Mr. Vertigo

by Paul Auster

  I was too awed to speak. I studied the master’s rib cage for signs of collapse, shuttling between joy and sorrow as his chest heaved up and down, up and down, swelling and shrinking against the long blue horizon. Halfway through my vigil, a cloud wandered in front of the sun and the sky turned ominously dark. I thought it was the angel of death passing overhead, but Master Yehudi’s lungs kept on pumping as the air slowly brightened again, and a moment later he sat up and smiled, eagerly wiping the dirt from his face.

  “Well,” he said, “what do you think of our hole?”

  “It’s a grand hole,” I said, “as deep and lovely a hole as there ever was.”

  “I’m glad you like it, because you and that hole are going to be on intimate terms for the next twenty-four hours.”

  “I don’t mind. It looks like an interesting place to me. As long as it don’t rain, it might be fun to sit in there for a while.”

  “No need to worry about the rain, Walt.”

  “You a weatherman or something? Maybe you haven’t noticed, but conditions change around here about every fifteen minutes. When it comes to weather, this Kansas place is as fickle as it gets.”

  “True enough. The skies in these parts can’t be counted on. But I’m not saying it won’t rain. Just that you don’t have to worry if it does.”

  “Sure, give me a cover, or one of them canvas thingamajigs—a tarp. That’s good thinking. You can’t go wrong if you plan for the worst.”

  “I’m not putting you down there for fun and frolic. You’ll have a breath-hole, of course, a long tube to keep in your mouth for purposes of respiration, but otherwise it’s going to be fairly dank and uncomfortable. A closed-in, wormy kind of discomfort, if you forgive my saying so. I doubt you’ll forget the experience as long as you live.”

  “I know I’m dumb, but if you don’t stop talking in riddles, we’ll be out here all day before I glom onto your drift.”

  “I’m going to bury you, son.”

  “Say what?”

  “I’m going to put you down in that hole, cover you up with dirt, and bury you alive.”

  “And you expect me to agree to that?”

  “You don’t have any choice. Either you go down there of your own volition or I strangle you with my two bare hands. One way, you get to live a long, prosperous life; the other way, your life ends in thirty seconds.”

  So I let him bury me alive—an experience I would not recommend to anyone. Distasteful as the idea sounds, the actual incarceration is far worse, and once you’ve spent some time in the bowels of netherness as I did that day, the world can never look the same to you again. It becomes inexpressibly more beautiful, and yet that beauty is drenched in a light so transient, so unreal, that it never takes on any substance, and even though you can see it and touch it as you always did, a part of you understands that it is no more than a mirage. Feeling the dirt on top of you is one thing, the pressure and coldness of it, the panic of deathlike immobility, but the true terror doesn’t begin until later, until after you’ve been unburied and can stand up and walk again. From then on, everything that happens to you on the surface is connected to those hours you spent underground. A little seed of craziness has been planted in your head, and even though you’ve won the struggle to survive, nearly everything else has been lost. Death lives inside you, eating away at your innocence and your hope, and in the end you’re left with nothing but the dirt, the solidity of the dirt, the everlasting power and triumph of the dirt.

