In the Country of Last Things

by Paul Auster

  Our necks were saved for a little while. No one would be going to prison, in any event, but the money that Boris forked over to the constable had pretty much exhausted our reserves. Within three days of Frick’s exhumation, the last items from the fifth floor were sold off: a gold-plated letter opener, a mahogany end table, and the blue velvet curtains that had hung on the windows. After that, we scraped up some additional cash by selling books from the downstairs library—two shelves of Dickens, five sets of Shakespeare (one of them in thirty-eight miniature volumes no bigger than the palm of your hand), a Jane Austen, a Schopenhauer, an illustrated Don Quixote—but the bottom had fallen out of the book market by then, and these things fetched no more than a trifle. From that point on, it was Boris who carried us. His store of objects was far from infinite, however, and we did not delude ourselves into thinking it would last for very long. We gave ourselves three or four months at best. With winter coming on again, we knew it would probably be less than that.

  The sensible thing would have been to shut down Woburn House right then. We tried to talk Victoria into it, but it was hard for her to take that step, and several weeks of uncertainty followed. Then, just as Boris seemed on the point of convincing her, the decision was taken out of her hands, was taken out of all our hands. I am referring to Willie. With hindsight, it seems perfectly inevitable that it should have worked out that way, but I would be lying to you if I said that any of us could see it coming. We were all too involved in the tasks at hand, and when the thing finally happened, it was like a bolt from the blue, like an explosion from the depths of the earth.

  After Frick’s body was carried off, Willie was never really the same. He continued to do his work, but only in silence, in a solitude of blank stares and shrugs. As soon as you got close to him, his eyes would blaze with hostility and resentment, and once he even threw my hand off his shoulder as though he meant to hurt me if I ever did it again. Working together as we did in the kitchen every day, I probably spent more time with him than anyone else. I did my best to help, but I don’t think anything I said ever got through to him. Your grandfather is all right, Willie, I would say. He’s in heaven now, and what happens to his body is unimportant. His soul is alive, and he wouldn’t want you to be worrying about him like this. Nothing can hurt him. He’s happy where he is now, and he wants you to be happy, too. I felt like a parent trying to explain death to a small child, mouthing the same hypocritical nonsense I had heard from my own parents. It didn’t matter what I said, however, for Willie wasn’t buying any of it. He was a prehistoric man, and the only way he could respond to death was to worship his departed ancestor, to think of him as a god. Victoria had instinctively understood this. Frick’s burial site had become holy ground for Willie, and now it had been desecrated. The order of things had been smashed, and no amount of talk from me would ever set it right.

  He began going out after dinner, rarely returning before two or three in the morning. It was impossible to know what he did out there in the streets, since he never talked about it, and there was no point in asking him any questions. One morning he failed to show up altogether. I thought that perhaps he was gone for good, but then, just after lunch, he walked into the kitchen without a word and started chopping vegetables, almost daring me to be impressed by his arrogance. It was late November by then, and Willie had spun off into his own orbit, an errant star with no definable trajectory. I gave up depending on him to do his share of the work. When he was there, I accepted his help; when he was gone, I did the work myself. Once, he stayed away for two days before coming back; another time it was three days. These gradually lengthening absences lulled us into thinking that he was somehow fading away from us. Sooner or later, we thought, a time would come when he wouldn’t be there anymore, more or less in the same way that Maggie Vine wasn’t there anymore. There was so much for us to do just then, the scramble to keep our sinking ship afloat was so exhausting, that one tended not to think about Willie when he wasn’t around. He stayed away for six days the next time, and at that point I think we all felt that we had seen the last of him. Then, very late one night during the first week of December, we were startled awake by a horrendous thumping and crashing from the downstairs rooms. My initial reaction was to think that people from the line outside had broken into the house, but then, just as Sam sprang out of bed and grabbed the shotgun we kept in our room, there was a sound of machine gun fire down below, a huge burst and splatter of bullets, and then more and more of it. I heard people screaming, felt the house shake with footsteps, heard the machine gun go tearing into the walls, the windows, the splintering floors. I lit a candle and followed Sam to the head of the stairs, fully expecting to see the constable or one of his men, girding myself for the moment when I would be shot to pieces. Victoria was already racing down ahead of us, and from what I could gather she was unarmed. It wasn’t the constable, of course, though I don’t doubt that it was his gun. Willie was on the second-floor landing, making his way up to us with the weapon in his hands. My candle was too far off for me to get a look at his face, but I saw him pause when he noticed that Victoria was coming toward him. “That’s enough, Willie,” she said. “Drop the gun. Drop the gun right now.” I don’t know if he was planning to fire at her, but the fact was that he did not drop it. Sam was standing next to Victoria by then, and an instant after she spoke those words, he pulled the trigger of his shotgun. The blast hit Willie in the chest, and suddenly he was flying backward, tumbling down the stairs until he reached the bottom. He was dead before he got there, I think, dead before he even knew he had been shot.

