The Music of Chance

by Paul Auster

  “It’s like this, Jack,” he said, barely giving the kid a chance to look at the paper. “They’ve pulled a fast one on us, and now we’re sunk. We thought we were even, but the way they’ve worked it out, we’re still three thousand dollars in the hole. Food, magazines, even the goddamned broken window—they’ve charged us for all of it. Not to speak of Miss Hot Pants and her chauffeur, which probably goes without saying. We just took it for granted that those things were covered by the contract, but the contract doesn’t say anything about them. Fine. So we made a mistake. The point is: What do we do now? As far as I’m concerned, you’re not in it anymore. You’ve done enough, and from now on this thing is my problem. So I’m going to get you out of here. We’ll dig a hole under the fence, and once it gets dark, you’ll crawl through that hole and be on your way.”

  “And what about you?” Pozzi said.

  “I’m going to stay and finish the job.”

  “Not a chance. You’re crawling through that hole with me.”

  “Not this time, Jack. I can’t.”

  “And why the hell not? You afraid of holes or something? You’ve already been living in one for the past two months—or haven’t you noticed?”

  “I promised myself I’d see it through to the end. I’m not asking you to understand it, but I’m just not going to run away. I’ve done too much of that already, and I don’t want to live like that anymore. If I sneak out of here before the debt is paid off, I won’t be worth a goddamned thing to myself.”

  “Custer’s last stand.”

  “That’s it. The old put-up-or-shut-up routine.”

  “It’s the wrong battle, Jim. You’ll just be wasting your time, fucking yourself over for nothing. If the three grand is so important to you, why don’t you send them a check? They don’t care how they get their money, and they’ll have it a whole lot sooner if you leave with me tonight. Shit, I’ll even go half-and-half with you. I know a guy in Philly who can get us into a game tomorrow night. All we have to do is hitch a ride, and we’ll have the dough in less than forty-eight hours. Simple. We’ll send it to them special delivery, and that will be that.”

  “Flower and Stone aren’t here. They left for Paris this morning.”

  “Jesus, you’re a stubborn son of a bitch, aren’t you? Who the fuck cares where they are?”

  “Sorry, kid. No dice. You can talk yourself blue in the face, but I’m not going.”

  “It will take you twice as long working by yourself, asshole. Did you ever think of that? Ten dollars an hour, not twenty. You’ll be lugging around those stones until Christmas.”

  “I know that. Just don’t forget to send me a card, Jack, that’s all I ask. I usually get kind of sentimental around that time of year.”

  They kept it up for another forty-five minutes, arguing back and forth until Pozzi finally slammed down his fist on the kitchen table and left the room. He was so angry at Nashe that he wouldn’t talk to him for the next three hours, hiding behind the closed door of his bedroom and refusing to come out. At four o’clock, Nashe went to the door and announced that he was going outside to start digging the hole. Pozzi didn’t respond, but not long after Nashe put on his jacket and left the trailer, he heard the door slam again, and a moment later the kid was trotting across the meadow to catch up with him. Nashe waited, and then they walked to the tool shed together in silence, neither one of them daring to reopen the argument.

  “I’ve been thinking it over,” Pozzi said, as they stood before the locked door of the shed. “What’s the point of going through all this escape business? Wouldn’t it be simpler if we just went to Calvin and told him I’m leaving? As long as you’re still here to honor the contract, what difference could it make?”

  “I’ll tell you why,” Nashe said, picking up a small stone from the ground and smashing it against the door to break the lock. “Because I don’t trust him. Calvin isn’t as stupid as he looks, and he knows your name is on that contract. With Flower and Stone gone, he’ll say he doesn’t have the authority to make any changes, that we can’t do anything until they get back. That’s his line, isn’t it? I just work here, boys, and I do what the bosses tell me. But he knows what’s going on, he’s been part of it from the beginning. Otherwise, Flower and Stone wouldn’t have taken off and left him in charge. He pretends to be on our side, but he belongs to them, he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about us. As soon as we told him you wanted to leave, he’d figure out you were going to escape. That’s the next step, isn’t it? And I don’t want to give him any advance warning. Who knows what kind of trick he’d pull on us then?”

