by Paul Auster
“It means that you can’t live without other people,” I said. “When they’re there for you in the flesh, the real world is sufficient. When you’re alone, you have to invent imaginary characters. You need them for the companionship.”
All through the visit, the three of us kept ourselves busy doing nothing. We ate and drank, we swam in the pond, we talked. Sachs had installed an all-weather basketball court behind the house, and for an hour or so each morning we shot hoops and played one-on-one (he whipped me soundly every time). While Iris napped in the afternoons, he and I would take turns carrying Sonia around the yard, rocking her to sleep as we talked. The first night, I stayed up late and read the typescript of his book-in-progress. The other two nights, we stayed up late together, discussing what he had written so far and what was still to come. The sun shone on three of the four days; the temperatures were warm for that time of year. All in all, it was just about perfect.
Sachs’s book was only a third written at that point, and the piece I read was still a long way from being finished. Sachs understood that, and when he gave me the manuscript the first night I was there, he wasn’t looking for detailed criticisms or suggestions on how to improve this or that passage. He just wanted to know if I thought he should continue. “I’ve reached a stage where I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” he said. “I can’t tell if it’s good or bad. I can’t tell if it’s the best thing I’ve ever done or a pile of garbage.”
It wasn’t garbage. That much was clear to me from the first page, but as I worked my way through the rest of the draft, I also realized that Sachs was onto something remarkable. This was the book I had always imagined he could write, and if it had taken a disaster to get him started, then perhaps it hadn’t been a disaster at all. Or so I persuaded myself at the time. Whatever problems I found in the manuscript, whatever cuts and changes would ultimately have to be made, the essential thing was that Sachs had begun, and I wasn’t going to let him stop. “Just keep writing and don’t look back,” I told him over breakfast the next morning. “If you can push on to the end, it’s going to be a great book. Mark my words: a great and memorable book.”
It’s impossible for me to know if he could have pulled it off. At the time, I felt certain that he would, and when Iris and I said good-bye to him on the last day, it never even crossed my mind to doubt it. The pages I had read were one thing, but Sachs and I had also talked, and based on what he said about the book over the next two nights, I was convinced that he had the situation well in hand, that he understood what lay ahead of him. If that’s true, then I can’t imagine anything more sickening or terrible. Of all the tragedies my poor friend created for himself, leaving this book unfinished becomes the hardest one to bear. I don’t mean to say that books are more important than life, but the fact is that everyone dies, everyone disappears in the end, and if Sachs had managed to finish his book, there’s a chance it might have outlived him. That’s what I’ve chosen to believe, in any case. As it stands now, the book is no more than the promise of a book, a potential book buried in a box of messy manuscript pages and a smattering of notes. That’s all that’s left of it, along with our two late-night conversations out in the open air, sitting under a moonless sky crammed full of stars. I thought his life was beginning all over again, that he had come to the brink of an extraordinary future, but it turned out that he was almost at the end. Less than a month after I saw him in Vermont, Sachs stopped working on his book. He went out for a walk one afternoon in the middle of September, and the earth suddenly swallowed him up. That was the long and the short of it, and from that day on he never wrote another word.
To mark what will never exist, I have given my book the same title that Sachs was planning to use for his: Leviathan.
4
I didn’t see him again for close to two years. Maria was the only person who knew where he was, and Sachs had made her promise not to tell. Most people would have broken that promise, I think, but Maria had given her word, and no matter how dangerous it was for her to keep it, she refused to open her mouth. I must have run into her half a dozen times in those two years, but even when we talked about Sachs, she never let on that she knew more about his disappearance than I did. Last summer, when I finally learned how much she had been holding back from me, I got so angry that I wanted to kill her. But that was my problem, not Maria’s, and I had no right to vent my frustration on her. A promise is a promise, after all, and even though her silence wound up causing a lot of damage, I don’t think she was wrong to do what she did. If anyone should have spoken up, it was Sachs. He was the one responsible for what happened, and it was his secret that Maria was protecting. But Sachs said nothing. For two whole years, he kept himself hidden and never said a word.
