Three Messages and a Warning (10 page)

Eternity, he thought, will always find a place in a foolish conversation at the end of civilization. He saw that the man was lowering his eyes again and focusing first on the cloth and then on the gun, as if he were waiting to hear them speak at any moment.

“To get ahead of it, of course,” he said, and a wary irony filtered into his words. “If eternity catches up with us there’s nowhere to run.”

The man smiled, a convulsive grin directed to the gun, a face crisscrossed by fearless blood.

“Yes, you’re right . . . Yesterday was my one-year anniversary here. A year! No one told me that eternity lasted twelve months, that I had been hired to be the last watchman . . . Before, we watchmen guarded a tower in the desert; now we have to tend to dumps like this. The desert’s changed, but the dirt hasn’t, oh no, the dirt’s the same, and it’ll keep on being the same, eh? The invisible enemy . . . Yes, you’re right: now there’s nowhere to run. With so much dirt there’s nothing else to do but get ahead of eternity.”

The man passed a hand across his head and, with a sigh, set about his cleaning again: circles and fingernail, pause, circles and fingernail. When he spoke, his voice had regained its neutral mannequin’s tone. “Take what you like, just don’t mess anything up. I spent hours arranging this pile of trash.” He hesitated, and then added: “Anyway, we don’t accept American Express.”

He said good-bye. Before leaving, he turned to look at the clerk from the doorway and found him more Hopperesque than ever, radiant beneath the surgical glare, prisoner of his own eternity. What very cold blood escapees have, he thought.

“Are you sure everything’s okay?’ he said.

“I’m sure,” the man muttered without removing his gaze from his work. “I have to finish cleaning . . . The only thing you can be certain of is the dirt you have to watch out for.”

“See you soon, then.”

There was no response.

As he walked along the highway he heard the first shot clearly, a blast which fractured the morning’s gray silence. Moments later the second detonation came, and the air carried it towards the distant city. In case something doesn’t work out, he thought. Now I understand why a man might actually want two ounces of prevention.

When he returned to the hotel, the open doors and empty rooms confirmed that he was abandonment’s only guest, the guest of honor at a ceremony which would begin shortly. He explored a few rooms, collecting their emanations and humors, constructing a mental image of their occupants: here a pair of newlyweds or perhaps lovers—the smell of sex was so intense that it almost wove a second carpet—there a woman whose child was sick with diarrhea. The front desk did not offer any further surprises; only the bell on the counter attracted his attention, calling to mind the memory of a navel he had caressed decades or eons before. In front of the pool—if that’s what you could call that narrow rectangle of cloudy water—he amused himself following the trajectory of a rubber duck which the wind moved around at whim like a compass for tracking lost childhood. Then he lay down on one of the beach chairs decayed from disuse and the elements, and let himself be lulled to sleep by the insects’ scurrying, by the whisper of the trees and the humidity of the air, lifting his chin as if to challenge the sun in its futile attempt to dominate the stormy sky.

Noon pulled him gradually out of his drowsiness. Dazed, he looked at the chaises around him and thought of seats readied for a journey with no return; he thought of the Hopper painting “People in the Sun,” which had always disturbed him, and for a moment he believed that he had pried himself from the canvas, that he was one of the figures that the painter had sentenced to immortal stupor in beach chairs. A series of stomach growls sufficed to rid him of his laziness and remind him that he had not eaten—in a manner of speaking—for many hours now. He began to walk towards his room.

He was taking a piece of cheese and some raw meat out of the small fridge when his cell phone rang.

“Yes?” he answered. “Ah, yes . . . How are you. Yes . . . Aha . . .
Of course I understand, but . . . Yes, I know that . . . Aha . . . I can imagine it perfectly, but . . . What? No, listen to me . . . Aha . . . No, no . . . Listen to me, listen to me! . . . We’re all in the same boat, I’ve told you that a thousand times . . . No, you listen to me! . . . I’m tired of telling you that we have to be patient! . . . Patient! . . . Do you know what it is to be patient? . . . We’ve been patient for such a very long time, I don’t know . . . What? No, no one is going to die from waiting a little longer! . . .
What? Of course not! . . . I swear, I promise, whatever you want . . . Patience, goddammit! . . . Why are you in such a
rush? . . . What? Yes . . . You’ll see, you’ll see . . . Just so it’s clear: without patience there is nothing, nothing . . . All right . . . Calm down . . . What? No, calm down . . . See you soon.”

He hung up and took a few swigs from the bottle of whiskey on the night table to wash down his rage and desperation. Okay, he said to himself, take it easy. While he ate lunch, he remembered, not without a certain fury, the calls from all over the world which he had had to answer, to tolerate, over the past few days; all of them, without exception, focused on the same question: when, when? They’re like children, he thought, spoiled children utterly ignorant of the ancestral art of patience. So many years of stoic waiting about to be thrown overboard merely because of their inability to endure a little while longer. As if I weren’t just like them, he thought, as if I had not initiated them on this path made of patient steps. As if my eyes didn’t burn each morning.

