by Paul Auster
She decided to move back east. Twenty years earlier, she had thought of California as a promised land, but now it was little more than a place of disease and death, the capital of bad luck and painful memories, and so she bolted across America to be near her family—you and your wife to begin with, but also her mentally ill daughter in Connecticut, her sister, and her two grandchildren. She was flat broke, of course, which meant that you would have to support her, but that was hardly a problem now, and you were more than willing to do it. You bought her a one-bedroom apartment in Verona, leased a car for her, and gave her what you both considered to be an adequate monthly allowance. You were hardly the first son in the world to find himself in this position, but that didn’t make it any less strange or uncomfortable: to be taking care of the person who had once taken care of you, to have reached that point in life when your roles were reversed, with you now acting the part of parent while she was reduced to the part of helpless child. The financial arrangement occasionally caused some friction, since your mother found it difficult not to overspend her allowance, and even though you increased the amount several times, it was still difficult for her, which put you in the awkward spot of having to scold her every now and then, and once, when you were probably a bit too harsh with her, she broke down and cried on the telephone, telling you she was a useless old woman and maybe she should kill herself so she wouldn’t be such a burden anymore. There was something comical about this gush of self-pity (you knew you were being manipulated), but at the same time it made you feel wretched, and in the end you always caved in and let her have whatever she wanted. More worrisome to you was her inability to do anything, to get out of her apartment and engage herself with the world. You suggested that she volunteer as a reading teacher for struggling children or illiterate adults, get involved with the Democratic Party or some other political organization, take courses, travel, join a social club, but she simply didn’t have it in her to try. Until then, the lack of a formal education had never been an impediment to her—her native intelligence and quickness had seemed to make up for any deficiencies—but now that she was without a husband, without work, without anything to keep her occupied from day to day, you wished she could have developed an interest in music or art or books, in anything really, just so long as it was some kind of passionate, sustaining interest, but she had never formed the habit of nurturing inner pursuits of that kind, and therefore she continued to flail around without purpose, never quite sure what to do with herself when she woke up in the morning. The only novels she read were detective stories and thrillers, and even your books and your wife’s books, which you both automatically gave her whenever they were published—and which she proudly displayed on a special shelf in her living room—were not the sorts of books she could read. She watched a lot of television. The TV was always on in her apartment, blasting forth from early in the morning until late at night, but it wasn’t for watching programs so much as for the voices that came from the box. Those voices comforted her, were in fact necessary to her, and they helped her overcome her fear of living alone—which was probably her single greatest accomplishment of those years. No, they were not the best years, but you don’t want to give the impression that it was a time of unbroken melancholy and disarray. She made regular visits to Connecticut to see your sister, spent countless weekends with you at your house in Brooklyn, saw her granddaughter perform in school plays and sing her solos for the school chorus, followed her grandson’s ever-deepening interest in photography, and after all those years in distant California, she was now a part of your life again, always present for birthdays, holidays, and special events—public appearances by you and your wife, the openings of your films (she was mad for the movies), and occasional dinners with your friends. She continued to charm people in public, even into her mid-seventies, for in some small corner of her mind she still saw herself as a star, as the most beautiful woman in the world, and whenever she emerged from her diminished, largely shut-in life, her vanity seemed to be intact. So much of what she had become saddened you now, but you found it impossible not to admire her for that vanity, for still being able to tell a good joke when people were listening.
You scattered her ashes in the woods of Prospect Park. There were five of you present that day—your wife, your daughter, your aunt, your cousin Regina, and yourself—and you chose Prospect Park in Brooklyn because your mother had played there often as a little girl. One by one, you all read poems out loud, and then, as you opened the rectangular metal urn and tossed the ashes onto the fallen leaves and underbrush, your aunt (normally undemonstrative, one of the most reserved people you have ever known) gave in to a fit of tears as she repeated the name of her baby sister over and over again. A week or two later, on a sparkling afternoon in late May, you and your wife took your dog for a walk in the park. You suggested returning to the spot where you had scattered your mother’s ashes, but when you were still out on an open path, a good two hundred yards from the edge of the woods, you started feeling faint and dizzy, and even though you were taking pills to keep your new condition under control, you could feel another panic attack coming on. You took hold of your wife’s arm, and the two of you turned around and went home. That was nearly nine years ago. You have not tried to go back to those woods since.
