Oracle Night

by Paul Auster

  It was a bland, commonsense argument, a defense of pragmatism and science over the darkness of primitive, magical thinking. To my surprise, John took the opposite view. I wasn’t sure if he was pulling my leg or simply trying to play devil’s advocate, but he said that the writer’s decision made perfect sense to him and that he admired his friend for having kept his promise. ‘Thoughts are real,’ he said. ‘Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren’t aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that’s what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future.’

  Roughly three years after Trause and I had that conversation, I tore up the blue notebook and threw it into a garbage can on the corner of Third Place and Court Street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. At the time, it felt like the correct thing to do, and as I walked back to my apartment that Monday afternoon in September, nine days after the day in question, I was more or less convinced that the failures and disappointments of the past week were finally over. But they weren’t over. The story was just beginning – the true story started only then, after I destroyed the blue notebook – and everything I’ve written so far is little more than a prelude to the horrors I’m about to relate now. Is there a connection between the before and the after? I don’t know. Did the unfortunate French writer kill his child with his poem – or did his words merely predict her death? I don’t know. What I do know is that I would no longer argue against his decision today. I respect the silence he imposed on himself, and I understand the revulsion he must have felt whenever he thought of writing again. More than twenty years after the fact, I now believe that Trause called it right. We sometimes know things before they happen, even if we don’t know that we know. I blundered through those nine days in September 1982 like someone trapped inside a cloud. I tried to write a story and came to an impasse. I tried to sell an idea for a film and was rejected. I lost my friend’s manuscript. I nearly lost my wife, and yet fervently as I loved her, I didn’t hesitate to drop my pants in a darkened sex club and thrust myself into the mouth of a stranger. I was a lost man, an ill man, a man struggling to regain his footing, but underneath all the missteps and follies I committed that week, I knew something I wasn’t aware of knowing. At certain moments during those days, I felt as if my body had become transparent, a porous membrane through which all the invisible forces of the world could pass – a nexus of airborne electrical charges transmitted by the thoughts and feelings of others. I suspect that condition was what led to the birth of Lemuel Flagg, the blind hero of Oracle Night, a man so sensitive to the vibrations around him that he knew what was going to happen before the events themselves took place. I didn’t know, but every thought that entered my head was pointing me in that direction. Stillborn babies, concentration camp atrocities, presidential assassinations, disappearing spouses, impossible journeys back and forth through time. The future was already inside me, and I was preparing myself for the disasters that were about to come.

  I had seen Trause for lunch on Wednesday, but aside from our two telephone conversations later that week, I had no further contact with him before I got rid of the blue notebook on the twenty-seventh. We had talked about Jacob and the lost manuscript of his old story, but that was the extent of it, and I had no idea what he was doing with himself during those days – except lying on the sofa and taking care of his leg. It wasn’t until 1994, when James Gillespie published The Labyrinth of Dreams: A Life of John Trause, that I finally learned the details of what John had been up to from the twenty-second to the twenty-seventh. Gillespie’s massive six-hundred-page book is short on literary analysis and pays little attention to the historical context of John’s work, but it is exceedingly thorough when it comes to biographical facts, and given that he spent ten years working on the project and seemed to have talked to every living person who had ever known Trause (myself included), I have no reason to doubt the precision of his chronology.

  After I left John’s apartment on Wednesday, he worked until dinnertime, proofreading and making minor changes on the typescript of his novel The Strange Destiny of Gerald Fuchs, which he had apparently finished several days before the onset of his phlebitis attack. This was the book I had suspected he was writing but had never been certain about: a manuscript of just under five hundred pages that Gillespie says Trause had started during his last months in Portugal, which meant it had taken him over four years to complete. So much for the rumor that John had stopped writing after Tina’s death. So much for the rumor that a once-great novelist had given up his vocation and was living off his early accomplishments – a has-been with nothing more to say.

  That evening, Eleanor called with the news that Jacob had been found, and early the next morning, Thursday, Trause telephoned his lawyer, Francis W. Byrd. Lawyers seldom make house calls, but Byrd had been representing Trause for over ten years, and when a client of John’s stature informs his attorney that he’s laid up on the sofa with a bad leg and needs to see him on an urgent matter at two o’clock, the attorney will scrap his other plans and arrive at the appointed hour, equipped with all necessary papers and documents, which he will have pulled from his office files before heading downtown. When Byrd reached the Barrow Street apartment, John offered him a drink, and once the two men had finished their Scotch and sodas, they sat down to the task of rewriting Trause’s will. The old one had been drawn up more than seven years earlier, and it no longer represented John’s desires concerning the disposal of his estate. In the aftermath of Tina’s death, he had named Jacob as his sole heir and beneficiary, appointing his brother Gilbert to serve as executor until the boy reached the age of twenty-five. Now, by the simple act of tearing up all copies of that document, Trause disinherited his son in front of his lawyer’s eyes. Byrd then typed out a new will that bequeathed everything John owned to Gilbert. All cash, all stocks and bonds, all property, and all future royalties to be earned from Trause’s literary works would henceforth be inherited by his younger brother. They finished at five-thirty. John shook Byrd’s hand, thanking him for his help, and the lawyer left the apartment with three signed copies of the new will. Twenty minutes later, John went back to proofreading his novel. Madame Dumas served him dinner at eight, and at nine-thirty Eleanor called again, telling him that Jacob had been admitted to the program at Smithers and had been there since four o’clock that afternoon.