We knew that he was alive, but as the months passed and no message came from him, not even that was certain anymore. Only bits and pieces remained, a few ghostlike facts. We knew that he had left Vermont, that he had not driven his own car, and that for one horrible minute Fanny had seen him in Brooklyn. Beyond that, everything was conjecture. Since he hadn’t called to announce he was coming, we assumed that he had something urgent to tell her, but whatever that thing was, they never got around to talking about it. He just showed up one night out of the blue (“all distraught and crazy in the eyes,” as Fanny put it) and burst into the bedroom of their apartment. That led to the awful scene I mentioned earlier. If the room had been dark, it might have been less embarrassing for all of them, but several lights happened to be on, Fanny and Charles were naked on top of the covers, and Ben saw everything. It was clearly the last thing he expected to find. Before Fanny could say a word to him, he had already backed out of the room, stammering that he was sorry, that he hadn’t known, that he hadn’t meant to disturb her. She scrambled out of bed, but by the time she reached the front hall, the apartment door had banged shut and Sachs was racing down the stairs. She couldn’t go outside with nothing on, so she rushed into the living room, opened the window, and called down to him in the street. Sachs stopped for a moment and waved up at her. “My blessings on you both!” he shouted. Then he blew her a kiss, turned in the other direction, and ran off into the night.
Fanny telephoned us immediately after that. She figured he might be on his way to our place next, but her hunch proved wrong. Iris and I sat up half the night waiting for him, but Sachs never appeared. From then on, there were no more signs of his whereabouts. Fanny called the house in Vermont repeatedly, but no one ever answered. That was our last hope, and as the days went by, it seemed less and less likely that Sachs would return there. Panic set in; a contagion of morbid thoughts spread among us. Not knowing what else to do, Fanny rented a car that first weekend and drove up to the house herself. As she reported to me on the phone after she arrived, the evidence was puzzling. The front door had been left unlocked, the car was sitting in its usual place in the yard, and Ben’s work was laid out on the desk in the studio: finished manuscript pages stacked in one pile, pens scattered beside it, a half-written page still in the typewriter. In other words, it looked as though he were about to come back any minute. If he had been planning to leave for any length of time, she said, the house would have been closed. The pipes would have been drained, the electricity would have been turned off, the refrigerator would have been emptied. “And he would have taken his manuscript,” I added. “Even if he had forgotten everything else, there’s no way he would have left without that.”
The situation refused to add up. No matter how thoroughly we analyzed it, we were always left with the same conundrum. On the one hand, Sachs’s departure had been unexpected. On the other hand, he had left of his own free will. If not for that fleeting encounter with Fanny in New York, we might have suspected foul play, but Sachs had made it down to the city unharmed. A bit frazzled, perhaps, but essentially unharmed. And yet, if nothing had happened to him, why hadn’t he returned to Vermont? Why had he left behind his car, his clothes, his work? Iris and I talked it out with Fanny again and
again, going over one possibility after another, but we never reached a satisfactory conclusion. There were too many blanks, too many variables, too many things we didn’t know. After a month of beating it into the ground, I suggested that Fanny go to the police and report Ben as missing. She resisted the idea, however. She had no claims on him anymore, she said, which meant that she had no right to interfere. After what had happened in the apartment, he was free to do what he liked, and it wasn’t up to her to drag him back. Charles (whom we had met by then and who turned out to be quite well off) was willing to hire a private detective at his own expense. “Just so we know that Ben’s all right,” he said. “It’s not a question of dragging him back, it’s a question of knowing that he disappeared because he wanted to disappear.” Iris and I both thought that Charles’s plan was sensible, but Fanny wouldn’t allow him to go ahead with it. “He gave us his blessings,” she said. “That was the same thing as saying good-bye. I lived with him for twenty years, and I know how he thinks. He doesn’t want us to look for him. I’ve already betrayed him once, and I’m not about to do it again. We have to leave him alone. He’ll come back when he’s ready to come back, and until then we have to wait. Believe me, it’s the only thing to be done. We just have to sit tight and learn to live with it.”
