by Paul Auster
Years later, when Barber told me about the letter he had received from Victor, I finally understood why my uncle and I had left Saint Paul so suddenly back in 1959. The whole scene made sense to me now: the flurry of late-night packing, the nonstop drive back to Chicago, the two weeks of living in a hotel and not going to school. Victor could not have known the truth about Barber, but that did not make him any less afraid of what that truth might have been. A father was out there somewhere, and why take a chance on this man who was so curious to learn things about Emily? If worse came to worse, who was to say he wouldn’t fight for custody of the boy? It was simple enough to avoid mentioning me when he wrote back after the first letter, but then the second letter came with all those new questions, and Victor realized that he was trapped. Ignoring the letter would only postpone the problem, for if the stranger was as curious as he seemed to be, he would eventually come looking for us. What would happen then? Victor saw no choice but to abscond, to gather me up in the middle of the night and vanish in a cloud of smoke.
This story was one of the last things Barber told me, and it tore me apart to hear it. I understood what Victor had done, and seeing that devotion spelled out for me, I was caught in a surge of sentiment—aching with regret for my uncle, mourning his death all over again. But at the same time I also felt frustration, bitterness over the years that had been lost. For if Victor had answered Barber’s second letter instead of running away, I might have discovered who my father was as far back as 1959. No one was to blame for what happened, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. It was all a matter of missed connections, bad timing, blundering in the dark. We were always in the copy place at the wrong time, the wrong place at the copy time, always just missing each other, always just a few inches from figuring the whole thing out. That’s what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there from the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together.
None of this came out during that first meeting, of course. Once Barber decided not to talk about his suspicions, the only subject available to us was his father, and we covered that quite thoroughly during the days he spent in town. The first night, he took me to dinner at Gallagher’s on Fifty-second Street; the second night, we went out to a restaurant in Chinatown with Kitty; and the third day, Sunday, I joined him for breakfast at his hotel before he caught the plane back to Minnesota. Barber’s wit and charm soon made you forget his unfortunate appearance, and the more time I spent with him, the more comfortable I felt. We talked freely almost from the beginning, trading jokes and ideas as we told our stories to each other, and because he was not someone who was afraid of the truth, I was able to talk about his father without censoring myself, giving the whole story of my months with Effing, the good along with the bad.
As for Barber, he had never known much of anything. His father, they told him, had died out West a few months before he was born, and that seemed plausible enough, since the walls of the house were covered with paintings, and everyone had always said his father was a painter, a specialist in landscapes who had gone on many travels for his art. His last trip was to the deserts of Utah, they said, a godforsaken place if there ever was one, and that was where he had died. But the circumstances of that death were never made clear to him. When he was seven years old, an aunt told him that his father had fallen off a cliff. Three years later, an uncle explained that his father had been captured by Indians, and then, not six months after that, Molly Sharp announced that it had been the work of the devil. She was the cook who fed him all those delicious puddings after school—a florid, red-faced Irishwoman with large gaps between her teeth—and he had never known her to tell a lie. Whatever the cause, his father’s death was always given as the reason why his mother had taken to her room. That was how the family referred to his mother’s condition, although the fact was that she sometimes left her room, especially on warm summer nights, when she would wander through the corridors of the house, or even walk down to the beach and sit by the water, listening to the small waves wash in from the Sound.
He did not see his mother very often, and even on her good days she had trouble remembering his name. She addressed him as Teddy, or Malcolm, or Rob—always looking him straight in the eye, speaking with the utmost conviction—or else by using strange epithets that made no sense to him: Bally-Ball, Pooh-Bah, and Mr. Jinks. He never tried to correct her when she did this, since the hours spent in his mother’s company were too rare to be wasted, and he knew from experience that the slightest quibble could disrupt her mood. The others around the house called him Solly. He did not object to this nickname, for it somehow left his real name intact, as though it were a secret known only to him: Solomon, the wise king of the Hebrews, a man so precise in his judgments that he could threaten to cut a baby in half. Later on, the diminutive was dropped, and he became Sol. The Elizabethan poets taught him that this was an old word for “sun,” and not long after that he discovered it was also the French word for “ground.” It intrigued him that he could be both the sun and the earth at the same time, and for several years he took it to mean that he alone was able to encompass all the contradictions of the universe.
