by Paul Auster
When he was seventeen, she promised to come to New York for his high school graduation, but she never showed up. Curiously, he didn’t hold it against her. After Bobby’s death, things that had once mattered to him no longer mattered at all. He figured she had forgotten. Forgetting is not a sin—it is simple human error. The next time he saw her, she apologized, bringing up the subject before he had a chance to mention it, which he never would have done in any case.
His visits to California became less frequent. He was in college now, and during the three years he spent at Brown he went out there only twice. There were other meetings, however, lunches and dinners in New York restaurants, several long telephone conversations (always at her initiative), and a weekend together in Providence with Korngold, whose decade of steadfast loyalty to her had made it impossible for him to feel anything but admiration for the man. In some ways, Korngold reminded him of his father. Not in looks or affect or bearing, but in the work he did, which was scrambling to make small, worthwhile films in a world of mega-junk, just as his father was scrambling to publish worthwhile books in a world of fads and weightless ephemera. His mother was well into her forties by then, and she seemed more comfortable with herself than she’d been at the summit of her beauty, less involved in the intrigues of her own life, more open to others. During that weekend in Providence, she asked him if he’d thought about what he wanted to do after graduation. He wasn’t sure, he said. One day he was convinced he would become a doctor, the next day he was tilting toward photography, and the day after that he was planning to go into teaching. Not writing or publishing? she asked. No, he didn’t think so, he said. He loved to read books, but he had no interest in making them.
Then he vanished. His mother had nothing to do with the impetuous decision to turn on his heels and run, but once he left Willa and his father, he left her as well. For better or worse, it had to be that way, and it has to be that way now. If he goes to see his mother, she will immediately contact his father and tell him where he is, and then everything he has struggled to accomplish over the past seven and a half years will have been for naught. He has turned himself into a black sheep. That is the role he has willed himself to play, and he will go on playing it even in New York, even as he wanders back to the edge of the flock he left behind. Will he dare to go to the theater and knock on his mother’s dressing room door? Will he dare to ring the bell of the apartment on Downing Street? Possibly, but he doesn’t think so—or at least he can’t think about it now. After all this time, he still doesn’t feel quite ready.
Just north of Washington, as the bus enters the final leg of the trip, snow begins to fall. They are moving into winter now, he realizes, the cold days and long nights of his boyhood winters, and suddenly the past has turned into the future. He closes his eyes, thinking about Pilar’s face, running his hands over her absent body, and then, in the darkness behind his lids, he sees himself as a black speck in a world made of snow.
Bing Nathan and Company
Bing Nathan
He is the warrior of outrage, the champion of discontent, the militant debunker of contemporary life who dreams of forging a new reality from the ruins of a failed world. Unlike most contrarians of his ilk, he does not believe in political action. He belongs to no movement or party, has never once spoken out in public, and has no desire to lead angry hordes into the streets to burn down buildings and topple governments. It is a purely personal position, but if he lives his life according to the principles he has established for himself, he feels certain that others will follow his example.
When he talks about the world, then, he is referring to his world, to the small, circumscribed sphere of his own life, and not to the world-at-large, which is too large and too broken for him to have any effect on it. He therefore concentrates on the local, the particular, the nearly invisible details of quotidian affairs. The decisions he makes are necessarily small ones, but small does not always mean unimportant, and day after day he struggles to adhere to the fundamental rule of his discontent: to stand in opposition to things-as-they-are, to resist the status quo on all fronts. Since the war in Vietnam, which began nearly twenty years before he was born, he would argue that the concept known as America has played itself out, that the country is no longer a workable proposition, but if anything continues to unite the fractured masses of this defunct nation, if American opinion is still unanimous about any one idea, it is a belief in the notion of progress. He contends that they are wrong, that the technological developments of the past decades have in fact only diminished the possibilities of life. In a throwaway culture spawned by the greed of profit-driven corporations, the landscape has grown ever more shabby, ever more alienating, ever more empty of meaning and consolidating purpose. His acts of rebellion are petty ones, perhaps, peevish gestures that accomplish little or nothing even in the short run, but they help to enhance his dignity as a human being, to ennoble him in his own eyes. He takes it for granted that the future is a lost cause, and if the present is all that matters now, then it must be a present imbued with the spirit of the past. That is why he shuns cell phones, computers, and all things digital—because he refuses to participate in new technologies. That is why he spends his weekends playing drums and percussion in a six-man jazz group—because jazz is dead and only the happy few are interested in it anymore. That is why he started his business three years ago—because he wanted to fight back. The Hospital for Broken Things is located on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope. Flanked by a laundromat on one side and a vintage clothing shop on the other, it is a hole-in-the-wall storefront enterprise devoted to repairing objects from an era that has all but vanished from the face of the earth: manual typewriters, fountain pens, mechanical watches, vacuum-tube radios, record players, wind-up toys, gumball machines, and rotary telephones. Little matter that ninety percent of the money he earns comes from framing pictures. His shop provides a unique and inestimable service, and every time he works on another battered artifact from the antique industries of half a century ago, he goes about it with the willfulness and passion of a general fighting a war.
