The Music of Chance

by Paul Auster

  He had turned the radio to a classical station, and he recognized the music as something familiar, a piece he had listened to many times before. It was the andante from an eighteenth-century string quartet, but even though Nashe knew every passage by heart, the name of the composer kept eluding him. He quickly narrowed it down to Mozart or Haydn, but after that he felt stuck. For several moments it would sound like the work of one, and then, almost immediately, it would begin to sound like something by the other. It might have been one of the quartets that Mozart dedicated to Haydn, Nashe thought, but it might have been the other way around. At a certain point, the music of both men seemed to touch, and it was no longer possible to tell them apart. And yet Haydn had lived to a ripe old age, honored with commissions and court appointments and every advantage the world of that time could offer. And Mozart had died young and poor, and his body had been thrown into a common grave.

  Nashe had the car up to sixty by then, feeling in absolute control as he whipped along the narrow, twisting country road. The music had pushed Murks and Floyd far into the background, and he could no longer hear anything but the four stringed instruments pouring out their sounds into the dark, enclosed space. Then he was doing seventy, and immediately after that he heard Murks shouting at him through another fit of coughing. “You damned fool,” Nashe heard him say. “You’re driving too fast!” By way of response, Nashe pressed down on the accelerator and pushed the car up to eighty, taking the curve with a light and steady grip on the wheel. What did Murks know about driving? he thought. What did Murks know about anything?

  At the precise moment the car hit eighty-five, Murks leaned forward and snapped off the radio. The sudden silence came as a jolt to Nashe, and he automatically turned to the old man and told him to mind his own business. When he looked at the road again a moment later, he could already see the headlight looming up at him. It seemed to come out of nowhere, a cyclops star hurtling straight for his eyes, and in the sudden panic that engulfed him, his only thought was that this was the last thought he would ever have. There was no time to stop, no time to prevent what was going to happen, and so instead of slamming his foot on the brakes, he pressed down even harder on the gas. He could hear Murks and his son-in-law howling in the distance, but their voices were muffled, drowned out by the roar of blood in his head. And then the light was upon him, and Nashe shut his eyes, unable to look at it anymore.