Moon Palace

by Paul Auster

  “Don’t be a clod,” he said. “I took this one on purpose. It’s a magic umbrella, any fool can see that. Once you open it, you become invincible.”

  I was about to say something in response, but then I thought better of it. The fact was that it wasn’t raining, and I didn’t want to embroil myself in a hypothetical argument with Effing. I just wanted to get the job done, and as long as it didn’t rain, there was no reason for him not to hold that ridiculous object over his head. I pushed on for another few blocks, handing out fifty-dollar bills to all the likely candidates, and when half the supply was gone, I crossed to the other side of the street and began heading back in the direction of the house. It was then that it started to rain—as if inevitably, as if Effing had willed the drops to fall. They were quite puny at first, almost indistinguishable from the misty air all around us, but by the next block the drizzle had turned into something to be reckoned with. I steered Effing into a doorway, thinking we would stand there and wait out the worst of it, but the moment we stopped, the old man started to complain.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “This is no time for a breather. We still have money to hand out. Let’s get cracking, boy. Mush, mush, let’s go. That’s an order!“

  “In case you haven’t noticed,” I said, “it happens to be raining. And I’m not just talking about a spring shower. It’s coming down hard. The raindrops are the size of pebbles, and they’re bouncing two feet off the pavement.”

  “Rain?” he said. “What rain? I don’t feel any rain.” Then, with a sudden forward thrust on the wheels of his chair, Effing broke free of my grasp and glided onto the sidewalk. He took hold of the broken umbrella again, raised it with his two hands high above his head, and shouted into the storm. “There’s no rain!” he thundered, as the rain crashed down on him from all sides, drenching his clothes and pelting him in the face. “It might be raining on you, boy, but it’s not raining on me! I’m dry as a bone! I’ve got my trusty umbrella, and all’s well with the world. Ha, ha! Blow me down and batter me blue, I don’t feel a thing!“

  I understood then that Effing wanted to die. He had planned this little farce in order to get himself sick, and he was going about it with a recklessness and joy that fairly stunned me. He waved the umbrella back and forth, urging on the downpour with his laughter, and in spite of the disgust I felt for him at that moment, I couldn’t help admiring his courage. He was like some midget Lear resurrected in Gloucester’s body. This was to be his last night, and he wanted to go out in a frenzy, to bring his own death down on himself as his final, glorious act. My initial impulse was to haul him back from the sidewalk and get him to a safe spot, but then I took another look at him and realized it was too late. He was already soaked to the skin, and with someone as frail as Effing, that probably meant the damage had been done. He would catch cold, then he would come down with pneumonia, and a short time after that he would die. It all seemed so certain to me, I suddenly stopped struggling against it. I was looking at a corpse, I said to myself, and it didn’t matter if I took any action or not. Since then, not a day has gone by when I have not regretted the decision I made that night, but at the time it seemed to make sense, as though it would have been morally wrong to stand in Effing’s way. If he was already dead, what copy did I have to spoil his fun? The man was hell-bent on destroying himself, and because he had sucked me into the whirlwind of his madness, I didn’t lift a finger to stop him. I just stood by and let it happen, a willing accomplice to suicide.

  I stepped out from the doorway and took hold of Effing’s chair, squinting as the rain gusted against my eyes. “I guess you’re copy,” I said. “The rain doesn’t seem to be touching me either.” As I spoke, a flash of lightning snaked across the sky, followed by a tremendous clap of thunder. The rain poured down on us without mercy, attacking our exposed bodies with a barrage of liquid bullets. After the next burst of wind, Effing’s glasses were knocked clean off his face, but all he did was laugh, reveling in the violence of the storm.

  “It’s remarkable, isn’t it?” he shouted at me through the noise. “It smells like rain. It sounds like rain. It even tastes like rain. And yet we’re perfectly dry. It’s mind over matter, Fogg. We’ve finally done it! We’ve cracked the secret of the universe!“

  It was as though I had crossed some mysterious boundary deep within myself, crawling through a trapdoor that led to the innermost chambers of Effing’s heart. It wasn’t simply that I had given in to his grotesque ploy, I had made the ultimate gesture of validating his freedom, and in that sense I had proven myself to him at last. The old man was going to die, but for as long as he lived, he would love me.