Summer 2010. Heat-wave weather, the Dog Star barking from sunup to sundown and on through the nights, a string of ninety-degree days and now, suddenly, all the way up to a hundred and six. It is a minute or two past midnight. Your wife has already gone to bed, but you are too restless for sleep, and so you have gone into the upstairs parlor, the room you both refer to as the library, an ample space with bookshelves lining three of the walls, and because those shelves are full now, crammed with the thousands of hardcovers and paperbacks you and your wife have accumulated over the years, there are piles of books and DVDs on the floor as well, the inevitable spillover that continues to grow as the months and years rush past you, giving the library a cluttered but sympathetic atmosphere of plenitude and well-being, the kind of room all visitors to the house describe as cozy, and yes, it is unquestionably your favorite room, with its soft leather couch and flat-screen TV, a perfect place for reading books and watching films, and because of the excruciating weather outside, the air-conditioning is on and the windows are closed, blocking out all sounds from the street, the nighttime medley of barking dogs and human voices, the weird, chubby man who wanders through the neighborhood singing show tunes in a piercing falsetto, the rumble of passing trucks, cars, and motorcycles. You turn on the television. The Mets game ended a couple of hours ago, and with no distraction available to you from the world of sport, you switch to the movie channel you like best, TCM, with its round-the-clock programming of old American films, and a few minutes into the story you have now begun to watch, something important occurs to you. It begins when you see the man running through the streets of San Francisco, a crazed man charging down the stone steps of the medical center and dashing out into the streets, a man with nowhere to go, running along crowded sidewalks, darting into traffic, bumping into people as he sprints past them, a cannonball of frenzy and disbelief who has just been told he will be dead within days, if not hours, that his body has been contaminated by a luminous toxin, and because it is too late to flush the poison from his system, there is no hope for him, and even if he still appears to be alive, he is in fact already dead, he has in fact been murdered.
You have been that man, you tell yourself, and what you are watching on the television screen is a precise rendering of what happened to you two days after your mother’s death in 2002: the hammer that descends without warning, and then the inability to breathe, the pounding heart, the dizziness, the sweats, the body that falls to the floor, the arms and legs that turn to stone, the howls that blast forth from maddened, airless lungs, and the certainty that the end is upon you, that one second from now the world will no longer exist, because you will no longer exist.
Directed by Rudolph Maté in 195
0, the film is called D.O.A., police shorthand for dead on arrival, and the hero-victim is one Frank Bigelow, a man of no particular distinction or interest, a no one, an anyone, roughly thirty-five years old, an accountant, auditor, and notary public who lives in Banning, California, a small desert town near Palm Springs. Bulky of build, with a fleshy, full-lipped face, he is a man with little else on his mind but women, and because he is feeling suffocated by his adoring, neurotic, obsessively clinging secretary, Paula, the woman he might or might not be planning to marry, he impulsively decides to take a week off from work and go to San Francisco on a solo vacation. When he checks in at the St. Francis Hotel, the lobby is swarming with boisterous guests. It happens to be “market week,” the desk clerk tells him, an annual convention of traveling salesmen, and each time an attractive woman saunters past (all the women in the hotel are attractive), Bigelow turns to ogle her with the wide-eyed, slack-jawed lust of a man on the prowl. To push home the point, each of these glances is accompanied by a comic, slide-whistle rendition of the standard two-note wolf call, as if to suggest that Bigelow can’t quite believe his good luck, that by landing in this particular hotel on this particular day he will in all likelihood chance upon some easy action. When he goes up to his room on the sixth floor, the hallway is hopping with semi-inebriated revelers (more slide-whistle wolf calls) and the door of the room directly opposite is open, giving Bigelow a clear view of a full-scale bash in progress. So the vacation begins.
Paula has telephoned from Banning, and before Bigelow unpacks and settles in, he returns the call. It seems there has been an urgent message from someone named Eugene Philips of Los Angeles, who said it was imperative that Bigelow contact him at once, that they must talk before it’s too late. Bigelow has no idea who Philips is. Have we done business with him? he asks Paula, but she has no memory of such a person either. All during this conversation, Bigelow is distracted by the goings-on across the hall. Women stop in his open doorway to wave hello and smile at him, and he waves and smiles back, even as he goes on talking to Paula. Forget about Philips, he tells her. He’s on vacation now, he doesn’t want to be bothered, and he’ll deal with it when he returns to Banning.
