by Paul Auster
He drinks another scotch and then staggers off to bed. Exhausted, so exhausted that he is already asleep before the shouting and the fireworks begin.
3
He knows why Miles left. Even before the letter came, he was all but certain the boy had spent the night in the apartment, the night preceding the morning when he and Willa had talked so brutally about him in the kitchen. After breakfast, he had cracked open the door of Miles’s room to find out if the boy had come home for the weekend, and when he saw that the bed was empty, he went in to discover an ashtray filled with cigarette butts, a forgotten paperback anthology of Jacobean drama lying on the floor, and a flattened, unplumped pillow on the hastily made bed—sure signs that the boy had spent the night there, and if he had stolen off early that morning without bothering to greet them, without a hello or a good-bye, it could only mean that he had overheard the cruel things that had been said about him and was too upset to face his parents. Morris didn’t mention his discovery to Willa, but at that point there was no reason to suspect the conversation would lead to such a drastic response from Miles. He felt terrible about having said those things, angry with himself for not having defended the boy more vociferously against Willa’s harsh attacks, but he figured he would have a chance to apologize the next time they saw each other, to clear the air somehow and put the matter behind them. Then came the letter, the mad, falsely cheerful letter with the disturbing news that Miles had quit college. Burned out on school. The boy wasn’t burned out. He loved being in school, he was sailing through with top honors, and just two weeks before, when they met for Sunday breakfast at Joe Junior’s, Miles had been talking about the courses he was planning to take in his senior year. No, quitting had been a hostile act of revenge and self-sabotage, a symbolic suicide, and there was no doubt in Morris’s mind that it was a direct result of that conversation overheard in the apartment a few days earlier.
Still, there was no reason to panic. Miles was going to L.A. to spend a couple of weeks with his mother, and all Morris had to do was pick up the telephone and call him. He would do what he could to talk some sense into the boy, and if that didn’t work, he would fly to California and have it out with him face to face. But not only was Miles not at Mary-Lee’s, Mary-Lee was not at home either. She was in San Francisco, filming the pilot of a new televison series, and the person he spoke to was Korngold, who told him that Miles hadn’t been heard from in more than a month and that as far as he knew there were no plans for him to visit California anytime that summer.
From that moment on, they were in it together, all four of them, the two parents and the two stepparents, and when they hired a private detective to look for the missing boy, each couple bore half the cost, living through eight dismal months of progress reports that reported no progress, no leads, no signs of hope, not a single microdot of information. Morris held fast to the theory that Miles had vanished on purpose, but after three or four months both Willa and Korngold began to waver, gradually coming to the conclusion that Miles was dead. An accident of some kind, they thought, perhaps murdered, perhaps killed by his own hand, it was impossible to say. Mary-Lee took an agnostic position on the matter—she simply didn’t know. He could have been dead, yes, but on the other hand, the kid had issues, the thing with Bobby had been an absolute devastation, Miles had closed in on himself since then, and it was clear that he had a lot of stuff to work out. Running away was a stupid thing to do, of course, but maybe some good would come of it in the end, maybe being on his own for a while would give him a chance to straighten himself out. Morris didn’t disagree with this analysis. In fact, he found Mary-Lee’s attitude rather impressive—calm, compassionate, and thoughtful, not judging Miles so much as trying to understand him—and now that they were locked in this crisis together, he realized that the indifferent, irresponsible mother was far more attached to her son than he had imagined. If anything positive emerged from Miles’s disappearance, it was this shift in his perception of Mary-Lee. They were no longer enemies. They had become allies now, perhaps even friends.
Then Bing Nathan called, and everything turned upside down again. Miles was working as a short-order cook in Chicago, and Morris’s first impulse was to go out there and talk to him—not to make any demands, merely to find out what was going on—but Willa was against it, and after he called California to share the good news with Mary-Lee and Korngold, they took Willa’s side. Their argument was this: the boy was twenty-one now and capable of making his own decisions; as long as his health was sound, as long as he wasn’t in trouble with the law, as long as he wasn’t in a mental hospital, as long as he wasn’t asking them for money, they had no right to force him to do anything against his will—not even to make him talk to them, which he obviously had no wish to do. Give him time, they said. He’ll figure it out.
