by Paul Auster
The question was: Why didn’t he get up at that point and do what he had just done in the dream? There was nothing to prevent him from trying to escape, and yet he continued to balk at it, refused even to consider it as a possibility. At first, he attributed this reluctance to fear. He was convinced that Murks was responsible for what had happened to Pozzi (with a helping hand from Floyd, no doubt), and there was every reason to believe that something similar would be in store for him if he tried to run out on the contract. It was true that Murks had looked upset when he saw Pozzi that morning in the trailer, but who was to say he hadn’t been putting on an act? Nashe had seen Pozzi running down the road, and how could he have wound up in the meadow again if Murks hadn’t put him there? If the kid had been beaten by someone else, his attacker would have left him on the road and run away. And even if Pozzi had still been conscious then, he wouldn’t have had the strength to crawl back through the hole, let alone cross the entire meadow by himself. No, Murks had put him there as a warning, to show Nashe what happened to people who tried to escape. His story was that he had driven Pozzi to the Sisters of Mercy Hospital in Doylestown, but why couldn’t he have been lying about that as well? They could just as easily have dumped the kid in the woods somewhere and buried him. What difference would it make if he had still been alive? Cover a man’s face with dirt, and he’ll smother to death before you can count to a hundred. Murks was a master at filling in holes, after all. Once he got through with one of them, you couldn’t even tell if it had been there or not.
Little by little, however, Nashe understood that fear had nothing to do with it. Every time he imagined himself running away from the meadow, he saw Murks pointing a gun at his back and slowly pulling the trigger—but the thought of the bullet ripping through his flesh and rupturing his heart did not frighten him so much as make him angry. He deserved to die, perhaps, but he did not want to give Murks the satisfaction of killing him. That would be too easy, too predictable a way for things to end. He had already caused Pozzi’s death by forcing him to escape, but even if he let himself die as well (and there were times when this thought became almost irresistible to him), it wasn’t going to undo the wrong he had done. That was why he continued working on the wall—not because he was afraid, not because he felt obliged to pay off the debt anymore, but because he wanted revenge. He would finish out his time there, and once he was free to go, he would call in the cops and have Murks arrested. That was the least he could do for the kid now, he felt. He had to keep himself alive long enough to see that the son of a bitch got what was coming to him.
He sat down and wrote a letter to Donna, explaining that his construction job was taking longer than expected. He had thought they would be finished by now, but it looked like the work was going to last another six to eight weeks. He felt certain that Murks would open the letter and read it before sending it off, and so he made sure not to mention anything about what had happened to Pozzi. He tried to keep the tone light and cheerful, adding a separate page for Juliette with a drawing of a castle and several riddles he thought would amuse her, and when Donna wrote back a week later, she said that she was happy to hear him sounding so well. It didn’t matter what kind of work he was doing, she added. As long as he was enjoying it, that was reward enough in itself. But she did hope he would think about settling down after the job was over. They all missed him terribly, and Juliette couldn’t wait to see him again.
It pained Nashe to read this letter, and for many days afterward he cringed whenever he thought of how thoroughly he had deceived his sister. He was more cut off from the world now than ever before, and there were times when he could feel something collapsing inside him, as if the ground he stood on were gradually giving way, crumbling under the pressure of his loneliness. The work continued, but that was a solitary business as well, and he avoided Murks as much as possible, refusing to speak to him except when it was absolutely necessary. Murks maintained the same placid demeanor as before, but Nashe would not be lulled by it, and he resisted the foreman’s apparent friendliness with barely hidden contempt. At least once a day he went through an elaborate scene in which he imagined himself turning on Murks in a sudden outburst of violence—jumping on top of him and wrestling him to the ground, then freeing the gun from its holster and pointing it straight between his eyes. Work was the only escape from this tumult, the mindless labor of lifting and carting stones, and he threw himself into it with a grim and relentless passion, doing more on his own each day than he and Pozzi had ever managed together. He finished the second row of the wall in less than a week, loading up the wagon with three or four stones at once, and every time he made another journey across the meadow, he would inexplicably find himself thinking about Stone’s miniature world in the main house, as if the act of touching a real stone had called forth a memory of the man who bore that name. Sooner or later, Nashe thought, there would be a new section to represent where he was now, a scale model of the wall and the meadow and the trailer, and once those things were finished, two tiny figures would be set down in the middle of the field: one for Pozzi and one for himself. The idea of such extravagant smallness began to exert an almost unbearable fascination over Nashe. Sometimes, powerless to stop himself, he even went so far as to imagine that he was already living inside the model. Flower and Stone would look down on him then, and he would suddenly be able to see himself through their eyes—as if he were no larger than a thumb, a little gray mouse darting back and forth in his cage.
