by Paul Auster
He looked through the yellow pages for the Auster Detective Agency. There was no listing. In the white pages, however, he found the name. There was one Paul Auster in Manhattan, living on Riverside Drive -not far from Quinn's own house. There was no mention of a detective agency, but that did not necessarily mean anything. It could be that Auster had so much work he didn't need to advertise. Quinn picked up the phone and was about to dial when he thought better of it. This was too important a conversation to leave to the phone. He did not want to run the risk of being brushed off. Since Auster did not have an office, that meant he worked at home. Quinn would go there and talk to him face to face.
The rain had stopped now, and although the sky was still gray, far to the west Quinn. could see a tiny shaft of light seeping through the clouds. As he walked up Riverside Drive, he became aware of the fact that he was no longer following Stillman. It felt as though he had lost half of himself. For two weeks he had been tied by an invisible thread to the old man. Whatever Stillman had done, he had done; wherever Stillman had gone, he had gone. His body was not accustomed to this new freedom, and for the first few blocks he walked at the old shuffling pace. The spell was over, and yet his body did not know it.
Auster’s building was in the middle of the long block that ran between 116th and 119th Streets, just south of Riverside Church and Grant's Tomb. It was a well-kept place, with polished doorknobs and clean glass, and it had an air of bourgeois sobriety that appealed to Quinn at that moment. Auster's apartment was on the eleventh floor, and Quinn ran the buzzer, expecting to hear a voice speak to him through the intercom. But the door buzzer answered him without any conversation. Quinn pushed the door open, walked.through the lobby, and rode the elevator to the eleventh floor.
It was a man who opened the apartment door. He was a tall dark fellow in his mid-thirties, with rumpled clothes and a two-day beard. In his right hand, fixed between his thumb and first two fingers, he held an uncapped fountain pen, still poised in a writing position. The man seemed surprised to find a stranger standing before him.
"Yes?" he asked tentatively.
Quinn spoke in the politest tone he could muster. "Were you expecting someone else?"
"My wife, as a matter of fact. That's why I rang the buzzer without asking who it was."
"I'm sorry to disturb you," Quinn apologized. "But I'm looking for Paul Auster."
"I'm Paul Auster," said the man.
"I wonder if I could talk to you. It's quite important."
"You'll have to tell me what it's about first."
"I hardly know myself" Quinn gave Auster an earnest look. 'It's complicated, I'm afraid. Very complicated."
"Do you have a name?"
"I'm sorry. Of course I do. Quinn."
"Quinn what?"
"Daniel Quinn."
The name seemed to suggest something to Auster, and he paused for a moment abstractedly, as if searching through his memory. "Quinn," he muttered to himself "I know that name from somewhere." He went silent again, straining harder to dredge up the answer. "You aren't a poet, are you?"
“I used to be," said Quinn. "But I haven't written poems for a long time now."
"You did a book several years ago, didn't you? I think the title was Unfinished Business. A little book with a blue cover."
"Yes. That was me."
“I liked it very much. I kept hoping to see more of your work. In fact, I even wondered what had happened to you."
“I'm still here. Sort of."
Auster opened the door wider and gestured for Quinn to enter the apartment. It was a pleasant enough place inside: oddly shaped, with several long corridors, books cluttered everywhere, pictures on the walls by artists Quinn did not know, and a few children's toys scattered on the floor-a red truck, a brown bear, a green space monster. Auster led him to the living room, gave him a frayed upholstered chair to sit in, and then went off to the kitchen to fetch some beer. He returned with two bottles, placed them on a wooden crate that served as the coffee table, and sat down on the sofa across from Quinn.
"Was it some kind of literary thing you wanted to talk about?" Auster began.
"No," said Quinn. "I wish it was. But this has nothing to do with literature."
“With what, then?"
Quinn paused, looked around the room without seeing anything, and tried to start. "I have a feeling there's been a terrible mistake. I came here looking for Paul Auster, the private detective."
