by Paul Auster
* * * *
I was supposed to leave on a Friday. On Tuesday, Sophie and I went shopping for a record player. One of her younger sisters was about to move to New York, and we were planning to give her our old record player as a present. The idea of replacing it had been in the air for several months, and this finally gave us an excuse to go looking for a new one. So we went downtown that Tuesday, bought the thing, and then lugged it home in a cab. We hooked it up in the same spot where the old one had been and then packed away the old one in the new box. A clever solution, we thought. Karen was due to arrive in May, and in the meantime we wanted to keep it somewhere out of sight. That was when we ran into a problem.
Storage space was limited, as it is in most New York apartments, and it seemed that we didn’t have any left. The one closet that offered any hope was in the bedroom, but the floor was already crammed with boxes—three deep, two high, four across—and there wasn’t enough room on the shelf above. These were the cartons that held Fanshawe’s things (clothes, books, odds and ends), and they had been there since the day we moved in. Neither Sophie nor I had known what to do with them when she cleaned out her old place. We didn’t want to be surrounded by memories of Fanshawe in our new life, but at the same time it seemed wrong just to throw the things away. The boxes had been a compromise, and eventually we no longer seemed to notice them. They became a part of the domestic landscape—like the broken floorboard under the living room rug, like the crack in the wall above our bed—invisible in the flux of daily life. Now, as Sophie opened the door of the closet and looked inside, her mood suddenly changed.
“Enough of this,” she said, squatting down in the closet. She pushed away the clothes that were draped over the boxes, clicking hangers against each other, parting the jumble in frustration. It was an abrupt anger, and it seemed to be directed more at herself than at me.
“Enough of what?” I was standing on the other side of the bed, watching her back.
“All of it,” she said, still flinging the clothes back and forth. “Enough of Fanshawe and his boxes.”
“What do you want to do with them?” I sat down on the bed and waited for an answer, but she didn’t say anything. “What do you want to do with them, Sophie?” I asked again.
She turned around and faced me, and I could see that she was on the point of tears. “What good is a closet if you can’t even use it?” she said. Her voice was trembling, losing control. “I mean he’s dead, isn’t he? And if he’s dead, why do we need all this … all this”—gesturing, groping for the word—”garbage. It’s like living with a corpse.”
“If you want, we can call the Salvation Army today,” I said.
“Call them now. Before we say another word.”
“I will. But first we’ll have to open the boxes and sort through them.”
“No. I want it to be everything, all at once.”
“It’s fine for the clothes,” I said. “But I wanted to hold on to the books for a while. I’ve been meaning to make a list, and I wanted to check for any notes in the margins. I could finish in half an hour.”
Sophie looked at me in disbelief. “You don’t understand anything, do you?” she said. And then, as she stood up, the tears finally came out of her eyes—child’s tears, tears that held nothing back, falling down her cheeks as if she didn’t know they were there. “I can’t get through to you anymore. You just don’t hear what I’m saying.”
“I’m doing my best, Sophie.”
“No, you’re not. You think you are, but you’re not. Don’t you see what’s happening? You’re bringing him back to life.”
“I’m writing a book. That’s all—just a book. But if I don’t take it seriously, how can I hope to get it done?”
“There’s more to it than that. I know it, I can feel it. If the two of us are going to last, he’s got to be dead. Don’t you understand that? Even if he’s alive, he’s got to be dead.”
“What are you talking about? Of course he’s dead.”
“Not for much longer. Not if you keep it up.”
“But you were the one who got me started. You wanted me to do the book.”
“That was a hundred years ago, my darling. I’m so afraid I’m going to lose you. I couldn’t take it if that happened.”
“It’s almost finished, I promise. This trip is the last step.”
“And then what?”
“We’ll see. I can’t know what I’m getting into until I’m in it.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“You could go with me.”
“To Paris?”
“To Paris. The three of us could go together.”
“I don’t think so. Not the way things are now. You go alone. At least then, if you come back, it will be because you want to.”
“What do you mean ‘if ‘?”
“Just that. ‘If.’ As in, ‘if you come back.’ “
“You can’t believe that.”
“But I do. If things go on like this, I’m going to lose you.”
“Don’t talk like that, Sophie.”
“I can’t help it. You’re so close to being gone already. I sometimes think I can see you vanishing before my eyes.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“You’re wrong. We’re coming to the end, my darling, and you don’t even know it. You’re going to vanish, and I’ll never see you again.”
8
Things felt oddly bigger to me in Paris. The sky was more present than in New York, its whims more fragile. I found myself drawn to it, and for the first day or two I watched it constantly—sitting in my hotel room and studying the clouds, waiting for something to happen. These were northern clouds, the dream clouds that are always changing, massing up into huge gray mountains, discharging brief showers, dissipating, gathering again, rolling across the sun, refracting the light in ways that always seem different. The Paris sky has its own laws, and they function independently of the city below. If the buildings appear solid, anchored in the earth, indestructible, the sky is vast and amorphous, subject to constant turmoil. For the first week, I felt as though I had been turned upside-down. This was an old world city, and it had nothing to do with New York— with its slow skies and chaotic streets, its bland clouds and aggressive buildings. I had been displaced, and it made me suddenly unsure of myself. I felt my grip loosening, and at least once an hour I had to remind myself why I was there.
