The Book of Illusions

by Paul Auster

  I can remember everything up to that point, everything up to the moment when I spoke those words and a little bit beyond, but after that the sequence becomes rather murky to me. I know that I shouted at her, pounding on my chest and daring her to pull the trigger, but whether I did that before she started to cry or after is not something I can remember. Nor can I remember anything she said. That must mean that I did most of the talking, but the words were rushing out of me so fast by then that I scarcely knew what I was saying. What matters most is that she was frightened. She hadn’t expected me to turn the tables on her, and when I glanced up from the gun and looked into her eyes again, I knew that she didn’t have the nerve to kill me. She was all bluff and childish desperation, and the moment I started walking toward her, she immediately dropped her arm to her side. A mysterious sound escaped from her throat—a muffled, choked-off stream of breath, an unidentifiable noise that fell somewhere between a moan and a sob—and as I continued to attack her with my taunts and badgering insults, shouting at her to hurry up and get it over with, I knew—and knew absolutely, knew beyond any shadow of a doubt—that the gun wasn’t loaded. Again, I don’t claim to know where this certainty came from, but the instant I saw her lower her arm, I knew that nothing was going to happen to me, and I wanted to punish her for that, to make her pay for pretending to be something she was not.

  I’m talking about a matter of seconds, an entire lifetime reduced to a matter of seconds. I took a step, and then another step, and suddenly I was upon her, twisting her arm and tearing the gun out of her hand. She was no longer the angel of death, but I knew what death tasted like now, and in the madness of the seconds that followed, I did what was surely the wildest, most outlandish thing I have ever done. Just to prove a point. Just to show her that I was stronger than she was. I took the gun from her, backed off a few feet, and then pointed it at my head. There were no bullets in it, of course, but she didn’t know that I knew that, and I wanted to use my knowledge to humiliate her, to present her with a picture of a man who wasn’t afraid to die. She had started it, and now I was going to finish it. She was screaming by then, I remember, I can still hear how she screamed and begged me not to do it, but nothing was going to stop me now.

  I was expecting to hear a click, followed perhaps by a brief percussive echo from the empty chamber. I put my finger around the trigger, gave Alma Grund what must have been a grotesque and nauseating smile, and started to pull. Oh God, she screamed. Oh God, don’t do it. I pulled, but the trigger didn’t go anywhere. I tried again, and again nothing happened. I assumed the trigger was stuck, but when I lowered the gun to have a proper look at it, I finally saw what the trouble was. The safety catch was on. There were bullets in the gun, and the safety catch was on. She hadn’t remembered to release it. If not for that mistake, one of those bullets would have been in my head.

  She sat down on the sofa and went on crying into her hands. I didn’t know how long it was going to last, but once she pulled herself together, I assumed that she would get up and leave. What other choice did she have? I had nearly blown my brains out because of her, and now that she had lost our sickening contest of wills, I couldn’t imagine that she would have the heart to say another word to me.

  I put the gun in my pocket. As soon as I was no longer touching it, I could feel the madness start to drain out of my body. Only the horror was left—a kind of hot, tactile afterglow, the memory in my right hand of trying to pull the trigger, of pressing the hard metal against my skull. If there was no hole in that skull now, it was only because I was stupid and lucky, because for once in my life my luck had won out over my stupidity. I had come within an inch of killing myself. A series of accidents had stolen my life from me and then given it back, and in the interval, in the tiny gap between those two moments, my life had become a different life.

  When Alma finally lifted her face again, the tears were still running down her cheeks. Her makeup had smudged, leaving a zigzag of black lines across the center of her birthmark, and she looked so disheveled, so undone by the catastrophe she had made for herself, that I almost felt sorry for her.

  Go and wash up, I said. You look terrible.

  It moved me that she didn’t say anything. This was a woman who believed in words, who trusted in her ability to talk her way out of tough corners, but when I gave her that command, she stood up from the sofa in silence and did what I told her to do. Just the wan trace of a smile, the barest hint of a shrug. As she walked off and found her way to the bathroom, I sensed how badly she had been defeated, how mortified she was by what she had done. Inexplicably, the sight of her leaving the room touched something in me. It turned around my thoughts somehow, and in that first little flash of sympathy and fellow feeling, I made a sudden, altogether unexpected decision. To the extent that such things can be quantified, I believe that decision was the beginning of the story I am trying to tell now.

  While she was gone, I went into the kitchen to look for a place to hide the gun. After opening and shutting the cupboards above the sink, then casting about in several drawers and aluminum containers, I opted for the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. This was my first experience with a gun, and I wasn’t sure if I could unload it without causing more mischief, so I laid it in the freezer as it was, bullets and all, wedging it under a bag of chicken parts and a box of ravioli. I just wanted to get the thing out of sight. After I closed the door, however, I realized that I had no great urge to get rid of it. It wasn’t that I had any plans to use the gun again, but I liked the idea of having it near me, and until I thought of a better place to put it, I would let it go on sitting in the freezer. Every time I opened the door, I would remember what had happened to me that night. It would be my secret memorial, a monument to my brush with death.