  That was six or seven weeks ago. Of the eighteen residents who were living here at the time, seven were killed, five managed to escape, three were wounded, and three were unhurt. Mr. Hsia, a newcomer who had performed card tricks for us the night before, died from his bullet wounds at eleven o’clock the next morning. Mr. Rosenberg and Mrs. Rudniki both recovered. We took care of them for more than a week, and once they were strong enough to walk again, we sent them away. They were the last residents of Woburn House. The morning after the disaster, Sam made a sign and hammered it onto the front door: WOBURN HOUSE CLOSED. The people outside did not go away immediately, but then it got very cold, and as the days went by and the door did not open, the crowds began to disperse. Since then, we have been sitting tight, making plans about what to do next, trying to last through another winter. Sam and Boris spend a part of each day out in the garage, testing the car to make sure it’s in working order. The plan is to drive away from here as soon as the weather turns warm. Even Victoria says she is willing to go, but I’m not sure if she really means it. We’ll find out when the time comes, I suppose. From the way the sky has been acting for the past seventy-two hours, I don’t think we have much longer to wait.

  We did our best to take care of the bodies, to clean up the damage, to wipe away the blood. More than that, I don’t want to say anything. By the time we had finished, it was the following afternoon. Sam and I went upstairs to take a nap, but I wasn’t able to sleep. Sam dropped off almost at once. Not wanting to disturb him, I climbed out of bed and sat down on the floor in a corner of the room. My old bag happened to be lying there, and for no particular reason I started to look through it. That was when I rediscovered the blue notebook I had bought for Isabel. The first several pages were covered with her messages, the short notes she had written to me during the last days of her illness. Most of the messages were quite simple—things like “thank you” or “water” or “my darling Anna”—but when I saw that frail, overlarge handwriting on the page and remembered how hard she had struggled to make the words clear, those simple messages no longer seemed very simple at all. A thousand things came rushing back to me at once. Without even stopping to think about it, I quietly tore those pages from the notebook, folded them into a neat square, and put them back into the bag. Then, taking one of the pencils I had bought from Mr. Gambino so long ago, I propped up the notebook against my knees and started writing
this letter.

  I have kept at it ever since, adding a few more pages every day, trying to get it all down for you. I sometimes wonder how much I have left out, how much has been lost to me and will never be found again, but those are questions that cannot be answered. Time is running short now, and I mustn’t waste any more words than I have to. In the beginning, I didn’t think it would take very long—a few days to give you the essentials, and that would be it. Now the entire notebook has almost been filled, and I have barely even skimmed the surface. That explains why my handwriting has become smaller and smaller as I’ve progressed. I’ve been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it’s too late, but I see now how badly I’ve deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to the end.

  The words get smaller and smaller, so small that perhaps they are not even legible anymore. It makes me think of Ferdinand and his boats, his lilliputian fleet of sailing ships and schooners. God knows why I persist. I don’t believe there is any way this letter can reach you. It’s like calling out into the blankness, like screaming into a vast and terrible blankness. Then, when I permit myself a moment of optimism, I shudder to think what will happen if it does wind up in your hands. You’ll be stunned by the things I have written, you’ll worry yourself sick, and then you’ll make the same stupid mistake I did. Please don’t, I beg of you. I know you well enough to know you would do it. If you still have any love for me at all, please don’t get sucked into that trap. I couldn’t stand the thought of having to worry about you, of thinking you might be wandering around these streets. It’s enough that one of us has been lost. The important thing is that you stay where you are, that you continue to be there for me in my mind. I am here, and you are there. That is the only consolation I have, and you mustn’t do anything to destroy it.

