Oracle Night

by Paul Auster

  I bought the Scotch tape somewhere else and then walked down to Landolfi’s to buy a pack of cigarettes (Pall Malls, in honor of the late Ed Victory) and some newspapers to read at lunch. Half a block from the candy store was a place called Rita’s, the small, noisy coffee shop where I had whiled away most of the summer. I hadn’t been there in almost a month, and I found it gratifying that the waitress and the counterman both greeted me warmly when I walked in. Out of sorts as I was that day, it felt good to know that I hadn’t been forgotten. I ordered my usual grilled cheese sandwich and settled in with the papers. The Times first, then the Daily News for the sports (the Mets had lost both ends of a Sunday doubleheader to the Cardinals), and finally a look at Newsday. I was an old hand at wasting time by then, and with my work at a standstill and nothing urgent calling me back to the apartment, I was in no rush to leave, especially now that the rain had started and I had been too lazy to climb the stairs to fetch an umbrella before going out.

  If I hadn’t lingered in Rita’s for so long, ordering a second sandwich and a third cup of coffee, I never would have seen the article printed at the bottom of page thirty-seven in Newsday. Just the night before, I had written several paragraphs about Ed Victory’s experiences in Dachau. Although Ed was a fictional character, the story he told about giving milk to the dead baby was true. I borrowed it from a book I’d once read about the Second World War,8 and with Ed’s words still ringing in my ears (‘That was the end of mankind’), I came across this clumsily written news item about another dead baby, another dispatch from the bowels of hell. I can quote the article verbatim because I have it in front of me now. I tore it out of the paper that afternoon twenty years ago and have been carrying it around in my wallet ever since.

  BORN IN A TOILET,

  BABY DISCARDED

  High on crack, a 22-year-old reputed prostitute gave birth over a toilet in a Bronx SRO, then dumped her dead baby in an outdoor garbage bin, police said yesterday.

  The woman, police said, had been having sex with a john about 1 a.m. yesterday when she left the room they were sharing at 450 Cyrus Pl. and walked into a bathroom to smoke crack. Sitting over a toilet, the woman ‘feels the water break, feels something come out,’ Sgt. Michael Ryan said.

  But police said the woman – wasted on crack – apparently was not aware she had given birth.

  Twenty minutes later, the woman noticed the dead baby in the bowl, wrapped her in a towel, and dropped her in a garbage bin. She then returned to her customer and resumed having sex, Ryan said. A dispute over payment soon broke out, however, and police said the woman stabbed her customer in the chest about 1:15 a.m.

  Police said the woman, identified as Kisha White, fled to her apartment on 188th Street. Later, White returned to the Dumpster and recovered her baby. A neighbor, however, saw her return and called the police.

  When I finished reading the article for the first time, I said to myself: This is the worst story I have ever read. It was hard enough to absorb the information about the baby, but when I came to the stabbing incident in the fourth paragraph, I understood that I was reading a story about the end of mankind, that that room in the Bronx was the precise spot on earth where human life had lost its meaning. I paused for a few moments, trying to catch my breath, trying to stop myself from trembling, and then I read the article again. This time, my eyes filled with tears. The tears were so sudden, so unexpected, that I immediately covered my face with my hands to make sure no one saw them. If the coffee shop hadn’t been crowded with customers, I probably would have collapsed in a fit of real sobbing. I didn’t go that far, but it took every bit of strength in me to hold myself back.

  I walked home in the rain. Once I had peeled off my wet clothes and changed into something dry, I went into my workroom, sat down at my desk, and opened the blue notebook. Not to the story I had been writing earlier, but to the last page, the final verso opposite the inside back cover. The article had churned up so much in me, I felt I had to write some kind of response to it, to tackle the misery it had provoked head on. I kept at it for about an hour, writing backward in the notebook, beginning with page ninety-six, then turning to page ninety-five, and so on. When I finished my little harangue, I closed the notebook, stood up from my desk, and walked down the hall to the kitchen. I poured myself a glass of orange juice, and as I put the carton back into the refrigerator, I happened to glance over at the telephone, which sat on a little table in the corner of the room. To my surprise, the light was flashing on the answering machine. There hadn’t been any messages when I’d returned from my lunch at Rita’s, and now there were two. Strange. Insignificant, perhaps, but strange. For the fact was, I hadn’t heard the phone ring. Had I been so caught up in what I was doing that I hadn’t noticed the sound? Possibly. But if that were so, then it was the first time it had ever happened to me. Our phone had a particularly loud bell, and the noise always carried down the hall to my workroom – even when the door was shut.

  The first message was from Grace. She was rushing to meet a deadline and wouldn’t be able to get out of the office until seven-thirty or eight o’clock. If I got hungry, she said, I should start dinner without her, and she would heat up the leftovers when she came home.

  The second message was from my agent, Mary Sklarr. It seemed that someone had just called her from Los Angeles, asking if I was interested in writing another screenplay, and she wanted me to call her back so she could fill me in on the details.9 I called, but it took a while before she got down to business. Like everyone else who was close to me, Mary began the conversation by asking about my health. They’d all thought they had lost me, and even though I’d been home from the hospital for four months now, they still couldn’t believe I was alive, that they hadn’t buried me in some graveyard back at the beginning of the year.

