Oracle Night

by Paul Auster

  ‘No, I’m sorry. I must have been pretty wrapped up in what I was doing.’

  ‘When you didn’t answer, I opened the door and peeked inside. But you weren’t there.’

  ‘Of course I was. I was sitting at my desk.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t see you. Maybe you were somewhere else. In the bathroom maybe.’

  ‘I don’t remember going to the bathroom. As far as I know, I was sitting at my desk the whole time.’

  Grace shrugged. ‘If you say so, Sidney,’ she answered. She was clearly in no mood to pick a quarrel. Intelligent woman that she was, she gave me one of her glorious, enigmatic smiles and then turned back to the stove to finish preparing the tea.

  The rain stopped at some point in the middle of the afternoon, and several hours later a battered blue Ford from one of the local car services drove us across the Brooklyn Bridge for our biweekly dinner with John Trause. Since my return from the hospital, the three of us had made a point of getting together every other Saturday night, alternating meals at our place in Brooklyn (where we cooked for John) with elaborate culinary blowouts at Chez Pierre, an expensive new restaurant in the West Village (where John always insisted on picking up the tab). The original program for that night had been to meet at the bar of Chez Pierre at seven-thirty, but John had called earlier in the week to say that something was wrong with his leg and that he would have to cancel. It turned out to be an attack of phlebitis (an inflammation of the vein brought on by the presence of a blood clot), but then John had called back on Friday afternoon to tell us that he was feeling a little better. He wasn’t supposed to walk, he said, but if we didn’t mind coming to his apartment and ordering in Chinese food, maybe we could have our dinner after all. ‘I’d hate to miss seeing you and Gracie,’ he said. ‘Since I have to eat something anyway, why don’t we all do it here together? As long as I keep my leg up, it really doesn’t hurt too much anymore.’4

  I had stolen John’s apartment for my story in the blue notebook, and when we got to Barrow Street and he opened the door to let us in, I had the strange, not altogether unpleasant feeling that I was entering an imaginary space, walking into a room that wasn’t there. I had visited Trause’s apartment countless times in the past, but now that I had spent several hours thinking about it in my own apartment in Brooklyn, peopling it with the invented characters of my story, it seemed to belong as much to the world of fiction as to the world of solid objects and flesh-and-blood human beings. Unexpectedly, this feeling didn’t go away. If anything, it grew stronger as the night went on, and by the time the Chinese food arrived at eight-thirty, I was already beginning to settle into what I would have to call (for want of a better term) a state of double consciousness. I was both a part of what was going on around me and cut off from it, drifting freely in my mind as I imagined myself sitting at my desk in Brooklyn, writing about this place in the blue notebook, and sitting in a chair on the top floor of a Manhattan duplex, firmly anchored in my body, listening to what John and Grace were saying to each other and even adding some remarks of my own. It’s not unusual for a person to be so preoccupied as to appear absent – but the point was that I wasn’t absent. I was there, fully engaged in what was happening, and at the same time I wasn’t there – for the there wasn’t an authentic there anymore. It was an illusory place that existed in my head, and that’s where I was as well. In both places at the same time. In the apartment and in the story. In the story in the apartment that I was still writing in my head.

  John appeared to be in a lot more pain than he was willing to admit. He was leaning on a crutch when he opened the door, and as I watched him limp up the stairs and then hobble back to his place on the sofa – a big sagging affair festooned with a pile of pillows and blankets for propping up his leg – he was wincing noticeably, suffering with every step he took. But John wasn’t about to make a big production of it. He had fought in the Pacific as an eighteen-year-old private at the end of World War II, and he belonged to that generation of men who considered it a point of honor never to feel sorry for themselves, who recoiled in disdain whenever anyone tried to fuss over them. Other than making a couple of cracks about Richard Nixon, who had given the word phlebitis a certain comic resonance in the days of his administration, John stubbornly refused to talk about his infirmity. No, that’s not quite correct. After we entered the upstairs room, he allowed Grace to help him onto the sofa and to reposition the pillows and blankets, apologizing for what he called his ‘moronic decrepitude.’ Then, once he had settled into his spot, he turned to me and said, ‘We’re quite a pair, aren’t we, Sid? You with your wobbles and nosebleeds, and now me with this leg. We’re the goddamn gimps of the universe.’

