by Paul Auster
There was only one letter for me that day. It came in a plain white envelope with a New York postmark and had no return address. The handwriting was unfamiliar to me (my name and address were printed out in block letters), and I couldn’t even begin to guess who it was from. I opened the envelope in the elevator—and it was then, standing there on my way to the ninth floor, that the world fell on top of me.
“Don’t be angry with me for writing to you,” the letter began. “At the risk of causing you heart failure, I wanted to send you one last word—to thank you for what you have done. I knew that you were the person to ask, but things have turned out even better than I thought they would. You have gone beyond the possible, and I am in your debt. Sophie and the child will be taken care of, and because of that I can live with a clear conscience.
“I’m not going to explain myself here. In spite of this letter, I want you to go on thinking of me as dead. Nothing is more important than that, and you must not tell anyone that you’ve heard from me. I am not going to be found, and to speak of it would only lead to more trouble than it’s worth. Above all, say nothing to Sophie. Make her divorce me, and then marry her as soon as you can. I trust you to do that—and I give you my blessings. The child needs a father, and you’re the only one I can count on.
“I want you to understand that I haven’t lost my mind. I made certain decisions that were necessary, and though people have suffered, leaving was the best and kindest thing I have ever done.
“Seven years from the day of my disappearance will be the day of my death. I have passed judgment on myself, and no appeals will be heard.
“I beg you not to look for me. I have no desire to be found, and it seems to me that I have the right to live the rest of my life as I see fit. Threats are repugnant to me—but I have no choice but to give you this warning: if by some miracle you manage to track me down, I will kill you.
“I’m pleased that so much interest has been taken in my writing. I never had the slightest inkling that anything like this could happen. But it all seems so far away from me now. Writing books belongs to another life, and to think about it now leaves me cold. I will never try to claim any of the money—and I gladly give it to you and Sophie. Writing was an illness that plagued me for a long time, but now I have recovered from it.
“Rest assured that I won’t be in touch again. You are free of me now, and I wish you a long and happy life. How much better that everything should come to this. You are my friend, and my one hope is that you will always be who you are. With me it’s another story. Wish me luck.”
There was no signature at the bottom of the letter, and for the next hour or two I tried to persuade myself that it was a prank. If Fanshawe had written it, why would he have neglected to sign his name? I clung to this as evidence of a trick, desperately looking for an excuse to deny what had happened. But this optimism did not last very long, and little by little I forced myself to face the facts. There could be any number of reasons for the name to be left out, and the more I thought about it, the more clearly I saw that this was precisely why the letter should be considered genuine. A prankster would make a special point of including the name, but the real person would not think twice about it: only someone not out to deceive would have the self-assurance to make such an apparent mistake. And then there were the final sentences of the letter: “… remain who you are. With me it’s another story.” Did this mean that Fanshawe had become someone else? Unquestionably, he was living under another name—but how was he living—and where? The New York postmark was something of a clue, perhaps, but it just as easily could have been a blind, a bit of false information to throw me off his track. Fanshawe had been extremely careful. I read the letter over and over, trying to pull it apart, looking for an opening, a way to read between the lines—but nothing came of it. The letter was opague, a block of darkness that thwarted every attempt to get inside it. In the end I gave up, put the letter in a drawer of my desk, and admitted that I was lost, that nothing would ever be the same for me again.
What bothered me most, I think, was my own stupidity. Looking back on it now, I saw that all the facts had been given to me at the start—as early as my first meeting with Sophie. For years Fanshawe publishes nothing, then he tells his wife what to do if anything should happen to him (contact me, get his work published), and then he vanishes. It was all so obvious. The man wanted to leave, and he left. He simply got up one day and walked out on his pregnant wife, and because she trusted him, because it was inconceivable to her that he would do such a thing, she had no choice but to think he was dead. Sophie had deluded herself, but given the situation, it was hard to see how she could have done otherwise. I had no such excuse. Not once from the very beginning had I thought things through for myself. I had jumped right in with her, had rejoiced in accepting her misreading of the facts, and then had stopped thinking altogether. People have been shot for smaller crimes than that.
The days went by. All my instincts told me to confide in Sophie, to share the letter with her, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was too afraid, too uncertain as to how she would react. In my stronger moods, I argued to myself that keeping silent was the only way to protect her. What possible good would it do for her to know that Fanshawe had walked out on her? She would blame herself for what had happened, and I didn’t want her to be hurt. Underneath this noble silence, however, there was a second silence of panic and fear. Fanshawe was alive—and if I let Sophie know it, what would this knowledge do to us? The thought that Sophie might want him back was too much for me, and I did not have the courage to risk finding out. This was perhaps my greatest failure of all. If I had believed enough in Sophie’s love for me, I would have been willing to risk anything. But at the time there seemed to be no other choice, and so I did what Fanshawe had asked me to do—not for him, but for myself. I locked up the secret inside me and learned to hold my tongue.
