Paul Auster - Invisible

When I sent the letter, my trip to California was still six weeks off. Walker and I had already set the date and time of our dinner, he had furnished me with directions to his house, and I wasn’t anticipating another letter from him before my departure. A month went by, perhaps a little longer than that, and then, when I was least expecting it, he contacted me again. Not by mail this time, but by telephone. Years had passed since our last conversation, but I recognized his voice at once-and yet (how to express this?) it wasn’t quite the same voice I remembered, or else it was the same but with something added to it or subtracted from it, the same voice in a slightly different register: Walker at one remove from himself and the world, incapacitated, ill, speaking softly, slowly, with a barely perceptible flutter embedded in each word that escaped from his mouth, as if he were summoning all his strength to push the air up through his windpipe and into the phone.

Hi there, Jim, he said. I hope I’m not interrupting your dinner.

Not at all, I replied. We won’t be eating for another twenty or thirty minutes.

Good. It must be cocktail hour, then. Assuming you still drink.

I still drink. Which is exactly what we’re doing now. My wife and I just opened a bottle of wine, and we’re gradually swilling ourselves into a stupor as a chicken roasts in the oven.

The pleasures of domestic life.

And what about you? How are things on your end?

Couldn’t be better. A minor setback last month, but all is well again, and I’ve been working my head off. I wanted you to know that.

Working on the book?

Working on the book.

Which means you’re unstuck.

That’s why I called. To thank you for your last letter.

A new approach, then?

Yes, and it helped enormously.

This is good news.

I hope so. Rather brutal stuff, I’m afraid. Ugly things I haven’t had the heart or the will to look at in years, but I’m past it now and furiously mapping out the third chapter.

You mean the second chapter is finished?

A draft. I came to the end about ten days ago.

Why didn’t you send it to me?

I don’t know. Too nervous, I guess. Too unsure of myself.

Don’t be ridiculous.

I was thinking it might be better to wait until the whole thing was done before showing it to you.

No, no, send me the second part now. We can talk about it when I see you in Oakland next week.

After you read it, you might not want to come.

What are you talking about?

It’s disgusting, Jim. Every time I think about it, it makes me want to puke.

Send it anyway. No matter what my reaction is, I promise I won’t back out of the dinner. I want to see you again.

And I want to see you.

Good. Then it’s settled. The twenty-fifth at seven o’clock.

You’ve been very kind to me.

I haven’t done anything.

More than you know, good sir, more than you know.

Try to take care of yourself, all right?

I’ll do my best.

See you on the twenty-fifth, then.

Yes, the twenty-fifth. At the stroke of seven.

It was only after we hung up that I realized how unsettling this conversation had been for me. For one thing, I felt certain that Walker was lying about the state of his health-which was not good, not good at all, and no doubt growing worse by the minute-and while it was perfectly understandable that he should want to hide the truth from me, to deflect any impulse on my part to pity him by toughing it out with a stoic’s false cheerfulness ( Couldn’t be better! ), I nevertheless felt (and this is something of a paradox) a tone of self -pity running through his words, as if from the beginning to the end of our talk he had been fighting back tears, willing himself not to lose his grip and start weeping into the phone. His physical condition was already a cause for grave concern, but now I was just as worried about the condition of his mind. At certain points during our conversation, he had sounded like a man on the brink of a mental breakdown, a man holding himself together with nothing more than a few frayed pieces of string and wire. Was it possible that writing the new chapter of his book had depleted him to such an extent? Or was that only one element among several, among many? Walker was dying, after all, and perhaps the mere fact of his impending death, the corrosive horror of that impending death, had become too much for him to face anymore. And yet, the trembling, tearful catch in his voice could just as easily have been caused by an adverse reaction to a medicine he was taking, a side effect of some drug that was helping to keep him alive. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything, but after the lucid, forthright depiction of himself in the first part of his book, along with the two articulate and courageous letters he had sent me, I found myself a bit thrown by how different he sounded in person. I wondered what it would be like to spend an evening in his company, enclosed in the private world of his dwindling, devastated self, and for the first time since accepting his invitation I was beginning to dread our encounter.

Two days after the phone call, the second part of his book arrived at my house in a FedEx envelope. A brief cover letter informed me that he had at last come up with a title, 1967 , and that each chapter would be headed by the name of a season. The first part was Spring , the part I had just been sent was Summer , and the part he was working on now was Fall . I had already heard him describe the new pages to me over the phone, and with the words brutal, ugly , and disgusting still fresh in my mind, I braced myself for something unbearable, a story that would be even more harsh and troubling than Spring .

Spring turns into summer. For you it is the summer after the spring of Rudolf Born, but for the rest of the world it is the summer of the Six-Day War, the summer of race riots in more than one hundred American cities, the Summer of Love. You are twenty years old and have just finished your second year of college. When war breaks out in the Middle East, you think about joining the Israeli army and becoming a soldier, even though you are an avowed pacifist and have never shown any interest in Zionism, but before you can come to a decision and make any plans, the war suddenly ends, and you remain in New York.

Nevertheless, you feel a strong urge to quit the country, to be anywhere but where you are now, and therefore you have already gone to the dean of students and told him that you want to sign up for the Junior Year Abroad Program (after a lengthy consultation with your father, who has grudgingly given his approval). You have chosen Paris. You are not going there simply because you are fond of Paris, which you visited for the first time two summers ago, but because you are keen to perfect your French, which is adequate now but could be better. You are aware that Born is in Paris, or at least you assume he is, but you weigh the odds in your mind and figure your chances of running into him are slight. And if such an event should occur, you feel prepared to handle it in a manner appropriate to the circumstances. How difficult would it be to turn your head and walk on past him? That is what you tell yourself, in any case, but in your innermost heart of hearts you play out scenes in which you do not turn your head, in which you confront him in the middle of the street and strangle him to death with your bare hands.

You live in a two-bedroom apartment in a building on West 107th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. Your roommate has just graduated and is leaving the city, and because you need someone else to share the place with you, you have already invited your sister to occupy the other bedroom-for, as luck would have it, her years at Vassar have come to an end, and she is about to begin graduate work in the English Department at Columbia. You and your sister have always been close-best friends, co-conspirators, obsessed guardians of your dead brother’s memory, fellow students of literature, confidants-and you are pleased with the arrangement. It is only for the summer, of course, since you will be winging off to Paris in September, but for part of June and all of July and August you will be together, dwelling under the same roof for the first time in years. After you are gone, your sister will take over the lease and find another person to live in the room you have vacated.