Paul Auster - Invisible

Your money, the kid said. Your money and your watch. Both of you. Wallets first. And be quick about it. I ain’t got all night.

I reached into my pocket for my billfold, but Born unexpectedly chose to make a stand. A stupid move, I thought, an act of defiance that could wind up getting us both killed, but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

And what if I don’t want to give you my money? he asked.

Then I’ll shoot you, mister, the kid said. I’ll shoot you and take your wallet anyway.

Born let out a long, histrionic sigh. You’re going to regret this, little man, he said. Why don’t you just run along now and leave us alone?

Why don’t you just shut your fucking mouth and give me your wallet? the kid answered, thrusting the gun into the air a couple of times for emphasis.

As you wish, Born replied. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I was still looking at the kid, which meant that I had only a vague, peripheral view of Born, but at the last second I turned my head slightly to the left and saw him reach into the inside breast pocket of his jacket. I assumed he was going for his bill-fold, but when his hand emerged from the pocket it was bunched up into a fist, as if he was hiding something, concealing some object in his closed palm. I couldn’t begin to guess what that thing might have been. An instant later, I heard a click, and the blade of a knife jumped out of its sheath. With a hard, upward thrust, Born immediately stabbed the kid with the switchblade-straight in the stomach, a dead-center hit. The boy grunted as the steel tore through his flesh, grabbed his stomach with his right hand, and slowly sank to the ground.

Shit, man, he said. It ain’t even loaded.

The gun fell out of his hand and clattered onto the sidewalk. I could barely absorb what I was seeing. Too many things had happened in too short a time, and none of them seemed quite real anymore. Born swept up the gun and dropped it into the side pocket of his jacket. The kid was moaning now, clutching his stomach with both hands and writhing around on the pavement. It was too dark to make out much of anything, but after a few moments I thought I saw blood oozing onto the ground.

We have to get him to a hospital, I finally said. There’s a phone booth up on Broadway. You wait with him here and I’ll run to make the call.

Don’t be an idiot, Born said, grabbing hold of my jacket and giving me a good hard shake. No hospitals. The boy is going to die, and we can’t have anything to do with it.

He won’t die if an ambulance gets here within ten or fifteen minutes.

And if he lives, then what? Do you want to spend the next three years of your life in court?

I don’t care. Walk away from it if you like. Go home and drink another bottle of gin, but I’m running off to Broadway right now to call for an ambulance.

Fine. Have it your own way. We’ll pretend to be good little Boy Scouts, and I’ll sit here with this piece of garbage and wait for you to come back. Is that what you want? How stupid do you think I am, Walker?

I didn’t bother to answer him. Instead, I turned on my heels and started running up 112th Street toward Broadway. I was gone for ten minutes, fifteen minutes at the most, but when I returned to the spot where I’d left Born and the wounded boy, they had both disappeared. Except for a patch of congealing blood on the sidewalk, there was no sign that either one of them had ever been there.

I went home. There was no point in waiting for the ambulance now, so I climbed back up the hill toward Broadway and headed downtown. My mind was blank, incapable of producing a single coherent thought, but as I unlocked the door of the apartment, I realized that I was sobbing, had in fact been sobbing for the past several minutes. Luckily, my roommate was out, which spared me the trouble of having to talk to him in that state. I went on crying in my room, and when the tears finally stopped, I tore up Born’s check and put the pieces in an envelope, which I mailed to him early the next morning. There was no accompanying letter. I was confident that the gesture spoke for itself and that he would understand I was finished with him and wanted nothing more to do with his filthy magazine.

That afternoon, the late edition of the New York Post reported that the body of eighteen-year-old Cedric Williams had been discovered in Riverside Park with over a dozen knife wounds gouged into his chest and stomach. There was no doubt in my mind that Born was responsible. The moment I’d left him to call for the ambulance, he had picked up the bleeding Williams and carried him into the park to finish off the job he had started on the sidewalk. Considering the amount of traffic that moves along Riverside Drive, I found it incredible that no one had spotted Born crossing the street with the kid in his arms, but according to the paper, the investigators working on the case had yet to establish any leads.

Knowing what I did, I clearly had an obligation to call the local precinct house and tell them about Born and the knife and the attempt by Williams to hold us up. I chanced upon the article while drinking a cup of coffee in the Lions Den, the snack bar on the ground floor of the undergraduate student center, and rather than use a public phone, I decided to walk to my apartment on 107th Street and make the call from there. I still hadn’t told anyone about what had happened. I had tried to reach my sister in Poughkeepsie-the one person I was prepared to unburden myself to-but she hadn’t been in. Once I arrived at my apartment building, I collected my mail in the lobby before taking the elevator upstairs. There was only one letter for me: a stampless, hand-delivered envelope with my name written across the front in block letters, folded up in thirds and then shoved through a narrow slot in the mailbox. I opened it in the elevator on my way up to the ninth floor. Not a word, Walker. Remember: I still have the knife, and I’m not afraid to use it .

There was no signature at the bottom, but that hardly seemed necessary. It was a vicious threat, and now that I had seen Born in action, now that I had witnessed the brutality he was capable of, I felt certain he wouldn’t hesitate to carry it out. He would come after me if I tried to turn him in. If I did nothing, he would leave me alone. I still had every intention of calling the police, but the day passed, and then more days passed, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Fear reduced me to silence, but the fact was that only silence could protect me from having to cross paths with him again, and that was all that mattered to me now: to keep Born out of my life forever.

This failure to act is far and away the most reprehensible thing I have ever done, the low point in my career as a human being. Not only did it allow a killer to walk free, but it also had the insidious effect of forcing me to confront my own moral weakness, to recognize that I had never been the person I had thought I was, that I was less good, less strong, less brave than I had imagined myself to be. Horrid, implacable truths. My cowardice sickened me, and yet how not to be afraid of that knife? Born had stuck it into Williams’s belly without the slightest compunction or regret, and even if the first stab could have been justified as an act of self-defense, what about the twelve others he had delivered in the park, the cold-blooded decision to kill? After torturing myself for close to a week, I finally found the courage to call my sister again, and when I heard myself spewing out the whole sordid business to Gwyn over the course of our two-hour conversation, I realized that I didn’t have a choice. I had to step forward. If I didn’t talk to the police, I would lose all respect for myself, and the shame of it would go on haunting me for the rest of my life.