Oracle Night

by Paul Auster

  ‘Go back to Smithers,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing I can do for you.’

  ‘I can’t go back. They found out I was there. If I go back to that place, I’m dead.’

  ‘Who’s they? Who are you talking about?’

  ‘These guys, Richie and Phil. They think I owe them money. If I don’t come up with five thousand dollars, they’re going to kill me.’

  ‘I don’t believe you, Jacob.’

  ‘They’re the reason I went to Smithers. It wasn’t because of my mother. It was to hide from them.’

  ‘I still don’t believe you. But even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to help. I don’t have five thousand dollars. I don’t even have five hundred dollars. Call your mother. If she turns you down, call your father. But leave Grace and me out of this.’

  I heard the toilet flush down the hall, a signal that Grace would be coming back to the room at any moment. Distracted by the noise, Jacob turned his head toward that area of the apartment, and when he saw her walk into the living room with the pregnancy book in her hand, he broke into a big smile. ‘Hiya, Gracie,’ he said. ‘Long time no see.’

  Grace stopped in her tracks. ‘What’s he doing here?’ she said, addressing her words to me. She looked stunned, and she spoke in a kind of suppressed rage, refusing to turn her eyes back in Jacob’s direction.

  ‘He wants to borrow money,’ I said.

  ‘Come on, Gracie,’ Jacob said, in a half petulant, half sarcastic tone of voice. ‘Won’t you even say hello to me? I mean, it doesn’t cost anything to be polite, does it?’

  As I stood there watching the two of them, I couldn’t help thinking about the torn-up photograph that had been left on the sofa after the break-in. The frame had been stolen, but only someone with a deep, long-standing grudge against the person in the portrait would have gone to the trouble of ripping it to pieces. A professional burglar would have left it intact. But Jacob wasn’t a professional; he was a frantic, drug-addled kid who’d gone out of his way to hurt us – to hurt his father by going after two of his closest friends.

  ‘That’s enough,’ I said to him. ‘She doesn’t want to talk to you, and neither do I. You’re the person who robbed us last week. You crawled in through the kitchen window and smashed up the place, and then you walked off with every valuable thing you could find. Do you want me to pick up the phone and call the cops, or do you want to leave? Those are your two choices. Trust me, I’ll make that call with great pleasure. I’ll press charges against you, and you’ll wind up going to jail.’

  I was expecting him to deny the accusation, to pretend to be insulted that I would dare to think such a thing about him, but the boy was much cleverer than that. He let out a beautifully calibrated sigh of remorse, and then he sat down in a chair, slowly shaking his head back and forth, acting as if he were shocked by his own behavior. It was the same kind of self-loathing performance he’d mentioned to me on Saturday when he’d bragged about his theatrical talents. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But what I told you about Richie and Phil is true. They’re after me, and if I don’t give them their five thousand bucks, they’re going to put a bullet in my head. I came here the other day thinking I’d borrow your checkbook, but I couldn’t find it. So I took some other things instead. It was a dumb move. I’m really sorry. The stuff wasn’t even worth that much, and I shouldn’t have done it. If you want, I’ll give it all back to you tomorrow. I still have it in my apartment, and I’ll bring everything back first thing in the morning.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Grace said. ‘You’ve already sold what you could, and then you threw out the rest. Don’t play that sorry-little-boy routine, Jacob. You’re too big for that now. You ripped us off last week, and now you’re back for more.’

  ‘Those guys are fixing to shorten my life,’ he said, ‘and they need their money by tomorrow. I know you two are strapped for cash, but Christ, Gracie, your dad’s a federal judge. He’s not going to flinch if you ask him for a loan. I mean, what’s five thousand dollars to an old southern gentleman?’

  ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘There’s no way we’re going to drag Bill Tebbetts into this.’

  ‘Get him out of here, Sid,’ Grace said to me, her voice tight with anger. ‘I can’t stand it anymore.’

  ‘I thought we were family,’ Jacob replied, staring hard at Grace, almost forcing her to look at him. He had begun to pout, but in a curiously insincere way, as though he were trying to mock her and twist her dislike for him to his own advantage. ‘After all, you’re sort of my unofficial stepmom, aren’t you? At least you used to be. Doesn’t that count for something?’