  So they broke open the door of the shed, took out two shovels, and carried them down the dirt path that led through the woods. It was a longer walk to the fence than they had remembered, and by the time they started digging, the light had already begun to fade. The ground was hard and the bottom of the fence ran deep, and they both grunted each time they struck their shovels into the dirt. They could see the road right before them, but only one car passed in the half hour they spent there, a battered station wagon with a man, a woman, and a small boy inside it. The boy waved to them with a startled expression on his face as the car drove by, but neither Nashe nor Pozzi waved back. They dug on in silence, and when they had finally carved out a hole large enough for Pozzi’s body to fit through, their arms were aching with exhaustion. They flung down their shovels at that point and headed back to the trailer, crossing into the meadow as the sky grew purple around them, glowing thinly in the mid-October dusk.

  They ate their last meal together as if they were strangers. They didn’t know what to say to each other anymore, and their attempts at conversation were awkward, at times even embarrassing. Pozzi’s departure was too near to allow them to think of anything else, and yet neither one of them was willing to talk about it, so for long stretches they sat there locked in silence, each one imagining what would become of him without the other. There was no point in reminiscing about the past, in looking back over the good times they had spent together, for there hadn’t been any good times, and the future was too uncertain to be anything but a shadow, a formless, unarticulated presence that neither one of them wished to examine very closely. It was only after they stood up from the table and began clearing their plates that the tension spilled over into words again. Night had come, and suddenly they had reached the moment of last-minute preparations and farewells. They exchanged addresses and telephone numbers, promising to stay in touch with each other, but Nashe knew that it would never happen, that this was the last time he would ever see Pozzi. They packed a small bag of provisions—food, cigarettes, road maps of Pennsylvania and New Jersey—and then Nashe handed Pozzi a twenty-dollar bill, which he had found at the bottom of his suitcase earlier that afternoon.

  “It’s not much,” he said, “but I suppose it’s better than nothing.”

  The air was cold that night, and they bundled up in sweatshirts and jackets before leaving the trailer. They walked across the meadow carrying flashlights, moving along the length of the unfinished wall as a way to guide them in the darkness. When they came to the end and saw the immense piles of stones standing at the edge of the woods, they played their beams along the surfaces for a moment as they passed by. It produced a ghostly effect of weird shapes and darting shadows, and Nashe could not help thinking that the stones were alive, that the night had turned them into a colony of sleeping animals. He wanted to make a joke about it, but he couldn’t come up with anything fast enough, and a moment later they were walking down the dirt path in the woods. When they reached the fence, he saw the two shovels they had left on the ground and realized that it wouldn’t look right if Murks found both of them. One shovel would mean that Pozzi had planned his escape alone, but two shovels would mean that Nashe had been a part of it as well. As soon as Pozzi was gone, he would have to pick one up and carry it back to the shed.

  Pozzi struck a match, and as he lifted the flame to his cigarette, Nashe noticed that his hand was tremb
ling. “Well, Mr. Fireman,” he said, “it looks like we’ve come to a parting of the ways.”

  “You’ll be fine, Jack,” Nashe said. “Just remember to brush your teeth after every meal, and nothing bad can happen to you.”

  They grasped each other by the elbows, squeezing hard for a moment or two, and then Pozzi asked Nashe to hold the cigarette while he crawled through the hole. A moment later he was standing on the other side of the fence, and Nashe handed the cigarette back to him.

  “Come with me,” Pozzi said. “Don’t be a jerk, Jim. Come with me now.”

  He said it with such earnestness that Nashe almost gave in, but then he waited too long before giving an answer, and in that interval the temptation passed. “I’ll catch up with you in a couple of months,” he said. “You’d better get moving.”

  Pozzi backed off from the fence, dragged once on the cigarette, and then flicked it away from him, causing a small shower of sparks to flare up briefly on the road. “I’ll call your sister tomorrow and tell her you’re okay,” he said.

  “Just beat it,” Nashe said, rattling the fence with an abrupt, impatient gesture. “Go as fast as you can.”

  “I’m already out of here,” Pozzi said. “By the time you count to a hundred, you won’t even remember who I am.”

  Then, without saying good-bye, he turned on his heels and started running down the road.

