Oracle Night

by Paul Auster

  ‘And he invented the Blue Team?’

  ‘Sort of. To be more exact, he re-created it as an exercise in nostalgia.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘A few years earlier, he’d worked as a counselor at another camp. The colors of that camp were blue and gray. When color war broke out at the end of summer, Bruce was put on the Blue Team, and when he looked around and saw who was on the team with him, he realized it was everyone he liked, everyone he most respected. The Gray Team was just the opposite – filled with whining, unpleasant people, the dregs of the camp. In Bruce’s mind, the words Blue Team came to stand for something more than just a bunch of rinky-dink relay races. They represented a human ideal, a tight-knit association of tolerant and sympathetic individuals, the dream of a perfect society.’

  ‘This is getting pretty strange, Sid.’

  ‘I know. But Bruce didn’t take it seriously. That was the beauty of the Blue Team. The whole thing was kind of a joke.’

  ‘I didn’t know rabbis were allowed to make jokes.’

  ‘They probably aren’t. But Bruce wasn’t a rabbi. He was just a law student with a summer job, looking for a little entertainment. When he came to work at our camp, he told one of the other counselors about the Blue Team, and together they decided to form a new branch, to reinvent it as a secret organization.’

  ‘How did they choose you?’

  ‘In the middle of the night. I was fast asleep in my bed, and Bruce and the other counselor shook me awake. “Come on,” they said, “we have something to tell you,” and then they led me and two other boys into the woods with flashlights. They had a little campfire going, and so we sat around the fire and they told us what the Blue Team was, why they had selected us as charter members, and what qualifications they were looking for – in case we wanted to recommend other candidates.’

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘Nothing specific, really. Blue Team members didn’t conform to a single type, and each one was a distinct and independent person. But no one was allowed in who didn’t have a good sense of humor – however that humor might have expressed itself. Some people crack jokes all the time; others can lift an eyebrow at the right moment and suddenly everyone in the room is rolling on the floor. A good sense of humor, then, a taste for the ironies of life, and an appreciation of the absurd. But also a certain modesty and discretion, kindness toward others, a generous heart. No blowhards or arrogant fools, no liars or thieves. A Blue Team member had to be curious, a reader of books, and aware of the fact that he couldn’t bend the world to the shape of his will. An astute observer, someone capable of making fine moral distinctions, a lover of justice. A Blue Team member would give you the shirt off his back if he saw you were in need, but he would much rather slip a ten-dollar bill into your pocket when you weren’t looking. Is it beginning to make sense? I can’t pin it down for you and say it’s one thing or another. It’s all of them at once, each separate part interacting with all the others.’

  ‘What you’re describing is a good person. Pure and simple. My father’s term for it is honest man. Betty Stolowitz uses the word mensch. John says not an asshole. They’re all the same thing.’

  ‘Maybe. But I like Blue Team better. It implies a connection among the members, a bond of solidarity. If you’re on the Blue Team, you don’t have to explain your principles. They’re immediately understood by how you act.’

  ‘But people don’t always act the same way. They’re good one minute and bad the next. They make mistakes. Good people do bad things, Sid.’

  ‘Of course they do. I’m not talking about perfection.’

  ‘Yes you are. You’re talking about people who’ve decided they’re better than other people, who feel morally superior to the rest of us common folk. I’ll bet you and your friends had a secret handshake, didn’t you? To set you apart from the riffraff and the dumbbells, right? To make you think you had some special knowledge no one else was smart enough to have.’

  ‘Jesus, Grace. It was just a little thing from twenty years ago. You don’t have to break it down and analyze it.’

  ‘But you still believe in that junk. I can hear it in your voice.’

  ‘I don’t believe in anything. Being alive – that’s what I believe in. Being alive and being with you. That’s all there is for me, Grace. There’s nothing else, not a single thing in the whole goddamn world.’

