Mr. Vertigo

by Paul Auster

  The weather broke in early September. Downpours, lightning and thunder, high winds, a tornado that barely missed carrying away the house. Water levels rose again, but otherwise we were no better off than we’d been. The crops had failed, and with nothing to add to our long-term supplies, prospects for the future were bleak, touch and go at best. The master reported that farmers all over the region had been similarly devastated, and the mood in town was turning ugly. Prices were down, credit was scarce, and talk of bank foreclosures was in the air. When pocketbooks are empty, the master said, brains fill with anger and smut. “Those peckerwoods can rot for all I care,” he continued, “but after a while they’re going to look for someone to blame their troubles on, and when that happens, the four of us had better duck.” Throughout that strange autumn of storms and drenchings, Master Yehudi seemed distracted with worry, as if he were contemplating some unnameable disaster, a thing so black he dared not say it aloud. After coddling me all summer, urging me on through the rigors of my spiritual exercises, he suddenly seemed to have lost interest in me. His absences became more frequent, once or twice he stumbled in with what smelled like liquor on his breath, and he had all but abandoned his study sessions with Aesop. A new sadness had crept into his eyes, a look of wistfulness and foreboding. Much of this is dim to me now, but I remember that during the brief moments when he graced me with his company, he acted with surprising warmth. One incident stands out from the blur: an evening in early October when he walked into the house with a newspaper under his arm and a big grin on his face. “I have good news for you,” he said to me, sitting down and spreading out the paper on the kitchen table. “Your team won. I hope that makes you glad, because it says here it’s been thirty-eight years since they came out on top.”

  “My team?” I said.

  “The Saint Louis Cardinals. That’s your team, isn’t it?”

  “You bet it is. I’m with those Redbirds till the end of time.”

  “Well, they’ve just won the World Series. According to what’s printed here, the seventh game was the most breathless, riveting contest ever played.”

  That was how I learned my boys had become the 1926 champions. Master Yehudi read me the account of the dramatic seventh inning, when Grover Cleveland Alexander came in to strike out Tony Lazzeri with the bases loaded. For the first few minutes, I thought he was making it up. The last I’d heard, Alexander was top dog on the Philly staff, and Lazzeri was a name that meant nothing to me. It sounded like a pile of foreign noodles smothered in garlic sauce, but then the master informed me that he was a rookie and that Grover had been traded to the Cards in midseason. He’d hurled nine innings just the day before, shutting down the Yanks to knot the series at three games apiece, and here was Rogers Hornsby calling him in from the bullpen to snuff out a rally with the whole ball of wax on the line. And the old guy sauntered in, drunk as a skunk from last night’s bender, and mowed down the young New York hotshot. If not for a couple of inches, it would have been another story. On the pitch before the third strike, Lazzeri drove one into the left field seats, a sure grand slam that hooked foul at the last second. It was enough to give you apoplexy. Alexander hung in there through the eighth and ninth to nail down the win, and to top it off, the game and the series ended when Babe Ruth, the one and only Sultan of Swat, was thrown out trying to steal second base. There had never been anything like it. It was the maddest, most infernal game in history, and my Redbirds were the champs, the best team in the world.

  That was a watershed for me, a landmark event in my young life, but otherwise the fall was a somber stretch, a long interlude of boredom and quiet. After a while, I got so antsy that I asked Aesop if he wouldn’t mind teaching me how to read. He was more than willing, but he had to clear it with Master Yehudi first, and when the master gave his approval, I confess that I was a little hurt. He’d always said how he wanted to keep me stupid—how it was an advantage as far as my training was concerned—and now he had blithely gone ahead and reversed himself without any explanation. For a time I thought it meant he had given up on me, and disappointment festered in my heart, a hangdog sorrow that dragged down all my bright dreams and turned them to dust. What had I done wrong, I asked myself, and why had he deserted me when I most needed him?

