Timbuktu

by Paul Auster

  Or so reckoned the good Herr Doktor Bones. Ignore his opinion if you will, but who else are you prepared to trust? After listening to these stories for the past seven years, had he not earned the right to be called the world’s leading authority on the subject?

  That left Willy alone with his mother. She was hardly anyone’s idea of a good time, but at least she kept her hands to herself and showed him considerable amounts of affection, enough warmth of heart to counterbalance the periods when she nagged him and harangued him and got on his nerves. By and large, Willy tried to be a good son. At those rare moments when he was able to stop thinking about himself, he even made a conscious effort to be nice to her. If they had their differences, they were less a result of personal animosity than of starkly opposing world views. From hard-won experience, Mrs. Gurevitch knew that the world was out to get her, and she lived her life accordingly, doing everything in her power to stay clear of harm’s way. Willy also knew that the world was out to get him, but unlike his mother he had no qualms about fighting back. The difference was not that one was a pessimist and the other an optimist, it was that one’s pessimism had led to an ethos of fear, and the other’s pessimism had led to a noisy, fractious disdain for Everything-That-Was. One shrank, the other flailed. One toed the line, the other crossed it out. Much of the time they were at loggerheads, and because Willy found it so easy to shock his mother, he rarely wasted an opportunity to provoke an argument. If only she’d had the wit to back off a little, he probably wouldn’t have been so insistent about making his points. Her antagonism inspired him, pushed him into ever more extreme positions, and by the time he was ready to leave the house and go off to college, he had indelibly cast himself in his chosen role: as malcontent, as rebel, as outlaw poet prowling the gutters of a ruined world.

  Lord knows how many drugs that boy ingested in the two and a half years he spent on Morningside Heights. Name an illegal substance, and Willy either smoked it or snorted it or shot it into his veins. It’s one thing to walk around pretending you’re the second coming of François Villon, but feed an unstable young man enough toxic confections to fill a dump site in the Jersey Meadowlands, and his body chemistry is bound to be altered. Sooner or later, Willy might have cracked up anyway, but who would argue that the psychedelic free-for-all of his student days didn’t accelerate the process? When his roommate walked in on him one afternoon in the middle of his junior year and found Willy buck naked on the floor—chanting names from the Manhattan phone book and eating a bowl of his own excrement—the academic career of Mr. Bones’s future master came to an abrupt and permanent end.

  The loony bin followed, and then Willy returned to his mother’s apartment on Glenwood Avenue. It wasn’t the ideal place for him to live, perhaps, but where else could a burnout like poor Willy go? For the first six months, not much good came of the arrangement. Other than Willy’s switch from drugs to alcohol, things were essentially the same as they had been. The same tensions, the same conflicts, the same misunderstandings. Then, out of the blue, in late December 1969, Willy had the vision that changed everything, the mystical encounter with blessedness that turned him inside out and set his life on an entirely different course.

  It was two-thirty in the morning. His mother had gone to bed several hours before, and Willy was parked on the living room sofa with a pack of Luckies and a bottle of bourbon, watching television out of the corner of one eye. Television was a new habit for him, a by-product of his recent stay in the hospital. He wasn’t particularly interested in the images on the screen, but he enjoyed having the hum and glow of the tube in the background and found comfort in the gray-blue shadows it cast on the walls. The Late Late Show was on just then (something to do with gigantic grasshoppers devouring the citizens of Sacramento, California), but most of the air-time had been given over to chintzy exhortations on behalf of miracle breakthrough products: knives that never went dull, lightbulbs that never burned out, secret-formula lotions that removed the curse of baldness. Yak yak yak, Willy muttered to himself, it’s the same old suds and blather. Just as he was about to stand up and turn off the television, however, a new commercial came on, and there was Santa Claus popping out of someone’s fireplace in what looked like a suburban living room in Massapequa, Long Island. Given that Christmas was just around the corner, Willy had grown used to commercials that featured actors dressed up as Santa Claus. But this one was better than most—a roly-poly guy with rosy cheeks and an honest-to-goodness white beard. Willy paused to watch the beginning of the spiel, fully expecting to hear something about rug shampoos or burglar alarms, when all of a sudden Santa uttered the words that would change his destiny.