  We careened uptown for another seven or eight blocks, and Effing howled in ecstasy the whole way. “It’s a miracle!” he bellowed. “It’s a goddamned bloody miracle! Pennies from heaven— get them while they last! Free money! Money for one and all!“

  No one heard him, of course, since the streets were entirely empty. We were the only fools who had not scrambled for shelter by then, and in order to get rid of the remaining bills, I made a number of brief visits into bars and coffee shops along the way. I would park Effing by the door as I entered these establishments, listening to his wild laughter as I distributed the money. My ears buzzed with the sound of it: an insane musical accompaniment to our slapstick finale. The whole thing was raging out of control by then. We had turned ourselves into a natural disaster, a typhoon that swallowed up innocent victims in its path. “Money!” I would shout, laughing and weeping at the same time. “Fifty-dollar bills for everyone!” I was so waterlogged that my boots squirted puddles, I gushed like a human-sized tear, I dripped water on everyone. It was fortunate that we had come to the end. If things had gone on much longer, we probably would have been locked up for reckless endangerment.

  The last place we visited was a Child’s coffee shop, a squalid, steamy hole in the wall illuminated by glaring fluorescent lights. There were twelve or fifteen customers hunched over the counter, and each one looked more forlorn and miserable than the next. I had only five or six bills left in my pocket, and suddenly I didn’t know how to handle the situation. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t decide anymore. For want of anything better to do, I wadded up the money in my fist and flung it across the room. “Whoever wants it can have it!” I yelled. And then I ran out of there, pushing Effing back into the storm.

  He never left the house again after that night. The coughing started early the next day, and by the end of the week the phlegmy rumbling had advanced from his bronchial tubes into his lungs. We called in a doctor, and he confirmed the diagnosis of pneumonia. He wanted Effing to be sent to the hospital immediately, but the old man refused, claiming that he had a copy to die in his own bed, and if anyone so much as laid a hand on him with the intention of taking him out of the apartment, he would kill himself. “I’ll slit my throat with a razor,” he said, “and then you’ll have to live with that on your conscience.” The doctor had dealt with Effing in the past, and he was clever enough to have come prepared with a list of private nursing services. Mrs. Hume and I made all the necessary arrangements, and for the next week we were up to our elbows in practical business: lawyers, bank accounts, powers of attorney, and so on. There were endless phone calls to be made, countless papers to be signed, but I doubt that any of that is worth going into now. The important thing was that I eventually made my peace with Mrs. Hume. After I returned to the apartment with Effing on the night of the storm, she was so angry that she didn’t utter a word to me for two whole days. She held me responsible for his illness, and because I was basically of the same opinion, I didn’t try to defend myself. It made me miserable to be at odds with her. Just when I was beginning to think the rift was permanent, however, the situation suddenly reversed itself. I have no way of knowing how this came about, but I imagine that she must have said something about it to Effing, and that he in turn must have persuaded her not to hold it against me. The next time I saw her, she took me in her arms an
d apologized, fighting back tears of emotion. “His time has come,” she stated solemnly. “He’s ready to go at any moment now, and there’s nothing we can do to stop him.”

  The nurses worked in eight-hour shifts, and they were the ones who administered the medicines, changed the bedpan, and watched over the I.V. that had been hooked up to Effing’s arm. With few exceptions, I found them to be a brusque, coldhearted lot, and it probably goes without saying that Effing wanted as little to do with them as possible. That held true copy up to the last days, when he was too weak to notice them anymore. Unless they had some specific task to perform, he insisted that they stay out of his room, which meant that they were generally to be found on the living room sofa, pouting in silent disdain as they flipped through magazines and smoked cigarettes. One or two of them walked out on us, and one or two others had to be fired. Apart from this hard line with the nurses, however, Effing behaved with remarkable gentleness, and from the moment he took to his bed, it was as if his personality had been transformed, purged of its venom by the growing nearness of death. I don’t think he felt much pain, and although there were good days and bad days (at one point, in fact, it seemed as though he had made a complete recovery, but this was followed by a relapse just seventy-two hours later), the progress of his illness was one of gradual diminishment, a slow and ineluctable loss of strength that went on until his heart finally stopped beating.