  Trause had never been overly attentive to his appearance, but that night he looked particularly disheveled to me, and from the rumpled condition of his blue jeans and cotton sweater – not to speak of the grayish tinge that had spread over the bottoms of his white socks – I gathered he’d been wearing that outfit for several days in a row. Not surprisingly, his hair was mussed, and the back strands had been flattened and stiffened after lying on the sofa for so many hours in the past week. The truth was that John looked haggard, considerably older than he had ever looked to me before, but when a man is in pain, and no doubt losing much sleep because of that pain, he can hardly be expected to look his best. I wasn’t alarmed by what I saw, but Grace, who was normally the most unruffled person I knew, seemed flustered and upset by John’s condition. Before we could get down to the business of ordering the food, she grilled him for ten solid minutes about doctors, medicines, and prognoses, and then, once he’d assured her he wasn’t going to die, she moved on to a host of practical concerns: grocery shopping, cooking, trash removal, laundry, the daily routine. Madame Dumas had it all under control, John said, referring to the woman from Martinique who had been cleaning his apartment for the past two years, and when she wasn’t available, her daughter came instead. ‘Twenty years old,’ he added, ‘and very intelligent. Nice to look at, too, by the way. She doesn’t walk so much as glide around the room, as if her feet weren’t touching the floor. It gives me a chance to practice my French.’

  The matter of John’s leg aside, he seemed glad to be with us, and he talked more than he usually did on such occasions, rattling on steadily for most of the evening. I can’t be certain, but I believe it was the pain that loosened his tongue and kept him going. The words must have provided a distraction from the tumult coursing through his leg, a frenzied sort of relief. That, and the vast quantities of alcohol he consumed as well. As each new bottle of wine was uncorked, John was the first to hold out his glass, and of the three bottles we drank that night, roughly half the contents wound up in his system. That makes a bottle and a half of wine, along with the two glasses of straight Scotch he drank toward the end. I had seen him drink that much a few times in the past, but no matter how well lubricated John became, he never appeared to be drunk. No slurred speech, no glassiness in the eyes. He was a big person – six-two, a shade under two hundred pounds – and he could hold it.

  ‘About a week before this leg thing started,’ he said, ‘I got a call from Tina’s brother Richard.5 I hadn’t heard from him in a long time. Not since the day of the funeral, in fact, which means we’re talking about eight years – more than eight years. I’d never had much to do with her family while we were married, and now that she wasn’t there anymore, I hadn’t bothered to stay in touch with them. Nor they with me, for that matter – not that I particularly cared. All those Ostrow brothers, with their cruddy furniture store on Springfield Avenue and their boring wives and their mediocre children. Tina had about eight or nine first cousins, but she was the only one with any spirit, the only one who’d had the gumption to break out of that little New Jersey world and try to make something of herself. So it surprised me when Richard called the other day. He lives in Florida now, he said, and had come to New York on a business trip. Would I be interested in going out to dinner with him? Somewhere nice,
he said, his treat. Since I didn’t have any other plans, I accepted. I don’t know why I did, but there wasn’t any compelling reason not to, and so we arranged to meet the next night at eight o’clock.

  ‘You have to understand about Richard. He’d always struck me as a featherweight, a person without substance. He was born a year after Tina, which would make him about forty-three now, and except for a few moments of glory as a high school basketball player, he’d stumbled around for most of his life, flunking out of two or three colleges, moving from one dismal job to the next, never marrying, never really growing up. A sweet disposition, I suppose, but shallow and uninspired, with a kind of slack-jawed dopiness that always got on my nerves. About the only thing I ever liked about him was his devotion to Tina. He loved her every bit as much as I did – that’s certain, an uncontestable fact – and I’m not going to deny that he was a good brother to her, an exemplary brother. You were at the funeral, Gracie. You remember what happened. Hundreds of people showed up, and every person in the chapel was sobbing, moaning, wailing in horror. It was a flood of collective grief, suffering on a scale I’d never witnessed before. But of all the mourners in that room, Richard was the one who suffered the most. He and I together, sitting in the front pew. When the service was over, he nearly passed out when he tried to get to his feet. It took all my strength to hold him up. I literally had to throw my arms around his body to stop him from falling to the floor.

