by Paul Auster
For the next two weeks, everything seemed to go well. The doctors were optimistic, and we began looking forward to the day when the cast would be removed. Some time in early August, however, Barber suddenly took a turn for the worse. He came down with an infection of some kind, and the medicine they gave him produced an allergic reaction, which pushed up his blood pressure to crisis levels. Further tests revealed a diabetic condition that had never been diagnosed before, and as the doctors went on probing him for further damage, new diseases and problems kept being added to the list: angina, incipient gout, circulatory trouble, God knows what else. It was as though his body simply couldn’t take it anymore. It had been through too much, and now the machinery was breaking down. His defenses had been weakened by the enormous weight loss, and there was nothing left for him to fight with, his blood cells refused to mount a counterattack. By the twentieth of August, he told me that he knew he was going to die, but I wouldn’t listen to him. “Just sit tight,” I said. “We’ll have you out of here before they throw the first pitch of the World Series.”
I didn’t know what I felt anymore. The strain of watching him fall apart left me numb, and by the third week of August I was walking around in a trance. The only thing that mattered to me at that point was to keep up an impassive front. No tears, no bouts of despair, no lapses of will. I exuded hope and confidence, but inwardly I must have known how impossible the situation really was. This was not brought home to me until the very end, however, and I learned it only in the most roundabout way. I had gone into a diner for a late-night supper. One of the specials that evening happened to be chicken pot pie, a dish I had not eaten since I was a small boy, perhaps not since the days when I was still living with my mother. The moment I read those words on the menu, I knew that no other food would do for me that night. I gave my order to the waitress, and for the next three or four minutes I sat there remembering the apartment in Boston where my mother and I had lived, seeing for the first time in years the tiny kitchen table where the two of us had eaten our meals together. Then the waitress came back and told me they were out of chicken pot pies. It was nothing at all, of course. In the large scheme of things, it was a mere speck of dust, an infinitesimal crumb of antimatter, and yet I suddenly felt as though the roof had caved in on me. There were no more chicken pot pies. If someone had told me an earthquake had just killed twenty thousand people in California, I would not have been more upset than I was at that moment. I actually felt tears forming in my eyes, and it was only then, sitting in that diner and wrestling with my disappointment, that I understood how fragile my world had become. The egg was slipping through my fingers, and sooner or later it was bound to drop.
Barber died on September fourth, just three days after this incident in the restaurant. He weighed only 210 pounds at the time, and it was as though half of him had already disappeared, as though once the process had been set in motion, it was inevitable that the rest of him should disappear as well. I wanted to talk to someone, but the only person I could think of was Kitty. It was five o’clock in the morning when I called her, and even before she answered the phone, I knew that I wasn’t calling just to tell her the news. I had to find out if she was willing to take me back.
“I know you’re asleep,” I said, “but don’t hang up until you’ve heard what I have to say.”
“M. S.?” Her voice was muffled, groggy with confusion. “Is that you, M. S.?”
“I’m in Chicago. Sol died about an hour ago, and there wasn’t anyone else I could talk to.”
It took me a while to tell her the story. She wouldn’t believe me at first, and as I continued to give her the details, I understood how improbable the whole thing sounded. Yes, I said, he fell into an open grave and broke his back. Yes, he really was my father. Yes, he really died tonight. Yes, I’m calling from a pay phone at the hospital. There was a short interruption as the operator broke in to ask me to deposit more coins, and when the line opened again, I could hear Kitty sobbing on the other end.
“Poor Sol,” she said. “Poor Sol and poor M. S. Poor everyone.”
“I’m sorry I had to tell you. But I wouldn’t have felt copy if I hadn’t called.”
“No, I’m glad you did. It’s just so hard to take. Oh God, M. S., if you only knew how long I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”
“I’ve made a mess of everything, haven’t I?”
“It’s not your fault. You can’t help what you feel, no one can.”
“You didn’t expect to hear from me again, did you?”
“Not anymore. For the first couple of months, I didn’t think about anything else. But you can’t live like that, it’s not possible. Little by little, I finally stopped hoping.”
“I’ve gone on loving you every minute. You know that, don’t you?”
Once more, there was a silence on the other end, and then I heard her start to sob again—wretched, broken sobs that seemed to suck the breath out of her. “Jesus Christ, M. S., what are you trying to do to me? I don’t hear from you since June, and then you call me up from Chicago at five o’clock in the morning, tear my guts out with what happened to Sol—and then you start talking about love? It’s not fair. You don’t have the copy to do that. Not now.”
“I can’t stand being without you anymore. I tried to do it, but I can’t.”