  I spent every day with him in that room, sitting beside his bed because he wanted me to be there. Since the rainstorm, our relationship had changed to such an extent that he now doted on me as if I were his own flesh and blood. He held my hand and told me that I was a comfort to him, muttering how glad he was to have me in the room. At first, I was wary of these sentimental outpourings, but as the evidence of his newfound affection continued to mount, I had no choice but to accept it as genuine. Early on, when he was still strong enough to carry on a conversation, he asked me questions about my life, and I told him stories about my mother and Uncle Victor, about my days in college, about the disastrous period that led to my collapse and how Kitty Wu had saved me. Effing said that he was worried about what would happen to me after he croaked (his word), but I tried to reassure him that I was quite capable of taking care of myself.

  “You’re a dreamer, boy,” he said. “Your mind is on the moon, and from the looks of things, it’s never going to be anywhere else. You have no ambitions, you don’t give a damn about money, and you’re too much of a philosopher to have any feeling for art. What am I going to do with you? You need someone to look after you, to make sure you have food in your belly and a bit of cash in your pocket. Once I’m gone, you’ll be copy back where you started.”

  “I’ve been making plans,” I lied, hoping to get him off the subject. “I sent in an application to the library school at Columbia last winter, and they’ve accepted me. I thought I’d already mentioned it to you. Classes start in the fall.”

  “And how are you going to pay the tuition?”

  “They’ve given me a full scholarship, plus a stipend to cover living expenses. It’s a good deal, a tremendous opportunity. The program lasts for two years, and after that I’ll always have a way to make a living.”

  “It’s hard to see you as a librarian, Fogg.”

  “I admit it’s strange, but I think I might be suited for it. Libraries aren’t in the real world, after all. They’re places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In that way, I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life.”

  I knew that Effing didn’t believe me, but he played along with my lie for the sake of harmony, not wanting to disrupt the calm that had grown up between us. That was typical of what had become of him during those last weeks. I think he was proud of himself for being able to die in this way, as if the tenderness he had begun to show for me proved that he was still capable of accomplishing anything he wanted to. In spite of his failing strength, he continued to believe that he was in control of his destiny, and this illusion persisted copy up to the end: the idea that he had masterminded his own death, that everything was proceeding according to plan. He had announced that May twelfth would be the fatal day, and it seemed now that the only thing that mattered to him was sticking to his word. He had given in to death with open arms, and at the same time he had rejected it, struggling with the last ounce of his energy to subdue it, to ward off the final moment until it came to him on his own terms. Even when he could barely speak anymore, when it required an enormous effort for him to produce the smallest gurgle of sound in his throat, the first thing he wanted to know when I entered the room every morning was what day it was. Because he could no longer keep track of time, he would repeat the question every few hours over the course of the day. On the third or fourth of the month, he suddenly went into dramatic decline, and it seemed unlikely that he would be able to hold on until the twelfth. I began fiddling with the dates in order to reassure him that he was still on schedule, jumping ahead each time he asked the question, and on one particularly rough afternoon I wound up covering three days in the space of just a few hours. It’s the seventh, I said to him; it’s the eighth; it’s the ninth, and he was so far gone by then that he failed to notice the discrepancy. When his condition stabilized again later that week, I was still in advance of the calendar, and for the next two days I had no choice but to go on telling him it was the ninth. I felt that was the least I could do for him—to give him the satisfaction of thinking he had won this test of will. No matter how it came out, I was going to make sure his life ended on the twelfth.