  ‘Tip-top,’ I said. ‘A few lulls and droops every now and then, but basically good. Better and better every week.’

  ‘There’s a rumor going around that you’ve started writing something. True or false?’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘John Trause. He called this morning, and your name happened to come up.’

  ‘It’s true. But I don’t know where I’m going with it yet. It could be nothing.’

  ‘Let’s hope not. I told the movie people you’ve started a new novel and probably wouldn’t be interested.’

  ‘But I am interested. Very interested. Especially if there’s real money involved.’

  ‘Fifty thousand dollars.’

  ‘Good lord. With fifty thousand dollars, Grace and I would be out of the woods.’

  ‘It’s a dumb project, Sid. Not your kind of thing at all. Science fiction.’

  ‘Ah. I see what you mean. Not exactly my line of work, is it? But are we talking about fictitious science or scientific fiction?’

  ‘Is there a difference?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘They’re planning a remake of The Time Machine.’

  ‘H. G. Wells?’

  ‘Exactly. To be directed by Bobby Hunter.’

  ‘The guy who makes those big-budget action movies? What does he know about me?’

  ‘He’s a fan. Apparently, he’s read all your books and loved the movie of Tabula Rasa.’

  ‘I suppose I should be flattered. But I still don’t get it. Why me? I mean, why me for this?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Sid. I’ll call back and tell them no.’

  ‘Give me a couple of days to think about it first. I’ll read the book and see what happens. You never know. Maybe I’ll come up with an interesting idea.’

  ‘Okay, you’re the boss. I’ll tell them you’re considering it. No promises, but you want to mull it over before you decide.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure there’s a copy of the book in the apartment. An old paperback I bought in junior high school. I’ll start reading it now and call you back in a day or two.’

  The paperback had sold for thirty-five cents in 1961, and it included two of We
lls’s early novels, The Time Machine and War of the Worlds. The Time Machine was under a hundred pages, and it didn’t take me much more than an hour to finish it. I found it thoroughly disappointing – a bad, awkwardly written piece of work, social criticism disguising itself as adventure yarn and heavy-handed on both counts. It didn’t seem possible that anyone would want to do a straight adaptation of the book. That version had already been done, and if this Bobby Hunter character was as familiar with my work as he claimed to be, then it must have meant that he wanted me to take the story somewhere else, to leap out of the book and find a way of doing something fresh with the material. If not, why had he asked me? There were hundreds of professional screenwriters with more experience than I had. Any one of them could have translated Wells’s novel into an acceptable script – which, I imagined, would have wound up looking similar to the Rod Taylor–Yvette Mimieux film I’d seen as a boy, with more dazzling special effects.

  If there was anything that grabbed me about the book, it was the underlying conceit, the notion of time travel itself. Yet Wells had somehow managed to get that wrong too, I felt. He sends his hero into the future, but the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that most of us would prefer to visit the past. Trause’s story about his brother-in-law and the 3-D viewer was a good example of how powerfully the dead keep their hold on us. If given the choice of going forward or backward, I for one wouldn’t have hesitated. I would much rather have found myself among the no-longer-living than the unborn. With so many historical enigmas to be solved, how not to feel curious about what the world had looked like in, say, the Athens of Socrates or the Virginia of Thomas Jefferson? Or, like Trause’s brother-in-law, how to resist the urge to reencounter the people you had lost? To see your mother and father on the day they met, for example, or to talk to your grandparents when they were young children. Would anyone turn down that opportunity in exchange for a glimpse of an unknown and incomprehensible future? Lemuel Flagg had seen the future in Oracle Night, and it had destroyed him. We don’t want to know when we will die or when the people we love will betray us. But we’re hungry to know the dead before they were dead, to acquaint ourselves with the dead as living beings.

  I understood that Wells needed to send his man forward in time in order to make his point about the injustices of the English class system, which could be exaggerated to cataclysmic levels if placed in the future, but even granting him the right to do that, there was another, more serious problem with the book. If a man living in London at the end of the nineteenth century could invent a time machine, then it stood to reason that other people in the future would be able to do the same thing. If not on their own, then with the time traveler’s help. And if people from future generations could travel back and forth across the years and centuries, then both the past and the future would be filled with people who did not belong to the time they were visiting. In the end, all times would be tainted, thronged with interlopers and tourists from other ages, and once people from the future began to influence events in the past and people from the past began to influence events in the future, the nature of time would change. Instead of being a continuous progression of discrete moments inching forward in one direction only, it would crumble into a vast, synchronistic blur. Simply put, as soon as one person began to travel in time, time as we know it would be destroyed.

