by Paul Auster
It is not certain that Blue ever really recovers from the events of this night. And even if he does, it must be noted that several days go by before he returns to a semblance of his former self. In that time he does not shave, he does not change his clothes, he does not even contemplate stirring from his room. When the day comes for him to write his next report, he does not bother. It’s finished now, he says, kicking one of the old reports on the floor, and I’ll be damned if I ever write one of those again.
For the most part, he either lies on his bed or paces back and forth in his room. He looks at the various pictures he has tacked onto the walls since starting the case, studying each one in its turn, thinking about it for as long as he can, and then passing on to the next. There is the coroner from Philadelphia, Gold, with the death mask of the little boy. There is a snowcovered mountain, and in the upper right hand corner of the photograph, an inset of the French skier, his face enclosed in a small box. There is the Brooklyn Bridge, and next to it the two Roeblings, father and son. There is Blue’s father, dressed in his police uniform and receiving a medal from the mayor of New York, Jimmy Walker. Again there is Blue’s father, this time in his street clothes, standing with his arm around Blue’s mother in the early days of their marriage, the two of them smiling brightly into the camera. There is a picture of Brown with his arm around Blue, taken in front of their office on the day Blue was made a partner. Below it there is an action shot of Jackie Robinson sliding into second base. Next to that there is a portrait of Walt Whitman. And finally, directly to the poet’s left, there is a movie still of Robert Mitchum from one of the fan magazines: gun in hand, looking as though the world is about to cave in on him. There is no picture of the ex-future Mrs. Blue, but each time Blue makes a tour of his little gallery, he pauses in front of a certain blank spot on the wall and pretends that she, too, is there.
For several days, Blue does not bother to look out the window. He has enclosed himself so thoroughly in his own thoughts that Black no longer seems to be there. The drama is Blue’s alone, and if Black is in some sense the cause of it, it’s as though he has already played his part, spoken his lines, and made his exit from the stage. For Blue at this point can no longer accept Black’s existence, and therefore he denies it. Having penetrated Black’s room and stood there alone, having been, so to speak, in the sanctum of Black’s solitude, he cannot respond to the darkness of that moment except by replacing it with a solitude of his own. To enter Black, then, was the equivalent of entering himself, and once inside himself, he can no longer conceive of being anywhere else. But this is precisely where Black is, even though Blue does not know it.
One afternoon, therefore, as if by chance, Blue comes closer to the window than he has in many days, happens to pause in front of it, and then, as if for old time’s sake, parts the curtains and looks outside. The first thing he sees is Black—not inside his room, but sitting on the stoop of his building across the street, looking up at Blue’s window. Is he finished, then? Blue wonders. Does this mean it’s over?
Blue retrieves his binoculars from the back of the room and returns to the window. Bringing them into focus on Black, he studies the man’s face for several minutes, first one feature and then another, the eyes, the lips, the nose, and so on, taking the face apart and then putting it back together. He is moved by the depth of Black’s sadness, the way the eyes looking up at him seem so devoid of hope, and in spite of himself, caught unawares by this image, Blue feels compassion rising up in him, a rush of pity for that forlorn figure across the street. He wishes it were not so, however, wishes he had the courage to load his gun, take aim at Black, and fire a bullet through his head. He’d never know what hit him, Blue thinks, he’d be in heaven before he touched the ground. But as soon as he has played out this little scene in his mind, he begins to recoil from it. No, he realizes, that’s not what he wishes at all. If not that, then—what? Still struggling against the surge of tender feelings, saying to himself that he wants to be left alone, that all he wants is peace and quiet, it gradually dawns on him that he has in fact been standing there for several minutes wondering if there is not some way that he might help Black, if it would not be possible for him to offer his hand in friendship. That would certainly turn the tables, Blue thinks, that would certainly stand the whole business on its head. But why not? Why not do the unexpected? To knock on the door, to erase the whole story—it’s no less absurd than anything else. For the fact of the matter is, all the fight has been taken out of Blue. He no longer has the stomach for it. And, to all appearances, neither does Black. Just look at him, Blue says to himself. He’s the saddest creature in the world. And then, the moment he says these words, he understands that he’s also talking about himself.
Long after Black leaves the steps, therefore, turning around and reentering the building, Blue goes on staring at the vacant spot. An hour or two before dusk, he finally turns from the window, sees the disorder he has allowed his room to fall into, and spends the next hour straightening things up—washing the dishes, making the bed, putting away his clothes, removing the old reports from the floor. Then he goes into the bathroom, takes a long shower, shaves, and puts on fresh clothes, selecting his best blue suit for the occasion. Everything is different for him now, suddenly and irrevocably different. There is no more dread, no more trembling. Nothing but a calm assurance, a sense of rightness in the thing he is about to do.
Shortly after nightfall, he adjusts his tie one last time before the mirror and then leaves the room, going outside, crossing the street, and entering Black’s building. He knows that Black is there, since a small lamp is on in his room, and as he walks up the stairs he tries to imagine the expression that will come over Black’s face when he tells him what he has in mind. He knocks twice on the door, very politely, and then hears Black’s voice from within: The door’s open. Come in.