After they hang up, Bigelow lights a cigarette, a waiter appears with a drink, and then a reveler from across the hall, who identifies himself as Haskell, enters the room and asks if he can use the phone. Three more bottles of bourbon and two more bottles of scotch are ordered for the party in 617. When Haskell learns that Bigelow is a stranger in town, he invites him to join in the merriment (a few drinks, a few laughs), and within two minutes Bigelow is dancing a rumba with Haskell’s wife in the noisy room across the way. Sue is a brash, boozed-up piece of work, a frustrated woman looking for a good time, and because Bigelow turns out to be a skillful dancer, he becomes her number one target—not the most intelligent move, perhaps, given that her husband is right there to witness her antics, but Sue is both reckless and determined. Some minutes later, the gang from room 617 decides to leave the hotel and go out on the town. A reluctant Bigelow is dragged along with them, and suddenly they are in a crowded jazz club called the Fisherman, a frenetic place where an ensemble of black musicians is belting out an exultant, high-speed number with the word JIVE written on the wall behind them. One close-up after another shows the sax man, the piano man, the trumpet man, the bass man, and the drum man wailing on their instruments, intercut with wild reactions from the audience, and there is Bigelow sitting at the table with his new friends as the impetuous Sue clings tightly to him. Bigelow looks despondent, he is fed up, he wants no part of Sue or this cacophonous assault, and Haskell looks no less downhearted himself, studying his wife in silence as she throws herself at the stranger from across the hall. At some point in all this, the camera catches a man entering the club from behind, a tall man wearing a hat and an overcoat with an upturned collar, an odd and altogether curious collar, the reverse of which is marked by a black-and-white checkered pattern. The man approaches the bar, and a moment or two after that Bigelow finally manages to extricate himself from Sue and her companions. He goes to the bar as well and orders himself a bourbon, little knowing that the man with the curious collar is about to slip poison into his drink and that he, Bigelow, will be dead within twenty-four hours.
A stylish woman is sitting at the other end of the bar, and as Bigelow waits for his drink, he asks the bartender if the blonde is alone. The blonde turns out to be Jeanie, a jive-crazy rich girl who hangs out in clubs and uses words like dig and easy (i.e., copacetic, swell, no problem). Bigelow sidles over to her, and in those few seconds when he loses contact with his drink, which has now been poured and is waiting for him at his old spot at the other end of the bar, the man with the curious collar carries out his murderous mission, deftly pouring a measure of the toxic potion into the glass and then vanishing from sight. As Bigelow chats with the elegant Jeanie, who is at once cool and friendly, a self-possessed hipster queen, the bartender hands him his now doctored drink, his now deadly drink. Bigelow takes a sip, and instantly his face registers surprise, disgust. A second sip produces the same result. Pushing away the glass, he says to the bartender: “This isn’t mine. I ordered bourbon. Give me another drink.”
Meanwhile, Sue is on her feet, scanning the room for Bigelow, looking anxious, distraught, puzzled by his failure to return. Bigelow catches sight of her, then swings around and invites Jeanie to go somewhere else with him. There are people he wants to avoid, he says, and surely there must be other interesting places in San Francisco. Yes, Jeanie says, but she hasn’t quite had her fill of the Fisherman. Why don’t they meet up later when she hits her next spot of the evening, and then she writes down a telephone number on a piece of paper and tells him to call her there in an hour.
Bigelow returns to his hotel room, pulls out the scrap of paper with Jeanie’s number on it, and picks up the phone, but before he can make the call, he glances up and sees that a bouquet of flowers has been delivered to the room. There is a card from Paula attached to the wrapping paper, and the message reads: I’ll keep a light burning in the window. Sweet dreams. Bigelow is chastened. Instead of going out again to spend the night chasing skirts, he tears up Jeanie’s number and tosses it in the trash, and a moment after that the story enters a different register, the real story begins.
The poison has already begun to do its work. Bigelow’s head aches, but he assumes he has drunk too much and will feel better after he has slept it off. He climbs into bed, and as he does so the air fills with strange, disjointed sounds, the echoing voice of a distant female singer, mental debris from the jazz club, signs of mounting physical distress. When he wakes in the morning, Bigelow’s condition has not improved. Still convinced that he drank too much and is suffering from a hangover, he calls room service and orders a pick-me-up, one of those tart, eye-opening nostrums spiced with horseradish and Worcestershire sauce that are supposed to jolt you into instant sobriety, but once the waiter shows up with the concoction, Bigelow can’t face it, the mere sight of the drink fills him with nausea, and he asks the waiter to take it away. Something is seriously wrong. Bigelow clutches his stomach, appears dizzy and disoriented, and when the waiter asks if he is all right, the fatally ill victim-hero, still in the dark about what has befallen him, says he must have had too big a night of it and needs to get some fresh air.
Bigelow goes out, staggering ever so slightly, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief, and climbs onto a passing cable car. He jumps off at Nob Hill, and then he is walking, walking through deserted streets in broad daylight, walking with purpose, on his way somewhere—but what where and to what purpose?—until he finds the address he is looking for, a tall white structure with the words MEDICAL BUILDING chiseled into the stone façade. Bigelow is far more worried than he let on to the waiter at the hotel. He knows, indeed he knows, that something is seriously wrong with him.