"The what?" Auster laughed, and in that laugh everything was suddenly blown to bits. Quinn realized that he was talking nonsense. He might just as well have asked for Chief Sitting Bull-the effect would have been no different.
"The private detective," he repeated softly.
"I'm afraid you've got the wrong Paul Auster."
"You're the only one in the book."
"That might be," said Auster. "But I'm not a detective."
"Who are you then? What do you do?"
"I'm a writer."
"A writer?" Quinn spoke the word as though it were a lament.
"I'm sorry," Auster said. "But that's what I happen to be."
"If that's true, then there's no hope. The whole thing is a bad dream."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
Quinn told him. He began at the beginning and went through the entire story, step by step. The pressure had been building up in him since Stillman's disappearance that morning, and it came out of him now as a torrent of words. He told of the phone calls for Paul Auster, of his inexplicable acceptance of the case, of his meeting with Peter Stillman, of his conversation with Virginia Stillman, of his reading Stillman's book, of his following Stillman from Grand Central Station, of Stillman's daily wanderings, of the carpetbag and the broken objects, of the disquieting maps that formed letters of the alphabet, of his talks with Stillman, of Stillman's disappearance from the hotel. When he had come to the end, he said, "Do you think I'm crazy?"
"No," said Auster, who had listened attentively to Quinn's monologue. "If I had been in your place, I probably would have done the same thing."
These words came as a great relief to Quinn, as if, at long last, the burden was no longer his alone. He felt like taking Auster in his arms and declaring his friendship for life.
"You see," said Quinn, "I'm not making it up. I even have proof."' He took out his wallet and removed the five-hundred-dollar check that Virginia Stillman had written two weeks earlier. He handed it to Auster. "You see," he said. "It's even made out to you. "
Auster looked the check over carefully and nodded. "It seems to be a perfectly normal check."
"Well, it's yours," said Quinn. "I want you to have it."
"I couldn't possibly accept it."
"It's of no use to me." Quinn looked around the apartment and gestured vaguely. "Buy yourself some more books. Or a few toys for your kid."
"This is money you've earned. You deserve to have it yourself." Auster paused for a moment. "There's one thing I'll do for you, though. Since the check is in my name, I'll cash it for you. I'll take it to my bank tomorrow morning, deposit it in my account, and give you the money when it clears."
Quinn did not say anything.
"All right?" Auster asked. "Is it agreed?"
"All right," said Quinn at last. "We'll see what happens."
Auster put the check on the coffee table, as if to say the matter had been settled. Then he leaned back on the sofa and looked Quinn in the eyes. "There's a much more important question than the check," he said. "The fact that my name has been mixed up in this. I don't understand it at all."
"I wonder if you've had any trouble with your phone lately. Wires sometimes get crossed. A person tries to call a number, and even though he dials correctly, he gets someone else."
“Yes, that's happened to me before. But even if my phone was broken, that doesn't explain the real problem. It would tell us why the call went to you, but not why they wanted to speak to me in the first place."
"Is
it possible that you know the people involved?"
"I've never heard of the Stillmans."
"Maybe someone wanted to play a practical joke on you."
"I don't hang around with people like that."
"You never know."
"But the fact is, it's not a joke. It's a real case with real people. "
"Yes," said Quinn after a long silence. "I'm aware of that."
They had come to the end of what they could talk about. Beyond that point there was nothing: the random thoughts of men who knew nothing. Quinn realized that he should be going. He had been there almost an hour, and the time was approaching for his call to Virginia Stillman. Nevertheless, he was reluctant to move. The chair was comfortable, and the beer had gone slightly to his head. This Auster was the first intelligent person he had spoken to in a long time. He had read Quinn's old work, he had admired it, he had been looking forward to more. In spite of everything, it was impossible for Quinn not to feel glad of this.
They sat there for a short time without saying anything. At last, Auster gave a little shrug, which seemed to acknowledge that they had come to an impasse. He stood up and said, "I was about to make some lunch for myself. It's no trouble making it for two."
