by Paul Auster
Don’t be an idiot, Born said, grabbing hold of my jacket and giving me a good hard shake. No hospitals. The boy is going to die, and we can’t have anything to do with it.
He won’t die if an ambulance gets here within ten or fifteen minutes.
And if he lives, then what? Do you want to spend the next three years of your life in court?
I don’t care. Walk away from it if you like. Go home and drink another bottle of gin, but I’m running off to Broadway right now to call for an ambulance.
Fine. Have it your own way. We’ll pretend to be good little Boy Scouts, and I’ll sit here with this piece of garbage and wait for you to come back. Is that what you want? How stupid do you think I am, Walker?
I didn’t bother to answer him. Instead, I turned on my heels and started running up 112th Street toward Broadway. I was gone for ten minutes, fifteen minutes at the most, but when I returned to the spot where I’d left Born and the wounded boy, they had both disappeared. Except for a patch of congealing blood on the sidewalk, there was no sign that either one of them had ever been there.
I went home. There was no point in waiting for the ambulance now, so I climbed back up the hill toward Broadway and headed downtown. My mind was blank, incapable of producing a single coherent thought, but as I unlocked the door of the apartment, I realized that I was sobbing, had in fact been sobbing for the past several minutes. Luckily, my roommate was out, which spared me the trouble of having to talk to him in that state. I went on crying in my room, and when the tears finally stopped, I tore up Born’s check and put the pieces in an envelope, which I mailed to him early the next morning. There was no accompanying letter. I was confident that the gesture spoke for itself and that he would understand I was finished with him and wanted nothing more to do with his filthy magazine.
That afternoon, the late edition of the New York Post reported that the body of eighteen-year-old Cedric Williams had been discovered in Riverside Park with over a dozen knife wounds gouged into his chest and stomach. There was no doubt in my mind that Born was responsible. The moment I’d left him to call for the ambulance, he had picked up the bleeding Williams and carried him into the park to finish off the job he had started on the sidewalk. Considering the amount of traffic that moves along Riverside Drive, I found it incredible that no one had spotted Born crossing the street with the kid in his arms, but according to the paper, the investigators working on the case had yet to establish any leads.
Knowing what I did, I clearly had an obligation to call the local precinct house and tell them about Born and the knife and the attempt by Williams to hold us up. I chanced upon the article while drinking a cup of coffee in the Lions Den, the snack bar on the ground floor of the undergraduate student center, and rather than use a public phone, I decided to walk to my apartment on 107th Street and make the call from there. I still hadn’t told anyone about what had happened. I had tried to reach my sister in Poughkeepsie—the one person I was prepared to unburden myself to—but she hadn’t been in. Once I arrived at my apartment building, I collected my mail in the lobby before taking the elevator upstairs. There was only one letter for me: a stampless, hand-delivered envelope with my name written across the front in block letters, folded up in thirds and then shoved through a narrow slot in the mailbox. I opened it in the elevator on my way up to the ninth floor. Not a word, Walker. Remember: I still have the knife, and I’m not afraid to use it.
There was no signature at the bottom, but that hardly seemed necessary. It was a vicious threat, and now that I had seen Born in action, now that I had witnessed the brutality he was capable of, I felt certain he wouldn’t hesitate to carry it out. He would come after me if I tried to turn him in. If I did nothing, he would leave me alone. I still had every intention of calling the police, but the day passed, and then more days passed, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Fear reduced me to silence, but the fact was that only silence could protect me from having to cross paths with him again, and that was all that mattered to me now: to keep Born out of my life forever.
This failure to act is far and away the most reprehensible thing I have ever done, the low point in my career as a human being. Not only did it allow a killer to walk free, but it also had the insidious effect of forcing me to confront my own moral weakness, to recognize that I had never been the person I had thought I was, that I was less good, less strong, less brave than I had imagined myself to be. Horrid, implacable truths. My cowardice sickened me, and yet how not to be afraid of that knife? Born had stuck it into Williams’s belly without the slightest compunction or regret, and even if the first stab could have been justified as an act of self-defense, what about the twelve others he had delivered in the park, the cold-blooded decision to kill? After torturing myself for close to a week, I finally found the courage to call my sister again, and when I heard myself spewing out the whole sordid business to Gwyn over the course of our two-hour conversation, I realized that I didn’t have a choice. I had to step forward. If I didn’t talk to the police, I would lose all respect for myself, and the shame of it would go on haunting me for the rest of my life.
I’m fairly certain they believed my story. I gave them Born’s note, for one thing, and although it lacked a signature, the knife was mentioned, the threat was explicit, and if there was any doubt concerning the author’s identity, a handwriting expert could easily confirm that it had been composed by Born. There was also the bloodstain on the sidewalk near the corner of Riverside Drive and West 112th Street. And then there was my emergency call for the ambulance, which tallied with their records, and the additional fact that I was able to tell them that no one had been present at the scene when the ambulance arrived. At first, they were reluctant to believe that a professor at Columbia University’s School of International Affairs could commit such a nasty street crime, let alone that such a person would walk around with a switchblade in his pocket, but in the end they assured me they would look into it. I left the police station convinced that the matter would soon be closed. It was the end of May, which meant there were still two or three weeks to go before the semester ended, and because I had put off reporting to the police for six long days following the discovery of Williams’s corpse, I figured that Born must have thought his threatening note had done its job. But I was wrong, miserably and tragically wrong. As promised, the police did go to question him, but they quickly learned from an administrator at the School of International Affairs that Professor Born had returned to Paris earlier in the week. His mother had died quite suddenly, they were told, and with so little time remaining in the semester, his final classes were going to be taught by a substitute. In other words, Professor Born would not be coming back.