  Friday was the day Trause was supposed to have his leg examined at Saint Vincent’s Hospital, but he neglected to look at his calendar and forgot to go. In all the turmoil surrounding the business with Jacob, the appointment had slipped his mind, and at the precise moment when he should have been meeting with his doctor (a vascular surgeon named Willard Dunmore), he was on the phone with me, talking about his son’s lifelong animosity toward Grace and asking me to go to Smithers for him on Saturday. According to Gillespie, the doctor called Trause’s apartment at eleven-thirty to ask him why he hadn’t shown up at the hospital. When Trause explained that there had been a family emergency, Dunmore delivered an angry lecture on the importance of the scan and told his patient that such a cavalier attitude toward his own health was irresponsible and could lead to dire consequences. Trause asked if it would be possible to go in that afternoon, but Dunmore said it was too late and they would have to put it off until Monday at four o’clock. He urged Trause to remember to take his medicine and to remain as still as possible over the weekend. When Madame Dumas arrived at one, she found John in his usual spot on the sofa, correcting the pages of his book.

  On Saturday, while I was visiting Jacob at Smithers and tangling over the red notebook in Chang’s store, Trause continued to work on his novel. His phone records indicate that he also made three long-distance calls: one to Eleanor in East Hampton, a second to his brother Gilbert in Ann Arbor (who worked as a professor of musicology at the University of Michigan), and a third to his literary agent, Alice Lazarre, at h
er weekend house in the Berkshires. He reported to her that he was making good progress with the book, and if he didn’t run into any unforeseen problems in the days ahead, she could expect to have a finished manuscript by the end of the week.

  On Sunday morning, I called from Landolfi’s and gave him the rundown on my brief visit with Jacob. Then I made my confession about having lost his story, and John laughed. If I’m not mistaken, it was a laugh of relief rather than of amusement. It’s difficult to know for sure, but I think Trause gave me that story for highly complex reasons – and the talk about providing me with the subject for a film was no more than an excuse, a peripheral motive at best. The story was about the cutthroat machinations of a political conspiracy, but it was also about a marital triangle (a wife running off with her husband’s best friend), and if there was any truth to the speculations I put down in the notebook on the twenty-seventh, then perhaps John gave me the story in order to comment on the state of my marriage – indirectly, in the finely nuanced codes and metaphors of fiction. It didn’t matter that the story had been written in 1952, the year Grace was born. ‘The Empire of Bones’ was a premonition of things to come. It had been put in a box and left to incubate for thirty years, and little by little it had evolved into a story about the woman we both loved – my wife, my brave and struggling wife.

  I say he laughed with relief because I think he regretted what he had done. When we were having lunch on Wednesday, he reacted with great emotion to the news of Grace’s pregnancy, and immediately after that we found ourselves on the verge of an ugly quarrel. The moment passed, but I wonder now if Trause wasn’t a good deal angrier at me than he let on. He was my friend, but he also must have resented me for having won back Grace. Breaking off their affair had been her decision, and now that she was pregnant, there was no chance that he would ever be with her again. If this was true, giving me the story would have served as a veiled, cryptic form of revenge, a churlish sort of one-upmanship – as if to say, You don’t know anything, Sidney. You’ve never known anything, but I’ve been around a lot longer than you have. Perhaps. There is no way to prove any of this, but if I’ve misunderstood his actions, how then to interpret the fact that John never sent me the story? He promised to have Madame Dumas mail me a carbon of the manuscript, but he wound up sending me something else instead, and I took that thing not only as an act of supreme generosity but as an act of contrition as well. By losing the envelope on the subway, I had spared him the embarrassment of his momentary fit of pique. He was sorry for having let his passions run away from him, and now that my clumsiness had gotten him off the hook, he was determined to make it up to me with a spectacular, altogether unnecessary gesture of kindness and goodwill.

  We had talked on Sunday somewhere between ten-thirty and eleven o’clock. Madame Dumas arrived at noon, and ten minutes later Trause handed her his ATM card and instructed her to go to the neighborhood Citibank near Sheridan Square and transfer forty thousand dollars from his savings account to his checking account. Gillespie tells us that he spent the rest of the day working on his novel, and that evening, after Madame Dumas had served him dinner, he dragged himself off the sofa and limped into his study, where he sat down at his worktable and made out a check to me for thirty-six thousand dollars – the exact sum of my unpaid medical bills. Then he wrote me the following short letter:

  Dear Sid:

  I know I promised you a carbon of the ms., but what’s the point? The whole idea was to earn you some money, so I’ve cut to the chase and written you the enclosed check. It’s a gift, free and clear. No terms, no strings, no need to pay me back. I know you’re broke, so please don’t get on your high horse and tear it up. Spend it, live on it, get yourself going again. I don’t want you to have to waste your time fretting about movies. Stick with books. That’s where your future is, and I’m expecting great things from you.

