The Book of Illusions

by Paul Auster

  Most of the time, however, Hector received no more than a glancing nod from the journalists. He wasn’t much of a story yet, nothing more than one promising newcomer among others, and in fully half the columns I had on hand he appears only as a name—usually in the company of a woman, herself only a name as well. Hector Mann was spotted at the Feathered Nest with Sylvia Noonan. Hector Mann stepped out onto the dance floor of the Gibraltar Club last night with Mildred Swain. Hector Mann shared a laugh with Alice Dwyer, ate oysters with Polly McCracken, held hands with Dolores Saint John, slipped into a gin joint with Fiona Maar. In all, I counted the names of eight different women, but who knows how many others he went out with that year? My information was limited to the articles I had managed to find, and those eight easily could have been twenty, perhaps even more.

  When the news of Hector’s disappearance broke the following January, little attention was paid to his love life. Seymour Hunt had hanged himself in his bedroom just three days earlier, and instead of trying to dig up evidence of some soured romance or secret affair, the police concentrated their efforts on Hector’s troubled relations with the corrupt Cincinnati banker. It was probably too tempting not to make a connection between the two scandals. After Hunt’s arrest, Hector had been quoted as saying that he was relieved to know that Americans still had a sense of justice. The anonymous source, described as one of Hector’s close personal friends, reported that he had announced within earshot of half a dozen people: The man is a scoundrel. He cheated me out of thousands of dollars and tried to ruin my career. I’m glad they’re locking him up. He’s getting what he deserves, and I feel no pity for him. Rumors began circulating in the press that Hector had been the one who fingered Hunt to the authorities. Advocates of this theory claimed that now that Hunt was dead, his associates had eliminated Hector in order to prevent more revelations from leaking to the public. Some versions went so far as to suggest that Hunt’s death had not been a suicide but a murder arranged to look like a suicide—the first step in an elaborate conspiracy by his underworld friends to rub out the traces of their crimes.

  It was the gangland reading of events. That must have felt like a plausible approach in 1920s America, but without a body to back up the hypothesis, the police investigation began to founder. The press played along for the first couple of weeks, running stories about Hunt’s business practices and the rise of the criminal element in the motion picture industry, but when no definite connection could be established between Hector’s disappearance and the death of his former producer, they began looking for other motives and explanations. Everyone had been tantalized by the proximity of the two events, but it was logically unsound to assume that the one had caused the other. Contiguous facts are not necessarily related facts, even though their nearness to one another would seem to suggest they are linked. Now, as other lines of inquiry began to be pursued, it turned out that many of the trails had already gone cold. Dolores Saint John, named in several of the early articles as Hector’s fiancée, quietly skipped town and returned to her parents’ house in Kansas. Another month went by before the journalists could find her, and when they did, she refused to talk to them, claiming that she was still too distraught over Hector’s disappearance to issue a full statement. Her only comment was My heart is broken, and after that she was never heard from again. A fetching young actress who had appeared in half a dozen movies (among them The Prop Man and Mr. Nobody, in which she had played the sheriff’s daughter and Hector’s wife), she impulsively abandoned her career and vanished from the world of show business.