My French was neither good nor bad. I had enough to understand what people said to me, but speaking was difficult, and there were times when no words came to my lips, when I struggled to say even the simplest things. There was a certain pleasure in this, I believe—to experience language as a collection of sounds, to be forced to the surface of words where meanings vanish—but it was also quite wearing, and it had the effect of shutting me up in my thoughts. In order to understand what people were saying, I had to translate everything silently into English, which meant that even when I understood, I was understanding at one remove—doing twice the work and getting half the result. Nuances, subliminal associations, undercurrents— all these things were lost on me. In the end, it would probably not be wrong to say that everything was lost on me.
Still, I pushed ahead. It took me a few days to get the investigation started, but once I made my first contact, others followed. There were a number of disappointments, however. Wyshnegradsky was dead; I was unable to locate any of the people Fanshawe had tutored in English; the woman who had hired Fanshawe at the New York Times was gone, had not worked there in years. Such things were to be expected, but I took them hard, knowing that even the smallest gap could be fatal. These were empty spaces for me, blanks in the picture, and no matter how successful I was in filling the other areas, doubts would remain, which meant that the work could never be truly finished.
I spoke to the Dedmons, I spoke to the art book publishers Fanshawe had worked for, I spoke to the woman named Anne (a girlfriend, it turned out), I spoke to the movie producer. “Od
d jobs,” he said to me, in Russian-accented English, “that’s what he did. Translations, script summaries, a little ghost writing for my wife. He was a smart boy, but too stiff. Very literary, if you know what I’m saying. I wanted to give him a chance to act—even offered to give him fencing and riding lessons for a picture we were going to do. I liked his looks, thought we could make something of him. But he wasn’t interested. I’ve got other eggs to fry, he said. Something like that. It didn’t matter. The picture made millions, and what do I care if the boy wants to act or not?”
There was something to be pursued here, but as I sat with this man in his monumental apartment on the Avenue Henri Martin, waiting for each sentence of his story between phone calls, I suddenly realized that I didn’t need to hear any more. There was only one question that mattered, and this man couldn’t answer it for me. If I stayed and listened to him, I would be given more details, more irrelevancies, yet another pile of useless notes. I had been pretending to write a book for too long now, and little by little I had forgotten my purpose. Enough, I said to myself, consciously echoing Sophie, enough of this, and then I stood up and left.
The point was that no one was watching me anymore. I no longer had to put up a front as I had at home, no longer had to delude Sophie by creating endless busy-work for myself. The charade was over. I could discard my nonexistent book at last. For about ten minutes, walking back to my hotel across the river, I felt happier than I had in months. Things had been simplified, reduced to the clarity of a single problem. But then, the moment I absorbed this thought, I understood how bad the situation really was. I was coming to the end now, and I still hadn’t found him. The mistake I was looking for had never surfaced. There were no leads, no clues, no tracks to follow. Fanshawe was buried somewhere, and his whole life was buried with him. Unless he wanted to be found, I didn’t have a ghost of a chance.
Still, I pushed ahead, trying to come to the end, to the very end, burrowing blindly through the last interviews, not willing to give up until I had seen everyone. I wanted to call Sophie. One day, I even went so far as to walk to the post office and wait in line for the foreign operator, but I didn’t go through with it. Words were failing me constantly now, and I panicked at the thought of losing my nerve on the phone. What was I supposed to say, after all? Instead, I sent her a postcard with a photograph of Laurel and Hardy on it. On the back I wrote: “True marriages never make sense. Look at the couple on the other side. Proof that anything is possible, no? Perhaps we should start wearing derbies. At the very least, remember to clean out the closet before I return. Hugs to Ben.”
I saw Anne Michaux the following afternoon, and she gave a little start when I entered the café where we had arranged to meet (Le Rouquet, Boulevard Saint-Germain). What she told me about Fanshawe is not important: who kissed who, what happened where, who said what, and so on. It comes down to more of the same. What I will mention, however, is that her initial double take was caused by the fact that she mistook me for Fanshawe. Just the briefest flicker, as she put it, and then it was gone. The resemblance had been noticed before, of course, but never so viscerally, with such immediate impact. I must have shown my reaction, for she quickly apologized (as if she had done something wrong) and returned to the point several times during the two or three hours we spent together—once even going out of her way to contradict herself: “I don’t know what I was thinking. You don’t look at all like him. It must have been the American in both of you.”
