by Paul Auster
In this way Brick and Flora swim along in their conjugal nothing, the little life she lured him back to with the good sense of a woman who doesn’t believe in other worlds, who knows there is only this world and that numbing routines and brief squabbles and financial worries are an essential part of it, that in spite of the aches and boredoms and disappointments, living in this world is the closest we will ever come to seeing paradise. After the horrific hours he spent in Wellington, Brick too wants only this, the jumbled grind of New York, the naked body of his little Floratina, his work as the Great Zavello, his unborn child growing invisibly as the days pass, and yet deep inside himself he knows that he has been contaminated by his visit to the other world and that sooner or later everything will come to an end. He contemplates driving up to Vermont and talking to Brill. Would it be possible to convince the old man to stop thinking about his story? He tries to imagine the conversation, tries to summon the words he would use to present his argument, but all he ever sees is Brill laughing at him, the incredulous laughter of a man who would take him for an imbecile, a mental defective, and promptly throw him out of the house. So Brick does nothing, and precisely one month after his return from Wellington, on the evening of May twenty-first, as he sits in the living room with Flora, demonstrating a new card trick to his laughing wife, someone knocks on the door. Without having to think about it, Brick already knows what has happened. He tells Flora not to open the door, to run into the bedroom and go down the fire escape as fast as she can, but willful, independent Flora, unaware of the fix they’re in, scoffs at his panicked instructions and does exactly what he tells her not to do. Bounding off the sofa before he can grab her arm, she dances to the door with a mocking pirouette and yanks it open. Two men are standing on the threshold, Lou Frisk and Duke Rothstein, and since each one is holding a revolver in his hand and pointing it at Flora, Brick doesn’t move from his spot on the sofa. Theoretically, he can still try to escape, but the moment he stood up, the mother of his child would be dead.
Who the fuck are you? Flora says, in a shrill, angry voice.
Sit down next to your husband, Frisk replies, waving his gun in the direction of the sofa. We have some business to discuss with him.
Turning to Brick with an anguished look on her face, Flora says: What’s going on, baby?
Come here, Brick answers, patting the sofa with his right hand. Those guns aren’t toys, and you have to do what they say.
For once, Flora doesn’t resist, and as the two men enter the apartment and shut the door, she walks over to the sofa and sits down beside her husband.
These are my friends, Brick says to her. Duke Rothstein and Lou Frisk. Remember when I told you about them? Well, here they are.
Jesus holy Christ, Flora mutters, by now sick to death with fear.
Frisk and Rothstein settle into two chairs opposite the sofa. The cards that were used to demonstrate the trick are strewn across the surface of the coffee table in front of them. Taking hold of one of the cards and turning it over, Frisk says: I’m glad you remember us, Owen. We were beginning to have our doubts.
Don’t worry, Brick says. I never forget a face.
How’s the tooth? Rothstein asks, breaking into what looks like a cross between a grimace and a smile.
Much better, thank you, Brick says. I went to the dentist, and he put a cap on it.
I’m sorry I hit you so hard. But orders are orders, and I had to do my job. Scare tactics. I guess they didn’t work too well, did they?
Have you ever had a gun pointed at you? Frisk asks.
Believe it or not, Brick says, this is the first time.
You seem to be handling it pretty well.
I’ve played it out in my head so often, I feel as if it’s already happened.
Which means you’ve been expecting us.
Of course I’ve been expecting you. The only surprise is that you didn’t show up sooner.
We figured we’d give you a month. It’s a tough assignment, and it seemed only fair to give you a little time to work yourself up to it. But the month is over now, and we still haven’t seen any results. Do you want to explain yourself?
I can’t do it. That’s all. I just can’t do it.
