Paul Auster - Invisible

Hours after your mother was carted off to the mental hospital, you swore an oath on your brother’s memory to be a good person for the rest of your life. You were alone in the bathroom, you remember, alone in the bathroom fighting back tears, and by good you meant honest, kind, and generous, you meant never making fun of anyone, never feeling superior to anyone, and never picking a fight with anyone. You were twelve years old. When you were thirteen, you stopped believing in God. When you were fourteen, you spent the first of three consecutive summers working in your father’s supermarket (bagging, shelving, manning the register, signing in deliveries, removing trash-thus perfecting the skills that would lead to your exalted position as a page at the Columbia library). When you were fifteen, you fell in love with a girl named Patty French. Later that year, you told your sister that you were going to become a poet. When you were sixteen, Gwyn left home and you went into internal exile.

Without Gwyn, you never would have made it that far. Much as you wanted to forge a life for yourself beyond the grasp of your family, home was where you lived, and without Gwyn to protect you in that home, you would have been smothered, annihilated, driven to the edge of madness. Early memories nonexistent, but you first see her as a five-year-old as the two of you sit naked in the bathtub, your mother washing Gwyn’s hair, the shampoo foaming up in frothy white spikes and bizarre undulations as your sister throws back her head, laughing, and you look on in rapt wonder. Already, you loved her more than anyone else in the world, and until you were six or seven you assumed that you would always live with her, that you would end up as man and wife. Needless to add that you sometimes squabbled and played nasty tricks on each other, but not habitually, not half as often as most siblings do. You looked so much alike, with your dark hair and gray-green eyes, with your elongated bodies and smallish mouths, so alike that you could have passed for male and female versions of the same person, and then in jumped the fair-skinned Andy with his blond curls and short, chubby frame, and right from the start you both found him a comical personage, a clever midget in soggy diapers who had joined the family for the sole purpose of entertaining you. For the first year of his life, you treated him like a toy or pet dog, but then he began to talk, and you reluctantly decided that he must be human. A real person, then, but contrary to you and your sister, who tended to be restrained and well mannered, your little brother was a dervish of fluctuating moods, alternately boisterous and sulky, prone to sudden, uncontrollable crying fits and long spurts of jungle-crazy laughter. It couldn’t have been easy for him-trying to crack into the inner circle, trying to keep up with his big sister and brother-but the gap narrowed as he grew older, the frustrations gradually diminished, and near the end the crybaby was developing into a good kid-more than a little daft at times ( Ime in the lake ) but nevertheless a good kid.

Just before Andy was born, your parents moved you and your sister into adjoining bedrooms on the third floor. It was a separate realm up there under the eaves, a small principality cut off from the rest of the house, and after the cataclysm of Echo Lake in August 1957, it became your refuge, the only spot in that fortress of sorrow where you and your sister could escape your grieving parents. You grieved too, of course, but you grieved in the way children do, more selfishly, perhaps more solemnly, and for many months you and your sister tortured yourselves by recounting all the less-than-kind things you had ever done to Andy-the taunts, the cutting remarks, the teasing insults, the slaps and shoves, the too hard punches-as if compelled by some shadowy sense of guilt to do penance, to grovel in your wickedness by endlessly rehearsing the slew of misdemeanors you had committed over the years. These recitations always took place at night, in the dark after you had gone to bed, the two of you talking through the open door between your rooms, or else one of you in the other’s bed, lying side by side on your backs, looking up at the invisible ceiling. You felt like orphans then, with the ghosts of your parents haunting the floor below, and sleeping together became a natural reflex, an abiding comfort, a remedy to ward off the shakes and tears that came so often in the months after Andy’s death.

Intimacies of this sort were the unquestioned ground of your relations with your sister. It went all the way back to the beginning, to the very edge of conscious memory, and you cannot recall a single moment when you felt shy or afraid in her presence. You took baths with her when you were small children, you eagerly explored each other’s bodies in games of “doctor,” and on stormy afternoons when you were confined to the house, Gwyn’s preferred activity was jumping on the bed together stark naked. Not just for the pleasure of the jumping, as she put it, but because she liked to see your penis flopping up and down, and diminutive as that organ must have been at that point in your life, you readily obliged her, since it always made her laugh, and nothing made you happier than to see your sister laugh. How old were you then? Four years old? Five years old? Eventually, children begin to recoil from the rowdy, Caliban nudism of toddlerhood, and by the time they reach the age of six or seven the barriers of modesty have already gone up. For some reason, this failed to happen with you and Gwyn. No more splashing in the tub, perhaps, no more doctor games, no more jumping on the bed, but still, an altogether un-American casualness as far as your bodies were concerned. The door of the bathroom you shared was often left open, and how many times did you walk past that door and catch sight of Gwyn peeing into the toilet, how many times did she glimpse you stepping from the shower without a stitch of clothing on? It felt perfectly natural to see each other naked, and now, in the summer of 1967, as you put down your pen and look out the window to think about your childhood, you ponder this lack of inhibition and conclude that it must have been because you felt your body belonged to her, that each of you belonged to the other, and therefore it would have been unimaginable to act differently. It’s true that as time went on you both became somewhat more reserved, but even when your bodies began to change, you did not completely withdraw from each other. You remember the day Gwyn walked into your room, sat down on the bed, and lifted her blouse to show you the first, tiny swell of her nipples, the earliest sign of her incipient, growing breasts. You remember showing her your first pubic hair and one of your first adolescent erections, and you also remember standing next to her in the bathroom and looking at the blood run down her legs when she had her first period. Neither one of you thought twice about going to the other when these miracles occurred. Life-altering events demanded a witness, and what better person to serve that role than one of you?

Then came the night of the grand experiment. Your parents were going away for the weekend, and they had decided that you and your sister were old enough to take care of yourselves without supervision. Gwyn was fifteen and you were fourteen. She was nearly a woman, and you were just emerging from boyhood, but both of you were trapped in the throes of early teenage desperation, thinking about sex from morning to night, masturbating incessantly, out of your minds with desire, your bodies burning with lustful fantasies, longing to be touched by someone, to be kissed by someone, ravenous and unfulfilled, aroused and alone, damned. The week before your parents’ departure, the two of you had openly discussed the dilemma, the great contradiction of being old enough to want it but too young to get it. The world had played a trick on you by forcing you to live in the mid-twentieth century, citizens of an advanced industrial nation no less, whereas if you had been born into a primitive tribe somewhere in the Amazon or the South Seas, you would no longer still be virgins. That was when you hatched your plan-immediately following that conversation-but you waited until your parents were gone before you put it into action.