It was worst at night, however, after the work had ended and he went back to the trailer alone. That was when he missed Pozzi the most, and in the beginning there were times when his sorrow and nostalgia were so acute that he could barely muster the strength to cook a proper meal for himself. Once or twice, he did not eat anything at all, but sat down in the living room with a bottle of bourbon and spent the hours until bedtime listening to requiem masses by Mozart and Verdi with the volume at full blast, literally weeping as he sat there amid the uproar of the music, remembering the kid through the onrushing wind of human voices as though he were no more than a piece of earth, a brittle clot of earth scattering into the dust he was made of. It soothed him to indulge in these histrionics of grief, to sink to the depths of a lurid, imponderable sadness, but even after he caught hold of himself and began to adjust to his solitude, he never fully recovered from Pozzi’s absence, and he went on mourning the kid as though a part of himself had been lost forever. His domestic routines became dry and meaningless, a mechanical drudgery of preparing food and shoveling it into his mouth, of making things dirty and cleaning them up, the clockwork of animal functions. He tried to fill the emptiness by reading books, remembering how much pleasure they had given him on the road, but he found it difficult to concentrate now, and no sooner would he begin to read the words on the page than his head would swarm with images from his past: an afternoon he had spent in Minnesota five months ago, blowing bubbles with Juliette in the backyard; watching his friend Bobby Turnbull fall through a burning floor in Boston; the precise words he had spoken to Thérèse when he asked her to marry him; his mother’s face when he walked into the hospital room in Florida for the first time after her stroke; Donna jumping up and down as a cheerleader in high school. He didn’t want to remember any of these things, but without the stories in the books to take him away from himself, the memories kept pouring through him whether he liked it or not. He endured these assaults every night for close to a week, and then, not knowing what else to do, he broke down one morning and asked Murks if he could have a piano. No, it didn’t have to be a real piano, he said, he just needed something to keep himself busy, a distraction to steady his nerves.
“I can understand that,” Murks said, trying to sound sympathetic. “It must get lonely out here all by yourself. I mean, the kid had some peculiar ways about him, but at least he was company. It’ll cost you, though. Not that you don’t know that already.”
“I don’t care,” Nashe said. “I’m not asking for a rea
l piano. It can’t come to that much.”
“First time I ever heard of a piano that’s not a piano. What kind of instrument are we talking about?”
“An electronic keyboard. You know, one of those portable things you plug into a socket in the wall. It comes with speakers and funny little plastic keys. You’ve probably seen them around in the stores.”
“I can’t say that I have. But that don’t mean nothing. You just tell me what you want, Nashe, and I’ll see that you get it.”
