by Paul Auster
“I think I’m in the wrong place,” I said. “I was looking for David Zimmer.”
“Oh,” said the stranger, not missing a beat, “you must be Fogg. I was wondering when you’d turn up again.”
It was a brutal day outside—scalding, dog-day heat—and the walk had nearly done me in. As I stood in front of the door now, with sweat dripping into my eyes and my muscles feeling all spongy and stupid, I wondered if I had heard the stranger correctly. My impulse was to turn around and run away, but I suddenly felt so weak that I was afraid of passing out. I put my hand on the doorframe to steady myself and said, “I’m sorry, but would you say that again? I don’t think I caught it the first time.”
“I said you must be Fogg,” the stranger repeated. “It’s really quite simple. If you’re looking for Zimmer, then you must be Fogg. Fogg was the one who left all the messages under the door.”
“That’s very astute,” I said, letting out a small fluttering sigh. “I don’t suppose you know where Zimmer is now.”
“Sorry. I don’t have the slightest idea.”
Again, I began mustering my courage to leave, but just as I was about to turn away, I saw that the stranger was staring at me. It was an odd and penetrating look, aimed directly at my face. “Is something wrong?” I asked him.
“I was just wondering if you’re a friend of Kitty’s.”
“Kitty?” I said. “I don’t know anyone named Kitty. I’ve never met anyone named Kitty in my life.”
“You’re wearing the same shirt she is. It made me think you must be connected to her somehow.”
I looked down at my chest and saw that I had a Mets T-shirt on. I had bought it at a rummage sale earlier in the year for ten cents. “I don’t even like the Mets,” I said. “The Cubs are the team I root for.”
“It’s a weird coincidence,” the stranger continued, paying no attention to what I had said. “Kitty is going to love it. She loves things like that.”
Before I had a chance to protest, I found myself being led by the arm into the kitchen. There I came upon a group of five or six people sitting around the table eating Sunday breakfast. The table was crowded with food: bacon and eggs, a full pot of coffee, bagels and cream cheese, a platter of smoked fish. I had not seen anything like this in months, and I scarcely knew how to react. It was as though I had suddenly been put down in the middle of a fairy tale. I was the hungry child who had been lost in the woods, and now I had found the enchanted house, the cottage built of food.
“Look everyone,” announced my grinning, bare-chested host. “It’s Kitty’s twin brother.”
At that point I was introduced around the table. Everyone smiled at me and said hello, and I did my best to smile back. It turned out that most of them were students at Juilliard—musicians, dancers, singers. The host’s name was Jim or John, and he had just moved into Zimmer’s old apartment the day before. The others had been out partying that night, someone said, and instead of going home afterward, they had decided to burst in on Jim or John with an impromptu housewarming breakfast. That explained his lack of clothing (he had been asleep when they rang the bell) and the abundance of food I saw before me. I nodded politely when they told me all this, but I only pretended to be listening. The fact was that I couldn’t have cared less, and by the time the story was over, I had forgotten everyone’s name. For want of anything better to do, I studied my twin sister, a small Chinese girl of nineteen or twenty with silver bracelets on both wrists and a beaded Navaho band around her head. She returned my look with a smile—an exceptionally warm smile, I felt, filled with humor and complicity—and then I turned my attention back to the table, powerless to keep my eyes off it for very long. I realized that I was on the verge of embarrassing myself. The smells from the food had begun to torture me, and as I stood there waiting for them to invite me to sit down, it was all I could do not to grab something off the table and shove it in my mouth.
