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 new truths. Truths that could only come from the new order of a still-faraway future, yes; but one that was approaching faster and faster all the time. Running toward our shadow years, huffing and puffing—as if they were the little candles on a birthday cake—the ageless light of light years.
I write this as if it were a science-fiction story suspended in space with little chance of ever coming home.
A science-fiction story that wants to be something else—speaking a language not of the genre—but can’t stop being what it is.
I can’t help it.
Dubious automatic reflex.
Something that is, I fear, more existential degeneration than occupational compulsion.
Entertainment of a writernaut, sitting, fixed to desk and chair.
Static centrifugal force but his face still deformed by the acceleration of paragraphs in whose lines nothing ages and everything seems new.
There’s a moment in any life (maybe the moments that we start to sense as our last moments, after looking at and not recognizing ourselves in the morning’s first reflection, because you always think of yourself as younger than you really are) when the past becomes something paradoxically futuristic.
So, as I’ve said, the act of remembering has something about it that’s as technologically inexplicable as any of those miracles of extraterrestrial cultures so advanced they end up unattainable.
And so, pretty soon, we find ourselves wondering what happened, what took place, what is truth and what is lie in everything we see again when we go back in time.
Memory is a reverse time machine that’s as powerful as—always moving forward or in multiple alternate directions—that other time machine: imagination.
And so—in the same way that all realist and contemporary novels would be science fiction for a reader in ancient times—the novel of our current and past existence, viewed mechanically and organized artificially, always strikes us as fantastical. Something that—to keep from getting depressed or feeling like a device on the verge of breaking down beyond all repair—we prefer to conceive of as happening in another galaxy. Foreign customs. Exotic vistas, often in black and white or sepia. Words whose meaning we don’t know. Cleaner air and a simpler life that, also, we like to think of as more civilized or at least more peaceful.
And—beyond certain fixed dates and common coordinates—this implies that each person’s past constitutes, in and of itself, a different world. And so, every time I went to one of those now-bygone conventions of science-fiction writers, someone would ask me a question that nobody asks anymore (because no one is interested in the answer to this question, it’s passed its expiration date): “Do you believe in the existence of intelligent life on other planets?” And I answer: “Yes of course, just look back and think about what was and reflect on everything that’s been. That’s also the explanation for why, inevitably, day after day, life is extinguished on several thousand other planets that are on this planet: people prefer not to remember and to not draw useful conclusions with respect to why it was that this or that catastrophe occurred. People prefer to live on a planet called Present without realizing that that is the planet whose civilizations have the briefest history and least posterity. People prefer not to think.”
I write this and I do so by hand, slowly, not trusting machines and knowing that none of these pages will degenerate into that supposed and rapidly failed novelty of electronic books. Knowing, as well, that its writing and its reading are already futuristic in their own right: when mankind hadn’t yet set in motion the mysteries of cables and keys, we were already functioning—and already reading and writing—on the basis of that internal and mysterious electricity leaping from neuron to neuron and bouncing off the more or less well-painted and well-appointed walls of the caverns of our brains.
I write exactly like this: outside time and space, weightless, beyond any communication from the control center.
I’m a solitary cosmonaut of my own life, lacking sufficient oxygen to return home, somewhat disturbed by what’s happening to me, but without that meaning that I’m upset that I don’t entirely understanding something that’s just happened.
Or that always has been and won’t stop happening.
The Incident and all of that.
I write this like a shipwrecked writer of messages in bottles, who casts them into the sea with the naïve hope that maybe she will find one of them. And that she’ll break it open and remove the glowing and sacred green crystals of these pages, and Tzimtzum, she’ll unfold them and read them. And I hope that she feels something like pity, or, maybe, a trace of tenderness, and that she comes back to me, not to love me, but—because I don’t believe there exists a more noble and sublime way of loving someone—to explain everything to me.
To explain everything to me as my cousin Ezra Leventhal once explained everything to me.
And friendship is a strange force that strengthens us while simultaneously negating us with the need to feel ourselves as close and as similar to the other as possible. When this friendship also involves the unifying and homogenizing force of blood, then the whole thing becomes far more powerful.
But, of course, the final result is that of a false similitude; because there was nothing more different, between me and Ezra, than our reasons for being interested in science fiction.
While Ezra sought the comfort of other worlds to try to escape a future that would force him to carry on the family tradition amid rolls of fabric and mannequins, I, for my part, needed to travel to planets that were as far away from my past and my family’s past as possible.
Ezra was a rebel who had to overthrow a galactic tyranny that turned men into androids,