But Morris didn’t listen to them. He took a plane to Chicago the next morning, and by three o’clock he had parked his rented car across the street from Duke’s, a shabby, heavily frequented diner in a rough neighborhood on the South Side. Two hours later, Miles walked out of the restaurant wearing his leather jacket (the one Morris had bought for him on his nineteenth birthday) and looking well, very well in fact, a bit taller and more filled out than he’d been at that Sunday breakfast eight and a half months ago, and at his side there was a tall, attractive black woman who appeared to be in her mid-twenties, and the moment the two of them walked out the door, Miles put his arm around the woman’s shoulder, drew her toward him, and planted a kiss on her mouth. It was a joyful kiss, somehow, the kiss of a man who has just put in eight hours of work and is back with the woman he loves, and the woman laughed at this sudden outburst of affection, threw her arms around him, and returned his kiss with one of her own. A moment after that, they were walking down the street together, holding hands and talking in that intense, intimate way that is possible only in the closest friendships, the closest loves, and Morris just sat there, frozen in the seat of his rented car, not daring to roll down the window and call out to Miles, not daring to jump out and run after him, and ten seconds later Miles and the woman turned left at the first corner they came to and vanished from sight.
He has done it three more times since then, once in Arizona, once in New Hampshire, and once in Florida, always watching from a place where he couldn’t be seen, the warehouse parking lot where Miles was loading crates onto the back of a truck, the hotel lobby where the boy rushed past him in a bellhop’s uniform, the little park he sat in one day as his son read The Great Gatsby and then talked to the cute high school girl who happened to be reading the same book, always tempted to step forward and say something, always tempted to pick a fight with him, to punch him, to take him in his arms, to take the boy in his arms and kiss him, but never doing anything, never saying anything, keeping himself hidden, watching Miles grow older, watching his son turn into a man as his own life dwindles into something small, too small to care about anymore, listening to Willa’s tirade in Exeter, all the damage that has been done to her, his brave, battered Willa, Bobby on the road, Miles gone, and yet he grimly perseveres, never quite able to let go of it, still thinking the story hasn’t come to an end, and when thinking about the story becomes unbearable, he sometimes diverts himself with childish reveries about dressing up in costumes, disguising himself so thoroughly that not even his own son would recognize him, a demon of disguise in the spirit of Sherlock Holmes, not just the clothes and the shoes but an entirely different face, entirely different hair, an entirely different voice, an utter transformation from one being into another, and how many different old men has he invented since the idea occurred to him, wrinkled pensioners hobbling along with their canes and aluminum walkers, old men with flowing white hair, flowing white beards, Walt Whitman in his dotage, a friendly old fellow who has lost his way and stops the young man to ask for directions, and then they would begin to talk, the old man would invite the young man for a drink, and little by little the two of them would become friends, and now that Mi
les is living in Brooklyn, out there in Sunset Park next to Green-Wood Cemetery, he has come up with another character, a New York character he calls the Can Man, one of those old, broken-down men who forage among dumpsters and recycling bins for bottles and cans, five cents a bottle, five cents a can, a tough way to make a living, but times are tough and one mustn’t complain, and in his mind the Can Man is a Mohawk Indian, a descendent of the Mohawks who settled in Brooklyn in the early part of the last century, the community of Mohawks who came here to become construction workers on the tall buildings going up in Manhattan, Mohawks because for some reason Mohawks have no fear of heights, they feel at home in the air and were able to dance along the beams and girders without the slightest dread or vertiginous wobble, and the Can Man is a descendent of those fearless people who built the towers of Manhattan, a crazy customer, alas, not quite right in the head, a daft old loon who spends his days pushing his shopping cart through the neighborhood, collecting the bottles and cans that will fetch him five cents apiece, and when the Can Man speaks, more often than not he will punctuate his remarks with absurd, outlandishly inappropriate advertising slogans, such as, I’d walk a mile for a Camel, or: Don’t leave home without it, or: Reach out and touch someone, and perhaps Miles will be amused by a man who would walk a mile for a Camel, and when the Can Man wearies of his advertising slogans, he will start quoting from the Bible, saying things like: The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north, it whirleth about continually or And that which is done is that which shall be done, and just when Miles is about to turn around and walk away, the Can Man will push his face up against his and shout: Remember, boy! Bankruptcy is not the end! It’s just a new beginning!
