My Other Life

by Paul Theroux

  "What do these things cost?"

  "I can get you a price on it."

  That was salesman-speak for a lot of money.

  "I'll need to know that, because"—and here I was freewheeling—"I'm relocating to Manhattan and I've got to factor in that expense. I know these phones cost quite a bit."

  He did not hear me say that. He said, "You looking for office space?"

  "I'm looking for everything, but office space is my priority."

  He became even more alert—friendlier, more companionable.

  "I might be able to help. You got some time?"

  "I don't want to monopolize your day. You said you had an errand to run."

  "If you want to go for a ride, I could show you some locations. It'll only take an hour. How many square feet are you looking for?"

  That seemed an accurate question, though I had no idea of the answer.

  In desperation, I made conjuring gestures with my hands and said, "About this size."

  "This is just under five hundred. Let me show you two places."

  I was glad for a chance to spend a little more time with him, even though it was under false pretenses. But it was no greater a charade than my proposing to buy one of his $20,000 phones. His car, which we retrieved from an underground parking garage on Seventy-seventh Street, was an old Volvo station wagon, with a bike rack mounted on the rear. Stacked on the back seat were Global brochures showing the various satellite phones.

  "I'd rather be on a bike," he said when we were in the crush of Lexington Avenue traffic.

  "I don't think I could handle this," I said.

  "After my marriage broke up I was not about to compromise my immune system with casual dating," he said. "The biking was a necessity. And I worked more—for the money, and for the distraction."

  Crossing over to Third Avenue, we became caught in the middle of a block behind a delivery van. Falkenberg shook his head, he smiled sourly; and I remembered what he had said about having been in anger management.

  "That's how I came to be moonlighting in real estate," he said. "Funny, I didn't start out in sales."

  On the dashboard of his car was another shrine to his daughter; a snapshot in a magnetized plastic frame, and a ribbon tied in a bow to it—probably a hair ribbon, definitely a relic. I thought how estrangement from your children can turn that desperate love into a religious frenzy.

  "Cute kid," I said.

  "Yeah," he said hoarsely. He was too moved to say more.

  When I saw that he was trying to hide his pain—that he felt pain, that he had been hurt and undermined by it—I saw myself in him. He was like a weak and susceptible part of myself, someone I pitied and partly loathed.

  The compassion I felt was useful, because his sadness, his depression perhaps, made him reactive and strange. Heading for a parking lot, he saw a car pulling away from a meter and he shouted so loudly in a mirthless parody of glee that he startled me.

  Walking from there to the first office he wanted to show me, he pointed to a tree inside an ironwork fence in front of a brownstone and said, "I used to have one of those trees. It's a Japanese maple. I had a fence like that, too. They look nice but they're hell to fix. Sometimes the cold gets to them and they crack."

  It was a bonus to have him outside his office, in the world. By way of being competitive and impressive he volunteered a lot of information. The tree was not in White Plains—that was just a temporary situation. No, he had planted the tree himself at his house in Danbury, where he had raised a family. He had two older children, a boy and a girl. They were out of college—they were in jobs now, in their late twenties.

  He even spoke of Wanda, though obliquely.

  "I said to them, 'You're glad I'm here?'" —he was referring to one of his employers, I had missed the prologue—"'Thank my ex-wife for that,' I says. I could have put in for early retirement. Now I'll probably be doing another fifteen years."

  This thought was so dismal all I could manage was a platitude to the effect that work was one of man's driving instincts.

  "And sex is the other. My shrink told me that," he said. "But this isn't work. I was doing the real thing before. I'm not a salesman—I'm just trying to turn a buck."

  "You're succeeding," I said, hoping he would tell me more.

  He made a face, meaning that he was struggling, and he said, "I don't want to succeed at this. I was in development. I was creating programs—software for satellite phones. I was my own boss. I was free."

  I wondered whether I wanted to hear the rest of this painful story.

  He said, "I lost everything."