  She was taking a long time in the bathroom. The rain had stopped by then, and rather than sit around waiting for her to come out, I decided to clean up the mess in my truck and bring in the groceries. That took a little under ten minutes. When I had finished putting away the food, Alma was still in the bathroom. I walked over to the door to listen in, beginning to feel some twinges of worry, wondering if she hadn’t gone in there with the intention of doing something rash and idiotic. Before I left the house, the water in the sink had been running. I had heard the faucets going at full blast, and when I walked by the door on my way out, I had heard her sobbing under the noise. Now the water was off, and there was no sound at all. That could have meant that her crying fit was over and that she was calmly brushing her hair and putting on her makeup. Or it could have meant that she was out cold on the floor, crumpled up with twenty Xanax pills in her stomach.

  I knocked. When she didn’t answer, I knocked again and asked if she was all right. She was coming, she said, she would be out in a minute, and then, after a long pause, in a voice that seemed to be struggling for breath, she told me that she was sorry, sorry for every wretched thing that had happened. She would rather die than have to leave the house before I had forgiven her, she said, she was begging me to forgive her, but even if I couldn’t do that, she was going now, either way she was going, and she wouldn’t trouble me again.

  I stood there waiting by the door. When she came out, her eyes had that blotchy, puffed-up look you get after a long weeping jag, but her hair was in place again, and the powder and lipstick managed to hide most of the redness. She was intending to walk on past me, but I put out my hand and stopped her.

  It’s after two o’clock, I said. We’re both exhausted, and we need to get some sleep. You can use my bed. I’ll sleep downstairs on the sofa.

  She was so ashamed of herself, she couldn’t find the courage to lift her head and look at me. I don’t understand, she said, addressing her words to the floor, and when I didn’t say anything immediately after that, she said it again: I don’t understand.

  No one’s going anywhere tonight, I said. Not me, and not you either. We can talk about tomorrow tomorrow, but for now we both stay put.

  What
does that mean?

  It means that it’s a long way to New Mexico. Better to start off fresh in the morning. I know you’re in a hurry, but a few hours aren’t going to make that much of a difference.

  I thought you wanted me to leave.

  I did. But now I’ve changed my mind.

  Her head came up a little then, and I could see how thoroughly confused she was. You don’t have to be nice to me, she said. I’m not asking for that.

  Don’t worry. I’m thinking about myself, not you. We have a big day ahead of us tomorrow, and if I don’t sack out now, I’m not going to be able to keep my eyes open. I have to be awake to hear what you’re going to tell me, don’t I?

  You’re not saying you want to go with me. You can’t be saying that. It’s not possible for you to be saying that.

  I can’t think of anything else I have to do tomorrow. Why shouldn’t I go?

  Don’t lie. If you’re lying to me now, I don’t think I could stand it. You’d be tearing the heart right out of my body.

  It took several minutes for me to persuade her that I meant to go. The reversal was simply too stunning for her to comprehend, and I had to repeat myself several times before she was willing to believe me. I didn’t tell her everything, of course. I didn’t bother to talk about microscopic holes in the universe or the redemptive powers of temporary insanity. That would have been too difficult, and so I confined myself to telling her that my decision was personal and had nothing to do with her. We had both behaved badly, I said, and I was just as responsible for what had happened as she was. No blame, no forgiveness, no keeping score of who did what to whom. Or words to that effect, words that eventually proved to her that I had my own reasons for wanting to meet Hector and that I wasn’t going for anyone but myself.

  Arduous negotiations ensued. Alma couldn’t accept the offer of my bed. She had inconvenienced me enough, and on top of that I was banged up from the road accident earlier that night. I needed rest, and I wasn’t going to get it tossing and turning on the sofa. I insisted that I would be all right, but she wouldn’t hear of such a thing, and back and forth we went, each one trying to oblige the other in an inane comedy of manners less than an hour after I had ripped a gun out of her hand and come close to firing a bullet into my head. I was too worn out to put up much of an argument, however, and in the end I let her have her way. I fetched some bedding and a spare pillow for her, plopped them down on the sofa, and then showed her where to turn off the lights. That was all. She said she didn’t mind putting on the sheets herself, and after she had thanked me for the seventh time in the past three minutes, I went upstairs to my room.

