by Paul Auster
At first, the results of the examination are encouraging. Looking at Bigelow’s X-ray, a doctor says: “Lungs in good condition, blood pressure normal, heart fine. It’s a good thing everybody isn’t like you. It would put us doctors out of business.” He instructs Bigelow to put on his clothes as they wait for the results of the blood tests administered by his colleague, Dr. Schaefer. As Bigelow knots his tie in the foreground, face to the camera, expressionless, a nurse walks into the room behind him, too addled to say a word, staring at him with a look that combines both horror and pity, and at that moment there can be no doubt that Bigelow is doomed. Dr. Schaefer enters, trying to mask his alarm. He and the first doctor confirm that Bigelow is unmarried, that he has no relatives in San Francisco, that he has come to the city alone. Why these questions? Bigelow asks. You’re a very sick man, the doctor says. You must steel yourself for a shock. And then they tell him about the luminous toxic matter that has entered his system and will soon be attacking his vital organs. They wish there was something they could do, they say, but there is no antidote for this particular poison. He doesn’t have long.
Bigelow is incredulous, filled with rage. This is impossible! he shouts. They must be wrong, there must be an error, but the doctors calmly defend their diagnosis, assuring him that there hasn’t been an error—which only increases Bigelow’s fury. “You’re telling me I’m dead!” he roars. “I don’t even know who you are! Why should I believe you?” Calling them both crazy, he pushes them aside and storms out of the office.
Cut to an even larger building—a hospital? another medical center?—and a shot of Bigelow bounding up the front steps. He barges into a room marked EMERGENCY, apoplectic, a man about to explode into a hundred fragments, and shoves his way past two bewildered and frightened nurses, insisting that he see a doctor at once, demanding that someone examine him for luminous poison.
The new doctor comes to the same conclusion as the first pair. You’ve got it, all right. Your system has already absorbed it. To prove the point, he switches off the overhead light and shows Bigelow the test tube containing the examination results. It is an eerie sight. The thing glows in the dark—as if the doctor were holding a vial of incandescent milk, a frosted bulb filled with radium, or worse, the liquefied fallout from a nuclear bomb. Bigelow’s anger subsides. Faced with such overpowering evidence, he temporarily goes numb. “But I don’t feel sick,” he says quietly. “Just a little stomachache, that’s all.”
The doctor warns him not to be fooled by his apparent lack of symptoms. Bigelow has no more than a day or two to live, a week at the most. There’s nothing that can be done now. Then the doctor learns that Bigelow has no idea how, when, or where he swallowed the poison, which means that it was administered by another party, an unknown party, which further means that someone intentionally set out to kill him.
“This is a case for Homicide,” the doctor says, reaching for the telephone.
“Homicide?”
“I don’t think you understand, Bigelow. You’ve been murdered.”
This is the moment when Bigelow snaps, when the monstrous thing that has happened to him turns into an all-out, unbridled panic, when the howl of agony begins. He bursts out of the doctor’s office, bursts out of the building, and starts running through the streets, and as you follow this passage of the film, this long sequence of shots tracking Bigelow’s mad fugue through the city, you understand that you are witnessing the outer manifestation of an inner state, that this senseless, headlong, unstoppable running is nothing less than the depiction of a mind filled with horror, that you are watching the choreography of dread. A panic attack has been translated into a breathless sprint through the streets of a city, for panic is nothing if not an expression of mental flight, the unbidden force that grows inside you when you are trapped, when the truth is too much to bear, when the injustice of this unavoidable truth can no longer be confronted, and therefore the only possible response is to flee, to shut down your mind by transforming yourself into a gasping, twitching, delirious body, and what truth could be more terrible than this one? Condemned to death within hours or days, cut down in the middle of your life for reasons that entirely escape your understanding, your life suddenly reduced to a thimbleful of minutes, seconds, heartbeats.