While you’ve been twiddling your thumbs in Jackson Heights, the war has gone from bad to worse. The Federals launched a spring offensive, and nearly every town on the East Coast has been under attack. Operation Unity, they call it. A million and a half more dead while you sit here wrestling with your conscience. The Twin Cities were invaded three weeks ago, and half of Minnesota is under Federal control again. Huge parts of Idaho, Wyoming, and Nebraska have been turned into prison camps. Shall I go on?
No, no, I get the picture.
You have to do it, Brick.
I’m sorry. I just can’t.
You remember the consequences, don’t you?
Isn’t that why you’re here?
Not yet. We’re giving you a deadline. One week from today. If Brill isn’t taken care of by midnight on the twenty-eighth, Duke and I will be back, and next time our guns will be loaded. Do you hear me, Corporal? One week from today, or else you and your wife die for nothing.
I don’t know what time it is. The hands on the alarm clock aren’t illuminated, and I’m not about to switch on the lamp again and subject myself to the blinding rays of the bulb. I keep intending to ask Miriam to buy me one of those glow-in-the-dark jobs, but every time I wake up in the morning, I forget. The light erases the thought, and I don’t remember it again until I’m back in bed, lying awake as I am now, staring up at the invisible ceiling in my invisible room. I can’t be certain, but I would guess it’s somewhere between one-thirty and two o’clock. Inching along, inching along . . .
The Web site was Miriam’s idea. If I had known what she was up to, I would have told her not to waste her time, but she kept it a secret from me (in collusion with her mother, who had saved nearly every scrap of writing I’d ever published), and when she came to New York for my seventieth-birthday dinner, she took me into my study, turned on my laptop, and showed me what she had done. The articles were hardly worth the trouble, but the thought of my daughter spending untold hours typing up all those ancient pieces of mine—for posterity, as she put it—more or less undid me, and I didn’t know what to say. My usual impulse is to deflect emotional scenes with a dry quip or wiseacre remark, but that night I simply put my arms around Miriam and said nothing. Sonia cried, of course. She always cried when she was happy, but on that occasion her tears were especially poignant and terrible to me, since her cancer had been detected only three days earlier and the prognosis was cloudy, touch-and-go at best. No one said a word about it, but all three of us knew that she might not be around for my next birthday. As it turned out, a year was too much to hope for.
I shouldn’t be doing this. I promised myself not to fall into the trap of Sonia-thoughts and Sonia-memories, not to let myself go. I can’t afford to break down now and sink into a despond of grief and self-recrimination. I might start howling and wake the girls upstairs—or else spend the next several hours thinking of ever more artful and devious ways to kill myself. That task has been reserved for Brick, the protagonist of tonight’s story. Perhaps that explains why he and Flora turn on her computer and look at Miriam’s Web site. It seems important that my hero should get to know me a bit, to learn what kind of man he’s up against, and now that he’s dipped into some of the books I’ve recommended, we’ve finally begun to establish a bond. It’s turning into a rather complicated jig, I suppose, but the fact is that the Brill character wasn’t in my original plan. The mind that created the war was going to belong to someone else, another invented character, as unreal as Brick and Flora and Tobak and all the rest, but the longer I went on, the more I understood how badly I was fooling myself. The story is about a man who must kill the person who created him, and why pretend that I am not that person? By putting myself into the story, the story becomes real. Or else I become unreal, yet one more f
igment of my own imagination. Either way, the effect is more satisfying, more in harmony with my mood—which is dark, my little ones, as dark as the obsidian night that surrounds me.