  At the moment his life had become simpler he had fallen in love and left his wife, he said. "It was one of those things." He was not in despair. That was the worst of it. He said that he had payments to make—alimony, maintenance—a job to do, a daughter he adored. He had not expected any of it. He had lost his job, his house, his wife, his child, his peace of mind, his money; he feared for his health or he would not have been biking so furiously. He was saying, Hey, you don't plan these things.

  "My second marriage didn't work out," he said. "But I have a lovely daughter."

  He saw her every week, he said. He was going there this afternoon, after he showed me this office space. He didn't want to leave it too late, because of the traffic.

  "Why today? Isn't seeing your kid kind of a weekend thing?"

  "Tell that to my ex-wife." There was emotion in his eyes. "It doesn't matter what day it is. I'd go anytime. But, God, these visits break my heart."

  He did not say a bad word about her, nor did he praise her. All he said when I asked him a direct question about her was "I think I know her a lot better now than I did when I married her."

  He had resigned himself to this. He was like a mountain climber who for the sake of making it to the summit had lost all his toes to frostbite. But he did not contemplate his loss. That was the hardest part for me to bear—that I knew what he had lost and he didn't; and I began to understand that I was a free man.

  I went through the motions of seeing the office space. It was two shabby rooms, dirty windows, newspapers spread on the bare floors. Commenting about it was a bit like talking about abstract paintings at an exhibition. Was I vague and uninformed and obtuse, or were the pictures bad? Now the very term "office space" would make me think of a rathole.

  Falkenberg had gone to one window, and with his back to the room, and to me, he began speaking in a low voice.

  "I haven't talked about this at all with anyone," he said. "I think I should do it more often. Are you married?"

  He addressed this question to the window, though I knew he was speaking to me. That was awkward. Because his back was turned, and he could not see me, I was unable to give him a simple nod. I had to make a whole sentence.

  "My wife and I split up over a year ago."

  That was when he turned and looked at me. His eyes were like an exile's—wounded and wary; everything looked strange to those eyes. He said, as though to another exile, "I'm so glad I met you."

  He approached me. I dreaded that he was going to embrace me—hug me, saying something that would make me feel even worse. But he shook my hand. He apologized for his hurry, he urged me to stay in touch. I had the feeling he wanted to be my friend.

  "I hope to see you real soon!" he called out just before he drove away.

  But time passed, like mist lifting from a marsh and revealing the ditches and bones and the tidemark and the broken shells on the mud banks; more light, more detail, and it was the detail that shocked me and made me sad.

  EIGHTEEN

  Fugitive

  ONE OF THE DELUSIONS of travel is that you can be a new person in a distant land. I was in Honolulu, and Christmas was coming, and I should have been happy. But putting out the trash barrels or carrying groceries up the driveway—whenever I was exposed to the gaze of neighbors or just their twitching curtains—I felt like Adolf Eichmann on Garibaldi Street in Buenos Aires. I was another fug
itive hiding in a far-off bungalow. What about the notion that being far from home meant the past was erased? My hedges, my flowers, the barrels I dragged, made me seem like just a harmless householder, yet every move I made on this prim suburban street was furtive, and in my mind I was a monster.

  This feeling persisted, a memory of that book about Eichmann's capture by the Israelis. What I remembered best about it was not the commando operation but the routine of that awful man shuffling anonymously in the suburbs, doing ordinary things, but always looking over his shoulder. I could not explain my feeling. I was not a murderer or a criminal. Hadn't I a right to be happy? Yet I had an obscure sense not of guilt but of danger, as though I were a victim being stalked in a case of mistaken identity. Nothing I did prevented me from thinking of myself as a hunted man.

  I had stopped dreaming. Dreams had always stirred me, given me ideas, and I woke with my imagination going, as though my dreams had given it a spin and it was still turning when I opened my eyes. I thought of dreams as my other life. Without them I could not write and, because writing vitalized me, I was less than half alive without it. My work had come to a stop. I felt slow and stupid, my mind was muddy. I found the sunshine unbearable, and my nights were worse. Instead of dreams I had nightmares. I had no memory of them in the morning, only a sense of terror that took away my wit. Each dream is different, but every nightmare is the same, because fear is monotonous, like something spilled in the mind, ruining the imagination.

