The Music of Chance

by Paul Auster

  “I figured maybe you’d like to go out for a drink with me and Floyd tonight,” Calvin said.

  “What for?” Nashe answered, barely looking up from his work.

  “I don’t know. Just to get out and see what the world looks like again. You’ve been cooped up here a long time, son. It might not be a bad idea to do a little celebrating.”

  “I thought you were against celebrations.”

  “Depends on what kind of celebrating you mean. I’m not talking about anything fancy here. Just a few drinks over at Ollie’s in town. A workingman’s night out.”

  “You forget that I don’t have any money.”

  “That’s all right. The drinks are on me.”

  “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass. I was planning on writing a few letters tonight.”

  “You can always write them tomorrow.”

  “That’s true. But then again, I could be dead tomorrow. You never know what’s going to happen.”

  “All the more reason not to worry about it.”

  “Maybe some other time. It’s nice of you to offer, but I’m just not in the mood tonight.”

  “I’m just trying to be friendly, Nashe.”

  “I know you are, and I appreciate it. But you don’t have to worry about me. I can take care of myself.”

  Cooking dinner alone in the trailer that night, however, Nashe regretted his stubbornness. There was no question that he had done the right thing, but the truth was that he was desperate for a chance to leave the meadow, and the moral correctness he had shown in refusing Murks’s invitation felt like a paltry triumph to him now. He spent ten hours a day in the man’s company, after all, and just because they sat down together and had a drink, it wasn’t going to stop him from turning the son of a bitch over to the police. As it happened, Nashe got precisely what he wanted anyway. Just after he finished dinner, Murks and his son-in-law came around to the trailer to ask him if he had changed his mind. They were going out now, they said, and it didn’t seem fair that he should miss out on the fun.

  “It’s not like you’re the only one who’s been set free today,” Murks said, blowing his nose into a large white handkerchief. “I’ve been out there in that field same as you, freezing my butt off seven days a week. It’s about the worst damned job I’ve ever had. I’ve got nothing personal against you, Nashe, but it’s been no picnic. No sir, no picnic at all. Maybe it’s about time we sat down and buried the hatchet.”

  “You know,” Floyd said, smiling at Nashe as if to encourage him, “let bygones be bygones.”

  “You guys don’t give up, do you?” Nashe said, still trying to sound reluctant.

  “We’re not twisting your arm or anything,” Murks said. “Just trying to enter into the Christmas spirit.”

  “Like Santa’s helpers,” Floyd said. “Spreading good cheer wherever we go.”

  “All right,” Nashe said, studying their expectant faces. “I’ll go out for a drink with you. Why the hell not?”

  Before they could drive to town, they had to stop off at the main house to get Murks’s car. Murks’s car meant his car, of course, but in the excitement of the moment Nashe had forgotten all about that. He sat in the back of the jeep as they bounced along through the dark and icy woods, and it wasn’t until this first little journey was over that he realized his mistake. He saw the red Saab parked in the driveway, and the moment he understood what he was looking at, he felt himself go numb with grief. The thought of riding in it again made him sick, but there was no way he could back out of it now. They were set to go, and he had already caused enough fuss for one night.

  He didn’t say a word. He took his place in the backseat and closed his eyes, trying to make his mind go blank, listening to the familiar sound of the engine as the car moved along the road. He could hear that Murks and Floyd were talking in the front, but he didn’t pay attention to what they said, and after a while their voices blurred with the sound of the engine, producing a low, continuous hum that vibrated in his ears, a lulling music that sang along his skin and dug down into the depths of his body. He didn’t open his eyes again until the car stopped, and then he found himself standing in a parking lot at the edge of a small, deserted town, listening to a traffic sign rattle in the wind. Christmas decorations blinked in the distance down the street, and the cold air was red with the pulsing reflections, the throbs of light that bounced off the shop windows and glowed on the frozen sidewalks. Nashe had no idea where he was. They could still be in Pennsylvania, he thought, but then again, they could have crossed the river and gone into New Jersey. For a brief moment, he considered asking Murks which state they were in, but then he decided that he didn’t care.