Quinn hesitated. It was as though Auster had read his thoughts, divining the thing he wanted most-to eat, to have an excuse to stay a while. "I really should be going," he said. "But yes, thank you. A little food can't do any harm."
"How does a ham omelette sound?"
"Sounds good."
Auster retreated to the kitchen to prepare the food. Quinn would have liked to offer to help, but he could not budge. His body felt like a stone. For want of any other idea, he closed his eyes. In the past, it had sometimes comforted him to make the world disappear. This time, however, Quinn found nothing interesting inside his head. It seemed as though things had ground to a halt in there. Then, from the darkness, he began to hear a voice, a chanting, idiotic voice that sang the same sentence over and over again: "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs." He opened his eyes to make the words stop.
There was bread and butter, more beer, knives and forks, salt and pepper, napkins, and omelettes, two of them, oozing on white plates. Quinn ate with crude intensity, polishing off the meal in what seemed a matter of seconds. After that, he made a great effort to be calm. Tears lurked mysteriously behind his eyes, and his voice seemed to tremble as he spoke, but somehow he managed to hold his own. To prove that he was not a self-obsessed ingrate, he began to question Auster about his writing. Auster was somewhat reticent about it, but at last he conceded that he was working on a book of essays. The current piece was about Don Quixote.
"One of my favorite books," said Quinn.
"Yes, mine too. There's nothing like it."
Quinn asked him about the essay.
"I suppose you could call it speculative, since I'm not really out to prove anything. In fact, it's all done tongue-in-cheek. An imaginative reading, I guess you could say."
"What's the gist?"
"It mostly has to do with the authorship of the book. Who wrote it, and how it was written."
"Is there any question?"
"Of course not. But I mean the book inside the book Cervantes wrote, the one he imagined he was writing."'
“Ah.”
"It's quite simple. Cervantes, if you remember, goes to great lengths to convince the reader that he is not the author. The book, he says, was written in Arabic by Cid Hamete Benengeli. Cervantes describes how he discovered the manuscript by chance one day in the market at Toledo. He hires someone to translate it for him into Spanish, and thereafter he presents himself as no more than the editor of the translation. In fact, he cannot even vouch for the accuracy of the translation itself."
"And yet he goes on to say," Quinn added, "that Cid Hamete Benengeli's is the only true version of Don Quixote's story. All the other versions are frauds, written by imposters. He makes a great point of insisting that everything in the book really happened in the world."
"Exactly. Because the book after all is an attack on the dangers of the make-believe. He couldn't very well offer a work of the imagination to do that, could he? He had to claim that it was real."
"Still, I've always suspected that Cervantes devoured those,old romances. You can't hate something so violently unless a part of you also loves it. In some sense, Don Quixote was just a stand-in for himself."
"I agree with you. What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?"
"Precisely. "
"ln any case, since the book is supposed to be real, it follows that the story has to be written by an eyewitness to the events that take place in it. But Cid Hamete, the acknowledged author, never makes an appearance. Not once does he claim to be present at what happens. So, my question is this: who is Cid Hamete Benengeli?"
"Yes, I see what you're getting at."
"The theory I present in the essay is that he is actually a combination of four different people. Sancho Panza is of course the witness. There's no other candidate-since he is the only one who accompanies Don Quixote on all his adventures. But Sancho can neither read nor write. Therefore, he cannot be the author. On the other hand, we know that Sancho has a great gift for language. In spite of his inane malapropisms, he can talk circles around everyone else in the book. It seems perfectly possible to me that he dictated the story to someone else-namely, to the barber and the priest, Don Quixote's good friends. They put the story into proper literary form-in Spanish-and then turned the manuscript over to Samson Carrasco, the bachelor from Salamanca, who proceeded to translate 'it into Arabic. Cervantes found the translation, had it rendered back into Spanish, and then published the book The Adventures of Don Quixote."
"But why would Sancho and the others go to all that trouble?"