  One night in Honolulu there was a phone call, a calm voice that said, "I have some news."

  "Who is this?"

  The voice was uneducated, with a hint of an accent, and yet it was mellifluous. It combined politeness with a kind of insult, the way English people are often rude.

  "Never mind, listen," the voice said. "Paul Theroux is dead."

  I said, "I'm Paul Theroux."

  "No, you're not. I know who you are."

  This shook me. I wanted to say, Ask my wife! But that very thought upset me. The word "wife" or the word "marriage" I could not even pronounce without stammering. This was a delicate matter and it was so painful I preferred not to think about it. I had not seen Alison for four years. I had been separated from her for that long. "Semidetached," I explained to the few people who asked, and I hated my glibness. But semidetached was what we were. I felt it was helpful to her, my resisting the finality of petitioning for divorce. Divorce would be like shoving her out of the window. This way neither of us was alone. Being alone seemed to me like the worst fate—like not existing at all, and although I had never asked her I was sure she felt the same. On any official form I had to fill out, I always swallowed hard and checked the box marked Married and felt that this was a favor to her.

  That phone call ("Paul Theroux is dead") gave me a reason to call her, but I put it off. Because of the time difference between Hawaii and London, I was never able to call her. Anyway, I had something else on my mind.

  I needed a break. I had to get away from this bungalow that made me feel like Eichmann. The weather was perfect for paddling off the coast of Molokai. Paddling, and camping on a beach, and moving down the coast, from bay to bay of a tropical island, would be a tremendous restorative, and these south winds meant that this normally dangerous coast would be safe: calm seas, low surf, a light following breeze to give me a tail wind. No letup in this sticky Kona weather, the weatherman said on TV, but the trade winds would be back next week.

  So I had four days of perfect weather. I made my arrangements quickly: packed my camping gear and collapsible kayak, bought some food to take with me and a plane ticket to Molokai.

  The night before I left I had another call, and I could almost see the gloating face when I heard, "Paul Theroux is dead..."

  I hung up and set off in the morning, having hardly slept. I got an early flight to Molokai, rented a car at the airport at Hoolehua and had lunch in Kaunakakai, bought some bottled water, and drove the twenty-odd miles to the Halawa Valley. My idea was to leave my rental car there, paddle along the north shore to Kalaupapa, and then get a lift back to pick up the car. My only worry was the weather and the sea conditions: would the winds remain light, would it be calm enough to launch the boat in the notoriously surfy Halawa Bay?

  Conditions in fact were so good that I was able to make camp, set up my boat, and go for an evening paddle to the outer cliffs of the bay. I looked west along the shore where the high cliffs loomed, the same blackish hue and shape as the turrets on a Gothic cathedral: towers, spires, belfries, and buttresses. It seemed more appropriate and precise to describe these cliffs in terms of architecture than as geological formations, since they seemed more orderly and glorious and dignified than any amorphous rock walls.

  These were the cliffs I paddled past the next day. I struggled in my small boat in spite of the calm sea. I had slept badly in my tent on the dark sand beach. Every sound in a distant place to me these days was like a reproachful voice.

  It helped that almost from the moment I set out I could see my destination, Kalaupapa Peninsula, twenty miles off. That first night, as the sun set behind it, I steered myself into a bay—Pelekunu Bay, I reckoned from my chart—and landed my boat almost without getting my feet wet. I set up camp quickly, and made noodles and tea while the sky was still lighted. The Gothic cliffs of the bay enclosed me, and when darkness fell it was as though I had fallen into a cellar of that same cathedral I had imagined—but a damp unholy dungeon, strangely hot and airless.