  Ollie’s was a dark and noisy place, and he took an immediate dislike to it. Country-and-western songs thundered out of a jukebox in one corner, and the bar was thronged with a crush of beer-drinkers—men in flannel shirts, for the most part, decked out in fancy baseball caps and wearing belts with large, elaborate buckles. They were farmers and mechanics and truck drivers, Nashe supposed, and the few women scattered among them looked like regulars—puffy, dough-faced alcoholics who sat on the barstools and laughed as loudly as the men. Nashe had been in a hundred places like this before, and it didn’t take thirty seconds for him to realize that he wasn’t up to it tonight, that he had been away from crowds for too long. Everyone was talking at once, it seemed, and the ruckus of loud voices and blaring music was already hurting his head.

  They drank several rounds at a table in the far corner of the room, and after the first couple of bourbons Nashe began to feel somewhat revived. Floyd did most of the talking, addressing nearly all his remarks to Nashe, and after a while it became hard not to notice how little Murks was contributing to the conversation. He looked more under the weather than usual, Nashe thought, and every so often he would turn away and cough violently into his handkerchief, hawking up nasty gobs of phlegm. These fits seemed to take a lot out of him, and afterward he would sit there in silence, pale and shaken from the effort to still his lungs.

  “Granddad hasn’t been feeling too well lately,” Floyd said to Nashe (he always referred to Murks as Granddad). “I’ve been trying to talk him into taking a couple of weeks off.”

  “It’s nothing,” Murks said. “Just a touch of the ague, that’s all.”

  “The ague?” Nashe said. “Where the hell did you learn to talk, Calvin.”

  “What’s wrong with the way I talk?” Murks said.

  “No one uses words like that anymore,” Nashe said. “They went out about a hundred years ago.”

  “I learned it from my mother,” Murks said. “And she only died six years back. She’d be eighty-eight if she was alive today—which proves that word ain’t as old as you think it is.”

  Nashe found it strange to hear Murks talking about his mother. It was difficult to imagine that he had once been a child, let alone that twenty or twenty-five years ago he had once been Nashe’s age—a young man with a life to look forward to, a person with a future. For the first time since they had been thrown together, Nashe realized that he knew next to nothing about Murks. He didn’t know where he had been born; he didn’t know how he had met his wife or how many children he had; he didn’t even know how long he had been working for Flower and Stone. Murks was a creature who existed wholly in the present for him, and beyond that present he was nothing, a being as insubstantial as a shadow or a thought. When all was said and done, however, that was precisely how Nashe wanted it. Even if Murks had turned to him at that moment and offered to tell the story of his life, he would have refused to listen.

  Meanwhile, Floyd was telling him about his new job. Since Nashe seemed to have played some part in his finding it, he had to sit through an exhaustive, rambling account of how Floyd had struck up a conversation with the chauffeur who had driven the girl from Atlantic City on the night of her visit last month. The limousine company had apparently been looking for new drivers, and Floyd had gone down the very next day to apply for a
job. He was only working on a part-time basis now, just two or three days a week, but he was hoping they’d have more work for him after the first of the year. Just for something to say, Nashe asked him how he liked wearing the uniform. Floyd said it didn’t bother him. It was nice to have something special to wear, he said, it made him feel like someone important.

  “The main thing is that I love to drive,” he continued. “I don’t care what kind of car it is. As long as I’m sitting behind the wheel and moving down the road, I’m a happy man. I can’t think of a better way to make a living. Imagine getting paid for something you love to do. It almost doesn’t feel right.”

  “Yes,” Nashe said, “driving is a good thing. I agree with you about that.”

  “Well, you ought to know,” Floyd said. “I mean, look at Granddad’s car. That’s a beautiful machine. Isn’t that so, Granddad?” he said to Murks. “It’s a stunner, isn’t it?”

  “A fine piece of work,” Calvin said. “Handles real good. Takes the curves and hills like nobody’s business.”