  It was a dispiriting way for the conversation to end. My not-so-subtle attempt to tease her out of her dark mood had worked for a while, but then I’d pushed her too far, accidentally touching on the wrong subject, and she’d turned on me with that caustic denunciation. It was entirely out of character for her to talk with such belligerence. Grace seldom got herself worked up over issues of that sort, and whenever we’d had similar discussions in the past (those floating, meandering dialogues that aren’t about anything, that just dance along from one random association to the next), she’d tended to be amused by the notions I’d toss out at her, rarely taking them seriously or presenting a counterargument, content to play along and let me spout my meaningless opinions. But not that night, not on the night of the day in question, and because she was suddenly fighting back tears again, engulfed by the same unhappiness that had swept over her at the beginning of the ride, I understood that she was in genuine distress, unable to stop brooding about the nameless thing that was tormenting her. There were a dozen questions I wanted to ask, but again I held back, knowing that she wouldn’t confide in me until she was good and ready to talk – assuming she ever was.

  We had made it over the bridge by then and were traveling down Henry Street, a narrow thoroughfare flanked by red-brick walkups that led from Brooklyn Heights to our place in Cobble Hill, just below Atlantic Avenue. It wasn’t personal, I realized. Grace’s little outburst hadn’t been against me so much as a reaction to what I’d said – a spark produced by an accidental collision between my comments and her own train of thought. Good people do bad things. Had Grace done something wrong? Had someone close to her done something wrong? It was impossible to know, but someone felt guilty about something, I decided, and even though my words had triggered Grace’s defensive remarks, I was fairly certain they had nothing to do with me. As if to prove that point, a moment after we crossed Atlantic Avenue and headed into the final leg of the journey, Grace reached out her hand and took hold of the back of my neck, then pulled me toward her and pressed her mouth against mine, slowly pushing in her tongue for a long, provocative kiss – a full-bore osculation, as Trause had put it. ‘Make love to me tonight,’ she whispered. ‘The second we walk through the door, tear off my clothes and make love to me. Break me in two, Sid.’

  *

  We slept late the next morning, not climbing out of bed until eleven-thirty or twelve. One of Grace’s cousins was in town for the day, and they were planning to meet at the Guggenheim at two, then work their way down to the Met for a few hours in the permanent collection. Looking at paintings was Grace’s preferred weekend activity, and she scrambled out of the house at one in reasonably tranquil spirits.6 I offered to walk her to the subway, but she was already running late by then, and since the station was a good distance from the house (all the way up on Montague Street), she didn’t want me to overexert myself by having to walk so many blocks at too fast a pace. I accompanied her down the stairs and out onto the street, but at the first corner we said good-bye and walked off in opposite directions. Grace sped up Court Street toward the Heights, and I ambled down a few blocks to Landolfi’s Candy Store and bought a pack of cigarettes. That was the extent of my constitutional for the day. I was eager to return to the blue notebook, and so rather than take my usual walk around the neighborhood, I immediately turned around and went home. Ten minutes later, I was in the apartment, sitting at my desk in the room at the end of the hall. I opened the notebook, turned to the page where I had left off on Saturday, and settled down to work. I didn’t bother to read over what I had written so far. I just picked up the pen a
nd started to write.

  Bowen is on the plane, flying through the dark toward Kansas City. After the whirlwind of falling gargoyles and reckless dashes to the airport, a sense of growing calm, a serene blankness within. Bowen doesn’t question what he is doing. He has no regrets, doesn’t rethink his decision to leave town and abandon his job, feels not the slightest pang of remorse about walking out on Eva. He knows how hard it will be on her, but he manages to persuade himself that she’ll be better off without him in the end, that once she recovers from the shock of his disappearance, it will be possible for her to begin a new, more satisfying life. Hardly an admirable or sympathetic position, but Bowen is in the grip of an idea, and that idea is so large, so much bigger than his own paltry wants and obligations, that he feels he has no choice but to obey it – even at the cost of acting irresponsibly, of doing things that would have been morally repugnant to him just one day before. ‘Men died at haphazard,’ is how Hammett expressed the idea, ‘and lived only while blind chance spared them…. In sensibly ordering his affairs [Flitcraft] had got out of step, and not into step, with life. He knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away.’