  Jules Blaustein, the gagman who had worked with Hector on all twelve Kaleidoscope films, told a Variety reporter that he and Hector had been collaborating on a series of scripts for sound comedies and that his writing partner had been in excellent spirits. He had seen him every day since mid-December, and unlike everyone else who was interviewed about Hector, he continued to talk about him in the present tense. It’s true that things ended rather unpleasantly with Hunt, Blaustein admitted, but Hector wasn’t the only one who got a bad shake at Kaleidoscope. We all took our knocks there, and even if he got the worst of it, he isn’t someone to bear grudges. He has his whole future to look forward to, and the moment his contract with Kaleidoscope was up, he turned his mind to other things. He’s been working hard with me, as hard as I’ve ever seen him work, and his brain has been on fire with new ideas. When he dropped out of sight, our first script was nearly finished—a side¬ splitter called Dot and Dash—and we were about to sign a contract with Harry Cohn at Columbia. Shooting was supposed to begin in March. Hector was going to direct and play a small but hilarious silent role in it, and if that sounds like someone who was planning to kill himself, then you don’t know the first thing about Hector. It’s absurd to think he would take his own life. Maybe someone took it for him, but that would mean he has enemies, and in all the time I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him rub a person the wrong way. The man is a prince, and I love working with him. We can sit here all day musing about what happened, but even money says he’s alive somewhere, that he got one of his nutty inspirations in the middle of the night and just took off to be alone for a little while. Everyone keeps saying he’s dead, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Hector walked through that door right now, tossed his hat on the chair, and said, “Okay, Jules, let’s get to work.”

  Columbia confirmed that they had been negotiating with Hector and Blaustein on a three-picture contract that included Dot and Dash as well as two other feature comedies. Nothing had been signed yet, their spokesman said, but once the terms had been worked out to the satisfaction of both parties, the studio had been looking forward to welcoming Hector into the family. Blaustein’s remarks, coupled with the statement from Columbia, shot down the idea that Hector’s career had come to a dead end, which some of the tabloids had been pushing as a possible motive for suicide. But the facts showed that Hector’s prospects had been far from bleak. The mess at Kaleidoscope had not shattered his spirit, as the Los Angeles Record announced on February 18, 1929, and since no letter or note had turned up to support the contention that Hector had taken his own life, the suicide theory began losing ground to a host of wild speculations and crackpot conjectures: kidnappings gone awry, freakish accidents, supernatural events. Meanwhile, the police were making no progress on the Hunt connection, and although they claimed to be following up on several promising leads (the Los Angeles Daily News, March 7, 1929), no new suspects were ever brought forward. If Hector had been murdered, there wasn’t enough evidence to charge anyone with the crime. If he had killed himself, it wasn’t for a reason that anyone could understand. A few cynics suggested that his disappearance was no more than a publicity stunt, a cheap ploy orchestrated by Harry Cohn at Columbia to bring attention to his new star, and that we could expect a miraculous reappearance any day now. That seemed to make a certain kind of cockeyed sense, but as the days passed and Hector still didn’t return, that theory proved to be just as wrong as all the others. Everyone had an opinion about what had happened to Hector, but the fact was that no one knew a thing. And if someone did know, that person wasn’t talking.

  The case made headlines for about a month and a half, but then interest began to drop off. There were no new revelations to report, no new possibilities to examine, and eventually the press turned its attention to other matters. Late in the spring, the Los Angeles Examiner ran the first of several stories that appeared intermittently over the next couple of years in which Hector was supposed to have been seen by someone in an unlikely, far-flung place—the so-called Hector sightings—but these were little more than novelty items, small fillers buried at the bottom of the horoscope page, a kind of standing joke for Hollywood insiders. Hector in Utica, New York, working as a labor organizer. Hector on the pampas with his traveling circus. Hector on skid row. In March 1933, Randall Simms, the journalist who had interviewed Hector for the Picturegoer five years earlier, published an article in the Herald-Express Sunday supplement entitl
ed Whatever Happened to Hector Mann? It promised new information about the case, but beyond hinting at a desperate and complicated love triangle that Hector might or might not have been involved in, it was essentially a rehash of the articles that had appeared in the Los Angeles papers in 1929. A similar piece, written by someone named Dabney Strayhorn, cropped up in a 1941 issue of Collier’s, and a book from 1957 with the trashy title Hollywood Scandals and Mysteries, written by Frank C. Klebald, devoted one short chapter to Hector’s disappearance, which on closer examination turned out to be an almost word-for-word crib of Strayhorn’s magazine article. There might have been other articles and chapters written about Hector over the years, but I wasn’t aware of them. I only had what was in the box, and what was in the box was all I had managed to find.

