Paul Auster - Timbuktu

The fly never actually saw the key change hands. It might have happened at a moment when his attention was briefly diverted, but then again, Willy might have forgotten to mention it. At the time, it hardly seemed important. Once Bea Swanson entered the room, there were so many other things to think about, so many words to follow and feelings to digest, that he could scarcely remember his own name, let alone Willy’s half-cocked scheme for salvaging his literary archive.

Her hair had turned white, and she had put on thirty pounds, but the moment he saw her the fly knew who it was. Physically speaking, there was nothing to set her apart from a million other women her age. Dressed in blue-and-yellow madras shorts, a billowing white blouse, and a pair of leather sandals, she seemed to have stopped thinking about her appearance a long time ago. The plumpness of her arms and legs had grown even more pronounced over the years, and with the dimples in her pudgy knees and the varicose veins bulging from her calves and the flesh sagging from her upper arms, you could easily have mistaken her for a retirement-community golf lady, someone with nothing better to do than roam the back nine in an electric cart and worry about whether she was going to putt out in time for the early-bird special. But this woman’s skin was white, not tanned, and instead of sunglasses she had on a pair of no-nonsense wire-rimmed specs. Furthermore, once you looked through the lenses of those drugstore glasses, you discovered eyes of the most remarkable shade of blue. Look into those eyes, and you were trapped. They held you with their warmth and vivacity, their intelligence and watchfulness, the depth of their Scandinavian silences. These were the eyes that Willy had fallen in love with as a boy, and now the fly understood what all the fuss had been about. Forget the short-cropped hair and the chubby legs and the humdrum clothes. Mrs. Swanson was no dowager schoolmarm. She was the goddess of wisdom, and once you fell in love with her, you loved her until the day you died.

Nor was she quite the pushover that Mr. Bones had expected her to be. After listening to Willy go on about Mrs. Swanson’s kindness and generosity all the way down to Baltimore, he had imagined her as a softhearted sentimentalist, one of those flighty women prone to vast and sudden enthusiasms, who broke down and cried at the smallest provocation and bustled about straightening up after people the moment they stood up from their chairs. The real Mrs. Swanson was anything but. That is to say, the Mrs. Swanson in his dream was anything but. When she approached Willy’s bed and looked into the face of her former student for the first time in almost thirty years, the fly was startled by the toughness and clarity of her reaction. “Jesus Christ, William,” she said. “You’ve sure made a mess of things, haven’t you?”

“I’m afraid so,” Willy said. “I’m what you call a world-class fuckup, the king of the know-nothings.”

“At least you knew enough to get in touch with me,” Mrs. Swanson said, sitting down in the chair that Sister Mary Theresa had provided for her and taking hold of Willy’s hand. “The timing might not be so hot, but better late than never, huh?”

Tears started welling up in Willy’s eyes, and for once in his life he was unable to speak.

“It was always touch and go with you, William,” Mrs. Swanson continued, “so I can’t really say I’m surprised. I’m sure you’ve done your best. But we’re talking about highly combustible materials here, aren’t we? You walk around with a load of nitroglycerin in your brain, and sooner or later you’re going to bump into something. When it comes right down to it, it’s a wonder you didn’t blow yourself up a long time ago.”

“I walked all the way from New York,” Willy answered, apropos of nothing. “Too many miles with too little gas in the tank. It just about did me in. But now that I’m here, I’m glad I came.”

“You must be tired.”

“I feel like an old sock. But at least I can die happy now.”

“Don’t talk like that. They’re going to fix you up and make you better. You’ll see, William. In a couple of weeks, you’ll be as good as new.”

“Sure. And next year I’m going to run for president.”

“You can’t do that. You already have a job.”

“Not really. I’m sort of unemployed these days. Unemployable, really.”

“And what about the Santa Claus business?”

“Oh yeah. That.”

“You haven’t quit, have you? When you wrote me that letter, it sounded like a lifelong commitment.”

“I’m still on the payroll. Been on it for more than twenty years now.”

“It must be hard work.”

“Yeah, it is. But I’m not complaining. Nobody forced me to do it. I signed up of my own free will, and I’ve never had any second thoughts. Long hours, though, and not one day off in all that time, but what do you expect? It’s not easy doing good works. There’s no profit in it. And when there’s no money in a thing, people tend to get confused. They think you’re up to something, even when you’re not.”

“Do you still have the tattoo? You mentioned it in a letter, but I’ve never seen it.”

“Sure, it’s still there. Take a look if you want.”

Mrs. Swanson leaned forward in her chair, lifted the right sleeve of Willy’s hospital gown, and there it was. “Very nice,” she said. “That’s what I’d call a proper Santa Claus.”

“Fifty bucks,” Willy said. “And worth every penny.”

That was how the conversation began. It continued for the whole night and into the next morning, interrupted by occasional visits from the nurses, who came by to replenish Willy’s IV, take his temperature, and empty the bedpan. Sometimes, Willy’s strength would flag, and he would suddenly doze off in midsentence, sleeping for ten or twenty minutes at a stretch, but he would always come back, rising up from the depths of unconsciousness to join Mrs. Swanson again. If she hadn’t been there, the fly realized, it was doubtful that he would have held on as long as he did, but so great was his pleasure at being with her again that he continued to make the effort—for as long as effort was possible. Still, he did not struggle against what was coming, and even as he went through a list of things he had never done in life—never learned to drive a car, never flown in an airplane, never visited a foreign country, never learned to whistle—things he had never done and therefore would never do—it was not so much with regret as a kind of indifference, an attempt to prove to her that none of it mattered. “Dying’s no big deal,” he said, and by that he meant that he was ready to go, that he was grateful to her for seeing to it that his last hours had not been spent among strangers.

As one might have expected, his last words were about Mr. Bones. Willy had returned to the subject of his dog’s future, which he had already mentioned several times before, and was emphasizing to Mrs. Swanson how important it was that she comb the city and find him, that she do everything she could to give him a new home. “I’ve botched it,” he said. “I’ve let my pooch down.” And Mrs. Swanson, who was alarmed to see how weak he had suddenly become, tried to soothe him with a few meaningless words, “Don’t worry, William, it’s all right, it’s not important,” and Willy, rousing himself for one last effort, managed to lift his head and say, “Yes it is. It’s very important—” and then, just like that, his life stopped.

Sister Margaret, the nurse on duty at that hour, walked over to the bed and checked for a pulse. When none could be found, she took a small mirror out of her pocket and held it up to Willy’s mouth. A few moments later, she turned the mirror around and looked into it, but the only thing she saw there was herself. Then she put the mirror back in her pocket, reached out with her right hand, and closed Willy’s eyes. “It was a beautiful death,” she said.