  That was how my initiation began. Over the weeks and months that followed, I lived through more of the same, an unremitting avalanche of wrongs. Each test was more terrible than the one before it, and if I managed not to back down, it was only from sheer reptilian stubbornness, a brainless passivity that lurked somewhere in the core of my soul. It had nothing to do with will or determination or courage. I had none of those qualities, and the farther I was pushed, the less pride I felt in my accomplishments. I was flogged with a bullwhip; I was thrown from a galloping horse; I was lashed to the roof of the barn for two days without food or water; I had my skin smeared with honey and then stood naked in the August heat as a thousand flies and wasps swarmed over me; I sat in a circle of fire for one whole night as my body became scorched with blisters; I was dunked repeatedly for six straight hours in a tubfull of vinegar; I was struck by lightning; I drank cow, piss and ate horseshit; I took a knife and cut off the upper joint of my left pinky; I dangled for three days and three nights in a cocoon of ropes from the rafters in the attic. I did these things because Master Yehudi told me to do them, and if I could not bring myself to love him, neither did I hate him or resent him for the sufferings I endured. He no longer had to threaten me. I followed his commands with blind obedience, never bothering to question what his purpose might have been. He told me to jump, and I jumped. He told me to stop breathing, and I stopped breathing. This was the man who had promised to make me fly, and even though I never believed him, I let him use me as if I did. We had our bargain, after all, the pact we’d made that first night in Saint Louis, and I never forgot it. If he didn’t come through for me by my thirteenth birthday, I was going to lop off his head with an axe. There was nothing personal about that arrangement—it was a simple matter of justice. If the son-of-a-bitch let me down, I was going to kill him, and he knew it as well as I did.

  While these ordeals lasted, Aesop and Mother Sioux stuck by me as if I were their flesh and blood, the darling of their hearts. There were lulls between the various stages of my development, sometimes days, sometimes weeks, and more often than not Master Yehudi would vanish, leaving the farm altogether while my wounds mended and I recovered to face the next dumbfounding assault on my person. I had no idea where he went during those pauses, nor did I ask the others about it, since I always felt relieved when he was gone. Not only was I safe from further trials, but I was freed from the burden of the master’s presence—his brooding silences and tormented looks, the enormity of the space he occupied—and that alone reassured me, gave me a chance to breathe again. The house was a happier place without him, and the three of us lived together in remarkable harmony. Plump Mother Sioux and her two skinny boys. Those were the days when Aesop and I became pals, and miserable as much of that time was for me, it also contains some good memories, perhaps the best memories of all. He was a great one for telling stories, Aesop was, and I liked nothing better than to listen to that sweet voice of his spinning out the wild tales that were crammed in his head. He knew hundreds of them, and whenever I asked him, lying in bed all bruised and sore from my latest pummeling, he would sit there for hours reciting one story after another. Jack the Giant Killer, Sinbad the Sailor, Ulysses the Wanderer, Billy the Kid, Lancelot and King Arthur, Paul Bunyan—I heard them all. The best ones, though, the stories he saved for when I was feeling particularly blue, were about my namesake, Sir Walter Raleigh. I remember how shocked I was when he told me I had a famous name, the name of a real-life adventurer and hero. To prove that he wasn’t making it up, Aesop went to the book shelf and pulled down a thick volume with Sir Walter’s picture in it. I had never seen a more elegant face, and I soon fell into the habit of studying it for ten or fifteen minutes every day. I loved the pointy beard and razor-sharp eyes, the pearl earring fixed in his left lobe. It was the face of a pirate, a genuine swashbuckling knight, and from that day forth I carried Sir Walter inside me as a second self, an invisible brother to stand with me through thick and thin. Aesop recounted the stories of the cloak and the puddle, the search for El Dorado, the lost colony at Roanoke, the thirteen years in the Tower of London, the brave words he uttered at his beheading. He was the best poet of his day; he was a scholar, a scientist, and a freethinker; he was the number-one lover of women in all of England. “Think of you and me put together,” Aesop said, “and you begin to get an idea of who he was. A man with my brains and your guts, and tall and handsome as well—that’s Sir Walter Raleigh, the most perfect man who ever lived.”

  Every night, Moth
er Sioux would come into my room and tuck me in, sitting on my bed for however long it took me to fall asleep. I came to depend on this ritual, and though I was growing up fast and hard in every other way, I was still just a baby to her. I never let myself cry in front of Master Yehudi or Aesop, but with Mother Sioux I let the ducts give way on countless occasions, blubbering in her arms like some hapless mama’s boy. Once, I remember, I even went so far as to touch on the subject of flying, and what she said was so unexpected, so calm in its assurance, that it pacified the turmoil within me for weeks to come—not because I believed it myself, but because she did, and she was the person I trusted most in the world.

