by Paul Auster
“You’re confusing thoughts with deeds,” I said. “There’s a world of difference between doing something and just thinking about it. If we didn’t make that distinction, life would be impossible.”
“I’m not talking about that. The point was that I wanted to do something that just a moment before I hadn’t been aware of wanting to do. It wasn’t a question of being unfaithful to Fanny, it was a question of self-knowledge. I found it appalling to discover that I was capable of tricking myself like that. If I’d put a stop to it right then and there, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but even after I understood what I was up to. I went on flirting with her anyway.”
“But you didn’t touch her. In the end, that’s the only thing that counts.”
“No, I didn’t touch her. But I worked things out so she would have to touch me. As far as I’m concerned, that’s even worse. I was dishonest with myself. I stuck to the letter of the law like a good little Boy Scout, but I utterly betrayed its spirit. That’s why I fell off the fire escape. It wasn’t really an accident, Peter. I caused it myself. I acted like a coward, and then I had to pay for it.”
“Are you telling me you jumped?”
“No, nothing as simple as that. I ran a stupid risk, that’s all. I did something unforgivable because I was too ashamed to admit to myself that I wanted to touch Maria Turner’s leg. In my opinion, a man who goes to such lengths of self-deception deserves whatever he gets.”
That was why he took her out onto the fire escape. It was an exit from the awkward scene that had developed in the kitchen, but it was also the first step of an elaborate plan, a ruse that would allow him to rub up against Maria Turner’s body and still keep his honor intact. This was what so galled him in retrospect: not the fact of his desire, but the denial of that desire as a duplicitous means of fulfilling it. Everything was chaos out there, he said. Cheering crowds, exploding fireworks, a frenetic, pulsing din in his ears. They stood on the platform for several moments watching a volley of rockets illuminate the sky, and then he put the first part of his plan into effect. Given a lifetime of fear in such situations, it was remarkable that he did not hesitate. Moving forward to the edge of the platform, he swung his right leg over the railing, briefly steadied himself by taking hold of the bar with his two hands, and then swung his left leg over as well. Rocking slightly back and forth as he corrected his balance, he heard Maria gasp behind him. She thought he was about to jump, Sachs realized, and so he quickly reassured her, insisting that he was only trying to get a better view. Fortunately, Maria wasn’t satisfied with his answer. She pleaded with him to climb down, and when he wouldn’t do that, she did the very thing he was hoping she would do, the very thing his reckless stratagems had been calculated to make happen. She rushed up from behind him and wrapped her arms around his chest. That was all: a tiny act of concern that disguised itself as a passionate, full-fledged embrace. If it didn’t quite produce the ecstatic response he had been looking forward to (he was too scared to give it his full attention), neither did it wholly disappoint him. He could feel the warmth of her breath fluttering against the back of his neck, he could feel her breasts pushing into his spine, he could smell her perfume. It was the briefest of moments, the smallest of small, ephemeral pleasures, but as her bare, slender arms tightened around him, he experienced something that resembled happiness—a microscopic shudder, a surge of transitory bliss. His gamble seemed to have paid off. He had only to get himself down from there, and the whole masquerade would have been worth it. His plan was to lean back against Maria and use her body for support as he lowered himself to the platform (which would prolong the contact between them until the last possible second), but just as Sachs started shifting his weight to carry out this operation, Agnes Darwin was catching the heel of her shoe and stumbling into Maria from behind. Sachs had loosened his grip from the bar of the railing, and when Maria suddenly crashed into him with a violent forward thrust, his fingers opened and his hands lost contact with the bar. His center of gravity heaved upward, he felt himself pitching out from the building, and an instant later he was surrounded by nothing but air.
“It couldn’t have taken me long to reach the ground,” he said. “Maybe a second or two, three at most. But I distinctly remember having more than one thought during that time. First came the horror, the moment of recognition, the instant when I understood that I was falling. You’d think that would have been all, that I wouldn’t have had time to think of anything else. But the horror didn’t last. No, that’s wrong, the horror continued, but there was another thought that grew up inside it, something stronger than just horror alone. It’s hard to give it a name. A feeling of absolute certainty, perhaps. An immense, overpowering rush of conviction, a taste of some ultimate truth. I’ve never been so certain of anything in my life. First I realized that I was falling, and then I realized that I was dead. I don’t mean that I sensed I was going to die, I mean that I was already dead. I was a dead man falling through the air, and even though I was technically still alive, I was dead, as dead as a man who’s been buried in his grave. I don’t know how else to put it. Even as I fell, I was already past the moment of hitting the ground, past the moment of impact, past the moment of shattering into pieces. I had turned into a corpse, and by the time I hit the clothesline and landed in those towels and blankets, I wasn’t there anymore. I had left my body, and for a split second I actually saw myself disappear.”
