Timbuktu

by Paul Auster

  It was impossible to know for sure, but Willy tended to think that he did. Why else would it have been so difficult to wrench Mr. Bones away from the sites of certain smells? The dog was enjoying himself, that’s why. He was in a state of intoxication, lost in a nasal paradise he could not bear to leave. And if, as has already been established, Willy was convinced that Mr. Bones had a soul, did it not stand to reason that a dog of such spiritual inclinations would aspire to loftier things—things not necessarily related to the needs and urgencies of his body, but spiritual things, artistic things, the immaterial hungers of the soul? And if, as all philosophers on the subject have noted, art is a human activity that relies on the senses to reach that soul, did it not also stand to reason that dogs—at least dogs of Mr. Bones’s caliber—would have it in them to feel a similar aesthetic impulse? Would they not, in other words, be able to appreciate art? As far as Willy knew, no one had ever thought of this before. Did that make him the first man in recorded history to believe that such a thing was possible? No matter. It was an idea whose time had come. If dogs were beyond the pull of oil paintings and string quartets, who was to say they wouldn’t respond to an art based on the sense of smell? Why not an olfactory art? Why not an art for dogs that dealt with the world as dogs knew it?

  Thus began the lunatic winter of 1988. Mr. Bones had never seen Willy so excited, so calm, so filled with steadfast energy. For three and a half months he worked on the project to the exclusion of everything else, scarcely bothering to smoke or drink anymore, sleeping only when absolutely compelled to, all but forgetting to write, read, or pick his nose. He drew up plans, made lists, experimented with smells, traced diagrams, built structures out of wood, canvas, cardboard, and plastic. There were so many calculations to be made, so many tests to be run, so many daunting questions to be answered. What was the ideal sequence of smells? How long should a symphony last, and how many smells should it contain? What was the proper shape of the symphony hall? Should it be constructed as a labyrinth, or was a progression of boxes within boxes better suited to a dog’s sensibility? Should the dog do the work alone, or should the dog’s owner be there to guide him from one stage of the performance to the next? Should each symphony revolve around a single subject—food, for example, or female scents—or should various elements be mixed together? One by one, Willy talked out these problems with Mr. Bones, asked for his opinions, solicited his advice, and begged his indulgence to serve as guinea pig for the numerous trials and errors that followed. The dog had rarely felt so honored, so implicated in the throb of human affairs. Not only did Willy need him, but that need had been inspired by Mr. Bones himself. From his humble origins as a mutt of no particular worth or distinction, he had been turned into the dog of dogs, an exemplar of the whole canine race. Of course he was happy to do his bit, to play along with whatever Willy asked of him. What difference did it make if he didn’t fully understand? He was a dog, wasn’t he?, and why should he object to sniffing a pile of urine-soaked rags, to pushing his body through a narrow trapdoor, or to crawling through a tunnel whose walls had been smeared with the traces of a meatball-and-spaghetti dinner? It might not have served any purpose, but the truth was that it was fun.

  That was what came back to him now: the fun of it, the ongoing rush of Willy’s excitement. Forget Mom-san and her sarcastic comments. Forget the fact that their laboratory was in the sub-basement of the building, next to the furnace and the sewage pipes, and that they worked on a cold dirt floor. They were collaborating on something important, enduring hardships together in the name of scientific progress. If there was anything to regret sometimes, it was simply the depth of Willy’s commitment to what they were doing. He was so consumed by it, so wrapped up in the nuts and bolts of the project, that it became increasingly hard for him to keep things in perspective. One day, he would talk about his invention as if it were a major discovery, a breakthrough on a par with the lightbulb, the airplane, or the computer chip. It would rake in bags of money, he said, turn them into millionaires many times over, and they would never have to worry about anything again. On other days, however, suddenly filled with doubts and uncertainties, he would present arguments to Mr. Bones that were so finely parsed, so hair-splitting in their exactitude, that the dog began to fear for his master’s health. Was it perhaps pushing things too far, Willy asked one evening, to include female scents in the orchestration of the symphonies? Wouldn’t those smells induce lust in the dog who inhaled them, and wouldn’t that undermine their aesthetic aspirations, turning the piece into something pornographic, a kind of smut for dogs? Immediately following that statement, Willy started bending words again, which happened whenever his mind was working at top speed. “Cure porn with corn,” he muttered to himself, pacing back and forth across the dirt floor, “pure corn will cure porn.” Once Mr. Bones had untangled the knots of the spoonerism, he understood Willy to mean that sentimentality was preferable to sex, at least as far as the symphonies were concerned, and that to remain faithful to the endeavor of bringing aesthetic pleasure to dogs, spiritual longings would have to be emphasized over physical ones. So, after two straight weeks of rubbing his nose in towels and sponges saturated with the aromas of bitches in heat, Mr. Bones was offered a whole new set of instruments: Willy himself, in all his vaporous guises. Dirty socks, undershirts, shoes, handkerchiefs, pants, scarves, hats— anything and everything that bore the scent of his master. Mr. Bones enjoyed these things, just as he had enjoyed the other things. For the fact was that Mr. Bones was a dog, and dogs enjoyed smelling whatever they were given to smell. It was in their nature; it was what they were born to do; it was, as Willy had correctly observed, their calling in life. For once, Mr. Bones was glad that he had not been endowed with the power of human speech. If he had, he would have been forced to tell Willy the truth, and that would have caused him much pain. For a dog, he would have said, for a dog, dear master, the fact is that the whole world is a symphony of smells. Every hour, every minute, every second of his waking life is at once a physical and a spiritual experience. There is no difference between the inner and the outer, nothing to separate the high from the low. It’s as if, as if…