  “He’s a wicked man,” I said, referring to the master, “and by the time he’s through with me, I’ll be as hunched and crippled as Aesop.”

  “No, sonny, it ain’t so. You’ll be dancing with the clouds in the sky.”

  “With a harp in my hands and wings sprouting from my back.”

  “In your own skin. In your own flesh and bones.”

  “It’s a bluff, Mother Sioux, a disgusting pack of lies. If he aims to teach me what he says, why don’t he get down and do it? For one whole year, I’ve suffered every indignity known to man. I’ve been buried, I’ve been burned, I’ve been mutilated, and I’m still as bound to the earth as I ever was.”

  “Those are the steps. It has to be done that way. But the worst is nearly behind you now.”

  “So he’s suckered you into believing it, too.”

  “No one suckers Mother Sioux into anything. I’m too old and too fat to swallow what people say. False words are like chicken bones. They catch in my throat and I spit them out.”

  “Men can’t fly. It’s as simple as that. Men can’t fly because God don’t want them to.”

  “It can be done.”

  “In some other world maybe. But not this one.”

  “I saw it happen. When I was a little girl. I saw it with my own two eyes. And if it happened before, it can happen again.”

  “You dreamed it. You thought you saw it, but it was only in your sleep.”

  “My own father, Walt. My own father and my own brother. I saw them moving through the air like spirits. It wasn’t flying the way you imagine it. Not like birds or moths, not with wings or anything like that. But they were up in the air, and they were moving. All slow and strange. As if they was swimming. Pushing their way through the air like swimmers, like spirits walking on the bottom of a lake.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “Because you wouldn’t have believed me before. That’s why I’m telling you now. Because the time is coming. If you listen to what the master tells you, it’s coming sooner than you think.”

  When spring rolled around for the second time, the farm work was like a holiday to me, and I threw myself into it with manic good cheer, welcoming the chance to live like a normal person again. Instead of lagging behind and grousing about my aches and pains, I surged along at top speed, daring myself to stick with it, reveling in my own exertions. I was still puny for my age, but I was older and stronger, and even though it was impossible, I did all I could to keep up with Master Yehudi himself. I was out to prove something, I suppose, to stun him into respecting me, to be noticed. This was a new way of fighting back, and every time the master told me to slow down, to ease off and not push so hard (“It’s not an Olympic sport,” he would say, “we’re not out here competing for medals, kid”), I felt as if I had won a victory, as if I were gradually regaining possession of my soul.

  My pinky joint had healed by then. What had once been a bloody mess of tissue and bone had smoothed over into an odd, nailless stump. I enjoyed looking at it now and running my thumb over, the scar, touching that bit of me that was gone forever. I must have done it fifty or a hundred times a day, and every time I did, I would sound out the words Saint Louis in my head. I was struggling to hold on to my past, but by then the words had become just words, a ritual exercise in remembrance. They summoned forth no pictures, took me on no journeys back to where I had been. After eighteen months in Cibola, Saint Louis had been turned into a phantom city for me, and a little more of it was vanishing every day.

  One afternoon that spring the weather became inordinately hot, boiling up to midsummer levels. The four of us were working out in the fields, and when the master removed his shirt for greater comfort, I saw that he was wearing something around his neck: a leather thong with a small, transparent globe hanging from it like a jewel or an ornament. When I approached him to have a better look—merely curious, with no ulterior motive—I saw that it was my missing pinky joint, encased in the pendant along with some kind of clear liquid. The master must have noticed my surprise, for he glanced down at his chest with an expression of alarm, as if he thought a spider might be crawling there. When he saw what it was, he took hold of the globe in his fingers and held it out to me, smiling with satisfaction. “A pretty little widget, eh Wait?” he said.

  “I don’t know about pretty,” I said, “but it looks awful familiar to me.”

  “It should. It used to belong to you. For the first ten years of your life, it was part of who you were.”

