In the Country of Last Things

by Paul Auster

  I stayed with Isabel until the end. That includes the summer and the fall, and then a little bit beyond—to the edge of winter, just as the cold began to strike in earnest. In all those months we never talked about Ferdinand—not about his life, not about his death, not about anything. I found it hard to believe that Isabel had mustered the strength or the courage to kill him, but that was the only explanation that made sense to me. There were many times when I was tempted to ask her about that night, but I could never bring myself to do it. It was Isabel’s business somehow, and unless she wanted to talk about it, I did not feel I had the right to question her.

  This much was certain: neither one of us was sorry that he was gone. A day or two after the ceremony on the roof, I gathered up all his possessions and sold them, right down to the model ships and a half-empty tube of glue, and Isabel did not say a word. It should have been a time of new possibilities for her, but things did not work out that way. Her health continued to deteriorate, and she was never really able to take advantage of life without Ferdinand. In fact, after that day on the roof, she never left the apartment again.

  I knew that Isabel was dying, but I did not think it would happen so fast. It began with her not being able to walk anymore, and then, little by little, the weakness spread, until it was no longer just her legs that wouldn’t work, but everything, from her arms down into her spine, and finally even her throat and mouth. It was a kind of sclerosis, she told me, and there was no cure for it. Her grandmother had died of the same disease long ago, and Isabel referred to it simply as “the collapse,” or “the disintegration.” I could try to make her comfortable, but beyond that there was nothing to be done.

  The worst part of it was that I still had to work. I still had to get myself up early in the morning and shove off through the streets, on the prowl for whatever I could find. My heart was no longer in it, and it became increasingly difficult for me to track down anything of value. I was always lagging behind myself, thoughts going in one direction, steps in another, unable to make a quick or sure move. Time and again I was beaten out by other object hunters. They seemed to swoop down from nowhere, snatching things away from me just as I was about to pick them up. This meant that I had to spend more and more time outside in order to fill my quota, all the while plagued by the thought that I should be at home taking care of Isabel. I kept imagining that something would happen to her while I was gone, that she would die without my being there, and this would be enough to throw me off completely, to make me forget the work I had to do. And believe me, this work had to be done. Otherwise, there would have been nothing for us to eat.

  Toward the end, it became impossible for Isabel to move by herself. I would try to arrange her securely in bed, but because she no longer had much control over her muscles, she would inevitably start slipping again after a few minutes. These shifts of position were an agony to her, and even the weight of her own body pressing on the floor made her feel as though she were being burned alive. But pain was only part of the problem. The breakdown of muscle and bone finally reached her throat, and when that happened Isabel started losing the power of speech. A disintegrating body is one thing, but when the voice goes too, it feels as if the person is no longer there. It began with a certain sloppiness of articulation—her words slurred around the edges, the consonants getting softer and less distinct, gradually beginning to sound like vowels. I did not pay much attention to this at first. There were many more urgent things to think about, and at that point it was still possible to understand her with only a small effort. But then it continued to get worse, and I found myself straining to make sense of what she was trying to say, always managing to catch it in the end somehow, but with more and more difficulty as the days wore on. Then, one morning, I realized that she wasn’t talking anymore. She was gurgling and groaning, trying to say something to me but only managing to produce an incoherent sputter, an awful noise that sounded like chaos itself. Spittle was dribbling down from the corners of her mouth, and the noise kept pouring out of her, a dirge of unimaginable confusion and pain. Isabel cried when she heard herself that morning and saw the uncomprehending look on my face, and I don’t think I have ever felt sorrier for anyone than I did for her then. Bit by bit, the whole world had slipped away from her, and now there was almost nothing left.

  But it was not quite the end. For about ten days, Isabel still had enough strength to write out messages for me with a pencil. I went to a Resurrection Agent one afternoon and bought a large notebook with a blue cover. All the pages were blank, and this made it expensive, since good notebooks are extremely hard to find in the city. But it definitely seemed worth it to me, no matter what the price. The agent was a man I had done business with before—Mr. Gambino, the hunchback on China Street—and I remember haggling with him tooth and nail, the two of us going at each other for almost half an hour. I couldn’t get him to lower the price of the notebook, but in the end he threw in six pencils and a little plastic sharpener at no extra cost.

  Strangely enough, I am writing in that same blue notebook now. Isabel never managed to use very much of it, no more than five or six pages, and after she died I could not bring myself to throw it out. I took it along with me on my travels, and since then I have always kept it with me—the blue notebook, the six yellow pencils, and the green sharpener. If I had not found these things in my bag the other day, I don’t think I would have started writing to you. But there was the notebook with all those blank pages in it, and suddenly I felt an overwhelming urge to pick up one of the pencils and begin this letter. By now it is the one thing that matters to me: to have my say at last, to get it all down on these pages before it is too late. I tremble when I think how closely everything is connected. If Isabel had not lost her voice, none of these words would exist. Because she had no more words, these other words have come out of me. I want you to remember that. If not for Isabel, there would be nothing now. I never would have begun.