  “You must have enjoyed driving around in that thing,” Floyd said to Nashe.

  “I did,” Nashe said. “It was the best car I ever owned.”

  “There’s one thing that puzzles me, though,” Floyd said. “How did you ever manage to put so many miles on it? I mean, it’s a pretty new model, and the odometer’s already showing close to eighty thousand miles. That’s an awful lot of driving to do in one year.”

  “I suppose it is,” Nashe said.

  “Were you some kind of traveling salesman or something?”

  “Yeah, that’s it, I was a traveling salesman. They gave me a large territory, and so I had to be on the road a lot. You know, lugging around the samples in the trunk, living out of a suitcase, staying in a different city every night. I moved around so much, I sometimes forgot where I lived.”

  “I think I’d like that,” Floyd said. “It sounds like a good job to me.”

  “It’s not bad. You have to like being alone, but once you’ve taken care of that, the rest is easy.”

  Floyd was beginning to get on his nerves. The man was an oaf, Nashe thought, a full-fledged imbecile, and the longer he went on talking, the more he reminded Nashe of his son. They both had that same desperate desire to please, that same fawning timidity, that same lostness in the eyes. To look at him, you would never think he would harm a soul—but he had harmed Jack that night, Nashe was sure of it, and it was precisely that emptiness inside him that had made it possible, that immense chasm of want. It wasn’t that Floyd was a cruel or violent person, but he was big and strong and ever so willing, and he loved Granddad more than anyone else in the world. It was written all over his face, and every time he turned his eyes in Murks’s direction, it was as though he were looking at a god. Granddad had told him what to do, and he had gone ahead and done it.

  After the third or fourth round of drinks, Floyd asked Nashe if he would care to play some pool. There were several tables in the back room, he said, and one of them was bound to be free. Nashe was feeling a little woozy by then, but he accepted anyway, welcoming it as a chance to get up from his seat and end the conversation. It was close to eleven o’clock, and the crowd at Ollie’s had become thinner and less boisterous. Floyd asked Murks if he wanted to join them, but Calvin said he’d rather stay where he was and finish his drink.

  It was a large, dimly lit room with four pool tables in the center and a number of pinball machines and computer games along the side walls. They stopped by the rack near the door to choose their sticks, and as they walked over to one of the free tables, Floyd asked if it might not be more interesting if they made a friendly little bet on the action. Nashe had never been much of a pool player, but he didn’t think twice about saying yes. He wanted to beat Floyd in the worst way, he realized, and there was no question that putting some money on it would help him to concentrate.

  “I don’t have any cash,” he said. “But I’ll be good for it as soon as I get paid next week.”

  “I know that,” Floyd said. “If I didn’t think you’d be good for it, I wouldn’t have asked.”

  “How much do you want to make it for?”

  “I don’t know. Depends on what you’ve got in mind.”

  “How about ten dollars a game?”

  “Ten dollars? All right, sounds good to me.”

  They played eight-ball on one of those bumpy, quarter-a-rack tables, and Nashe scarcely said a word the whole time they were there. Floyd wasn’t bad, but in spite of his drunkenness, Nashe was better, and he wound up playing his heart out, zeroing in on his shots with a skill and precision that surpassed anything he had done before. He felt utterly happy and loose, and once he fell into the rhythm of the clicking, tumbling balls, the stick began to glide through his fingers as if it were moving on its own. He won the first four games by steadily increasing margins (by one ball, by two balls, by four balls, by six balls), and then he won the fifth game before Floyd could even take a turn, sinking two striped balls on the break and going on from there to clear the table, ending with a flourish as he sank the eight-ball on a three-way combination shot in the corner pocket.

  “That’s enough for me,” Floyd said after the fifth game. “I figured you might be good, but this is ridiculous.”

  “Just luck,” Nashe said, struggling to keep a smile off his face. “I’m generally pretty feeble. Things kept falling my way tonight.”

  “Feeble or not, it looks like I owe you fifty bucks.”

  “Forget the money, Floyd. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

  “What do you mean, forget it? You just won yourself fifty bucks. It’s yours.”