  Just as Mr. Bones was beginning to unfurl this imaginary speech in his head, he was interrupted by the sound of Willy’s voice. Damn, he heard him say. Damn, damn, and double damn. Mr. Bones jerked up his head to see what the trouble was. A light rain had begun to fall, a drizzle so faint that Mr. Bones hadn’t even felt it landing on his fluffy coat. But little beads of wetness were glistening in Willy’s beard, and the master’s black T-shirt had already absorbed enough moisture to be showing a fine polka-dotted pattern. This wasn’t good. The last thing Willy needed was to get drenched, but if the sky delivered what it seemed to have promised, that’s exactly what was going to happen. Mr. Bones perused the clouds overhead. Barring a sudden change of wind, in less than an hour the present feeble raindrops would develop into a fullblown, lusty downpour. Damn, he thought. How much farther to go before they found Calvert Street? They had been stumbling around for the past twenty or thirty minutes, and Bea Swanson’s house was still nowhere in sight. If they didn’t get there soon, they weren’t going to make it. They weren’t going to make it, because Willy wouldn’t have the strength to go on.

  Given their predicament, the last thing Mr. Bones was expecting just then was that his master would start to laugh. But there it was, rumbling up from the depths of his stomach and bursting forth into the Sunday stillness: the old familiar haw. For a moment he thought that maybe Willy was trying to clear his throat, but when the first haw was followed by another haw, and then another, and still another after that, he could no longer doubt what his ears were telling him.

  “Lookee here, ol’ bud,” Willy said, launching into his best cowboy twang. This was a voice reserved for special occasions, an accent that Willy called upon only when he found himself in the presence of life’s grandest, most dizzying ironies. Baffled though he was to hear it now, Mr. Bones tried to take hear
t from this sudden shift in the emotional weather.

  Willy had come to a full stop on the sidewalk. The neighborhood all around them stank of poverty and uncollected garbage, and yet where should they be standing but in front of the loveliest little house Mr. Bones had ever seen, a toy-sized edifice made of red bricks and adorned with slatted green shutters, three green steps, and a brightly painted white door. A plaque was affixed to the wall, and Willy was squinting forward to read what it said, sounding more and more like a Texas ranch hand with each passing second.

  “Two-oh-three North Amity Street,” he recited. “Residence of Edgar Allan Poe, eighteen-thirty-two to eighteen-thirty-five. Open to the public April to December, Wednesday through Saturday, noon to three forty-five P.M.”

  It sounded like pretty dull stuff to Mr. Bones, but who was he to grumble about his master’s enthusiasms? Willy sounded more inspired than at any moment in the past two weeks, and even though his recitation was followed by another brutal coughing fit (more sputum, more gasping, more foot-stomping as he clung to the downspout for dear life), he quickly rebounded once the spasm was over.

  “We done hit pay dirt, little pard,” Willy said, spitting out the last bits of mucus and pulmonary tissue. “It ain’t Miss Bea’s house, that’s for sure, but give me my druthers, and there’s no place on earth I’d rather be than here. This Poe fella was my grandpa, the great forebear and daddy of all us Yankee scribes. Without him, there wouldn’t have been no me, no them, no nobody. We’ve wound up in Poe-land, and if you say it quick enough, that’s the same country my own dead ma was born in. An angel’s led us to this spot, and I aim to sit here awhile and pay my respects. Seein’ as how I can’t take another step anyway, I’d be much obliged if you joined me, Mr. Bones. That’s right, take a seat beside me while I rest my pins. Never mind the rain. It’s just a few drops is all, and it don’t mean us no harm.”

  Willy let out a long, laboring grunt and then eased himself to the ground. It was a painful thing for Mr. Bones to observe—all that effort to travel just a few inches—and the dog’s heart welled up with pity to see his master in such a sorrowful state. He could never be certain exactly how he knew it, but as he watched Willy lower himself to the sidewalk and lean his back against the wall, he knew that he would never get up again. This was the end of their life together. The last moments were upon them, and there was nothing to do now but sit there until the light faded from Willy’s eyes.

  Still, the trip hadn’t worked out so badly. They’d come here looking for one thing and had found another, and in the end Mr. Bones much preferred the thing they’d found to the thing they hadn’t. They weren’t in Baltimore, they were in Poland. By some miracle of luck or fate or divine justice, Willy had managed to get himself home again. He had returned to the place of his ancestors, and now he could die in peace.