There were questions I wanted to ask him then, but I didn’t interrupt. Sachs was having trouble getting the story out, talking in a trance of hesitations and awkward silences, and I was afraid that a sudden word from me would throw him off course. To be honest, I didn’t quite understand what he was trying to say. There was no question that the fall had been a ghastly experience, but I was confused by how much effort he put into describing the small events that had preceded it. The business with Maria struck me as trivial, of no genuine importance, a trite comedy of manners not worth talking about. In Sachs’s mind, however, there was a direct connection. The one thing had caused the other, which meant that he didn’t see the fall as an accident or a piece of bad luck so much as some grotesque form of punishment. I wanted to tell him that he was wrong, that he was being overly hard on himself—but I didn’t. I just sat there and listened to him as he went on analyzing his own behavior. He was trying to present me with an absolutely precise account, splitting hairs with the patience of a medieval theologian, straining to articulate every nuance of his harmless dalliance with Maria out on the fire escape. It was infinitely subtle, infinitely labored and complex, and after a while I began to understand that this lilliputian drama had taken on the same magnitude for him as the fall itself. There was no difference anymore. A quick, ludicrous embrace had become the moral equivalent of death. If Sachs hadn’t been so earnest about it, I would have found it comical. Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to me to laugh. I was trying to be sympathetic, to hear him out and accept what he had to say on its own terms. Looking back on it now, I believe I would have served him better if I had told him what I thought. I should have laughed in his face. I should have told him he was crazy and made him stop. If there was ever a moment when I failed Sachs as a friend, it was that afternoon four years ago. I had my chance to help him, and I let the opportunity slip through my fingers.
He never made a conscious decision not to speak, he said. It just happened that way, and even as his silence continued, he felt ashamed of himself for causing so many people to worry. There was never any question of brain damage or shock, never any sign of physical impairment. He understood everything that was said to him, and in his heart he knew that he was capable of expressing himself on any subject. The pivotal moment had come at the beginning, when he opened his eyes and saw an unfamiliar woman staring directly into his face—a nurse, as he later discovered. He heard her announce to someone that Rip Van Winkle had finally woken up—or perhaps those words were addressed to him, he couldn’t be sure. He wanted to say something back to her, bu
t his mind was already in a tumult, wheeling in all directions at once, and with the pain in his bones suddenly making itself felt, he decided that he was too weak to answer her just then and let the opportunity pass. Sachs had never done anything like that before, and as the nurse continued to chatter away at him, eventually joined by a doctor and a second nurse, the three of them crowding around his bed, encouraging him to tell them how he felt, Sachs went on thinking his own thoughts as if they weren’t there, glad to have released himself from the burden of answering them. He assumed it would happen just that once, but the same thing happened the next time, and then the next time, and the time after that as well. Whenever someone spoke to him, Sachs was seized by the same odd compulsion to hold his tongue. As the days went on, he became ever more steadfast in his silence, acting as though it were a point of honor, a secret challenge to keep faith with himself. He would listen to the words that people directed at him, carefully weighing each sentence as it entered his ears, but then, instead of offering a remark of his own, he would turn away, or close his eyes, or stare back at his interlocutor as though he could see straight through him. Sachs knew how childish and petulant this behavior was, but that didn’t make it any less difficult for him to stop. The doctors and nurses meant nothing to him, and he felt no great responsibility toward Maria, or myself, or any of his other friends. Fanny was different, however, and there were several instances when he came close to backing down for her sake. At the very least, a flicker of regret would pass through him whenever she came to visit. He understood how cruel he was being to her, and it filled him with a sense of worthlessness, a loathsome aftertaste of guilt. Sometimes, as he lay there in bed warring with his conscience, he would make a feeble attempt to smile at her, and once or twice he actually went so far as to move his lips, producing some faint gurgling sounds in the back of his throat to convince her that he was doing his best, that sooner or later real words would start coming out of him. He hated himself for these shams, but too many things were happening inside his silence now, and he couldn’t summon the will to break it.
Contrary to what the doctors supposed, Sachs remembered every detail of the accident. He had only to think about any one moment of that night for the whole night to return in all its sickening immediacy: the party, Maria Turner, the fire escape, the first moments of his fall, the certainty of death, the clothesline, the cement. None of it was dim, no piece of it was less vivid than any other piece. The entire event stood in a surfeit of clarity, an avalanche of overpowering recall. Something extraordinary had taken place, and before it lost its force within him, he needed to devote his unstinting attention to it. Hence his silence. It was not a refusal so much as a method, a way of holding onto the horror of that night long enough to make sense of it. To be silent was to enclose himself in contemplation, to relive the moments of his fall again and again, as if he could suspend himself in midair for the rest of time—forever just two inches off the ground, forever waiting for the apocalypse of the last moment.