  So I learned the letters and numbers with Aesop’s help, and once I got started, they came so quickly that I wondered what all the fuss had been about. If I wasn’t going to fly, at least I could convince the master that I wasn’t a dolt, but so little effort was involved, it soon felt like a hollow victory. Spirits around the house picked up for a while in November when our food shortage was suddenly eliminated. Without telling anyone where he’d found the money to do such a thing, the master had secretly arranged for a delivery of canned goods. It felt like a miracle when it happened, an absolute bolt from the blue. A truck arrived at our door one morning and two burly men began unloading cartons from the back. There were hundreds of boxes, and each box contained two dozen cans of food: vegetables of every variety, meats and broths, puddings, preserved apricots and peaches, an outflow of unimaginable abundance. It took the men over an hour to haul the shipment into the house, and the whole time the master just stood there with his arms folded across his chest, grinning like a crafty old owl. Aesop and I both gawked, and after a while he called us over to him and put a hand on each of our shoulders. “It can’t hold a candle to Mother Sioux’s cooking,” he said, “but it’s a damn sight better than mush, eh boys? When the chips are down, just remember who to count on. No matter how dark our troubles might be, I’ll always find a way to pull us through.”

  However he had managed it, the crisis was over. Our larder was full again, and we no longer stood up from meals craving more, no longer moaned about our gurgling bellies. You’d think this turnaround would have earned our undying gratitude, but the fact was that we quickly learned to take it for granted. Within ten days, it seemed perfectly normal that we should be eating well, and by the end of the month it was hard to remember the days when we hadn’t. That’s how it is with want. As long as you lack something, you yearn for it without cease. If only I could have that one thing, you tell yourself, all my problems would be solved. But once you get it, once the object of your desires is thrust into your hands, it begins to lose its charm. Other wants assert themselves, other desires make themselves felt, and bit by bit you discover that you’re right back where you started. So it was with my reading lessons; so it was with the newfound plenty jammed into the kitchen cupboards. I had thought those things would make a difference, but in the end they were no more than shadows, substitute longings for the one thing I really wanted—which was precisely the thing I couldn’t have. I needed the master to love me again. That’s what the story of those months came down to. I hungered for the master’s affections, and no amount of food was ever going to satisfy me. After two years, I had learned that everything I was flowed directly from him. He had made me in his own image, and now he wasn’t there for me anymore. For reasons I couldn’t understand, I felt I had lost him forever.

  It never occurred to me to think of Mrs. Witherspoon. Not even when Mother Sioux dropped a hint one night about the master’s “widow lady” in Wichita did I put six and three together. I was backward in that regard, an eleven-year-old know-it-all who didn’t understand the first thing that went on between men and women. I assumed it was all carnal, intermittent spasms of wayward lust, and when Aesop talked to me about planting his boners in a nice warm quim (he had just turned seventeen), I immediately thought of the whores I’d known in Saint Louis, the blowsy, wisecracking dolls who strutted up and down the alleys at two in the morning, peddling their bodies for cold, hard cash. I didn’t know dirt about grown-up love or marriage or any of the so-called lofty sentiments. The only married couple I’d seen was Uncle Slim and Aunt Peg, and that was such a brutal combination, such a frenzy of spitting, cursing, and clamor, it probably made sense that I was so ignorant. When the master went away, I figured he was playing poker
somewhere or belting back a bottle of rotgut in a Cibola speakeasy. It never dawned on me that he was in Wichita courting a high-class lady like Marion Witherspoon—and gradually getting his heart broken in the process. I had actually laid eyes on her myself, but I had been so sick and feverish at the time that I could scarcely remember her. She was a hallucination, a figment born in the throes of death, and even though her face flashed through me every now and then, I did not credit her as real. If anything, I thought she was my mother—but then I would grow scared, appalled that I couldn’t recognize my own mother’s ghost.