I’m blathering on, letting my thoughts fly helter-skelter to keep Sonia at bay, but in spite of my efforts, she’s still there, the ever-present absent one, who spent so many nights in this bed with me, now lying in a grave in the Cimetière Montparnasse, my French wife of eighteen years, and then nine years apart, and then twenty-one more years together, thirty-nine years in all, forty-one counting the two years before our wedding, more than half my life, much more than half, and nothing left now but boxes of photographs and seven scratchy LPs, the recordings she made in the sixties and seventies, Schubert, Mozart, Bach, and the chance to listen to her voice again, that small but beautiful voice, so drenched in feeling, so much the essence of who she was. Photographs . . . and music . . . and Miriam. She left me our child, too, that mustn’t be overlooked, the child who is no longer a child, and how strange to think that I’d be lost without her now, no doubt drunk every night, if not dead or on life support in some hospital. When she asked me to move in with her after the accident, I politely turned her down, explaining that she had enough burdens already without adding me to the list. She took hold of my hand and said: No, Dad, you don’t get it. I need you. I’m so damned lonely in that house, I don’t know how much longer I can take it. I need someone to talk to. I need someone to look at, to be there at dinner, to hold me every once in a while and tell me that I’m not an awful person.
Awful person must have come from Richard, an epithet that shot out of his mouth during an ugly row at the end of their marriage. People say the worst things in the flush of anger, and it pains me that Miriam allowed those words to stick to her like some ultimate judgment of her character, a condemnation of who and what she is. There are depths of goodness in that girl, the same kind of self-punishing goodness that Noriko embodies in the film, and because of that, almost inevitably, even if Richard was the one who jumped ship, she continues to fault herself for what happened. I don’t know if I’ve been of much help to her, but at least she isn’t alone anymore. We were settling into a fairly comfortable routine before Titus was killed, and I just want you to remember this, Miriam: when Katya was in trouble, she didn’t go to her father, she went to you.
By now, Frisk and Rothstein have left the apartment. The moment the door shuts behind them, Flora begins swearing in Spanish, reeling off a long spate of invective that Brick is unable to follow, since his knowledge of the language is limited to just a few words, principally hello and good-bye, and yet he doesn’t interrupt her, withdrawing into himself during those thirty seconds of incomprehension to ponder the dilemma that is facing them and think of what to do next. He finds it odd, but all fear seems to have left him, and while just minutes earlier he was convinced that he and Flora were about to be killed, instead of shaking and trembling in the aftermath of that unexpected reprieve, a great calm has settled over him. He saw his death in the form of Frisk’s gun, and even if that gun is no longer there, his death is still with him—as if it were the only thing that belonged to him now, as if whatever life remains in him has already been stolen by that death. And if Brick is doomed, then the first thing to be done is to protect Flora by sending her as far away from him as possible.
Brick is calm, but it seems to have no effect on his wife, who is growing more and more agitated.
What are we going to do? she says. My God, Owen, we can’t just sit around here and wait for them to come back. I don’t want to die. It’s too stupid to die when you’re twenty-seven years old. I don’t know . . . maybe we can run away and hide somewhere.
It wouldn’t do any good. Wherever we went, they’re bound to track us down.
Then maybe you have to kill that old man, after all.
We’ve already been through that. You were against it, remember?
I didn’t know anything then. Now I know.
I don’t see how that makes any difference. I can’t do it, and even if I could, I’d only wind up in prison.
Who says you’ll be caught? If you think of a good plan, maybe you’ll get away with it.
Leave it alone, Flora. You don’t want me to do it any more than I do.
Okay. Then we hire someone to do it for you.
Stop it. We’re not killing anyone. Do you understand me?
What then? If we don’t do something, we’ll be dead one week from tonight.
I’m going to send you away. That’s the first step. Back to your mother in Buenos Aires.
But you just said they’d find us wherever we go.
They’re not interested in you. I’m the one they’re after, and once we’re apart, they’re not going to bother with you.
What are you saying, Owen?
Just that I want you to be safe.
And what about you?
Don’t worry. I’ll think of something. I’m not going to let myself be killed by those two maniacs, I promise. You’ll go down and visit your mother for a while, and when you come back, I’ll be waiting for you in this apartment. Understood?
I don’t like it, Owen.
You don’t have to like it. You just have to do it. For me.
