Oracle Night

by Paul Auster

  That was the end of the story. A disappointing end, John felt, but Grace disagreed with him. After communing with the dead for two months, Richard had put himself in danger, she said, and was perhaps running the risk of falling into a serious depression. I was about to say something then, but just as I opened my mouth to offer my opinion, I got another one of my infernal nosebleeds. They had started a month or two before I was put in the hospital, and even though most of my other symptoms had cleared up by now, the nosebleeds had persisted – always striking at the most inopportune moments, it seemed, and never failing to cause me intense embarrassment. I hated not to be in control of myself, to be sitting in a room as I was that night, for example, taking part in a conversation, and then suddenly to notice that blood was pouring out of me, splattering onto my shirt and pants, and not being able to do a damn thing to stop it. The doctors had told me not to worry – there were no medical consequences, no signs of impending trouble – but that didn’t make me feel any less helpless or ashamed. Every time my nose gushed blood, I felt like a little boy who’d wet his pants.

  I jumped out of the chair, pressed a handkerchief against my face, and hustled toward the nearest bathroom. Grace asked if I wanted any help, and I must have given her a somewhat peevish answer, although I can’t remember what I said. ‘Don’t bother,’ perhaps, or ‘Leave me alone.’ Something with enough irritation in it to amuse John, in any case, for I can distinctly remember hearing him laugh as I left the room. ‘Old Faithful strikes again,’ he said. ‘Orr’s menstruating schnozz. Don’t let it get you down, Sidney. At least you know you’re not pregnant.’

  There were two bathrooms in the apartment, one on each level of the duplex. Normally, we would have spent the evening downstairs in the dining room and living room, but John’s phlebitic leg had pushed us up to the second floor, since that was where he was spending most of his time now. The upstairs room was a kind of supplementary parlor, a cozy little spot with large bay windows, bookshelves lining three of the walls, and built-in spaces for stereo equipment and TV – the perfect enclave for a recovering invalid. The bathroom on that floor was just off John’s bedroom, and in order to reach the bedroom I had to walk through his study, the place where he wrote. I switched on the light when I entered that room, but I was too involved with my nosebleed to pay any attention to what was in it. I must have spent fifteen minutes in the bathroom squeezing my nostrils and tilting back my head, and until those old remedies began to work, so much liquid flowed out of me that I wondered if I wouldn’t have to go to the hospital for an emergency transfusion. How red the blood looked against the whiteness of the porcelain sink, I thought. How vividly imagined that color was, how aesthetically shocking. The other fluids that came out of us were dull in comparison, the palest of squirts. Whitish spittle, milky semen, yellow pee, green-brown mucus. We excreted autumn and winter colors, but running invisibly through our veins, the very stuff that kept us alive, was the crimson of a mad artist – a red as brilliant as fresh paint.

  After the attack was over, I lingered at the sink for a while, doing what I could to make myself presentable again. It was too late to remove the spots from my clothes (which had hardened into small rusty circles that smeared across the fabric when I tried to rub them out), but I gave my hands and face a thorough washing and wet down my hair, using John’s comb to complete the job. I was feeling a bit less sorry for myself by then, a bit less battered. My shirt and pants were still adorned with ugly polka dots, but the river wasn’t flowing anymore, and the stinging in my nose had mercifully abated.

  As I walked through John’s bedroom and entered his study, I glanced over at his desk. I wasn’t really looking there, just casting my eyes around the room as I headed for the door, but lying out in full view, surrounded by an assortment of pens, pencils, and messy stacks of paper, there was a blue hardbound notebook – remarkably similar to the one I’d bought in Brooklyn that morning. A writer’s desk is a holy place, the most private sanctuary in the world, and strangers aren’t allowed to approach it without permission. I had never gone near John’s desk before, but I was so startled, so curious to know if that notebook was the same as mine, that I forgot my discretion and went over to have a look. The notebook was closed, lying faceup on a small dictionary, and the moment I bent down to examine it, I saw that it was the exact double of the one lying on my desk at home. For reasons that still baffle me, I became enormously excited by this discovery. What difference did it make what kind of notebook John used? He had lived in Portugal for a couple of years, and no doubt they were a common item over there, available in any run-of-the-mill stationery store. Why shouldn’t he be writing in a blue hardbound notebook that had been manufactured in Portugal? No reason, no reason at all – and yet, given the deliciously pleasant sensations I’d felt that morning when I’d bought my own blue notebook, and given that I’d spent several productive hours writing in it earlier that day (my first literary efforts in close to a year), and given that I’d been thinking about those efforts all through the evening at John’s, it hit me as a startling conjunction, a little piece of black magic.

  I wasn’t planning to mention it when I returned to the sitting room. It was too nutty, somehow, too idiosyncratic and personal, and I didn’t want to give John the impression that I was in the habit of snooping into his things. But when I walked into the room and saw him lying on the sofa with his leg up, staring at the ceiling with a grim, defeated look in his eyes, I suddenly changed my mind. Grace was downstairs in the kitchen, washing dishes and disposing of leftovers from our take-out meal, and so I sat down in the chair she had been occupying, which happened to be just to the right of the sofa, a couple of feet from John’s head. He asked if I was feeling any better. Yes, I replied, much better, and then I leaned forward and said to him, ‘The strangest thing happened to me today. When I was out on my morning walk, I went into a store and bought a notebook. It was such an excellent notebook, such an attractive and appealing little thing, that it made me want to write again. And so the minute I got home, I sat down at my desk and wrote in it for two straight hours.’

