00.32 — The Word and the Big Bang

00.32 — THE WORD AND THE BIG BANG

Uncertain date · Cuetzalan · Night

The light in the pool rises from below. No one yet sees what is beginning to move at the bottom.

The white ball strikes the triangle.

The sound passes through Casey’s studio, and for a second everything else seems to stop. The balls scatter across the green cloth; one goes into a pocket, two collide, and another keeps spinning slowly until it stops in front of Rodolfo.

He is not playing.

He is listening to music.

He looks at a portrait leaning against the wall.

A priest.

Roman collar. Yellow teeth, slightly crooked. Uncombed hair. A face that seems to have arrived late for its own portrait.

Casey insists he painted it from memory.

—Did you know him?

—No.

—Then it is not from memory.

Casey sets the cue on the table.

—Caravaggio did not always need people to be in front of him either.

—Caravaggio had models.

—And afterward he had paint.

Rodolfo keeps looking.

Something about the priest bothers him. Perhaps the eyes. Not because they are particularly well painted, but because they do not seem to belong to the rest of the face. Casey has left the face almost unfinished, but the eyes have an unpleasant precision.

—Who is he?

—I do not know yet.

Another Casey answer.

Rodolfo laughs.

At the table, someone racks the balls again.

In the pool, Víctor and René kiss underwater.

There is no music down there.

Only the dull thud of movements against the water and that inner sound your own breathing makes when you try to hold it.

René opens his eyes.

Víctor does too.

They look distorted to each other.

Closer than they really are.

René smiles and loses air.

They rise.

They come up laughing.

Neither notices that at the bottom, beside the drain grate, a green substance is beginning to appear.

Very little.

Something like mud.

The movement of their bodies slowly stirs it up.

Rodolfo had once read that in 1951 Pius XII spoke of the expanding universe as something compatible with creation.

It amuses him to imagine the problem.

A pope facing the Big Bang.

A priest facing an equation.

John facing the beginning.

In the beginning was the Word.

For years he had understood the phrase as a statement about Christ. Tonight something else interests him.

Word.

A word.

Not because words manufacture objects. The Moon would have been there even if no human being had yet learned to call it the Moon.

But the Moon did not exist.

That existed.

Stone.

Reflected light.

Tides.

A thing without our name.

Then someone pointed upward.

The word appeared.

And something changed.

Not in the Moon.

In us.

—Before the word there was no sin —Rodolfo says.

Casey raises an eyebrow.

—Now that is quite a claim.

—There were acts. Not sin.

—Cain would be delighted with your theory.

—Cain needs someone to write Genesis.

Casey smiles.

Rodolfo approaches the portrait.

—Before someone said murder, there was a dead man and another man with blood on his hands.

—That is still rather serious.

—But it is not a story yet.

Casey takes the cue.

—Now you are beginning to understand something.

He strikes.

He misses.

Víctor gets out of the pool.

René stays in.

—Come on.

—I am fine.

—It is cold.

—Not anymore.

Víctor takes a towel.

René lets himself float.

He looks at the ceiling.

From there the pool seems to contain another world: bent lights, reflections, shadows moving with a slowness that would be impossible outside the water.

The green mud keeps rising behind him.

Now it forms a small cloud.

René does not see it.

He closes his eyes.

Rodolfo thinks of the Word again.

Not as the first word spoken in an empty universe.

As the first difference.

This.

That.

I.

You.

Before.

After.

Perhaps time truly began when something could distinguish one thing from another.

He would like to tell his father.

His father would have begun correcting him before he finished the sentence.

Time does not need language.

Of course.

But we do.

Without before and after, how do you remember?

Without I, who remembers?

Without you, whom do you desire?

Rodolfo looks at the priest again.

—Perhaps that is the Word.

—What?

—Difference.

Casey is concentrating on the table.

—Very theological.

—No.

—Then worse.

Rodolfo laughs.

The ball strikes a cushion.

René feels something against his foot.

He opens his eyes.

He moves his leg.

Nothing.

He closes his eyes again.

The water has become just a little darker near the bottom.

Víctor is sitting outside, looking at his phone.

—René.

—What.

—Get out already.

René dives under.

He goes down.

For fun.

He wants to touch the bottom and come back up.

Halfway down he opens his eyes.

Then he sees the stain.

Green.

It does not look dangerous.

That is precisely what catches his attention.

He reaches out a hand.

Rodolfo says:

—Bang.

Casey looks up.

—What?

—Nothing.

Rodolfo moves his hands as if separating something.

—Word. Difference. Space. Time.

—You are building a theology with a billiard table.

—There are worse religions.

Casey laughs.

Rodolfo touches the portrait’s frame.

—Perhaps the beginning is not that God said something.

—Then?

—That something could answer.

Casey stops smiling.

Only for an instant.

Then he returns to the game.

René’s hand passes through the mud.

The cloud opens.

There is something pale beneath it.

He does not know what.

Stone, perhaps.

A shape.

René stays underwater too long.

Víctor puts down the phone.

—René.

He approaches the edge.

He cannot see him.

Then René bursts to the surface.

He breathes.

—What are you doing, asshole?

René wipes the water from his eyes.

—There is something down there.

—What?

He looks toward the bottom again.

The green cloud slowly closes once more.

—I do not know.

Víctor leans over.

For a moment they both look.

Nothing happens.

The water trembles.

The lights at the bottom distort their faces.

Behind them, in the studio, one ball strikes another again.

The sound reaches them muffled.

Rodolfo contemplates the priest Casey claims to have invented.

René contemplates the green stain.

Both are waiting for something to let itself be recognized.

They do not yet know that recognizing a thing is also beginning to give it a name.

And that, after the name, it rarely goes back to being only what it was.