The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández (inspirational books .txt) 📗

ordinary, beyond the bounds of what we were used to seeing. The short episodes told fantastical, bizarre stories. A man with a stopwatch that can stop time. A man who sees gremlins that hound him and try to bring down the plane he’s in. A man who is reunited with his ten-year-old son, while in a parallel world that is considerably more real, the boy is a soldier who dies in battle. A man who talks to his stepdaughter’s killer doll. A man who crosses over to the other side of the mirror. In every episode a door or a tiny crack opened, offering a glimpse through the TV screen of an alternate reality that I was eager to visit.

At night my mother got home from work and we ate together. According to her, often I would tell her the story of some episode that had made an impression on me. Apparently she was rarely sure which stories were part of the series and which I had made up. After dinner we went straight to bed, only to leave for school first thing the next day. I can’t remember much of our morning routine, or those early years of school, but I know that at noon my mother would come for me once class was finished and bring me home for lunch. We talked during the meal, and after dessert and hot tea with lemon verbena from the patio, she returned to work while I was left in the middle of those long seventies afternoons, The Twilight Zone marking the moment when the sun began to set.

A space traveler has to make an emergency landing on an unknown planet a million miles from home. His spaceship is out of commission. His right arm is broken, his forehead cut and bleeding. Colonel Cook, voyager across the ocean of space, will never fly the smoldering wreck of his ship again. He survived the crash, but his lonely journey has just begun. Hurting and afraid, he sends messages home pleading for someone to rescue him, though that appears to be impossible. His people can’t come for him and he’ll be left all alone, on a small planet in space, his very own twilight zone.

And so a new episode brings the day to a close.

Once, while we were eating lunch, my mother told my grandmother and me about something very strange she had just seen. At noon, right there on Calle Nataniel, a few blocks from our house, a man had thrown himself under the wheels of a bus. It hadn’t been an accident. The man was walking along the sidewalk when suddenly he flung himself on purpose, fully aware of what he was doing. The bus screeched to a halt. The passersby who witnessed it froze in confusion, silent and still, as if the stopwatch man on The Twilight Zone had scheduled a few minutes of paralysis. A national police jeep pulled up. My mother described how an officer got out and tried to take charge of the situation. She and a group of people had gathered to see what condition the injured man was in. He was big, maybe thirty years old, bleeding heavily from a head wound. He was half-conscious, his eyes barely open, looking around in confusion, as the bus driver tried to explain to the national police officer what had happened.

I can’t remember my mother’s story very well. She herself sees a blur of images when she tries to reconstruct the scene. She says that as the passersby and the driver and the national police officer were shouting, a group of people moved decisively toward the injured man, who was still on the ground. As soon as he saw them, he yelled as if he’d seen the devil or a pack of gremlins hounding him. He said they were intelligence agents, and they were going to take him away to torture him again, and could he please be left to die in peace, and could a message please be taken to the Maluje pharmacy in Concepción. My mother says that then everyone froze again. The magic stopwatch did its work, and the fear that someone else would land in the hands of the gremlins halted all possibility of reacting. A car drove up, and amid shouts and pleas and kicks and shoves they maneuvered the man into it, who then vanished forever outside the bounds of reality.

My mother doesn’t know it, but that morning she was very close to the man who tortured people.

Part of the garbled story that she told and keeps telling at my request is a part of what he relayed to the reporter in his testimony.

The man who tortured people said that Carlos Contreras Maluje had been caught the day before, betrayed by one of his comrades. The man who tortured people said that Maluje was being held at the command center on Calle Dieciocho known as La Firma, and that he was interrogated and tortured late into the night. The man who tortured people said that Carlos Contreras Maluje had declared that the next day he had a point of contact on Calle Nataniel. That if they let him go and he kept the appointment they could arrest one more Communist. The man who tortured people said that they did exactly that. The next day they dropped him off on Calle Nataniel, and Carlos Contreras Maluje walked toward Avenida Matta, shadowed by agents deployed through the neighborhood. The man who tortured people said that he himself was seven blocks away when suddenly, over the radio, he heard another agent say: The subject threw himself under a bus.

The passersby, the people on the street, my mother, the bus driver, everyone inhabiting the surface world of everyday life, were brief witnesses to the crack through which the twilight zone appeared. The man who tortured people said that when he got to the location in question, a crowd had already gathered and