It is ten o’clock in the morning, the first morning of the new year, and he is sitting in a booth at Joe Junior’s, the diner on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Twelfth Street where he last spoke to Miles more than two thousand seven hundred days ago, sitting, as it happens, in the same booth the two of them sat in that morning, eating his scrambled eggs and buttered toast as he toys with the notion of turning himself into the Can Man. Joe Junior’s is a small place, a simple, down-at-the-heels neighborhood joint featuring a curved Formica counter with chrome trim, eight swivel stools, three tables by the window in front, and four booths along the northern wall. The food is ordinary at best, the standard greasy-spoon fare of two dozen breakfast combinations, grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches, tuna fish salads, hamburgers, hot open turkey sandwiches, and fried onion rings. He has never sampled the onion rings, but legend has it that one of the old regulars, Carlton Rabb, now deceased, was so enamored of them that he added a clause to his will stipulating that an order of Joe Junior’s fried onion rings be smuggled into his coffin before his body was laid to rest. Morris is fully aware of Joe Junior’s shortcomings as a dining establishment, but among its advantages are the total absence of music, the chance to eavesdrop on stimulating, often hilarious conversations, the broad spectrum of its clientele (from homeless beggars to wealthy home owners), and, most important, the role it plays in his memory. Joe Junior’s was the site of the ritual Saturday breakfast, the place where he brought the boys every week throughout their childhoods, the quiet Saturday mornings when the three of them would tiptoe out of the apartment as Willa caught an extra hour or two of sleep, and to sit in this place now, this drab little restaurant on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Twelfth Street, is to return to those countless Saturdays of long ago and remember the Eden he once lived in.
Bobby lost interest in coming here when he was thirteen (the boy liked his sleep), but Miles carried on the tradition all the way to the end of high school. Not every Saturday morning, of course, at least not after he turned seven and started playing in the local kids’ baseball league, but often enough to feel that the room is still saturated with his presence. Such a bright young thing, such an earnest young thing, so little laughter in that somber face of his, but just below the surface a frolicking sort of inner mirth, and the pleasure he took in the various teams they made up together with the names of real players, the all-body-parts team, for example, with a lineup of Bill Hands, Barry Foote, Rollie Fingers, Elroy Face, Ed Head, and Walt “No-Neck” Williams, along with substitutes such as Tony Armas (Arm) and Jerry Hairston (Hair), or the all-finance team, consisting of Dave Cash, Don Money, Bobby Bonds, Barry Bonds, Ernie Banks, Elmer Pence, Bill Pounds, and Wes Stock. Yes, Miles loved that nonsense when he was a boy, and when laughter did come out of him, it was propulsive and unstoppable, red-faced, breathless, as if an unseen phantom were tickling him all over his body. But most often the breakfasts were subdued affairs, quiet conversations about his classmates, his aversion to his piano lessons (he eventually quit), his disagreements with Bobby, his homework, the books he was reading, the fortunes of the Mets and football Giants, the finer points of pitching. Of all the regrets Morris has accumulated over the course of his life, there is the lingering sadness that his father did not live long enough to know his grandson, but if he had, and if by some miracle he had lasted into the boy’s teens, there would have been the happiness of seeing Miles pitch, the right-handed version of his young self, living proof that all the hours he had spent teaching his son how to throw properly had not been wasted, that even if Morris never developed much of an arm himself, he had passed on his father’s lessons to his own son, and until Miles quit in his Junior year, the results had been promising—no, more than promising—excellent. Pitching was the ideal position for him. Solitude and strength, concentration and will, the lone wolf standing in the middle of the infield, carrying the entire game on his back. It was all fastballs and changeups back then, two pitches and endless work on his delivery, the fluid motion, the arm whipping forward at the same angle every time, the coiled right leg pushing off the rubber