except the last one. There, in Solomon Goldman’s familiar handwriting—but shrunk to microscopic size; I needed the help of a magnifying glass to read it—I made out words that I was quick to memorize because, despite their complexity and scope, I understood them to be my father’s last words. The final destination of his last voyage and, consequently, something worth preserving. In a way, I thought, these words were my inheritance, a legacy that had finally come to me:
“The only true essence of magic resides in the ability to exist in a state of consciousness where the past and the future long to trade places. Classical Hebrew, without going any further, has two verbal tenses: the present and another barely discernible time between the past and the future. Thus, to denote something that already happened, it’s enough to say I went. To refer to the future, however, one only need add the participle already as in I already went, which is understood as an I will go in a perpetual motion of coming and going. Thus, it suggests a kind of primitive understanding of existence. An understanding that would transgress our mode of separating, in actuality, the real from the imaginary. But in that ancient grammar, facts are not seen as facts that have already occurred, but as instructions from tomorrow. That is to say, as premonitions that visit us in dreams and nightmares. In the primitive world, yesterday’s facts mingled with the wonders and adventures of last night’s dreams. So saying that you have done something that you didn’t do is the initial and essential step to take in shaping what will be the future. Facts arise from premonitions. It’s as if the future couldn’t exist without the existence of its a priori delineation. A pencil sketch of what someday will become an oil landscape. The childish exercise that grows into the wise and mature symphony. God (or whatever you want to call Him; I know His true name, but I’m not allowed to put it in writing or say it or even think it) conceives of the world first and only then creates it. Thus, the cabalistic perception of this kind of miracle passes not through the magnitude of the enterprise, but through the fact that, in the act of imagining how the world will be, God has already created it before making it.”
Yes: my father had been and had already been and would already be.
Something like that.
But years before all of this (and just after they took Solomon Goldman away, tightly wrapped in a straight jacket) a man and a woman belonging to one of those organizations charged with the protection of minors told me to pack up what few belongings I had in my small suitcase.
My magazines, my notebooks, my books, some clothes, two or three photographs. I didn’t have any toys, I never did, they never interested me.
I made the short but transcendent journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan where I was taken to the house of an aunt and uncle—my mother’s brother—whom I’d never met before.
And there, in a house on 7th Street, where I thought I’d be cured of my evil secrets, I met my cousin Ezra Leventhal.
I remember that moment perfectly.
I remember it as if it were happening again right now.
A thing that had been and had already been, but that would already be and will be again: Ezra shakes my hand, he shows me our room which until then was “just my room,” he explains to me, arching an eyebrow while—feigning a reflexive pose, hand on chin, thinking I won’t notice—squeezing a pimple. And, raising his voice to make himself heard over the relentless clamor of the sewing machines in the shop downstairs, Ezra tells me, in a serious tone of voice, suddenly broken by uncontrolled, high-pitched adolescent hormones, that my father “has probably been kidnapped by beings from a planet called Omikron.”
And with a conspiratorial gesture—almost nonexistent in its efficiency, as if it were a secret embodied in an object, in something palpable and true—Ezra hands me a notebook with a black oilcloth jacket and a cover where, on a white label, in precise caps, it reads: MANUAL OF A YOUNG SPACE TRAVELER/INSTRUCTIONS FOR HOW TO OPERATE, INTERACT, AND PROSPER ON THIS AND OTHER PLANETS ACCORDING TO THE PRECEPTS OF EZRA LEVENTHAL (REX ARCANA OF THE MILKY WAY).
Then Ezra points dramatically upward, toward the room’s ceiling, toward something beyond the sky, toward the other side of everything and the end of everything on this side.
He looks at me, smiling.
And looks up again.
And I look exactly in the same direction that he’s looking and pointing.
And I see.
What I remember most about my first days in Manhattan are the nights. So different from those of Brooklyn. So much noisier. More alive. Nights that walk and talk in their sleep. It wasn’t like Brooklyn was rural, but compared to the incessant and aggressive electric pulse of the metropolis, Brooklyn’s voice was much closer to a whisper, acoustic and loving.
And the sky of the great city—because it’s at night that we’re most aware of the immensity of space, of its infinite possibilities, as during the day the sun’s blinding presence blots out everything—seemed, to me, to have shaken loose the stars so they fell across an always burning skyline. A city in flames, phosphorescent and trembling with subterranean gasps of subways and moans of elevated trains.
I remember that I could barely sleep, that I heard the voices of nearby skyscrapers as if they were talking to each other in that language of steel and cement that buildings communicate with. There they were, all of a sudden, all those immense skyscrapers, like rockets condemned never to fly, having to settle for being signposts of girders and windows indicating the path to follow. Thinking about it now, from here, from this present, for me, at that time, Manhattan was the future. A science-fiction city. A tomorrow and—once again—an and already was in the present. And there I was—recently landed in Manhattan—like a caveman lost in that space where for me everything was new and at the same time as ancient and primitive as matters of family tend to be. “Family” understood as that thousand-headed organism where stories—situations—repeat themselves over and over with slight variations and dissonances that are surprising at first, but find their original aria before too long. Because inside a family—though it goes unsaid, a deafening silence—nobody hesitates to pinpoint the exact situation of that original and now-dead star whose sickly light still reaches us.
In other words: my father wasn’t the first Goldman—nor will he be the last Leventhal—to go mad. But it was clear that, for me, neither the certainty of a past lunatic nor the possibility of a future madman was any comfort at all.
They stuck my father in a straight jacket, inside a room with padded walls, cursing a nameless creator. And I was alone, far from home, sharing a room with a cousin of exceedingly peculiar habits, who was convinced that our world, as we know it and as it is shown in the history books, wasn’t really ours.
But really—I realized almost right away—Ezra’s ideas, his histrionic poses, the borrowing of revelations written, in letters that looked more printed than handwritten, all the same height, repeating the same curves and straight lines, in the pages of his MANUAL OF A YOUNG SPACE TRAVELER/INSTRUCTIONS FOR HOW TO OPERATE, INTERACT, AND PROSPER ON THIS AND OTHER PLANETS ACCORDING TO THE PRECEPTS OF EZRA LEVENTHAL (REX ARCANA OF THE MILKY WAY), were just my cousin’s way of welcoming me. His way of helping me feel less alone. A way of telling me that he and I belonged to the same rare and privileged species. Because Ezra would say to me the day after my arrival, in the morning following that first terrible night, looking me in the eyes, his hands on my shoulders: “To be an extraterrestrial it is enough, cousin Isaac, to feel that you’re an extraterrestrial.”
And I knew right then that Ezra would never lie to me, that he’d always tell me the truth, and that he’d devote the rest of his life to searching for and discovering