Months passed. Then it was a year, and then it was two years, and the enigma remained unsolved. By the time Sachs showed up in Vermont last August, I was long past thinking we would ever find an answer. Iris and Charles both believed that he was dead, but my hopelessness didn’t stem from anything as specific as that. I never had a strong feeling about whether Sachs was alive or dead—no sudden intuitions, no bursts of extrasensory knowledge, no mystical experiences—but I was more or less convinced that I would never see him again. I say “more or less” because I wasn’t sure of anything. In the first months after he disappeared, I went through a number of violent and contradictory responses, but these emotions gradually burned themselves out, and in the end terms such as sadness or anger or grief no longer seemed to apply. I had lost contact with him, and his absence felt less and less like a personal matter. Every time I tried to think about him, my imagination failed me. It was as if Sachs had become a hole in the universe. He was no longer just my missing friend, he was a symptom of my ignorance about all things, an emblem of the unknowable itself. This probably sounds vague, but I can’t do any better than that. Iris told me that I was turning into a Buddhist, and I suppose that describes my position as accurately as anything else. Fanny was a Christian, Iris said, because she never abandoned her faith in Sachs’s eventual return; she and Charles were atheists; and I was a Zen acolyte, a believer in the power of nothing. In all the years she had known me, she said, it was the first time I hadn’t expressed an opinion.
Life changed, life went on. We learned, as Fanny had begged us, to live with it. She and Charles were together now, and in spite of ourselves, Iris and I were forced to admit that he was a decent fellow. Mid to late forties, an architect, formerly married, the father of two boys, intelligent, desperately in love with Fanny, beyond reproach. Little by little, we managed to form a friendship with him, and a new reality took hold for all of us. Last spring, when Fanny mentioned that she wasn’t planning to go to Vermont for the summer (she just couldn’t, she said, and probably never would again), it suddenly occurred to her that perhaps Iris and I would like to use the house. She wanted to give it to us for nothing, but we insisted on paying some kind of rent, and so we worked out an arrangement that would at least cover her costs—a prorated share of the taxes, the maintenance, and so on. That was how I happened to be present when Sachs turned up last summer. He arrived without warning, chugging into the yard one night in a battered blue Chevy, spent the next couple of days here, and then vanished again. In between, he talked his head off. He talked so much, it almost scared me. But that was when I heard his story, and given how determined he was to tell it, I don’t think he left anything out.
He went on working, he said. After Iris and I left with Sonia, he went on working for another three or four weeks. Our conversations about Leviathan had apparently been helpful, and he threw himself back into the manuscript that same morning, determined not to leave Vermont until he had finished a draft of the whole book. Everything seemed to go well. He made progress every day, and he felt happy with his monk’s life, as happy as he had been in years. Then, early one evening in the middle of September, he decided to go out for a walk. The weather had turned by then, and the air was crisp, infused with the smells of fall. He put on his woolen hunting jacket and tramped up the hill beyond the house, heading north. He figured there was an hour of daylight left, which meant that he could walk for half an hour before he had to turn around and start back. Ordinarily, he would have spent that hour shooting baskets, but the change of seasons was in full swing now, and he wanted to have a look at what was happening in the woods: to see the red and yellow leaves, to watch the slant of the setting sun among the birches and maples, to wander in the glow of the pendant colors. So he set off on his little jaunt, with no more on his mind than what he was going to cook for dinner when he got home.
Once he entered the woods, however, he became distracted. Instead of looking at the leaves and migrating birds, he started thinking about his book. Passages he had written earlier that day came rushing back to him, and before he was conscious of what he was doing, he was already composing new sentences in his head, mapping out the work he wanted to do the next morning. He kept on walking, thrashing through the dead leaves and thorny underbrush, talking out loud to himself, chanting the words of his book, paying no attention to where he was. He could have gone on like that for hours, he said, but at a certain point he noticed that he was having trouble seeing. The sun had already set, and because of the thickness of the woods, night was fast coming on. He looked around him, hoping to get his bearings, but nothing was familiar, and he realized that he had never been in this place before. Feeling like an idiot, he turned around and started running in the direction he had come from. He had just a few minutes before everything disappeared, and he knew he would never make it. He had no flashlight, no matches, no food in his pockets. Sleeping outdoors promised to be an unpleasant experience, but he couldn’t think of any alternative. He sat down on a tree stump and started to laugh. He found himself ridiculous, he said, a comic figure of the first rank. Then night fell in earnest, and he couldn’t see a thing. He waited for a moon to appear, but the sky clouded over instead. He laughed again. He wasn’t going to give the matter another thought, he decided. He was safe where he was, and freezing his ass off for one night wasn’t going to kill him. So he did what he could to make himself comfortable. He stretched out on the ground, he covered himself haphazardly with some leaves and twigs, and tried to think about his book. Before long, he even managed to fall asleep.