He had no intention of forgiving himself, he told me. His guilt was a foregone conclusion, and the less time he wasted on it the better. “At any other moment in my life,” he said, “I probably would have looked for excuses. Accidents happen, after all. Every hour of every day, people are dying when they least expect it. They burn up in fires, they drown in lakes, they drive their cars into other cars, they fall out of windows. You read about it in the paper every morning, and you’d have to be a fool not to know that your life could end just as abruptly and pointlessly as any one of those poor bastards’. But the fact was that my accident wasn’t caused by bad luck. I wasn’t just a victim, I was an accomplice, an active partner in everything that happened to me, and I can’t ignore that, I have to take some responsibility for the role I played. Does this make sense to you, or am I talking gibberish? I’m not saying that flirting with Maria Turner was a crime. It was a shabby business, a despicable little stunt, but not a hell of a lot more than that. I might have felt like a shit for lusting after her, but if that tweak in my gonads was the whole story, I would have forgotten all about it by now. What I’m saying is that I don’t think sex had much to do with what happened that night. That’s one of the things I figured out in the hospital, lying in bed for all those days without talking. If I’d really been serious about chasing after Maria Turner, why did I go to such ridiculous lengths to trick her into touching me? God knows there were less dangerous ways of going about it, a hundred more effective strategies for achieving the same result. But I turned myself into a daredevil out there on the fire escape, I actually risked my life. For what? For a tiny squeeze in the dark, for nothing at all. Looking back on that scene from my hospital bed, I finally understood that everything was different from how I had imagined it. I had gotten it backwards, I had been looking at it upside-down. The point of my crazy antics wasn’t to get Maria Turner to put her arms around me, it was to risk my life. She was only a pretext, an instrument for getting me onto the railing, a hand to guide me to the edge of disaster. The question was: Why did I do it? Why was I so eager to court that risk? I must have asked myself that question six hundred times a day, and each time I asked it, a tremendous chasm would open up inside me, and immediately after that I would be falling again, plunging headlong into the darkness. I don’t want to be overly dramatic about it, but those days in the hospital were the worst days of my life. I had put myself in a position to fall, I realized, and I had done it on purpose. That was my discovery, the unassailable conclusion that rose up out of my silence. I learned that I didn’t want to live. For reasons that are still impenetrable to me, I climbed onto the railing that night in order to kill myself.”
“You were drunk,” I said. “You didn’t know what you were doing.”
“I was drunk, and I knew exactly what I was doing. It’s just that I didn’t know I knew it.”
“That’s double-talk. Pure sophistry.”
“I didn’t know that I knew, and the drinks gave me the courage to act. They helped me do the thing I didn’t know I wanted to do.”
“You told me you fell because you were too afraid to touch Maria’s leg. Now you change your story and tell me that you fell on purpose. You can’t have it both ways. It’s got to be one or the other.”
“It’s both. The one thing led to the other, and they can’t be separated. I’m not saying I understand it, I’m just telling you how it was, what I know to be true. I was ready to do away with myself that night. I can still feel it in my gut, and it scares the hell out of me to walk around with that feeling.”
“There’s a part in everyone that wants to die,” I said, “a little caldron of self-destructiveness that’s always boiling under the surface. For some reason, the fires were stoked too high for you that night, and something crazy happened. But just because it happened once, it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen again.”
“Maybe so. But that doesn’t wash away the fact that it happened, and it happened for a reason. If I could be caught by surprise like that, it must mean there’s something fundamentally wrong with me. It must mean that I don’t believe in my life anymore.”
“If you didn’t believe in it, you wouldn’t have started talking again. You must have come to some kind of decision. You must have settled things for yourself by then.”
“Not really. You walked into the room with David, and he came up to my bed and smiled at me. I suddenly found myself saying hello to him. It was as simple as that. He looked so nice. All tanned and healthy from his weeks at camp, a perfect nine-year-old boy. When he walked up to my bed and smiled at me, it never occurred to me not to talk to him.”
“There were tears in your eyes. I thought that meant you had resolved something for yourself, that you were on your way back.”
“It meant that I knew I’d hit bottom. It meant that I understood I had to change my life.”
“Changing your life isn’t the same thing as wanting to end it.”
“I want to end the life I’ve been livi
ng up to now. I want everything to change. If I don’t manage to do that, I’m going to be in deep trouble. My whole life has been a waste, a stupid little joke, a dismal string of petty failures. I’m going to be forty-one years old next week, and if I don’t take hold of things now, I’m going to drown. I’m going to sink like a stone to the bottom of the world.”
“You just need to get back to work. The minute you start writing again, you’ll begin to remember who you are.”
“The idea of writing disgusts me. It doesn’t mean a goddamned thing to me anymore.”
“This isn’t the first time you’ve talked like this.”
“Maybe not. But this time I mean it. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life rolling pieces of blank paper into a typewriter. I want to stand up from my desk and do something. The days of being a shadow are over. I’ve got to step into the real world now and do something.”
“Like what?”
“Who the hell knows?” Sachs said. His words hung in the air for several seconds, and then, without warning, his face broke into a smile. It was the first smile I had seen on him in weeks, and for that one transitory moment, he almost began to look like his old self again. “When I figure it out,” he said, “I’ll write you a letter.”
I left Sachs’s apartment thinking he would pull through the crisis. Not right away, perhaps, but over the long term I found it difficult to imagine that things wouldn’t return to normal for him. He had too much resiliency, I told myself, too much intelligence and stamina to let the accident crush him. It’s possible that I was underestimating the degree to which his confidence had been shaken, but I tend to think not. I saw how tormented he was, I saw the anguish of his doubts and self-recriminations, but in spite of the hateful things he said about himself that afternoon, he had also flashed me a smile, and I read that fugitive burst of irony as a signal of hope, as proof that Sachs had it in him to make a full recovery.