It is difficult to say exactly what Blue was expecting to find— but in all events, it was not this, not the thing that confronts him the moment he steps into the room. Black is there, sitting on his bed, and he’s wearing the mask again, the same one Blue saw on the man in the post office, and in his right hand he’s holding a gun, a thirty-eight revolver, enough to blow a man apart at such close range, and he’s pointing it directly at Blue. Blue stops in his tracks, says nothing. So much for burying the hatchet, he thinks. So much for turning the tables.
Sit down in the chair, Blue, says Black, gesturing with the gun to the wooden desk chair. Blue has no choice, and so he sits—now facing Black, but too far away to make a lunge at him, too awkwardly positioned to do anything about the gun.
I’ve been waiting for you, says Black. I’m glad you finally made it.
I figured as much, answers Blue.
Are you surprised?
Not really. At least not at you. Myself maybe—but only because I’m so stupid. You see, I came here tonight in friendship.
But of course you did, says Black, in a slightly mocking voice. Of course we’re friends. We’ve been friends from the beginning, haven’t we? The very best of friends.
If this is how you treat your friends, says Blue, then lucky for me I’m not one of your enemies.
Very funny.
That’s right, I’m the original funny man. You can always count on a lot of laughs when I’m around.
And the mask—aren’t you going to ask me about the mask?
I don’t see why. If you want to wear that thing, it’s not my problem.
But you have to look at it, don’t you?
Why ask questions when you already know the answer?
It’s grotesque, isn’t it?
Of course it’s grotesque.
And frightening to look at.
Yes, very frightening.
Good. I like you, Blue. I always knew you were the right one for me. A man after my own heart.
If you stopped waving that gun around, maybe I’d start feeling the same about you.
I’m sorry, I can’t do that. It’s t
oo late now.
Which means?
I don’t need you anymore, Blue.
It might not be so easy to get rid of me, you know. You got me into this, and now you’re stuck with me.
No, Blue, you’re wrong. Everything is over now.
Stop the doubletalk.
It’s finished. The whole thing is played out. There’s nothing more to be done.
Since when?
Since now. Since this moment.
You’re out of your mind.
No, Blue. If anything, I’m in my mind, too much in my mind. It’s used me up, and now there’s nothing left. But you know that, Blue, you know that better than anyone.
So why don’t you just pull the trigger?
When I’m ready, I will.
And then walk out of here leaving my body on the floor? Fat chance.
Oh no, Blue. You don’t understand. It’s going to be the two of us together, just like always.
But you’re forgetting something, aren’t you?
Forgetting what?
You’re supposed to tell me the story. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to end? You tell me the story, and then we say good-bye.
You know it already, Blue. Don’t you understand that? You know the story by heart.
Then why did you bother in the first place?
Don’t ask stupid questions.
And me—what was I there for? Comic relief?
No, Blue, I’ve needed you from the beginning. If it hadn’t been for you, I couldn’t have done it.
Needed me for what?
To remind me of what I was supposed to be doing. Every time I looked up, you were there, watching me, following me, always in sight, boring into me with your eyes. You were the whole world to me, Blue, and I turned you into my death. You’re the one thing that doesn’t change, the one thing that turns everything inside out.
And now there’s nothing left. You’ve written your suicide note, and that’s the end of it.
Exactly.
You’re a fool. You’re a goddamned, miserable fool.
I know that. But no more than anyone else. Are you going to sit there and tell me that you’re smarter than I am? At least I know what I’ve been doing. I’ve had my job to do, and I’ve done it. But you’re nowhere, Blue. You’ve been lost from the first day.
Why don’t you pull the trigger, then, you bastard? says Blue, suddenly standing up and pounding his chest in anger, daring Black to kill him. Why don’t you shoot me now and get it over with?
Blue then takes a step towards Black, and when the bullet doesn’t come, he takes another, and then another, screaming at the masked man to shoot, no longer caring if he lives or dies. A moment later, he’s right up against him. Without hesitating he swats the gun out of Black’s hand, grabs him by the collar, and yanks him to his feet. Black tries to resist, tries to struggle against Blue, but Blue is too strong for him, all crazy with the passion of his anger, as though turned into someone else, and as the first blows begin to land on Black’s face and groin and stomach, the man can do nothing, and not long after that he’s out cold on the floor. But that does not prevent Blue from continuing the assault, battering the unconscious Black with his feet, picking him up and banging his head on the floor, pelting his body with one punch after another. Eventually, when Blue’s fury begins to abate and he sees what he has done, he cannot say for certain whether Black is alive or dead. He removes the mask from Black’s face and puts his ear against his mouth, listening for the sound of Black’s breath. There seems to be something, but he can’t tell if it’s coming from Black or himself. If he’s alive now, Blue thinks, it won’t be for long. And if he’s dead, then so be it.
Blue stands up, his suit all in tatters, and begins collecting the pages of Black’s manuscript from the desk. This takes several minutes. When he has all of them, he turns off the lamp in the corner and leaves the room, not even bothering to give Black a last look.
