The Book of Illusions

by Paul Auster

  At the time, none of this seemed terribly important. The alarm went off at five, and with only half an hour to get myself ready and out the door, I wouldn’t have given Frieda a single thought if her name hadn’t been mentioned. What mattered to me that morning was waking up with Alma, drinking coffee with her on the front steps of the house, being able to touch her again. All groggy and tousled, all stupid with happiness, all bleary with sex and skin and thoughts about my new life. If I had been more alert, I would have understood what I was walking away from, but I was too tired and too rushed for anything but the simplest gestures: a last hug, a last kiss, and then the van pulled up in front of the cottage, and it was time for me to go. We went back into the house to retrieve my bag, and as we were walking out again, Alma plucked a book from the table near the door and handed it to me (To look at on the plane, she said), and then there was a last last hug, a last last kiss, and I was off to the airport. It wasn’t until I was halfway there that I realized that Alma had forgotten to give me the Xanax.

  On any other day, I would have told the driver to turn around and go back to the ranch. I almost did it then, but after thinking through the humiliations that would follow from that decision—missing the plane, exposing myself as a coward, reaffirming my status as neurotic weakling—I managed to curb my panic. I had already made one drugless flight with Alma. Now the trick was to see if I could do it alone. To the extent that distractions were necessary, the book she had given me proved to be an enormous help. It was over six hundred pages long, weighed almost three pounds, and kept me company the whole time I was in the air. A compendium of wildflowers with the blunt, no-nonsense title Weeds of the West, it had been put together by a team of seven authors (six of whom were described as Extension Weed Specialists; the seventh was a Wyoming-based Herbarium Manager) and published, aptly enough, by something called the Western Society of Weed Science, in association with the Western United States Land Grant Universities Cooperative Extension Services. In general, I didn’t take much interest in botany. I couldn’t have named more than a few dozen plants and trees, but this reference book, with its nine hundred color photographs and precise prose descriptions of the habitats and characteristics of over four hundred species, held my attention for several hours. I don’t know why I found it so absorbing, but perhaps it was because I had just come from that land of prickly, water-starved vegetation and wanted to see more of it, had not quite had my fill. Most of the photographs had been shot in extreme close-up, with nothing in the background but blank sky. Occasionally, the picture would include some surrounding grass, a patch of dirt, or, even more rarely, a distant rock or mountain. Noticeably absent were people, the smallest reference to human activity. New Mexico had been inhabited for thousands of years, but to look at the photos in that book was to feel that nothing had ever happened there, that its entire history had been erased. No more ancient cliff dwellers, no more archaeological ruins, no more Spanish conquerors, no more Jesuit priests, no more Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, no more Indian pueblos, no more builders of the atomic bomb. There was only the land and what covered the land, the meager growths of stems and stalks and spiny little flowers that sprang up from the parched soil: a civilization reduced to a smattering of weeds. In themselves, the plants weren’t much to look at, but their names had an impressive music, and after I had studied the pictures and read the words that accompanied them (Leaf blade ovate to lanceolate in outline … . Achenes are flattened, ribbed and rugose, with pappus of capillary bristles), I took a brief pause to write down some of those names in my notebook. I started on a fresh verso, immediately after the pages I had used to record the extracts from Hector’s journal, which in turn had followed the description of The Inner Life of Martin Frost. The words had a chewy Saxon thickness to them, and I took pleasure in sounding them out to myself, in feeling their stolid, clanging resonances on my tongue. As I look at the list now, it strikes me as near gibberish, a random collection of syllables from a dead language—perhaps from the language once spoken on Mars.