  I didn’t have to approve of Bowen’s actions in order to write about them. Bowen was Flitcraft, and Flitcraft had done the same thing to his own wife in Hammett’s novel. That was the premise of the story, and I wasn’t about to back down from the bargain I’d made with myself to stick to the premise of the story. At the same time, I understood that there was more to it than just Bowen and what happens to him after he boards the plane. There was Eva to consider as well, and no matter how wrapped up I became in following Nick’s adventures in Kansas City, I wouldn’t be doing the story justice unless I returned to New York and explored what was happening to her. Her fate was just as important to me as her husband’s. Bowen is in search of indifference, a tranquil affirmation of things-as-they-are, whereas Eva is at war with those things, a victim of circumstances, and from the moment Nick fails to return from his errand around the corner, her mind becomes a storm field of conflicting emotions: panic and fear, sorrow and anger, despair. I relished the prospect of entering that misery, of knowing that I would be able to live those passions with her and write about them in the days ahead.

  Half an hour after the plane takes off from La Guardia, Nick opens his briefcase, slides out the manuscript of Sylvia Maxwell’s novel, and begins to read. That was the third element of the narrative that was taking shape in my head, and I decided that it should be introduced as early as possible – even before the plane lands in Kansas City. First, Nick’s story; then, Eva’s story; and finally, the book that Nick reads and continues to read as their stories unfold: the story within the story. Nick is a literary man, after all, and therefore someone susceptible to the power of books. Little by little, by force of the attention he brings to Sylvia Maxwell’s words, he begins to see a connection between himself and the story in the novel, as if in some oblique, highly metaphorical way, the book were speaking intimately to him about his own present circumstances.

  At that point, I had only the dimmest notion of what I wanted Oracle Night to be, no more than the first tentative tracings of an outline. Everything still had to be worked out concerning the plot, but I knew that it was supposed to be a brief philosophical novel about predicting the future, a fable about time. The protagonist is Lemuel Flagg, a British lieutenant blinded by a mortar explosion in the trenches of World War I. Bleeding from his wounds, disoriented and howling in pain, he wanders off from the battle and loses contact with his regiment. Thrashing forward, stumbling, with no idea where he is, he enters the Ardennes Forest and collapses to the ground. Later that same day, his unconscious body is discovered by two French children, an eleven-year-old boy and a fourteen-year-old girl, François and Geneviève. They are war orphans who live on their own in an abandoned hut in the middle of the woods – pure fairy tale characters in a pure fairy-tale setting. They carry Flagg home and nurse him back to health, and when the war ends a few months later, he takes the children back to England with him. It is Geneviève who narrates the story, looking back from the vantage of 1927 at the strange career and eventual suicide of her adoptive father. Flagg’s blindness has given him the gift of prophecy. In sudden trancelike fits, he falls to the ground and begins flailing about like an epileptic. The seizures last from eight to ten minutes, and for the length of the time they endure, his mind is overrun with images of the future. The spells come upon him without warning, and there is nothing he can do to stop them or control them. His talent is both a curse and a blessing. It brings him wealth and influence, but at the same time the attacks cause him intense physical pain – not to speak of mental pain, since many of Flagg’s visions furnish him with knowledge of things he would prefer not to know. The day of his mother’s death, for example, or the site of a train wreck in India where two hundred people will be killed. He struggles to lead an unobtrusive life with his children, but the astonishing accuracy of his predictions (which range from weather forecasts to the results of Parliamentary elections to the scores of cricket test matches) turns him into one of the most celebrated men in postwar Britain. Then, at the peak of his fame, things begin to go wrong for him in love, and his talent ends up destroying him. He falls for a woman named Bettina Knott, and for two years she reciprocates his love, even to the point of accepting his proposal of marriage. On the night before their wedding, however, Flagg has another one of his spells, during which he is visited by the knowledge that Bettina will betray him before the year is out. His predictions have never been wrong, and therefore he knows the marriage is doomed. The tragedy is that Bettina is innocent, utterly free of guilt, since she has not yet met the man she will betray her husband with. Unable to face the anguish that destiny has prepared for him, Flagg stabs himself in the heart and dies.