  Mr. Bones raised his left hind paw and began working on an itch behind his ear. In the distance, he saw a man and a little girl walking slowly in the opposite direction, but he didn’t trouble himself about them. They would come, they would go, and it made no difference who they were. The rain was coming down harder now, and a small breeze was beginning to kick around the candy wrappers and paper bags in the street. He sniffed the air once, twice, then yawned for no particular reason. After a moment, he curled up on the ground beside Willy, exhaled deeply, and waited for whatever was going to happen next.

  2

  NOTHING DID. FOR THE LONGEST TIME, it was as if the entire neighborhood had stopped breathing. No one walked by, no cars passed, not a single person went in or out of a house. The rain poured down, just as Mr. Bones had predicted it would, but then it slackened, gradually turned into a drizzle again, and at last made a quiet departure from the scene. Willy stirred not a muscle during these skyward agitations. He lay sprawled out against the brick building as before, his eyes shut and his mouth partly open, and if not for the rusty, creaking noise that intermittently emerged from his lungs, Mr. Bones might well have assumed that his master had already slipped into the next world.

  That was where people went after they died. Once your soul had been separated from your body, your body was buried in the ground and your soul lit out for the next world. Willy had been harping on this subject for the past several weeks, and by now there was no doubt in the dog’s mind that the next world was a real place. It was called Timbuktu, and from everything Mr. Bones could gather, it was located in the middle of a desert somewhere, far from New York or Baltimore, far from Poland or any other city they had visited in the course of their travels. At one point, Willy described it as “an oasis of spirits.” At another point he said: “Where the map of this world ends, that’s where the map of Timbuktu begins.” In order to get there, you apparently had to walk across an immense kingdom of sand and heat, a realm of eternal nothingness. It struck Mr. Bones as a most difficult and unpleasant journey, but Willy assured him that it wasn’t, that it took no more than a blink of an eye to cover the whole distance. And once you were there, he said, once you had crossed the boundaries of that refuge, you no longer had to worry about eating food or sleeping at night or emptying your bladder. You were at one with the universe, a speck of antimatter lodged in the brain of God. Mr. Bones had trouble imagining what life would be like in such a place, but Willy talked about it with such longing, with such pangs of tenderness reverberating in his voice, that the dog eventually gave up his qualms. Tim-buk-tu. By now, even the sound of the word was enough to make him happy. The blunt combination of vowels and consonants rarely failed to stir him in the deepest parts of his soul, and whenever those three syllables came rolling off his master’s tongue, a wave of blissful well-being would wash through the entire length of his body—as if the word alone were a promise, a guarantee of better days ahead.

  It didn’t matter how hot it was there. It didn’t matter that there was nothing to eat or drink or smell. If that’s where Willy was going, that’s where he wanted to go too. When the moment came for him to part company with this world, it seemed only right that he should be allowed to dwell in the hereafter with the same person he had loved in the here-before. Wild beasts no doubt had their own Timbuktu, giant forests in which they were free to roam without threat from two-legged hunters and trappers, but lions and tigers were different from dogs, and it made no sense to throw the tamed and untamed together in the afterlife. The strong would devour the weak, and in no time flat every dog in the place would be dead, dispatched to yet another afterlife, a beyond beyond the beyond, and what would be the point of arranging things like that? If there was any justice in the world, if the dog god had any influence on what happened to his creatures, then man’s best friend would stay by the side of man after said man and said best friend had both kicked the bucket. More than that, in Timbuktu dogs would be able to speak man’s language and converse with him as an equal. That was what logic dictated, but who knew if justice or logic had any more impact on the next world than they did on this one? Willy had somehow forgotten to mention the matter, and because Mr. Bones’s name had not come up once, not once in all their conversations about Timbuktu, the dog was still in the dark as to where he was headed after his own demise. What if Timbuktu turned out to be one of those places with fancy carpets and expensive antiques? What if no pets were allowed? It didn’t seem possible, and yet Mr. Bones had lived long enough to know that anything was possible, that impossible things happened all the time. Perhaps this was one of them, and in that perhaps hung a thousand dreads and agonies, an unthinkable horror that gripped him every time he thought about it.

  Then, against all odds, just as he was about to fall into another one of his funks, the sky began to brighten. Not only had the rain stopped, but the bulked-up clouds overhead were slowly breaking apart, and whereas just an hour before everything had been gray and gloom, now the sky was tinged with color, a motley jumble of pink and yellow streaks that bore down from the west and steadily advanced across the breadth of the city.

  Mr. Bones lifted his head.
A moment later, as if the two actions were secretly connected, a shaft of light came slanting through the clouds. It struck the sidewalk an inch or two from the dog’s left paw, and then, almost immediately, another beam landed just to his right. A crisscross of light and shadow began to form on the pavement in front of him, and it was a beautiful thing to behold, he felt, a small, unexpected gift on the heels of so much sadness and pain. He looked back at Willy then, and just as he was turning his head, a great bucketful of light poured down on the poet’s face, and so intense was the light as it crashed against the sleeping man’s eyelids that his eyes involuntarily opened—and there was Willy, all but defunct a moment ago, back in the land of the living, dusting off the cobwebs and trying to wake up.