A few more days went by, and then I proposed marriage to Sophie. We had talked about it before, but this time I took it out of the realm of talk, making it clear to her that I meant business. I realized that I was acting out of character (humorless, inflexible), but I couldn’t help myself. The uncertainty of the situation was impossible to live with, and I felt that I had to resolve things right then and there. Sophie noticed this change in me, of course, but since she didn’t know the reason for it, she interpreted it as an excess of passion—the behavior of a nervous, overly ardent male, panting after the thing he wanted most (which was also true). Yes, she said, she would marry me. Did I ever really think she would turn me down?
“And I want to adopt Ben, too,” I said. “I want him to have my name. It’s important that he grow up thinking of me as his father.”
Sophie answered that she wouldn’t have it any other way. It was the only thing that made sense—for all three of us.
“And I want it to happen soon,” I went on, “as soon as possible. In New York, you couldn’t get a divorce for a year—and that’s too long, I couldn’t stand waiting that long. But there are other places. Alabama, Nevada, Mexico, God knows where. We could go off on a vacation, and by the time we got back, you’d be free to marry me.”
Sophie said that she liked the way that sounded—”free to marry me.” If it meant going somewhere for a while, she would go, she said, she would go anywhere I wanted.
“After all,” I said, “he’s been gone for more than a year now, almost a year and a half. It takes seven years before a dead person can be declared officially dead. Things happen, life moves on. Just think: we’ve known each other for almost a year.”
“To be precise,” Sophie answered, “you walked through that door for the first time on November twenty-fifth, nineteenseventy-six. In eight more days it will be exactly a year.”
“You remember.”
“Of course I remember. It was the most important day of my life.”
We took a plane to Birmingham, Alabama, on November twenty-seventh and were back in New York by the f
irst week of December. On the eleventh we were married in City Hall, and afterward we went to a drunken dinner with about twenty of our friends. We spent that night at the Plaza, ordered a room service breakfast in the morning, and later that day flew to Minnesota with Ben. On the eighteenth, Sophie’s parents gave us a wedding party at their house, and on the night of the twenty-fourth we celebrated Norwegian Christmas. Two days later, Sophie and I left the snow and went to Bermuda for a week and a half, then returned to Minnesota to fetch Ben. Our plan was to start looking for a new apartment as soon as we got back to New York. Somewhere over western Pennsylvania, about an hour into the flight, Ben peed through his diapers onto my lap. When I showed him the large dark spot on my pants, he laughed, clapped his hands together, and then, looking straight into my eyes, called me Da for the first time.
5
I dug into the present. Several months passed, and little by little it began to seem possible that I would survive. This was life in a foxhole, but Sophie and Ben were down there with me, and that was all I really wanted. As long as I remembered not to look up, the danger could not touch us.
We moved to an apartment on Riverside Drive in February. Settling in carried us through to mid-spring, and I had little chance to dwell on Fanshawe. If the letter did not vanish from my thoughts altogether, it no longer posed the same threat. I was secure with Sophie now, and I felt that nothing could break us apart—not even Fanshawe, not even Fanshawe in the flesh. Or so it appeared to me then, whenever I happened to think of it. I understand now how badly I was deceiving myself, but I did not find that out until much later. By definition, a thought is something you are aware of. The fact that I did not once stop thinking about Fanshawe, that he was inside me day and night for all those months, was unknown to me at the time. And if you are not aware of having a thought, is it legitimate to say that you are thinking? I was haunted, perhaps, I was even possessed—but there were no signs of it, no clues to tell me what was happening.
Daily life was full for me now. I hardly noticed that I was doing less work than I had in years. I had no job to go off to in the morning, and since Sophie and Ben were in the apartment with me, it was not very difficult to find excuses for avoiding my desk. My work schedule grew slack. Instead of beginning at nine sharp every day, I sometimes didn’t make it to my little room until eleven or eleven-thirty. On top of that, Sophie’s presence in the house was a constant temptation. Ben still took one or two naps a day, and in those quiet hours while he slept, it was hard for me not to think about her body. More often than not, we wound up making love. Sophie was just as hungry for it as I was, and as the weeks passed, the house was slowly eroticized, transformed into a domain of sexual possibilities. The nether world rose up to the surface. Each room acquired its own memory, each spot evoked a different moment, so that even in the calm of practical life, a particular patch of carpet, say, or the threshold of a particular door, was no longer strictly a thing but a sensation, an echo of our erotic life. We had entered the paradox of desire. Our need for each other was inexhaustible, and the more it was fulfilled, the more it seemed to grow.