  The plane lands. Bowen puts the half-read manuscript back into his briefcase, walks out of the terminal, and finds a cab. He knows nothing about Kansas City. He has never been there, has never met anyone who lives within a hundred miles of the place, and would be hard-pressed to point to it on a blank map. He asks the driver to take him to the best hotel in town, and the driver, a corpulent black man with the unlikely name of Ed Victory, bursts out laughing. I hope you’re not superstitious, he says.

  Superstitious? Nick replies. What’s that got to do with it?

  You want the best hotel. That would be the Hyatt Regency. I don’t know if you read the papers, but there was a big disaster at the Hyatt about a year ago. The suspended walkways came loose from the ceiling. They crashed down into the lobby, and over a hundred people got themselves killed.

  Yes, I remember that. There was a photo on the front page of the Times.

  The place is open again now, but some folks feel pretty squeamish about staying there. If you’re not squeamish, and if you’re not superstitious, that’s the hotel I’d recommend.

  All right, Nick says. The Hyatt it is. I’ve already been struck by lightning once today. If it wants to hit me again, it will know where to find me.7

  Ed laughs at Nick’s answer, and the two men continue talking as they drive into the city. It turns out that Ed is about to retire from the taxi business. He’s been at it for thirty-four years, and tonight is his last night on the job. This is his last shift, his last airport run, and Bowen is his last fare – the final passenger who will ever travel in his cab. Nick asks what he plans on doing now to keep himself occupied, and Edward M. Victory (for that is the man’s full name) reaches into his shirt pocket, pulls out a business card, and hands it to Nick. BUREAU OF HISTORICAL PRESERVATION is what the card says – with Ed’s name, address, and phone number printed at the bottom. Nick is about to ask what the words mean, but before he can
form the question, the car pulls up in front of the hotel, and Ed holds out his hand to receive the last fare that will ever be given to him. Bowen adds a twenty-dollar tip to the amount, wishes the now-retired taxi driver good luck, and walks through the revolving doors into the lobby of the ill-fated hotel.

  Because he is low on cash and has to pay with a credit card, Nick registers under his own name. The reconstructed lobby looks as if it’s just a few days old, and Nick can’t help thinking that he and the hotel are more or less in the same situation: both of them trying to forget their pasts, both of them trying to begin a new life. The glittering palace with its transparent elevators and immense chandeliers and burnished metallic walls, and he with nothing but the clothes on his back, two credit cards in his wallet, and a half-read novel in his leather bag. He splurges on a suite, rides the elevator up to the tenth floor, and doesn’t come down again for thirty-six hours. Naked under his hotel robe, he eats room service meals, stands by the window, studies himself in the bathroom mirror, and reads Sylvia Maxwell’s book. He finishes it that first night before going to bed, and then he spends the entire next day reading it again, and then again, and then a fourth time, plowing through its two hundred and nineteen pages as if his very life depended on it. The story of Lemuel Flagg affects him deeply, but Bowen doesn’t read Oracle Night because he is looking to be moved or entertained, and he doesn’t immerse himself in the novel in order to put off making a decision about what to do next. He knows what he has to do next, and the book is the only means at hand with which to do it. He has to train himself not to think about the past. That’s the key to the whole mad adventure that started for him when the gargoyle crashed to the sidewalk. If he has lost his old life, then he must act as if he has just been born, pretend that he is no more burdened by the past than an infant is. He has memories, of course, but those memories are no longer relevant, no longer a part of the life that has begun for him, and whenever he finds himself drifting into thoughts about his old life in New York – which has been erased, which is nothing more than illusion now – he does everything in his power to turn his mind from the past and concentrate on the present. That is why he reads the book. That is why he keeps reading the book. He must lure himself away from the false memories of a life that no longer belongs to him, and because the manuscript demands total surrender in order to be read, an unremitting attentiveness of both body and mind, he can forget who he was when he is lost in the pages of the novel.