by Auster, Paul
But I don’t work for him. That’s only a cover.
What does that mean?
Do I have to spell it out?
You’re a double agent?
Sort of.
You’re not going to tell me you’re with the Federals.
Of course not. I hate those murdering bastards.
Then who is it?
Patience, Owen. You have to give me some time. First things first, okay?
All right. I’m listening.
Yes, I was the one who suggested you for the job. But I didn’t know what it was. Something big, they said, something vital to the outcome of the war, but they never gave me any details. I wasn’t told until you were already on the other side. I swear, I had no idea they were going to order you to kill someone. And then, even after I found out, I had no idea Frisk was going to threaten to kill you if you didn’t carry out the job. I only learned about that last night. That’s why I came. Because I wanted to help.
I don’t believe a word you’re saying.
Why should you? If I were in your place, I wouldn’t believe me either. But it’s the truth.
The funny thing is, Virginia, it doesn’t bother me anymore. When you lie, I mean. I like you too much to get worked up about it. You might be a fake, you might even be the person who winds up killing me, but I’ll never stop liking you.
I like you, too, Owen.
You’re a strange person. Did anyone ever tell you that?
All the time. Ever since I was a little girl.
How long has it been since you’ve been back on this side?
Fifteen years. This is my first trip. It wasn’t even possible until about three months ago. You were the first one to go back and forth. Did you know that?
No one ever told me anything.
It’s like stepping into a dream, isn’t it? The same place, but entirely different. America without war. It’s hard to digest. You get so used to the fighting, it kind of creeps into your bones, and after a while, you can’t imagine a world without it.
America’s at war, all right. We’re just not fighting it here. Not yet, anyway.
How’s your wife, Owen? It’s stupid of me, but I can’t remember her name.
Flora.
That’s right, Flora. Do you want to call and let her know you’ll be gone for a couple of days?
She isn’t in New York. I sent her back to her mother in Argentina.
Smart thinking. You did the right thing.
She’s pregnant, by the way. I thought you’d like to know that.
Good work, kid. Congratulations.
Flora’s pregnant, I love her more than ever, I’d rather cut off my right arm than do anything to hurt her, and still, the only thing I really want right now is to go to bed with you. Does that make any sense?
Absolutely.
One last roll in the hay.
Don’t talk like that. You’re not going to die, Owen.
Well, what do you think? Does the idea appeal to you?
Do you remember what I said the last time you saw me?
How could I forget?
Then you already have your answer, don’t you?
They cross the border into Massachusetts, and a few minutes later they stop to fill the tank with gas, visit the ladies’ and men’s, and eat a pair of wretched, microwaved hot dogs on soggy buns, which they wash down with gulps of bottled water. As they walk back to the car, Brick takes Virginia in his arms and kisses her, driving his tongue deep into her mouth. It is a delicious moment for him, fulfilling the dream of half a lifetime, but one also marked by shame and regret, for this small prelude to further pleasures with his old love is the first time he has touched another woman since marrying Flora. But Brick, who is nothing less than a soldier now, a man engaged in fighting a war, justifies his infidelity by reminding himself that he could well be dead by tomorrow.
Once they hit the highway again, he turns to Virginia and asks her the question he’s been putting off for more than two hours: where are they going?
Two places, she says. The first one today, the next one tomorrow.
Well, that’s a start, I guess. You wouldn’t care to be a little more specific, would you?
I can’t tell you about the first stop, because I want that to be a surprise. But tomorrow we’re going to Vermont.
Vermont … That means Brill. You’re taking me to Brill.
You catch on fast, Owen.
It won’t do any good, Virginia. I’ve thought about going there a dozen times, but I have no idea what to say to him.
Just ask him to stop.
He’ll never listen to me.
How do you know unless you try?
Because I do, that’s all.
You’re forgetting that I’ll be with you.
What difference does that make?
I’ve already told you that I don’t really work for Frisk. Who do you think I take my orders from?
How should I know?
Come on, Corporal. Think.
Not Brill.
Yes, Brill.
That’s impossible. He’s on this side, and you’re on the other side. There’s no way for you to communicate.
Did you ever hear of a telephone?
The phones don’t work. I already tried to call when I was in Wellington. I dialed my apartment in Queens, and they said the number was out of service.
There are phones and there are phones, my friend. Given his part in all this, do you think Brill would have one that didn’t work?
So you talk to him.
Constantly.
But you’ve never met.
No. Tomorrow is the big day.
And what about now? Why not go to him now?
Because the appointment is for tomorrow. And until then, you and I have other plans.
Your surprise …
Exactly.
How much longer to go?
Less than half an hour. In about two minutes, I’m going to ask you to close your eyes. You can open them again after we get there.