  Still, fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money, and I wasn’t going to let a few logical flaws stand in my way. I put down the book and started pacing around the apartment, walking in and out of rooms, scanning the titles of the books on the shelves, parting the curtains and looking through the window at the wet street below, accomplishing nothing for several hours. At seven o’clock, I went into the kitchen to prepare a meal that would be ready for Grace when she returned from Manhattan. A mushroom omelet, a green salad, boiled potatoes, and broccoli. My culinary skills were limited, but I had once worked as a short-order cook, and I had a certain talent for whipping up spare and simple dinners. The first job was to peel the potatoes, and as I started slicing away the skins over a brown paper bag, the plot of the story finally came to me. It was just a beginning, with many rough edges and a host of particulars to be added later, but I felt pleased with it. Not because I felt it was good, but because I thought it might work for Bobby Hunter – whose opinion was the only one that mattered.

  There would be two time travelers, I decided, a man from the past and a woman from the future. The action would cut back and forth between them until they embark on their journeys, and then, about a third of the way into the film, they would meet up in the present. I didn’t know what to call them yet, so for the time being I referred to them as Jack and Jill.

  Jack is similar to the hero in Wells’s book – but American, not British. It’s 1895, and he lives on a ranch in Texas, the twenty-eight-year-old son of a deceased cattle baron. Independently wealthy, with no interest in running his father’s business, he leaves the operation of the ranch to his mother and older sister and devotes himself to scientific research and experimentation. After two years of unrelenting work and failure, he manages to build a time machine. He takes off on his first voyage. Not thousands of years into the future as the Wellsian character does, but just sixty-eight years ahead, climbing out of his glittering contraption on a cool and sunny day in late November 1963.

  Jill belongs to the world of the mid-twenty-second century. Time travel has been mastered by then, but it is practiced only rarely, and severe restrictions have been placed on its use. Understanding its potential for disruption and disaster, the government allows each person only one journey in his or her lifetime. Not for the pleasure of visiting other moments in history, but as an initiation rite into adulthood. It happens when you reach the age of twenty. A celebration is held in your honor, and that same night you’re sent into the past to travel around the world for one year and observe your ancestors. You begin two hundred years before your birth, roughly seven generations back, and then gradually work your way home to the present. The purpose of the trip is to teach you humility and compassion, tolerance for your fellow men. Out of the hundreds of forebears you encounter on the voyage, the entire gamut of human possibilities will be played out before you, every number in the genetic lottery will turn up. The traveler will understand that he has come from an immense cauldron of contradictions and that among his antecedents are beggars and fools, saints and heroes, cripples and beauties, gentle souls and violent criminals, altruists and thieves. To be exposed to so many lives in such a short span of time is to gain a new understanding of yourself and your place in the world. You see yourself as part of something greater than yourself, and you see yourself as a distinct individual, an unprecedented being with your own irreplaceable future. You understand, finally, that you alone are responsible for making yourself who you are.

  Certain rules are in force for the length of the journey. You must not reveal your true identity; you must not interfere with anyone’s actions; you must not allow anyone to enter your machine. To break any one of these rules is to suffer banishment from your own time and live in exile for the rest of your days.

  Jill’s story begins on the morning of her twentieth birthday. Once the party is over, she says good-bye to her parents and friends and straps herself into her government-issued time machine. She is carrying a long list of names with her, a dossier of the ancestors she will meet on her journey. The dial on the control panel is set to November 20, 1963, exactly two hundred years before her birth. She studies the papers one last time, shoves them into her pocket, and starts up the engine of the machine. Ten seconds later, with her friends and family waving their tearful farewells, the machine vanishes into thin air, and Jill is on her way.

  Jack’s machine has come to a stop in a meadow on the outskirts of Dallas. It’s November 27, five days after Kennedy’s assassination, and Oswald is already dead, gunned down by Jack Ruby in a basement passageway of City Hall. Within six hours of his arrival, Jack has read enough newspa
pers and listened to enough radio and TV broadcasts to understand that he has arrived in the midst of a national tragedy. He has lived through a presidential assassination himself (Garfield, in 1881), and he has painful memories of the trauma and chaos it produced. He ponders the dilemma for a couple of days, wondering if he has a moral right to alter the facts of history, and in the end he concludes that he does. He will take action for the good of his country; he will do everything in his power to save Kennedy’s life. He returns to his time machine in the meadow, sets the dial of the chronometer to November 20, and travels back nine days into the past. When he emerges from the cockpit of his vessel, he finds himself standing not ten feet from another time machine – a sleek, twenty-second-century version of his own. Jill steps out, a bit woozy and disheveled. When she sees Jack standing there, looking at her in utter stupefaction, she reaches into her pocket and pulls out her list of names. Excuse me, sir, she says, but I wonder if you happen to know where I could find a man named Lee Harvey Oswald.

  I hadn’t worked out many details after that. I knew Jack and Jill would have to fall in love (this was Hollywood, after all), and I knew Jack would ultimately persuade her to help him stop Oswald from murdering Kennedy – even at the risk of turning her into an outlaw, of making it impossible for her to return to her own time. They would ambush Oswald on the morning of the twenty-second just as he is entering the Texas School Book Depository with his rifle, tie him up, and hold him hostage for several hours. And yet, for all their efforts, nothing would change. Kennedy would still be shot and killed, and American history would not be altered by a single comma. Oswald, the self-proclaimed patsy, had been telling the truth. Whether he had fired at the president or not, he was not the only gunman involved in the conspiracy.