To distract himself he took another long swig from the bottle, picked up the remote control and turned on the television; a roar of static fractured the apparent stillness. He turned down the sound and flipped through the local and cable channels. The spectacle of absence repeated itself over and over again: a gray tempest, a cathodic hissing which set his nerves on edge. The few stations which had not yet gone off the air were broadcasting similar images: maps of different cities crowded with symbols indicating the locations of nuclear shelters. Only on CNN did he encounter a space where the real world—a memento of the real world—insinuated itself timidly: a studio inhabited only by screens and consoles which blinked in desolation, waiting for newscasters who had forgotten their papers on the varnished desk in the foreground. Eternity, he thought, who would report the news of eternity, of so many thirsty shadows? He turned off the TV, and, after making sure that the curtains were drawn, after leafing for the umpteenth time through the magazines and newspapers strewn about the floor, he determined that the best way to kill time was drinking—whiskey, for now. With the half-full bottle in his hand, he tumbled onto the bed. Cheers, he murmured. Cheers and Laus Deo.

A hangover, barely a soft veil against his temples, woke him hours later; three aspirins and a little cocaine were enough for him to shake it off. Though the late afternoon had already turned into a night as dense as the day, disturbed by flashes of lightning and infused with an oily atmosphere bristling with electricity, he decided to keep his dark glasses on. And now that he had recovered his good mood, thanks to his nap, he turned on the television only to confirm that the world—even on CNN—had dissolved beneath an avalanche of dirty snow. What a way to celebrate the broadcasting apocalypse, he thought, with a great feast of invisibility crowned at the last moment with static. He went to pee, realized he had one last sip of whiskey left, turned off his cell, which was ringing insistently, grabbed the only chair in the room and prepared himself to wait in the hallway of the hotel. To wait, he thought, one must know how to wait, like the creatures on Hopper’s chaises, like the men in vests at the borders of civilization; in the end, we’re all just looking out for dirt. He noticed that the wind whipped the doors of the vacant rooms, a noise that had filtered into his nap in the form of fluttering wings. Birds, he thought, that’s why I dreamt a rainstorm of birds. He studied the electrical wires and phone lines; the crows had disappeared without a trace. The highway appeared to vibrate, swaddled in an illumination which seemed to him false, like that of a puppet theater. The city was nothing more than a faraway book in which the storm recorded its scribbles of light.

His watch read eleven forty-three when the blackout occurred. Preceded by a clap of thunder which shook the air, the ground, the entire world, with vertiginous speed the darkness gained more and more territory: first the hotel, which seemed to fall into an endless pit, and after a few seconds the highway, which dragged with it cars and tollbooths alike as it fell. Free of earthly brightness, the sky imposed itself abruptly onto the landscape: a violet-colored belly, swollen, run through with white veins.

Captive to a childish excitement, he got up from his chair and walked through the parking lot until he was able to catch sight of the city which twinkled—which had been twinkling—in the distance which was now conquered by darkness. It’s always good to come home, he thought. Whoever says that in the beginning was the Word is wrong: there is no origin other than the Dark. Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome, he hummed, to our cabaret, our cabaret, our cabareeeeet. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the show of darkness; hopefully you will not find it too inconvenient. Children, my dear children, he thought, our wait has ended, it’s time to get drunk. He laughed, and, still without giving up his glasses—he had the sense that they sharpened his vision somehow, darkness on darkness—he skipped onto the highway and began to slide down the asphalt to the rhythm of a Viennese waltz which flooded his mind. A little, he said to himself as he danced, just a little more.

It happened moments after midnight fell against the world with its entire weight. The air, before anything else the air: one instant it was whistling and the next it became completely paralyzed. Then the change in the atmosphere, a kind of swift compression, as if enormous hands were wringing it, reducing it to a ball of extraordinary density. Then the earthquake above his head and under his feet, a jolt which united the sky and the earth into one single trembling organ. And then, in the middle of the pristine silence which flowed out in all directions, the light: the most clear, the most beautiful, the sun of suns, its glow stoking the cosmos to its farthest corner. And after that the clamor, an avalanche of sound which buried even the music of the heavens.

Unmoving in the middle of the highway, all his senses aroused to their very limits, his lips twisted into a smile which grew second by second, he closed his eyes. When he opened them he could not avoid the flashing in his memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nevada desert, the Pacific atolls; the mushroom cloud—slender, gorgeous—which rose up on the horizon as if of its own accord, was the irrefutable proof that humankind was—and would continue to be, as far as the nuclear shelters would allow—the same humankind of long ago. No one, he thought, would have believed that man could make such sublime mushrooms blossom.

As he turned towards the lair which some nights before he had dug in the damp soil at the back of the hotel, he imagined pupils exposed to the apocalypse that he had evaded for centuries, hands covering eyes forced to witness the spectacle of bones through radiographic skin, bottles of eyedrops at the moment of dissolution. As he took off his dark glasses, he imagined his children, his beloved progeny, repeating that same gesture all over the world, and he pictured himself walking together with them along highways sown with eyeglasses. He recalled the temperature human blood reached when fear took root, and he could do nothing more than cluck his tongue.

Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome, he thought, to real live eternity—a time dedicated to drink. Or was that not why they, ghosts, always returned: to drink the blood of the living few?