Winter Journal

by Paul Auster

  Some memories are so strange to you, so unlikely, so outside the realm of the plausible, that you find it difficult to reconcile them with the fact that you are the person who experienced the events you are remembering. At the age of seventeen, for example, on a flight from Milan to New York after your first trip abroad (to visit your mother’s sister in Italy, where she had been living for the past eleven years), you sat next to an attractive, highly intelligent girl of eighteen or nineteen, and after an hour of conversation, you spent the rest of the journey kissing each other with lustful abandon, necking passionately in front of the other passengers without the slightest hint of shame or self-consciousness. It seems impossible that this could have happened, but it did. Even stranger, on the last morning of your European jaunt the following year, the one that began by crossing the Atlantic on the student ship, you boarded a plane at Shannon Airport in Ireland and found yourself sitting next to another pretty girl. After an hour of serious conversation about books, colleges, and your summer adventures, the two of you began necking as well, going at each other so fiercely that eventually you covered yourselves with a blanket, and under that blanket you moved your hands all over her body and up into her skirt, and it was only by sheer force of will that the two of you restrained yourselves from venturing into the forbidden territory of out-and-out fucking. How was it possible that such a thing could have happened? Are the sexual energies of youth so powerful that the mere presence of another body can serve as an inducement to sex? You would never do such a thing now, would not even dare to think of doing such a thing—but then again, you are no longer young.

  No, you were never promiscuous, even if you sometimes wish you had allowed yourself to be wilder and more impulsive, but in spite of your temperate behavior, you had a couple of run-ins with the dreaded germs of intimacy. The clap. It happened to you once, when you were twenty years old, and once was more than enough. A viscous green slime oozing from the tip of your cock, a feeling that a metal pin had been jammed down your urethra, and the simple act of urination turned into an agony. You never knew how you contracted gonorrhea, the cast of possible candidates was limited, and none of them struck you as a likely carrier of that dismal scourge, but five years later, when you found yourself with a case of the crabs, you did know who was responsible. No pain this time, but an incessant itch in the pubic region, and when you finally looked down to see what was going on, you were astonished to discover that you had been infested with a battalion of midget crabs—identical in shape to the crabs that live in the ocean, but minute in size, no bigger than ladybugs. You were so ignorant about venereal diseases that you had never heard of this affliction until you caught it yourself, had no idea that such a thing as the crab louse even existed. Penicillin had cured the gonorrhea, but nothing more than a powder was needed to rid you of the vermin who were camping out in your pubes. A minor complaint, then, rather comical when looked at from a distance, but at the time you found it sad, deeply sad, for the person who had contaminated you with those itchy devils had been the first great love of your life, the mad love that had struck you down at fifteen and had tortured you through the remaining years of your adolescence, and sleeping with her now, in your early adulthood, had made you feel that perhaps you were destined to love her again and that this time—if the gods were with you—your love would be fully requited. But the clandestine weekend you had spent together was not the beginning of a new story. It was the end of an old story—a happy end in its own way, but still the end, the very end, and the bugs crawling around in your crotch were nothing more than a sad little coda to that final chapter.

  Ladybugs were considered good luck. If one of them landed on your arm, you were supposed to make a wish before it flew away. Four-leaf clovers were also agents of good fortune, and you spent countless hours in your early childhood on your hands and knees in the grass, searching for those small prizes, which did indeed exist but were found only rarely and therefore were a cause for much celebration. Spring was heralded by the appearance of the first robin, the brown, red-breasted bird who would suddenly and unaccountably show up in your backyard one morning, hopping around on the grass and digging for worms. You would count the robins after that, taking note of the second one, the third one, the fourth one, adding more robins to the tally each day, and by the time you stopped counting them, the weather would be warm. The first summer after you moved into the house on Irving Avenue (1952), your mother planted a garden in the backyard, and among the clusters of annuals and perennials in the loamy earth of the flower bed, there was a single sunflower, which continued to grow as the weeks went by, first coming up to your shins, then up to your waist, then up to your shoulders, and then, after reaching the top of your head, shooting on past you to a height of about six feet. The sunflower’s progress was the central event of the summer, a bracing plunge into the mysterious workings of time, and every morning you would run into the backyard to measure yourself against it and see how fast it was gaining on you. That same summer, you made your first close friend, the first true comrade of your childhood, a boy named Billy whose house was just a short distance from yours, and because you were the only person who could understand him when he talked (he garbled his words, which seemed to sink back into his saliva-clogged mouth before they could emerge as cleanly articulated sound), he relied on you as his interpreter to the rest of the world, and you relied on him as an intrepid Huck to your more cautious Tom. The next spring, you spent every afternoon combing through the bushes together, looking for dead birds—mostly fledglings, you now realize, who must have fallen out of their nests and could not make their way back home. You buried them in a patch of dirt that ran along the side of your house—intensely solemn rituals accompanied by made-up prayers and long moments of silence. You had both discovered death by then, and you knew that it was a serious business, something that did not allow for any jokes.