Brick plays along with the game, gladly submitting to Virginia’s puerile whims, and for the last minutes of the journey he sits in his seat without saying a word, trying to guess what prank she has in store for him. If he were better versed in geography, he might have found a solution long before their arrival, but Brick has no more than a fuzzy understanding of maps, and since he has never actually set foot in Worcester, Massachusetts (having imagined himself there only in a dream), when the car stops and Virginia tells him to open his eyes, he is convinced he’s back in Wellington. The car has pulled up in front of the suburban house they entered last month, the same brick-and-stucco manor with the luxuriant front lawn, the flower beds, and the tall, blooming bushes. When he glances down the street, however, all the neighboring houses are intact. No charred walls, no collapsed roofs, no broken windows. The war has not touched the block, and as Brick slowly turns around in a circle, trying to absorb the familiar but altered setting, the illusion finally bursts, and he knows where he is. Not Wellington but Worcester, the former name of the city in the other world.
Isn’t it wonderful? Virginia says, raising her arms and gesturing to the undamaged houses. Her eyes have lit up, and a smile is spreading across her face. This is the way it used to be, Owen. Before the guns … before the attacks … before Brill started tearing everything apart. I never thought I’d live to see it again.
Let Virginia Blaine have her brief moment of joy. Let Owen Brick forget his little Flora and find comfort in the arms of Virginia Blaine. Let the man and the woman who met as children take mutual pleasure in their adult bodies. Let them climb into bed together and do what they will. Let them eat. Let them drink. Let them return to the bed and do what they will to every inch and orifice of their grown-up bodies. Life goes on, after all, even under the most painful circumstances, goes on until the end, and then it stops. And these lives will stop, since they must stop, since neither one of them can ever make it to Vermont to talk to Br
ill, for Brill might weaken then and give up, and Brill can never give up, since he must go on telling his story, the story of the war in that other world, which is also this world, and he can’t allow anyone or anything to stop him.
It’s the middle of the night. Virginia is lying under the covers asleep, her sated flesh expanding and contracting as the cool air enters and exits her lungs, dreaming God knows what in the dim moonlight that filters through the half-open window. Brick is on his side, his body curled around hers, one hand cupping her left breast, the other hand poised on the rounded area where her hip and buttock merge, but the corporal is restless, unaccountably wakeful, and after struggling to fall asleep for close to an hour, he slips out of bed to go downstairs and pour himself a drink, wondering if a shot of whiskey might not quell the tremors that are rising within him as he contemplates tomorrow’s meeting with the old man. Dressed in the dead husband’s terry-cloth robe, he walks into the kitchen and turns on the light. Confronted by the dazzle of that elegant space, with its sleek surfaces and costly appliances, Brick begins to think about Virginia’s marriage. Her husband must have been a good deal older than she was, he muses, a sharp operator with the wherewithal to afford a house like this one, and because Virginia has yet to say a word about him (except to mention that he was rich), the not-so-well-off magician from Queens asks himself if she cared about her departed spouse or simply married him for his money. The idle thoughts of an insomniac, searching the cupboards for a clean glass and a bottle of scotch: the endless banalities that flit through the mind as one notion mutates into the next. So it goes with all of us, young and old, rich and poor, and then an unexpected event comes crashing down on us to jolt us out of our torpor.
Brick hears the low-flying planes in the distance, then the noise of a helicopter engine, and an instant after that, the keening blast of an explosion. The windows in the kitchen shatter to bits, the floor shakes under his bare feet and then begins to tilt, as if the entire foundation of the house were shifting position, and when Brick runs into the front hall to mount the stairs and check on Virginia, he is met by large, writhing spears of flame. Wooden shards and slate roof tiles are falling down from above. Brick turns his eyes upward, and after several seconds of confusion he understands that he is looking at the night sky through clouds of billowing smoke. The top half of the house is gone, which means that Virginia is also gone, and while he knows it will serve no purpose, he desperately wants to mount the stairs and look for her body. But the stairs are on fire now, and he will burn to death if he gets any closer.
He runs outside onto the lawn, and all around him howling neighbors are pouring from their houses into the night. A contingent of Federal troops has massed in the middle of the street, fifty or sixty helmeted men, all of them armed with machine guns. Brick raises his hands in a gesture of surrender, but it doesn’t do him any good. The first bullet hits him in the leg, and he falls down, clutching the wound as blood spurts onto his fingers. Before he can inspect the damage and see how badly he is hurt, a second bullet goes straight through his right eye and out the back of his head. And that is the end of Owen Brick, who leaves the world in silence, with no chance to say a last word or think a last thought.
Meanwhile, seventy-five miles to the northwest, in a white wooden house in southern Vermont, August Brill is awake, lying in bed and staring into the dark. And the war goes on.
* * *
Does it have to end that way? Yes, probably yes, although it wouldn’t be difficult to think of a less brutal outcome. But what would be the point? My subject tonight is war, and now that war has entered this house, I feel I would be insulting Titus and Katya if I softened the blow. Peace on earth, good will toward men. Piss on earth, good will toward none. This is the heart of it, the black center of the dead of night, a good four hours still to burn and all hope for sleep utterly smashed. The only solution is to leave Brick behind me, make sure that he gets a decent burial, and then come up with another story. Something low to the ground this time, a counterweight to the fantastical machine I’ve just built. Giordano Bruno and the theory of infinite worlds. Provocative stuff, yes, but there are other stones to be unearthed as well.