Tangibility. That is the word he uses most often when discussing his ideas with his friends. The world is tangible, he says. Human beings are tangible. They are endowed with bodies, and because those bodies feel pain and suffer from disease and undergo death, human life has not altered by a single jot since the beginning of mankind. Yes, the discovery of fire made man warmer and put an end to the raw-meat diet; the building of bridges enabled him to cross rivers and streams without getting his toes wet; the invention of the airplane allowed him to hop over continents and oceans while creating new phenomena such as jet lag and in-flight movies—but even if man has changed the world around him, man himself has not changed. The facts of life are constant. You live and then you die. You are born out of a woman’s body, and if you manage to survive your birth, your mother must feed you and take care of you to ensure that you go on surviving, and everything that happens to you from the moment of your birth to the moment of your death, every emotion that wells up in you, every flash of anger, every surge of lust, every bout of tears, every gust of laughter, everything you will ever feel in the course of your life has also been felt by everyone who came before you, whether you are a caveman or an astronaut, whether you live in the Gobi Desert or the Arctic Circle. It all came to him in a sudden, epiphanic burst when he was sixteen years old. Paging through an illustrated book about the Dead Sea scrolls one afternoon, he stumbled across some photographs of the things that had been unearthed along with the parchment texts: plates and eating utensils, straw baskets, pots, jugs, all of them perfectly intact. He studied them carefully for several moments, not quite understanding why he found these objects so compelling, and then, after several more moments, it finally came to him. The decorative patterns on the dishes were identical to the patterns on the dishes in the window of the store across the street from his apartment. The straw baskets were identical to the baskets millions of Europeans use to shop
with today. The things in the pictures were two thousand years old, and yet they looked utterly new, utterly contemporary. That was the revelation that changed his thinking about human time: if a person from two thousand years ago, living in a far-flung outpost of the Roman Empire, could fashion a household item that looked exactly like a household item from today, how was that person’s mind or heart or inner being any different from his own? That is the story he never tires of repeating to his friends, his counterargument to the prevailing belief that new technologies alter human consciousness. Microscopes and telescopes have permitted us to see more things than ever before, he says, but our days are still spent in the realm of normal sight. E-mails are faster than posted letters, he says, but in the end they’re just another form of letter writing. He reels off example after example. He knows he drives them crazy with his conjectures and opinions, that he bores them with his long, nattering harangues, but these are important issues to him, and once he gets started, he finds it difficult to stop.
He is a large, hulking presence, a sloppy bear of a man with a full brown beard and a gold stud in his left earlobe, an inch under six feet tall but a wide and waddling two hundred and twenty pounds. His daily uniform consists of a pair of sagging black jeans, yellow work boots, and a plaid lumberjack shirt. He changes his underwear infrequently. He chews his food too loudly. He has been unlucky in love. Of all the things he does in life, playing the drums gives him the most pleasure. He was a boisterous child, a noisemaker of undisciplined exuberance and clumsy, scattershot aggression, and when his parents presented him with a drum set on his twelfth birthday, hoping his destructive urges might take a new form, their hunch proved correct. Seventeen years later, his collection has grown from the standard kit (snare drums, tom-toms, side drum, bass drum, suspended cymbals, hi-hat cymbals) to include more than two dozen drums of various shapes and sizes from around the world, among them a murumba, a batá, a darbuka, an okedo, a kalangu, a rommelpot, a bodhrán, a dhola, an ingungu, a koboro, a ntenga, and a tabor. Depending on the instrument, he plays with sticks, mallets, or hands. His percussion closet is stocked with standbys such as bells, gongs, bull-roarers, castanets, clappers, chimes, washboards, and kalimbas, but he has also performed with chains, spoons, pebbles, sandpaper, and rattles. The band he belongs to is called Mob Rule, and they average two or three gigs a month, mostly in small bars and clubs in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. If they earned more money, he would gladly drop everything and spend the rest of his life touring the world with them, but they barely earn enough to cover the costs of their rehearsal space. He loves the harsh, dissonant, improvised sound they create—shit-kicking funk, as he sometimes calls it—and they are not without their loyal followers. But there aren’t enough of them, not nearly enough, and so he spends his mornings and afternoons in the Hospital for Broken Things, putting frames around movie posters and mending relics that were built when his grandparents were children.
When Ellen Brice told him about the abandoned house in Sunset Park this past summer, he saw it as an opportunity to put his ideas to the test, to move beyond his invisible, solitary attacks on the system and participate in a communal action. It is the boldest step he has yet taken, and he has no trouble reconciling the illegality of what they are doing with their right to do it. These are desperate times for everyone, and a crumbling wooden house standing empty in a neighborhood as ragged as this one is nothing if not an open invitation to vandals and arsonists, an eyesore begging to be broken into and pillaged, a menace to the well-being of the community. By occupying that house, he and his friends are protecting the safety of the street, making life more livable for everyone around them. It is early December now, and they have been squatting there for close to four months. Because it was his idea to move there in the first place, and because he was the one who picked the soldiers of their little army, and because he is the only one who knows anything about carpentry, plumbing, and electric wiring, he is the unofficial leader of the group. Not a beloved leader, perhaps, but a tolerated leader, for they all know the experiment would fall apart without him.