Kitty was the one who finally broke the ice. “Now that my brother is here,” she said, obviously entering into the spirit of the moment, “the least we can do is ask him to join us for breakfast.” I wanted to kiss her for having read my mind like that. An awkward moment followed, however, when no extra chair could be found, but again Kitty came to the rescue, gesturing for me to sit between her and the person to her copy. I promptly wedged myself into the spot, planting one buttock on each chair. A plate was set before me along with the necessary accoutrements: knife and fork, glass and cup, napkin and spoon. After that, I entered a miasma of feeding and forgetting. It was an infantile response, but once the food entered my mouth, I wasn’t able to control myself. I chomped down one dish after another, devouring whatever they put in front of me, and eventually it was as though I had lost my mind. Since the generosity of the others seemed infinite, I kept on eating until everything on the table had disappeared. That is how I remember it, in any case. I gorged myself for fifteen or twenty minutes, and when I was done, the only thing left was a pile of whitefish bones. Nothing more than that. I search my memory for something else, but I can never find it. Not one morsel. Not even a crust of bread.
It was only then that I noticed how intently the others were staring at me. Had it been as bad as that? I wondered. Had I slobbered and made a spectacle of myself? I turned to Kitty and gave her a feeble smile. She did not seem disgusted so much as stunned. That reassured me somewhat, but I wanted to make amends for any offense I might have caused the others. That was the least I could do, I thought: sing for my grub, make them forget I had just licked their plates clean. As I waited for an opportunity to enter the conversation, I became increasingly aware of how good it felt to be sitting next to my long-lost twin. From the drift of the talk around me, I gathered that she was a dancer, and there was no question that she did a lot more for her Mets T-shirt than I did for mine. It was hard not to be impressed, and as she went on chatting and laughing with the others, I kept on sneaking little glances at her. She wore no makeup and no bra, but there was a constant tinkling of bracelets and earrings as she moved. Her breasts were nicely formed, and she displayed them with an admirable nonchalance, neither flaunting them nor pretending they were not there. I found her beautiful, but more than that I liked the way she held herself, the way she did not seem to be paralyzed by her beauty as so many beautiful girls did. Perhaps it was the freedom of her gestures, the blunt, down-to-earth quality I heard in her voice. This was not a pampered, middle-class kid like the others, but someone who knew her way around, who had managed to learn things for herself. The fact that she seemed to welcome the nearness of my body, that she did not squirm away from my shoulder or leg, that she even allowed her bare arm to linger against mine—these were things that drove me to the point of foolishness.
I found an opening into the conversation a few moments later. Someone started talking about the moon landing, and then someone else declared that it had never really happened. The whole thing was a hoax, he said, a television extravaganza staged by the government to get our minds off the war. “People will believe anything they’re told to believe,” that person added, “even some rinky-dink bullshit filmed in a Hollywood studio.” That was all I needed to make my entrance. Jumping in with the most outrageous remark I could think of, I calmly asserted that not only had last month’s moon landing been genuine, it was by no means the first time it had happened. Men had been going to the moon for hundreds of years, I said, perhaps even thousands. Everyone tittered when I said that, but then I launched into my best comico-pedantic style, and for the next ten minutes I showered them with a history of moon lore, replete with references to Lucian, Godwin, and others. I wanted to impress them with how much I knew, but I also wanted to make them laugh. Intoxicated by the meal I had just finished, determined to prove to Kitty that I was not like anyone she had ever met, I worked myself into top form, and my sharp, staccato delivery soon had them all in stitches. Then I began to describe Cyrano’s voyage to the moon, and someone interrupted me. Cyrano de Bergerac wasn’t real,
