In the Country of Last Things

by Paul Auster

  The man’s name was Samuel Farr, but other than that I knew nothing about him. I had behaved too arrogantly with Bogat to ask for any details, and now I had precious little to go on. A name and a face, and that was all. With the proper sense and humility, I might have spared myself a good deal of trouble. Ultimately, I did meet up with Sam, but that had nothing to do with me. It was the work of pure chance, one of those bits of luck that fall down on you from the sky. And a long time passed before that happened—more time than I would like to remember.

  The first days were the hardest. I wandered around like a sleepwalker, not knowing where I was, not even daring to talk to anyone. At one point I sold my bags to a Resurrection Agent, and that kept me in food for an ample stretch, but even after I began working as a scavenger, I had no place to live. I slept outside in all kinds of weather, hunting for a different place to sleep every night. God knows how long this period lasted, but there’s no question that it was the worst, the one that came closest to doing me in. Two or three weeks minimum, perhaps as long as several months. I was so miserable that my mind seemed to stop working. I became dull inside, all instinct and selfishness. Terrible things happened to me then, and I still don’t know how I managed to live through it. I was nearly raped by a Tollist on the corner of Dictionary Place and Muldoon Boulevard. I stole food from an old man who tried to rob me one night in the atrium of the old Hypnotists’ Theatre—snatched the porridge right out of his hands and didn’t even feel sorry about it. I had no friends, no one to talk to, no one to share a meal with. If not for the picture of Sam, I don’t think I would have made it. Just knowing that he was in the city gave me something to hope for. This is the man who will help you, I kept telling myself, and once you find him, everything will be different. I must have pulled the photograph out of my pocket a hundred times a day. After a while, it became so creased and rumpled that the face was almost obliterated. But by then I knew it by heart, and the picture itself no longer mattered. I kept it with me as an amulet, a tiny shield to ward off despair.

  Then my luck changed. It must have been a month or two after I began working as an object hunter, although that is just a guess. I was walking along the outskirts of the fifth census zone one day, near the spot where Filament Square had once been, when I saw a tall, middle-aged woman pushing a shopping cart over the stones, bumping along slowly and awkwardly, her thoughts obviously not on what she was doing. The sun was bright that day, the kind of sun that dazzles you and makes things invisible, and the air was hot, I remember that, very hot, almost to the point of dizziness. Just as the woman managed to get the cart into the middle of the street, a band of Runners came charging around the corner. There were twelve or fifteen of them, and they were running at full tilt, closely packed together, screaming that ecstatic death-drone of theirs. I saw the woman look up at them, as if suddenly shaken from her reverie, but instead of scrambling out of the way, she froze to her spot, standing like a bewildered deer trapped in the headlights of a car. For some reason, and even now I don’t know why I did it, I unhooked the umbilical cord from my waist, ran from where I was, grabbed hold of the woman with my two arms, and dragged her out of the way a second or two before the Runners passed. It was that close. If I hadn’t done it, she probably would have been trampled to death.

  That was how I met Isabel. For better or worse, my true life in the city began at that moment. Everything else is prologue, a swarm of tottering steps, of days and nights, of thought I do not remember. If not for that one irrational moment in the street, the story I am telling you would not be this one. Given the shape I was in at the time, I doubt there would have been any story at all.

  We lay there panting in the gutter, still hanging on to each other. As the last of the Runners disappeared around the corner, Isabel gradually seemed to understand what had happened to her. She sat up, looked around her, looked at me, and then, very slowly, began to cry. It was a moment of horrible recognition for her. Not because she had come so close to being killed, but because she had not known where she was. I felt sorry for her, and also a little afraid. Who was this thin, trembling woman with the long face and hollow eyes—and what was I doing sprawled out next to her in the street? She seemed half out of her mind, and once I had my breath back, my first impulse was to get away.

  “Oh, my dear child,” she said, reaching tentatively for my face. “Oh, my dear, sweet, little child, you’ve cut yourself. You jump out to help an old woman, and you’re the one who gets hurt. Do you know why that is? It’s because I’m bad luck. Everyone knows it, but they don’t have the heart to tell me. But I know. I know everything, even if no one tells me.”

