Paul Auster - Invisible

Your sister says to you: What do you think, Adam? Should we go home for the weekend or stay here and sweat it out in New York?

Let’s stay, you answer, as you contemplate the bus ride to New Jersey and the long hours you would have to spend talking to your parents. If it gets too hot in the apartment, you say, we can always go to the movies. There are some good things playing at the New Yorker and the Thalia on Saturday and Sunday, and the air-conditioning will cool us off.

It is early July, and you and your sister have been living together for two weeks now. Since all your friends have vanished for the summer, Gwyn is the only person you have seen-not counting the people you work with at the library, but they don’t count for much. You have no girlfriend at the moment (Margot was the last woman you slept with), and your sister has recently parted ways with the young professor she was involved with for the past year and a half. Therefore, you have only each other for company, but there is nothing wrong with that as far as you are concerned, and all in all you are more than satisfied with the way things have worked out since she moved in with you. You are entirely at ease in her company, you can talk more openly with her than anyone else you know, and your relations are remarkably free of conflict. Every now and then, she becomes annoyed with you for neglecting to wash the dishes or leaving a mess in the bathroom, but each time you fall down on the domestic front you promise to mend your lackadaisical habits, and little by little you have been improving.

It is a happy arrangement, then, just as you imagined it would be when you proposed the idea in the first place, and now that you are slowly going to pieces at your job in the Castle of Yawns, you understand that living in the apartment with your sister is no doubt helping you keep your sanity, that more than anyone else she has the power to lighten the despair you carry around inside you. On the other hand, the fact that you are together again has produced some curious effects, consequences you did not foresee when the two of you discussed the possibility of joining forces back in the spring. Now you ask yourself how you could have been so blind. You and Gwyn are brother and sister, you belong to the same family, and therefore it is only natural, during the course of the long conversations you have with each other, that family matters should sometimes be mentioned-remarks about your parents, references to the past, memories of small details from the life you shared as children-and because these subjects have been unearthed so often during the weeks you have spent together, you find yourself thinking about them even when you are alone. You don’t want to think about them, but you do. You have spent the past two years consciously trying to avoid your parents, doing everything you can to keep them at arm’s length, and you have gone back to Westfield only when you were certain that Gwyn was going to be there as well. You still love your parents, but you don’t particularly like them anymore. You came to this conclusion after your sister went off to college, leaving you alone with them for your last two years of high school, and when you finally went off to college yourself, you felt as if you had broken out of prison. It’s not that you pride yourself for feeling the way you do-in fact, you are revolted by it, appalled by your coldness and lack of compassion-and you constantly berate yourself for accepting money from your father, who supports you and pays your tuition, but you need to be in college in order to stay away from him and your mother, and since you have no money of your own, and since your father earns too much for you to qualify for a scholarship, what choice do you have but to wallow in the ignominy of your two-faced position? So you run, and as you run you know you are running for your life, and unless you maintain the distance between you and your parents, you will begin to wither and die, just as surely as your brother Andy died when he drowned in Echo Lake on August 10, 1957, that small lake in New Jersey with its eerily appropriate name, for Echo too withered and died, and after her beloved Narcissus drowned, there was nothing left of her but a heap of bones and the wailing of her disembodied, inextinguishable voice.

You don’t want to think about these things. You don’t want to think about your parents and the eight years you spent walled up in a house of grief. You were ten at the time of Andy’s death, and both you and Gwyn had been shipped off to a summer camp in New York State, which meant that neither one of you was present when the accident occurred. Your mother was alone with the seven-year-old Andy, planning to spend a week in the little lakeside bungalow your father bought in 1949 when you and your sister were no more than tots, the site of family summers, the site of smoky barbecues and mosquito-ridden sunsets, and the irony was that they were in the process of selling the place, this was to be the last summer at Echo Lake, just an hour’s drive from home but no longer the calm retreat it had been now that all the new houses were going up, and so, with her two oldest kids away, your mother succumbed to a burst of nostalgia and decided to haul Andy out to the lake, even though your father was too busy to go with them. Andy wasn’t much of a swimmer at that point, was still struggling to get the hang of it, but he had a daredevil streak in him, and he incited mischief with such hell-bent exuberance that everyone thought he was destined to earn an advanced degree in Practical Jokes. On the third day of the visit, sometime around six in the morning, with your mother still asleep in her room, Andy got it into his head to go for an unchaperoned swim. Before leaving, the seven-year-old adventurer sat down to write this short, semi-literate message- Deere Mom Ime in the lake Lov Andy -then tiptoed out of the bungalow, jumped into the water, and drowned. Ime in the lake .

You don’t want to think about it. You have run away now, and you don’t have the heart to return to that house of screams and silences, to listen to your mother howling in the bedroom upstairs, to reopen the medicine cabinet and count the bottles of tranquilizers and antidepressants, to think about the doctors and the breakdowns and the suicide attempt and the long stay in the hospital when you were twelve. You don’t want to remember your father’s eyes and how for years they seemed to look right through you, nor his robotic daily drill of waking at six sharp every morning and not returning from work until nine at night, or his refusal to mention the name of his dead son to you or your sister. You rarely saw him anymore, and with your mother all but incapable of tending the house and preparing meals, the ritual of the family dinner came to an end. The chores of cleaning and cooking were handled by a succession of so-called maids, principally worn-out black women in their fifties and sixties, and because on most nights your mother preferred to eat alone in her room, it was usually just you and your sister, sitting face to face at the pink Formica table in the kitchen. Where your father ate his dinner was a mystery to you. You imagined that he went to restaurants, or perhaps the same restaurant every night, but he never said a word about it.

It is painful for you to think about these things, but now that your sister is with you again, you can’t help yourself, the memories come rushing in on you against your will, and when you sit down to work on the long poem you started in June, you often find yourself stopping in mid-phrase, staring out the window, and reminiscing about your childhood.

You realize now that you began running away from them much earlier than you suspected. If not for Andy’s death, you probably would have remained a compliant, dutiful son until the hour you left home, but once the household began to fall apart-with your mother withdrawing into a state of permanent guilt-racked mourning and your father scarcely present anymore-you had to look elsewhere for some kind of sustainable existence. In the circumscribed world of childhood, elsewhere meant school and the ball fields you played on with your friends. You wanted to excel at everything, and because you were lucky enough to have been endowed with reasonable intelligence and a strong body, your grades were always near the top of your class and you stood out in any number of sports. You never sat down and thought any of this through (you were too young for that), but these successes helped to nullify some of the grimness that surrounded you at home, and the more you succeeded, the more you asserted your independence from your mother and father. They wished you well, of course, they were not actively against you, but a moment arrived (you could have been eleven) when you began to crave the admiration of your friends as much as you craved your parents’ love.