  ‘That’s good news, Sidney,’ John said. ‘You’re starting to work again.’

  ‘The Flitcraft episode.’

  ‘Ah, even better.’

  ‘We’ll see. It’s just some rough notes so far, nothing to get excited about. But the notebook seems to have charged me up, and I can’t wait to write in it again tomorrow. It’s dark blue, a very pleasant shade of dark blue, with a cloth strip running down the spine and a hard cover. Made in Portugal, of all places.’

  ‘Portugal?’

  ‘I don’t know which city. But there’s a little label on the inside back cover that says MADE IN PORTUGAL.’

  ‘How on earth did you find one of those things here?’

  ‘There’s a new shop in my neighborhood. The Paper Palace, owned by a man named Chang. He had four of them in stock.’

  ‘I used to buy those notebooks on my trips down to Lisbon. They’re very good, very solid. Once you start using them, you don’t feel like writing in anything else.’

  ‘I had that same feeling today. I hope it doesn’t mean I’m about to become addicted.’

  ‘Addiction might be too strong a word, but there’s no question that they’re extremely seductive. Be careful, Sid. I’ve been writing in them for years, and I know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘You make it sound as if they’re dangerous.’

  ‘It depends on what you write. Those notebooks are very friendly, but they can also be cruel, and you have to watch out that you don’t get lost in them.’

  ‘You don’t look lost to me – and I just saw one lying on your desk when I left the bathroom.’

  ‘I bought a big supply before I moved back to New York. Unfortunately, the one you saw is the last one I have, and I’ve almost filled it up. I didn’t know you could get them in America. I was thinking of writing to the manufacturer and ordering some more.’

  ‘The man i
n the shop told me that the company’s gone out of business.’

  ‘Just my luck. But I’m not surprised. Apparently there wasn’t much of a demand for them.’

  ‘I can pick one up for you on Monday, if you want.’

  ‘Are there any blue ones left?’

  ‘Black, red, and brown. I bought the last blue one.’

  ‘Too bad. Blue is the only color I like. Now that the company’s gone, I guess I’ll have to start developing some new habits.’

  ‘It’s funny, but when I looked over the pile this morning, I went straight for the blue myself. I felt drawn to that one, as if I couldn’t resist it. What do you think that means?’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything, Sid. Except that you’re a little off in the head. And I’m just as off as you are. We write books, don’t we? What else can you expect from people like us?’

  Saturday nights in New York are always crowded, but that night the streets were even more packed than usual, and what with one delay and another, it took us over an hour to get home. Grace managed to flag down a cab right outside John’s door, but when we climbed in and told the driver we were going to Brooklyn, he made some excuse about being low on gas and wouldn’t accept the fare. I wanted to make a stink about it, but Grace took hold of my arm and gently pulled me out of the cab. Nothing materialized after that, so we walked over to Seventh Avenue, threading our way past gangs of raucous, drunken kids and half a dozen demented panhandlers. The Village was percolating with energy that night, a madhouse jangle that seemed ready to erupt into violence at any moment, and I found it exhausting to be out among those crowds, trying to keep my balance as I clung to Grace’s arm. We stood at the corner of Barrow and Seventh for a good ten minutes before an empty taxi approached us, and Grace must have apologized six times for having forced me out of the other one. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t let you put up a fight,’ she said. ‘It’s my fault. The last thing you need is to be standing out in this chill, but I hate to argue with stupid people. It makes me too upset.’

  But Grace wasn’t only upset by stupid cabdrivers that night. A few moments after we got into the second taxi, she inexplicably began to cry. Not on a large scale, not with some breathless outrush of sobs, but the tears started gathering in the corners of her eyes, and when we stopped at Clarkson for a red light, the glare of the street lamps swept into the cab, and I could see the tears glistening in the brightness, welling up in her eyes like small expanding crystals. Grace never broke down like that. Grace never cried or gave way to excessive shows of feeling, and even at her most stressful moments (during my collapse, for example, and all through the desperate early weeks of my stay in the hospital), she seemed to have an inborn talent for holding herself together, for facing up to the darkest truths. I asked her what was wrong, but she only shook her head and turned away. When I put my hand on her shoulder and asked again, she shrugged me off – which was something she had never done before. It wasn’t a terribly hostile gesture, but again, it was unlike Grace to act that way, and I admit that I felt a little stung by it. Not wanting to impose myself on her or let her know I’d been hurt, I withdrew to my corner of the backseat and waited in silence as the cab inched southward along Seventh Avenue. When we came to the intersection at Varick and Canal, we were stalled in traffic for several minutes. It was a monumental jam-up: honking cars and trucks, drivers shouting obscenities at one another, New York mayhem in its purest form. In the middle of all that ruckus and confusion, Grace abruptly turned to me and apologized. ‘It’s just that he looked so terrible tonight,’ she said, ‘so done-in. All the men I love are falling apart. It’s getting to be a little hard to take.’