  I had scratched myself on one of the stones as we fell, and blood was trickling from my left temple. But it was nothing serious, no cause for panic. I was about to say good-bye and walk off, when I felt a little pang about leaving her. Perhaps I should take her home, I thought, to make sure that nothing else happens to her. I helped her to her feet and retrieved the shopping cart from across the square.

  “Ferdinand will be furious with me,” she said. “This is the third day in a row I’ve come up empty-handed. A few more days like this, and we’ll be finished.”

  “I think you should go home anyway,” I said, “At least for a while. You’re in no condition to be pushing around this cart now.”

  “But Ferdinand. He’ll go crazy when he sees I don’t have anything.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll explain what happened.”

  I had no idea what I was talking about, of course, but something had taken hold of me, and I couldn’t control it: some sudden rush of pity, some stupid need to take care of this woman. Perhaps the old stories about saving someone’s life are true. Once it happens, they say, that person becomes your responsibility, and whether you like it or not, the two of you belong to each other forever.

  It took us nearly three hours to get back to her house. Under normal circumstances, it would have taken only half that long, but Isabel moved so slowly, walked with such faltering steps, that the sun was already going down by the time we got there. She had no umbilical cord with her (she had lost it a few days earlier, she said), and every once in a while the cart would slip out of her hands and go bounding down the street. At one point someone nearly snatched it away from her. After that, I decided to keep one hand on her cart and one hand on my own, and that slowed down our progress even more. We traveled along the edges of the sixth census zone, veering away from the clusters of toll mounds on Memory Avenue, and then shuffled through the Office Sector on Pyramid Road where the police now have their barracks. In her rambling, disconnected way, Isabel told me quite a bit about her life. Her husband had once been a commercial sign painter, she said, but with so many businesses closing up or unable to meet costs, Ferdinand had been out of work for several years. For a while he drank too much—stealing money from Isabel’s purse at night to support his sprees, or else hanging around the distillery in the fourth census zone, cadging glots from the workers by dancing for them and telling funny stories—until one day a group of men beat him up and he never went out again. Now he refused to budge, sitting in their small apartment day after day, rarely saying anything and taking no interest in their survival. Practical matters he left to Isabel, since he no longer considered such details worthy of his attention. The only thing he cared about now was his hobby: making miniature ships and putting them into bottles.

  “They’re so beautiful,” Isabel said, “you almost want to forgive him for the way he is. Such beautiful little ships, so perfect and small. They make you want to shrink yourself down to the size of a pin, and then climb aboard and sail away…

  “Ferdinand is an artist,” she went on, “and even in the old days he was moody, an unpredictable sort of man. Up one minute, down the next, always something to set him off in one direction or the other. But you should have seen the signs he painted! Everyone wanted to use Ferdinand, and he did work for all kinds of shops. Drug stores, groceries, tobacconist
s, jewelers, taverns, book stores, everything. He had his own work place then, right in the warehouse district downtown, a lovely little spot. But all that’s gone now: the saws, the paintbrushes, the buckets of color, the smells of sawdust and varnish. It all got swept away during the second purge of the eighth census zone, and that was the end of it.”

