Oracle Night

by Paul Auster

  Nick carries out his new employer’s request, and a moment later the two men are climbing down an iron ladder affixed to a cement wall. They reach the bottom about twelve feet below the surface. Aided by the light shining through the open hatch above, Nick sees that they’re in a narrow passageway, facing a bare plywood door. No handle or knob is visible, but there’s a padlock on the right side at about chest level. Ed takes a key from his pocket and inserts it into the plug at the bottom of the casing. Once the spring mechanism is released and the padlock is in his hand, he flicks away the latch with his thumb and slides the freed end of the shackle back through the eye of the hasp. It’s a smooth and practiced gesture, Nick realizes, surely the product of countless visits to this dank, subterranean hideout over the years. Ed gives the door a little push, and as it swings open on its hinges Nick peers into the darkness before him, unable to see a thing. Ed gently nudges him aside, steps across the threshold, and an instant later Nick hears the flick of a light switch, then another, then a third, and perhaps even a fourth. In a stuttering succession of flashes and buzzing oscillations, several banks of overhead fluorescent lights gradually come on, and Nick finds himself looking into a large storeroom, a windowless enclosure that measures approximately fifty by thirty feet. In precise rows running the length of the floor, gray metal bookshelves fill the entire space, each one extending all the way to the ceiling, which is somewhere between nine and ten feet high. Bowen has the impression that he’s entered the stacks of some secret library, a collection of forbidden books that no one but the initiated can be trusted to read.

  The Bureau of Historical Preservation, Ed says, with a small wave of the hand. Take a look. Don’t touch anything, but look as long as you like.

  The circumstances are so bizarre, so remote from anything Nick was expecting, he can’t even begin to guess what’s in store for him. He walks down the first aisle and discovers that the shelves are crammed with telephone books. Hundreds of telephone books, thousands of telephone books, arranged alphabetically by city and set out in chronological order. He happens to be in the row that contains Baltimore and Boston. Checking the dates on the spines of the directories, he sees that the earliest Baltimore book is from 1927. There are several gaps after that, but beginning with 1946 the collection is complete until the present year, 1982. The first Boston book is even older, dating from 1919, but again there are a number of missing volumes until 1946, when all years begin to be accounted for. On the strength of this scant evidence, Nick surmises that Ed started the collection in 1946, the year after the end of World War II, which also happens to be the year that Bowen himself was born. Thirty-six years devoted to a vast and apparently meaningless undertaking, which tallies exactly with the span of his own life.

  Atlanta, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, the five boroughs of New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, San Francisco, Seattle – every American metropolis is on hand, along with dozens of smaller cities, rural counties in Alabama, suburban towns in Connecticut, and unincorporated territories in Maine. But America isn’t the end of it. Four of the twenty-four double-backed rows of towering metal bookcases are given over to cities and towns in foreign countries. These archives aren’t as thorough or exhaustive as their domestic counterparts, but in addition to Canada and Mexico, most nations from western and eastern Europe are represented: London, Madrid, Stockholm, Paris, Munich, Prague, Budapest. To his astonishment, Nick sees that Ed has even managed to acquire a Warsaw phone directory from 1937/38: Spis Abonentów Warszawskiej Sieci TELEFONÓW. As Nick fights the temptation to pull it off the shelf, it occurs to him that nearly every Jewish person listed in that book is long dead – murdered before Ed’s collection was ever started.

  The tour lasts for ten or fifteen minutes, and everywhere Nick goes, Ed trails after him with a little grin on his face, relishing his visitor’s bafflement. When they come to the final row of shelves at the southern end of the room, Ed finally says: The man is mystified. He’s asking himself, What the hell is going on?

  That’s one way of putting it, Nick answers.

  Any thoughts – or just out and out confusion?

  I’m not sure, but I have the impression it’s not just a game for you. I think I understand that much. You’re not someone who collects for the sake of collecting. Bottle caps, cigarette wrappers, hotel ashtrays, glass figurines of elephants. People spend their time looking for all kinds of junk. But these phone books aren’t junk. They mean something to you.

  This room contains the world, Ed replies. Or at least a part of it. The names of the living and the dead. The Bureau of Historical Preservation is a house of memory, but it’s also a shrine to the present. By bringing those two things together in one place, I prove to myself that mankind isn’t finished.

  I don’t think I follow.

  I saw the end of all things, Lightning Man. I went down into the bowels of hell, and I saw the end. You return from a trip like that, and no matter how long you go on living, a part of you will always be dead.

  When did this happen?

  April 1945. My unit was in Germany, and we were the ones who liberated Dachau. Thirty thousand breathing skeletons. You’ve seen the pictures, but the pictures don’t tell you what it was like. You have to go there and smell it for yourself; you have to be there and touch it with your own hands. Human beings did it to human beings, and they did it with a clear conscience. That was the end of mankind, Mr. Good Shoes. God turned his eyes away from us and left the world forever. And I was there to witness it.

  How long were you in the camp?

