by Paul Auster
“And you’re ready to talk now?”
“Yes, I’m ready to talk. Until I came in here and saw you holding that knife, I wasn’t going to say a word. That was always the plan: to say nothing, to keep it all to myself. But I think I’ve changed my mind now. It’s not that I can’t live with it, but it suddenly occurs to me that someone should know. Just in case something happens to me.”
“Why should anything happen to you?”
“Because I’m in a dangerous spot, that’s why, and my luck could run out.”
“But why tell me?”
“Because you’re my best friend, and I know you can keep a secret.” He paused for a moment and looked straight into my eyes. “You can keep a secret, can’t you?”
“I think so. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard one. I’m not sure I’ve ever had one to keep.”
That was how it started: with these enigmatic remarks and hints of impending disaster. I found a bottle of bourbon in the pantry, collected two clean glasses from the drainboard, and then led Sachs across the yard to the studio. That was where I kept my cigars, and for the next five hours he smoked and drank, struggling against exhaustion as he spilled out his story to me. We were both sitting in armchairs, facing each other across my cluttered work table, and in all that time neither one of us moved. Candles burned all around us, flickering and sputtering as the room filled with his voice. He talked and I listened, and bit by bit I learned everything I have told so far.
Even before he began, I knew that something extraordinary must have happened to him. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have kept himself hidden for so long; he wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to make us believe he was dead. That much was clear, and now that Sachs had returned, I was ready to accept the most far-flung and outrageous disclosures, to listen to a story I never could have dreamed of myself. It wasn’t that I was expecting him to tell this particular story, but I knew that it would be something like it, and when Sachs finally began (leaning back in his chair and saying, “You’ve heard of the Phantom of Liberty, I suppose?”) I scarcely even blinked. “So that’s what you’ve been up to,” I said, interrupting him before he could go any further. “You’re the funny little man who’s been blowing up all those statues. A nice line of work if you can get it, but who on earth picked you as the conscience of the world? The last time I saw you, you were writing a novel.”
It took him the rest of the night to answer that question. Even then there were gaps, holes in the account I haven’t been able to fill in. Roughly speaking, the idea seems to have come to him in stages, beginning with the slap he witnessed that Sunday afternoon in Berkeley and ending with the disintegration of his affair with Lillian. In between, there was a gradual surrender to Dimaggio, a growing obsession with the life of the man he had killed.
“I finally found the courage to go into his room,” Sachs said. “That’s what started it, I think, that was the first step toward some kind of legitimate action. Until then, I hadn’t even opened the door. Too scared, I suppose, too afraid of what I might find if I started looking. But Lillian was gone again, and Maria was off at school, and there I was sitting alone in the house, slowly beginning to lose my mind. Predictably enough, most of Dimaggio’s belongings had been cleared out of the room. Nothing personal was left—no letters or documents, no diaries or telephone numbers, no clues about his life with Lillian. But I did stumble across some books. Three or four volumes of Marx, a biography of Bakunin, a pamphlet by Trotsky on race relations in America, that sort of thing. And then, sitting in a black binder in the bottom drawer of his desk, I found a copy of his dissertation. That was the key. If I hadn’t found that, I don’t think any of the other things would have happened.
