The Music of Chance

by Paul Auster

  The next morning, the boy came to the meadow dressed in his Halloween costume: a black-and-white skeleton outfit with a mask that looked like a skull. It was one of those crude, flimsy things you buy in a box at Woolworth’s, and because the weather was cold that day, he wore it over his outer garments, which gave him an oddly bloated appearance, as if he had doubled his weight overnight. According to Murks, the boy had insisted on wearing the costume so that Nashe could see how he looked in it, and in his demented state at that moment, Nashe immediately began to wonder if the boy wasn’t trying to tell him something. The costume stood for death, after all, death in its purest and most symbolic form, and perhaps that meant the boy knew what Nashe was planning, that he had come to the meadow dressed as death because he knew he was going to die. Nashe could not help seeing it as a message written in code. The boy was telling him that it was all right, that as long as Nashe was the one who killed him, everything was going to be all right.

  He warred against himself for the whole of that day, devising any number of ruses to keep the skeleton boy at a safe distance from his murderous hands. In the morning, he told him to watch a particular stone at the back of one of the piles, instructing him to guard it so that it would not disappear, and in the afternoon Nashe let him play with the wagon while he went off and busied himself with masonry work at the other end of the meadow. But inevitably there were lapses, moments when the boy’s concentration broke down and he came running toward Nashe, or else, even from a distance, those times when Nashe had to endure the litany of his name, the endless Jim, Jim, Jim, resounding like an alarm from the depths of his own fear. Again and again, he wanted to tell Murks not to bring him around anymore, but the struggle to keep his feelings under control took so much out of him, brought him so close to the point of mental collapse, that he could no longer trust himself with the words he wanted to say. He drank himself into a stupor that night, and the next morning, as if waking into the fullness of a nightmare, he opened the door of the trailer and saw that the boy was back—clutching a bag of Halloween candies against his chest, and then, without saying a word, solemnly handing it over to Nashe like a young brave delivering the spoils of his first hunt to the tribal chief.

  “What’s this for?” Nashe said to Murks.

  “Jim,” the boy said, answering the question himself. “Sweeties for Jim.”

  “That’s right,” Murks said. “He wanted to share his candy with you.”

  Nashe opened the bag a crack and peered down at the jumble of candy bars, apples, and raisins inside. “This is taking it a bit far, don’t you think, Calvin? What’s the kid trying to do, poison me?”

  “He don’t mean nothing by it,” Murks said. “He just felt sorry for you—missing out on the trick-or-treating and all. It’s not like you have to eat it.”

  “Sure,” Nashe said, staring at the boy and wondering how he was going to live through another day of this. “It’s the thought that counts, right?”

  But he couldn’t stand it anymore. The moment he stepped out into the meadow, he knew that he had reached his limit, that the boy would be dead within the next hour if he did not find a way to stop himself. He put one stone into the wagon, started to lift another, and then let it fall from his hands, listening to the thud as it crashed against the ground.

  “There’s something wrong with me today,” he said to Murks. “I don’t feel like myself.”

  “Maybe it’s that flu bug that’s been going around,” Murks said.

  “Yeah, that must be it. I’m probably coming down with the flu.”

  “You work too hard, Nashe, that’s the problem. You’re all worn out.”

  “If I lie down for an hour or two, maybe I’ll feel better this afternoon.”

  “Forget this afternoon. Take the whole day off. There’s no sense in pushing too hard, no sense at all. You need to get your strength back.”

  “All right, then. I’ll take a couple of aspirins and crawl into bed. I hate to lose the day, though. But I guess it can’t be helped.”

  “Don’t worry about the money. I’ll give you credit for the ten hours anyway. We’ll call it a baby-sitting bonus.”

  “There’s no need for that.”

  “No, I don’t suppose there is, but that don’t mean I can’t do it. It’s probably just as well, anyway. The weather’s too cold out here for little Floyd. He’d catch his death standing around in this meadow all day.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right. The kid would catch his death on a day like this.”

  Nashe’s head buzzed with these strangely omniscient words as he walked back to the trailer with Murks and the boy, and by the time he opened the door, he discovered that he was actually feeling ill. His body ached, and his muscles had become inexpressibly weak with exhaustion, as if he were suddenly burning up with a high fever. It was odd how quickly it had come over him: no sooner had Murks mentioned the word flu than he seemed to have caught it. Perhaps he had used himself up, he thought, and there was nothing left inside him. Perhaps he was so empty now that even a word could make him sick.

  “Oh my gosh,” Murks said, slapping himself against the forehead just as he was about to leave. “I almost forgot to tell you.”

  “Tell me?” Nashe said. “Tell me what?”

  “About Pozzi. I called the hospital last night to see how he was, and the nurse said he was gone.”