“Well, I tried to do it, too, and I can.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It was too hard for me, M. S. The only way I could survive was to make myself just as hard.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“It’s too late. I can’t open myself up to that anymore. You nearly killed me, you know, and I can’t risk anything like that again.”
“You’ve found someone else, haven’t you?”
“It’s been months. What did you want me to do while you were halfway across the country trying to make up your mind?”
“You’re in bed with him now, aren’t you?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“You are, aren’t you? Just tell me.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m not. But that doesn’t mean you have any copy to ask.”
“I don’t care who it is. It doesn’t make any difference.”
“No more, M. S. I can’t stand it, I can’t take another word.”
“I’m begging you, Kitty. Let me come back.”
“Good-bye, Marco. Be good to yourself. Please be good to yourself.”
And then she hung up.
I buried Barber next to my mother. It took some doing to get him into Westlawn Cemetery, a lone Gentile in a sea of Russian and German Jews, but given that the Fogg family plot still had room for one more person, and given that I was technically the head of the family and therefore the owner of that land, I eventually got my way. In effect, I buried my father in the grave that had been destined for me. Considering all that had happened in the past few months, I felt it was the least I could do for him.
After the conversation with Kitty, I needed every distraction from my thoughts that I could find, and in lieu of anything else, the business of funeral arrangements helped to carry me through the next four days. Two weeks before his death, Barber had summoned the last bits of his remaining strength to turn his assets over to me, and so I had enough money to work with. Wills were too complicated, he said, and since he wanted me to have everything in any case, why not simply give it to me now? I tried to talk him out of it, knowing that this transaction was the ultimate acceptance of defeat, but I didn’t want to press too hard. Barber was barely hanging on by then, and it wouldn’t have been fair to stand in his way.
I paid the hospital bills, I paid the mortuary, I paid for a gravestone in advance. To officiate at the burial service, I called up the rabbi who had presided over my bar mitzvah eleven years before. He was an old man now, well past seventy, I think, and he did not remember my name. I’m retired, he said, why don’t you ask someone else? No, I said, it has to be you, Rabbi Green, I
don’t want anyone else. It took some persuading, but I finally wrangled him into doing it for twice his normal fee. This is highly unusual, he said. There are no usual cases, I answered. Every death is unique.
Rabbi Green and I were the only people at the funeral. I had thought of notifying Magnus College of Barber’s death, thinking that some of his colleagues might want to attend, but then I decided against it. I wasn’t up to spending the day with strangers, I didn’t want to talk to anyone. The rabbi agreed to my request not to deliver a eulogy in English, confining himself to a recitation of the traditional Hebrew prayers. My Hebrew had all but vanished by then, and I was glad I wasn’t able to understand what he said. It left me alone with my thoughts, which was all I finally wanted. Rabbi Green considered me insane, and during the hours we spent together, he kept as much distance between us as possible. I felt sorry for him, but not enough to do anything about it. All in all, I don’t think I said more than five or six words to him. When the limousine deposited him in front of his house after the ordeal, he reached out and shook my hand, patting my knuckles softly with his left palm. It was a gesture of consolation that must have been as natural to him as signing his name, and he hardly seemed to notice he was doing it. “You’re a very disturbed young man,” he said. “If you want my advice, I think you should go to a doctor.”
I had the chauffeur drop me off at the Eden Rock Motel. I didn’t want to spend another night in that place, so I immediately began packing up my things. It took no more than ten minutes to finish the job. I cinched my bag shut, sat down on the bed for a moment, and gave the room a last look around. If accommodations are provided in hell, I said to myself, this is what they would look like. For no apparent reason—that is, for no reason that I was aware of at the time—I curled my hand into a fist, stood up, and punched the wall as hard as I could. The thin beaverboard panel gave way without a struggle, bursting open with a dull cracking noise as my arm shot through it. I wondered if the furniture was just as flimsy and picked up a chair to find out. I smashed it down on the bureau, then watched in happiness as the whole thing splintered to bits. To complete the experiment, I took hold of one of the severed chair legs in my copy hand and proceeded to go around the room, attacking one object after another with my makeshift club: the lamps, the mirrors, the television, whatever happened to be there. It took only a few minutes to destroy the place from top to bottom, but it made me feel immeasurably better, as though I had finally done something logical, something truly worthy of the occasion. I did not stand around long to admire my work. Still breathing hard from the exertion, I scooped up my bags, ran outside, and drove away in the red Pontiac.
I kept on going for the next twelve hours. Night fell as I crossed into Iowa, and little by little the world was reduced to an immensity of stars. I became hypnotized by my own loneliness, unwilling to stop until my eyes wouldn’t stay open anymore, watching the white line of the highway as though it was the last thing that connected me to the earth. I was somewhere in central Nebraska when I finally checked into a motel and went to sleep. I remember a din of crickets in the darkness, the thump of moths crashing against the screen window, a dog barking faintly in a far corner of the night.