“It was a study of Alexander Berkman—a reappraisal of his life and works in four hundred fifty-odd pages. I’m sure you’ve run across the name. Berkman was the anarchist who shot Henry Clay Frick—the man whose house is now a museum on Fifth Avenue. That was during the Homestead Steel Strike in 1892, when Frick called in an army of Pinkertons and had them open fire on the workers. Berkman was twenty at the time, a young Jewish radical who’d emigrated from Russia just a few years before, and he traveled down to Pennsylvania and went after Frick with a gun, hoping to eliminate this symbol of capitalist oppression. Frick survived the attack, and Berkman was thrown into the state penitentiary for fourteen years. After his release, he wrote Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist and continued to involve himself in political work, mostly with Emma Goldman. He was the editor of Mother Earth, helped found a libertarian school, gave speeches, agitated for causes like the Lawrence textile strike, and so on. When America entered the First World War, he was put in jail again, this time for speaking out against conscription. Two years later, not long after he was released, he and Emma Goldman were deported to Russia. At the farewell dinner before they left, news came that Frick had died that same evening. Berkman’s only comment was: ‘Deported by God.’ An exquisite statement, no? In Russia, it didn’t take long for him to become disillusioned. The Bolsheviks had betrayed the Revolution, he felt; one kind of despotism had replaced another, and after the Kronstadt rebellion was crushed in 1921, he decided to emigrate from Russia for the second time. He eventually settled in the South of France, where he lived out the last ten years of his life. He wrote the ABC of Communist Anarchism, kept body and soul together by doing translations, editing, and ghost-writing, but still needed help from friends in order to survive. By 1936, he was too sick to go on, and rather than continue to ask for handouts, he picked up a gun and shot himself through the head.
“It was a good dissertation. A bit clumsy and didactic at times, but well researched and passionate, a thorough and intelligent job. It was hard not to respect Dimaggio for it, to see that he’d been a man with a real mind. Considering what I knew about his later activities, the dissertation was obviously something more than just an academic exercise. It was a step in his inner development, a way of coming to grips with his own ideas about political change. He didn’t come right out and say it, but I could tell that he supported Berkman, that he believed there was a moral justification for certain forms of political violence. Terrorism had its place in the struggle, so to speak. If used correctly, it could be an effective tool for dramatizing the issues at stake, for enlightening the public about the nature of institutional power.
“I couldn’t help myself after that. I started to think about Dimaggio all the time, to compare myself to him, to question how we’d come to be together on that road in Vermont. I sensed a kind of cosmic attraction, the pull of some inexorable force. Lillian wouldn’t tell me much about him, but I knew he’d been a soldier in Vietnam and that the war had turned him inside-out, that he’d left the army with a new understanding of America, of politics, of his own life. It fascinated me to think that I’d gone to prison because of that war—and that fighting in it had brought him around to more or less the same position as mine. We’d both become writers, we both knew that fundamental changes were needed—but whereas I started to lose my way, to dither around with half-assed articles and literary pretentions, Dimaggio kept developing, kept moving forward, and in the end he was brave enough to put his ideas to the test. It’s not that I think blowing up logging camps is a good idea, but I envied him for having the balls to act. I’d never lifted a finger for anything. I’d sat around grumbling and complaining for the past fifteen years, but for all my self-righteous opinions and embattled stances, I’d never put myself on the line. I was a hypocrite and Dimaggio wasn’t, and when I thought about myself in comparison to him, I began to feel ashamed.
“My first thought was to write something about him. Something similar to what he had written about Berkman—only better, deeper, a genuine examination of his soul. I planned it as an elegy, a memorial in the shape of a book. If I could do this for him, I thought, then maybe I could start to redeem myself, then maybe something good could start to come out of his death. I would have to talk to a lot of people, of cou
rse, go around the country gathering information, setting up interviews with as many people as I could find: his parents and relatives, his army buddies, the people he went to school with, professional colleagues, old girlfriends, members of Children of the Planet, hundreds of different people. It would be an enormous project, a book that would take me years to finish. But that was the point somehow. As long as I was devoting myself to Dimaggio, I would be keeping him alive. I would give him my life, so to speak, and in exchange he would give my life back to me. I’m not asking you to understand this. I barely understood it myself. But I was groping, you see, thrashing out blindly for something to cling to, and for a little while this felt solid, a better solution than anything else.
“I never got anywhere with it. I sat down a few times to take notes, but I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t organize my thoughts. I don’t know what the problem was. Maybe I still had too much hope that things would work out with Lillian. Maybe I didn’t believe it would be possible for me to write again. God knows what was stopping me, but every time I picked up a pen and tried to start, I would break out in a cold sweat, my head would spin, and I’d feel as though I was about to fall. Just like the time I fell off the fire escape. It was the same panic, the same feeling of helplessness, the same rush toward oblivion.