  I didn’t believe her. My body was on the mend, and it seemed implausible that Grace would have been so disheartened by John’s fleeting leg ailment. Something else was troubling her, some private torment she wasn’t willing to share with me, but I knew that if I kept on hounding her to open up, it would only make things worse. I reached out and put my arm around her shoulder, then drew her slowly toward me. There was no resistance in her this time. I felt her muscles relax, and a moment later she was curling up beside me and leaning her head against my chest. I put my hand on her forehead and began stroking her hair with the flat of my palm. It was an old ritual of ours, the expression of some wordless intimacy that continued to define who we were together, and because I never grew tired of touching Grace, never grew tired of having my hands on some part of her body, I kept on doing it, repeating the gesture dozens of times as we made our way down West Broadway and crept toward the Brooklyn Bridge.

  We didn’t say anything to each other for several minutes. By the time the cab turned left on Chambers Street and started to approach the bridge, every ramp was clogged with traffic, and we could hardly advance at all. Our driver, whose name was Boris Stepanovich, muttered curses to himself in Russian, no doubt lamenting the folly of trying to cross over to Brooklyn on a Saturday night. I leaned forward and talked to him through the money slot in the scarred Plexiglas partition. Don’t worry, I said, your patience will be rewarded. Oh? he said. And what means that? A big tip, I answered. As long as you get us there in one piece, you’ll have your biggest tip of the night.

  Grace let out a small laugh when she heard the malapropism – What means that? – and I took it as a sign that her funk was lifting. I settled back into the seat to resume stroking her head, and as we mounted the roadway of the bridge, crawling along at one mile an hour, suspended over the river with a blaze of buildings behind us and the Statue of Liberty off to our right, I started to talk to her – to talk for no other reason than to talk – in order to hold her attention and prevent her from drifting away from me again.

  ‘I made an intriguing discovery tonight,’ I said.

  ‘Something good, I hope.’

  ‘I discovered that John and I have the same passion.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It turns out that we’re both in love with the color blue. In particular, a defunct line of blue notebooks that used to be made in Portugal.’

  ‘Well, blue is a good color. Very calm, very serene. It sits well in the mind. I like it so much, I have to make a conscious effort not to use it on all the covers I design at work.’

  ‘Do colors really convey emotions?’

  ‘Of course they do.’

  ‘And moral qualities?’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Yellow for cowardice. White for purity. Black for evil. Green for innocence.’

  ‘Green for envy.’

  ‘Yes, that too. But what does blue stand for?’

  ‘I don’t know. Hope, maybe.’

  ‘And sadness. As in, I’m feeling blue. Or, I’ve got the blues.’

  ‘Don’t forget true blue.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. Blue for loyalty.’

  ‘But red for passion. Everyone agrees on that.’

  ‘The Big Red Machine. The red flag of socialism.’

  ‘The white flag of surrender.’

  ‘The black flag of anarchism. The Green Party.’

  ‘But red for love and hate. Red for war.’

  ‘You carry the colors when you go into battle. That’s the phrase, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Are you familiar with the term color war?’

  ‘It doesn’t ring any bells.’

  ‘It comes from my childhood. You spent your summers riding horses in Virginia, but my mother sent me to a sleep-away camp in upstate New York. Camp Pontiac, named after the Indian chief. At the end of the summer, they’d divide everyone into two teams, and for the next four or five days different groups from the two sides would compete against one another.’

  ‘Compete at what?’

  ‘Baseball, basketball, tennis, swimming, tug-of-war – even egg-and-spoon races and singing contests. Since the camp colors were red and white, one side was called the Red Team and the other was called the White Team.’

  ‘And that’s color war.’

  �
�For a sports maniac like me, it was terrific fun. Some years I was on the White Team and other years on the Red. After a while, though, a third team was formed, a kind of secret society, a brotherhood of kindred souls. I haven’t thought about it in years, but it was very important to me at the time. The Blue Team.’

  ‘A secret brotherhood. It sounds like silly boys’ stuff to me.’

  ‘It was. No … actually it wasn’t. When I think about it now, I don’t find it silly at all.’

  ‘You must have been different then. You never want to join anything.’

  ‘I didn’t join, I was chosen. As one of the charter members, in fact. I felt very honored.’

  ‘You’re already on Red and White. What’s so special about Blue?’

  ‘It started when I was fourteen. A new counselor came to the camp that year, someone a little older than the rest of the people on the staff – who were mostly nineteen-and twenty-year-old college students. Bruce … Bruce something … the last name will come to me later. Bruce had his BA and had already finished a year at Columbia Law School. A scrawny, gnomish little guy, a strict nonathlete working at a camp devoted to sports. But sharp-witted and funny, always challenging you with difficult questions. Adler. That’s it. Bruce Adler. Commonly known as the Rabbi.’