  In the end, what did her in was the same thing that had taken away her voice. Her throat finally stopped working altogether, and because of that she could no longer swallow. From then on, solid food was out of the question, but eventually even water became impossible for her to get down. I was reduced to putting a few drops of moisture on her lips to prevent her mouth from drying up, but we both knew that it was only a matter of time now, since she was literally starving to death, wasting away for lack of any nourishment. It was a remarkable thing, but once I even thought that Isabel was smiling at me, right there at the end, as I sat beside her dabbing water on her lips. I can’t be absolutely certain, however, since she was already so far away from me by then, but I like to think that it was a smile, even if Isabel did not know what she was doing. She had been so apologetic about getting sick, so ashamed at having to rely on me for everything, but the fact was that I needed her just as much as she needed me. What happened then, right after the smile, if it was a smile, was that Isabel began to choke on her own saliva. She just couldn’t get it down anymore, and though I tried to clean out her mouth with my fingers, too much of it was sliding back down her throat, and soon there was no more air left for her to breathe. The sound she made then was horrible, but it was so weak, so devoid of real struggle, that it did not last very long.

  Later that same day, I gathered up a number of things from the apartment, packed them in my cart, and took them over to Progress Avenue in the eighth census zone. I wasn’t thinking very clearly—I can even remember being aware of it at the time—but that didn’t stand in my way. I sold dishes, clothes, bedding, pots, pans, God knows what else—anything I could get my hands on. It was a relief to be getting rid of it all, and in some way it took the place of tears for me. I couldn’t cry anymore, you see, not since that day on the roof, and after Isabel died, I felt like smashing things, I felt like turning the house upside down. I took the money and went across the city to Ozone Prospect and bought the most beautiful dress I could find. It was white, with lace on the collar and sleeves, and a bro
ad satin sash that went around the waist. I think Isabel would have been happy if she had known she was wearing it.

  After that, things get a little confused for me. I was exhausted, you understand, and I had that blurring in the brain that makes you think you are no longer yourself, when you begin to drift in and out of consciousness, even though you are awake. I can remember lifting Isabel in my arms and shuddering when I felt how light she had become. It was like carrying a child, with those feathery bones and that soft, pliant body. Then I was out on the street, pushing her in the cart across the city, and I can remember being scared, feeling that everyone I passed was looking at the cart, wondering how they could attack me and steal the dress Isabel was wearing. After that, I can see myself arriving at the gate of the Third Transformation Center and waiting in line with many others—and then, when my turn came, being paid the normal fee by one of the officials. He, too, eyed Isabel’s dress with more than usual interest, and I could see the wheels spinning in his sordid little head. I held up the money he had just given me and said that he could have it if he promised to burn the dress along with Isabel. Naturally he agreed—with a vulgar, complicitous wink—but I have no way of knowing if he kept his word. I tend to think not, which explains why I prefer not to think about any of this at all.

  After leaving the Transformation Center, I must have wandered around for a while, my head in the clouds, paying no attention to where I was. Later, I fell asleep somewhere, probably in a doorway, but I woke up feeling no better than I had before, maybe worse. I thought about returning to the apartment, then decided that I wasn’t ready to face it. I dreaded the prospect of being there alone, of going back to that room and just sitting there with nothing to do. Perhaps another few hours of fresh air would do me some good, I thought. Then, as I woke up a little more and gradually saw where I was, I discovered that I no longer had the cart. The umbilical cord was still secured around my waist, but the cart itself was gone. I looked up and down the street for it, rushing frantically from one doorway to the next, but it was no use. Either I had left it at the crematorium or it had been stolen from me while I was asleep. My mind was so fuzzed just then that I couldn’t be sure which. That’s all it takes. A moment or two when your attention flags, a single second when you forget to be vigilant, and then everything gets lost, all your work is suddenly wiped out. The cart was the one thing I needed to survive, and now it was gone. I couldn’t have done a better job of sabotaging myself if I had taken out a razor blade and slit my throat.

  That was bad enough, but the funny part was that I didn’t seem to care. Objectively speaking, the loss of the cart was a disaster, but it also gave me the one thing I had been secretly wanting for a long time: an excuse to give up scavenging. I had stuck with it for Isabel’s sake, but now that she was gone, I couldn’t imagine myself doing it anymore. It was part of a life that had ended for me, and here was my chance to set out on a fresh course, to take my life in my own hands and do something about it.

  Without even pausing in my tracks, I set out for one of the document forgers in the fifth census zone and sold my scavenger’s license to him for thirteen glots. The money I earned that day would keep me going for at least two or three weeks, but now that I had started, I had no intention of stopping there. I returned to the apartment full of plans, calculating how much more money I could bring in by selling additional household articles. I worked through the night, heaping goods into a pile in the middle of the room. I ransacked the closet for every useful object, overturning boxes, riffling through drawers, and then, at about 5:00 A.M., extracted an unhoped-for bounty from Isabel’s hiding place under the floor: a silver knife and fork, the gilt-edged Bible, and a little pouch stuffed with forty-eight glots in change. I spent the whole of the next day cramming the sellable items into a suitcase and tramping off to various Resurrection Agents around the city, selling one batch of things and then returning to the apartment to prepare another. All in all, I rustled up over three hundred glots (the knife and fork accounted for almost a third of that), and suddenly I had staked myself to a good five or six months in the clear. Under the circumstances, it was more than I could have asked for. I felt rich, positively on top of the world.