  The first human death your remember with any clarity took place in 1957, when your eighty-year-old grandmother dropped down on the floor with a heart attack and died in a hospital later that day. You have no memory of going to the funeral, which would suggest you were not there, in all likelihood because you were ten years old and your parents thought you were too young. What you remember is the darkness that filled the house for days afterward, the people coming and going to sit shiva with your father in the living room, unknown men reciting incomprehensible Hebrew prayers in mumbled voices, the strangely quiet commotion of it all, your father’s grief. You yourself were almost entirely untouched by this death. You had felt no connection to your grandmother, no love from her, no curiosity about who you were, not the slightest glimmer of affection, and the few times she’d wrapped her arms around you for a grandmotherly hug, you had felt frightened, eager for the embrace to end. The 1919 murder was still a family secret then, you would not learn about it until you were in your early twenties, but you had always sensed that your grandmother was mad, that this small immigrant woman with her broken English and violent screaming spells was someone to be kept at arm’s length. Even as the mourners drifted in and out of the house, you went about your ten-year-old-boy’s business, and when the rabbi put his hand on your shoulder and said it would be all right for you to go off and play in your Little League game that evening, you went up to your room, put on your baseball uniform, and ran out of the house.

  Eleven years later, the death of your mother’s mother was a different story. You were grown then, the bolt of lightning that had killed your friend when you were fourteen had taught you that the world was capricious and unstable, that the future can be stolen from us at any moment, that the sky is full of lightning bolts that can crash down and kill the young as well as the old, and always, always, the lightning strikes when we are least expecting it. This was the grandmother you cared about, the prim and slightly nervous woman you loved, the one who stayed with you often and was a consistent presence in your life, and now that you are thinking about her death, the nature of her death, which
was slow and dreadful and anguishing to watch, you realize that all the other deaths in your family have been sudden, a series of lightning bolts similar to the one that killed your friend: your father’s mother (heart attack, dead within hours), your father’s father (shot and killed before you knew him), your father (heart attack, dead within seconds), your mother (heart attack, dead within minutes), and even your mother’s father, whose death was not instantaneous, who made it to eighty-five in good health and then, after a swift decline of two or three weeks, died of pneumonia, which is to say, died of old age—a death to be envied, you feel, full-bore life into your ninth decade and then, rather than electrocution by lightning bolt, a chance to absorb the fact that you are on your way out, a chance to reflect for a while, and then you go to sleep and float off into the land of nothingness. Your grandmother didn’t float anywhere. For two years she was dragged over a bed of nails, and when she died at seventy-three, there was little of anything left of her. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. You have seen people’s bodies consumed by the autocannibalism of virulent cancer, have watched the gradual strangulation of others by emphysema, but ALS is no less ravaging or cruel, and once you have been diagnosed with it, there is no hope, no remedy, nothing in front of you but a prolonged march toward disintegration and death. Your bones melt. The skeleton inside your skin turns to putty, and one by one your organs fail. What made your grandmother’s case particularly hard to bear was that the first symptoms appeared in her throat, and her speech functions were attacked before anything else: larynx, tongue, esophagus. One day, out of nowhere, she found it difficult to pronounce her words clearly, the syllables came out slurred, slightly off. A month or two later, they were alarmingly off. Several months after that, rattles of phlegm occluding her sentences, choked-off gurglings, the humiliations of impairment, and when no New York doctor could figure out what was wrong with her, your mother took her to the Mayo Clinic for a full workup. The men in Minnesota were the ones who pronounced her death sentence, and before long her speech had become unintelligible. She was forced to communicate in writing after that, carrying a little pencil and a pad of paper wherever she went, though for the time being the rest of her seemed well, she could still walk, still take part in the life around her, but as the months passed and the musculature of her throat continued to atrophy, swallowing became problematic, eating and drinking became a permanent trial, and in the end the rest of her body began to betray her as well. For the first week or two in the hospital, she still had the use of her arms and hands, could still use the pencil and pad to communicate, even though her handwriting had deteriorated badly, and then she came under the watch of a private nurse named Miss Moran (short and efficient, a rictus of perpetual false cheer glued onto her face), who kept the pad and pencil from your grandmother, and the more your grandmother howled in protest, the longer that pad was kept from her. Once you and your mother got wind of what was going on, Moran was fired, but the battle your grandmother had fought with the sadistic nurse had depleted whatever strength she had left. The gentle, self-effacing woman who had read you Maupassant stories when you were ill, who had taken you to shows at Radio City Music Hall, who had treated you to ice cream sundaes and lunches at Schrafft’s was dying in Doctors Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and not long after she became too weak to hold the pencil anymore, she lost her mind. Whatever force she still had in her was subsumed by rage, a demented anger that made her unrecognizable and expressed itself in constant howls, the throttled, dammed-up howls of a helpless, immobilized person struggling not to drown in a puddle of her own sputum. Born in Minsk, 1895. Died in New York, 1968. The end of life is bitter (Joseph Joubert, 1814).

