Paul Auster - Invisible

– Are you allowed to publish these stories? I thought there were laws that prevented government workers from exposing state secrets.

– If we run into any difficulties, we’ll redo the manuscript and publish it as a novel-under your name.

– My name?

– Yes, your name. I’ll keep myself out of it, and you can have all the glory.

I no longer believed a word he was saying. By the time R.B. left the room, I was convinced he was mad, that he had lost his mind and gone stark raving mad. He’d spent too many years on Quillia, and the tropical sun had cooked the wires in his brain and pushed him over the edge of sanity. Espionage. Marriage. Memoirs that transformed themselves into novels. He was like a child, a desperate child who made up things as he went along, saying whatever popped into his head and then spinning it out into a fiction that would serve his purpose at any given moment-in this case, the bizarre, wholly preposterous idea that he wanted to marry me. He didn’t want to marry me. He couldn’t want to marry me. But if he did, and if he thought he could, then it only proved that he was no longer in his right mind.

I pretended to play along with him, acting as if I took his experiment in the form of a business proposal seriously. Was I too afraid to challenge him, or was I simply trying to avoid an unpleasant scene? A little of both, I think. I didn’t want to say anything that would provoke his anger, but at the same time I found the conversation unbearably tedious, and I wanted to get rid of him as quickly as I could. So you’ll think it over? he asked. Yes, I said, I promise to think it over. But you’ll have to tell me more about the book before I make my decision. Of course, he answered, that goes without saying. I have some chores to do with Samuel now, but we can talk about it over lunch. Then he patted me on the cheek and said: I’m so glad you’ve come. The world has never looked more beautiful to me.

I didn’t go to lunch. I said that I wasn’t feeling well, which was partly true and partly not true. I could have gone if I had pushed myself, if I had actively wanted to go, but I wasn’t in the mood to push myself, and I didn’t want to go. I needed a break from R.B., and the fact was that the trip had taken its toll on me. I felt exhausted, jet-lagged, spent. Without bothering to take off my clothes, I lay down on the bed and napped for three solid hours. I woke up in a sweat, perspiration gushing from every pore of my body, my mouth dry, my head pounding. Stripping off my clothes, I went into the bathroom, hung one of the water-filled plastic bags on the shower hook, opened the nozzle, and let the water rush down onto my head. A lukewarm shower in the midday heat. The bathroom was out in the open, a small, nichelike space carved into the stone and perched on top of the cliff, with nothing below me but the immense, glittering ocean. The world has never looked more beautiful . Yes, I said to myself, this is beyond doubt a beautiful place, but it is a harsh beauty, an inhospitable beauty, and I am already looking forward to leaving it.

I thought about writing in my diary, but I was too agitated to sit still. Then it occurred to me that I should suspend all writing for the duration of my visit. What if R.B. sneaked into my room and found the diary, I wondered, what if he saw the things I was saying about him? All hell would break loose. I might even be in danger.

I tried to read, but reading was beyond my powers of concentration just then. All the useless books I had packed for my holiday in the sun. Novels by Bernhard and Vila-Matas, poems by Dupin and du Bouchet, essays by Sacks and Diderot-all worthy books, but useless to me now that I had reached my destination.

I sat in the chair by the window. I paced around the room. I sat down in the chair again.

And what if R.B. hadn’t gone mad? I asked myself. What if he was playing with me, proposing marriage in order to tease me and make fun of me, having a good laugh at my expense? That too was possible. Anything was possible.

He drank heavily at dinner that night. A couple of tall rum punches before we sat down at the table, then ample doses of wine throughout the meal. At first, it seemed to have no effect on him. He solicitously asked if I was feeling better, and I said yes, the nap had done me a world of good, and after that we talked about small, inconsequential things, with no mention of marriage, no mention of Adam Walker, no mention of books about undercover intelligence work that can be turned into novels. Although we were speaking French, I wondered if he preferred not to talk about these matters in front of the servants. I also wondered if he wasn’t going senile, in the early stages of Alzheimer’s or dementia, and had simply forgotten the things we had talked about earlier in the day. Perhaps thoughts flitted through his head like butterflies or mosquitoes-ephemeral notions that came and went so fast that he couldn’t keep track of them anymore.

About ten or fifteen minutes into the meal, however, he began talking about politics. Not in any personal way, not with any stories about his own experiences, but abstractly, theoretically, sounding very much like the professor he had been for most of his adult life. He began with the Berlin Wall. Everyone in the West was so happy when the wall came down, he said, everyone thought a new era of peace and brotherly love had dawned on earth, but in fact it was the most alarming event of recent times. Distasteful as it might have been, the Cold War had held the world together for forty-four years, and now that the simple, black-and-white binary world of us versus them was gone, we had entered a period of instability and chaos similar to the years prior to World War I. Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD. It was a frightening concept, yes, but when one half of humanity is in a position to blow up the other half, and when the other half is in a position to blow up the first half, neither side will pull the trigger. Permanent stalemate. The most elegant answer to military aggression in the history of mankind.

I didn’t interrupt. R.B. was talking rationally for once, even if his argument was rather crude. What about Algeria and Indochina, I wanted to ask him, what about Korea and Vietnam, what about U.S. interference in Latin America, the assassinations of Lumumba and Allende, the Soviets rolling their tanks into Budapest and Prague, the long war in Afghanistan? There was little point in asking these questions. I had sat through enough lectures of this sort as a girl to know that tangling with R.B. wasn’t worth the trouble. Let him rant, I said to myself, let him spout forth his simplistic opinions, and before long he’ll talk himself out and the evening will be over. This was the R.B. of old, and for the first time since I’d set foot in his house, I felt I was on familiar ground.

But he didn’t talk himself out, and the evening dragged on much longer than I thought it would. He was only warming up with those comments about the Cold War, clearing his throat, as it were, and for the next two hours he subjected me to the most blistering harangue I had ever heard from him. Arab terrorism, September 11th, the encroaching war in Iraq, the price of oil, global warming, food shortages, mass starvation, a world depression, dirty bombs, anthrax attacks, the annihilation of Israel-what didn’t he talk about, what dire, death-rattling prophecy did he not conjure up and spew in my face? Some of the things he said were so mean and ugly, so vicious in their hatred of anyone who was not a European with white skin, of anyone who was not, finally, Rudolf Born himself, that a moment came when I couldn’t bear to listen to him anymore. Stop it, I said. I don’t want to hear another word. I’m going to bed.

As I stood up from my chair and left the room, he was still talking, still preaching to me in his drunken, rasping voice, not even aware that I was no longer sitting at the table. The polar ice caps are melting, he said. Fifteen years from now, twenty years from now, the floods will come. Drowned cities, obliterated continents, the end of everything. You’ll still be alive, Cécile. You’ll get to see it happen, and then you’ll drown. You’ll drown with all the others, all the billions of others, and that will be the end. How I envy you, Cécile. You’ll be there to see the end of everything.