  I had a nightmare that a specter had appeared to me and was standing before me and stinking. But it was not a nightmare. When I woke and crawled out of the tent, I saw it—dark and hooded, the same shape as the looming cliffs. Much worse than an angry apparition, the thing seemed to be gloating in silence because I had done something wrong. And it was not a ghost; it was an actual shape, with a shadow and a real smell hanging about it. I got back into my tent with the full knowledge that the thing was outside, casually haunting me, as though I had already died. I did not sleep that night either.

  In the morning I left the bay and paddled on, with the smell of that hooded figure still clinging to me. I was so determined now to end this trip that I hardly took any notice of the cliffs beside me. The waves reflected by hitting the foot of the cliffs made the water so turbulent that I paddled a mile or so offshore to where the sea was calmer. Unable to land, I ate lunch—a sandwich, a swig of water—in my boat and paddled on slowly until the late afternoon. Towards noon I had passed the lighthouse just above Kahi'u Point, at the tip of the Kalaupapa Peninsula, and around five I was just off Kalaupapa.

  It seemed to me that this trip had been worth it. I could now see the leper settlement, my destination, and I had a sense that though I had been spooked the night before, I had overcome my feeling of persecution, or at least had managed to diminish it. Yes, the fear still straggled after me, but it was a threadbare remnant and at this rate I would soon outdistance it.

  Just inside the harbor there was a jetty, and a man standing on it, watching me, the sun setting behind the cliffs casting a shadow over my approach. He said nothing, although I called out hello. His face was dark, and I took him to be one of the few lepers still remaining.

  I decided to take my boat apart while there was still some daylight, because I wanted to get an early start on the mule track in the morning. I removed my gear from the boat, unfastened the frame, and stripped off the hull, working quickly in the fading light. As I broke down the frame and began packing it, making it into bundles and slipping them into my carrying bag, I noticed that the man—the leper—was crouched a short distance away. He had withered fingers and a sunken face, his skull clearly showing through his skin.

  "Still here?" I said, trying to be friendly.

  He did not reply. His silence threatened me, and at last he spoke up and froze me.

  "We are better off knowing that we belong here, alone in our own world. No one is waiting for us somewhere else."

  I wanted to say: I didn't ask yo
u that. No sooner had he stopped speaking than a shadow covered him, a moving darkness with a black edge, the mountain slipping over him as the sun sank behind it. I could not think of a reply to what he had said, and I thought he had gone, when from the darkness he spoke again.

  "You have a telephone call."

  "How do you know who I am?"

  But he simply pointed to the office in the small frame house on the pier. When I entered it I could hardly see, and it was only by fumbling on the desk that I discovered that the phone was off the hook. Standing in the darkness, I held it to my ear and heard a familiar voice.

  "Paul Theroux is dead..."

  I put down the phone and went outside to look for the leper. He had gone. There was no light at all, no moon, and not even the lamps of the small settlement reached the jetty. I was too upset by the phone call to introduce myself at the mission, and I was too tired to eat. I picked up my sleeping bag and water bottle and, leaving my boat, walked to the edge of the beach I later discovered was called Papaloa, and I slept there, miserably, fighting demons, thinking: We are better off knowing that we belong here, alone in our own world. No one is waiting for us somewhere else.

  At first light I went back to the jetty for my food bag. I ate a grapefruit and some cheese and bread, and looked for a way out of the valley. I knew that there were fewer than fifty lepers left in Kalaupapa, but even so I saw no people at all. The valley was famous for its zigzag mule track up to the ridge. I thought of hiring two mules, one for me, the other for my gear, but how to arrange it?

  I was debating this when a pickup truck appeared on the jetty.

  "You can get in," the driver said. He was the man I had seen the night before.

  "I want to go to the airport," I said.

  "I know." He smiled and, before I could ask him how, went on, "I know who you are."

  It was not the voice but rather the statement that seemed familiar. Where had I heard it? Then I remembered—on the phone. And I recognized the voice, the same voice.