Moon Palace

by Paul Auster

  Zimmer was the one who took care of me during my convalescence. His new apartment was on the second floor of an ancient West Village tenement building, a dingy hogan of a place crowded with books and records: two small rooms with no door between them, a rudimentary kitchen, a windowless bathroom. I understood what a sacrifice it was for him to put me up there, but every time I tried to thank him for it, Zimmer would wave me off, pretending it didn’t matter. He fed me out of his own pocket, allowed me to sleep in his bed, asked for nothing in return. At the same time, he was furious with me, and he made no bones about telling me how disgusted he was. Not only had I acted like an imbecile, but I had nearly killed myself in the process. It was inexcusable for a person of my intelligence to act like that, he said. It was grotesque, it was asinine, it was unhinged. If I was in trouble, why hadn’t I turned to him for help? Didn’t I know that he would have been willing to do anything for me? I said very little in response to these attacks. I understood that Zimmer’s feelings had been hurt, and I was ashamed of myself for having done that to him. As time went on, it became increasingly difficult for me to make sense of the disaster I had created. I had thought I was acting with courage, but it turned out that I was merely demonstrating the most abject form of cowardice: rejoicing in my contempt for the world, refusing to look things squarely in the face. I felt nothing but remorse now, a crippling sense of my own stupidity. The days went by in Zimmer’s apartment, and as I slowly put myself back together, I realized that I would have to start my life all over again. I wanted to atone for my errors, to make amends to the people who still cared about me. I was tired of myself, tired of my thoughts, tired of brooding about my fate. More than anything else, I felt a need to purify myself, to repent for all my excesses of self-involvement. From total selfishness, I resolved to achieve a state of total selflessness. I would think of others before I thought of myself, consciously striving to undo the damage I had done, and in that way perhaps I would begin to accomplish something in the world. It was an impossible program, of course, but I stuck to it with almost religious fanaticism. I wanted to turn myself into a saint, a godless saint who would wander through the world performing good works. No matter how absurd it sounds to me now, I believe that was precisely what I wanted. I was desperate for a certainty, and I was prepared to do anything to find it.

  There was one more obstacle in my way, however. Luck got me around it in the end, but only by the smallest hair’s breadth of a margin. A day or two after my temperature returned to normal, I happened to get out of bed to go to the toilet. It was evening, I think, and Zimmer was working at his desk in the other room. As I shuffled back to bed after I was done, I noticed Uncle Victor’s clarinet case lying on the floor. I had not thought of it since my rescue, and I was suddenly horrified to see what poor condition it was in. The black leather covering was half gone, and much of what remained had bubbled and cracked apart. The storm in Central Park had been too much for it, and I wondered if the water had seeped through and damaged the instrument as well. I picked up the case and carried it into bed with me, fully prepared for the worst. I unsnapped the locks and opened it, but before I had a chance to examine the clarinet, a white envelope fluttered to the floor, and I realized that my troubles were only just beginning. It was the letter from the draft board. Not only had I forgotten the date of my physical, I had forgotten that the letter had been sent to me. In that one instant, everything closed in on me again. I was probably a fugitive from justice, I thought. If I had missed the physical, then the government would already have issued a warrant for my arrest—and that meant there would be hell to pay, consequences I could not even imagine. I tore open the envelope and found the date that had been typed into the blank on the form letter: September 16. This meant nothing to me, since I no longer knew what day it was. I had lost the habit of looking at clocks and calendars, and I couldn’t even make a guess.

  “One small question,” I said to Zimmer, who was still bent over his work. “Do you happen to know what day it is?”

  “It’s Monday,” he said, without looking up.

  “I mean the date. The month and the number. You don’t have to give me the year. I’m fairly certain of that.”

  “September fifteenth,” he said, still not bothering to look up.

  “September fifteenth?” I said. “Are you sure of that?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

  I sank back onto the pillow and closed my eyes. “It’s extraordinary,” I muttered. “It’s absolutely extraordinary.”