  By then, Grace was already moving across the room, on her way to the kitchen. ‘I’m calling the police,’ she said. ‘If you won’t do it, Sid, I will. I want this slimeball out of here.’ In order for her to reach the phone in the kitchen, however, she had to pass in front of the chair Jacob was sitting in, and before she managed to get there, he had already stood up to block her way. Until then, the confrontation had consisted entirely of words. The three of us had been talking, and no matter how distasteful that talk had been, I wasn’t prepared for those words to erupt into physical violence. I was standing near the sofa, a good eight or ten feet from the chair, and when Grace tried to slip past Jacob, he grabbed hold of her arm and said, ‘Not the police, stupid. Your father. The only person you’re going to call is the judge – to ask for the money.’ Grace tried to squirm out of his grip, bucking around like an incensed animal, but Jacob was five or six inches taller than she was, which gave him superior leverage and allowed him to bear down on her from above. I rushed toward him, slowed by my sore muscles and the splinter in my foot, but before I got there, Jacob had already locked his hands onto her shoulders and was slamming her into the wall. I jumped him from behind, trying to wrap my arms around his torso and pull him away from her, but the kid was strong, much stronger than I had expected, and without even bothering to turn around, he sent his elbow straight into my stomach. It blew the wind out of me and knocked me down, and before I could make another charge at him, he was punching Grace in the mouth and kicking her in the belly with his thick leather boots. She tried to fight back, but each time she stood up, he slugged her in the face, banged her against the wall, and threw her to the floor. Blood was pouring out of her nose when I was ready to attack again, but I knew that I was too weak to have any effect, too debilitated to stop him with my sad and frail fists. Grace was moaning and nearly unconscious by then, and I felt there was a real danger that he would beat her to death. Instead of going straight for him, I rushed into the kitchen and pulled out a large carving knife from the top drawer next to the sink. ‘Stop it!’ I yelled at him. ‘Stop it, Jacob, or else I’m going to kill you!’ I don’t think he heard me at first. He was completely lost in his fury, an insane destroyer who scarcely seemed to know what he was doing anymore, but as I advanced toward him with the knife, he must have caught a glimpse of me out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head to the left, and when he saw me there with the knife raised in my hand, he suddenly stopped hitting her. His eyes had a wild, unfocused look, and sweat was sliding off his nose and falling onto his narrow, trembling chin. I felt certain he was going to come after me next. I wouldn’t have hesitated to stick the knife into his body, but when he glanced down at the bleeding and immobilized Grace, he dropped his arms to his sides and said, ‘Thanks a lot, Sid. Now I’m a dead man.’ Then he turned around and left the apartment, vanishing into the streets of Brooklyn a few minutes before the police cars and the ambulance pulled up in front of the house.

  Grace lost the baby. The blows from Jacob’s boot had torn up her insides, and once the hemorrhaging began, the tiny embryo was dislodged from the wall of her uterus and came washing out in a miserable stream of blood. Spontaneous abortion, as the term goes; a miscarriage; a life that was never born. They drove her across the Gowanus Canal to Methodist Hospital in Park Slope, and as I sat beside her in the back of the ambulance, wedged in among the oxygen tanks and tw
o paramedics, I kept looking down at her poor battered face, unable to stop myself from trembling, seizing up in continual spasms that shuddered through my chest and down the entire length of my body. Her nose was broken, the left side of her face was covered with bruises, and her right eyelid was so swollen it looked as if she would never see out of that eye again. At the hospital, they wheeled her off for X rays on the ground floor and then took her upstairs to an operating room, where they worked on her for more than two hours. I don’t know how I did it, but as I waited for the surgeons to finish their job, I managed to pull myself together just long enough to call Grace’s parents in Charlottesville. That was when I found out John was dead. Sally Tebbetts answered the phone, and at the end of our exhausting, interminable conversation, she told me that Gilbert had called earlier that evening with the news. She and Bill were already in shock, she said, and now I was telling her that John’s son had tried to kill their daughter. Had the world gone crazy? she asked, and then her voice choked up and she started to cry. She handed the phone to her husband, and when Bill Tebbetts came on, he got right to the point and asked me the only question worth asking. Was Grace going to live? Yes, I said, she was going to live. I didn’t know that yet, but I wasn’t about to tell him that Grace was in critical condition and might not pull through. I wasn’t going to hex her chances by speaking the wrong words. If words could kill, then I had to keep a careful watch over my tongue and make sure never to express a single doubt or negative thought. I hadn’t come back from the dead in order to watch my wife die. Losing John was terrible enough, and I wasn’t going to lose anyone else. It simply wasn’t going to happen. Even if I had no say in the matter, I wasn’t going to allow it to happen.

  For the next seventy-two hours, I sat by Grace’s bed and didn’t budge from my spot. I washed and shaved in the adjoining bathroom, ate meals as I watched the clear liquid in the IV line drip into her arm, and lived for those rare moments when she opened her good eye and said a few words to me. With so many painkillers circulating in her blood, she seemed to have no memory of what Jacob had done to her and only the dimmest awareness that she was in a hospital. Three or four times, she asked me where she was, but then she’d drift off again and immediately forget what I’d told her. She often whimpered in her sleep, groaning softly as she swatted at the bandages on her face, and once she woke up with tears in her eyes asking, ‘Why do I hurt so much? What’s wrong with me?’

  People came and went during those days, but I have no more than the faintest memories of them, and I can’t recall a single conversation I had with anyone. The assault occurred on a Monday night, and by Tuesday morning Grace’s parents had already flown up from Virginia. Her cousin Lily drove down from Connecticut that same afternoon. Her younger sisters, Darcy and Flo, arrived the next morning. Betty Stolowitz and Greg Fitzgerald came. Mary Sklarr came. Mr. and Mrs. Caramello came. I must have talked to them and left the room every now and then, but I can’t remember anything but sitting with Grace. For most of Tuesday and Wednesday, she was in a semiconscious torpor – drowsing, sleeping, waking for just a few minutes at a stretch – but by Wednesday evening she seemed to be a little more coherent and was beginning to remain conscious for longer periods of time. She slept soundly that night, and when she woke up on Thursday morning, she finally recognized me. I took hold of her hand, and as our palms touched, she muttered my name, then repeated it to herself several more times, as though that one-syllable word were an incantation that could turn her from a ghost into a living being again.

  ‘I’m in a hospital, aren’t I?’ she said.

  ‘Methodist Hospital in Park Slope,’ I answered. ‘And I’m sitting next to you, holding your hand. It’s not a dream, Grace. We’re really here, and little by little you’re going to get better.’

  ‘I’m not going to die?’

  ‘No, you’re not going to die.’

  ‘He beat me up, didn’t he? He punched me and kicked me, and I remember thinking I was going to die. Where were you, Sid? Why didn’t you help me?’

  ‘I got my arms around him, but I couldn’t pull him off you. I had to threaten him with a knife. I was ready to kill him, Grace, but he ran off before anything happened. Then I called Nine-one-one, and the ambulance brought you here.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Three nights ago.’

  ‘And what’s this stuff on my face?’

  ‘Bandages. And a splint for your nose.’

  ‘He broke my nose?’

  ‘Yes. And gave you a concussion. But your head is clearing now, isn’t it? You’re starting to come around.’

  ‘What about the baby? There’s this big pain in my gut, Sid, and I think I know what it means. It can’t be true, can it?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is. Everything else is going to get better, but not that.’

  One day later, Trause’s ashes were scattered in a meadow in Central Park. There must have been thirty or forty of us in the group that morning, a gathering of friends, relatives, and fellow writers, with no official from any religion present and not one mention of the word God made by any of the people who spoke. Grace knew nothing about John’s death, and her parents and I had decided to keep it from her as long as we could. Bill went to the ceremony with me, but Sally stayed behind at the hospital to be with Grace – who had been told I was accompanying her father to the airport for his flight back to Virginia. Grace was gradually getting better, but she still wasn’t well enough to handle a blow of that magnitude. One tragedy at a time, I said to her parents, but no more. Like the single drops of liquid that fell from the plastic bag into the IV tube attached to Grace’s arm, the medicine would have to be parceled out in small doses. The lost child was more than enough for now. John could wait until she was strong enough to bear a second onslaught of grief.