  ‘But that was years ago. We lived through that trauma together, and then I lost track of him. When I agreed to have dinner the other night, I was expecting to have a dull time of it, to slog my way through a couple of hours of awkward conversation and then dash for the door and head home. But I was wrong. I’m happy to report that I was wrong. It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don’t know half as much as I think I do.

  ‘It started with the pleasure of seeing his face. I’d forgotten how much he resembled his sister, how many features they had in common. The set and slant of the eyes, the rounded chin, the elegant mouth, the bridge of the nose – it was Tina in a man’s body, or little flashes of her at any rate, darting out at random moments. It overwhelmed me to be with her again like that, to feel her presence again, to feel that a part of her had lived on in her brother. A couple of times Richard turned in a certain way, gestured in a certain way, did a certain something with his eyes, and I was so moved that I wanted to lean across the table and kiss him. Smack on the lips – a full-bore osculation. You’ll probably laugh, but I’m actually sorry now that I didn’t.

  ‘Richard was still Richard, the selfsame Richard of yore – but better, somehow, more comfortable in his own skin. He’s gotten himself married and has two little girls. Maybe that’s helped. Maybe being eight years older has helped, I don’t know. He’s still grinding away at one of those sad-sack jobs of his – computer parts salesman, efficiency consultant, I forget what it was – and he still spends every evening in front of the television set. Football games, sitcoms, cop shows, nature specials – he loves everything about television. But he never reads, never votes, never even bothers to pretend to have an opinion about what’s going on in the world. He’s known me for sixteen years, and in all that time he hasn’t once taken the trouble to open one of my books. I don’t mind, of course, but I mention it in order to show how lazy he is, how thoroughly lacking in curiosity. And yet I enjoyed being with him the other night. I enjoyed listening to him talk about his favorite TV programs, about his wife and two daughters, about his ever-improving tennis game, about the advantages of living in Florida over New Jersey. Better climate, you understand. No more snowstorms and icy winters; summer every day of the year. So ordinary, children, so fucking complacent, and yet – how shall I put it? – utterly at peace with himself, so contented with his life that I almost envied him for it.

  ‘So there we were, eating an unremarkable dinner in an unremarkable midtown restaurant, talking about nothing of any great importance, when Richard suddenly looked up from his plate and began to tell me a story. That’s why I’ve been telling you all this – in order to get to Richard’s story. I don’t know if you’ll agree with me, but it strikes me as one of the most interesting things I’ve heard in a long time.

  ‘Three or four months ago, Richard was in his garage at home, looking for something in a cardboard box, when he came across an old 3-D viewer. He vaguely remembered that his parents had bought it when he was a kid, but he couldn’t recall the circumstances or what they’d used it for. Unless he’d blanked out the experience, he was fairly certain he’d never looked through it, had never even held it in his hands. When he lifted it out of the box and started to examine it, he saw that it wasn’t one of those cheap, flimsy things used for looking at ready-made pictures of tourist sites and pretty scenery. It was a solid, well-built optical instrument, a prize relic from the 3-D craze of the early fifties. The fad didn’t last long, but the idea was to take your own 3-D pictures with a special camera, develop them as slides, and then look at them through the viewer, which served as a kind of three-dimensional photo album. The camera was missing, but Richard found a box of slides. There were just twelve of them, he said, which seemed to suggest his parents had shot only one roll of film with their novelty camera – and then had stowed it away somewhere and forgotten all about it.