  Zimmer turned from his desk at last and gave me a puzzled look. “Why on earth should it be extraordinary?”

  “Because it means I’m not a criminal.”

  “What?”

  “Because it means I’m not a criminal.”

  “I heard you the first time. Saying it again doesn’t make it any clearer.”

  I held up the letter and waved it in the air. “Once you look at this,” I said, “you’ll understand what I mean.”

  I was due to report at Whitehall Street the next morning. Zimmer had already been through his physical in July (he had been given a deferment because of asthma), and we spent the next two or three hours discussing what was in store for me. It was essentially the same conversation that millions of young men in America had during those years. Unlike the vast majority of them, however, I had done nothing to prepare myself for the moment of truth. I did not have a note from a doctor, I had not gorged myself on drugs to distort my motor responses, I had not staged a series of mental breakdowns to establish a history of psychological disturbance. I had always known that I would never join the army, but once I reached that conclusion, I had not given the subject much thought. As with so many other things, inertia had got the better of me, and I had steadfastly shut the problem out of my mind. Zimmer was appalled, but even he was forced to admit that it was too late to do anything about it now. I would either pass the physical or flunk it, and if I passed, there were only two options available to me: I could leave the country or go to prison. Zimmer told a number of stories about people who had gone abroad, to Canada, to France, to Sweden, but I wasn’t terribly interested. I had no money, I said, and I wasn’t in the mood to travel.

  “So you’ll turn out to be a criminal anyway,” he said.

  “A prisoner,” I corrected him. “A prisoner of conscience. There’s a difference.”

  I was still in the first stages of recovery, and when I stood up the next morning to get dressed—in Zimmer’s clothes, which were several sizes too small for me—I realized that I was in no shape to be going anywhere. I was utterly depleted, and just trying to walk across the room demanded all my energy and concentration. Until then, I hadn’t been out of bed for more than a minute or two at a time, groping my way feebly to the toilet and back. If Zimmer hadn’t been there to hold me up, I doubt that I would have made it out the door. He literally kept me on my feet, walking me down the stairs with both arms around my body and then letting me lean on him as we staggered along to the subway. It was a sad and gruesome spectacle, I’m afraid. Zimmer took me to the front door of the building on Whitehall Street and then pointed to a restaurant directly opposite, where he said I could find him after I was done. He squeezed my arm for encouragement. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll make a hell of a soldier, Fogg. It’s written all over you.” “You’re fucking copy,” I answered. “Best fucking soldier in the whole goddamned Army. Any fool can see that.” I gave Zimmer a mock salute and then tottered into the building, clinging to the walls for support.

  Much of what followed is lost to me now. Bits and pieces remain, but nothing that adds up to a full-fledged memory, nothing that I can talk about with any conviction. This inability to see what happened proves how wretchedly frail I must have been. It took all my strength just to stand there, trying not to fall down, and I did not pay attention as I should have. I think, in fact, that my eyes were mostly shut during those hours, and when I did manage to open them
, it was seldom long enough for the world to get in. There were fifty or a hundred of us who marched through the process together. I remember sitting at a desk in a large room and listening to a sergeant talk to us, but I can’t remember what he said, am unable to bring back a single word of it. They gave us forms to fill out, and then there was a written test of some kind, although it’s possible that the test came first and the forms second. I remember checking off the organizations I had belonged to and taking some time with that: SDS from college, SANE and SNCC from high school, and then having to explain the circumstances of my arrest the year before. I was the last one in the room to finish, and by the end the sergeant was standing over my shoulder, muttering something about Uncle Ho and the American flag.