  There was no question that I was tired, but once I slipped in under the covers, I had trouble falling asleep. I lay there looking at the shadows on the ceiling, and when that no longer seemed interesting, I turned onto my side and listened to the faint sounds of Alma stirring around on the floor below. Alma, the feminine form of almus, meaning nourishing, bountiful. Eventually, the light went out under my door, and I heard the springs in the sofa shift as she settled in for the night. After that, I must have dozed off for a while, since I can’t remember anything else that happened until I opened my eyes at three-thirty. I saw the time on the electric clock beside the bed, and because I was groggy, suspended in that half state between sleeping and waking, I only dimly understood that I had opened my eyes because Alma was crawling into the bed beside me and putting her head on my shoulder. It’s lonely down there, she said, I can’t sleep. That made perfect sense to me. I knew all about not being able to sleep, and before I was awake enough to ask her what she was doing in my bed, I had my arms around her and was kissing her on the mouth.

  . . .

  We set off the next morning just before noon. Alma wanted to drive, so I rode shotgun and handled the navigation duties, telling her where to turn and which highways to take as she steered her blue rented Dodge toward Boston. There were some traces of the storm left on the ground—fallen branches, wet leaves plastered to the roofs of cars, a toppled flagpole lying on someone’s lawn—but the sky was clear again, and we drove through sunlight all the way to the airport.

  Neither one of us said anything about what had happened in my bedroom the night before. It sat in the car with us like a secret, like something that belonged to the domain of small rooms and nocturnal thoughts and must not be exposed to the light of day. To name it would have been to risk destroying it, and therefore we didn’t go much beyond an occasional sidelong glance, a fleeting smile, a hand placed cautiously on the other’s knee. How could I presume to know what Alma was thinking? I was glad that she had crawled into my bed, and I was glad that we had spent those hours together in the darkness. But that was only one night, and I had no idea what was going to happen to us next.

  The last time I had driven to Logan Airport, I had been in the car with Helen, Todd, and Marco. The last morning of their lives had been spent on the same roads that Alma and I were traveling now. Turn by turn, they had made the same trip; mile by mile, they had covered the same ground. Route 30 to Interstate 91; 91 to the Mass Pike; the Mass Pike to 93; 93 to the tunnel. A part of me welcomed this grotesque reenactment. It felt like some cunningly devised form of punishment, as if the gods had decided that I wouldn’t be allowed to have a future until I returned to the past. Justice therefore dictated that I should spend my first morning with Alma in the same way I had spent my last morning with Helen. I had to get into a car and drive to the airport, and I had to be rushing along at ten and twenty miles over the speed limit to avoid missing a plane.

  The boys had been squabbling in the back seat, I remembered, and at one point Todd had hauled off and punched his little brother on the arm. Helen had turned around to remind him that he knew better than to pick on a four-year-old, and our firstborn son had petulantly complained that M. had started it and therefore was only getting what he deserved. If someone hits you, he said, you had the right to hit him back. To which I had answered, making what was to be the last paternal pronouncement of my life, that no one had the right to hit someone smaller than he was. But Marco will always be smaller than I am, Todd said. That means I’ll never be able to hit him. Well, I said, impressed by the logic of his argument, sometimes life isn’t fair. It was a cretinous thing to say, and I remembered that Helen had burst out laughing when I uttered that dreadful truism. It was her way of telling me that of the four people sitting in the car that morning, Todd was the one with the best set of brains. I agreed with her, of course. They were all smarter than I was, and not for a second did I think I could hold a candle to them.

  Alma was a good driver. As I sat there watching her weave in and out of the left and center lanes, passing everything in sight, I told her that she looked beautiful.

  That’s because you’re looking at my good side, she said. If you were sitting over here, you probably wouldn’t say that.

  Is that why you wanted to drive?

  The car’s rented in my name. I’m the only one who’s supposed to drive it.

  And vanity has nothing to do with it.

  It’s going to take time, David. There’s no point in overdoing it when we don’t have to.

  It doesn’t bother me, you know. I’m already getting used to it.

  You can’t be. Not yet, anyway. You haven’t looked at me enough to know what you feel.

  You said you were married. It obviously hasn’t stopped men from finding you attractive.

  I like men. After a while, they come to like me. I might not have been around as much as some girls, but I’ve had my fair share of experiences. Spend enough time with me, and you won’t even see it anymore.

  But I like seeing it. It makes you different, someone who doesn’t look like anyone else. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who looks only like herself.

  That’s what my father used to say. He told me it was a special present from God, and it made me more beautiful than all the other girls.

  Did you believe him?

  Some
times. And sometimes I felt cursed. It’s an ugly thing, after all, and it makes you an easy target when you’re a child. I kept thinking that someday I’d be able to get rid of it, that some doctor would perform an operation and make me look normal. Whenever I dreamed about myself at night, both sides of my face were the same. Smooth and white, perfectly symmetrical. That didn’t stop until I was about fourteen.

  You were learning how to live with it.

  Maybe, I don’t know. But something happened to me around then, and my thinking started to change. It was a big experience for me, a turning point in my life.

  Someone fell in love with you.

  No, someone gave me a book. For Christmas that year, my mother bought me an anthology of American short stories. Classic American Tales, a huge hardcover book with green cloth binding, and on page forty-six there was a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Birthmark. Do you know it?