  “Gone. Gone in what sense?”

  “Gone. As in gone good-bye. He just got himself up out of bed, put on his clothes, and walked out of the hospital.”

  “You don’t have to make up stories, Calvin. Jack’s dead. He died two weeks ago.”

  “No, sir, he ain’t dead. It looked pretty bad there for a while, I’ll grant you that, but then he pulled through. The little runt was tougher than we thought. And now he’s got himself all better. At least better enough to stand up and walk out of the hospital. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “I only want to know the truth. Nothing else interests me.”

  “Well, that’s the truth. Jack Pozzi’s gone, and you don’t have to worry about him no more.”

  “Then let me call the hospital myself.”

  “I can’t do that, son, you know that. No calls allowed until you finish paying off the debt. At the rate you’re going, it won’t be long now. Then you can make all the calls you want. As far as I’m concerned, you can go on calling till kingdom come.”

  It was three days before Nashe was able to work again. For the first two days he slept, rousing himself only when Murks entered the trailer to deliver aspirin and tea and canned soup, and when he was sufficiently conscious to realize that those two days had been lost to him, he understood that sleep had not only been a physical necessity, it had been a moral imperative as well. The drama with the little boy had changed him, and if not for the hibernation that followed, those forty-eight hours in which he had temporarily vanished from himself, he might never have woken up into the man he had become. Sleep was a passage from one life into another, a small death in which the demons inside him had caught fire again, melting back into the flames they were born of. It wasn’t that they were gone, but they had no shape anymore, and in their formless ubiquity they had spread themselves through his entire body—invisible yet present, a part of him now in the same way that his blood and chromosomes were, a fire awash in the very fluids that kept him alive. He did not feel that he was any better or worse than he had been before, but he was no longer frightened. That was the crucial difference. He had rushed into the burning house and pulled himself out of the flames, and now that he had done it, the thought of doing it again no longer frightened him. On the third morning he woke up hungry, instinctively climbing out of bed and heading for the kitchen, and although he was remarkably unsteady on his feet, he knew that hunger was a good sign, that it meant he was getting well. Rummaging around in one of the drawers for a clean spoon, he came upon a slip of paper with a telephone number written on it
, and as he studied the childish, unfamiliar penmanship, he suddenly found himself thinking of the girl. She had written down her number for him at some point during the party on the sixteenth, he remembered, but several minutes passed before he could bring back her name. He ran through an inventory of near misses (Tammy, Kitty, Tippi, Kimberly), went blank for thirty or forty seconds after that, and then, just when he was about to give up, he found it: Tiffany. She was the only person who could help him, he realized. It would cost him a fortune to get that help, but what did it matter if his questions were finally answered? The girl had liked Pozzi, she seemed to have been crazy about him in fact, and once she heard the story of what had happened to him after the party, chances were that she would be willing to call the hospital. That was all it would take—one telephone call. She would ask them if Jack Pozzi had ever been a patient there, and then she would write to Nashe—a short letter telling him what she had found out. There might be a problem with the letter, of course, but that was a risk he’d have to take. He didn’t think the letters from Donna had been opened. At least the envelopes hadn’t looked tampered with, and why shouldn’t Tiffany’s letter get through to him as well? It was worth a try in any case. The more Nashe thought about this plan, the more promising it felt to him. What did he have to lose except money? He sat down at the kitchen table and began to drink his tea, trying to imagine what would happen when the girl came to visit him in the trailer. Before he could think of any of the words he would say to her, he discovered that he had an erection.

  It took some doing to get Murks to go along with it, however. When Nashe explained that he wanted to see the girl, Calvin reacted with surprise, and then, almost immediately afterward, a look of profound disappointment. It was as though Nashe had let him down, as though he had reneged on some tacit understanding between them, and he wasn’t about to let it happen without putting up a fight.

  “It don’t make sense,” Murks said. “Nine hundred dollars for a roll in the hay. That’s nine days’ work, Nashe, ninety hours of sweat and toil for nothing. It just don’t add up. A little taste of girlie flesh against all that. Anybody can see it don’t add up. You’re a smart fella, Nashe, it’s not like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “I don’t ask you how you spend your money,” Nashe said. “And it’s none of your business how I spend mine.”

  “I just hate to see a man make a fool of himself, that’s all. Especially when there’s no need for it.”

  “Your needs are not my needs, Calvin. As long as I do the work, I’m entitled to any damned thing I want. It’s written in the contract, and it’s not your place to say a word about it.”