  Two months. I was a cook, so I worked kitchen detail. My job was to feed the survivors. I’m sure you’ve read the stories about how some of them couldn’t stop eating. The starved ones. They’d thought about food for so long, they couldn’t help it. They ate until their stomachs burst, and they died. Hundreds of them. On the second day, a woman came up to me with a baby in her arms. She’d lost her mind, this woman, I could see it, I could see it in the way her eyes kept dancing around in their sockets, and so thin, so malnourished, I couldn’t understand how she managed to stay on her feet. She didn’t ask for any food, but she wanted me to give the baby some milk. I was happy to oblige, but when she handed me the baby, I saw that it was dead, that it had been dead for days. Its face was shriveled up and black, blacker than my own face, a tiny thing that weighed almost nothing, just shriveled skin and dried pus and weightless bones. The woman kept begging for milk, and so I poured some onto the baby’s lips. I didn’t know what else to do. I poured the milk onto the dead baby’s lips, and then the woman took back her child – so happy, so happy that she began to hum, almost to sing, really, to sing in this cooing, joyful sort of way. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone happier than she was at that moment, walking off with her dead baby in her arms, singing because she’d finally been able to give it some milk. I stood there watching her as she left. She staggered along for about five yards, and then her knees buckled, and before I could run over there and catch her, she fell down dead in the mud. That was the thing that started it for me. When I saw that woman die, I knew I was going to have to do something. I couldn’t just go home after the war and forget about it. I had to keep that place in my head, to go on thinking about it every day for the rest of my life.

  Nick still doesn’t follow. He can grasp the enormity of what Ed lived through, sympathize with the anguish and horror that continue to haunt him, but how those feelings found expression in the mad enterprise of collecting telephone books eludes his understanding. He can imagine a hundred other ways to translate the experience of the death camp into an enduring lifelong action, but not this strange underground archive filled with the names of people from around the world. But who is he to judge another man’s passion? Bowen needs work, he enjoys Ed’s company, and he has no qualms about spending the next weeks or months helping him to reorganize the storage system of the books, useless as that job might be. The two men c
ome to terms on the matter of wages, hours, and so on, and then shake hands to seal the contract. But Nick is still in the embarrassing position of having to ask for an advance on future earnings. He needs clothes and a place to live, and the sixty-odd dollars in his billfold are not enough to cover those expenses. His new boss, however, is one step ahead of him. There’s a Goodwill Mission not one mile from where we’re standing, he says, and Nick can stock up on new duds for just a few dollars that afternoon. Nothing fancy, of course, but working for him will require work clothes, not expensive business suits. Besides, he already has one of those, and if he ever feels like stepping out on the town, all he has to do is climb back into it.

  That problem solved, Ed immediately solves the housing problem as well. There’s a one-room apartment on the premises, he informs Nick, and if Bowen isn’t spooked by the thought of spending his nights underground, he’s welcome to stay there free of charge. Beckoning Nick to follow him, Ed waddles down one of the center stacks, moving gingerly on his sore and swollen ankles until he reaches the gray cinder-block wall at the western limit of the room. I often stay here myself, he says, reaching into his pocket and pulling out his keys. It’s a cozy place.

  A metal door is fitted into the wall flush with the surface, and since it’s the same shade of gray as the wall itself, Nick never even noticed it when he walked past the spot a few minutes earlier. Like the wooden entrance door at the other end of the room, this one has no knob or handle, and it opens inward with a soft push from Ed’s hand. Yes, Nick says politely when he steps inside, it’s a cozy place, although he finds the room rather dismal, as bare and sparsely furnished as Ed’s lodgings at the boardinghouse. But all the rudiments are there – except for a window, of course, a prospect to look out on. Bed, table and chair, refrigerator, hot plate, flush toilet, a cupboard filled with canned goods. Not so terrible, really, and in the end what choice does Nick have but to accept Ed’s offer? Ed seems pleased by Bowen’s willingness to stay there, and as he locks the door and the two men turn around to head for the ladder that will take them above ground again, he tells Nick that he started building the room twenty years ago. Back in the fall of ’sixty-two, he says, in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis. I thought they were going to drop the big one on us, and I figured I’d need a place to hide out in. You know, a whatchamacallit.

  A fallout shelter.

  Right. So I broke through the wall and added on that little room. The crisis was over before I finished, but you never know, do you? Those maniacs who run the world are capable of anything.

  Nick feels a slight flush of alarm when he hears Ed talk like this. Not that he doesn’t share his opinion about the rulers of the world, but he wonders now if he hasn’t joined forces with an unhinged person, a destabilized and/or demented crank. It’s certainly possible, he tells himself, but Ed Victory is the man fate has delivered to him, and if he means to abide by the principles of the falling gargoyle, then he must carry on and pursue the direction he’s taken – for better or worse. Otherwise, his departure from New York becomes a hollow, childish gesture. If he can’t accept what’s happening, accept it and actively embrace it, he should admit defeat and call his wife to tell her he’s coming home.