the person said, he was a character in a play, a make-believe man. I couldn’t let this error go uncorrected, and so I made a short digression to tell them the story of Cyrano’s life. I sketched out his early days as a soldier, discussed his career as a philosopher and poet, and then dwelled at some length on the various hardships he encountered over the years: financial troubles, an agonizing bout with syphilis, his battles with the authorities over his radical views. I told them how he had finally found a protector in the Duc d’Arpajon, and then, just three years later, how he had been killed on a Paris street when a building stone fell from a rooftop and landed on his head. I paused dramatically to allow the grotesqueness and humor of this tragedy to sink in. “He was only thirty-six at the time,” I said, “and to this day no one knows if it was an accident or not. Had one of his enemies murdered him, or was it simply a matter of chance, of blind fate pouring destruction down from the sky? Alas, poor Cyrano. This was no figment, my friends. He was a creature of flesh and blood, a real man who lived in the real world, and in 1649 he wrote a book about his trip to the moon. Since it’s a firsthand account, I don’t see why anyone should doubt what he says. According to Cyrano, the moon is a world like this one. When seen from that world, our earth looks just like the moon does from here. The Garden of Eden is located on the moon, and when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, God banished them to the earth. Cyrano first attempts to travel to the moon by strapping bottles of lighter-than-air dew to his body, but after reaching the Middle Distance, he floats back to earth, landing among a tribe of naked Indians in New France. There he builds a machine that eventually takes him to his destination, which no doubt goes to show that America has always been the ideal place for moon launchings. The people he encounters on the moon are eighteen feet tall and walk on all fours. They speak two different languages, but neither language has any words in it. The first, used by the common people, is an intricate code of pantomime gestures that calls for constant movement from all parts of the body. The second language is spoken by the upper classes, and it consists of pure sound, a complex but unarticulated humming that closely resembles music. The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry—actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself. The worst crime is virginity, and young people are expected to show disrespect for their parents. The longer one’s nose, the more noble one’s character is considered to be. Men with short noses are castrated, for the moon people would rather die out as a race than be forced to live with such ugliness. There are talking books and traveling cities. When a great philosopher dies, his friends drink his blood and eat his flesh. Bronze penises hang from the waists of men—in the same way that seventeenth-century Frenchmen used to carry swords. As a moon man explains to the befuddled Cyrano: Is it not better to honor the tools of life than the tools of death? Cyrano spends a good part of the book in a cage. Because he is so small, the moon people think he must be a parrot without feathers. In the end, a giant black man throws him back to earth with the Anti-Christ.”
I rattled on like that for several more minutes, but all the talk had worn me down, and I could feel my inspiration beginning to flag. Midway through my last speech (on Jules Verne and the Baltimore Gun Club), it abandoned me entirely. My head shrank, then grew enormously large; I saw peculiar lights and comets darting behind my eyes; my stomach began to rumble, to bulge with dagger-thrusts of pain, and suddenly I felt I was going to be sick. Without a word of warning, I broke off from my lecture, stood up from the table, and announced that I had to leave. “Thank you for your kindness,” I said, “but urgent business calls me away. You are dear, good people, and I promise to remember you all in my will.” It was a deranged performance, a madman’s jig. I staggered out of the kitchen, knocking over a coffee cup in the process, and groped my way to the door. By the time I got there, Kitty was standing next to me. To this day, I still don’t understand how she managed to get there before I did.
“You’re a very strange brother,” she said. “You look like a man, but then you turn yourself into a wolf. After that, the wolf becomes a talking machine. It’s all mouths for you, isn’t it? First the food, then the words—into the mouth and out of it. But you’re forgetting the best thing mouths are made for. I’m your sister, after all, and I’m not going to let you leave without kissing me good-bye.”
I started to apologize, but then, before I had a chance to say anything, Kitty stood on her toes, put her hand on the back of my neck, and kissed me—very tenderly, I felt, almost with compassion. I didn’t know what to make of it. Was I supposed to treat it as a genuine kiss, or was it just one more part of the game? Before I could decide, I accidentally leaned my back against the door, and the door opened. It felt like a message to me, a secret cue that things had come to an end, and so, without another word, I continued backing out the door, turned as my feet crossed the sill, and left.