That evening they book a round-trip flight to Buenos Aires, and the next morning Brick drives Flora to the airport. He knows it is the last time he will ever see her, but he struggles to maintain his composure and gives no hint of the anguish roiling inside him. As he kisses her good-bye at the security entrance, surrounded by throngs of travelers and uniformed airport personnel, Flora suddenly begins to cry. Brick gathers her into his arms and strokes the top of her head, but now that he can feel her body convulsing against his, and now that her tears are seeping through his shirt and dampening his skin, he no longer knows what to say.
Don’t make me go, Flora begs.
No tears, he whispers back to her. It’s only ten days. By the time you come home, everything will be finished.
And so it will, he thinks, as he climbs into his car and drives home to Jackson Heights from the airport. At that point, he has every intention of keeping his word: to avoid another encounter with Rothstein and Frisk, to be waiting for Flora in the apartment when she returns—but that doesn’t mean he plans on being alive.
So now it’s a suicide, he remembers saying to Frisk.
In a roundabout way, yes.
Brick is approaching his thirtieth birthday, and not once in his life has he ever thought of killing himself. Now it has become his sole preoccupation, and for the next two days he sits in the apartment trying to figure out the most painless and efficient method of leaving this world. He considers buying a gun and shooting himself in the head. He considers poison. He considers slitting his wrists. Yes, he says to himself, that’s the old standard, isn’t it? Drink half a bottle of vodka, pour twenty or thirty sleeping pills down your throat, slip into a warm tub, and then slash your veins with a carving knife. Rumor has it that you barely feel a thing.
The conundrum is that there are still five more days to go, and with each day that passes, the calm and certainty that descended over his mind as he looked into the barrel of Frisk’s gun loosen their hold on him by several more degrees. Death was a foregone conclusion back then, a mere formality under the circumstances, but as his calm gradually turns into disquiet, and his certainty melts away into doubt, he tries to imagine the vodka and the pills, the warm bath and the blade of the knife, and suddenly the old fear returns, and once that happens, he understands that his resolve has vanished, that he will never find the courage to go through with it.
How much time has passed by then? Four days—no, five days—which means that only forty-eight hours are left. Brick has yet to stir from his apartment and venture outside. He has canceled all his Great Zavello performances for the week, claiming to be down with the flu, and has unplugged the phone from the wall. He suspects that Flora has been trying to reach him, but he can’t bring himself to talk to her just n
ow, knowing that the sound of her voice would upset him so much that he might lose control and start babbling inanities to her or, worse, start crying, which would only deepen her alarm. Nevertheless, on the morning of May 27, he finally shaves, showers, and puts on a fresh set of clothes. Sunlight is pouring through the windows, the beckoning radiance of the New York spring, and he decides that a walk in the air might do him some good. If his mind has failed to solve his problems for him, perhaps he will find the answer in his feet.
The instant he steps onto the sidewalk, however, he hears someone calling his name. It’s a woman’s voice, and because no other pedestrians are passing by at that moment, Brick is at a loss to identify where the voice is coming from. He looks around, the voice calls to him again, and behold, there is Virginia Blaine, sitting behind the wheel of a car parked directly across the street. In spite of himself, Brick is inordinately glad to see her, but as he steps down from the curb and walks over to the woman who has haunted him for the past month, a wave of apprehension flutters through him. By the time he reaches the white Mercedes sedan, he can feel his pulse pounding inside his head.
Good morning, Owen, Virginia says. Do you have a minute?
I wasn’t expecting to see you again, Brick replies, looking closely at her beautiful face, which is even more beautiful than he remembered, and her dark brown hair, which is shorter than it was the last time he saw her, and her delicate mouth with the red lipstick, and her blue eyes with the long lashes, and her thin, graceful hands resting on the wheel of the car.
I hope I’m not interrupting anything, she says.
Not at all. I was just going out for a walk.
Good. Let’s make it a drive instead, okay?
Where to?
I’ll tell you later. We have a lot to talk about first. By the time we get to where we’re going, you’ll understand why I took you there.