  In the end, these anxieties prove groundless. The days go by, and as the two men work together in the crypt below the railroad tracks, lugging telephone books back and forth across the room in wooden apple boxes mounted on roller skates, Nick discovers that Ed is nothing less than a stalwart character, a man of his word. He never asks his helper to explain himself or tell his story, and Nick grows to admire that discretion, especially in someone as garrulous as Ed, whose very being emanates curiosity about the world. Ed’s manners are so refined, in fact, that he never even asks Nick his name. At one point, Bowen mentions to his boss that he can call him Bill, but understanding that the name is an invention, Ed rarely bothers, preferring to address his employee as Lightning Man, New York, and Mr. Good Shoes. Nick is perfectly satisfied with the arrangement. Dressed in the various outfits acquired from the Goodwill Mission store (flannel shirts, jeans and khaki pants, white tube socks, and frayed basketball sneakers), he wonders about the men who originally owned the clothes he’s now wearing. Castoffs can come from one of two sources, and they’re given away for one of two reasons. A person loses interest in a garment and donates it to charity, or else a person dies, and his heirs dispose of his goods for a meager tax deduction. Nick warms to the idea of walking around in a dead man’s clothes. Now that he has ceased to exist, it seems fitting to don the wardrobe of a man who has likewise ceased to exist – as if that double negation made the erasure of his past more thorough, more permanent.

  But Bowen nevertheless has to stay on his guard. He and Ed take frequent breaks while they work, and each time they interrupt their labors Ed enjoys passing the time in conversation, often punctuating his remarks with a swig from a can of beer. Nick learns about Wilhamena, Ed’s first wife, who vanished one morning in 1953 with a liquor salesman from Detroit, and about Rochelle, Wilhamena’s successor, who bore him three daughters and then died of heart trouble in 1969. Bowen finds Ed an engaging raconteur, but he is careful to refrain from asking him any pointed questions – so as not to open the way to be asked any questions about himself. They have established a silent pact about not probing into each other’s secrets, and much as Nick would like to know if Victory is Ed’s real name, for example, or if he owns the underground space that houses the Bureau of Historical Preservation or has simply appropriated it without being caught by the authorities, he says nothing about these matters and contents himself with listening to what Ed offers of his own free will. More dangerous are the moments when Nick almost gives himself away, and each time that happens, he warns himself to keep a more careful watch over what he says. One afternoon, when Ed is talking about his experiences as a soldier in World War II, he brings up the name of a young private who joined his regiment in late ’forty-four, John Trause. Just eighteen years old, Ed says, but the quickest, brightest lad he ever ran into. He’s a famous writer now, he continues, and no wonder when you think about how sharp that boy’s mind was. That’s when Bowen makes a near catastrophic slip. I know him, he says, and when Ed looks up and asks how John’s doing these days, Nick immediately covers his tracks by clarifying the statement. Not personally, he says. I mean his books, I’ve read his books, and there the subject is dropped and they move on to other things. But the truth is that Nick works with John and is the editor responsible for his backlist. Not one month ago, in fact, he finished working on a set of newly commissioned covers for the paperback editions of Trause’s novels. He has known him for years, and the principal reason why he applied for the job at the company he works for (or did work for until a few days ago) was that John Trause’s novels were published there.

  Nick starts working for Ed on Thursday morning, and the task of rearranging the telephone books is so daunting, so colossal in terms of the poundage to be dealt with – the bulk and heft of countless thousand-page volumes to be taken off the shelves, carted to other areas of the room, and lifted onto new shelves – that progress is slow, much slower than they anticipated it would be. They decide to work straight through the weekend, and by Wednesday of the following week (the same day Eva walks into a photocopy store to design the poster that will broadcast the news of her missing husband, which also happens to be the day Rosa Leightman returns to New York and listens to Bowen’s lovelorn messages on her answering machine), Nick’s growing concern over Ed’s health finally blossoms into full-scale distress. The ex-cabbie is sixty-seven years old and at least sixty-seven pounds overweight. He smokes three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day and has trouble walking, trouble breathing, and trouble mounting in every one of his cholesterol-packed arteries. Already the victim of two heart attacks, he is in no shape to do the work that he and Nick are trying to accomplish. Even going up and down the ladder every day requires an enormous effort of concentration and will, taxing his strength to
such a point that he can barely breathe when he comes to the top or bottom of his climb. Nick has been aware of this from the beginning and has continually encouraged Ed to sit down and rest, assuring him that he’s capable of handling the job himself, but Ed is a stubborn fellow, a man with a vision, and now that his dream of reorganizing his telephone-book museum is at last under way, he ignores Bowen’s advice and jumps in to help at every opportunity. On Wednesday morning, things finally take a darker turn. Bowen returns from a trip to the other end of the room with his empty apple box in tow and finds Ed sitting on the floor leaning against one of the bookcases. His eyes are shut, and his right hand is pressed tightly over his heart.

  Chest pains, Nick says, leaping to the obvious conclusion. How bad?

  Just give me a minute, Ed says. I’ll be all right.

  But Nick refuses to accept that as an answer and insists on accompanying Ed to the emergency room of the nearest medical facility. After putting up a short token protest, Ed agrees to go.