Nevertheless, I found it disturbing, could not help feeling appalled. Something monstrous was happening, and I had no control over it anymore. The sky was growing dark inside—that much was certain; the ground was trembling. I found it hard to sit still, and I found it hard to move. From one moment to the next, I seemed to be in a different place, to forget where I was. Thoughts stop where the world begins, I kept telling myself. But the self is also in the world, I answered, and likewise the thoughts that come from it. The problem was that I could no longer make the right distinctions. This can never be that. Apples are not oranges, peaches are not plums. You feel the difference on your tongue, and then you know, as if inside yourself. But everything was beginning to have the same taste to me. I no longer felt hungry, I could no longer bring myself to eat.
As for the Dedmons, there is perhaps even less to say. Fanshawe could not have chosen more fitting benefactors, and of all the people I saw in Paris, they were the kindest, the most gracious. Invited to their apartment for drinks, I stayed on for dinner, and then, by the time we reached the second course, they were urging me to visit their house in the Var—the same house where Fanshawe had lived, and it needn’t be a short visit, they said, since they were not planning to go there themselves until August. It had been an important place for Fanshawe and his work, Mr. Dedmon said, and no doubt my book would be enhanced if I saw it myself. I couldn’t disagree with him, and no sooner were these words out of my mouth than Mrs. Dedmon was on the phone making arrangements for me in her precise and elegant French.
There was nothing to hold me in Paris anymore, and so I took the train the following afternoon. This was the end of the line for me, my southward trek to oblivion. Whatever hope I might have had (the faint possibility that Fanshawe had returned to France, the illogical thought that he had found refuge in the same place twice) evaporated by the time I got there. The house was empty; there was no sign of anyone. On the second day, examining the rooms on the upper floor, I came across a short poem Fanshawe had written on the wall—but I knew that poem already, and under it there was a date: August 25, 1972. He had never come back. I felt foolish now even for thinking it.
For want of anything better to do, I spent several days talking to people in the area: the nearby farmers, the villagers, the people of surrounding towns. I introduced myself by showing them a photograph of Fanshawe, pretending to be his brother, but feeling more like a down-and-out private eye, a buffoon clutching at straws. Some people remembered him, others didn’t, still others weren’t sure. It made no difference. I found the southern accent impenetrable (with its rolling r’s and nasalized endings) and barely understood a word that was said to me. Of all the people I saw, only one had heard from Fanshawe since his departure. This was his closest neighbor—a tenant farmer who lived about a mile down the road. He was a peculiar little man of about forty, dirtier than anyone I had ever met. His house was a dank, crumbling seventeenth-century structure, and he seemed to live there by himself, with no companions but his truffle dog and hunting rifle. He was clearly proud of having been Fanshawe’s friend, and to prove how close they had been he showed me a white cowboy hat that Fanshawe had sent to him after returning to America. There was no reason not to believe his story. The hat was still in its original box and apparently had never been worn. He explained that he was saving it for the right moment, and then launched into a political harangue that I had trouble following. The revolution was coming, he said, and when it did, he was going to buy a white horse and a machine gun, put on his hat, and ride down the main street in town, plugging all the shopkeepers who had collaborated with the Germans during the War. Just like in America, he added. When I asked him what he meant, he delivered a rambling, hallucinatory lecture about cowboys and Indians. But that was a long time ago, I said, trying to cut him short. No, no, he insisted, it still goes on today. Didn’t I know about the shootouts on Fifth Avenue? Hadn’t I heard of the Apaches? It was pointless to argue. In defense of my ignorance, I told him that I lived in another neighborhood.
I stayed on in the house for a few more days. My plan was to do nothing for as long as I could, to rest up. I was exhausted, and I needed a chance to regroup before going back to Paris. A day or two went by. I walked through the fields, visited the woods, sat out in the sun reading French translations of American detective novels. It should have been the perfect cure: holing up in the middle of nowhere, letting my mind float free. But none of it really helped. The house wouldn’t make room for me, and by the third day I sensed that I wa
s no longer alone, that I could never be alone in that place. Fanshawe was there, and no matter how hard I tried not to think about him, I couldn’t escape. This was unexpected, galling. Now that I had stopped looking for him, he was more present to me than ever before. The whole process had been reversed. After all these months of trying to find him, I felt as though I was the one who had been found. Instead of looking for Fanshawe, I had actually been running away from him. The work I had contrived for myself—the false book, the endless detours—had been no more than an attempt to ward him off, a ruse to keep him as far away from me as possible. For if I could convince myself that I was looking for him, then it necessarily followed that he was somewhere else— somewhere beyond me, beyond the limits of my life. But I had been wrong. Fanshawe was exactly where I was, and he had been there since the beginning. From the moment his letter arrived, I had been struggling to imagine him, to see him as he might have been—but my mind had always conjured a blank. At best, there was one impoverished image: the door of a locked room. That was the extent of it: Fanshawe alone in that room, condemned to a mythical solitude—living perhaps, breathing perhaps, dreaming God knows what. This room, I now discovered, was located inside my skull.