wish machine

He did not lose his temper. He had no temper left to lose. That was his tragedy, and his mark of dignity too.

Some people go through heavy stuff. They fight in wars. They’re in jail. They start a business and it gets shut down by gangsters. They end up hustling their ass in a foreign country. It’s one long list of setbacks and humiliations. But it doesn’t touch them, not really. They’re having an adventure. It’s like: What’s next? And then there’s other people who are just trying to live quietly, they stay out of trouble, they’re maybe ten years old, or fourteen, and one Friday morning at 9.35 something happens to them, something private, something that breaks their heart. For ever.

I’m only going to say this once. This experience is not educational. It is not instructive. It is not God moving in mysterious ways, it is not God figuring out exactly what sublime ultimate purpose can be served by me stepping on Joshua’s leg and everything after. The Saviour I believed in took an interest in what I did and how I behaved. The Saviour I believed in made things happen and stopped things happening. I was deluding myself. I am alone and frightened and married to a missionary who’s going to tell me that the fool has said in his heart there is no God, and if you don’t say it it will just be because you’re being diplomatic, because in your heart you’re convinced I made this happen through my faltering of faith, and that makes me feel even more alone. Because you’re not coming back to me, are you? You like it up there. Because you’re on Planet God. So even if you did come back to me, we still wouldn’t be together. Because in your heart you’d still be on Planet God, and I’d be a trillion miles away from you, alone with you by my side.

The window he’d been using as a mirror became a window again, as lights flared up outside. Two glowing points, like the eyes of some monstrous organism approaching. He stepped closer to the glass and peered through, but the vehicle’s headlights disappeared just as he recognised them for what they were.

But like I said, I don’t fantasize about the existence of nations.

The people of L’Atlàntide believe that the gardens belong to them, but in reality the gardens are foreign to them; they belong to the other, to the unknown enigma. And we can never approach this unknown mystery without words.

We survivors have cultivated some gardens with the seeds or the memory of the remains that we salvaged from the destruction, but I almost never visit them. This is something else that the other survivors don’t understand—they say it’s foolish and unnecessary to dirty my feet among the ruins since we’ve created an earthly paradise in an artificial enclosure that replicates the natural world and is “untouched by the hand of man.” It’s as if they believe that they’ve succeeded in replicating the garden where still-innocent Eves and Adams stroll because they haven’t recreated the serpent.

So why books? I work with books because they survive across time. From the moment a book is written, it begins to interact with the past and the future. Books have always been the memory of other times—those that have been, those that will be, those that couldn’t be, or can’t be, or that should have been.

Sometimes when I remember the atmosphere burning, I think I feel what they used to call “melancholy.” But I’ve had enough of the sad, cadaverous footprints of things—dirtying the bottoms of the seas and lakes, the water of the rivers, and the surface of the Earth—dancing a macabre dance in cyclones full of man-made things.

I respect the past because I remember. But I don’t do so blindly; remembering the men from the time of History doesn’t mean singing their praises, lamenting their demise, or exalting ourselves. I remember them by writing for them, even though they don’t know it because they destroyed themselves. Remembering doesn’t make me a doe-eyed optimist or a slave to the past. I remember in order to stir my imagination and sharpen fantasy’s penetrating point.

I won’t be able to maintain this blindness that can’t distinguish the wolf from the lamb.

One day we’ll understand that to remember is to survive. Then language will regain its proper place and the memorious will be the soul of L’Atlàntide.

Most people in L’Atlàntide think we should only be concerned with the present and the future. In fact, they think we have to forget the past completely because it was merely a lesson in errors—a lesson on how to destroy the Natural World. If it’s true, as they say, that we only need to focus on the present and the future—and if we erase the past completely like they want us to do—Time, or what we know as such, would dissolve. We would float in an amorphous mass where there isn’t a place for Time. The proposed reform—calling for total oblivion—means that we would lose conscious awareness, we would lose everything it means to be human. But what if we didn’t lose consciousness? What if consciousness left us instead and closed the doorway to the imagination? What kind of future would we have? Do we have another door to the future? To be able to imagine we have to remember, we have to listen to the voice of memory. That’s what I think anyway.