  “William Gurevitch,” Santa said. “Yes, William Gurevitch of Brooklyn, New York, I’m talking to you.”

  Willy had drunk only half a bottle that night, and it had been eight months since his last full-blown hallucination. Nobody was going to trick him into swallowing this garbage. He knew the difference between reality and make-believe, and if Santa Claus was talking to him from his mother’s television set, that could only mean he was a lot drunker than he supposed.

  “Fuck you, mister,” Willy said, and without giving the matter another thought, he clicked off the machine.

  Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to leave things as they were. Because he was curious, or because he wanted to make sure he wasn’t having another breakdown, Willy decided it would be all right if he turned the television back on—just for a peek, a last little peek. It wasn’t going to hurt anyone, was it? Better to learn the truth now than to walk around with that sack of Yuletide shit preying on his mind for the next forty years.

  And lo and behold, there he was again. There was Santa bloody Claus, wagging his finger at Willy and shaking his head with a sad, disappointed look in his eyes. When he opened his mouth and started to talk (picking up precisely where he had left off ten seconds earlier), Willy didn’t know whether he should burst out laughing or jump through the window. It was happening, folks. What could not happen was happening, and right then and there Willy knew that nothing in the world would ever look the same to him again.

  “That wasn’t nice, William,” Santa said. “I’m here to help you, but we’re never going to get anywhere if you don’t give me a chance to talk. Do you follow me, son?”

  The question seemed to call for a response, but Willy hesitated. Listening to this clown was bad enough. Did he really want to make things worse by talking back to him?

  “William!” Santa said. His voice was stern and reproachful, and it contained the power of a personality that was not to be trifled with. If Willy was ever going to squirm out of this nightmare, his only hope would be to play along.

  “Yeah, boss,” he mumbled, “I read you loud and clear.”

  The fat man smiled. Then, very slowly, the camera moved in on him for a close-up. For the next several seconds Santa stood there stroking his beard, apparently lost in thought.

  “Do you know who I am?” he finally said.

  “I know who you look like,” Willy said, “but that doesn’t mean I know who you are. At first I thought you were some asshole actor. Then I thought maybe you were that genie in the bottle. Now I don’t have a clue.”

  “The thing I look like is the thing I am.”

  “Sure, pal, and I’m Haile Selassie’s brother-in-law.”

  “Santa Claus, William. A.k.a. Saint Nick. Father Christmas himself. The only force for good left in the world.”

  “Santa, huh? And you wouldn’t happen to spell that S-A-N-T-A, would you?”

  “Yes, I would. That’s exactly how I’d spell it.”

  “That’s what I figured. Now rearrange the letters a little bit, and what do you have? S-A-T-A-N, that’s what. You’re the goddamn devil, grandpa, and the only place you exist is in my mind.”

  Notice how Willy struggled against the apparition, how determined he was to thwart its charms. He wasn’t some pea-brained psycho who let figments and specters push him around. He wanted no
part of this one, and the disgust he felt, the downright hostility he expressed whenever he recalled the first moments of the encounter, was precisely what convinced Mr. Bones that it was true, that Willy had experienced an authentic vision and was not making the story up. To hear him tell it, the situation was a scandal, an insult to his intelligence, and merely having to look at that bovine lump of clichés brought his blood to a boil. Let someone else make with the ho-ho stuff. Christmas was a fraud, a season for quick bucks and ringing cash registers, and as the symbol of that season, as the very essence of the whole consumerist shebang, Santa was the biggest fake of them all.