  4

  TWO WEEKS LATER, I still hadn’t heard from Frieda Spelling. I had anticipated calls in the middle of the night, special-delivery letters, telegrams, faxes, desperate pleas to rush to Hector’s bedside, but after fourteen days of silence, I stopped giving her the benefit of the doubt. My skepticism returned, and little by little I worked my way back to where I had been before. The box went into the closet again, and after moping around for another week or ten days, I picked up the Chateaubriand manuscript and started hacking away at it again. I had been sidetracked for nearly a month, but other than some residual feelings of disappointment and disgust, I managed to push the thought of Tierra del Sueño out of my mind. Hector was dead again. He had died in 1929, or else he had died the day before yesterday. It didn’t matter which death was real. He no longer belonged to this world, and I was never going to have a chance to meet him.

  I closed in on myself again. The weather swung back and forth, alternating between good stretches and bad. A day or two of sparkling light followed by furious storms; drenching downpours, then crystal blue skies; wind and no wind, warm and cold, mist dissolving into clarity. It was always five degrees cooler on my mountain than in the town below, but there were afternoons when I was able to walk around in nothing but shorts and a T-shirt. On other afternoons, I had to light a fire and bundle up in three sweaters. June turned into July. I had been working steadily for about ten days then, gradually settling into the old rhythm, digging in for what I thought would be the final push on the job. Just after the holiday weekend, I knocked off early one day and drove into Brattleboro to do my shopping. I spent about forty minutes at the Grand Union, and then, after loading the bags into the cab of the truck, decided to stick around for a while and take in a movie. It was just an impulse, a sudden whim that came over me as I stood in the parking lot, squinting and sweating in the late afternoon sun. My work was finished for the day, and there was no reason not to change my plans, no reason to rush back home if I didn’t want to. I got to the Latchis Theatre on Main Street just as the coming attractions for the six o’clock show were about to begin. I bought a Coke and a bag of popcorn, found a seat in the middle of the last row, and sat through one of the Back to the Future movies. It turned out to be both ridiculous and enjoyable. After the film was over, I decided to prolong the outing by having dinner at the Korean restaurant across the street. I had eaten there once before, and judging by Vermont standards, the food wasn’t half bad.

  I had spent two hours sitting in the dark, and by the time I walked out of the theater, the weather had changed again. It was another one of those abrupt shifts: clouds rolling in, the temperature dropping down into the fifties, the wind starting to blow. After a day of intense and brilliant sun, there should have been some light left in the sky at that hour, but the sun had disappeared before dusk, and the long summer day had turned into a wet, chilly evening. It was already raining when I crossed the street and went into the restaurant, and as I sat down at one of the front tables and ordered my food, I watched the storm gathering force outside. A paper bag rose up from the ground and flew into the window of Sam’s Army-Navy Store; an empty soda can went clattering down the street toward the river; bullets of rain pelted the sidewalk. I started off with a platter of kimchi, washing down every other bite with a swallow of beer. It was tangy stuff that burned the tongue, and when I moved on to the main course, I kept on dipping the meat into the hot sauce, which meant that I kept on drinking beer. I must have had three bottles in all, perhaps four, and by the time I paid the check, I was a little more juiced than I should have been. Sharp enough to walk a white line, I think, sharp enough to think lucid thoughts about my translation, but probably not sharp enough to drive.

  Still, I’m not going to blame the beer for what happened. My reflexes might have been a bit sluggish, but there were other elements involved as well, and I doubt that the result would have been any different if beer had been removed from the equation. The rain was still pounding down when I left the restaurant, and after running several hundred yards to the municipal parking lot, I was soaked through to the skin. It didn’t help that I fumbled with the keys as I tried to get them out of my wet pants, and it helped even less that once I caught hold of them and managed to pull them out, I immediately dropped them into a puddle. That meant more lost time as I crouched down to search for them in the darkness, and when I finally stood up and climbed into my truck, I was as wet as someone who had taken a shower with his clothes on. Blame the beer, but also blame those wet clothes and the water dripping into my eyes. Again and again, I had to take one hand off the wheel to wipe my forehead, and when you add that distraction to the inconvenience of a bad defrost system (which meant that when I wasn’t wiping my forehead, I was using that same hand to wipe off the fogged-up windshield) and then compound the problem by throwing in defective windshield wipers (when are they not defective?), the conditions that night were hardly ones to guarantee a safe ride home.