  No one mentioned Jacob at the service, but he was present in my thoughts as I listened to John’s brother and Bill and various other friends deliver their eulogies under the blazing light of that autumn morning. How rotten for a man to die before he had a chance to become old, I said to myself, how grim to contemplate the work he still had in front of him. But if John had to die now, I felt, then surely it was better that he had died on Monday, and not Tuesday or Wednesday. If he had lived another twenty-four hours, he would have found out what Jacob had done to Grace, and I was certain that knowledge would have destroyed him. As it was, he would never have to confront the fact that he had sired a monster, never have to walk around with the burden of the outrage his son had committed against the person he loved most in the world. Jacob had become the unmentionable, but I burned with hatred against him, and I was looking forward to the moment when the police finally caught up with him and I would be able to testify against him in court. To my infinite regret, I was never given that opportunity. Even as we stood in Central Park mourning his father, Jacob was already dead. None of us could have known it then, since another two months went by before his decomposing body was found – wrapped in a sheath of black plastic and buried in a Dumpster at an abandoned construction site near the Harlem River in the Bronx. He had been shot twice in the head. Richie and Phil had not been phantoms of his imagination, and when the forensic report was placed in evidence at their trial the following year, it showed that each bullet had been fired from a different gun.

  That same day (October 1), the letter sent from Manhattan by Madame Dumas reached its destination in Brooklyn. I found it in my mailbox after I went home from Central Park (to change my clothes before setting out for the hospital again), and because there was no return address on the envelope, I didn’t learn who it was from until I’d carried it upstairs and opened it. Trause had written the letter by hand, and the script was so jagged, so frenzied in its execution, that I had trouble deciphering it. I had to go through the text several times before I managed to crack the mysteries of its illegible curls and scratches, but once I began to translate the marks into words, I could hear John’s voice talking to me – a living voice talking f
rom the other side of death, from the other side of nowhere. Then I found the check inside the envelope, and I felt my eyes watering up with tears. I saw John’s ashes streaming out of the urn in the park that morning. I saw Grace lying in her bed in the hospital. I saw myself tearing up the pages of the blue notebook, and after a while – in the words of John’s brother-in-law Richard – I had my face in my hands and was sobbing my guts out. I don’t know how long I carried on like that, but even as the tears poured out of me, I was happy, happier to be alive than I had ever been before. It was a happiness beyond consolation, beyond misery, beyond all the ugliness and beauty of the world. Eventually, the tears subsided, and I went into the bedroom to put on a fresh set of clothes. Ten minutes later, I was out on the street again, walking toward the hospital to see Grace.

  1. Twenty years have elapsed since that morning, and a fair amount of what we said to each other has been lost. I search my memory for the missing dialogue, but I can come up with no more than a few isolated fragments, bits and pieces shorn from their original context. One thing I’m certain of, however, is that I told him my name. It must have happened just after he found out I was a writer, since I can hear him asking me who I was – on the off chance he ran across something I had published. ‘Orr’ is what I said to him, giving my last name first, ‘Sidney Orr.’ Chang’s English wasn’t good enough for him to understand my response. He heard Orr as or, and when I shook my head and smiled, his face seemed to crumple up in embarrassed confusion. I was about to correct the error and spell out the word for him, but before I could say anything his eyes brightened again and he began making furious little rowing gestures with his hands, thinking that perhaps the word I’d said to him was oar. Again, I shook my head and smiled. Utterly defeated now, Chang emitted a loud sigh and said: ‘Terrible tongue, this English. Too tricky for my poor brain.’ The misunderstanding continued until I lifted the blue notebook from the counter and wrote out my name in block letters on the inside front cover. That seemed to produce the desired result. After so much effort, I didn’t bother to tell him that the first Orrs in America had been Orlovskys. My grandfather had shortened the name to make it sound more American – just as Chang had done by adding the decorative but meaningless initials, M. R., to his.