“Then something strange happened. I was walking down Telegraph Avenue one morning to get my car when I spotted someone I knew from New York. Cal Stewart, a magazine editor I’d written a couple of articles for back in the early eighties. It was the first time since coming to California that I’d seen anyone I knew, and the thought that he might recognize me stopped me dead in my tracks. If one person knew where I was, I’d be finished, I’d be absolutely destroyed. I ducked into the first doorway I came to, just to get myself off the street. It turned out to be a used bookstore, a big place with high ceilings and six or seven rooms. I went all the way to the back and hid out behind a row of tall shelves, my heart thumping, trying to pull myself together. There was a mountain of books in front of me, millions of words piled on top of each other, a whole universe of discarded literature—the books that people no longer wanted, that had been sold, that had outlived their usefulness. I didn’t realize it at first, but I happened to be standing in the American fiction section, and right there at eye level, the first thing I saw when I started to look at the titles, was a copy of The New Colossus, my own little contribution to this graveyard. It was an astonishing coincidence, a thing that hit me so hard I felt it had to be an omen.
“Don’t ask me why I bought it. I had no intention of reading the book, but once I saw it there on the shelf, I knew I had to have it. The physical object, the thing itself. It cost only five dollars for the original hardcover edition, complete with dust jacket and purple endpapers. And there was my picture on the back flap: the portrait of the artist as a young moron. Fanny took that photo, I remember. I was twenty-six or twenty-seven at the time, with my beard and long hair, and I’m staring into the lens with an unbelievably earnest, soulful expression in my eyes. You’ve seen that picture, you know the one I’m talking about. When I opened up the book and saw it in the store that day, I almost burst out laughing.
“Once the coast was clear, I left the store and drove back to Lillian’s house. I knew I couldn’t stay in Berkeley anymore. Seeing Cal Stewart had scared the hell out of me, and I suddenly understood how precarious my position was, how vulnerable I had made myself. When I got home with the book, I put it on the coffee table in the living room and sat down on the sofa. I had no ideas anymore. I had to leave, but at the same time I couldn’t leave, I couldn’t bring myself to walk out on Lillian. I had just about lost her, but I wasn’t willing to let go, I couldn’t face the thought of never seeing her again. So I sat there on the sofa, staring at the cover of my novel, feeling like someone who’s just run into a brick wall. I hadn’t done anything with the book about Dimaggio; I’d thrown away more than a third of the money; I’d botched every hope for myself. Out of pure wretchedness, I kept my eyes fixed on the cover of the book. For a long time I don’t think I even saw it, but then, little by little, something began to happen. It must have taken close to an hour, but once the idea took hold of me, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The Statue of Liberty, remember? That strange, distorted drawing of the Statue of Liberty. That was where it started, and once I realized where I was going, the rest followed, the whole cockeyed plan fell into place.
“I closed out a few of my bank accounts that afternoon and then took care of the others the next morning. I needed cash to do what I had to do, which meant reversing all the commitments I had made—taking the rest of the money for myself instead of giving it to Lillian. It bothered me to have broken my word, but not as much as I would have thought. I had already given her sixty-five thousand dollars, and even if it wasn’t all there was, it was a lot of money, a lot more than she had been expecting me to give her. The ninety-one thousand I still had would take me a long way, but it wasn’t as if I was going to blow it on myself. The purpose I had contrived for that money was just as meaningful as my original plan. More meaningful, in fact. Not only would I be using it to carry out Dimaggio’s work, but I would be using it to express my own convictions, to take a stand for what I believed in, to make the kind of difference I had never been able to make before. All of a sudden, my life seemed to make sense to me. Not just the past few months, but my whole life, all the way back to the beginning. It was a miraculous confluence, a startling conjunction of motives and ambitions. I had found the unifying principle, and this one idea would bring all the broken pieces of myself together. For the first time in my life, I would be whole.