  Thanks for taking the trouble to visit the brat yesterday. It’s much appreciated – nay, more than much, since I know how unpleasant it must have been for you.

  Dinner this coming Saturday? Can’t say where yet, since it all depends on this damn leg. Strange fact: the clot was brought on by my own cheapness. Ten days before the pain started, I made a lightning trip to Paris – back and forth in thirty-six hours – to talk at the funeral of my old friend and translator, Philippe Joubert. I flew coach, slept both ways, and the doctor says that’s what did it. All cramped up in those midget seats. From now on, I only travel first class.

  Kiss Gracie for me – and don’t give up on Flitcraft. All you need is a different notebook, and the words will start coming again.

  J. T.

  He sealed up the letter and the check in an envelope and then wrote out my name and address in block letters across the front, but there were no more stamps in the house, and when Madame Dumas left Barrow Street at ten o’clock to return to her apartment in the Bronx, Trause gave her a twenty-dollar bill and asked her to swing by the post office in the morning to stock up on a new supply of first-class stamps. The ever-efficient Madame Dumas took care of the errand, and when she showed up for work on Monday at 11 a. m., John was finally able to put a stamp on the letter. She served him a light lunch at one. After the meal, he pushed on with the proofreading of his novel, and when Madame Dumas left the apartment at two-thirty to shop for groceries, Trause handed her the letter and asked her to mail it for him while she was out. She promised to return by three-thirty, at which point she would help him down the stairs and into the town car he had ordered to take him to his appointment with Dr. Dunmore at the hospital. After Madame Dumas left, Gillespie tells us we can be sure of only one thing. Eleanor called at two-forty-five and informed Trause that Jacob had gone missing. He’d walked out of Smithers sometime in the middle of the night, and no one had heard from him since. Gillespie quotes Eleanor as saying that John became ‘extremely upset’ and went on talking to her for fifteen or twenty minutes. ‘He’s on his own now,’ John finally said. ‘There’s nothing we can do for him anymore.’

  Those were Trause’s last words. We have no idea what happened to him after he hung up the phone, but when Madame Dumas returned at three-thirty, she found him lying on the floor at the foot of his bed. That would seem to suggest he’d gone into the bedroom to begin changing his clothes for the appointment with Dunmore, but that is only conjecture. All we know for certain is that he died somewhere between three o’clock and three-thirty on September 27, 1982 – less than two hours after I tossed the remains of the blue notebook into a garbage can on a street corner in South Brooklyn.

  The initial cause of death was presumed to be a heart attack, but on further investigation by the medical examiner that verdict was changed to pulmonary embolism. The blood clot that had been sitting in John’s leg for the past two weeks had broken loose, traveled upward through his system, and found its target. The little bomb had finally gone off inside him, and my friend was dead at fifty-six. Too soon. Too soon by thirty years. Too soon to thank him for sending me the money and trying to save my life.

  *

  John’s death was reported in a late bulletin at the end of the local six o’clock news broadcasts. Under normal circumstances, Grace and I would have turned on the television as we were setting the table and preparing our dinner, but we didn’t have a television anymore, so we went through the evening without knowing that John was lying in the city morgue, without knowing that his brother Gilbert was already on a plane from Detroit to New York, without knowing that Jacob was on the loose. After dinner, we went into the living room and stretched out on the sofa together, talking about Grace’s upcoming appointment with Dr. Vitale, a female obstetrician recommended by Betty Stolowitz, whose first baby had been delivered in March. The visit was scheduled for Friday afternoon, and I told Grace I wanted to be there with her and would show up at the office on West Ninth Street at four o’clock. As we were going over these arrangements, Grace suddenly remembered that Betty had given her a book about pregnancy that morning – one of
those big paperback compendiums filled with charts and illustrations – and she hopped off the sofa and went into the bedroom to retrieve it from her shoulder bag. While she was gone, someone knocked on the door. I assumed it was one of our neighbors, coming to borrow a flashlight or a book of matches. It couldn’t have been anyone else, since the front door of the building was always locked, and a person without a key had to push an outside buzzer and announce himself through the intercom before he could get in. I remember that I wasn’t wearing any shoes, and when I climbed off the sofa and went to open the door, I picked up a small splinter in the sole of my left foot. I also remember looking at my watch and seeing that it was eight-thirty. I didn’t bother to ask who it was. I simply opened the door, and once I did that, the world became a different world. I don’t know how else to put it. I unlocked the door, and the thing that had been building inside me over the past days was suddenly real: the future was standing in front of me.

  It was Jacob. He had dyed his hair black, and he was bundled up in a long dark overcoat that hung down to his ankles. Hands thrust into his pockets, bouncing impatiently on the balls of his feet, he looked like some futuristic undertaker who’d come to carry away a dead body. The green-headed clown I’d talked to on Saturday had been disturbing enough, but this new creature scared me, and I didn’t want to let him in. ‘You’ve got to help me,’ he said. ‘I’m in real trouble, Sid, and there’s no one else to turn to.’ Before I could tell him to go away, he pushed himself into the apartment and shut the door behind him.