  Half of what Isabel said I didn’t understand. But by reading between the lines and trying to fill in the gaps myself, I gathered that she had had three or four children, all of whom were either dead or had run away from home. After Ferdinand lost his business, Isabel had become a scavenger. You would expect a woman of her age to have signed up as a garbage collector, but strangely enough she chose object hunting. It struck me as the worst possible choice. She wasn’t fast, she wasn’t clever, and she had no stamina. Yes, she said, she knew all that, but she had made up for her deficiencies with certain other qualities—a curious knack of knowing where to go, an instinct for sniffing out things in neglected places, an inner magnet that somehow seemed to draw her to the right spot. She couldn’t explain it herself, but the fact was that she had made some startling finds: a whole bag of lace underwear that she and Ferdinand had been able to live off of for almost a month, a perfectly intact saxophone, a sealed carton of brand-new leather belts (straight from the factory it seemed, although the last belt manufacturer had been out of business for more than five years), and an Old Testament printed on rice paper with calfskin binding and gilt-edged pages. But that was some time ago, she said, and for the past six months she had been losing her touch. She was worn out, too tired to stay on her feet for very long, and her mind now wandered constantly from her work. Nearly every day she would discover herself walking down a street she did not recognize, turning a corner without knowing where she had just been, entering a neighborhood and thinking she was somewhere else. “It was a miracle that you happened to be there,” she said, as we paused to rest in a doorway. “But it wasn’t an accident. I have prayed to God for so long now that he finally sent someone to rescue me. I know that people don’t talk about God anymore, but I can’t help myself. I think about him every day, I pray to him at night when Ferdinand is asleep, I talk to him in my heart all the time. Now that Ferdinand won’t say anything to me anymore, God is my only friend, the only one who listens to me. I know he is very busy and doesn’t have time for an old woman like me, but God is a gentleman, and he has me on his list. Today, at long last, he paid me a visit. He sent you to me as a sign of his love. You are the dear, sweet child that God has sent to me, and now I am going to take care of you, I am going to do everything I can for you. No more sleeping outside, no more roaming the streets from morning to night, no more bad dreams. All that’s over now, I promise you. As long as I’m alive, you’ll have a place to live, and I don’t care what Ferdinand says. From now on, there will be a roof over your head and food to eat. That’s how I’m going to thank God for what he has done. He has answered my prayers, and now you are my dear, sweet, little child, my darling Anna who came to me from God.”

  Their house was on Circus Lane, deep inside a network of small alleys and dirt paths that wound through the heart of the second census zone. This was the oldest section of the city, and I had been there only once or twice before. Pickings for scavengers were slim in this neighborhood, and I had always been nervous about getting lost in its mazelike streets. Most of the houses were made of wood, and this made for a number of curious effects. Instead of eroding bricks and crumbling stones, with their jagged heaps and dusty residues, things here seemed to lean and sag, to buckle under their own weight, to be twisting themselves slowly into the ground. If the other buildings were somehow flaking to bits, these buildings were withering, like old men who had lost their strength, arthritics who could no longer stand up. Many of the roofs had caved in, shingles had rotted away to the texture of sponge, and here and there you could see entire houses leaning in two opposite directions, standing precariously like giant parallelograms—so nearly on their last legs that one touch of the finger, one tiny breath, would send them crashing to the ground.

  The building that Isabel lived in was made of brick, however. There were six floors with four small apartments on each, a dark staircase with worn, wobbling steps, and peeling paint on the walls. Ants and cockroaches moved about unmolested, and the whole place stank of turned food, unwashed clothes, and dust. But the building itself seemed reasonably solid, and I could only think of how lucky I was. Note how quickly things change for us. If someone had told me before I came here that this was where I would wind up living, I would not have believed it. But now I felt blessed, as though some great gift had been bestowed on me. Squalor and comfort are relative terms, after all. Just three or four months after coming to the city, I was willing to accept this new home of mine without the slightest shudder.

  Ferdinand did not make much noise when Isabel announced that I would be moving in with them. Tactically, I think she went about it in the right way. She did not ask his permission for me to stay there, she simply informed him that there were three people in the household now instead of two. Since Ferdinand had relinquished all practical decisions to his wife long ago, it would have been difficult for him to assert his authority in this one area without tacitly conceding that he should assume more responsibility in others. Nor did Isabel bring the question of God into it, as she had done with me. She gave a deadpan account of the facts, telling him how I had saved her, adding the where and the when, but with no flourishes or commentary. Ferdinand listened to her in silence, pretending not to pay attention, shooting a furtive glance at me every now and then, but mostly just staring off toward the window, acting as though none of this concerned him. When Isabel had finished, he seemed to consider it for a moment, then shrugged. He looked at me directly for the first time and said, “It’s too bad you went to all that trouble. The old bone bag would be better off dead.” Then, without waiting for me to answer, he withdrew to his chair in the corner of the room and went back to work on his tiny model ship.