  The irony was that I was aware of all this. Shivering in my wet clothes, eager to get back and change into something warm, I nevertheless made a conscious effort to drive as slowly as I could. That’s what saved me, I suppose, but at the same time it also could have been what caused the accident. If I had been driving faster, I probably would have been more alert, more attuned to the vagaries of the road, but after a while my mind began to wander, and eventually I fell into one of those long, pointless meditations that only seem to occur when you’re driving alone in a car. In this case, if I remember correctly, it had to do with quantifying the ephemeral acts of daily life. How much time had I spent in the past forty years lacing up my shoes? How many doors had I opened and closed? How often had I sneezed? How many hours had I lost looking for objects I couldn’t find? How many times had I stubbed my toe or banged my head or blinked away something that had crept into my eye? I found it to be a rather pleasant exercise, and I kept adding to the list as I sloshed my way through the darkness. About twenty miles out of Brattleboro, on an open stretch of road between the towns of T—— and West T——, just three miles before the turnoff that would take me up the dirt road to my house, I saw the eyes of an animal gleaming in the headlights. An instant later, I saw that it was a dog. He was twenty or thirty yards ahead, a wet and ragged creature blundering through the night, and contrary to what most dogs do when they’re lost, he wasn’t traveling on the side of the road but trotting down the center of it—or just to the left of center, which put him smack in the middle of my lane. I swerved to avoid hitting him, and at the same moment I put my foot on the brake. I probably shouldn’t have done that, but I had already done it before I could tell myself not to, and because the surface of the road was wet and oily from the rain, the tires didn’t hold. I skidded across the yellow line, and before I could swing back the other way, the truck rammed into a utility pole.

  I had my seat belt on, but the jolt knocked my left arm against the wheel, and with all the groceries suddenly flying out of their bags, a can of tomato juice sprang up and struck me on the chin. My face hurt like hell, and my forearm was throbbing, but I could still flex my hand, could still open and close my mouth, and I concluded that no bones had been broken. I should have felt relieved,
lucky to have escaped without any serious injuries, but I was in no mood to count my blessings and speculate on how much worse it could have been. This was bad enough, and I was furious with myself for having banged up the truck. One headlight was knocked out; the fender was crumpled; the front end was smashed in. The engine was still running, though, but when I tried to back out and drive away, I discovered that the front tires were half submerged in mud. It took me twenty minutes of shoving in the glop and rain to get the thing unstuck, and by then I was too wet and exhausted to bother cleaning up the groceries that had been tossed around the inside of the cab. I just sat down behind the wheel, backed up into the road, and took off. As I later found out, I finished the drive home with a package of frozen peas wedged into the small of my back.

  It was already past eleven o’clock when I pulled up in front of my house. I was shivering in my clothes, my jaw and arm were aching, and I was in a foul temper. Expect the unexpected, they say, but once the unexpected happens, the last thing you expect is that it will happen again. My guard was down, and because I was still brooding about the dog and the utility pole, still going over the details of the accident as I climbed out of the truck, I didn’t notice the car that was parked to the left of the house. My headlight hadn’t swept over in that direction, and when I cut the motor and turned off the light, everything went dark around me. The rain had slackened by then, but it was still drizzling, and there were no lights on in the house. Thinking that I would be back before the sun went down, I hadn’t bothered to turn on the light above the front door. The sky was black. The ground was black. I groped my way to the house by memory and feel, but I couldn’t see a thing.