It doesn’t matter what happens next. You watch the second half of the film attentively, but you know the story is over, that even as the story continues, there is nothing left to say. Bigelow will spend his last hours on earth trying to solve the mystery of his murder. He will learn that Philips, the man who called his office from Los Angeles, is dead. He will go to Los Angeles and investigate the activities of various thieves, psychopaths, and two-faced women. He will be shot at and punched. He will learn that his involvement in the story is purely accidental, that the villains want him dead because he happened to notarize a bill of sale pertaining to a stolen shipment of iridium and he is the only man alive who can identify the culprits. He will track down his murderer, the man with the curious collar, who is also the murderer of Philips, and kill him in a shoot-out on the landing of a darkened stairway. And then, shortly after that, Bigelow himself will die, just as the doctors said he would—in mid-sentence, telling his story to the police.
There is nothing wrong with playing it out like this, you suppose. It is the conventional thing to do, the manly, heroic option, the trope that befits all adventure stories, but why, you wonder, does Bigelow never divulge his imminent fate to anyone, not even to his doting, lovesick Paula? Perhaps because heroes must remain tough until the bitter end, and even when time is running out, they can’t allow themselves to get bogged down in useless sentiment.
But you aren’t tough anymore, are you? Ever since the panic attack of 2002, you have stopped being tough, and even though you work hard at trying to be a decent person, it has been a long time now since you last thought of yourself as heroic. If you ever found yourself in Bigelow’s shoes, you are certain you would never do what Bigelow did. You would run through the streets, yes, you would run until you could no longer take another step, no longer breathe, no longer stand up, and then what? Call Paula, call Paula the instant you stopped running, but if her number happened to be busy when you called, then what? Prostrate yourself on the ground and weep, cursing the world for allowing you to have been born. Or else, quite simply, crawl off into a hole somewhere and wait to die.
You can’t see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether friends or strangers or the most intimate beloveds, your own face is invisible to you. You can see other parts of yourself, arms and legs, hands and feet, shoulders and torso, but only from the front, nothing of the back except the backs of your legs if you twist them into the right position, but not your face, never your face, and in the end—at least as far as others are concerned—your face is who you are, the essential fact of your identity. Passports do not contain pictures of hands and feet. Even you, who have lived inside your body for sixty-four years now, would probably be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to speak of your ear, or your elbow, or one of your eyes in close-up. All so familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others. Think of what happened to you when you were fourteen. For two weeks at the end of the summer, you worked for your father in Jersey City, joining one of the small crews that repaired and maintained the apartment buildings he and his brothers owned and managed: painting walls and ceilings, mending roofs, hammering nails into two-by-fours, pulling up sheets of cracked linoleum. The two men you worked with were black, every tenant in every apartment was black, every person in the neighborhood was black, and after two weeks of looking at nothing but black faces, you began to forget that your own face wasn’t black. Since you couldn’t see your own face, you saw yoursel
f in the faces of the people around you, and bit by bit you stopped thinking of yourself as different. In effect, you stopped thinking about yourself at all.
Looking at your right hand as it grips the black fountain pen you are using to write this journal, you think of Keats looking at his own right hand under similar circumstances, in the act of writing one of his last poems and suddenly breaking off to scribble eight lines in the margin of the manuscript, the bitter outcry of a young man who knew he was headed for an early grave, darkly underscored by the word now in the first line, for every now necessarily implies a later, and what later could Keats look forward to but the prospect of his own death?
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—
I hold it toward you.