  Ferdinand was not as bad as I thought he would be, however, at least not in the beginning. An uncooperative presence, to be sure, but with none of the outright malice I was expecting. His fits of bad temper came in short, fractious bursts, but most of the time he said nothing, stubbornly refusing to talk to anyone, brooding in his corner like some aberrant creature of ill will. Ferdinand was an ugly man, and there was nothing about him that made you forget his ugliness—no charm, no generosity, no redeeming grace. He was bone-thin and hunched, with a large hook nose and a half-bald head. The little hair he had left was frizzy and unkempt, sticking out furiously on all sides, and his skin had a sick man’s pallor—an unearthly white, made to seem even whiter because of the black hair that grew all over him—on his arms, his legs, and chest. Perpetually unshaven, dressed in rags, and never once with a pair of shoes on his feet, he looked like someone’s cartoon version of a beachcomber. It was almost as though his obsession with ships had led him to play out the role of a man marooned on a desert island. Or else it was the opposite. Already stranded, perhaps he had begun building ships as a sign of inner distress—as a secret call for rescue. But that did not mean he thought the call would be answered. Ferdinand was never going anywhere again, and he knew it. In one of his more affable moods, he once confessed to me that he had not set foot outside the apartment in over four years. “It’s all death out there,” he said, gesturing toward the window. “There are sharks in those waters, and whales that can swallow you whole. Hug to the shore is my advice, hug to the shore and send up as many smoke signals as you can.”

  Isabel had not exaggerated Ferdinand’s talents, however. His ships were remarkable little pieces of engineering, stunningly crafted, ingeniously designed and put together, and as long as he was furnished with enough materials—scraps of wood and paper, glue, string, and an occasional bottle—he was too absorbed by his work to stir up much trouble in the house. I learned that the best way to get along with him was to pretend he wasn’t
there. In the beginning, I went out of my way to prove my peaceful intentions, but Ferdinand was so embattled, so thoroughly disgusted with himself and the world, that no good came of it. Kind words meant nothing to him, and more often than not he would turn them into threats. Once, for example, I made the mistake of admiring his ships out loud and suggesting that they would fetch a lot of money if he ever chose to sell them. But Ferdinand was outraged. He jumped up from his chair and started lurching around the room, waving his penknife in my face. “Sell my fleet!” he shouted. “Are you crazy? You’ll have to kill me first. I won’t part with a single one—not ever! It’s a mutiny, that’s what it is. An insurrection! One more word out of you, and you’ll walk the plank!”

  His only other passion seemed to be catching the mice that lived in the walls of the house. We could hear them scampering around in there at night, gnawing away at whatever minuscule pickings they had found. The racket got so loud at times that it disrupted our sleep, but these were clever mice and not readily prone to capture. Ferdinand rigged up a small trap with wire mesh and wood, and each night he would dutifully set it with a piece of bait. The trap did not kill the mice. When they wandered in for the food, the door would shut behind them, and they would be locked inside the cage. This happened only once or twice a month, but on those mornings when Ferdinand woke up and discovered a mouse in there, he nearly went mad with happiness—hopping around the cage and clapping his hands, snorting boisterously in an adenoidal rush of laughter. He would pick up the mouse by the tail, and then, very methodically, roast it over the flames of the stove. It was a terrible thing to watch, with the mouse wriggling and squeaking for dear life, but Ferdinand would just stand there, entirely engrossed in what he was doing, mumbling and cackling to himself about the joys of meat. A breakfast banquet for the captain, he would announce when the singeing was done, and then, chomp, chomp, slobbering with a demonic grin on his face, devour the creature fur and all, carefully spitting out the bones as he chewed. He would put the bones on the window sill to dry, and eventually they would be used as pieces for one of his ships—as masts or flagpoles or harpoons. Once, I remember, he took apart a set of mouse’s ribs and used them as oars for a galley ship. Another time, he used a mouse’s skull as a figurehead and attached it to the prow of a pirate schooner. It was a bright little piece of work, I have to admit, even if it disgusted me to look at it.