Every now and then, Sophie talked of looking for a job, but neither one of us felt any urgency about it. Our money was holding up well, and we even managed to put away quite a bit. Fanshawe’s next book, Miracles, was in the works, and the advance from the contract had been heftier than the one from Neverland. According to the schedule that Stuart and I had charted out, the poems would come six months after Miracles, then Fanshawe’s earliest novel, Blackouts, and last of all the plays. Royalties from Neverland started coming in that March, and with checks suddenly arriving for one thing and another, all money problems evaporated. Like everything else that seemed to be happening, this was a new experience for me. For the past eight or nine years, my life had been a constant scrambling act, a frantic lunge from one paltry article to the next, and I had considered myself lucky whenever I could see ahead for more than a month or two. Care was embedded inside me; it was part of my blood, my corpuscles, and I hardly knew what it was to breathe without wondering if I could afford to pay the gas bill. Now, for the first time since I had gone out on my own, I realized that I didn’t have to think about these things anymore. One morning, as I sat at my desk struggling over the final sentence of an article, groping for a phrase that was not there, it gradually dawned on me that I had been given a second chance. I could give this up and start again. I no longer had to write articles. I could move on to other things, begin to do the work I had always wanted to do. This was my chance to save myself, and I decided I’d be a fool not to take it.
More weeks passed. I went into my room every morning, but nothing happened. Theoretically, I felt inspired, and whenever I was not working, my head was filled with ideas. But each time I sat down to put something on paper, my thoughts seemed to vanish. Words died the moment I lifted my pen. I started a number of projects, but nothing really took hold, and one by one I dropped them. I looked for excuses to explain why I couldn’t get going. That was no problem, and before long I had come up with a whole litany: the adjustment to married life, the responsibilities of fatherhood, my new workroom (which seemed too cramped), the old habit of writing for a deadline, Sophie’s body, the sudden windfall—everything. For several days, I even toyed with the idea of writing a detective novel, but then I got stuck with the plot and couldn’t fit all the pieces together. I let my mind drift without purpose, hoping to persuade myself that idleness was proof of gathering strength, a sign that something was about to happen. For more than a month, the only thing I did was copy out passages from books. One of them, from Spinoza, I tacked onto my wall: “And when he dreams he does not want to write, he does not have the power to dream he wants to write; and when he dreams he wants to write, he does not have the power to dream he does not want to write.”
It’s possible that I would have worked my way out of this slump. Whether it was a permanent condition or a passing phase is still unclear to me. My gut feeling is that for a time I was truly lost, floundering desperately inside myself, but I do not think this means my case was hopeless. Things were happening to me. I was living through great changes, and it was still too early to tell where they were going to lead. Then, unexpectedly, a solution presented itself. If that is too favorable a word, I will call it a compromise. Whatever it was, I put up very little resistance to it. It came at a vulnerable time for me, and my judgment was not all it should have been. This was my second crucial mistake, and it followed directly from the first.
I was having lunch with Stuart one day near his office on the Upper East Side. Midway through the meal, he brought up the Fanshawe rumors again, and for the first time it occurred to me that he was actually beginning to have doubts. The subject was so fascinating to him that he couldn’t stay away from it. His manner was arch, mockingly conspiratorial, but underneath the pose I began to suspect that he was trying to trap me into a confession. I played along with him for a while, and then, growing tired of the game, said that the one foolproof method for settling the question was to commission a biography. I made this remark in all innocence (as a logical point, not as a suggestion), but it seemed to strike Stuart as a splendid idea. He began to gush: of course, of course, the Fanshawe myth explained, perfectly obvious, of course, the true story at last. In a matter of minutes he had the whole thing figured out. I would write the book. It would appear after all of Fanshawe’s work had been published, and I could have as much time as I wanted—two years, three years, whatever. It would have to be an extraordinary book, Stuart added, a book equal to Fanshawe himself, but he had great confidence in me, and he knew I could do the job. The proposal caught me off guard, and I treated it as a joke. But Stuart was serious; he wouldn’t let me turn him down. Give it some thought, he said, and then tell me how you feel. I remained skeptical, but to be polite I told him I would think about it. We agreed that I would give him a final answer by the end of the month.
I discussed it with Sophie that night, but since I
couldn’t talk to her honestly, the conversation was not much help to me.
“It’s up to you,” she said. “If you want to do it, I think you should go ahead.”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“No. At least I don’t think so. It’s already occurred to me that sooner or later there would be a book about him. If it has to happen, then better it should be by you than by someone else.”
“I’d have to write about you and Fanshawe. It might be strange.”
“A few pages will be enough. As long as you’re the one who’s writing them, I’m not really worried.”
“Maybe,” I said, not knowing how to continue. “The toughest question, I suppose, is whether I want to get so involved in thinking about Fanshawe. Maybe it’s time to let him fade away.”
“It’s your decision. But the fact is, you could do this book better than anyone else. And it doesn’t have to be a straight biography, you know. You could do something more interesting.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, something more personal, more gripping. The story of your friendship. It could be as much about you as about him.”
