Paul Auster: Invisible

Climbing down the mountain was less of a challenge than climbing up had been. I broke into a sweat, of course, I was bedeviled by the same aerial attacks of gnats and mosquitoes, but I didn’t fall this time, not even once. I moved at a moderate pace, neither too plodding nor too rushed, pausing every now and then to examine wildflowers by the side of the road-bright, beautiful things whose names were unknown to me. Burning red. Burning yellow. Burning blue.

As I approached the bottom of the mountain, I began to hear something, a sound or collection of sounds that I was unable to identify. At first, I thought it resembled the chirping of crickets or cicadas, the persistent metallic cries of insects in the afternoon heat. But it was too hot for insects to be calling to one another just then, and as I drew closer, I understood that the sounds were too loud, that the rhythms of the sounds were too complex, too pulsing and intricate to be coming from any living thing. A barrier of trees blocked my view. I kept on walking, but the barrier didn’t end until I reached the very bottom. Once I got there, I stopped, turned to my right, and finally saw where the sounds were coming from, finally saw what my ears had been telling me.

A barren field stretched out before me, a barren, dusty field cluttered with gray stones of various shapes and sizes, and scattered among the stones in that field were fifty or sixty men and women, each holding a hammer in one hand and a chisel in the other, pounding on the stones until they broke in two, then pounding on the smaller stones until they broke in two, and then pounding on the smallest stones until they were reduced to gravel. Fifty or sixty black men and women crouching in that field with hammers and chisels in their hands, pounding on the stones as the sun pounded on their bodies, with no shade anywhere and sweat glistening on every face. I stood there watching them for a long time. I watched and listened and wondered if I had ever seen anything like it. This was the kind of work one usually associated with prisoners, with people in chains, but these people weren’t in chains. They were working, they were making money, they were keeping themselves alive. The music of the stones was ornate and impossible, a music of fifty or sixty clinking hammers, each one moving at its own speed, each one locked in its own cadence, and together they formed a fractious, stately harmony, a sound that worked itself into my body and stayed there long after I had left, and even now, sitting on the plane as it flies across the ocean, I can still hear the clinking of those hammers in my head. That sound will always be with me. For the rest of my life, no matter where I am, no matter what I am doing, it will always be with me.

Paul Auster is the bestselling author of Man in the Dark, The Book of Illusions , and The New York Trilogy , among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his other honors are the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke and the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan . He has also been short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award ( The Book of Illusions ), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction ( The Music of Chance ), and the Edgar Award ( City of Glass ). His work has been translated into thirty-five languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.