  Bur chervil. Spreading dogbane. Labriform milkweed. Skeletonleaf bursage. Common sagewort. Nodding beggar-sticks. Plumeless thistle. Squarerrose knapweed. Hairy fleabane. Bristly hawksbeard. Curlycup gunweed. Spotted catsear. Tansy ragwort. Riddell groundsel. Blessed milkthistle. Poverty sumpweed. Spineless horsebrush. Spiny cocklebur. Western sticktight. Smallseed falseflax. Flixwood tansymustard. Dyer’s woad. Clasping pepperweed. Bladder campion. Nettleleaf goosefoot. Dodder. Prostrate spurge. Twogrooved milkvetch. Everlasting peavine. Silky crazyweed. Toad rush. Henbit. Purple deadnettle. Spurred anoda. Panicle willowweed. Velvety gaura. Ripgut brome. Mexican sprangletop. Fall panicum. Rattail fescue. Sharppoint fluvellin. Dalmatian toadflax. Bilobed speedwell. Sacred datura.

  Vermont looked different to me after I returned. I had been gone for only three days and two nights, but everything had become smaller in my absence: closed in on itself, dark, clammy. The greenness of the woods around my house felt unnatural, impossibly lush in comparison to the tans and browns of the desert. The air was thick with moisture, the ground was soft underfoot, and everywhere I turned I saw wild proliferations of plant life, startling instances of decay: the over-saturated twigs and bark fragments moldering on the trails, the ladders of fungus on the trees, the mildew stains on the walls of the house. After a while, I understood that I was looking at these things through Alma’s eyes, trying to see them with a new clarity in order to prepare myself for the day when she moved in with me. The flight to Boston had gone well, much better than I had dared to hope it would, and I had walked off the plane feeling that I had accomplished something important. In the big scheme of things, it probably wasn’t much, but in the small scheme of things, in the microscopic place where private battles are won and lost, it counted as a singular victory. I felt stronger than I had felt at any time in the past three years. Almost whole, I said to myself, almost ready to become real again.

  For the next several days, I kept as busy as I could, tackling chores on several fronts at once. I worked on the Chateaubriand translation, took my banged-up truck to the body shop for repairs, and cleaned the house to within an inch of its life—scrubbing floors, waxing furniture, dusting books. I knew that nothing could hide the essential ugliness of the architecture, but at least I could make the rooms presentable, give them a sheen they hadn’t had before. The only difficulty was deciding what to do with the boxes in the spare bedroom—which I intended to convert into a study for Alma. She would need to have a place to finish her book, a place to go to when she needed to be alone, and that room was the only one available. Storage space in the rest of the house was limited, however, and with no attic and no garage at my disposal, the only area I could think of was the cellar. The problem with that solution was the dirt floor. Every time it rained, the cellar would fill up with water, and any cardboard box left down there was certain to be drenched. To avoid that calamity, I bought ninety-six cinder blocks and eight large rectangles of plywood. By stacking the cinder blocks three high, I managed to construct a platform that was well above the waterline of the worst flood that had visited me. For extra security against the effects of dampness, I wrapped each box in a thick plastic garbage bag and sealed up the opening with tape. That should have been satisfactory, but it took another two days for me to build up the courage to carry them downstairs. Everything that remained of my family was in those boxes. Helen’s dresses and skirts. Her hairbrush and stockings. Her big winter coat with the fur hood. Todd’s baseball glove and comic books. Marco’s jigsaw puzzles and plastic men. The gold compact with the cracked mirror. Hooty Tooty the stuffed bear. The Walter Mondale campaign button. I had no use for these things anymore, but I had never been able to throw them away, had never even considered giving them to charity. I didn’t want Helen’s clothes to be worn by another woman, and I didn’t want the boys’ Red Sox caps to sit on the heads of other boys. Taking those things down to the cellar was like burying them in the ground. It wasn’t the end, perhaps, bu
t it was the beginning of the end, the first milestone on the road to forgetfulness. Hard to do, but not half as hard as getting on that plane to Boston had been. After I finished emptying the room, I went to Brattleboro and picked out furniture for Alma. I bought her a mahogany desk, a leather chair that rocked back and forth when you pushed a button under the seat, an oak filing cabinet, and a nifty, multicolored throw rug. It was the best stuff in the store, top-of-the-line office equipment. The bill came to more than three thousand dollars, and I paid in cash.

