Paul Auster - Invisible

Two policemen in uniform, young French gendarmes with guns in their holsters and sticks in their hands. An older man in a business suit. Befuddled Maurice lurking at the door. They ask if his name is Adam Walker- Valk-air . They ask for his papers, meaning his American passport, and when he gives it to one of the gendarmes, it is not returned to him. Then the older man instructs the other gendarme to search the armoire. The bottom drawer is opened, and out comes a large brick wrapped in aluminum foil. The younger man gives it to the older man, who begins peeling back the foil. Hashish, he says. A good two and a half kilos, maybe three.

The exquisite irony of Born’s retaliation. The boy who never took drugs is charged with possession of drugs.

They take him away. In the backseat of the car, W. tells the older man that he is innocent, that someone planted the drugs in his room while he was out walking. The man tells him to shut up.

They lead him into a building, put him in a room, and lock the door. He has no idea where he is. All he knows is that he is sitting in a small, empty room somewhere in Paris and that handcuffs have been placed around his wrists. Has he been arrested? He isn’t sure. No one said a word to him, but he finds it odd that he hasn’t been photographed and fingerprinted, that he is sitting in this small, empty room and not in the lockup cell of some prison.

He sits there for close to seven hours. At ten-thirty, he is taken from the building and driven to the Palais de Justice. The handcuffs are removed from his wrists. He goes into an office and talks to a man who claims to be the juge d’instruction . It could be that the man is who he says he is, but W. suspects not. He is growing more and more convinced that he is in a farce directed by Rudolf Born, and all the men and women are merely players .

The examining magistrate, assuming he is the examining magistrate, tells W. that he is a lucky young man. Possession of such a large quantity of illicit drugs is a serious crime in France, punishable by X many years in prison. Fortunately for W., a man with considerable influence in government circles has interceded on his behalf, arguing for clemency in light of the accused’s heretofore unblemished record. The Ministry of Justice is therefore prepared to strike a bargain with W. They will drop the charges if he agrees to deportation. He will never be allowed to enter France again, but he will be a free man in his own country.

The juge d’instruction opens the top drawer of his desk and takes out W.’s passport (which he holds up in his right hand) and an airline ticket (which he holds up in his left). This is a one-time offer, he says. Take it or leave it.

W. will take it.

Good, the man says. A wise decision. The plane leaves this afternoon at three. That will give you just enough time to return to your hotel and pack. An officer will accompany you, of course, but once the plane takes off and leaves French soil, the affair will be closed. We earnestly hope that this is the last we’ll ever see of you. Have a pleasant journey, Mr. Walker.

And so ends W.’s brief sojourn in the land of Gaul-expelled, humiliated, banned for life.

He will never go back there, and he will never see any of them again.

Good-bye, Margot. Good-bye, Cécile. Good-bye, Hélène.

Forty years later, they are no more substantial than ghosts.

They are all ghosts now, and W. will soon be walking among them.

Riding back on the plane from San Francisco to New York, I searched my memory for the exact moment when I had first spotted Walker in the fall of 1967. I hadn’t known that he had gone off to study in Paris for the year, but a few days into the semester, when we held our first editorial meeting of the Columbia Review (Adam and I were both on the board), I noticed that he wasn’t there. What happened to Walker? I asked someone, and that was when I learned he was in Europe, enrolled in the Junior Year Abroad Program. Not long after that (a week? ten days?), he suddenly appeared again. I was taking Edward Tayler’s seminar on sixteenth-and seventeenth-century poetry (Wyatt, Surrey, Raleigh, Greville, Herbert, Donne), the same Edward Tayler who had taught Milton back in the spring. Walker and I had been in that class together, and we were both of the opinion that Tayler was hands down the best professor in the English Department. Since the seminar was primarily for graduate students, I felt lucky to have been admitted as a third-year undergraduate, and I worked my head off for the sly, ironical, tight-lipped, ever-brilliant Tayler, wanting to earn the respect of this demanding, much-admired person. The seminar met twice a week for an hour and a half, and at the third or fourth session, with no explanation from anyone, there was Walker again, unexpectedly among us, the thirteenth member of a class officially limited to twelve.

We talked in the hall afterward, but Adam seemed distracted, unwilling to say much about his precipitous return to New York (I now know why). He mentioned that the program in Paris had been a disappointment to him, that the courses he was allowed to take had not been interesting enough (all grammar, no literature), and rather than waste a year in the sub-basement of the French educational bureaucracy, he had opted to come back. Quitting the program on such short notice had caused some upheavals, but Columbia had acted with unusual kindness, he felt, and even though classes had already begun when he bolted from Paris, a long talk with one of the deans had settled the matter, and he had been reinstated as a full-time student in good standing-which meant that he didn’t have to worry about the draft, at least not for another four semesters. The only problem was that he had no permanent place to live. He had shared his old apartment with his sister in July and August, but after he left for what he had thought would be a full year, she had found another roommate, and now he was out in the cold. For the time being, he was crashing with different friends in the neighborhood while he hunted for a new apartment of his own. In fact, he said, glancing down at his watch, he had an appointment in twenty minutes to look at a small studio that had just opened up on 109th Street, and he had to be off. See you later, he said, and then he began running toward the stairs.

I knew that Adam had a sister, but this was the first I’d heard about her being in New York-a resident of Morningside Heights, no less, and doing graduate work in English at Columbia. Two weeks later, I caught my first sight of her on campus. She was walking past Rodin’s statue of the thinker on her way into Philosophy Hall, and because of the strong, almost eerie resemblance to her brother, I felt certain that the young woman flitting past me was Walker’s sister. I have already mentioned how beautiful she was, but saying that doesn’t do justice to the overwhelming impact she had on me. Gwyn was ablaze with beauty, an incandescent being, a storm in the heart of every man who laid eyes on her, and seeing her for the first time ranks as one of the most astonishing moments of my life. I wanted her-from the first second I wanted her-and, with the passionate obstinacy of a daydreaming fool, I went after her.

Nothing ever happened. I got to know her a little bit, we met for coffee a couple of times, I asked her out to the movies (she turned me down), I invited her to a concert (she turned me down), and then, accidentally, we both wound up at a large Chinese dinner one night and discussed the poems of Emily Dickinson for half an hour. A short time after that, I persuaded her to go for a walk with me in Riverside Park, tried to kiss her, and was pushed away. Don’t, Jim, she said. I’m involved with someone else. I can’t do this.