Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo Fresán

Author:Rodrigo Fresán
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781940953793
Publisher: Open Letter
Published: 2018-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

II

The Space between This Planet and the Other Planet

The space between this planet and the other planet is small enough for us to be able to watch you from our own forgotten world and, at the same time, big enough so that you, in your unforgettable world, so busy looking at one another, can’t know that we’re watching you.

That we’re always watching you.

And that it’s good, that it makes us happy that it is so.

One of the ways—maybe the only way—not to collapse from the pain of realizing that nobody will remember you, not to break when you become aware that from here onward nobody will ever wonder even once what became of your life, is to forget about yourself before anybody else forgets you, that’s how you achieve a kind of immortality. You become, in a way, paradoxically, unforgettable.

My case.

And—hey hey hey, fire in the sky and death on earth—here I come and there I go.

Again.

Talking to myself.

Have you ever talked to yourselves in the desert, in that place where your self is the only one you can talk to?

Here I am, somewhere inside nowhere, talking to myself, as if I were that last extraterrestrial who disappears in the pages of my favorite novel.

Now I disappear. Or, better, now I vanish. To vanish is to disappear slowly, without hurry, without drama, without thinking about the fact that you’re disappearing.

I am the last of my species.

So, not only do I vanish, but the history of my kind vanishes as well. I guess that’s a little dramatic. But I don’t get too worked up about it. I’ll miss you all so much, but I don’t think anyone will really miss me. There won’t be anyone left to miss me and I don’t think our voyage through this universe has been especially interesting to the inhabitants of other planets.

Perfection isn’t interesting.

So here I go—here I go—and here goes the past and the present and the future (though those are temporal categories that we never conceived of or understood in the way you do) of all those who once dreamed of surviving by invading another planet and, all of a sudden, awoke from their dream understanding, too late, that they are the ones who have been invaded.

This is the story of one of the most triumphant failures (I’ll use, from now on, the space jargon of earthlings so you understand me better; though I’m actually talking to myself) that ever took place in this or any galaxy.

This is the story (to tell it I’ll also use earthly names when it comes to measurements, colors, distances, and even sentiments) of what happened. Or, better yet (again, out of respect for the origin of the readers of these pages, which don’t take the form of pages but of light, transparent spheres, out of fondness for your hospitality, no doubt incredulous, but hospitality nonetheless, here I’ll invoke the way we figure in your childish astral charts, courtesy of telescopes that will never return home), this is the story, I insist, of something that stopped happening in a place known as Urkh 24.

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