  I missed her. However impetuous our plan might have been, I never had any doubts or second thoughts about it. I pushed on in a state of blind happiness, waiting for the moment when she would finally be able to come east, and whenever I started to miss her too much, I would open the freezer door and look at the gun. The gun proved that Alma had already been there—and if she had been there once, there was no reason to believe she wouldn’t return. At first, I didn’t dwell on the fact that the gun was still loaded, but after two or three days it started to bother me. I hadn’t touched it in all that time, but one afternoon, just to be safe, I lifted it out of the refrigerator and carried it into the woods, where I fired all six bullets into the ground. They made a noise like a string of Chinese firecrackers, like bursting paper bags. When I returned to the house, I put the gun in the top drawer of the bedside table. It couldn’t kill anymore, but that didn’t mean it was any less potent, any less dangerous. It embodied the power of a thought, and every time I looked at it, I remembered how close that thought had come to destroying me.

  The phone in Alma’s cottage was temperamental, and I couldn’t always get through to her when I called. Faulty wiring, she said, a loose connection somewhere in the system, which meant that even after I dialed her number and heard the rapid little clicks and beeps that suggested the call was going through, the bell on her end didn’t ring. More often than not, however, that phone could be counted on for outgoing calls. On the day I returned to Vermont, I made several unsuccessful attempts to reach her, and when Alma finally called at eleven (nine o’clock mountain time), we decided to stick to that arrangement in the future. She would call me rather than the other way around. Every time we talked after that, we ended the conversation by fixing the time of the next call, and for three nights running the routine worked as smoothly as a trick in a magic show. We would say seven o’clock, for example, and at ten minutes to seven I would install myself in the kitchen, pour myself a straight shot of tequila (we went on drinking tequila together, even long-distance), and at seven sharp, just as the second hand on the wall clock was sweeping up to mark the hour, the telephone would ring. I came to depend on the precision of those calls. Alma’s punctuality was a sign of faith, a commitment to the principle that two people in two different parts of the world could nevertheless be of one mind about nearly everything.

  Then, on the fourth night (the fifth night after I had left Tierra del Sueño), Alma didn’t call. I suspected that she was having trouble with her phone, and therefore I didn’t act right away. I went on sitting in my spot, patiently waiting for the phone to ring, but when the silence stretched on for another twenty minutes, then thirty minutes, I began to worry. If the phone was out of order, she would have sent a fax to explain why I hadn’t heard from her. Alma’s fax machine was hooked up to another line, and there had never been any glitches with that number. I knew it was useless, but I picked up my own phone and called her anyway—with the expected negative result. Then, thinking that she might have been caught up in some business with Frieda, I called the number at the main house, but the result was the same. I called again, just to make sure I had dialed correctly, but again there was no answer. As a last resort, I sent a brief note by fax. Where are you, Alma? Is everything all right? Puzzled. Please write (fax) if phone is out of order. I love you, David.

  There was only one phone in my house, and it was in the kitchen. If I went upstairs to the bedroom, I was afraid I wouldn’t hear it ringing if Alma called later in the night—or, if I did, that I wouldn’t be able to get downstairs in time to answer it. I had no idea what to do with myself. I waited around in the kitchen for several hours, hoping that something would happen, and then, when it finally got to be past one in the morning, I went into the living room and stretched out on the sofa. It was the same lumpy ensemble of springs and cushions that I had turned into a makeshift bed for Alma the first night we were together—a good place for thinking morbid thoughts. I kept at it until dawn, torturing myself with imagined car crashes, fires, medical emergencies, deadly stumbles down flights of stairs. At some point, the birds woke up and started singing in the branches outside. Not long after that, I unexpectedly fell asleep.