“I can’t begin to convey the power of my happiness to you. I felt free again, utterly liberated by my decision. It wasn’t that I wanted to leave Lillian and Maria, but there were more important things to take care of now, and once I understood that, all the bitterness and suffering of the past month just melted out of my heart. I was no longer bewitched. I felt inspired, invigorated, cleansed. Almost like a man who had found religion. Like a man who had heard the call. The unfinished business of my life suddenly ceased to matter. I was ready to march out into the wilderness and spread the word, ready to begin all over again.
“Looking back on it now, I see how pointless it was to have pinned my hopes on Lillian. Going out there was a crazy thing to do, an act of desperation. It might have worked if I hadn’t fallen in love with her, but once that happened, the venture was doomed to fail. I had put her in an impossible bind, and she didn’t know how to cope with it. She wanted the money, and she didn’t want it. It made her greedy, and her greed humiliated her. She wanted me to love her, and she hated herself for loving me back. I don’t blame her for putting me through hell anymore. She’s a wild person, Lillian. Not just beautiful, you understand, but incandescent. Fearless, out of control, ready for anything—and she never had a chance to be who she was with me.
“In the end, the remarkable thing wasn’t that I left, but that I managed to stay as long as I did. The circumstances were so peculiar, so dangerous and unsettling, that I think they began to excite her. That’s what sucked her in: not me, but the excitement of my being there, the darkness I represented. The situation was fraught with all sorts of romantic possibilities, and after a while she couldn’t resist them anymore, she let herself go a lot farther than she ever intended to. Not unlike the weird and implausible way she had met Dimaggio. That had led to marriage. In my case, it led to a honeymoon, those two dazzling weeks when nothing could go wrong for us. It doesn’t matter what happened after that. We couldn’t have sustained it, and sooner or later she would have started running around again, she would have slipped back into her old life. But while it lasted, I don’t think there’s any question that she was in love with me. Whenever I begin to doubt it, I have only to remember the proof. She could have turned me in to the police, and she didn’t. Even after I told her the money had run out. Even after I was gone. If nothing else, that proves th
at I meant something to her. It proves that everything that happened to me in Berkeley really happened.
“But no regrets. Not anymore at least. It’s all behind me—over and done with, ancient history. The hard part was having to leave the little girl. I didn’t think it would affect me, but I missed her for a long time, much more than I ever missed Lillian. Whenever I happened to be driving west, I’d start to think about going all the way to California—just to look her up and pay her a visit. But I never did. I was afraid of what might happen if I saw Lillian again, so I kept myself clear of California, and I haven’t set foot in the state since the morning I left. Eighteen, nineteen months ago. By now, Maria’s probably forgotten who I am. At one time, before things fell apart with Lillian, I used to think I’d wind up adopting her, that she would actually become my daughter. It would have been good for her, I think, good for both of us, but it’s too late to dream about that now. I don’t suppose I was ever meant to be a father. It didn’t work with Fanny, and it didn’t work with Lillian. Little seeds. Little eggs and seeds. You get just so many chances, and then life takes hold of you, and then you’re off on your own forever. I’ve become who I am now, and there’s no going back. This is it, Peter. For as long as I make it last, this is it.”
He was beginning to ramble. The sun was already up by then, and a thousand birds were singing in the trees: larks, finches, warblers, the morning chorus at full strength. Sachs had been talking for so many hours, he scarcely knew what he was saying anymore. As the light streamed through the windows, I could see that his eyes were about to close on him. We can go on talking later, I said. If you don’t lie down and get some sleep, you’re probably going to black out, and I’m not sure I’m strong enough to carry you over to the house.
I put him in one of the empty bedrooms on the second floor, pulled down the shades, and then tiptoed back to my own room. I doubted that I would be able to sleep. There were too many things to digest, too many images churning in my mind, but the moment my head touched the pillow, I began to lose consciousness. I felt as if I’d been clubbed, as if my skull had been crushed by a stone. Some stories are too terrible, perhaps, and the only way to let them into you is to escape, to turn your back on them and steal off into the darkness.