  Lying in bed that night, Nashe rehearsed the story he was planning to tell Murks in the morning, going over it several times until it began to sound like the truth: how he and Pozzi had gone to sleep at around ten o’clock, how he hadn’t heard a sound for the next eight hours (“I always sleep like a log”), and how he had come out of his room at six to prepare breakfast, had knocked on the kid’s door to wake him up, and had discovered that he was gone. No, Jack hadn’t talked about running away, and he hadn’t left a note or any clue as to where he might be. Who knows what happened to him? Maybe he got up early and decided to take a walk. Sure, I’ll help you look for him. He’s probably wandering around in the woods somewhere, trying to catch a glimpse of the migrating geese.

  But Nashe never had a chance to tell any of those lies. When his alarm rang at six o’clock the next morning, he went into the kitchen to boil a pot of water for coffee, and then, curious to know what the temperature was, he opened the door of the trailer and stuck his head outside to test the air. That was when he saw Pozzi—although it took several moments before he realized who it was. At first he saw no more than an indistinguishable heap, a bundle of blood-spattered clothing sprawled out on the ground, and even after he saw that a man was in those clothes, he did not see Pozzi so much as he saw a hallucination, a thing that could not have been there. He noticed that the clothes were remarkably similar to the ones that Pozzi had been wearing the night before, that the man was dressed in the same windbreaker and hooded sweatshirt, the same blue jeans and mustard-colored boots, but even then Nashe could not put those facts together and say to himself: I am looking at Pozzi. For the man’s limbs were oddly tangled and inert, and from the way his head was cocked to one side (twisted at an almost impossible angle, as if the head were about to separate itself from the body), Nashe felt certain that he was dead.

  He started down the steps a moment later, and at that point he finally understood what he was seeing. As he walked across the grass toward the kid’s body, Nashe felt a series of small gagging sounds escape from his throat. He fell to his knees, took Pozzi’s battered face in his hands, and discovered that a pulse was still fluttering weakly in the veins of the kid’s neck. “My God,” he said, only half-aware that he was talking out loud. “What have they done to you, Jack?” Both the kid’s eyes were swollen shut, ugly gashes had been opened on his forehead, temples, and mouth, and several teeth were gone: it was a pulverized face, a face beaten beyond recognition. Nashe heard the gagging sounds escape from his throat again, and then, almost whimpering, he gathered Pozzi into his arms and carried him up the steps of the trailer.

  It was impossible to know how serious the injuries were. The kid was unconscious, perhaps even in a coma, but lying out there in the frigid autumn weather for God knows how many hours had only made matters worse. In the end, that had probably done as much damage as the beating itself. Nashe laid the kid out on the sofa and then rushed into both bedrooms and stripped the blankets off the beds. He had seen several people die of shock after being rescued from fires, and Pozzi had all the symptoms of a bad case: the dreadful pallor, the blueness of the lips, the icy, corpselike hands. Nashe did everything he could to keep him warm, rubbing his body under the blankets and tilting his legs to get the blood flowing again, but even after the kid’s temperature began to rise a little, he showed no signs of waking up.

  Things happened quickly after that. Murks arrived at seven, tramping up the steps of the trailer and giving his customary knock on the door, and when Nashe called for him to come in, his first response on seeing Pozzi was to laugh. “What’s the matter with him?” he said, gesturing at the sofa with his thumb. “Did he tie one on again last night?” But once he stepped into the room and was close enough to see Pozzi’s face, his amusement turned to alarm. “Christ almighty,” he said. “This boy’s in trouble.” “You’re damn right he’s in trouble,” Nashe said. “If we don’t get him to a hospital in the next hour, he’s not going to make it.”

  So Murks ran back to the house to fetch the jeep, and in the meantime Nashe dragged out the mattress from Pozzi’s bed and leaned it against the wall of the trailer, keeping it there to be used for their makeshift ambulance. The ride was going to be hard enough anyway, but perhaps the cushion would prevent the kid from being jolted around too much. When Murks finally returned, there was another man sitting with him in the front of the jeep. “This here is Floyd,” he said. “He can help us carry the kid.” Floyd was Murks’s son-in-law, and he looked to be somewhere in his mid to late twenties—a large, solidly built young man who stood at least six four or six five, with a smooth reddish face and a woolen hunting cap on his head. He seemed no more than moderately intelligent, however, and when Murks introduced him to Nashe he extended his hand with a clumsy, earnest cheerfulness that was entirely inappropriate for the situation. Nashe was so disgusted that he refused to offer his hand in return, merely staring at Floyd until the big man dropped his arm to his side.