He woke up at dawn, bone-cold and shivering, his clothes wet with dew. The situation didn’t seem so funny anymore. He was in a foul temper, and his muscles ached. He was hungry and disheveled, and the only thing he wanted was to get out of there and find his way home. He took what he thought was the same path he had taken the previous evening, but after he had walked for close to an hour, he began to suspect that he was on the wrong path. He considered turning around and heading back to the place where he had started, but he wasn’t sure he would be able to find it again—and even if he did, it was doubtful that he would recognize it. The sky was gloomy that morning, with dense swarms of clouds blocking the sun. Sachs had never been much of a woodsman, and without a compass to orient his position, he couldn’t tell if he was traveling east or west or north or south. On the other hand, it wasn’t as though he were trapped in a primeval forest. The woods were bound to end sooner or later, and it hardly mattered which direction he followed, just as long as he walked in a straight line. Once he made it to an open road, he would knock on the door of the first house he saw. With any luck, the people inside would be able to tell him where he was.
I
t took a long time before any of that happened. Since he had no watch, he never knew exactly how long, but he guessed somewhere between three and four hours. He was thoroughly disgusted by then, and he cursed his stupidity over the last miles with a growing sense of rage. Once he came to the end of the woods, however, his dark mood lifted, and he stopped feeling sorry for himself. He was on a narrow dirt road, and even if he didn’t know where he was, even if there wasn’t a single house in sight, he could comfort himself with the thought that the worst of it was over. He walked for ten or fifteen more minutes, making bets with himself about how far he had strayed from home. If it was under five miles, he would spend fifty dollars on a present for Sonia. If it was over five but under ten, he would spend a hundred dollars. Over ten would be two hundred. Over fifteen would be three hundred, over twenty would be four hundred, and so on. As he was showering these imaginary gifts on his goddaughter (stuffed panda bears, dollhouses, ponies), he heard a car rumbling in the distance behind him. He stopped and waited for it to approach. It turned out to be a red pickup truck, speeding along at a good clip. Figuring he had nothing to lose, Sachs stuck up his hand to get the driver’s attention. The truck barreled past him, but before Sachs could turn around again, it slammed to a halt. He heard a clamor of flying pebbles, dust rose everywhere, and then a voice was calling out to him, asking if he needed a lift.
The driver was a young man in his early twenties. Sachs sized him up as a local kid, a road mender or plumber’s assistant, maybe, and though he didn’t feel much inclined to talk at first, the boy turned out to be so friendly and ingratiating that he soon fell into a conversation with him. There was a metal Softball bat lying on the floor in front of Sachs’s seat, and when the kid put his foot on the accelerator to get the truck going again, the bat lurched up and hit Sachs in the ankle. That was the opener, so to speak, and once the kid had apologized for the inconvenience, he introduced himself as Dwight (Dwight McMartin, as Sachs later learned) and they started in on a discussion about softball. Dwight told him that he played on a team sponsored by the volunteer fire department in Newfane. The regular season had ended last week, and the first game of the playoffs was scheduled to be played that evening—”if the weather holds,” he added several times, “if the weather holds and the rain don’t fall.” Dwight was the first baseman, the cleanup hitter, and number two in the league in homeruns, a bulky gulumph in the mold of Moose Skowron. Sachs said he’d try to make it down to the field to watch, and Dwight answered in all seriousness that it was bound to be worth it, that it was sure to be a terrific game. Sachs couldn’t help smiling. He was rumpled and unshaven, there were brambles and leaf particles stuck in his clothes, and his nose was running like a spigot. He probably looked like a hobo, he thought, and yet Dwight didn’t press him with personal questions. He didn’t ask him why he had been walking on that deserted road, he didn’t ask him where he lived, he didn’t even bother to ask his name. He could have been a simpleton, Sachs realized, or maybe he was just a nice guy, but one way or the other, it was hard not to appreciate that discretion. All of a sudden, Sachs wished that he hadn’t kept so much to himself over the past months. He should have gone out and mingled with his neighbors a bit more; he should have made an effort to learn something about the people around him. Almost as an ethical point, he told himself that he mustn’t forget the softball game that night. It would do him some good, he thought, give him something to think about other than his book. If he had some people to talk to, maybe he wouldn’t be so apt to get lost the next time he went walking in the woods.