Fortunately, he still had his books of music, and there was no shortage of material for him to play. Once he had sold his piano, there had seemed little reason to hold onto them, but he hadn’t been able to throw them out, and so they had spent the whole year traveling around in the trunk of his car. There were about a dozen books in all: selections from a variety of composers (Bach, Couperin, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bartok, Satie), a couple of Czerny exercise books, and a fat volume of popular jazz and blues numbers transcribed for piano. Murks showed up with the instrument the next evening, and although it was a bizarre and ridiculous piece of technology—scarcely better than a toy, in fact—Nashe happily removed the thing from its box and set it up on the kitchen table. For a couple of nights he spent the hours between dinner and bedtime teaching himself how to play again, going through countless finger exercises to limber up his rusty joints as he learned the possibilities and limitations of the curious machine: the oddness of the touch, the amplified sounds, the lack of percussive force. In that respect, the keyboard functioned more like a harpsichord than a piano, and when he finally started to play real pieces on the third night, he discovered that older works—pieces written before the invention of the piano—tended to sound better than the new ones. This led him to concentrate on works by pre-nineteenth-century composers: The Notebook of Anna Magdalena Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, “The Mysterious Barricades.” It was impossible for him to play this last piece without thinking about the wall, and he found himself returning to it more often than any of the others. It took just over two minutes to perform, and at no point in its slow, stately progress, with all its pauses, suspensions, and repetitions, did it require him to touch more than one note at a time. The music started and stopped, then started again, then stopped again, and yet through it all the piece continued to advance, pushing on toward a resolution that never came. Were those the mysterious barricades? Nashe remembered reading somewhere that no one was certain what Couperin had meant by that title. Some scholars interpreted it as a comical reference to women’s underclothing—the impenetrability of corsets—while others saw it as an allusion to the unresolved harmonies in the piece. Nashe had no way of knowing. As far as he was concerned, the barricades stood for the wall he was building in the meadow, but that was quite another thing from knowing what they meant.
He no longer looked upon the hours after work as a blank and leaden time. Music brought oblivion, the sweetness of no longer having to think about himself, and once he had finished practicing for the night, Nashe usually felt so languorous and empty of emotion that he was able to fall asleep without much trouble. Still, he despised himself for allowing his feelings to soften toward Murks, for remembering the foreman’s kindness to him with such gratitude. It wasn’t just that Murks had gone out of his way to buy the keyboard—he had positively jumped at the chance, acting as though his single desire in life were to restore Nashe’s good opinion of him. Nashe wanted to hate Murks totally, to turn him into something less than human by the sheer force of that hatred, but how was that possible when the man refused to act like a monster? Murks began showing up at the trailer with little presents (pies baked by his wife, woolen scarves, extra blankets), and at work he was never less than indulgent, always telling Nashe to slow down and not to push so hard. Most troubling of all, he even seemed to be worried about Pozzi, and several times a week he would give Nashe a progress report on the kid’s condition, talking as though he were in constant touch with the hospital. What was Nashe to make of this solicitude? He sensed it was a trick, a smoke screen to cover up the true danger that Murks posed to him—and yet how could he be sure? Little by little, he felt himself weakening, gradually giving in to the foreman’s quiet persistence. Every time he accepted another gift, every time he paused to chat about the weather or smiled at one of Calvin’s remarks, he felt that he was betraying himself. And yet he kept on doing it. After a while, the only thing that prevented him from capitulating was the continued presence of the gun. That was the ultimate sign of how things stood between them, and he had only to look at the weapon on Murks’s waist to remind himself of their fundamental inequality. Then one day, just to see what would happen, he turned to Murks and said, “What’s with the gun, Calvin? Are you still expecting trouble?” And Murks glanced down at the holster with a puzzled look on his face and said, “I don’t know. I just got into the habit of wearing it, I guess.” And when he came out to the meadow the next morning to begin work, the gun was gone.
Nashe didn’t know what to think anymore. Was Murks telling him that he was free now, or was this simply another twist in an elaborate strategy of deception? Before Nashe could begin to decide, yet another element was thrown into the maelstrom of his uncertainty. It came in the form of a small boy, and for several days after that, Nashe felt that he was standing on the edge of a precipice, staring into the bowels of a private hell that he had never even known was there: a fiery underworld of clamoring beasts and dark, unimaginable impulses. On October thirtieth, just two days after Murks stopped wearing the gun, he came to the meadow holding the hand of a four-year-old boy whom he introduced as his grandson, Floyd Junior.
“Floyd Senior lost his job in Texas this summer,” he said, “and now him and my daughter Sally are back here trying to make a fresh start. They’re both out looking for work and a place to live, and since Addie’s feeling a bit under the weather this morning, she thought it might be a good idea if little Floyd tagged along with me. I hope you don’t mind. I’ll keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn’t get in your way.”