* * *
War stories. Let your guard down for a moment, and they come rushing in on you, one by one by one …
* * *
The last time Sonia and I went to Europe together, we wound up in Brussels for a couple of days to attend a reunion of some distant branch of her family. One afternoon, we had lunch with a second cousin of hers, an old gent pushing eighty, a former publisher who had grown up in Belgium and later moved to France, an affable, well-read person who spoke in complex, highly articulated paragraphs, a walking book in the shape of a man. The restaurant was in a narrow arcade somewhere in the center of the city, and before we went inside to have our meal, he took us to a small courtyard at the end of the walkway to show us a fountain and a bronze statue of a water nymph sitting in the pool. It wasn’t an especially brilliant work—a somewhat smaller than life-size rendering of a nude girl in her mid- to late teens—but in spite of its clumsiness, there were touching qualities about it as well, something about the curve of the girl’s back, I think, or else the tininess of her breasts and her slender hips, or else simply the smallish scale of the piece in general. As we stood there examining it, Jean-Luc told us that the model had grown up to become his high school literature teacher and was only seventeen when she posed for the artist. We turned around and went into the restaurant, and over lunch he told us more about his connection to that woman. She was the one who made him fall in love with books, he said, because when he was her student he developed an intense crush on her, and that love wound up changing the direction of his life. When the Germans occupied Belgium in 1940, Jean-Luc was just fifteen, but he joined an underground resistance cell as a courier, attending school by day and running messages at night. His teacher joined the resistance as well, and one morning in 1942 the Germans marched into the lycée and arrested her. Shortly after that, Jean-Luc’s cell was infiltrated and destroyed. He had to go into hiding, he said, and for the last eighteen months of the war he lived alone in an attic and did nothing but read books—all books, every book, from the ancient Greeks to the Renaissance to the twentieth century, consuming novels and plays, poetry and philosophy, understanding that he never could have done this without the influence of his teacher, who had been arrested before his eyes and for whom he prayed every night. When the war finally ended, he learned that she hadn’t made it home from the camp, but no one could tell him how or when she had died. She had been blotted out, expunged from the face of the earth, and not a single person knew what had happened to her.
Some years after that (late forties? early fifties?), he was eating alone in a restaurant in Brussels and overheard two men talking at the next table. One of them had spent time in a concentration camp during the war, and as he told the other man a story about one of his fellow inmates, Jean-Luc became more and more convinced that he was referring to his teacher, the little water nymph sitting in the fountain at the end of the arcade. All the details seemed to fit: a Belgian girl in her twenties, red hair, small body, extremely beautiful, a left-wing troublemaker who had defied an order from one of the camp guards. To set an example for the other prisoners and demonstrate what happens to people who disobey the guards, the commandant decided to execute her in public, with the entire population of the camp on hand to witness the killing. Jean-Luc was expecting the man to say that they hanged her or stood her up against a wall and shot her, but it turned out that the commandant had something more traditional in mind, a method that had gone out of fashion several centuries earlier. Jean-Luc couldn’t look at us when he spoke the words. He turned his head away and looked out the window, as if the execution were taking place just outside the restaurant, and in a quiet voice suddenly filled with emotion, he said: She was drawn and quartered. With long chains attached to both her wrists and both her ankles, she was led into the yard, made to stand
at attention as the chains were attached to four jeeps pointing in four different directions, and then the commandant gave the order for the drivers to start their engines. According to the man at the next table, the woman didn’t cry out, didn’t make a sound as one limb after another was pulled off her body. Is such a thing possible? Jean-Luc was tempted to talk to the man, he said, but then he realized that he wasn’t capable of talking. Fighting back tears, he stood up, tossed some money on the table, and left the restaurant.
* * *
Sonia and I returned to Paris, and within forty-eight hours I heard two more stories that hit me hard—not with the sickening violence of Jean-Luc’s story, but hard enough to have left an enduring impact. The first one came from Alec Foyle, a British journalist who flew in from London to have dinner with us one night. Alec is in his late forties, a onetime boyfriend of Miriam’s, and even if it’s all water under the bridge now, Sonia and I were both a little surprised when our daughter chose Richard over him. We had been out of contact for a number of years, and there was a lot of catching up to do, which led to one of those hectic conversations that careen abruptly from one subject to the next. At a certain point we started talking about families, and Alec told us about a recent conversation he’d had with a friend, a woman who covered the arts for the Independent or the Guardian, I forget which. He said to her: At one time or another, every family lives through extraordinary events—horrendous crimes, floods and earthquakes, bizarre accidents, miraculous strokes of luck, and there isn’t a family in the world without secrets and skeletons, trunkfuls of hidden material that would make your jaw drop if the lid were ever opened. His friend disagreed with him. It’s true for many families, she said, maybe for most families, but not all. Her family, for example. She couldn’t think of a single interesting thing that had ever happened to any of them, not one exceptional event. Impossible, Alec said. Just concentrate for a moment, and you’re bound to come up with something. So his friend thought for a while, and eventually she said: Well, maybe there’s one thing. My grandmother told it to me not long before she died, and I suppose it’s fairly unusual.