  “It still is. Just because it’s detached from my body, that don’t make it any less mine than before.”

  “It’s pickled in formaldehyde. Preserved like some dead fetus in a jar. It doesn’t belong to you now, it belongs to science.”

  “Yeah, then what’s it doing around your neck? If it belongs to science, why not donate it to the wax museum?”

  “Because it has special meaning for me, sport. I wear it to remind myself of the debt I owe you. Like a hangman’s noose. This thing is the albatross of my conscience, and I can’t let it fall into a stranger’s hands.”

  “What about my hands, then? Fair is fair, and I want my joint back. If anyone wears that necklace, it’s got to be me.”

  “I’ll make a bargain with you. If you let me hold on to it a little longer, I’ll think of it as yours. That’s a promise. It’s got your name on it, and once I get you off the ground, you can have it back.”

  “For keeps?”

  “For keeps. Of course for keeps.”

  “And how long is this ‘little longer’ going to be?”

  “Not long. You’re already standing on the brink.”

  “The only brink I’m standing on is the brink of perdition. And if that’s where I am, that’s where you are, too. Ain’t that so, master?”

  “You catch on fast, son. United we stand, divided we fall. You for me and me for you, and where we stop nobody knows.”

  This was the second time I had been given encouraging news about my progress. First from Mother Sioux, and now from the master Himself. I won’t deny that I felt flattered, but for all their confidence in my abilities, I failed to see that I was one jot closer to success. After that sweltering afternoon in May, we went through a period of epic heat, the hottest summer in living memory. The ground was a caldron, and every time you walked on it, you felt that the soles would melt right off your shoes. We prayed for rain at supper every evening, and for three months not a single drop fell from the sky. The air was so parched, so delirious in its dessication, you could track the buzzing of a horsefly from a hundred yards away. Everything seemed to itch, to rasp like thistle rubbing against barbed wire, and the smell from the outhouse was so rank it singed the hairs in your nostrils. The corn wilted, drooped, and died; the lettuce bolted to grotesque, gargantuan heights, standing in the garden like mutant towers. By mid-August, you could drop a pebble down the well and count to six before you heard the water plink. No green beans, no corn on the cob, no succulent tomatoes like the year before. We subsisted on eggs and mush and smoked ham, and while there was enough to see us through the summer, our diminishing stores boded ill for the months that lay ahead. “Tighten your belts, children,” the master would say to us at supper, “tighten your belts and chew until you can’t taste it anymore. If we don’t stretch out what we have, it’s goin
g to be a long, hungry winter.”

  For all the woes that assailed us during the drought, I was happy, much happier than would have seemed possible. I had weathered the most gruesome parts of my initiation, and what stood before me now were the stages of mental struggle, the showdown between myself and myself. Master Yehudi was hardly an obstacle anymore. He would issue his commands and then disappear from my mind, leading me to places of such inwardness that I no longer remembered who I was. The physical stages had been a war, an act of defiance against the master’s skull-denting cruelty, and he had never withdrawn from my sight, standing over me as he studied my reactions, watching my face for each microscopic shudder of pain. All that was finished now. He had turned into a gentle, munificent guide, talking in the soft voice of a seducer as he lured me into accepting one bizarre task after another. He had me go into the barn and count every blade of straw in the horse’s stall. He had me stand on one leg for an entire night, then stand on the other leg for the whole of the next night. He tied me to a post in the midday sun and ordered me to repeat his name ten thousand times. He imposed a vow of silence on me, and for twenty-four days I did not speak to anyone, did not utter a sound even when I was alone. He had me roll my body across the yard, he had me hop, he had me jump through hoops. He taught me how to cry at will, and then he taught me how to laugh and cry at the same time. He made me teach myself how to juggle, and once I could juggle three stones, he made me juggle four. He blindfolded me for a week, then he plugged my ears for a week, then he bound my arms and legs together for a week and made me crawl on my belly like a worm.