Keats to begin with, but no sooner do you think of This living hand than you are reminded of a story someone once told you about James Joyce, Joyce in Paris in the 1920s, standing around at a party eighty-five years ago when a woman walked up to him and asked if she could shake the hand that wrote Ulysses. Instead of offering her his right hand, Joyce lifted it in the air, studied it for a few moments, and said: “Let me remind you, madam, that this hand has done many other things as well.” No details given, but what a delicious piece of smut and innuendo, all the more effective because he left everything to the woman’s imagination. What did he want her to see? Wiping his ass, probably, picking his nose, masturbating in bed at night, sticking his fingers into Nora’s cunt and diddling her bunghole, popping pimples, scraping food from his teeth, plucking out nostril hairs, disgorging wax from his ears—fill in the appropriate blanks, the central point being: whatever was most disgusting to her. Your hands have served you in similar ways, of course, everyone’s hands have done those things, but mostly they are busy performing tasks that require little or no thought. Opening and closing doors, screwing light bulbs into sockets, dialing telephones, washing dishes, turning the pages of books, holding your pen, brushing your teeth, drying your hair, folding towels, taking money out of your wallet, carrying bags of groceries, swiping your MetroCard in subway turnstiles, pushing buttons on machines, picking up the newspaper from the front steps in the morning, turning down the covers of the bed, showing your ticket to the train conductor, flushing the toilet, lighting your little cigars, stubbing out your little cigars in ashtrays, putting on your pants, taking off your pants, tying your shoes, squirting shaving cream onto the tips of your fingers, clapping at plays and concerts, sliding keys into locks, scratching your face, scratching your arm, scratching your ass, wheeling suitcases through airports, unpacking suitcases, putting your shirts on hangers, zipping up your fly, buckling your belt, buttoning your jacket, knotting your tie, drumming your fingers on tables, loading paper into your fax machine, tearing checks out of your checkbook, opening up boxes of tea, switching on lights, switching off lights, plumping up your pillow before going to bed. Those same hands have sometimes punched people (as previously noted), and three or four times, in moments of intense frustration, they have also punched walls. They have thrown plates onto the floor, dropped plates onto the floor, and picked up plates from the floor. Your right hand has shaken more hands than you could possibly count, has blown your nose, wiped your ass, and waved good-bye more often than the number of words in the largest dictionary. Your hands have held the bodies of your children, have wiped the asses and blown the noses of your children, have bathed your children, rubbed the backs of your children, dried the tears of your children, and stroked the faces of your children. They have patted the shoulders of friends, work comrades, and relatives. They have pushed and shoved, pulled people off the ground, gripped the arms of people who were about to fall, navigated the wheelchairs of those who could not walk. They have touched the bodies of clothed and naked women. They have moved down the length of your wife’s naked skin and found their way onto every part of her. They are happiest there, you feel, have always been happiest there since the day you met her, for, to paraphrase a line from one of George Oppen’s poems, some of the most beautiful places in the world are on your wife’s body.
The day after the car crash in 2002, you went to the junkyard where the car had been towed to retrieve your daughter’s belongings. It was a Sunday morning in August, warm as always, with a misty blur of rain dappling the streets as one of your friends drove you out to some godforsaken neighborhood in Brooklyn, a no-man’s-land of crumbling warehouses, vacant lots, and boarded-up wooden buildings. The junkyard was run by a black man in his mid-sixties, a smallish fellow with long dreadlocks and clear, steady eyes, a gentle Rasta man who watched over his domain of wrecked automobiles like a shepherd tending a flock of dozing sheep. You told him why you were there, and when he led you over to the shiny new Toyota you had been driving the day before, you were stunned by how thoroughly destroyed it was, could not fathom how you and your family had managed to survive such a catastrophe. Immediately after the crash, you had noticed how badly damaged the car was, but you had been rattled by the collision, were not fully able to absorb what had happened to you, but now, a day later, you could see that the metal body of the car was so smashed in, it looked like a piece of crumpled paper. “Look at that,” you said to the Rasta man. “We should all be dead now.” He studied the car for a few seconds, looked you in the eye, and then turned his head upward as the fine rain fell onto his face and abundant hair. “An angel was watching over you,” he said in a quiet voice. “You were supposed to die yesterday, but then an angel stretched out his hand and pulled you back into the world.” He delivered those words with such serenity and conviction, you almost believed him.