Ellen was the first person he asked. Without her, he never would have set foot in Sunset Park and discovered the house, and therefore it seemed only fitting to give her the right of first refusal. He has known her since they were small children, when they went to elementary school together on the Upper West Side, but then they lost contact for many years, only to find out seven months ago that they were both living in Brooklyn and were in fact not terribly distant Park Slope neighbors. She walked into the Hospital one afternoon to have something framed, and although he didn’t recognize her at first (could anyone recognize a twenty-nine-year-old woman last seen as a girl of twelve?), when he wrote down her name on the order form he instantly understood that this was the Ellen Brice he had known as a boy. Strange little Ellen Brice, all grown up now and working as a real estate agent for a firm on Seventh Avenue and Ninth Street, an artist in her spare time in the same way he is a musician in his spare time, although he has the semblance of a career and she does not. That first afternoon in the shop, he blundered in with his usual friendly, tactless questions and soon learned that she was still unmarried, that her parents had retired to a coastal town in North Carolina, and that her sister was pregnant with twin boys. His first meeting with Millie Grant was still six weeks in the future (the same Millie who is about to be replaced by Miles Heller), and because he and Ellen were both officially available, he asked her out for a drink.
Nothing came of that drink, nor of the dinner he invited her to three nights later, but there had been nothing between them as children and that continued to be the case in adulthood as well. They were both at loose ends, however, and even if romance was not in the picture, they went on seeing each other from time to time and began to build a modest friendship. It didn’t matter to him that she hadn’t liked the Mob Rule concert she attended (the clanging chaos of their work was not for everyone), nor was he unduly concerned that he found her drawings and paintings dull (meticulous, well-executed still lifes and cityscapes that lacked all flair and originality, he felt). What counted was that she seemed to enjoy listening to him talk and that she never turned him down when he called. Something in him responded to the sense of loneliness that enveloped her, he was touched by her quiet goodness and the vulnerability he saw in her eyes, and yet the more their friendship advanced, the less he knew what to make of her. Ellen was not an unattractive woman. Her body was trim, her face was pleasant to look at, but she projected an aura of anxiety and defeat, and with her too pale skin and flat, lusterless hair, he wondered if she wasn’t mired in some sort of depression, living out her days in an underground room at the Hotel Melancholia. Whenever he saw her, he did everything in his power to make her laugh—with mixed results.
Early in the summer, on the same scorching day that Pilar Sanchez moved in with Miles Heller down in southern Florida, a crisis broke out up north. The lease on the storefront that housed the Hospital for Broken Things was about to expire, and his landlord was demanding a twenty percent rent increase. He explained that he couldn’t afford it, that the extra monthly charges would drive him out of business, but the prick refused to budge. The only solution was to leave his apartment and find a cheaper place somewhere else. Ellen, who worked in the rental division of her real estate company on Seventh Avenue, told him about Sunset Park. It was a rougher neighborhood, she said, but it wasn’t far from where he was living now, and rents were a half or a third of the rents in Park Slope. That Sunday, the two of them went out to explore the territory between Fifteenth and Sixty-fifth streets in western Brooklyn, an extensive hodgepodge of an area that runs from Upper New York Bay to Ninth Avenue, home to more than a hundred thousand people, including Mexicans, Dominicans, Poles, Chinese, Jordanians, Vietnamese, American whites, American blacks, and a settlement of Christians from Gujarat, India. Warehouses, factories, abandoned waterfront facilities, a view of the Statue of Liberty, the shut-down Army Terminal where ten thous
and people once worked, a basilica named Our Lady of Perpetual Help, biker bars, check-cashing places, Hispanic restaurants, the third-largest Chinatown in New York, and the four hundred and seventy-eight acres of Green-Wood Cemetery, where six hundred thousand bodies are buried, including those of Boss Tweed, Lola Montez, Currier and Ives, Henry Ward Beecher, F.A.O. Schwarz, Lorenzo Da Ponte, Horace Greeley, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Samuel F. B. Morse, Albert Anastasia, Joey Gallo, and Frank Morgan—the wizard in The Wizard of Oz.
Ellen showed him six or seven listings that day, none of which appealed to him, and then, as they were walking along the edge of the cemetery, they turned at random down a deserted block between Fourth and Fifth avenues and saw the house, a dopey little two-story wooden house with a roofed-over front porch, looking for all the world like something that had been stolen from a farm on the Minnesota prairie and plunked down by accident in the middle of New York. It stood between a trash-filled vacant lot with a stripped-down car in it and the metal bones of a half-built mini–apartment building on which construction had stopped more than a year ago. The cemetery was directly across the way, which meant there were no houses lining the other side of the street, which further meant that the abandoned house was all but invisible, since it was a house on a block where almost no one lived. He asked Ellen if she knew anything about it. The owners had died, she said, and because their children had been delinquent in paying the property taxes for several years running, the house now belonged to the city.