Paul Auster - Invisible

After twenty-four hours of bleak introspection, the agony slowly subsides. The turnaround begins on Saturday, the second evening of the early July weekend you have chosen to spend in Manhattan. After dinner, you and your sister ride the 104 bus down Broadway to the New Yorker theater and walk into the coolness of that dark space to watch Carl Dreyer’s 1955 film, Ordet (The Word). Normally, you would not be interested in a film about Christianity and matters of religious faith, but Dreyer’s direction is so exact and piercing that you are quickly swept up into the story, which begins to remind you of a piece of music, as if the film were a visual translation of a two-part invention by Bach. The aesthetics of Lutheranism, you whisper into Gwyn’s ear at one point, but since she has not been privy to your thoughts, she has no idea what you are talking about and returns your comment with a bewildered frown.

There is little need to rehash the intricacies of the story. Compelling as those twists and turns might be, they amount to just one story among an infinity of stories, one film among a multitude of films, and if not for the end, Ordet would not have affected you more than any other good film you have seen over the years. It is the end that counts, for the end does something to you that is wholly unexpected, and it crashes into you with all the force of an axe felling an oak.

The farm woman who has died in childbirth is stretched out in an open coffin as her weeping husband sits beside her. The mad brother who thinks he is the second coming of Christ walks into the room holding the hand of the couple’s young daughter. As the small group of mourning relatives and friends looks on, wondering what blasphemy or sacrilege is about to be committed at this solemn moment, the would-be incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth addresses the dead woman in a calm and quiet voice. Rise up, he commands her, lift yourself out of your coffin and return to the world of the living. Seconds later, the woman’s hands begin to move. You think it must be a hallucination, that the point of view has shifted from objective reality to the mind of the addled brother. But no. The woman opens her eyes, and just seconds after that she sits up, fully restored to life.

There is a large crowd in the theater, and half the audience bursts out laughing when they see this miraculous resurrection. You don’t begrudge them their skepticism, but for you it is a transcendent moment, and you sit there clutching your sister’s arm as tears roll down your cheeks. What cannot happen has happened, and you are stunned by what you have witnessed.

Something changes in you after that. You don’t know what it is, but the tears you shed when you saw the woman come back to life seem to have washed out some of the poison that has been building up inside you. The days pass. At various moments, you think your small breakdown in the balcony of the New Yorker theater might be connected to your brother, Andy, or, if not to Andy, then to Cedric Williams, or perhaps to both of them together. At other moments, you are convinced that by some strange, sympathetic overlapping of subject and object, you felt you were watching yourself rise from the dead. Over the next two weeks, your step gradually becomes less heavy. You still feel doomed, but you sense that when the day comes for you to be led to the scaffold, you might have it in you to crack a parting joke or exchange pleasantries with your hooded executioner.

Every year since your brother’s death, you and your sister have celebrated his birthday. Just the two of you, with no parents, relatives, or other guests allowed. For the first three years, when you were both still young enough to spend your summers at sleepaway camp, you would hold the party in the open air, the two of you tiptoeing out of your cabins in the middle of the night and running across the darkened ball fields up to the meadow on the northern edge of the campgrounds and then bolting into the woods with flashlights illuminating your path through the trees and underbrush-each one of you holding a cupcake or cookie, which you had stolen from the mess hall after dinner that evening. For three consecutive summers after your camp days ended, you both worked in your father’s supermarket, and therefore you were at home on the twenty-sixth of July and could celebrate the birth of your brother in Gwyn’s bedroom on the third floor of the house. The next two years were the most difficult, since you both traveled during those summers and were far apart on the appointed day, but you managed to perform truncated versions of the ritual over the telephone. Last year, you took a bus to Boston, where Gwyn was shacked up with her then boyfriend, and the two of you went out to a restaurant to lift a glass in honor of the departed Andy. Now another July twenty-sixth is upon you, and for the first summer in a long while you are together again, about to throw your little fête in the kitchen of the apartment you share on West 107th Street.

It is not a party in the traditional sense of the word. Over the years, you and your sister have developed a number of strict protocols regarding the event, and with slight variations, depending on how old you have been, each July twenty-sixth is a reenactment of all the previous July twenty-sixths of the past ten years. In essence, the birthday dinner is a conversation divided into three parts. Food is served and eaten, and once the three-part talk is finished, a small chocolate cake appears, ornamented by a single candle burning in the center. You do not sing the song. You mouth the words in unison, speaking softly, barely raising your voices above a whisper, but you do not sing them. Nor do you blow the candle out. You let it burn down to a stub, and then you listen to it sizzle as the flame is extinguished in the ooze of the chocolate frosting. After a slice of cake, you open a bottle of scotch. Alcohol is a new element, not introduced until 1963 (the last of the supermarket summers, when you were sixteen and Gwyn was seventeen), but for the next two years you were apart and drinkless, and last year you were in a public place, which meant you had to watch your consumption. This year, alone in your New York apartment, you both aim to get good and drunk.

Gwyn has put on lipstick and makeup for the dinner, and she comes to the table wearing gold hoop earrings and a pale green summer shift, which makes the green of her gray-green eyes appear even more vivid. You are in a white oxford shirt with short sleeves and a button-down collar, and around your neck is the only tie you own, the same tie Born ridiculed you for wearing last spring. Gwyn laughs when she sees you in that getup and says you look like a Mormon-one of those earnest young men who go around the world knocking on doors and giving out pamphlets, a proselytizer on a holy mission. Nonsense, you tell her. You don’t have a crew cut, and your hair isn’t blond, and therefore you could never be confused with a Mormon. Still and all, Gwyn says, you look mighty, mighty strange. If not a Mormon, she continues, then perhaps a fledgling accountant. Or a math student. Or a wannabe astronaut. No, no, you shoot back at her-a civil rights worker in the South. All right, she says, you win, and an instant later you remove both the tie and the shirt, leave the kitchen, and change into something else. When you return, Gwyn smiles but says nothing further about your clothes.

As usual, the weather is hot, and because you don’t want to increase the temperature in the kitchen, you have refrained from using the oven and prepared a light summer meal that consists of chilled soup, a platter of cold cuts (ham, salami, roast beef), and a lettuce-and-tomato salad. There is also a loaf of Italian bread, along with a bottle of chilled Chianti encased in a straw covering (the cheap wine of choice among students of the period). After taking your first sips of the cold watercress soup, you begin the three-part conversation. That is the core of the experience for you, the single most important reason for staging this annual event. All the rest-the meal, the cake, the candle, the words of the happy birthday song, the booze-are mere trappings.