  Things were the way they were, and you never stopped to question them. There were public schools and Catholic schools in your town, and because you were not Catholic, you attended the public schools, which were considered to be good schools, at least by the standards that were used to measure such things at the time, and according to what your mother later told you, it was for this reason that your family had moved to the house on Irving Avenue in the months before you were scheduled to begin kindergarten. You have nothing to compare your experience with, but in the thirteen years you spent in that system, the first seven at Marshall School (K–6), the next three at South Orange Junior High School (7–9), and the last three at Columbia High School in Maplewood (10–12), you had some good teachers and some mediocre teachers, a handful of exceptional and inspiring teachers and a handful of lousy and incompetent teachers, and your fellow students ranged from the brilliant to the average to the semi-moronic. Such is the case with all public schools. Everyone who lives in the district can go for free, and because you grew up in a time before the advent of special education, before separate schools had been established to accommodate children with so-called problems, a number of your classmates were physically handicapped. No one in a wheelchair that you can remember, but you can still see the hunchbacked boy with the twisted body, the girl who was missing an arm (a fingerless stump jutting from her shoulder), the drooling boy who slobbered down the front of his shirt, and the girl who was scarcely taller than a midget. Looking back on it now, you feel that these people were an essential part of your education, that without their presence in your life your understanding of what it means to be human would have been impoverished, lacking all depth and compassion, all insight into the metaphysics of pain and adversity, for those children were the heroic ones, the ones who had to work ten times harder than any of the others to find a place for themselves. If you had lived only among the physically blessed, the children like yourself who took your well-formed bodies for granted, how would you have ever learned what heroism was? One of your friends from those early years was a plump, nonathletic boy with glasses and a homely, chinless sort of face, but he was much loved by the other boys for his sharp wit and humor, his prowess at math, and what struck you then as an uncommon generosity of spirit. He had a bedridden younger brother, a boy suffering from a disease that had stunted his growth and left him with brittle bones, bones that broke from the slightest contact with hard surfaces, bones that broke for no reason at all, and you can remember visiting your friend’s house after school on several occasions and going in to see his brother, who was just a year or two younger than you were, lying in a hospital bed rigged with pulleys and wires, his legs in plaster casts, with his large head and impossibly pale skin, and you could hardly open your mouth in that room, you felt nervous, perhaps a bit scared, but the brother was a nice kid, friendly and affable and bright, and it always struck you as absurd, altogether outrageous that he should be lying in that bed, and every time you saw him you wondered what idiot god had decreed that he should be locked inside that body and not you. Your friend was devoted to him, they were as close to each other as any brothers you have ever known, and they shared a private, two-person world, a secret universe dominated by a mutual obsession with the fantasy baseball game they played, a board game with dice, cards, complex rules, and elaborate statistics, meticulously keeping records of every game they played, which evolved into entire seasons of games, every month or two another season, season after season of imaginary games as the years rolled on. How perfectly right, you realize now, that it should have been this friend of yours who called you one evening in the winter of 1957–58, not long after the Dodgers had announced their move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, to tell you that Roy Campanella, the All-Star catcher, had been in a car accident, an accident so terrible that even if he pulled through, he would be paralyzed for the rest of his life. Your friend was weeping into the phone.

  February twenty-third: the thirtieth anniversary of the day you met your wife, the thirtieth anniversary of the first night you spent together. The two of you leave your house in the late afternoon, cross the Brooklyn Bridge, and check into a hotel in lower Manhattan. A bit of an indulgence, perhaps, but you don’t want these twenty-four hours to slip by without doing something to mar
k the occasion, and because the idea of throwing a party never came up (why would a couple want to celebrate its longevity in front of others?), you and your wife eat dinner alone in the hotel restaurant. Afterward, you take the elevator to the ninth floor and enter your room, where you polish off a bottle of champagne together, forgetting to turn on the radio, forgetting to turn on the television to investigate the four thousand movies that are available to you, and as you drink the champagne you talk to each other, for several hours you do nothing but talk, not about the past and the thirty years that are behind you but about the present, about your daughter and your wife’s mother, about the work you are both engaged in now, about any number of things both pertinent and trivial, and in that respect this evening is no different from any other evening of your marriage, since the two of you have always talked, that is what defines you somehow, and for all these years you have been living inside the long, uninterrupted conversation that started the day you met. Outside, another cold winter night, another burst of freezing rain lashing against the windows, but you are in bed with your wife now, and the hotel bed is warm, the sheets are smooth and comfortable, and the pillows are positively gigantic.