  It took a couple of near disasters to set me straight. In early December, Aesop cut his finger opening a can of cling peaches. It seemed like nothing at first, a simple scratch that would heal in no time, but instead of scabbing over as it should have, it swelled up into a frightful bloat of pus and rawness, and by the third day poor Aesop was languishing in bed with a high fever. It was fortunate that Master Yehudi was home then, for in addition to his other talents, he had a fair knowledge of medicine, and when he went upstairs to Aesop’s room the next morning to see how the patient was doing, he walked out two minutes later shaking his head and blinking back a rush of tears. “There’s no time to waste,” he said to me. “Gangrene has set in, and unless we get rid of that finger now, it’s liable to spread through his hand and up into his arm. Run outside and tell Mother Sioux to drop what’s she’s doing and put on two pots of water to boil. I’ll go down to the kitchen and sharpen the knives. We have to operate within the hour.”

  I did what I was told, and once I’d rounded up Mother Sioux from the barnyard, I dashed back into the house, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and parked myself beside my friend. Aesop looked dreadful. The lustrous black of his skin had turned to a chalky, mottled gray, and I could hear the phlegm rattling in his chest as his head lolled back and forth on the pillow.

  “Hang on, buddy,” I said. “It won’t be long now. The master’s going to fix you up, and before you know it you’ll be downstairs at the ivories again, twiddling out one of your goofy rags.”

  “Walt?” he said. “Is that you, Walt?” He opened his bloodshot eyes and looked in the direction of my voice, but his pupils were so glazed over I wasn’t sure he could see me.

  “Of course it’s me,” I answered. “Who else do you think would be sitting here at a time like this?”

  “He’s going to cut off my finger, Walt. I’ll be deformed for life, and no girl will ever want me.”

  “You’re already deformed for life, and that hasn’t stopped you from hankering for twat, has it? He ain’t going to cut off your dick, Aesop. Only a finger, and a finger on your left hand at that. As long as your willy’s still attached, you can bang the broads till kingdom come.”

  “I don’t want to lose my finger,” he moaned. “If I lose my finger, it means there’s no justice. It means that God has turned his back on me.”

  “I ain’t got but nine and a half fingers myself, and it don’t bother me hardly at all. Once you lose yours, we’ll be just like twins. Bonafide members of the Nine Finger Club, brothers till the day we drop—just like the master always said.”

  I did what I could to reassure him, but once the operation began, I was shunted aside and forgotten. I stood in the doorway with my hands over my face, peeking through the cracks every now and then as the master and Mother Sioux did their work. There was no ether or anaesthetic, and Aesop howled and howled, belting out a horrific, bloodcurdling noise that never slackened from start to finish. Sorry as I felt for him, those howls nearly undid me. They were inhuman, and the terror they expressed was so deep and so prolonged, it was all I could do not to begin screaming myself. Master Yehudi went about his business with the calm of a trained doctor, but the howls got to Mother Sioux just as badly as they got to me. That was the last thing I was expecting from her. I’d always thought that Indians hid their feelings, that they were braver and more stoical than white folks, but the truth was that Mother S. was unhinged, and as the blood continued to spurt and Aesop’s pain continued to mount, she gasped and whimpered as if the knife was tearing into her own flesh. Master Yehudi told her to get a grip on herself. She apologized, but fifteen seconds later she started sobbing again. She was a pitiful nurse, and after a while her tearful interruptions so distracted the master that he had to send her out of the room. “We need a fresh bucket of boiling water,” he said. “Snap to it, woman. On the double.” It was just an excuse to get rid of her, and as she rushed past me into the hall, she buried her face in her hands and wept on blindly to the top of the stairs. I had a clear view of everything that happened after that: the way her foot snagged on the first step, the way her knee buckled as she tried to right her balance, and then the headlong fall down the stairs—the thumping, tumbling career of her huge bulk as it crashed to the bottom. She landed with a thud that shook the entire house. An instant later she let out a shriek, then grabbed hold of her left leg and started writhing around on the floor. “You dumb old bitch,” she said to herself. “You dumb old floozy bitch, now look what you done. You fell down the stairs and broke your goddamn leg.”