His mother lived on the fourth floor with a series of companions and helpers, and there were long stretches of time when she did not come down even once. It was a separate realm up there, with the newly built kitchen at one end of the hall and the large, nine-sided room at the other. That was where his father used to paint his pictures, they said, and the windows were built in such a way that when you looked out of them you saw nothing but water. If you stood in front of those windows long enough, he found, pressing your face against the glass, it would begin to feel as though you were floating in the sky. He was not allowed to go up there very often, but from his room on the floor below he could sometimes hear his mother pacing at night (the creak of floorboards under the rug), and every once in a while he was able to distinguish voices: the rumble of conversations, laughter, snatches of songs, bouts of groaning and sobbing. His visits to the fourth floor were dictated by the nurses, and each one laid down a different set of rules. Miss Forrest set aside one hour for him every Thursday; Miss Caxton examined his fingernails before letting him in; Miss Flower championed brisk walks on the beach; Miss Buxley served hot chocolate; and Miss Gunderson talked in a voice so low that he couldn’t hear what she said. Once, Barber played dress-up with his mother for an entire afternoon, and on another occasion they sailed a toy boat in the pond until it got dark. Those were the visits that stood out most sharply for him, and years later he realized they must have been the happiest hours he spent with her. As far back as he could remember, she had seemed old to him, with her gray hair and unadorned face, the watery blue eyes and downturned mouth, the liver spots on the backs of her hands. There was a slight but constant trembling to her movements, and this probably made her seem even more fragile than she was—nerves flying off in all directions, a woman forever on the verge of collapse. Still, he did not think of her as mad (unhappy was the word that usually came to him), and even when she did things that alarmed everyone else, he often felt that she was only pretending. There were a number of crises over the years (a screaming fit when one of the nurses was fired, a suicide attempt, a period of several months when she refused to wear any clothes), and at one point she was sent away to Switzerland for what was called a long rest. Much later, he discovered that Switzerland was merely the polite term for a mental asylum in Hartford, Connecticut.
It was a lugubrious childhood, but not without its pleasures, and far less lonely than it might have been. His mother’s parents lived there most of the time, and in spite of his grandmother’s penchant for harebrained fads—Fletcherism, Symmes’s holes, the books of Charles Fort—she was exceedingly good to him, as was his grandfather, who told him stories about the Civil War and taught him how to hunt for wildflowers. Later on, his Uncle Binkey and Aunt Clara also moved in, and for several years they all lived together in a k
ind of cantankerous harmony. The crash of 1929 did not destroy them, but certain economies had to be made after that. The Pierce Arrow departed along with the chauffeur, the lease on the New York apartment was allowed to run out, and Barber was not sent to boarding school as everyone had planned. In 1931, a number of works from his father’s collection were sold—the Delacroix drawings, the Samuel French Morse painting, and the small Turner that had hung in the downstairs parlor. Still, there was much that remained. Barber was particularly fond of the two Blakelocks in the dining room (a moonlight canvas on the eastern wall and a view of an Indian encampment on the southern), and there were scores of paintings by his father everywhere he turned: the Long Island water scenes, the pictures of the Maine coast, the Hudson River studies, and an entire room of landscapes brought back from an excursion to the Catskills—crumbling farmhouses, otherwordly mountains, enormous fields of light. Barber spent hundreds of hours looking at these works, and in his third year of high school he organized an exhibition that was mounted in the town hall, complete with an essay on his father’s work that was distributed free of charge to everyone who came to the opening.