until the moment of release, but no curveballs or sliders, at sixteen he was still growing, and young arms can be ruined by the unnatural torque required to snap off a good breaking ball. He was disappointed, yes, but he never blamed Miles for quitting when he did. The self-flagellating grief of surviving Bobby had demanded a sacrifice of some kind, and so he gave up the thing he loved doing most at that point in his life. But willing yourself out of something is not the same as renouncing it in your heart. Four years ago, when Bing called to report the arrival of another letter—from Albany, California, just outside Berkeley—he mentioned that Miles was pitching for a team in a Bay Area amateur league, competing against ex–college players who hadn’t been good enough or interested enough to turn pro, but serious competition for all that, and he was holding his own, Miles said, winning twice as many games as he lost, and he had finally taught himself how to throw a curveball. He went on to say that the San Francisco Giants were sponsoring an open tryout later that month, and his teammates were urging him to go, recommending that he lie about his age and tell them he was nineteen, not twenty-four, but he wasn’t going to do it. Imagine him signing a contract to play in the low minor leagues, he said. Preposterous.
The Can Man is thinking, remembering, sifting through the countless Saturday mornings he ate breakfast here with the boy, and now, as he lifts his arm and asks for the check, just a minute or two before he will be stepping out into the cold air again, he stumbles across something that hasn’t occurred to him in years, an unearthed shard, a shining piece of glass to put in his pocket and take home with him. Miles was ten or eleven. It was one of the first times they came here without Bobby, just the two of them sitting across from each other in one of the booths, perhaps this booth, perhaps another, he can’t recall which one now, and the boy had brought along a book report he had written for his fifth- or sixth-grade class, no, not a report exactly, a short paper of six or seven hundred words, an analysis of the book the teacher had assigned to the pupils, the book they had been reading and discussing for the past several weeks, and now each child had to produce a paper, an interpretation of the novel they had all finished, To Kill a Mockingbird, a sweet book, Morris felt, a good book for children of
that age, and the boy wanted his father to read over what he had done. The Can Man remembers how tense the boy looked as he removed the three sheets of paper, the four sheets of paper from his backpack, awaiting his father’s judgment on what he had written, his first attempt at literary criticism, his first grown-up assignment, and from the look in the boy’s eyes, his father understood how much work and thought had gone into this little piece of writing. The paper was about wounds. The father of the two children, the lawyer, is blind in one eye, the boy wrote, and the black man he defends against the false charge of rape has a withered arm, and late in the book, when the lawyer’s son falls out of the tree, he breaks his arm, the same arm as the withered arm of the innocent black man, left or right, the Can Man no longer remembers, and the point of all this, the young Miles wrote, is that wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man. His father wondered how it was possible for a ten- or eleven-year-old child to read a book so carefully, to pull together such disparate, unemphasized elements of a story and see a pattern develop over the course of hundreds of pages, to hear the repeated notes, notes so easily lost in the whirl of fugues and cadenzas that form the totality of a book, and not only was he impressed by the mind that had paid such close attention to the smallest details of the novel, he was impressed by the heart that had come up with such a profound conclusion. Until you are wounded, you cannot become a man. He told the boy he had done a superior job, that most readers twice or three times his age could never have written anything half as good as this, and only a person with a great soul could have thought about the book in this way. He was very moved, he said to his son that morning seventeen or eighteen years ago, and the fact is that he is still moved by the thoughts expressed in that short paper, and as he collects his change from the cashier and walks out into the cold, he goes on thinking about these thoughts, and just before he reaches his house, the Can Man stops and says to himself: When?