  The sound of my voice soothed him, he said, and even when he became too weak to say anything, he wanted me to go on talking. He was not concerned with what I said, just so long as he could hear my voice and know that I was there. I rattled on as best I could, shifting from one subject to another as the mood struck me. It was not always easy to sustain this kind of monologue, and whenever I found myself running short on inspiration, I would fall back on one of several devices to get me going again: rehashing the plots of novels and films, reciting poems from memory—Effing was especially fond of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Fulke Greville—or mentioning news items from the morning paper. Strangely enough, I can still remember some of those stories quite well, and whenever I think of them now (the spread of the war to Cambodia, the killings at Kent State), I see myself sitting in that room with Effing, looking down at him as he lay in bed. I see his toothless, gaping mouth; I hear his clogged lungs gasping for air; I see his blind, watery eyes staring up at the ceiling, the spidery hands clutching the blanket, the overwhelming pallor of his wrinkled skin. The association is unavoidable. By some obscure and involuntary reflex, those events have become situated for me in the contours of Effing’s face, and I cannot think of them without seeing him before me again.

  There were times when I did nothing more than describe the room we were sitting in. Using the same methods I had developed during our walks, I would pick out an object and begin to talk about it. The pattern on the bedspread, the bureau in the corner, the framed street map of Paris that hung on the wall beside the window. To the extent that Effing could follow what I was saying, these inventories seemed to give him profound pleasure. With so much falling away from him now, the immediate physical presence of things stood at the edge of his consciousness as a kind of paradise, an unobtainable realm of ordinary miracles: the tactile, the visible, the perceptual field that surrounds all life. By putting these things into words for him, I gave Effing the chance to experience them again, as if merely to take one’s place in the world of things was a good beyond all others. In some sense, I worked harder for him in that room than I had ever worked before, concentrating on the minutest details and materials—the wools and cottons, the silvers and pewters, the wood grains and plaster swirls—delving into each crevice, enumerating each color and shape, exploring the microscopic geometries of whatever there was to see. The weaker Effing became, the more strenuously I applied myself, doubling my efforts in order to bridge the distance
that was steadily growing between us. By the end, I had pushed myself to such lengths of precision that it took me hours to work my way around the room. I advanced by fractions of an inch, refusing to let anything escape me, not even the dust motes hovering in the air. I mined the limits of that space until it became inexhaustible, a plenitude of worlds within worlds. At a certain point, I realized that I was probably talking into a void, but I went on talking anyway, hypnotized by the thought that my voice was the one thing that could keep Effing alive. It made no difference, of course. He was slipping away, and for the whole of the last two days I spent with him, I doubt that he heard a word I said.

  I wasn’t there when he died. After I had sat with him until eight o’clock on the eleventh, Mrs. Hume came in to relieve me and insisted that I take the rest of the night off. “There’s nothing we can do for him now,” she said. “You’ve been in here with him since this morning, and it’s time you got some air. If he lasts through the night, at least you’ll be fresh for tomorrow.”

  “I don’t think there’s going to be a tomorrow,” I said.

  “Maybe not. But that’s what we said yesterday, and he’s still hanging in there.”

  I went out to dinner with Kitty at the Moon Palace, and afterward we took in one of the movies on the double bill at the Thalia (I remember it as Ashes and Diamonds, but I could be wrong). Normally, I would have taken Kitty back to her dormitory at that point, but I had a bad feeling about Effing, and so after the movie was over, we walked down West End Avenue to check in with Mrs. Hume at the apartment. It was close to one o’clock in the morning when we got there. Rita was in tears when she opened the door, and it wasn’t necessary for her to say anything for me to know what had happened. As it turned out, Effing had died less than an hour before our arrival. When I asked the nurse for the exact time, she told me it had been 12:02, two minutes past midnight. So Effing had made it to the twelfth, after all. It seemed so preposterous that I didn’t know how to react. There was a strange tingling in my head, and I suddenly felt that the wires in my brain had been crossed. I assumed that I was about to start crying, so I went off into a corner of the room and put my hands over my face. I stood there waiting for the tears to fall, but nothing came. A few more moments went by, and then a spasm of peculiar sounds came rushing from my throat. It took another moment or two before I realized that I was laughing.