and would have impressed no one but his underground followers. But just before he died, Zack’s stock had been on the rise. His works were being rereleased in prestigious collections and his name was beginning to be heard, repeated more and more by the voices of “serious” writers who considered him “a secret prophet” or “someone who dared to look beyond” or “the philosopher who came from the future to help us understand our incomprehensible present.” And what was most intriguing about Zack’s novels wasn’t their plots (difficult to adapt, strange, like a different language that was actually just an exotic variant of our own), but their ideas. Ideas that producers, screenwriters, and directors could distill into movies flooded with digital effects, popular and, on more than one occasion, critical successes.
The first that premiered—the one that turned on the engine of his posthumous mythos—was a noir mutation featuring sentient androids. I was hired in the capacity of creative supervisor and advisor and “specialist” in Zack’s visions, and when the director offered to let me write the final monologue of a dying robot under the acid rain of a retro-futuristic Los Angeles, I thought I’d be able to take revenge against his ghost. I put words in his mouth that, I thought, Zack would despise: elegiac phrases honoring the memory of galaxies, where Zack’s characters—more preoccupied with their place on Earth, or, at most, in a decadent Martian colony too similar to an industrial suburb—would never have dreamed of venturing, because there was nothing that interested them less than traveling far away. The speech overflowed with poetic lines easy to remember and immediately place. Many people found them moving and, I’m sure, there were some who cried during the filming of the scene. I felt that, with that, I’d done right, I’d managed to slip in a particle of restraint and nobility. A call to return to that future that we’d believed in so fervently in the past. My idea of science fiction contaminating Zack’s idea of science fiction.
And yet, it’s true, ghosts can never be beaten.
And my gesture was lost and swallowed up by the blinding light of a dead star named Warren Wilbur Zack: everyone thought he had written that humanoid machine’s farewell under the rain, that it had been extracted from one of his many notebooks and unpublished manuscripts, which were no longer unpublished, but were being bought for astronomical sums that, like I said, I benefited from and that today are my only stable source of income, my means of survival.
The movie premiered, it wasn’t a great popular success, but with time, it became a cult classic, almost a religion, an incessant maker of money and prestige, a masterpiece—there’s nothing more marvelous than a cult artist who also makes money—admired by the young, who soon occupied important positions in the industry and declared themselves fans of Zack and his visions.
So it goes: I’m kept afloat by Warren Wilbur Zack, he pays my bills, my health insurance, he’s turned me into an expert on his life and work, and I even wrote the first of his various biographies and annotated a volume of his eccentric letters and a collection of his “meta-philosophical-religious essays.”
And it is regarding Warren Wilbur Zack that I get invited to speak, to answer questions, to lie.
But no.
Not this time. To my surprise, my young visitor doesn’t want to talk about Zack and the legend of Zack and the array of rumors orbiting around the persona of Zack, the type of thing one hears at conventions or reads in fanzines. “Zack . . . Overrated,” he says with a twisted smile that I can’t help but silently appreciate.
My young visitor isn’t seeking to elucidate some mystery about Zack, but to discuss The Faraways and the rumors circulating about the modern-day Ezra Leventhal and about Evasion. (Indeed, Zack was one of the few, if not the only person, who ever thought I might be the author in the shadow of Evasion. Zack explained to me, with that tone of voice that never sounded like an insult, but like a strange form of respect or, at least, like the interest of someone confronted with a rare species: “Your imagination is so imaginative . . . Your imagination has a logic and an order that I envy. You don’t know what it’s like to live with an imagination like mine. Inside my head, all the ideas yell and raise their hands at the same time, fighting to get to the front of the line and say their piece. In a way, I write so that I’m able to stop thinking a little.”)
To my amazement, my young visitor wasn’t there to find out about what I’d witnessed, but about something that I’d lived through and taken part in; something that today feels so far away, more shadow years than light years, but descending now at full speed, rolling toward me down the stairs from the attic of the past.
And, at the same time, his questions seemed like veils, concealing answers to other questions he dared not ask or didn’t really know how to formulate.
And yet, I answered all of them.
Why did I answer him?
Why answer?
Because he reminded me so much of myself?
Because of his glasses with thick, black plastic frames (glasses that now, apparently, are in style and that, when he took them off every so often, didn’t reveal the steely-eyed gaze of a superhero, but the fragile, naked eyes of one of those fish for whom the brilliance of the sun and the blue of the sea are nothing but an impossible-to-confirm rumor)?
Because of his crooked teeth (back then all authentic cultivators of sci-fi had bad teeth)?
Because of the impossible-to-hide pockmarks on his cheeks, wreckage of a difficult and still painful adolescence (those lunar, epidermal craters, dead skin where only with great difficulty might there have landed the extraterrestrial visit of a young kiss)?
Why did I feel he was like a ghostly vision of Christmas past, like fugitive spores seeping through a crack in the wall, leaving the damp stains of a distant galaxy?
Why the perturbing sensation that—at times—the same questions were repeated in different words to insure that he not produce a single inaccuracy?
Why when he left did he leave me with the gift of a supernova-intensity migraine?
Why didn’t I resist, why did it feel like I’d succumbed to his sharp and persistent voice, like the buzzing of certain ancient insects?
Why . . . ?
To put it another way—if asked to explain my submissive and voluntary conduct—I was moved by his enthusiasm and respect for me, a person who, for him, wasn’t really a person, but more like a symbol. Someone considered a living souvenir of a dead age that he sensed, or needed to believe, had been glorious and, I thought at the time, I bestowed on him that particular and solemn joy that one only experiences when facing a great ruin. Facing a monument from another age. Facing something you dig up first and decode later, to convince yourself that you understand absolutely everything without knowing practically anything.
His hypotheses, I suppose, were fuel for my vanity, immobile after so long.
For him I was a kind of deity.
One of The Faraways.
The alleged but never confessed co-author (and not mere editor and sincere prologuer, who claimed not to know or even suspect the true identity of the author) of Evasion. The faithful guardian of a thousand pages of a legendary science-fiction novel that’d been coming to me in the mail for several years (without the sender’s name on the envelope, always sent from different offices), which nobody had read in its entirety (because it’d never been finished or it was so open-ended that it failed to meet the protocols of the genre), but about which many had written and theorized, drawing on the various fragments circulating
