The Twilight Zone

by Nona Fernández

How is a museum of memory curated? Who chooses what to show? Who chooses what to leave out?

“Government Suppresses Opposition Magazines. Photographs Banned.” This is from a newspaper article that appeared twelve days after the man who tortured people gave his testimony to the Cauce magazine reporter. The article describes a court order that forbade certain magazines from publishing anything but text. Accordingly, the magazines on display in the museum feature white boxes on their covers, ghost images that serve only to draw one’s attention and rouse suspicion.

the courts ruled in the magazine’s favor. Then the government made another bumbling attempt at censorship,

The government was resorting to the only unbeatable weapon it had left: the suspension of civil rights.

I believe that evil is directly proportional to idiocy. I believe that the territory you roamed in anguish before you disappeared is ruled by idiots. It isn’t true that criminals are masterminds. It takes a vast amount of stupidity to assemble the parts of such grotesque, absurd, and cruel machinery.

Pure brutality disguised as a master plan. Small people, with small minds, who don’t understand the abyss of the other.

They lack the language or tools for it. Empathy and compassion require a clear mind. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, changing your skin, adopting a new fac...

there are images missing from the documentary, other shots that would’ve been more powerful, more earth-shaking. Maybe we should have reconstructed some scenes: brutal fights, hand-to-hand combat with evil agents. Maybe we should have hired stars like Robert Downey Jr. or, more realistically, a face familiar from the afternoon soaps. Maybe we should have included some special effects, or at least photoshopped wrinkles and gray hair, patched in a swelling sound track for each segment, and added something as spectacular and hair-raising as the explosion up above us that I can still hear.

History not as glamorous as a Marvel movie- maybe more people would engage w/ the past/history if it is entertaining

This empty theater is a parenthesis in time, a spatiotemporal capsule, a spaceship in which my mother and I travel at a pace set by a clock telling a different time, the same as the one marking the hours at Barbara Jean Trenton’s mansion in The Twilight Zone.

It doesn’t matter what you see. All that matters is what you believe you see.

Having gotten out once, maybe he thought he could get out again. But the twilight zone stopwatch is remorseless. No matter the year or the day, its tiny hands keep time locked up inside it, revolving around itself, advancing backward, retreating forward, inevitably ending up in the same spot, that place beyond rescue distance

there has never been a kitchen anywhere in the world that is safe from the blaze of history.

We didn’t start the fire, no we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.

We’ve been celebrating this strange day and lighting and lighting these damn candles for too long. For an endless, tedious moment of déjà vu, we play the parenthesis game and we’re always here in the fragile light of the little flames, our eyes red from the smoke.