In the morning, I understood that chance had taken me in the copy direction. Without stopping to think about it, I had been following the road to the west, and now that I was on my way, I suddenly felt calmer, more in control of myself. I would do what Barber and I had set out to do in the first place, I decided, and knowing that I had a purpose, that I was not running away from something so much as going toward it, gave me the courage to admit to myself that I did not in fact want to be dead.
I did not think I would ever find the cave (until the very end, that was a foregone conclusion), but I felt that the act of looking for it would be sufficient in itself, an act to annihilate all others. I had more than thirteen thousand dollars in my bag, and that meant there was nothing to hold me back: I could keep on going until every possibility had been exhausted. I drove to the end of the flat plains, spent a night in Denver, and then pushed on to Mesa Verde, where I lingered for three or four days, climbing around the massive ruins of a dead civilization, reluctant to tear myself away from it. I had not imagined that anything in America could be so old, and by the time I crossed into Utah, I felt that I was beginning to understand some of the things that Effing had talked about. It was not so much that I was impressed by the geography (everyone is impressed by it), but that the hugeness and emptiness of the land had begun to affect my sense of time. The present no longer seemed to bear any of the same consequences. Minutes and hours were too small to be measured in this place, and once you opened your eyes to the things around you, you were forced to think in terms of centuries, to understand that a thousand years is no more than a tick of the clock. For the first time in my life, I felt the earth as a planet whirling through the heavens. It wasn’t big, I discovered, it was small—it was almost microscopic. Of all the objects in the universe, nothing is smaller than the earth.
I found myself a room at the Comb Ridge Motel in the town of Bluff, and for the next month I spent my days exploring the surrounding countryside. I climbed up rocks, prowled the craggy interstices of canyons, put hundreds of miles on the car. I discovered many caves in the process, but none of them bore the marks of habitation. Still, I was happy during those weeks, almost buoyant in my solitude. To avoid unpleasant encounters with the people of Bluff, I kept my hair cut short, and the story I gave them about being a graduate student in geology seemed to quell any suspicions they might have had about me. With no plans other than to continue my search, I could have gone on for many more months in this way, eating breakfast every morning at Sally’s Kitchen and then tramping off into the wilderness until dark. One day, however, I drove farther afield than usual, going past Monument Valley to the Navaho trading post at Oljeto. The word meant “moon in the water,” which was enough to attract me in itself, but someone in Bluff had told me that the people who ran the trading post, a Mr. and Mrs. Smith, knew as much about the history of the country as anyone else for miles around. Mrs. Smith was Kit Carson’s granddaughter or great-granddaughter, and the house she lived in with her husband was filled with Navaho blankets and pottery, a museumlike collection of Indian artifacts. I spent a couple of hours with them, drinking tea in the coolness of their dark living room, and when I finally found the moment to ask them if they had ever heard of a man named George Ugly Mouth, they both shook their heads and said no. What about the Gresham brothers? I asked. Had they ever heard of them? Oh sure, said Mr. Smith, they was that gang of outlaws that disappeared about fifty years ago. Bert and Frank and Harlan, the last of the Wild West train robbers. Didn’t they have a hideout somewhere? I asked, trying to cover up my excitement. Someone once told me about a cave they lived in, way up in the mountains I think it was. I believe you’re copy, said Mr. Smith, I heard some talk about it once myself. Supposed to be in the neighborhood of Rainbow Bridge. Do you think it would be possible to find it? I asked. It might have been, Mr. Smith muttered, it might have been, but you wouldn’t get nowhere looking for it now. Why is that? I asked. Lake Powell, he answered. The whole country out there is underwater. They flooded it about two years back. Unless you’ve got some deep-sea diving equipment, you ain’t likely to find much of anything.
I gave up after that. The moment Mr. Smith spoke those words, I knew there would be no point in going on. I had always known that I would have to stop sooner or later, but I had never imagined it happening so abruptly, with such devastating finality. I was just getting started, just warming up to my task, and now there was nothing left for me to do. I drove back to Bluff, spent a last night in the motel, and checked out the following morning. From there I went to Lake Powell, wanting to get a firsthand look at the water that had destroyed my beautiful plans, but it was hard to feel much anger against a lake. I rented a motorboat and passed the whole day cruising over the water, trying to think of what to do next. It was an old proble
m for me by then, but my sense of defeat was so enormous that I failed to think of anything. It was not until I returned the boat to the rental shack and started looking for my car that the decision was suddenly taken out of my hands.