  So Nashe won the argument, and even though Murks continued to grumble about it, he went ahead and arranged for the girl’s visit. She was due to come on the tenth, less than a week after Nashe had found her telephone number in the drawer, and it was a good thing he didn’t have to wait any longer than that, for once he had convinced Murks to call her, he found it impossible to think about anything else. Long before the girl showed up, therefore, he knew that his reasons for inviting her were only partly connected to Pozzi. The erection had proved that (along with the others that followed), and he spent the next few days alternating between fits of dread and excitement, skulking around the meadow like some hormone-crazed adolescent. But he had not been with a woman since the middle of the summer—not since that day in Berkeley when he had held the sobbing Fiona in his arms—and it was probably inevitable that the girl’s impending visit should fill his head with thoughts about sex. That was her business, after all. She fucked men for money, and since he was already paying for it, what was the harm in fulfilling his end of the exchange? It wouldn’t prevent him from asking for her help, but that was only going to take twenty or thirty minutes, and in order to get her there to spend that time with him, he had to buy her services for the whole evening. There would be no point in wasting those hours. They belonged to him, and just because he wanted the girl for one thing, that didn’t mean it was wrong to want her for another thing as well.

  The tenth turned out to be a cold night, more like winter than fall, with strong winds gusting across the meadow and a sky full of stars. The girl arrived in a fur coat, cheeks red and eyes tearing from the chill, and Nashe felt that she was prettier than he had remembered, although it could have been the color in her face that made him think that. Her clothes were less provocative than the last time—white turtleneck sweater, blue jeans with woolen leg warmers, the ever-present spike heels–and all in all it was an improvement over the gaudy costume she had worn in October. She seemed more her age now, and for whatever it was worth, Nashe decided that he preferred her this way, that it made him feel less uncomfortable to look at her.

  It helped that she smiled at him when she entered the trailer, and even though he found it a somewhat florid and theatrical smile, there was enough warmth in it to persuade him that she was not unhappy to be seeing him again. He realized that she had expected Pozzi to be there as well, and when she glanced around the room and did not find him, it was only natural that she should ask Nashe where he was. But Nashe couldn’t quite bring himself to tell the truth—at least not yet. “Jack was called away on another job,” he said. “Remember the Texas project he told you about last time? Well, our oilman had some questions about the drawings, and so he flew Jack down to Houston last night on his private jet. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment things. Jack was real sorry about it, but that’s how it is with our work. We have to keep our clients happy.”

  “Geez,” the girl said, making no attempt to hide her disappointment. “I liked that little guy a whole lot. I was looking forward to seeing him again.”

  “He’s one in a million,” Nashe said. “They don’t make them any better than Jack.”

  “Yeah, he’s a terrific guy. You get a john like that, and it doesn’t feel like work anymore.”

  Nashe smiled at the girl, and then he reached out tentatively and touched her shoulder. “I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for me tonight,” he said.

  “Well, worse things have happened,” she replied, recovering quickly with a playful, down-from-under look. To emphasize the point, she moaned softly and began running her tongue over her lips. “I might be wrong,” she said, “but I seem to remember that we had some unfinished business to take care of anyway.”

  Nashe had half a mind to tell her to take off her clothes right then, but he suddenly felt self-conscious, tongue-tied by his own arousal, and instead of taking her in his arms, he just stood where he was, wondering what to do next. He wished that Pozzi could have left behind a couple of jokes for him to use then, a few wisecracks to lighten up the atmosphere.

  “How about a little music?” he suggested, seizing on the first thing that popped into his head. Before the girl could answer, he was already down on the floor, digging through the piles of cassettes he kept under the coffee table. After clattering among the operas and classical pieces for close to a minute, he finally pulled out his tape of Billie Holiday songs, Billie’s Greatest Hits.

  The girl frowned at what she called the “old-fashioned” music, but when Nashe asked her to dance, she seemed touched by the quaintness of the proposal, as if he had just asked her to partake of some prehistoric rite—a taffy pull, for example, or bobbing for apples in a wooden bucket. But the fact was that Nashe liked to dance, and he thought the movement might help to steady his nerves. He took hold of her with a firm grip, guiding her in small circles around the living room, and after a few minutes she seemed to settle into it, following him more gracefully than he would have expected. In spite of the high heels, she was impressively light on her feet.

  “I’ve never known anyone named Tiffany before,” he said. “I think it’s very nice. It makes me think of beautiful and expensive things.”

  “That’s the idea,” she said. “It’s supposed to make you see diamonds.”

  “Your parents must have known you’d turn out to be a beautiful
girl.”

  “My parents had nothing to do with it. I picked the name myself.”

  “Oh. Well, that makes it even better. There’s no point in being stuck with a name you don’t like, is there?”

  “I couldn’t stand mine. As soon as I got away from home, I changed it.”

  “Was it really that bad?”

  “How would you like to be called Dolores? It’s about the worst name I can think of.”

  “That’s funny. My mother’s name was Dolores, and she never liked it either.”

  “No shit? Your old lady was a Dolores?”