When you sleep, you sleep soundly, seldom stirring until it is time to wake up in the morning. The problem you occasionally run into, however, is a reluctance to go to bed in the first place, a late-night surge of energy that prevents you from wanting to call it quits until you have polished off another chapter of the book you are reading, or watched a film on television, or, if it is baseball season and the Mets or the Yankees are playing on the West Coast, tuned in the broadcast from San Francisco, Oakland, or Los Angeles. Afterward, you crawl into bed beside your wife, and within ten minutes you are dead to the world until morning. Nevertheless, every now and then, something will interfere with your normally profound slumbers. If you accidentally wind up on your back, for example, you might begin to snore, in all likelihood you will begin to snore, and if the noise you produce is loud enough to wake your wife, she will softly urge you to roll over, and if that benign tactic should fail, she will give you a shove, or shake your shoulder, or pinch your ear. Nine times out of ten, you will unconsciously do what she commands, and she will quickly fall back to sleep. The other ten percent of the time, her shove will wake you up, and because you don’t want to trouble her sleep any further, you will go down the hall to the library and stretch out on the sofa, which is long enough to accommodate your fully extended body. More often than not, you manage to fall back asleep on the sofa—but sometimes you don’t. Over the years, your sleep has also been broken by flies and mosquitoes buzzing in the room (the perils of summer), inadvertent punches in the face from your wife, who tends to fling out her arms when she rolls over in bed, and once, just once, you were rousted from your dreams when your wife started singing in the middle of one of her own dreams—belting out the lyrics of a song from a movie she had seen as a child, your brilliant, erudite, supremely sophisticated wife returning to her midwestern childhood with a splendid, full-voiced rendition of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” as sung by Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins. One of the rare instances when the eight-year difference in your ages has ever been apparent to you, since you were too old for
that film when it came out and therefore (mercifully) have never seen it.
But what to do when it is the middle of the night, when you have woken up sometime between two and four in the morning, have stretched out on the sofa in the library, and are unable to go back to sleep? It is too late to read, too late to turn on the television, too late to watch a film, and so you lie in the dark and ruminate, letting your thoughts go wherever they choose to go. Sometimes you get lucky and are able to latch onto a word, or a character, or a scene from the book you are working on, but more often you will discover yourself thinking about the past, and in your experience, whenever your thoughts turn to the past at three o’clock in the morning, those thoughts tend to be dark. One memory haunts you above all others, and on nights when you are unable to sleep, you find it difficult not to go back to it, to rehash the events of that day and relive the shame you felt afterward, have continued to feel ever since. It was thirty-two years ago, the morning of your father’s funeral, and at some point you found yourself standing next to one of your uncles (the father of the cousin who called you on the morning of your panic attack), the two of you shaking hands with a line of mourners who shuffled past you as they offered their condolences, the ritual handshakes and empty words that punctuate every funeral service. Family members mostly, friends of your father’s, men and women, faces you recognized and didn’t recognize, and then you were shaking hands with Tom, one of the faces you didn’t recognize, who told you he had been your father’s chief electrician for many years and that your father had always treated him well, he was a good man, he said, this small Irishman with his Jersey City accent was telling you that your father was a good man, and you thanked him for that, you shook his hand again for that, and then he moved on to shake your uncle’s hand, and when your uncle saw him, he immediately told Tom to leave, this was a private family funeral, he said, no outsiders were allowed, and when Tom mumbled that he only wanted to pay his respects, your uncle said sorry, he would have to leave, and so Tom turned around and left. Their conversation lasted no more than fifteen or twenty seconds, and you barely registered what was happening before Tom was on his way out. When you finally realized what your uncle had done, you were filled with disgust, appalled that he could have treated a person like that, any person, but especially this person, who was there only because he felt it was his duty to be there, and what still galls you today, what still floods you with shame, is that you said nothing to your uncle. Never mind that he was a man with a notorious temper, a hothead given to explosive rages and monumental shouting fits, and that if you had confronted him then, there was every chance he would have turned on you in the middle of your father’s funeral. But so what? You should have confronted him, you should have had the courage to shout back at him if he had started shouting at you, and if not that, then why at least didn’t you run after Tom and tell him he could stay? You have no idea why you didn’t take a stand at that moment, and the shock of your father’s sudden death is no excuse. You should have acted, and you didn’t. All your life, you had been sticking up for people who had been pushed around, it was the one principle you believed in above all others, but on that particular day you held your tongue and did nothing. When you look back on it now, you understand that this failure to act is the reason why you have stopped thinking of yourself as heroic: because there was no excuse.