He had been frightened of me, after all. In spite of the note, he had assumed I would ignore his threat and go to the police anyway. Yes, I did go—but not soon enough, not soon enough by half, and because I gave him that extra time, he had pounced at the opportunity and run, fleeing the country and escaping the jurisdiction of New York’s laws. I knew for a fact that the story about his mother’s death was a sham. During our first conversation at the party in April, he had told me that both his parents were dead, and unless his mother had been resurrected in the interim, I was hard-pressed to see how she could have died twice. When the detective called to tell me what had happened, I felt crushed, humiliated, numb. Born had defeated me. He had shown me something about myself that filled me with revulsion, and for the first time in my life I understood what it was to hate someone. I could never forgive him—and I could never forgive myself.
II
Back in the dark ages of our youth, Walker and I had been friends. We entered Columbia together in 1965, two eighteen-year-old freshmen from New Jersey, and over the next four years we moved in the same circles, read the same books, shared the same ambitions. Then our class graduated, and I lost contact with him. In the early seventies, I ran into someone who told me Adam was living in London (or maybe it was Rome, he wasn’t sure), and tha
t was the last time I heard anyone mention his name. For the next thirty-something years, he rarely entered my thoughts, but whenever he did, I would find myself wondering how he had managed to disappear so thoroughly. Of all the young misfits from our little gang at college, Walker was the one who had struck me as the most promising, and I figured it was inevitable that sooner or later I would begin reading about the books he had written or come across something he had published in a magazine—poems or novels, short stories or reviews, perhaps a translation of one of his beloved French poets—but that moment never came, and I could only conclude that the boy who had been destined for a life in the literary world had gone on to concern himself with other matters.
A little less than a year ago (spring 2007), a UPS package was delivered to my house in Brooklyn. It contained the manuscript of Walker’s story about Rudolf Born (Part I of this book), along with a cover letter from Adam that read as follows:
Dear Jim,
Forgive the intrusion after such a long silence. If memory serves, it’s been thirty-eight years since we last talked, but I recently came across an announcement that you’ll be doing an event in San Francisco next month (I live in Oakland), and I was wondering if you might have some free time to spend with me—perhaps dinner at my house, for example—since I’m in urgent need of help, and I believe you’re the only person I know (or knew) who can give it to me. I say this not to alarm you but because of the enormous admiration I have for the books you have written—which have made me so proud of you, so proud to have once counted myself among your friends.
By way of anticipation, I enclose a still-not-finished draft of the first chapter of a book I am trying to write. I want to go on with it but seem to have hit a wall of struggle and uncertainty—fear might be the word I’m looking for—and I’m hoping that a talk with you might give me the courage to climb over it or tear it down. I should add (in case you’re in doubt) that it is not a work of fiction.
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I should also add that I am not well, am in fact slowly dying of leukemia, and will be lucky to hang on for another year. Just so you know what you’re getting yourself into, in case you choose to get into it. I look a fright these days (no hair! thin as a twig!), but vanity has no place in my world anymore, and I have done my best to come to terms with the thing that has happened to me, even as I fight on with the treatments. A couple of centuries ago, sixty used to be considered old, and since none of us thought we would live past thirty, reaching the double of that isn’t half bad, is it?
I could go on, but I don’t want to take up any more of your time. Sending you this manuscript was not an easy decision (you must be inundated by countless letters from cranks and would-be novelists), but I’ll be glad to fill you in on my comings and goings of the past four decades if you decide to accept my invitation—which I fervently hope you will. As for the ms., save it for the plane trip to California if you’re too busy between now and then. It’s short enough to be consumed in less than an hour.
Hoping for a response.
Yours in solidarity,
Adam Walker
It hadn’t been a close friendship—no shared confidences, no long one-on-one talks, no letters exchanged—but there was no question that I admired Walker, and I had no doubt that he looked on me as an equal, since he never failed to show me anything but respect and goodwill. He was a bit timid, I remember, a trait that seemed odd in a person of such keen intelligence who also happened to be one of the best-looking boys on campus—handsome as a movie star, as a girlfriend of mine once put it. But better to be shy than arrogant, I suppose, better to blend in delicately than to intimidate everyone with your insufferable human perfection. He was something of a loner, then, but amiable and droll whenever he emerged from his cocoon, with a sharp, offbeat sense of humor, and what I especially liked about him was the broad range of his interests, his ability to talk about Cavalcanti, say, or John Donne, and then, with the same acumen and knowledge, turn around and tell you something about baseball that had never occurred to you before. Concerning his inner life, however, I knew nothing. Beyond the fact that he had an older sister (a remarkable beauty, by the way, leading one to suspect that the entire Walker clan had been blessed with the genes of angels), I knew nothing about his family or background, and certainly nothing about the death of his little brother. Now Walker himself was dying, a month past his sixtieth birthday he was beginning to say his farewells, and after reading his hesitant, touching letter, I couldn’t help thinking that this was the start, that the bright young men of yore were at last turning old, and before long our whole generation would be gone. Rather than follow Adam’s advice and ignore his manuscript until I was on the plane to California, I sat down and read it immediately.