  I had never thought that Frieda would do to Alma what she had done to me. Hector had wanted me to stay at the ranch and watch his films; then he died, and Frieda had prevented it from happening. Hector had wanted Alma to write his biography. Now that he was dead, why hadn’t it occurred to me that Frieda would take it upon herself to prevent the book from being published? The situations were almost identical, and yet I hadn’t seen the resemblance, had utterly failed to notice the similarities between them. Perhaps it was because the numbers were so far apart. Watching the films would have taken me no more than four or five days; Alma had been working on her book for close to seven years. It never crossed my mind that anyone could be cruel enough to take seven years of a person’s work and rip it to shreds. I simply lacked the courage to think that thought.

  If I had seen what was coming, I wouldn’t have left Alma alone at the ranch. I would have forced her to pack her manuscript, pushed her into the van, and taken her with me to the airport on that last morning. Even if I hadn’t acted then, it still might have been possible to do something before it was too late. We had had four telephone conversations since my return to Vermont, and Frieda’s name had come up in every one of them. But I hadn’t wanted to talk about Frieda. That part of the story was over for me now, and I was only interested in talking about the future. I rattled on to Alma about the house, about the room I was preparing for her, about the furniture I had ordered. I should have been asking her questions, pressing her for details about Frieda’s state of mind, but Alma seemed to enjoy hearing me talk about these domestic matters. She was in the early stages of moving—filling up cardboard boxes with her clothes, deciding what to take and what to leave behind, asking me which books in my library duplicated hers—and the last thing she was expecting was trouble.

  Three hours after I left for the airport, Alma and Frieda had driven to the funeral parlor in Albuquerque to collect the urn. Later that day, in a windless corner of the garden, they had scattered Hector’s ashes among the rosebushes and tulip beds. It was the same spot where Taddy had been stung by the bee, and Frieda had been quite shaky throughout the ceremony, holding her own for a minute or two and then giving in to prolonged fits of silent crying. When Alma and I talked on the phone that night, she told me that Frieda had never looked so vulnerable to her, so dangerously close to collapse. Early the next morning, however, she walked over to the main house and discovered that Frieda was already awake—sitting on the floor in Hector’s study, combing through mountains of papers, photographs, and drawings that were spread out in a circle around her. The screenplays were next, she told Alma, and after that she was going to make a systematic search for every other document linked to the production of the films: storyboard folios, costume sketches, set-design blueprints, lighting diagrams, notes for the actors. It would all have to be burned, she said, not a single scrap of material could be spared.

  Already, then, just one day after I left the ranch, the limits of the destruction had been changed, pushed back to accommodate a broader interpretation of Hector’s will. It wasn’t just the movies anymore. It was every piece of evidence that could prove those movies had ever existed.

  There were fires on each of the next two days, but Alma took no part in them, letting Juan and Conchita serve as helpers as she went about her
own business. On the third day, scenery was dragged out from the back rooms of the sound stage and burned. Props were burned, costumes were burned, Hector’s journals were burned. Even the notebook I had read in Alma’s house was burned, and still we were unable to grasp where things were headed. That notebook had been written in the early thirties, long before Hector went back to making films. Its only value was as a source of information for Alma’s biography. Destroy that source, and even if the book was eventually published, the story it told would no longer be credible. We should have understood that, but when we talked on the phone that night, Alma mentioned it only in passing. The big news of the day had to do with Hector’s silent films. Copies of those films were already in circulation, of course, but Frieda was worried that if they were discovered on the ranch, someone would make the connection between Hector Spelling and Hector Mann, and so she had decided to burn them as well. It was a gruesome job, Alma reported her as saying, but it had to be done thoroughly. If one part of the job was left unfinished, then all the other parts would become meaningless.

  We arranged to talk again at nine o’clock the next evening (seven her time). Alma was going to be in Sorocco for most of the afternoon—shopping at the supermarket, taking care of personal errands—but even though it was an hour-anda-half drive back to Tierra del Sueño, we figured that she would return to the cottage by six. When her call didn’t come, my imagination immediately started filling in the blanks, and by the time I stretched out on the sofa at one o’clock, I was convinced that Alma had never made it home, that something monstrous had happened to her.