  On the other hand, even if this notebook finally gets to you, there is nothing that says you have to read it. You are under no obligation to me, and I would not want to think I had forced you to do anything against your will. Sometimes, I even find myself hoping that it will turn out that way—that you simply won’t have the courage to begin. I understand the contradiction, but that is how I sometimes feel. If that is the case, then the words I am writing to you now are already invisible to you. Your eyes will never see them, your brain will never be burdened by the tiniest fraction of what I have said. So much the better, perhaps. Still, I don’t think I’d want you to destroy this letter or throw it away. If you choose not to read it, perhaps you should pass it on to my parents instead. I’m sure they would like to have the notebook, even if they can’t bring themselves to read it either. They could put it somewhere in my room at home. I think I would like that, knowing it had wound up in that room. Up on one of the shelves above my bed, for example, along with my old dolls and the ballerina costume I had when I was seven—one last thing to remember me by.

  I don’t go out much anymore. Only when my turn comes to do the shopping, but even then Sam usually volunteers to take my place. I have lost the habit of the streets now, and excursions have become a great strain on me. It’s a question of balance, I think. My headaches have been bad again this winter, and whenever I have to walk more than fifty or a hundred yards, I feel myself beginning to wobble. Each time I take a step, I think I’m going to fall down. Being indoors is not as hard on me. I continue to do most of the cooking, but after preparing meals for twenty or thirty people at a time, cooking for four is almost nothing. We don’t eat much in any case. Enough to stifle the pangs, but hardly more than that. We’re trying to hoard our money for the trip and mustn’t depart from this regime. The winter has been relatively cold, almost as cold as the Terrible Winter, but without the incessant snows and high winds. We’ve kept ourselves warm by dismantling portions of the house and throwing the pieces into the furnace. Victoria was the one who suggested it, but I can’t tell if this means she is looking ahead to the future or has simply stopped caring. We’ve taken apart the banisters, the door frames, the partitions. There was a kind of anarchic pleasure to it at first—chopping up the house for fuel—but now it has become merely grim. Most of the rooms have been stripped bare, and it feels as though we are living in an abandoned bus depot, an old wreck of a building slated for demolition.

  For the past two weeks, Sam has gone out nearly every day to comb the perimeters of the city, investigating the situation along the ramparts, watching carefully to see if troops are massing or not. Such knowledge could make all the difference when the time comes. As of this moment, the Fiddler’s Rampart seems to be our logical choice. It is the westernmost barrier, and it leads directly to a road that takes you into open country. The Millennial Gate to the south has also tempted us, however. There is more traffic on the other side, we have been told, but the Gate itself is not as strictly guarded. The only option we have definitely eliminated so far is the north. There is apparently great danger and turmoil in that part of the country, and for some time now people have been talking of an invasion, of foreign armies gathering in the forests and preparing to strike the city when the snow melts. We have heard these rumors before, of course, and it is difficult to know what to believe. Boris Stepanovich has already obtained our travel permits by bribing an official, but he still spends several hours every day lurking around the municipal buildings in the center of the city, hoping to glean some scrap of information that might be useful to us. We are lucky to have the travel permits, but that does not necessarily mean they will work. They could be forged, in which case we stand to be arrested the moment we present them to the Exit Supervisor. Or he could confiscate them for no reason at all and tell us to turn back. Such things have been known to happen, and we must be prepared for every contingency. Boris therefore continues to snoop and listen, but the talk he hears is too muddled and discordant to be of any concrete value. He thinks this means that the government will soon be out of power again. If so, we might be able to take advantage of the temporary confusion, but nothing at this point is really clear. Nothing is clear, and we continue to wait. In the meantime, the car sits in the garage, loaded with our suitcases and nine jerry cans of supplementary fuel.

  Boris moved in with us about a month ago. He is a good deal thinner than he used to be, and every now and then I can detect a certain haggard look in his face, as though he were suffering from some illness. He never complains, however, and therefore it is impossible to know what the trouble is. Physically, there is no question that he has lost some of his bounce, but I don’t think his spirits have been affected by it, at least not in any obvious way. His principal obsession these days is trying to figure out what we will do with ourselves once we leave the city. He comes up with a new plan almost every morning, each one more absurd than the last. The most recent one tops them all, but I think he secretly has his heart set on it. He wants the four of us to create a magic show. We can tour the countryside in our car, he says, giving performances in exchange for food and lodging. He will be the magician, of course, dressed in a black tuxedo and a high silk hat. Sam will be the barker, and Victoria will be the business manager. I will be the assistant—the luscious young woman prancing around in a skimpy, sequined outfit. I will hand the maestro his instruments during the act, and for the grande finale I will climb into a wooden box and get sawed in half. A long, delirious pause will follow, and then, at the precise moment when all hope has been lost, I will emerge from the box with my limbs intact, gesturing triumphantly, blowing kisses to the crowd with a bright, artificial smile on my face.