  But this Santa was no fake, and he was no devil in disguise. He was the true Father Christmas, the one and only Lord of the Elves and Spirits, and the message he’d come to preach was one of goodness, generosity, and self-sacrifice. This unlikeliest of fictions, this contradiction of everything Willy stood for, this absurd display of hokum in the red jacket and the fur-fringed boots—yes, Santa Claus in all his Madison Avenue glory—had sprung forth from the depths of Television Land to debunk the certitudes of Willy’s skepticism and put his soul back together again. It was as simple as that. If anyone was a fraud, Santa said, it was Willy, and then he let him have it in no uncertain terms, lecturing the frightened and bewildered boy for the better part of an hour. He called him a sham, a poseur, and a no-talent hack. Then he upped the ante and called him a zero, a douche bag, a dunderhead, and little by little he broke down the wall of Willy’s defenses and made him see the light. Willy was on the floor by then, weeping his eyes out as he begged for mercy and promised to mend his ways. Christmas was real, he learned, and there would be no truth or happiness for him until he began to embrace its spirit. That would be his mission in life from now on: to embody the message of Christmas every day of the year, to ask nothing from the world and give it only love in return.

  In other words, Willy decided to turn himself into a saint.

  And so it happened that William Gurevitch concluded his business on this earth, and from his flesh a new man named Willy G. Christmas was born. To celebrate the event, Willy scuttled off to Manhattan the next morning and had himself tattooed with a picture of Santa Claus on his right arm. It was a painful ordeal, but Willy suffered the needles gladly, triumphant in the knowledge that he now bore a visible sign of his transformation and would carry its mark with him forever.

  Alas, when he returned to Brooklyn and proudly showed his mother this new ornament, Mrs. Gurevitch went wild, erupting in a tantrum of tears and angry disbelief. It wasn’t just the idea of the tattoo that bent her out of shape (although that was part of it, given that tattooing was proscribed by Jewish law—and given what role the tattooing of Jewish skin had played in her lifetime), it was what this particular tattoo represented, and in that Mrs. Gurevitch saw the three-color Santa Claus on Willy’s arm as a token of betrayal and incurable madness, her outburst at that moment was perhaps understandable. Until then, she had managed to delude herself into thinking that her son would make a full recovery. She blamed his condition on the drugs, and once the noxious residues were flushed out of his system and his blood count returned to normal, she felt it would only be a matter of time before he turned off the television set and went back to college. But not anymore. One glance at the tattoo, and all those vain hopes and false expectations shattered at her feet like so much glass. Santa Claus was from the other side. He belonged to the Presbyterians and the Roman Catholics, to the Jesus-worshipers and Jew-haters, to Hitler and all the rest of them. The goyim had taken hold of Willy’s brain, and once they crawled inside you they never let go. Christmas was only the first step. Easter was just a few months down the road, and then they’d drag out those crosses of theirs and start talking about murder, and before long the storm troopers would be breaking down the door. She saw the picture of Santa Claus emblazoned on her son’s arm, but as far as she was concerned it might just as well have been a swastika.

  Willy was frankly perplexed. He hadn’t meant any harm, and in his present blissful state of remorse and conversion, the last thing he wanted was to offend his mother. But talk and explain as he did, she refused to listen. She shrieked at him and called him a Nazi, and when he persisted in trying to make her understand that Santa Claus was an incarnation of the Buddha, a holy being whose message to the world was one of merciful love and compassion, she threatened to send him back to the hospital that very afternoon. This brought to mind a sentence that Willy had heard from a fellow patient at Saint Luke’s—”I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy”—and suddenly he knew what was in store for him if he let his mother have her way. So rather than go on beating a dead horse, he climbed into his overcoat and left the apartment, heading in a beeline for God knows where.

  Thus began a pattern that continued for the next umpteen years. Willy would stay with his mother for several months, then leave for several months, then come back. The first departure was probably the most dramatic, if only because Willy still had everything to learn about the wandering life. He was gone for just a short spell, and although Mr. Bones was never quite certain what Willy meant by short, whatever happened to his master during the weeks or months he was away proved to him that he had found his true calling. “Don’t tell me that two and two is four,” Willy said to his mother when he returned to Brooklyn. “How do we know that two is two? That’s the real question.”