"To cure Don Quixote of his madness. They want to save their friend. Remember, in the beginning they bum his books of chivalry, but that has no effect. The Knight of the Sad Countenance does not give up his obsession. Then, at one time or another, they all go out looking for him in various disguises-as a woman in distress, as the Knight of the Mirrors, as the Knight of the White Moon-in order to lure Don Quixote back home. In the end, they are actually successful. The book was just one of their ploys. The idea was to hold a mirror up to Don Quixote's madness, to record each of his absurd and ludicrous delusions, so that when he finally read the book himself, he would see the error of his ways.
"I like that."
"Yes. But there's one last twist. Don Quixote, in my view, was not really mad. He only pretended to be. In fact, he orchestrated the whole thing himself Remember: throughout the book Don Quixote is preoccupied by the question of posterity. Again and again he wonders how accurately his chronicler will record his adventures. This implies knowledge on his part; he knows beforehand that this chronicler exists. And who else is it but Sancho Panza, the faithful squire whom Don Quixote has chosen for exactly this purpose? In the same way, he chose the three others to play the roles he destined for them. It was Don Quixote who engineered the Benengeli quartet. And not only did he select the authors, it was probably he who translated the Arabic manuscript back into Spanish. We shouldn't put it past him. For a man so skilled in the art of disguise, darkening his skin and donning the clothes of a Moor could not have been very difficult. I like to imagine that scene in the marketplace at Toledo. Cervantes hiring Don Quixote to decipher the story of Don Quixote himself. There's great beauty to it."
"But you still haven't explained why a man like Don Quixote would disrupt his tranquil life to engage in such an elaborate hoax.
"That's the most interesting part of all. In my opinion, Don Quixote was conducting an experiment. He wanted to test the gullibility of his fellow men. Would it be possible, he wondered, to stand up before the world and with the utmost conviction spew out lies and nonsense? To say that windmills were knights, that a barber's basin was a helmet, that puppets were real people? Would it be po
ssible to persuade others to agree with what he said, even though they did not believe him? In other words, to what extent would people tolerate blasphemies if they gave them amusement? The answer is obvious, isn't it? To any extent. For the proof is that we still read the book. It remains highly amusing to us. And that's finally all anyone wants out of a book-to be amused."
Auster leaned back on the sofa, smiled with a certain ironic pleasure, and lit a cigarette. The man was obviously enjoying himself, but the precise nature of that pleasure eluded Quinn. It seemed to be a kind of soundless laughter, a joke that stopped short of its punchline, a generalized mirth that had no object. Quinn was about to say something in response to Auster's theory, but he was not given the chance. Just as he opened his mouth to speak, he was interrupted by a clattering of keys at the front door, the sound of the door opening and then slamming shut, and a burst of voices. Auster's face perked up at the sound. He rose from his seat, excused himself to Quinn, and walked quickly towards the door.
Quinn heard laughter in the' hallway, first from a woman and then from a child-the high and the higher, a staccato of ringing shrapnel-and then the basso rumbling of Auster's guffaw. The child spoke: "Daddy, look what I found!" And then the woman explained that it had been lying on the street, and why not, it seemed perfectly okay. A moment later he heard the child running towards him down the hall. The child shot into the living room, caught sight of Quinn, and stopped dead in his tracks. He was a blond-haired boy of five or six.
"Good afternoon," said Quinn.
The boy, rapidly withdrawing into shyness, managed no more than a faint hello. In his left hand he held a red object that Quinn could not identify. Quinn asked the boy what it was.
"It's a yoyo," he answered, opening his hand to show him. "I found it on the street.
"Does it work?"
The boy gave an exaggerated pantomime shrug. "Dunno. Siri can't do it. And I don't know how."
Quinn asked him if he could try, and the boy walked over and put it in his hand. As he examined the yoyo, he could hear the child breathing beside him, watching his every move. The yoyo was plastic, similar to the ones he had played with years ago, but more elaborate somehow, an artifact of the space age. Quinn fastened the loop at the end of the string around his middle finger, stood up, and gave it a try. The yoyo gave off a fluted, whistling sound as it descended, and sparks shot off inside it. The boy gasped, but then the yoyo stopped, dangling at the end of its line.