The following year, he spent his nights composing a novel based on his father’s disappearance. Barber was just seventeen then, and, trapped in the throes of adolescent tumult, he began to fancy himself an artist, a future genius who would save his soul by pouring his anguish onto paper. He sent me a copy of the manuscript after he returned to Minnesota—not, as he apologetically warned in his cover letter, to show off his juvenile talents (the book had been rejected by twenty-one publishers), but to give me an idea of the extent to which his father’s absence had affected his imagination. The book was called Kepler’s Blood, and it was written in the sensational style of thirties pulp novels. Part Western and part science fiction, the story lurched from one improbability to the next, churning forward with the implacable momentum of a dream. Some of it was dreadful, but for all that I found myself engrossed, and by the time I came to the end, I felt that I had a better idea of who Barber was, that I understood something about what had formed him.
The setting of the book was pushed back by about forty years, with the initial event taking place in the 1870s, but otherwise the story follows almost directly from the few things that Barber had managed to learn about his father. A thirty-five-year-old artist named John Kepler says good-bye to his wife and young son and leaves his Long Island home for a six-month trek through Utah and Arizona, fully expecting, in the words of the seventeen-year-old author, “to discover a land of marvels, a world of wild beauty and ferocious color, a domain of such monumental proportions that even the smallest stone would bear the mark of the infinite.” All goes well for the first several months, and then Kepler meets up with an accident similar to the one that had supposedly befallen Julian Barber: he tumbles off a cliff, breaks numerous bones, and lapses into unconsciousness. Upon coming to himself the next morning, he discovers that he cannot move, and because his supplies are inaccessible to him, he resigns himself to starving to death in the wilderness. On the third day, however, just as he is on the point of giving up the ghost, Kepler is rescued by a group of Indians—which echoes another one of the stories that Barber heard as a young boy. The Indians carry the dying man to their settlement, a rock-strewn glen flanked by cliffs on all sides, and in this place rich with the smell of yucca and juniper, they nurse him back to health. Thirty or forty people live in this community, roughly an equal number of men, women, and children who walk around with little or nothing on their bodies in the torrid midsummer heat. Scarcely saying a word to him or each other, they watch over him as his strength gradually returns, holding water to his lips and giving him odd-looking foods that he has never tasted before. As his mind begins to clear, Kepler notices that these people do not resemble the Indians from any of the local tribes—the Ute and the Navaho, the Paiute and the Shoshone. They seem more primitive to him, more isolated, more gentle in their manners. On closer inspection, in fact, he concludes that many of them do not have Indian features at all. Some have blue eyes, others have a reddish tint to their hair, and a number of men even have hair on their chests. Rather than accept the evidence, Kepler begins to think that he is still on the brink of death, having imagined his recovery in a delirium of coma and pain. But that does not last long. Little by little, as his condition continues to improve, he is forced to admit that he is alive and that everything around him is real.
“They called themselves the Humans,” Barber writes, “the Folk, the Ones Who Came from Far Away. Long ago, according to the legends they told him, their ancestors had lived on the moon. But a great drought took the water from the land, and all the Humans died except for Pog and Ooma, the original Father and Mother. For twenty-nine days and twenty-nine nights, Pog and Ooma walked through the desert, and when they reached the Mountain of Miracles, they climbed to the top and attached themselves to a cloud. The spirit cloud carried them through space for seven years, and at the end of that time they floated down to earth, where they discovered the Forest of First Things and started the world again. Pog and Ooma produced more than two hundred children, and for many years the Humans were happy, building houses among the trees, planting corn, hunting the magic deer, and gathering fish from the water. The Others also lived in the Forest of First Things, and because they were willing to share their secrets, the Humans learned the Vast Knowledge of the plants and animals, which helped them to feel at home on earth. The Humans returned the Others’ kindness with gifts of their own, and for generations the two realms lived in harmony. But then the Wild Men came from the other side of the world, sailing onto the land one morning in their huge wooden boats. For a time the Bearded Ones seemed friendly, but then they marched into the Forest of First Things and cut down many trees. When the Humans and the Others asked