  Nashe maneuvered the mattress into the back of the jeep, and then the three of them went into the trailer and lifted Pozzi off the sofa, carrying him outside with the blankets still wrapped around his body. Nashe tucked him in, trying to make him as comfortable as possible, but every time he looked down at the kid’s face, he knew there was no hope. Pozzi didn’t have a chance anymore. By the time they got him to the hospital, he would already be dead.

  But worse was still to come. Murks clapped his hand on Nashe’s shoulder at that point and said, “We’ll be back as soon as we can,” and when it finally dawned on Nashe that they weren’t planning to take him along, something in him snapped, and he turned on Murks in a sudden fit of rage. “Sorry,” Murks said. “I can’t let you do that. There’s been enough commotion around here for one day, and I don’t want things getting out of hand. You don’t have to worry, Nashe. Floyd and me can manage on our own.”

  But Nashe was beside himself, and instead of backing off, he lunged at Murks and grabbed hold of his jacket, calling him a liar and a goddamn son of a bitch. Before he could bring his fist into Calvin’s face, however, Floyd was all over him, wrapping his arms around him from behind and yanking him off the ground. Murks took two or three steps back, pulled his gun out of the holster, and pointed it at Nashe. But not even that was enough to put an end to it, and Nashe went on yelling and kicking in Floyd’s arms. “Shoot me, you son of a bitch!” he said to Murks. “Come on, go ahead and shoot me!”

  “He don’t know what he’s saying anymore,” Murks said calmly, glancing over at his son-in-law. “The poor bugger’s lost it.”

  Without warning, Floyd threw Nas
he violently to the ground, and before Nashe could get up to resume the assault, a foot came crashing into his stomach. It knocked the wind out of him, and as he lay there gasping for breath, the two men broke for the jeep and climbed in. Nashe heard the engine kick over, and by the time he was able to stand up again, they were already driving off, disappearing with Pozzi into the woods.

  He did not hesitate after that. He went inside, put on his jacket, stuffed the pockets with as much food as they would hold, and immediately left the trailer again. His only thought was to get out of there. He would never have a better chance to escape, and he wasn’t going to squander the opportunity. He would crawl through the hole he had dug with Pozzi the night before, and that would be the end of it.

  He walked across the meadow at a quick pace, not even bothering to look at the wall, and when he reached the woods on the other side, he suddenly started to run, charging down the dirt path as if his life depended on it. He came to the fence a few minutes later, breathing hard from the exertion, staring out at the road before him with his arms pressed against the barrier for support. For a moment or two, it didn’t even occur to him that the hole had vanished. But once he began to recover his breath, he looked down at his feet and saw that he was standing on level ground. The hole had been filled in, the shovel was gone, and what with the leaves and twigs scattered around him, it was almost impossible to know that a hole had ever been there.

  Nashe gripped the fence with all ten fingers and squeezed as hard as he could. He held on like that for close to a minute, and then, opening his hands again, he brought them to his face and began to sob.

  8

  For several nights after that, he had the same recurring dream. He would imagine that he was waking up in the darkness of his own room, and once he understood that he was no longer asleep, he would put on his clothes, leave the trailer, and start walking across the meadow. When he came to the tool shed at the other end, he would kick down the door, grab a shovel, and continue on into the woods, running down the dirt path that led to the fence. The dream was always vivid and exact, less a distortion of the real than a simulacrum, an illusion so rich in the details of waking life that Nashe never suspected that he was dreaming. He would hear the faint crackling of the earth underfoot, he would feel the chill of the night air against his skin, he would smell the pungent autumn decay wafting through the woods. But every time he came to the fence with the shovel in his hand, the dream would suddenly stop, and he would wake up to discover that he was still lying in his own bed.