After that, there were no more free meals. When the second eviction notice arrived on August thirteenth, I was down to my last thirty-seven dollars. As it turned out, that was the same day the astronauts came to New York for their ticker-tape parade. The sanitation department later reported that three hundred tons of trash were thrown to the streets during the festivities. It was an all-time record, they said, the largest parade in the history of the world. I kept my distance from such things. Not knowing where to turn anymore, I left my apartment as seldom as possible, trying to conserve whatever strength I still had. A quick jaunt down to the corner for supplies and then back again, nothing more than that. My ass became raw from wiping myself with the brown paper bags I carried home from the market, but it was the heat I suffered from most. The air in the apartment was intolerable, a sweatbox stillness that bore down on me night and day, and no matter how wide I opened the windows, I could not coax a breeze to enter the room. My pores gushed constantly. Even sitting in one place put me in a sweat, and when I moved in any way at all, it provoked a flood. I drank as much water as possible. I took cold baths, doused my head under the tap, pressed wet towels against my face and neck and wrists. This offered scant comfort, but at least I was able to keep myself clean. The soap in the bathroom had shrunk to a small white sliver by then, and I had to keep it in reserve for shaving. Because my stock of razor blades was also running low, I limited myself to two shaves a week, carefully scheduling them to fall on the days when I went out to do my shopping. Although it probably didn’t matter, it consoled me to think that I was managing to keep up appearances.
The essential thing was to plot my next move. But that was precisely what gave me the most trouble, the thing I could no longer do. I had lost the ability to think ahead, and no matter how hard I tried to imagine the future, I could not see it, I could not see anything at all. The only future that had ever belonged to me was the present I was living in now, and the struggle to remain in that present had gradually overwhelmed the rest. I had no ideas anymore. The moments unfurled one after the other, and at each moment the future stood before me as a blank, a white page of uncertainty. If life was a story, as Uncle Victor had often told me, and each man was the author of his own story, then I was making it up as I went along. I was working without a plot, writing each sentence as it came to me and refusing to think about the next. All well and good, perhaps, but the question was no longer whether I could write the story off the top of my head. I had already done that. The question was what I was supposed to do when the pen ran out of ink.
The clarinet was still there, sitting in its case by my bed. I am ashamed to admit it now, but I nearly buckled under and sold it. Worse than that, I even went so far as to take it to a music store one day to find out how much it was worth. When I saw that it wouldn’t bring in enough to cover a month’s rent, I abandoned the idea. But that was the only thing that spared me the indignity of going through with it. As time went on, I realized how close I had come to committing an unpardonable sin. The clarinet was my last link to Uncle Victor,
and because it was the last, because there were no other traces of him, it carried the entire force of his soul within it. Whenever I looked at it, I was able to feel that force within myself. It was something to cling to, a piece of wreckage to keep me afloat.
Several days after my visit to the music store, a minor disaster nearly drowned me. The two eggs I was about to place in a pot of water and boil up for my daily meal slipped through my fingers and broke on the floor. Those were the last two eggs of my current supply, and I could not help feeling that this was the cruelest, most terrible thing that had ever happened to me. The eggs landed with an ugly splat. I remember standing there in horror as they oozed out over the floor. The sunny, translucent innards sank into the cracks, and suddenly there was muck everywhere, a bobbing slush of slime and shell. One yolk had miraculously survived the fall, but when I bent down to scoop it up, it slid out from under the spoon and broke apart. I felt as though a star were exploding, as though a great sun had just died. The yellow spread over the white and then began to swirl, turning into a vast nebula, a debris of interstellar gases. It was all too much for me—the last, imponderable straw. When this happened, I actually sat down and cried.
Struggling to get a grip on my emotions, I went out and splurged on a meal at the Moon Palace. It didn’t help. Self-pity had given way to extravagance, and I loathed myself for surrendering to the impulse. To carry my disgust even further, I started off with egg drop soup, unable to resist the perversity of the pun. I followed it with fried dumplings, a plate of spicy shrimp, and a bottle of Chinese beer. The good this nourishment might have done me, however, was negated by the poison of my thoughts. I nearly gagged on the rice. This was no dinner, I told myself, it was a last meal, the food they serve up to a condemned man before they drag him off to the gallows. Forcing myself to chew it, to get it down my throat, I remembered a phrase from Raleigh’s last letter to his wife, written on the eve of his execution: My brains are broken. Nothing could have been more apt than those words. I thought of Raleigh’s chopped-off head, preserved by his wife in a glass box. I thought of Cyrano’s head, crushed by the stone that fell on it. Then I imagined my head cracking open, splattering like the eggs that had fallen to the floor of my room. I felt my brains dribbling out of me. I saw myself in pieces.