Paul Auster - Invisible

I don’t know that they’re true. At least I can’t verify that they’re true. But all those other things tally with what Adam told me back then, forty years ago. I never met Born or Margot or Cécile or Hélène. I wasn’t with Adam in New York that spring. I wasn’t with him in Paris that fall. But he did talk to me about those people, and everything he said about them in 1967 matches up with what he says about them in the book.

All the odder, then, that he should make up those things about you.

I know you don’t believe me. I know you think I’m trying to protect myself, that I don’t want to admit those things could have happened between us. But it wasn’t like that, I promise. I’ve been thinking about it for the past twenty-four hours, and the only answer I’ve come up with is that those pages are a dying man’s fantasy, a dream of what he wished had happened but never did.

Wished?

Yes, wished. I’m not denying those feelings were in the air, but I had no interest in acting on them. Adam was too attached to me, Jim. It was an unhealthy attachment, and after we’d been living together for a while that summer, he started telling me that I’d spoiled him for other women, that I was the only woman he could ever love, and that if we weren’t brother and sister, he would marry me in a second. Sort of joking, of course, but I didn’t like it. To be perfectly honest, I was relieved when he went to Paris.

Interesting.

And then, as we both know, less than a month later he was back-booted out in disgrace, as he put it to me at the time. But I had another roommate by then, and Adam had to look for a new apartment of his own. We were still friends, still the best of friends, but I started to put a little distance between us, to back away from him for his own good. You saw a fair amount of him during your last two years of college, but how often did you see him with me?

I’m trying to remember… Not a lot. No more than a couple of times.

I rest my case.

So what happens to his book now? Do we put it in a drawer and forget about it?

Not necessarily. In its present form, the book is unpublishable. Not only is it untrue-at least partly untrue-but if those untrue pages ever found their way into the world, they would create misery and disaster for untold numbers of people. I’m a married woman, Jim. I have two daughters and three grandchildren, dozens of relatives, hundreds of friends, a stepniece I’m very fond of, and it would be a crime to publish the book as it stands now. Agreed?

Yes, yes. You won’t get an argument from me.

On the other hand, I was deeply moved by the book. It brought my brother back to me in ways I hadn’t expected, in ways that utterly surprised me, and if we can transform it into something publishable, I would give the project my blessing.

I’m a little lost. How do you make an unpublishable book publishable?

That’s where you come into it. If you’re not interested in helping, we’ll drop the matter now and never talk about it again. But if you do want to help, then this is what I propose. You take the notes for the third part and put them into decent shape. That shouldn’t be too hard for you. I could never do it myself, but you’re the writer, you’ll know how to handle it. Then, most important, you go through the manuscript and change all the names. Remember that old TV show from the fifties? The names have been changed to protect the innocent . You change the names of the people and the places, you add or subtract any material you see fit, and then you publish the book under your own name.

But then it wouldn’t be Adam’s book anymore. It feels dishonest somehow. Like stealing… like some weird form of plagiarism.

Not if you frame it correctly. If you give credit to Adam for the passages he wrote-to the real Adam under the false name you’ll invent for him-then you won’t be stealing from him, you’ll be honoring him.

But no one will know it’s Adam.

Does it matter? You and I will know, and as far as I’m concerned, we’re the only ones who count.

You’re forgetting my wife.

You trust her, don’t you?

Of course I trust her.

Then the three of us will know.

I’m not sure, Gwyn. I need to think about it. Give me a little time, okay?

Take all the time you need. There’s no rush.

Her story was convincingly told, more than plausible, I felt, and for her sake I wanted to believe it. But I couldn’t, at least not entirely, at least not with a strong doubt that the text of Summer was a story of lived experience and not some salacious dream of a sick and dying man. To satisfy my curiosity, I took a day off from the novel I was writing and went up to the Columbia campus, where I learned from an administrator at the School of International Affairs that Rudolf Born had been employed as a visiting professor during the 1966-67 academic year, and then, after a session in the microfilm room of Butler Library, the same Castle of Yawns where Walker had worked over the summer, that the corpse of eighteen-year-old Cedric Williams had been discovered one May morning in Riverside Park with more than a dozen knife wounds in his chest and upper body. These other things , as Gwyn had called them, had been accurately reported in Walker’s manuscript, and if these other things were true, why would he have gone to the trouble of fabricating something that wasn’t true, damning himself with a highly detailed, self-incriminating account of incestuous love? It’s possible that Gwyn’s version of those two summer months was correct, but it’s also possible that she lied to me. And if she lied, who can blame her for not wanting the facts to be dragged out into the open? Anyone would lie in her situation, everyone would lie, lying would be the only alternative. As I rode back to Brooklyn on the subway, I decided that it didn’t matter to me. It mattered to her, but not to me.

Several months went by, and in that time I scarcely thought about Gwyn’s proposal. I was hard at work on my book, entering the last stages of a novel that had already consumed several years of my life, and Walker and his sister began to recede, to melt away, turning into two dim figures on the far horizon of consciousness. Whenever Adam’s book happened to make an appearance in my mind, I was fairly certain that I didn’t want to get involved with it, that the episode was finished. Then, two things happened that led me to reverse my thinking. I came to the end of my own book, which meant that I was free to turn my attention to other things, and I stumbled upon some new information connected to Walker’s story, a coda, as it were, a last little chapter that gave the project new meaning for me-and with that meaning an impetus to begin.

I have already described how I revamped Walker’s notes for Fall . As for the names, they have been invented according to Gwyn’s instructions, and the reader can therefore be assured that Adam Walker is not Adam Walker. Gwyn Walker Tedesco is not Gwyn Walker Tedesco. Margot Jouffroy is not Margot Jouffroy. Hélène and Cécile Juin are not Hélène and Cécile Juin. Cedric Williams is not Cedric Williams. Sandra Williams is not Sandra Williams, and her daughter, Rebecca, is not Rebecca. Not even Born is Born. His real name was close to that of another Provençal poet, and I took the liberty to substitute the translation of that other poet by not-Walker with a translation of my own, which means that the remarks about Dante’s Inferno on the first page of this book were not in not-Walker’s original manuscript. Last of all, I don’t suppose it is necessary for me to add that my name is not Jim.

Westfield, New Jersey, is not Westfield, New Jersey. Echo Lake is not Echo Lake. Oakland, California, is not Oakland, California. Boston is not Boston, and although not-Gwyn works in publishing, she is not the director of a university press. New York is not New York, Columbia University is not Columbia University, but Paris is Paris. Paris alone is real. I managed to keep it in because the Hôtel du Sud vanished long ago, and all recorded evidence of not-Walker’s stay there in 1967 has long since vanished as well.