He was a scrawny child with a long, narrow face and a runny nose, and he stood there beside his grandfather bundled up in a thick red parka, gazing at Nashe with both curiosity and detachment, as if he had been plunked down in front of an odd-looking bird or shrub. No, Nashe didn’t mind, but even if he had, how could he have dared to say it? For the better part of the morning, the boy scrambled among the piles of stones in the corner of the meadow, cavorting like some strange and silent monkey, but every time Nashe returned to that area to load up the wagon again, the boy would stop what he was doing, squat down on his perch, and study Nashe with those same rapt and expressionless eyes. It began to make Nashe feel uncomfortable, and after it had happened five or six times, he was so unnerved by it that he forced himself to look up at the boy and smile—simply as a way to break the spell. Unexpectedly, the boy smiled back at him and waved, and just then, as if remembering something from another century, Nashe understood that this was the same boy who had waved to him and Pozzi that night from the back of the station wagon. Was that how they had been found out? he wondered. Had the boy told his mother and father that he had seen two men digging a hole under the fence? Had the father then gone to Murks and reported what the boy had said? Nashe could never quite grasp how it happened, but an instant after this thought occurred to him, he looked up at Murks’s grandson again and realized that he hated him more than he had ever hated anyone in his life. He hated him so much, he felt he wanted to kill him.
That was when the horror began. A tiny seed had been planted in Nashe’s head, and before he even knew it was there, it was already sprouting inside him, proliferating like some wild, mutant flower, an ecstatic burgeoning that threatened to overrun the entire field of his consciousness. All he had to do was snatch the boy, he thought, and everything would change for him: he would suddenly know what he had to know. The boy for the truth, he would say to Murks, and at that point Calvin would have to talk, he would have
to tell him what he had done with Pozzi. There wouldn’t be any choice. If he didn’t talk, his grandson would be dead. Nashe would make sure of that. He would strangle the kid right in front of his eyes.
Once Nashe allowed that thought to enter his head, it was succeeded by others, each one more violent and repulsive than the last. He slit the boy’s throat with a razor. He kicked him to death with his boots. He took his head and smashed it against a stone, beating in his little skull until his brains turned to pulp. By the end of the morning, Nashe was in a frenzy, a delirium of homicidal lust. No matter how desperately he tried to erase those images, he would begin to hunger for them the moment they disappeared. That was the true horror: not that he could imagine killing the boy, but that even after he had imagined it, he wanted to imagine it again.
The worst part of it was that the boy kept coming back to the meadow—not just the next day, but the day after that as well. The first hours had been bad enough, but then the boy took it into his head to become infatuated with Nashe, responding to their exchange of smiles as if they had sworn an oath to each other and were now friends for life. Even before lunch, Floyd Junior had crawled down from his mountain of stones and was trotting after Nashe as his new hero pulled the wagon back and forth across the meadow. Murks made a move to stop him, but Nashe, already dreaming of how he was going to kill the child, waved him off and said it was all right. “I don’t mind,” he said. “I like kids.” By then, Nashe had already begun to sense that something was wrong with the boy—some dullness or simplemindedness that made him appear subnormal. He was barely able to talk, and the only thing he said as he ran along behind him through the grass was Jim! Jim! Jim! pronouncing the name over and over again in a kind of moronic incantation. Except for his age, he seemed to have nothing in common with Juliette, and when Nashe compared the sad pallor of this little boy with the brightness and sparkle of his curly-headed daughter, his darling dervish with her crystal laugh and chubby knees, he felt nothing but contempt for him. With every hour that passed, his urge to attack him became stronger and more uncontrollable, and when six o’clock finally rolled around, it seemed almost a miracle to Nashe that the boy was still alive. He put away his tools in the shed, and just as he was about to shut the door, Murks came up to him and patted him on the shoulder. “I have to hand it to you, Nashe,” he said. “You’ve got the magic touch. The little fella ain’t never taken to anyone like he did to you today. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it.”