by Paul Auster
I was no one. Rodney Grant was no one. Omar Hassim-Ali was no one. Javier Rodriguez – the seventy-eight-year-old retired carpenter who took over the bed at four o’clock – was no one. Eventually, we would all die, and when our bodies were carried off and buried in the ground, only our friends and families would know we were gone. Our deaths wouldn’t be announced on radio or television. There wouldn’t be any obituaries in the New York Times. No books would be written about us. That is an honor reserved for the powerful and famous, for the exceptionally talented, but who bothers to publish biographies of the ordinary, the unsung, the workaday people we pass on the street and barely take the trouble to notice?
Most lives vanish. A person dies, and little by little all traces of that life disappear. An inventor survives in his inventions, an architect survives in his buildings, but most people leave behind no monuments or lasting achievements: a shelf of photograph albums, a fifth-grade report card, a bowling trophy, an ashtray filched from a Florida hotel room on the final morning of some dimly remembered vacation. A few objects, a few documents, and a smattering of impressions made on other people. Those people invariably tell stories about the dead person, but more often than not dates are scrambled, facts are left out, and the truth becomes increasingly distorted, and when those people die in their turn, most of the stories vanish with them.
My idea was this: to form a company that would publish books about the forgotten ones, to rescue the stories and facts and documents before they disappeared – and shape them into a continuous narrative, the narrative of a life.
The biographies would be commissioned by friends and relatives of the subject, and the books would be printed in small, private editions – anywhere from fifty to three or four hundred copies. I imagined writing the books myself, but if demand ever became too heavy, I could always hire others to help with the work: struggling poets and novelists, ex-journalists, unemployed academics, perhaps even Tom. The cost of writing and publishing such books would be steep, but I didn’t want my biographies to be an indulgence affordable only by the rich. For families of lesser means, I envisioned a new type of insurance policy whereby a certain negligible sum would be set aside each month or quarter to defray the expenses of the book. Not home insurance or life insurance – but biography insurance.
Was I crazy to dream that I could make something of this farfetched project? I didn’t think so. What young woman wouldn’t want to read the definitive biography of her father – even if that father had been no more than a factory worker or the assistant manager of a rural bank? What mother wouldn’t want to read the life story of her policeman son who was shot down in the line of duty at age thirty-four? In every case, it would have to be a question of love. A wife or a husband, a son or a daughter, a parent, a brother or a sister – only the strongest attachments. They would come to me six months or a year after the subject had died. They would have absorbed the death by then, but they still wouldn’t be over it, and now that everyday life had started for them again, they would understand that they would never be over it. They would want to bring their loved one back to life, and I would do everything humanly possible to grant their wish. I would resurrect that person in words, and once the pages had been printed and the story had been bound between covers, they would have something to hold on to for the rest of their lives. Not only that, but something that would outlive them, that would outlive us all.
One should never underestimate the power of books.
X MARKS THE SPOT
The results of the final blood test came in just after midnight. It was too late to discharge me from the hospital, so I stayed on until morning, feverishly planning the structure of my new company as I watched the exhausted Javier Rodriguez doze in the opposite bed. I thought of various names that would capture the spirit of the work that lay before me, and in the end I hit upon the neutral but descriptive Bios Unlimited. About an hour after that, I decided that my first move would be to contact Bette Dombrowski in Chicago and ask her if she would be interested in commissioning me to write a biography of her ex-husband. It seemed appropriate that the first book in the collection should be about Harry.
Then they let me go. I stepped out into the cool morning air, and I felt so glad to be alive, I wanted to scream. Overhead, the sky was the bluest of pure deep blues. If I walked quickly enough, I would be able to get to Carroll Street before Joyce left for work. We would sit down in the kitchen and have a cup of coffee together, watching the kids run around like chipmunks as their mothers got them ready for school. Then I would walk Joyce to the subway, put my arms around her, and kiss her good-bye.
It was eight o’clock when I stepped out onto the street, eight o’clock on the morning of September 11, 2001 – just forty-six minutes before the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Just two hours after that, the smoke of three thousand incinerated bodies would drift over toward Brooklyn and come pouring down on us in a white cloud of ashes and death.
But for now it was still eight o’clock, and as I walked along the avenue under that brilliant blue sky, I was happy, my friends, as happy as any man who had ever lived.
Author biography
Paul Auster was born in New Jersey in 1947. After attending Columbia University he lived in France for four years. Since 1974 he has published poems, essays, novels, screenplays, and translations. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
by the same author
Novels
THE NEW YORK TRILOGY
IN THE COUNTRY OF LAST THINGS
MOON PALACE
THE MUSIC OF CHANCE
LEVIATHAN
MR VERTIGO
TIMBUKTU
THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS
ORACLE NIGHT
COLLECTED NOVELS: Volume One
COLLECTED NOVELS: Volume Two
Non-Fiction
THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE
THE ART OF HUNGER
HAND TO MOUTH
COLLECTED PROSE
Screenplays
SMOKE & BLUE IN THE FACE
LULU ON THE BRIDGE
Poetry
SELECTED POEMS
Editor
TRUE TALES OF AMERICAN LIFE
Translation
CHRONICLE OF THE GUAYAKI INDIANS
by Pierre Clastres
Copyright
First published in the United Kingdom in 2005
by Faber and Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2008
All rights reserved
© Paul Auster, 2005
The right of Paul Auster to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
ISBN 978—0—571—24613—7
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Overture
An Unexpected Encounter
Farewell to the Court
Purgatory
A Wall Falls
Disturbing Revelations
On Rascals
In the Flesh
The Sperm Bank Surprise
The Queen of Brooklyn
On the Stupidity of Men
A Night of Eating and Drinking
Cigarette Break
On the Stupidity of Men (2)
Monkey Business
A Knock on the Door
Riding North
Our Girl, or Coke is it
Dream Days at the Hotel Existence
Double-Cross
Counterattack
Adieu
Further Developments
Hawthorn Street or Hawthorne Street?
The Laughing Girl
Flying North
A New Life
“Just Like Tony”
Inspiration
x Marks the Spot
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright