by Paul Auster
“I hope so,” Pozzi said, obviously not impressed, but still trying to remain polite. “It would be a shame to spend all that money on lessons and not get anything out of it. I’ll bet you old Sid charged a pretty penny for his services.”
“He didn’t come cheap,” Flower said. “But I think he was worth it. At one point, I asked him if he had ever heard of you, but he confessed that he didn’t know your name.”
“Well, Sid’s a little out of touch these days,” Pozzi said. “Besides, I’m still at the beginning of my career. The word hasn’t spread yet.”
“I suppose you could say that Willie and I are at the beginning of our careers, too,” Flower said, standing up from his seat and lighting a new cigar. “If nothing else, the game should be exciting tonight. I’m looking forward to it immensely.”
“Me too, Bill,” Pozzi said. “It’s going to be a gas.”
They began the tour of the house on the ground floor, walking through one room after another as Flower talked to them about the furniture, the architectural improvements, and the paintings that hung on the walls. By the second room, Nashe noticed that the big man rarely neglected to mention what each thing had cost, and as the catalogue of expenses continued to grow, he found that he was developing a distinct antipathy to this boorish creature who seemed so full of himself, who exulted so shamelessly in his fussy accountant’s mind. As before, Stone said almost nothing, piping in an occasional non sequitur or redundant remark, a perfect yes-man in the thrall of his larger and more aggressive friend. The whole scene was beginning to get Nashe down, and eventually he could think of little else but how absurd it was for him to be there, enumerating the odd conjunctions of chance that had put him in this particular house at this particular moment, as if for no other purpose than to listen to the bombastic prattle of a fat, overstuffed stranger. If not for Pozzi, he might have slipped into a serious funk. But there was the kid, tripping happily from room to room, seething with sarcastic politeness as he pretended to be following what Flower said. Nashe could not help admiring him for his spirit, for his ability to make the most of the situation. When Pozzi flashed him a quick wink of amusement in the third or fourth room, he felt almost grateful to him, as if he were a morose king drawing courage from the pranks of his court jester.
Things picked up considerably once they climbed to the second floor. Rather than show them the bedrooms that stood behind the six closed doors in the main hallway, Flower took them to the end of the corridor and opened a seventh door that led to what he referred to as the “east wing.” This door was almost invisible, and until Flower put his hand on the knob and started to open it, Nashe had not noticed it was there. Covered with the same wallpaper that ran the length of the corridor (an ugly, old-fashioned fleur-de-lys pattern in muted pinks and blues), the door was so skillfully camouflaged that it seemed to melt into the wall. The east wing, Flower explained, was where he and Willie spent most of their time. It was a new section of the house that they had built shortly after moving in (and here he gave the precise amount it had cost, a figure which Nashe promptly tried to forget), and the contrast between the dark, somewhat musty old house and this new wing was impressive, even startling. The moment they stepped across the sill, they found themselves standing under a large, many-faceted glass roof. Light poured down from above, inundating them with the brightness of the late afternoon. It took Nashe’s eyes a moment to adjust, but then he saw that this was only a passageway. Directly in front of them there was another wall, a freshly painted white wall with two closed doors in it.
“One half belongs to Willie,” Flower said, “and the other half is mine.”
“It looks like a greenhouse up here,” Pozzi said. “Is that what you fellows do, grow plants or something?”
“Not quite,” Flower said. “But we cultivate other things. Our interests, our passions, the garden of our minds. I don’t care how much money you have. If there’s no passion in your life, it’s not worth living.”
“Well put,” Pozzi said, nodding his head with feigned seriousness. “I couldn’t have phrased it better myself, Bill.”
“It doesn’t matter which part we visit first,” Flower said, “but I know that Willie is especially eager to show you his city. Maybe we should start by going through the door on the left.”
Without waiting to hear Stone’s opinion on the matter, Flower opened the door and gestured for Nashe and Pozzi to go in. The room was much larger than Nashe had imagined it would be, a place almost barnlike in its dimensions. With its high transparent ceiling and pale wooden floor, it seemed to be all openness and light, as if it were a room suspended in the middle of the air. Running along the wall immediately to their left was a series of benches and tables, the surfaces of which were cluttered with tools, scraps of wood, and an odd assortment of metal bric-a-brac. The only other object in the room was an enormous platform that stood in the center of the floor, covered with what seemed to be a miniature scale-model rendering of a city. It was a marvelous thing to behold, with its crazy spires and lifelike buildings, its narrow streets and microscopic human figures, and as the four of them approached the platform, Nashe began to smile, astounded by the sheer invention and elaborateness of it all.
“It’s called the City of the World,” Stone said modestly, almost struggling to get the words out of his mouth. “It’s only about half-finished, but I guess you can get some idea of what it’s supposed to look like.”
There was a slight pause as Stone searched for something more to say, and in that brief interval Flower jumped in and started talking again, acting like one of those proud, overbearing fathers who always pushes his son into playing the piano for the guests. “Willie has been at it for five years now,” he said, “and you have to admit that it’s amazing, a stupendous achievement. Just look at the city hall over there. It took him four months to do that building alone.”
“I like working on it,” Stone said, smiling tentatively. “It’s the way I’d like the world to look. Everything in it happens at once.”
“Willie’s city is more than just a toy,” Flower said, “it’s an artistic vision of mankind. In one way, it’s an autobiography, but in another way, it’s what you might call a utopia—a place where the past and future come together, where good finally triumphs over evil. If you look carefully, you’ll see that many of the figures actually represent Willie himself. There, in the playground, you see him as a child. Over there, you see him grinding lenses in his shop as a grown man. There, on the corner of that street, you see the two of us buying the lottery ticket. His wife and parents are buried in the cemetery over here, but there they are again, hovering as angels over that house. If you bend down, you’ll see Willie’s daughter holding his hand on the front steps. That’s what you might call the private backdrop, the personal material, the inner component. But all these things are put in a larger context. They’re merely an example, an illustration of one man’s journey through the City of the World. Look at the Hall of Justice, the Library, the Bank, and the Prison. Willie calls them the Four Realms of Togetherness, and each one plays a vital role in maintaining the harmony of the city. If you look at the Prison, you’ll see that all the prisoners are working happily at various tasks, that they all have smiles on their faces. That’s because they’re glad they’ve been punished for their crimes, and now they’re learning how to recover the goodness within them through hard work. That’s what I find so inspiring about Willie’s city. It’s an imaginary place, but it’s also realistic. Evil still exists, but the powers who rule over the city have figured out how to transform that evil back into good. Wisdom reigns here, but the struggle is nevertheless constant, and great vigilance is required of all the citizens—each of whom carries the entire city within himself. William Stone is a great artist, gentlemen, and I consider it a tremendous honor to count myself among his friends.”
As Stone blushed and looked down at the floor, Nashe pointed to a blank area of the platform and asked what his plans for that section were. Stone l
ooked up, stared at the empty space for a moment, and then smiled in contemplation of the work that lay ahead of him.
“The house we’re standing in now,” he said. “The house, and then the grounds, the fields, and the woods. Over to the right”—and here he pointed in the direction of the far corner—“I’m thinking about doing a separate model of this room. I’d have to be in it, of course, which means that I would also have to build another City of the World. A smaller one, a second city to fit inside the room within the room.”
“You mean a model of the model?” Nashe said.
“Yes, a model of the model. But I have to finish everything else first. It would be the last element, a thing to add at the very end.”
“Nobody could make anything so small,” Pozzi said, looking at Stone as though he were insane. “You’d go blind trying to do a thing like that.”
“I have my lenses,” Stone said. “All the small work is done under magnifying glasses.”
“But if you did a model of the model,” Nashe said, “then theoretically you’d have to do an even smaller model of that model. A model of the model of the model. It could go on forever.”
“Yes, I suppose it could,” Stone said, smiling at Nashe’s remark. “But I think it would be very difficult to get past the second stage, don’t you? I’m not just talking about the construction, I’m also talking about time. It’s taken me five years to get this far. It will probably take another five years to finish the first model. If the model of the model is as difficult as I think it’s going to be, that would take another ten years, maybe even another twenty years. I’m fifty-six now. If you add it up, I’m going to be pretty old when I finish anyway. And nobody lives forever. At least that’s what I think. Bill might have other ideas about that, but I wouldn’t bet much money on them. Sooner or later, I’m going to leave this world like everyone else.”
“You mean,” Pozzi said, his voice rising with incredulity, “you mean you’re planning to work on this thing for the rest of your life?”
“Oh yes,” Stone said, almost shocked that anyone could have thought otherwise. “Of course I am.”
There was a brief silence as this remark sank in, and then Flower put his arm around Stone’s shoulder and said: “I don’t pretend to have any of Willie’s artistic talent. But perhaps that’s all for the best. Two artists in the household might be taking it a bit far. Someone has to attend to the practical side of things, eh Willie? It takes all kinds of people to make a world.”
Flower’s rambling chatter continued as they left Stone’s workshop, returned to the passageway, and approached the other door. “As you will see, gentlemen,” he was saying, “my interests lie in another direction altogether. By nature, I suppose you could call me an antiquarian. I like to track down historical objects that have some value or significance, to surround myself with tangible remnants of the past. Willie makes things; I like to collect them.”
Flower’s half of the east wing was entirely different from Stone’s. Instead of one large open area, his was divided into a network of smaller rooms, and if not for the glass dome perched overhead, the atmosphere might have been oppressive. Each of the five rooms was choked with furniture, overspilling bookcases, rugs, potted plants, and a multitude of knickknacks, as though the idea was to reproduce the thick, tangled feeling of a Victorian parlor. As Flower explained, however, there was a certain method to the apparent disorder. Two of the rooms were devoted to his library (first editions of English and American authors in one; his collection of history books in the other), a third room was given over to his cigars (a climate-controlled chamber with a dropped ceiling that housed his stock of hand-rolled masterpieces: cigars from Cuba and Jamaica, from the Canary Islands and the Philippines, from Sumatra and the Dominican Republic), and a fourth room served as the office in which he conducted his financial affairs (an old-fashioned room like the others, but with several pieces of modern equipment in it as well: telephone, typewriter, computer, fax machine, stock ticker, file cabinets, and so on). The last room was twice the size of any of the others, and as it was also significantly less cluttered, Nashe found it almost pleasant by contrast. This was the place where Flower kept his historical memorabilia. Long rows of glassed-in display cabinets occupied the center of the room, and the walls were fitted with mahogany shelves and cupboards with protective glass doors. Nashe felt as if he had walked into a museum. When he looked over at Pozzi, the kid gave him a goofy grin and rolled his eyes, making it perfectly clear that he was already bored to death.
Nashe did not think the collection dull so much as curious. Neatly mounted and labeled, each object sat under the glass as though proclaiming its own importance, but in fact there was little to get excited about. The room was a monument to trivia, packed with articles of such marginal value that Nashe wondered if it were not some kind of joke. But Flower seemed too proud of himself to understand how ridiculous it was. He kept referring to the pieces as “gems” and “treasures,” oblivious to the possibility that there might be people in the world who did not share his enthusiasm, and as the tour continued over the next half hour, Nashe had to fight back an impulse to feel sorry for him.
In the long run, however, the impression that lingered of that room was quite different from what Nashe had imagined it would be. In the weeks and months that followed, he often found himself thinking back to what he had seen there, and it stunned him to realize how many of the objects he could remember. They began to take on a luminous, almost transcendent quality for him, and whenever he stumbled across one of them in his mind, he would unearth an image so distinct that it seemed to glow like an apparition from another world. The telephone that had once sat on Woodrow Wilson’s desk. A pearl earring worn by Sir Walter Raleigh. A pencil that had fallen from Enrico Fermi’s pocket in 1942. General McClellan’s field glasses. A half-smoked cigar filched from an ashtray in Winston Churchill’s office. A sweatshirt worn by Babe Ruth in 1927. William Seward’s Bible. The cane used by Nathaniel Hawthorne after he broke his leg as a boy. A pair of spectacles worn by Voltaire. It was all so random, so misconstrued, so utterly beside the point. Flower’s museum was a graveyard of shadows, a demented shrine to the spirit of nothingness. If those objects continued to call out to him, Nashe decided, it was because they were impenetrable, because they refused to divulge anything about themselves. It had nothing to do with history, nothing to do with the men who had once owned them. The fascination was simply for the objects as material things, and the way they had been wrenched out of any possible context, condemned by Flower to go on existing for no reason at all: defunct, devoid of purpose, alone in themselves now for the rest of time. It was the isolation that haunted Nashe, the image of irreducible separateness that burned down into his memory, and no matter how hard he struggled, he never managed to break free of it.
“I’ve begun to branch out into new areas,” Flower said. “The things you see here are what you might call snippets, dwarf mementoes, motes of dust that have slipped through the cracks. I’ve started a new project now, and in the end it will make all this look like child’s play.” The fat man paused for a moment, put a match to his dead cigar, and then puffed until his face was surrounded by smoke. “Last year Willie and I went on a trip to England and Ireland,” he said. “We haven’t done much traveling, I’m afraid to say, and this glimpse of life abroad gave us enormous pleasure. The best thing about it was discovering how many old things there are in that part of the world. We Americans are always tearing down what we build, destroying the past in order to start over again, rushing headlong into the future. But our cousins on the other side of the pond are more attached to their history, it comforts them to know that they belong to a tradition, to age-old habits and customs. I won’t bore you by going into my love of the past. You have only to look around you to know how much it means to me. While I was over there with Willie, visiting the ancient sites and monuments, it occurred to me that I had the opportunity to do something grand. We were in the west of I
reland then, and one day as we were motoring around the countryside, we came upon a fifteenth-century castle. It was no more than a heap of stones, really, sitting forlornly in a little valley or glen, and it was so sad and neglected that my heart went out to it. To make a long story short, I decided to buy it and have it shipped back to America. That took some time, of course. The owner was an old codger by the name of Muldoon, Patrick Lord Muldoon, and he was naturally quite reluctant to sell. Some persuasion was required on my part, but money talks, as they say, and in the end I got what I wanted. The stones of the castle were loaded onto trucks—lorries, as they call them over there—and transported to a ship in Cork. Then they were sent across the ocean, once again loaded onto lorries—trucks, as we call them over here, ha!—and brought to our little spot in the Pennsylvania woods. Amazing, isn’t it? The whole thing cost a bundle, I can assure you, but what do you expect? There were over ten thousand stones, and you can imagine what that kind of cargo must have weighed. But why worry when money is no object? The castle arrived less than a month ago, and even as we speak, it’s sitting on this property—over there in a meadow at the northern edge of our land. Just think, gentlemen. A fifteenth-century Irish castle destroyed by Oliver Cromwell. An historical ruin of major significance, and Willie and I own it.”
“You’re not planning to rebuild the thing, are you?” Nashe asked. For some reason, the idea struck him as grotesque. Instead of the castle, he kept seeing the bent old figure of Lord Muldoon, wearily submitting to the blunderbuss of Flower’s fortune.
“We thought about it, Willie and I,” Flower said, “but we finally dismissed it as impractical. Too many pieces are missing.”
“A hodgepodge,” Stone said. “In order to rebuild it, we’d have to mix in new materials with the old. And that would defeat the purpose.”
“So you have ten thousand stones sitting in a meadow,” Nashe said, “and you don’t know what to do with them.”