  “No, no, I’m telling you to keep it. I don’t want your money.”

  Floyd kept trying to press the fifty dollars into Nashe’s hand, but Nashe was just as adamant about refusing it, and after a few moments it finally dawned on Floyd that Nashe meant what he was saying, that he wasn’t just putting on an act.

  “Buy your little boy a present,” Nashe said. “If you want to make me happy, use it on him.”

  “It’s awfully good of you,” Floyd said. “Most guys wouldn’t let fifty bucks slip through their fingers like that.”

  “I’m not most guys,” Nashe said.

  “I guess I owe you one,” Floyd said, patting Nashe’s back in an awkward show of gratitude. “Any time you need a favor, all you have to do is ask.”

  It was one of those empty, obliging remarks that people often make at such moments, and under any other circumstances Nashe probably would have let it pass. But he suddenly found himself glowing with the warmth of an idea, and rather than lose the opportunity he had just been given, he looked straight back at Floyd and said, “Well, now that you mention it, maybe there is one thing you can do for me. It’s a very small thing really, but your help would mean a lot.”

  “Sure, Jim,” Floyd said. “Just name it.”

  “Let me drive the car back home tonight.”

  “You mean Granddad’s car?”

  “That’s right, Granddad’s car. The car I used to own.”

  “I don’t think it’s for me to say whether you can or not, Jim. It’s Granddad’s car, and he’s the one you’ll have to ask. But I’ll certainly put in a word for you.”

  As it turned out, Murks didn’t mind. He was feeling pretty tuckered, he said, and he was planning to ask Floyd to drive the car anyway. If Floyd wanted to let Nashe do it, that was all right with him. As long as they got to where they were going, what difference did it make?

  When they stepped outside, they discovered that it was snowing. It was the first snow of the year, and it fell in thick, moist flakes, most of it melting the instant it touched the ground. The Christmas decorations had been turned off down the street, and the wind had stopped blowing. The air was still now, so still that the weather felt almost warm. Nashe took a deep breath, glanced up at the sky, and stood there for a moment as the snow fell against his face. He was happy, he realized, happ
ier than he had been in a long time.

  When they came to the parking lot, Murks handed him the keys to the car. Nashe unlocked the front door, but just as he was about to open it and climb in, he pulled back his hand and started to laugh. “Hey, Calvin,” he said. “Where the hell are we?”

  “What do you mean where are we?” Murks said.

  “What town?”

  “Billings.”

  “Billings? I thought that was in Montana.”

  “Billings, New Jersey.”

  “So we’re not in Pennsylvania anymore?”

  “No, you have to cross the bridge to get back there. Don’t you remember?”

  “I don’t remember anything.”

  “Just take Route Sixteen. It carries you right on through.”

  He hadn’t thought it would be so important to him, but once he positioned himself behind the wheel, he noticed that his hands were trembling. He started the engine, flicked on the headlights and windshield wipers, and then backed out slowly from the parking space. It hadn’t been so long, he thought. Just three and a half months, and yet it took a while before he felt any of the old pleasure again. He was distracted by Murks coughing beside him in the front seat, by Floyd rattling on about how he had lost at pool in the back, and it was only when Nashe turned on the radio that he was able to forget they were there with him, that he was not alone as he had been for all those months when he had driven back and forth across America. He never wanted to do that again, he realized, but once he left the town behind him and could accelerate on the empty road, it was hard not to pretend for a little while, to imagine that he was back in those days before the real story of his life had begun. This was the only chance he would have, and he wanted to savor what had been given to him, to push the memory of who he had once been as far as it would go. The snow whirled down onto the windshield before him, and in his mind he saw the crows swooping down over the meadow, calling out with their mysterious cries as he watched them pass overhead. The meadow would look beautiful under the snow, he thought, and he hoped it would go on falling through the night so he could wake up to see it that way in the morning. He imagined the immensity of the white field, and the snow continuing to fall until even the mountains of stones were covered, until everything disappeared under an avalanche of whiteness.