  After that, there is a break of several minutes, perhaps half an hour. I see corridors, fluorescent lights, clusters of young men standing around in their underpants. I can remember the intense vulnerability I felt then, but numerous other details have vanished. Where we changed out of our clothes, for example, and what we said to each other as we waited in line. More specifically, I have been unable to conjure up any images concerning our feet. Above the knees we had nothing on but our jockey shorts, but everything below them remains a mystery to me. Were we allowed to wear our shoes and/or our socks, or did they make us walk through those halls barefooted? I draw nothing but blanks on this subject, cannot detect even the faintest glimmer.

  Eventually, I was told to enter a room. A doctor thumped me on the chest and back, looked into my ears, grabbed hold of my balls and asked me to cough. These things required little effort, but then it was time for him to take a blood sample, and suddenly the examination became more eventful. I was so anemic and emaciated that the doctor couldn’t find a vein in my arm. He poked a needle into me two or three times, jabbing and bruising my skin, but no blood flowed into the tube. I must have looked awful by then—all pale and queasy, like someone on the verge of blacking out—and after a while he gave up and told me to sit down on a bench. He was rather kind about it, I believe, or at least indifferent. “If you feel dizzy again,” he said, “just sit on the floor and wait until it passes. We don’t want you falling down and hitting your head, do we?”

  I distinctly remember sitting on the bench, but after that I see myself lying on a table in another room. It is impossible to know how much time elapsed between these two events. I don’t think I fainted, but when they tried to get blood from me again, they probably didn’t want to take any chances. A rubber cord was secured around my bicep to make the vein stand out, and when the doctor finally got the needle in—I can’t remember if it was the same doctor or another one—he said something about how thin I was and asked if I had eaten breakfast that morning. In what was surely my most lucid moment of the day, I turned to him and gave the simplest, most heartfelt answer I could think of. “Doctor,” I said, “do I look like someone who can go without eating breakfast?”

  There was more, there must have been a lot more, but I can’t pin down much of it. They gave us lunch somewhere (in the building? in a restaurant outside the building?), but the only thing I remember about the meal is that no one wanted to sit next to me. In the afternoon, back in the corridors upstairs, they finally got around to measuring and weighing us. I tipped the scales at some ridiculously low figure—112 pounds, I think it was, or perhaps 115. From that point on I was separated from the rest of the group. They sent me in to see a psychiatrist, a pudgy man with squat, truncated fingers, and I remember thinking that he looked more like a wrestler than a doctor. There was no question of telling him lies. I had already entered my new period of potential sainthood, and the last thing I wanted was to do something I would regret later. The psychiatrist sighed once or twice during our conversation, but other than that he seemed unperturbed by my remarks or my appearance. I imagined that he was an old hand at these interviews by now, and there wasn’t much that could upset him anymore. For my part, I was rather surprised by the vagueness of his questions. He asked me if I took drugs, and when I told him no, he raised his eyebrows and asked me again, but I gave him the same answer the second time and he didn’t pursue it. Standard questions followed after that: what my bowel movements looked like, whether or not I had nocturnal emissions, how often did I think of suicide. I answered as simply as I could, without embellishment or commentary. As I spoke, he checked off little boxes on a sheet of paper and did not look up at me. There was something that comforted me about discussing such intimate matters in this way—as though I were talking to an accountant or a garage mechanic. When he reached the bottom of the page, however, the doctor raised his eyes again and fixed them on me for a good four or five seconds.

  “You’re in pretty sorry shape, son,” he finally said.

  “I know that,” I said. “I haven’t been very well. But I think I’m getting better now.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “If you like.”

  “You can start by telling me about your weight.”

  “I’ve had the flu. I caught one of those stomach things a couple of weeks ago and haven’t been able to eat.”

  “How much weight have you lost?”

  “I don’t know. Forty or fifty pounds, I think.”

  “In two weeks?”

  “No, it’s taken about two years. But most of it came off this summer.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Money, for one thing. I haven’t had enough money to buy food.”

  “You don’t have a job?”

  “No.”

  “Have you been looking for one?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll have to explain that to me, son.”

  “It’s a fairly complicated business. I don’t know if you’ll be able to understand.”