  For the next couple of weeks, the house was as gloomy as a hospital. There were two invalids to be taken care of, and the master and I spent our days rushing up and down the stairs, serving them their meals, emptying their potties, and doing everything short of wiping their bedridden asses. Aesop was in a funk of self-pity and dejection, Mother Sioux rained down curses on herself from morning to night, and what with the animals to be looked after in the barn and the rooms to be cleaned and the beds to be made and the dishes to be washed and the stove to be fed, there wasn’t so much as a minute left over for the master and me to do our work. Christmas was approaching, the time when I was supposed to be off the ground, and I was still as subject to the laws of gravity as I’d ever been. It was my darkest moment in over a year. I’d been turned into a regular citizen who did his chores and knew how to read and write, and if it went on any longer, I’d probably wind up taking elocution lessons and joining the Boy Scouts.

  One morning, I woke up a little earlier than usual. I checked in on Aesop and Mother Sioux, saw that they were both still asleep, and tiptoed down the stairs, intending to surprise the master with my predawn levee. Ordinarily, he would have been down in the kitchen at that hour, cooking breakfast and preparing to start the day. But there were no smells of coffee wafting up from the stove, no sounds of bacon crackling in the pan, and sure enough, when I entered the room it turned out to be empty. He’s in the barn, I told myself, gathering eggs or milking one of the cows, but then I realized that the stove had not been lit. Starting the fire was the first order of business on winter mornings, and the temperature downstairs was frigid, cold enough for me to send forth a burst of vapor every time I exhaled. Well, I continued to myself, maybe the old guy is fagged out and wanted to catch up on his beauty sleep. That would certainly put a new twist on things, wouldn’t it? For me to be the one to rouse him from bed instead of vice versa. So I went back upstairs and knocked on his bedroom door, and when there was no response after several tries, I opened the door and gingerly stepped across the threshold. Master Yehudi was nowhere to be found. Not only was he not in his bed, but the bed itself was neatly made and bore no signs of having been slept in that night. He’s run out on us, I said to myself. He’s upped and skedaddled, and that’s the last we’ll ever see of him.

  For the next hour, my mind was a free-for-all of desperate thoughts. I spun from sorrow to anger, from belligerence to laughter, from snarling grief to vile self-mockery. The universe had gone up in smoke, and I was left to dwell among the ashes, alone forever among the smoldering ruins of betrayal.

  Mother Sioux and Aesop slept on in their beds, oblivious to my rantings and my tears. Somehow or other (I can’t remember how I got there), I was down in the kitchen again, lying on my stomach with my face pressed against the floor, rubbing my nose into the filthy wooden planks. There were no more tears to be gotten out
of me—only a dry, choked heaving, an aftermath of hiccups and scorched, airless breaths. Presently I grew still, almost tranquil, and bit by bit a sense of calm spread through me, radiating out among my muscles and oozing toward the tips of my fingers and toes. There were no more thoughts in my head, no more feelings in my heart. I was weightless inside my own body, floating on a placid wave of nothingness, utterly detached and indifferent to the world around me. And that’s when I did it for the first time—without warning, without the least notion that it was about to happen. Very slowly, I felt my body rise off the floor. The movement was so natural, so exquisite in its gentleness, it wasn’t until I opened my eyes that I understood my limbs were touching only air. I was not far off the ground—no more than an inch or two—but I hung there without effort, suspended like the moon in the night sky, motionless and aloft, conscious only of the air fluttering in and out of my lungs. I can’t say how long I hovered like that, but at a certain moment, with the same slowness and gentleness as before, I eased back to the ground. Everything had been drained out of me by then, and my eyes were already shut. Without so much as a single thought about what had just taken place, I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, sinking like a stone to the bottom of the world.