  These high spirits did not last long, however. I went to bed that night exhausted from my selling binge, and the very next morning, less than an hour after dawn, I was awakened by a loud pounding on the door. It’s strange how quickly one knows such things, but my first thought after hearing the sound of that knocking was to hope they wouldn’t kill me. I did not even have a chance to stand up. The housebreakers forced the door open and then crossed the threshold with the usual bludgeons and sticks in their hands. There were three of them, and I recognized the two biggest ones as the Gunderson boys from downstairs. News must travel fast, I thought. Isabel had been dead for only two days, and already the neighbors had pounced.

  “Up on the dogs, girlie,” one of them said. “Time to be going now. Just move along nice and quiet, and you won’t get hurt.”

  It was all so frustrating, so intolerable. “Give me a few minutes to pack my bag,” I said, climbing out of my blankets. I did my best to be calm, to suppress my anger, knowing that any hint of violence on my part would only cause them to attack.

  “Okay,” said one of the others. “We’ll give you three minutes. But no more than one bag. Just put your stuff in there and blow.”

  The miracle was that the temperature had fallen drastically during the night, and I had wound up going to bed with all my clothes on. This spared me the indignity of having to dress in front of them, but more than that—and this was finally what saved my life—I had put the three hundred glots inside my trouser pockets. I am not one to believe in clairvoyance, but it almost seems as though I knew what was going to happen in advance. The thugs eyed me closely as I filled my knapsack, but not one of them was intelligent enough to suspect where the money was hidden. Then I hustled myself out of there as fast as I could, taking the stairs two at a time. I paused briefly at the bottom to catch my breath and then pushed the front door open. The air hit me like a hammer. There was a tremendous noise of wind and cold, a rush of winter in my ears, and all around me objects were flying with crazy vehemence, crashing helter-skelter into the sides of buildings, skittering down the streets, breaking apart like so many chunks of ice. I had been in the city for more than a year now, and nothing had happened. There was some money in my pocket, but I had no job, no place to live. After all the ups and downs, I was right back where I had started.

  In spite of what you would suppose, the facts are not reversible. Just because you are able to get in, that does not mean you will be able to get out. Entrances do not become exits, and there is nothing to guarantee that the door you walked through a moment ago will still be there when you turn around to look for it again. That is how it works in the city. Every time you think you know the answer to a question, you discover that the question makes no sense.

  I spent several weeks trying to escape. At first, there seemed to be any number of possibilities, a whole range of methods for getting myself back home, and given the fact that I had some money to work with, I did not think it would be very hard. That was wrong, of course, but it took me a while before I was willing to admit it. I had arrived in a foreign charity ship, and it seemed logical to assume that I could return in one. I therefore made my way down to the docks, fully prepared to bribe whatever official I had to in order to book passage. No ships were in sight, however, and even the little fishing boats I had seen there a month before were gone. Instead, the whole waterfront was thronged with workers—hundreds and hundreds of them, it seemed to me, more men than I was able to count. Some were unloading rubble from trucks, others were carrying bricks and stones to the edge of the water, still others were laying the foundations for what looked like an immense sea wall or fortification. Armed police guards stood on platforms surveying the workers, and the place swarmed with din and confusion—the rumbling of engines, people running back a
nd forth, the voices of crew chiefs shouting orders. It turned out that this was the Sea Wall Project, a public works enterprise that had recently been started by the new government. Governments come and go quite rapidly here, and it is often difficult to keep up with the changes. This was the first I had heard of the current takeover, and when I asked someone the purpose of the sea wall, he told me it was to guard against the possibility of war. The threat of foreign invasion was mounting, he said, and it was our duty as citizens to protect our homeland. Thanks to the efforts of the great So-and-So—whatever the name of the new leader was—the materials from collapsed buildings were now being collected for defense, and the project would give work to thousands of people. What kind of pay were they offering? I asked. No money, he said, but a place to live and one warm meal a day. Was I interested in signing up? No thanks, I said, I have other things to do. Well, he said, there would be plenty of time for me to change my mind. The government was estimating that it would take at least fifty years to finish the wall. Good for them, I said, but in the meantime how does one get out of here? Oh no, he said, shaking his head, that’s impossible. Ships aren’t allowed to come in anymore—and if nothing comes in, nothing can go out. What about an airplane? I said. What’s an airplane? he asked, smiling at me in a puzzled sort of way, as though I had just told a joke he didn’t understand. An airplane, I said. A machine that flies through the air and carries people from one place to another. That’s ridiculous, he said, giving me a suspicious kind of look. There’s no such thing. It’s impossible. Don’t you remember? I asked. I don’t know what you’re talking about, he said. You could get into trouble for spreading that kind of nonsense. The government doesn’t like it when people make up stories. It’s bad for morale.