them to stop, the Wild Men took out their thunder-and-lightning sticks and killed them. The Humans understood that they were no match for the power of such weapons, but the Others chose to stand and fight. That was the time of the Terrible Farewell. Some of the Humans joined ranks with the Others, a few of the Others joined ranks with the Humans, and then the two families went their separate ways. The Humans left their homes and moved off into the Darkness, traveling through the Forest of First Things until they felt they were beyond the reach of the Wild Men. This happened many times over the course of the years, for no sooner would they build a settlement in some new area of the Forest and begin to feel at home there than the Wild Men would follow. The Bearded Ones always professed friendliness at first, but inevitably they would start cutting down trees and killing the Humans, shouting about their god and their book and their indomitable strength. The Humans therefore continued to wander, always moving westward, always trying to stay ahead of the advancing Wild Men. Eventually, they came to the end of the Forest of First Things and discovered the Flat World, with its interminable winters and brief, hellish summers. From there they moved on to the Land in the Sky, and when time ran out for them there, they descended into the Land of Little Water, a place so parched and desolate that even the Wild Men refused to live there. When the Wild Men appeared, it was only because they were on their way to some other place, and those who happened to stop and build houses were so few and scattered that the Humans could avoid them with little trouble. This was where the Humans had lived since the beginning of the New Time, and it had been going on for so long now that no one could remember what came before.”
Their language is incomprehensible to Kepler at first, but within several weeks he has mastered enough to grope his way through a simple conversation. He begins by acquiring nouns, the this and the that of the world around him, and his speech is no more subtle than a child’s. Crenepos is woman. Mantoac are the gods. Okeepenauk refers to an edible root, and tapisco means stone. With so much to absorb all at once, he is unable to detect any structural coherence to the language. Pronouns do not seem to exist as separate entities, for example, but are a part of a complex system of verb endings that
shift according to the age and sex of the speaker. Certain frequently used words have two diametrically opposed meanings—top and bottom, noon and midnight, childhood and old age—and there are many instances in which the meanings of words are altered by the facial expression of the speaker. After two or three months, Kepler’s tongue grows more adept at producing the strange sounds of this language, and as the morass of undifferentiated syllables begins to separate into smaller, more definable units of sense, his ear becomes sharper, more finely adjusted to nuance and intonation. Remarkably enough, he begins to think that he can hear traces of English when the Humans speak—not English as he knows it, precisely, but cut-off pieces of it, remnants of English words, a kind of transmogrified English that has somehow slid into the crevices of this other language. A phrase such as Land of Little Water, for example, becomes a single word, Lano-li-wa. Wild Men becomes Wi-me, and Flat World becomes something that resembles the word flow. At first, Kepler is inclined to dismiss these parallels as coincidence. Sounds overlap from one language to another, after all, and he is reluctant to let his imagination run away with him. On the other hand, it seems that roughly every seventh or eighth word of the Humans’ language follows this same pattern, and when Kepler finally puts his theory to the test by making up words and trying them out on the Humans (words he has not been taught, but which he forms by the same method of paring and decomposition he used to construct the others), he finds himself speaking a number of words that the Humans recognize as their own. Encouraged by his success, Kepler begins to advance certain ideas about the origins of this strange tribe. The legend about the moon notwithstanding, he feels that they must be the product of some prior intermingling of English and Indian blood. “Stranded in the immense forests of the New World,” Barber writes, following the thread of Kepler’s argument, “perhaps faced with the threat of extinction, a band of early colonists might well have asked admittance into an Indian tribe to ensure their survival against the hostile forces of nature. Perhaps those Indians were the ‘Others’ who appeared in the legends he had been told, Kepler thought. If so, then perhaps a group of them split off from the main body and headed out West, eventually settling in Utah. Taking this hypothesis one step further, he reasoned that the story of their origins was probably composed after their arrival in Utah, as a way of drawing spiritual comfort from their decision to live in such a barren place. For nowhere in the world, Kepler thought, does the earth look more like the moon than it does here.”