  ‘Not knowing what to expect, Richard put one of the slides in the viewer, pressed down on the background illuminator button, and had a look. In one instant, he said, thirty years of his life were erased. It was 1953, and he was in the living room of his family’s house in West Orange, New Jersey, standing among the guests at Tina’s sixteenth birthday party. He remembered everything now: the Sweet Sixteen bash, the caterers unpacking their food in the kitchen and lining up champagne glasses on the counter, the ringing of the doorbell, the music, the din of voices, the chignon knot in Tina’s hair, the whooshing of her long yellow dress. One by one, he put each slide in the viewer and looked at all twelve of them. Everyone was there, he said. His mother and father, his cousins, his aunts and uncles, his sister, his sister’s friends, and even himself, a scrawny fourteen-year-old with his protruding Adam’s apple, flattop haircut, and red clip-on bow tie. It wasn’t like looking at normal photographs, he explained. It wasn’t even like looking at home movies – which always disappoint you with their jerky images and washed-out colors, their sense of belonging to the remote past. The 3-D pictures were incredibly well preserved, supernaturally sharp. Everyone in them looked alive, brimming with energy, present in the moment, a part of some eternal now that had gone on perpetuating itself for close to thirty years. Intense colors, the minutest details shining in utmost clarity, and an illusion of surrounding space, of depth. The longer he looked at the slides, Richard said, the more he felt that he could see the figures breathing, and every time he stopped and went on to the next one, he had the impression that if he’d looked a little longer – just one more moment – they actually would have started to move.

  ‘After he’d looked at each slide once, he looked at them all again, and the second time around it gradually occurred to him that most of the people in the pictures were now dead. His father, killed by a heart attack in 1969. His mother, killed by kidney failure in 1972. Tina, killed by cancer in 1974. And of his six aunts and uncles in attendance that day, four of them dead and buried as well. In one picture, he was standing on the front lawn with his parents and Tina. It was just the four of them – arms linked, leaning into one another, a row of four smiling faces, ridiculously animated, mugging for the camera – and when Richard put that one into the viewer for the second time, his eyes suddenly filled with tears. That was the one that did him in, he said, the one that was too much for him. He was standing on the lawn with three ghosts, he realized, the only survivor from that afternoon thirty years ago, and once the tears started, there was nothing he could do to stop them. He put down the viewer, lifted his hands over his face, and began to sob. That was th
e word he used when he told me the story: sob. ‘I sobbed my guts out,’ he said. ‘I completely lost it.’

  ‘This was Richard, remember – a man with no poetry in him, a man with the sensitivity of a doorknob – and yet once he found those pictures, he couldn’t think about anything else. The viewer was a magic lantern that allowed him to travel through time and visit the dead. He would look at the pictures in the morning before he left for work, and he would look at them in the evening after he came home. Always in the garage, always by himself, always away from his wife and children – obsessively returning to that afternoon in 1953, unable to get enough of it. The spell lasted for two months, and then one morning Richard went into the garage and the viewer didn’t work. The machine had jammed up, and he couldn’t depress the button anymore to turn on the light. He’d probably used it too much, he said, and since he didn’t know how to fix it, he assumed the adventure was over, that the marvelous thing he’d discovered had been taken away from him for good. It was a catastrophic loss, the cruelest of deprivations. He couldn’t even look at the slides by holding them up to the light. Three-D pictures aren’t conventional photographs, and you need the viewer to translate them into coherent images. No viewer, no image. No image, no more time travel into the past. No more time travel, no more joy. Another round of grief, another round of sorrow – as if, after bringing them back to life, he had to bury the dead all over again.

  ‘That was the situation when I saw him two weeks ago. The machine was broken, and Richard was still trying to come to grips with what had happened to him. I can’t tell you how touched I was by his story. To see this bumbling, ordinary man turned into a philosophical dreamer, an anguished soul longing for the unattainable. I told him I’d do anything I could to help. This is New York, I said, and since everything in the world can be found in New York, there has to be someone in the city who can fix it. Richard was a little embarrassed by my enthusiasm, but he thanked me for the offer, and that was where we left it. The next morning, I got busy. I called around, did some research, and within a day or two I’d tracked down the owner of a camera shop on West Thirty-first Street who thought he could do it. Richard was back in Florida by then, and when I called him that night to tell him the news, I thought he’d be excited, that we’d immediately start talking about how to pack up the viewer and ship it to New York. But there was a long pause on the other end of the line. “I don’t know, John,” Richard finally said. “I’ve thought about it a lot since I saw you, and maybe it’s not such a good idea for me to be looking at those pictures all the time. Arlene was getting pretty upset, and I wasn’t really paying much attention to the girls. Maybe it’s better this way. You have to live in the present, right? The past is past, and no matter how much time I spend with those pictures, I’m never going to get it back.”’