  “Let me be the judge of that. Just tell me what happened and don’t worry about how it sounds. We’re not in any rush.”

  For some reason, I felt an overpowering urge to pour out my story to this stranger. Nothing could have been more inappropriate, but before I had a chance to stop myself, words were coming out of my mouth. I could feel my lips moving, but at the same time it was as though I was listening to someone else. I heard my voice rattling on about my mother, about Uncle Victor, about Central Park and Kitty Wu. The doctor nodded politely, but it was obvious that he had no idea what I was talking about. As I continued to explain the life I had lived for the past two years, I could see that he was actually becoming uncomfortable. This frustrated me, and the more his incomprehension showed, the more desperately I tried to make things clear to him. I felt that my humanity was somehow at stake. It didn’t matter that he was an army doctor; he was also a human being, and nothing was more important than getting through to him. “Our lives are determined by manifold contingencies,” I said, trying to be as succinct as possible, “and every day we struggle against these shocks and accidents in order to keep our balance. Two years ago, for reasons both personal and philosophical, I decided to give up the struggle. It wasn’t because I wanted to kill myself—you musn’t think that—but because I thought that by abandoning myself to the chaos of the world, the world might ultimately reveal some secret harmony to me, some form or pattern that would help me to penetrate myself. The point was to accept things as they were, to drift along with the flow of the universe. I’m not saying that I managed to do this very well. I failed miserably, in fact. But failure doesn’t vitiate the sincerity of the attempt. If I came close to dying, I nevertheless believe that I’m a better person for it.”

  It was a horrible botch. My language became increasingly awkward and abstract, and eventually I could see that the doctor had stopped listening. He was staring at some invisible point above my head, his eyes clouded over in a mixture of confusion and pity. I don’t know how many minutes my monologue went on, but it lasted long enough for him to determine that I was a hopeless case—an authentically hopeless case, and not one of the spurious madmen he had been trained to detect. “That will do, son,” he fi
nally said, cutting me off in midsentence. “I think I’m beginning to get the picture.” For the next minute or two I sat silently in my chair, shaking and sweating as he scribbled a note on a piece of official stationery. He folded it in half and then handed it to me across the desk. “Take this to the commanding officer down the hall,” he said, “and tell the next person to come in on your way out.”

  I remember walking down the hall with the note in my hand, struggling against the temptation to look at it. It was impossible not to feel that I was being watched, that there were people in the building who could read my thoughts. The commanding officer was a large man in full uniform with a jigsaw puzzle of medals and decorations on his chest. He looked up from a pile of papers on his desk and casually waved me in. I handed him the psychiatrist’s note. As soon as he glanced at it, he broke into a big toothy grin. “Thank goodness,” he said. “You just saved me a couple of days’ work.” Without any further explanation, he started tearing up the papers on his desk and throwing them into the trash basket. He seemed enormously satisfied. “I’m glad you flunked, Fogg,” he said. “We were going to have to do a full-scale investigation on you, but now that you’re unfit, we won’t have to bother.”

  “Investigation?” I said.

  “All those organizations you belonged to,” he said, almost merrily. “We can’t have pinko subversives and agitators in the army, can we? It’s not good for morale.”

  I don’t remember the precise sequence of events after that, but a short time later I found myself sitting in a room along with the other misfits and rejects. There must have been a dozen of us in there, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more pathetic bunch of people gathered in one place. One boy, with hideous acne all over his face and back, sat trembling in a corner talking to himself. Another had a withered arm. Another, who weighed no less than three hundred pounds, stood against a wall making farting noises with his lips, laughing after each outburst like a troublesome seven-year-old. These were the simpletons, the grotesques, the young men who did not belong anywhere. I was almost unconscious with fatigue by then and did not talk to any of them. I settled into a chair by the door and closed my eyes. The next time I opened them, an officer was shaking my arm and telling me to wake up. You can go home now, he said, it’s all over.