How to describe my response? Fascination, amusement, a growing sense of dread, and then horror. If I hadn’t been told it was a true story, I probably would have plunged in and taken those sixty-plus pages for the beginning of a novel (writers do, after all, sometimes inject characters who bear their own names into works of fiction), and then I might have found the ending implausible—or perhaps too abrupt, which would have made it unsatisfying—but because I approached it as a piece of autobiography from the start, Walker’s confession left me shaken and filled with sorrow. Poor Adam. He was so hard on himself, so contemptuous of his weakness in relation to Born, so disgusted with his petty aspirations and youthful strivings, so sick over his failure to recognize that he was dealing with a monster, but who can blame a twenty-year-old boy for losing his bearings in the blur of sophistication and depravity that surrounds a person like Born? He had shown me something about myself that filled me with revulsion. But what had Walker done wrong? He had called for an ambulance on the night of the stabbing, and then, after a momentary lapse of courage, he had gone and talked to the police. Under the circumstances, no one could have done more than that. Whatever revulsion Walker felt about himself could not have been caused by how he behaved at the end. It was the beginning that distressed him, the simple fact that he had allowed himself to be seduced, and he had gone on torturing himself about it for the rest of his life—to such an extent that now, even as his life was ending, he felt driven to march back into the past and tell the story of his shame. According to his letter, this was only the first chapter. I wondered what could possibly come next.
I wrote back to Walker that evening, assuring him that I had received his package, expressing concern and sympathy over the state of his health, telling him that in spite of everything I was happy to have heard from him after so many years, was moved by his kind words about the books I had published, and so on. Yes, I promised, I would adjust my schedule to make sure I could go to his house for dinner and would gladly discuss the problems he was having with the second chapter of his memoir. I don’t have a copy of my letter, but I remember that I wrote it in a spirit of encouragement and support, calling the chapter he had sent me both excellent and disturbing, or words to that effect, and telling him I felt the project was well worth seeing through to the end. I needn’t have said anything more, but curiosity got the better of me, and I concluded with what might have been an impertinence. Forgive me for asking, I wrote, but I’m not sure I can wait until next month to find out what happened to you after we last saw each other. If you’re feeling up to it, I would welcome another letter before I head for your neck of the woods. Not a blow-by-blow account, of course, but the gist, whatever you care to tell me.
Not wanting to entrust my letter to the vagaries of the U.S. Postal Service, I shipped it by express mail the following morning. Two days later, I received Walker’s express mail response.
Gratified, thankful, looking forward to next month.
In answer to your question, I’m more than happy to oblige you, although I’m afraid you’ll find my story rather dull. June 1969. We shook hands, I remember, vowed to stay in touch, and then walked off in opposite directions, never to meet again. I went back to my parents’ house in New Jersey
, planning to visit for a couple of days, got drunk with my sister that night, tripped, fell down the stairs, and broke my leg. Bad luck, it would seem, but in the end it was the best thing that could have happened to me. Ten days later, Greetings!, and an invitation from the federal government to show up for my army physical. I hobbled into the draft board on crutches, was given a I-Y deferment because of the broken leg, and by the time the break mended, the Selective Service had instituted the lottery. I wound up drawing a high number, an obscenely high number (346), and all of a sudden, literally in a single flash, the confrontation I had been dreading for so long was permanently erased from my future.
Beyond that early gift from the gods, I mostly bumped along, struggling to keep my balance, lurching fitfully between bouts of optimism and blinding stretches of despair. Unaccountable, perplexing, perplexed. In the fall of 1969 I moved to London—not because England attracted me, but because I couldn’t stand living in America anymore. The poison of Vietnam, the tears of Vietnam, the blood of Vietnam. We were all out of our minds back then, weren’t we? All driven to madness by a war we detested and couldn’t stop. So I left our fair country, found myself a shithole flat in Hammersmith, and spent the next four years toiling in the sewers of Grub Street—cranking out countless freelance book reviews and accepting any translation that came my way, French books mostly, one or two in Italian, regurgitating into English everything from a dull academic history of the Middle East to an anthropological study of voodoo to crime fiction. Meanwhile, I continued writing my crabbed, gnostic poems. In 1972, a book was published by an obscure small press based in Manchester, an edition of three or four hundred copies, one review in an equally obscure little magazine, sales in the neighborhood of fifty—echoing those hilarious lines from Krapp’s Last Tape (which I remember you were so fond of): “Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas. Getting known.” Getting known indeed.
