novel that wasn’t a science-fiction novel and possibly, not even a novel. A science-fiction novel in which—unlike typical science-fiction novels where things happen all the time—almost nothing happened. Just a succession of sunsets—their many differences described in minute detail—contemplated by the last inhabitant of another planet. Little more than loose fragments and scattered extraterrestrial thoughts, which I finally collected and organized under a classical and typographical cover. Yellow background and black letters, dispensing with the illustrations characteristic of the genre that, generally, had little to do with what was said and told inside. A few handmade copies published with my own money (I want to emphasize this, I don’t want there to be doubts about this: not with Zack’s money) so long ago, in another century, in another millennium.
You might also say—I don’t mean it as an alibi or an excuse—that in that moment, faced with the young journalist and his questions, I was still shaken, or more precisely, frightened, by everything that’d happened to me the day before. Which, lacking a better name but needing so badly to be named (because unnamed things produce the most fear) I (availing myself of the conspiratorial language so in vogue, Expedients Z and all that) had come to call The Incident.
But I didn’t talk to the young journalist about The Incident and told him, even better, that I was depressed, but that being depressed didn’t worry me too much: a recent psychological study had proven that the majority of writers had depressive personalities or came from melancholic bloodlines. So I qualified under both conditions, no problem.
I answered him how and as best I could.
I was honest but also partial, incomplete (to be continued . . .).
I kept to myself—as I’ve been doing for years, you should know, wherever you are—the antimatter of your name, or what you told us your name was, and now it slips through my fingers, as if I were chasing a firefly through a forest full of fireflies.
And yet, I believe, I was both generous and selfish: I remembered for him, but also for myself.
I told and answered and, I suppose, filled in or improved or invented some dark zones while simultaneously activating numerous protective shields of varying force and intensity.
Every question, it is known, hides too many possible answers.
And, in a way, all of them are accurate though maybe not correct.
The truth is fractal. It breaks into pieces and scatters in infinite directions. So, how to catch it.
Ah, yes . . .
I know . . .
By being progressively regressive.
Memory like the launch tower for the rocket of the past.
It’s no coincidence, I think, that the countdown required to initiate a rocket launch is exactly the same as the one used by a hypnotist to make his subject, who has volunteered to come up on stage, surrender his will and fall into a trance.
Like this:
10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . . 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .
. . . 0
Zero.
Childhood is the zero.
Childhood is another dimension.
Childhood is the atmosphere-zero where, looking back, we feel we breathed deepest and best. But maybe this is a distorted impression, a result of too many years of insufficient oxygen and then, of course, there are some adults who are suddenly certain they remember being used in satanic rituals and secret orgies by their loving and, until that moment, perfect parents.
Childhood is pure radiation that refuses to disappear, making the needles of our Geiger counter jump at the most unexpected moments with a glowing, fluorescent green. That unmistakable science-fiction green. Alien green. The color of a particular moment that we thought had vanished but that was actually pulsing, wrapped in an artificial dream, electrodes attached to its head, lying on a stainless steel gurney. There, like I said: in a subterranean bunker only accessible by a magic word or, all at once, with the aid of a fortuitous and capricious stimulus that provokes failures in the previously inviolate and fortified security of our mind.
Childhood is that longed-for other planet that we travel from toward this planet. Toward our so-called maturity, which, we know now, will never be like that other early world where we dreamed of growing up, of stimulating our bodies’ protons, of defying the heavy gravitational laws imposed by our elders, and flying off, breaking the barrier of their warning sounds, overcoming the speed of their lights, which invariably, with scientific punctuality and at a fixed hour, go out. Nine or ten tolls and then the key moment when at first we’d pretend to be asleep (all of a sudden I’m transformed into something else, I pluralize, I’m not just talking about me, but about so many others who were like me, clones fascinated by the same feeling and same longing for the future) and then turn on our flashlights under the covers and keep reading. Reading there, in a cave, living inside the adventures of some galactic guardians, our mouths full of difficult words and a gun bursting with lightning and thunder. And, of course, maybe most important of all, along with the voluptuous anatomy of Martian princesses that they wrapped themselves around, were the green tentacles of beings with thousands of revolving pupils that never tired of devouring those princesses with their eyes, which weren’t, but at the same time were, our eyes. Their scaly skin a metaphor for our acne. Because, even though we never dared consider it even in the lowest of voices, it’s possible that they were what enticed us, the illusion that, on some distant horizon unfit for human life, albeit by the most drastic means, someday someone might end up in our arms. A place where nobody had ever been: cyanide in place of oxygen, too many suns in the sky, and days as long as years. And maybe there women like that would notice us, notice people like the young journalist who has come to pay me a visit and ask me questions.
The young journalist has gone, but his presence and questions have radically altered the atmosphere of my world. His arrival has had an effect similar to that of a nearly undetectable but critical tear in an astronaut’s spacesuit. Little by little the oxygen is escaping and thoughts flow and the sound of the memories is exactly the same as the sound of air seeping out through a tiny opening.
A hypnotic hiss.
A growing delirium.
And I float.
There’s no above or below in space.
And I travel back to the past and, yes, it’s a hazardous voyage. Because any intrusion into the process of transmutation (or whatever you want to call it) by a mosquito-sized quantity of foreign matter, or just stepping on a butterfly, is enough to make you arrive on the other side of the dematerializer (or whatever you want to call it), radically and definitively transformed or in a world that’s no longer ours and that’s been changed forever.
Memories are sensitive material, volatile.
Memories are particles in constant and increasing acceleration.
Memories have made neurons burn.
Memories can make you to forget everything.
So I must handle them with great care. Hermetically seal them in the command room and review the coordinates and controls again and again before deploying them. Touch them with robotic pincers connected to my brain with wires. Move them telekinetically and bring
