The ER effect

​

Nobody knew what happened, only deflagrations, dry and violent blasts had been heard. He was the first to reach the pinnacle, climb the stone wall, jump to the other side, walk along the path and see from the edge the changes in the landscape, below there, at altitude cero. He thought it was the snow that covered it, virgin snow, but then he said to himself it had noticed and it was not yet time for the cold season, and that the place from where he was observing smelled strangely of pigments, of plaster, of resin, of glue. He saw the bridges. They looked like fragments of frames that joined zones: zone A to zone B, zone B to zone C. Sometimes they were not bridges and zones were joined by very fine stretches of earth seeming filaments, burlap threads. He saw plots and mounds of the colour of the earth which had not been covered and next to them, undulations and reliefs completely buried under that strange white matter, and straight lines, and lines that crossed each other, meanders, foothills, nodules. Everything he told on his return. He said: You have not seen what I have seen. He also said: There were very deep blue stripes, very deep, water stripes the colour of mercury, and then small yellow zones and other zones of a reddish hue. What were they? they asked him. He did not know, fields? tree groupings? he only knew that from above they looked like paint stains. They remained uneasy and, to calm them, he raised his hands and ended their fear telling them it must have been the effect of the light, of how the light impacted and bounced off the white floor surface. Look carefully, he insisted, jump onto the other side and look carefully, look at what I have seen, I myself would have wanted to go all the way down there and pass my fingers over the reliefs and the volumes, place my ear. But they loved order, the established, legality, so they put up signs forbidding entry, forbidding crossing that landscape and warning of the danger, and as the human world gives names as a way to appropriate the unknown, to those blasts and natural deflagrations still unexplained they called "ER effect", or "the ER effect", it was the same. Seasons elapse and the landscape has not changed. The white matter, the colours, the zones, the earth threads, the bridges. He continues to climb over the stone wall: jumps onto the other side and reaches the edge. There is where he truly sees and breathes and where his heart inflates like a coloured candle, like the effect of mercury light he inflates like a candle and defies the danger the fields the colour of the burlap zones and the threads that climb up to the heart the fingers over the plaster the ear in the water fringes and the very deep blue from where he breathes palpitates and lives.