  The next day, he sat down and started writing again. It was the first time he’d picked up a pen since before the hospital, and the words poured out of him like water gushing from a broken pipe. Willy G. Christmas proved to be a better and more inspired poet than William Gurevitch had ever been, and what his early efforts lacked in originality, they made up for in hell-bent enthusiasm. Thirty-three Rules to Live By was a good example. Its opening lines read as follows:

  Throw yourself into the arms of the world

  And the air will hold you. Hold back

  And the world will jump you from behind.

  Go for broke down the highway of bones.

  Follow the music of your steps, and when the lights go out

  Don’t whistle—sing.

  If you keep your eyes open, you’ll always be lost.

  Give away your shirt, give away your gold,

  Give away your shoes to the first stranger you see.

  Much will come of nothing

  If you dance the jitterbug waltz…

  Literary pursuits were one thing, but how you conducted yourself in the world was quite another. Willy’s poems might have changed, but that still didn’t answer the question about whether Willy himself had changed. Did he actually become a new person, or was the plunge into sainthood no more than a passing impulse? Had he boondoggled himself into an untenable position, or was there something more to be said about his rebirth than the tattoo on his right biceps and the ridiculous moniker he took such pleasure in using? An honest answer would be yes and no, perhaps, a little of both. For Willy was weak, and Willy was often belligerent, and Willy was prone to forget things. Mental mishaps dogged him, and whenever the pinball machine in his head speeded up and went tilt, all bets were off. How could a man of his ilk propose to don the mantle of purity? Not only was he an incipient lush, and not only was he a bred-in-the-bone liar with a strong paranoiac bent, he was too damn funny for his own good. Once Willy started in with the jokes, Santa Claus burst into flames, and the whole hearts-and-flowers act burned to the ground with him.

  Still and all, it would be wrong to say that he didn’t try, and in that trying hung a large part of the story. Even if Willy didn’t always live up to his expectations for himself, at least he had a model for how he wanted to behave. At those rare moments when he was able to focus his thoughts and curb his excesses in the beverage department, Willy demonstrated that no act of courage or generosity was beyond him. In 1972, for example, at no small risk to himself, he rescued a four-year-old girl from drowning. In 1976, he came to the defense of an eighty-one-year
-old man who was being mugged on West Forty-third Street in New York—and for his pains received a knife wound in his shoulder and a bullet in his leg. More than once he gave his last dollar to a friend down on his luck, he let the lovelorn and the heartsick cry on his shoulder, and over the years he talked one man and two women out of suicide. There were fine things in Willy’s soul, and whenever he let them come out, you forgot the other things that were in there as well. Yes, he was a bedraggled, demented pain in the ass, but when all was right in his head, Willy was one in a million, and everyone who crossed paths with him knew it.

  Whenever he talked to Mr. Bones about those early years, Willy tended to dwell on the good memories and ignore the bad. But who could blame him for sentimentalizing the past? We all do it, dogs and people alike, and in 1970 Willy had been nowhere if not in the pink of youth. His health was as robust as it would ever be, his teeth were intact, and to top it off he had money in the bank. A small sum had been set aside for him from his father’s life insurance policy, and when he came into this money on his twenty-first birthday, he was kept in pocket change for close to a decade. But above and beyond the boon of money and youth, there was the historical moment, the times themselves, the spirit abroad in the land when Willy set forth on his career of vagabondage. The country was crawling with dropouts and runaway children, with long-haired neo-visionaries, dysfunctional anarchists, and doped-up misfits. For all the oddness he demonstrated in his own right, Willy hardly stood out among them. He was just one more weirdo on the Amerikan scene, and wherever his travels happened to take him—be it Pittsburgh or Pittsburgh, Pocatello or Boca Raton—he managed to latch on to like-minded souls for company. Or so he said, and in the long run Mr. Bones saw no reason to doubt him.