Paul Auster - Invisible

Step One: You talk about Andy in the past tense, dredging up everything you can recall about him while he was still alive. Invariably, this is the longest portion of the ritual. You remember your memories of past years, but additional ones always seem to spring forth from your unconscious as well. You try to keep the tone light and cheerful. This is not an exercise in morbidity, it is a celebration, and laughter is permitted at all times. You repeat some of his early mispronunciations of words: hangaburger for hamburger, human bean for human being, chuthers for each other-as in They kissed their chuthers -and the perfectly logical but demented Mommy’s Ami , following a reference by your mother to the city of Miami. You talk about his bug collection, his Superman cape, and his bout with the chicken pox. You remember teaching him how to ride a bicycle. You remember his aversion to peas. You remember his first day of school (tears and torment), his skinned elbows, his hiccuping fits. Just seven years on this earth, but every year you and Gwyn come to the same conclusion: the list is inexhaustible. And yet, every year, you can’t help feeling that a little more of him has vanished, that in spite of your best efforts, less and less of him is coming back to you, that you are powerless to stop him from fading away.

Step Two: You talk about him in the present tense. You imagine what kind of person he would have become if he were still alive today. For ten years now, he has been living this shadow existence inside you, a phantom being who has grown up in another dimension, invisible yet breathing, breathing and thinking, thinking and feeling, and you have followed him since the age of eight, for more years after death than he ever managed to live, and now that he is seventeen, the gap between you has become ever smaller, ever less significant, and it shocks you, it shocks you and your sister simultaneously, to realize that at seventeen he is probably no longer a virgin, that he has smoked pot and gotten drunk, that he shaves and masturbates, drives a car, reads difficult books, is thinking about what college to go to, and is on the brink of becoming your equal. Gwyn starts to cry, saying that she can’t stand it anymore, that she wants to stop, but you tell her to hang on for a few more minutes, that the two of you never have to do this again, that this will be the last birthday party for the rest of your lives, but for Andy’s sake you have to see this one through to the end.

Step Three: You talk about the future, about what will happen to Andy between now and his next birthday. This has always been the easiest part, the most enjoyable part, and in past years you and Gwyn have sailed through the game of predictions with immense enthusiasm and brio. But not this year. Before you can begin the third and last part of the conversation, your overwrought sister clamps her hand over her mouth, gets up from her chair, and rushes out of the kitchen.

You find her in the living room, sobbing on the sofa. You sit down next to her, put your arm around her shoulders, and talk to her in a soothing voice. Calm down, you say. It’s all right, Gwyn. I’m sorry… sorry I pushed you so hard. It’s my fault.

You feel the thinness of her quaking shoulders, the delicate bones beneath her skin, her heaving rib cage pressing against your own ribs, her hip against your hip, her leg against your leg. In all the years you have known her, you doubt you have ever seen her so miserable, so crushed by sadness.

It’s no good, she finally says, her eyes cast downward, addressing her words to the floor. I’ve lost contact with him. He’s gone now, and we’ll never find him again. In two weeks, it will have been ten years. That’s half your life, Adam. Next year, it will be half of mine. That’s too long. The space keeps growing. The time keeps growing, and every minute he drifts farther and farther away from us. Good-bye, Andy. Send us a postcard someday, all right?

You don’t say anything. You sit there with your arm around your sister and let her go on crying, knowing that it would be useless to intervene, that you must allow the explosion to run its course. How long does it last? You haven’t the faintest idea, but a moment eventually comes when you notice that the tears have stopped. With your left hand, the free hand that is not around her shoulders, you take hold of her chin and turn her face toward you. Her eyes are red and swollen. Rivulets of mascara have run down her cheeks. Mucus is dribbling from her nose. You withdraw your left hand, put it into the back pocket of your pants, and pull out a handkerchief. You begin dabbing her face with the cloth. Little by little, you wipe away the tears, the snot, and the black mascara, and throughout the long, meticulous procedure, your sister doesn’t move. Looking at you intently, her eyes washed clean of any discernible emotion, she sits in absolute stillness as you repair the damage left by the storm. When the job is finished, you stand up and say to her: Time for a drink, Miss Walker. I’ll go get the scotch.

You march off to the kitchen. A minute later, when you return to the living room with a bottle of Cutty Sark, two glasses, and a pitcher of ice cubes, she is exactly where she was when you left her-sitting on the sofa, her head leaning against the backrest, eyes shut, breathing normally again, purged. You put down the drinking equipment on one of the three wooden milk crates that stand side by side in front of the sofa, the battered, upside-down boxes that you and your former roommate dragged off the street one day and which now serve as your excuse for a coffee table. Gwyn opens her eyes and gives you a wan, exhausted smile, as if asking you to forgive her for her outburst, but there is nothing to forgive, nothing to talk about, nothing you could ever hold against her, and as you set about pouring the drinks and putting ice into the glasses, you feel relieved that the business with Andy is over, relieved that there will be no more birthday celebrations for your absent brother, relieved that you and your sister have at last put this childish thing behind you.

You hand Gwyn her drink and then sit down beside her on the sofa. For several minutes, neither one of you says a word. Sipping your scotches and staring ahead at the wall in front of you, you both know what is going to happen tonight, you feel it as a certainty in your blood, but you also know that you have to be patient and give the alcohol time to do its work. When you lean forward to prepare the second round of drinks, Gwyn starts talking to you about her broken romance with Timothy Krale, the thirty-year-old assistant professor who entered her life more than eighteen months ago and left it this past April, at roughly the same moment you were shaking Born’s hand for the first time. The teacher of her class on modernist poetry, of all things, the man risked his job by going after her, and she fell hard for him, especially in the beginning, during the first wild months of furtive assignations and weekend jaunts to distant motel rooms in forgotten towns across upstate New York. You yourself met him a number of times, and you understood what Gwyn saw in him, you concurred that Krale was an attractive and intelligent fellow, but you also sensed that there was something desiccated about the man, a detachment from others that made it difficult for you to warm up to him. It didn’t surprise you when Gwyn turned down his proposal of marriage and put a stop to the affair. She told him that she felt too young, that she wasn’t ready to commit herself over the long term, but that wasn’t the real reason, she explains to you now, she left him because he wasn’t a kind enough lover. Yes, yes, she says, she knows he loved her, loved her as much as he was capable of loving anyone, but she found him selfish in bed, inattentive, too driven by his own needs, and she couldn’t imagine herself tolerating such a man for the rest of her life. She turns to you now, and with a look of utmost seriousness and conviction in her eyes, she sets forth her definition of love, wanting to know if you share her opinion or not. Real love, she says, is when you get as much pleasure from giving pleasure as you do from receiving it. What do you think, Adam? Am I right or wrong? You tell her she is right. You tell her it is one of the most perceptive things she has ever said.