my resentment and got his revenge in the most elegant and perfect way: at the reading of his will, it was revealed that he’d named me his literary executor and—those were hard times, I had no choice but to accept—stipulated that I receive a generous percentage of the profits any future adaptations of his work might earn. Just a few years prior, that designation