It’s past midnight when Blue gets back to his room across the street. He puts the manuscript down on the table, goes into the bathroom, and washes the blood off his hands. Then he changes his clothes, pours himself a glass of scotch, and sits down at the table with Black’s book. Time is short. They’ll be coming before he knows it, and then there will be hell to pay. Still, he does not let this interfere with the business at hand.
He reads the story right through, every word of it from beginning to end. By the time he finishes, dawn has come, and the room has begun to brighten. He hears a bird sing, he hears footsteps going down the street, he hears a car driving across the Brooklyn Bridge. Black was right, he says to himself. I knew it all by heart.
But the story is not yet over. There is still the final moment, and that will not come until Blue leaves the room. Such is the way of the world: not one moment more, not one moment less. When Blue stands up from his chair, puts on his hat, and walks through the door, that will be the end of it.
Where he goes after that is not important. For we must remember that all this took place more than thirty years ago, back in the days of our earliest childhood. Anything is possible, therefore. I myself prefer to think that he went far away, boarding a train that morning and going out West to start a new life. It is even possible that America was not the end of it. In my secret dreams, I like to think of Blue booking passage on some ship and sailing to China. Let it be China, then, and we’ll leave it at that. For now is the moment that Blue stands up from his chair, puts on his hat, and walks through the door. And from this moment on, we know nothing.
(1983)
The Locked Room
1
It seems to me now that Fanshawe was always there. He is the place where everything begins for me, and without him I would hardly know who I am. We met before we could talk, babies crawling through the grass in diapers, and by the time we were seven we had pricked our fingers with pins and made ourselves blood brothers for life. Whenever I think of my childhood now, I see Fanshawe. He was the one who was with me, the one who shared my thoughts, the one I saw whenever I looked up from myself.
But that was a long time ago. We grew up, went off to different places, drifted apart. None of that is very strange, I think. Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.
Seven years ago this November, I received a letter from a woman named Sophie Fanshawe. “You don’t know me,” the letter began, “and I apologize for writing to you like this out of the blue. But things have happened, and under the circumstances I don’t have much choice.” It turned out that she was Fanshawe’s wife. She knew that I had grown up with her husband, and she also knew that I lived in New York, since she had read many of the articles I had published in magazines.
The explanation came in the second paragraph, very bluntly, without any preamble. Fanshawe had disappeared, she wrote, and it was more than six months since she had last seen him. Not a word in all that time, not the slightest clue as to where he might be. The police had found no trace of him, and the private detective she hired to look for him had come up empty-handed. Nothing was sure, but the facts seemed to speak for themselves: Fanshawe was probably dead; it was pointless to think he would be coming back. In the light of all this, there was something important she needed to discuss with me, and she wondered if I would agree to see her.
This letter caused a series of little shocks in me. There was too much information to absorb all at once; too many forces were pulling me in different directions. Out of nowhere, Fanshawe had suddenly reappeared in my life. But no sooner was his name mentioned than he had vanished again. He was married, he had been living in New York—and I knew nothing about him anymore. Selfishly, I felt hurt that he had not bothered to get in touch with me. A phone call, a postcard, a drink to catch up on old times—it would not have been difficult to arrange. But the fault was equally my own. I knew where Fanshawe’s mother lived, and if I had wanted to find him, I could eas
ily have asked her. The fact was that I had let go of Fanshawe. His life had stopped the moment we went our separate ways, and he belonged to the past for me now, not to the present. He was a ghost I carried around inside me, a prehistoric figment, a thing that was no longer real. I tried to remember the last time I had seen him, but nothing was clear. My mind wandered for several minutes and then stopped short, fixing on the day his father died. We were in high school then and could not have been more than seventeen years old.
I called Sophie Fanshawe and told her I would be glad to see her whenever it was convenient. We decided on the following day, and she sounded grateful, even though I explained to her that I had not heard from Fanshawe and had no idea where he was.
She lived in a red-brick tenement in Chelsea, an old walk-up building with gloomy stairwells and peeling paint on the walls. I climbed the five flights to her floor, accompanied by the sounds of radios and squabbles and flushing toilets that came from the apartments on the way up, paused to catch my breath, and then knocked. An eye looked through the peephole in the door, there was a clatter of bolts being turned, and then Sophie Fanshawe was standing before me, holding a small baby in her left arm. As she smiled at me and invited me in, the baby tugged at her long brown hair. She ducked away gently from the attack, took hold of the child with her two hands, and turned him face front towards me. This was Ben, she said, Fanshawe’s son, and he had been born just three-and-a-half months ago. I pretended to admire the baby, who was waving his arms and drooling whitish spittle down his chin, but I was more interested in his mother. Fanshawe had been lucky. The woman was beautiful, with dark, intelligent eyes, almost fierce in their steadiness. Thin, not more than average height, and with something slow in her manner, a thing that made her both sensual and watchful, as though she looked out on the world from the heart of a deep inner vigilance. No man would have left this woman of his own free will—especially not when she was about to have his child. That much was certain to me. Even before I stepped into the apartment, I knew that Fanshawe had to be dead.
