Mr. Vertigo

by Paul Auster

  The master and I rode back to the house that night drunk with joy. Everything seemed possible to us now: the conquest of both loft and locomotion, the ascension into actual flight, the dream of dreams. That was our greatest moment together, I think, the moment when our whole future fell into place at last. On June sixth, however, just one night after reaching that pinnacle, my training ground to an abrupt and irrevocable halt. The thing that Master Yehudi had been dreading for so long finally came to pass, and when it did, it happened with such violence, caused such havoc and upheaval in our hearts, that neither one of us was ever the same again.

  I had worked well all day, and as was our habit throughout that miraculous spring, we decided to linger on into the night. At seven thirty, we ate a supper of sandwiches that Mother Sioux had packed for us that morning and then resumed our labors as darkness gathered in the surrounding fields. It must have been close to ten o’clock when we heard the sound of horses. It was no more than a faint rumbling at first, a disturbance in the ground that made me think of distant thunder, as if a lightning storm were brewing somewhere in the next county. I had just completed a double somersault at the edge of the pond and was waiting for the master’s comments, but instead of speaking in his normal calm voice, he grabbed hold of my arm in a sudden, panic-stricken gesture. “Listen,” he said. And then he said it again: “Listen to that. They’re coming. The bastards are coming.” I pricked up my ears, and sure enough, the sound was getting louder. A couple of seconds passed, and then I understood that it was the sound of horses, a stampeding clatter of hooves charging in our direction.

  “Don’t move,” the master said. “Stay where you are and don’t move a muscle until I come back.”

  Then, without a word of explanation, he started running toward the house, tearing through the fields like a sprinter. I ignored his command and took off after him, racing along as fast as my legs could carry me. We were a good quarter mile from the house, but before we’d traveled a hundred yards, flames were already visible, a glowing surge of red and yellow pulsing against the black sky. We heard whoops and war yodels, a volley of shots rang out, and then we heard the unmistakable sound of human screams. The master kept running, steadily increasing the distance between us, but once he came to the stand of oaks on the far side of the barn, he stopped. I pushed on to the verge of the trees myself, intent on continuing all the way to the house, but the master saw me out of the corner of his eye and wrestled me to the ground before I could go any farther. “We’re too late,” he said. “If we go in there now, we’re only going to get ourselves killed. There’s twelve of them and two of us, and they’ve all got rifles and guns. Pray to God they don’t find us, Walt, but there’s not a damned thing we can do for the others.”

  So we stood there helplessly behind the trees, watching the Ku Klux Klan do its work. A dozen men on a dozen horses pranced about the yard, a mob of yelping murderers with white sheets over their heads, and we were powerless to thwart them. They dragged Aesop and Mother Sioux out of the burning house, put ropes around their necks, and strung them up to the elm tree by the side of the road, each one to a different branch. Aesop howled, Mother Sioux said nothing, and within minutes they were both dead. My two best friends were murdered before my eyes, and all I could do was watch, fighting back tears as Master Yehudi clamped his palm over my mouth. Once the killing was over, a couple of the Klansmen stuck a wooden cross in the ground, doused it with gasoline, and set it on fire. The cross burned as the house burned, the men whooped it up a little more, firing rounds of buckshot into the air, and then they all climbed onto their horses and rode off in the direction of Cibola. The house was incandescent by then, a fireball of heat and roaring timbers, and by the time the last of the men was gone, the roof had already given way, collapsing to the ground in a shower of sparks and meteors. I felt as if I had seen the sun explode. I felt as if I had just witnessed the end of the world.

  II

  We buried them on the property that night, lowering their bodies into two unmarked graves beside the barn. We should have said some prayers, but our lungs were too full of sobbing for that, so we just covered them up with dirt and said nothing, working in silence as the salt water trickled down our cheeks. Then, without returning to the smoldering house, without even bothering to see if any of our belongings were still intact, we hitched the mare to the wagon and drove off into the darkness, leaving Cibola behind us for good.

  It took all night and half the next morning before we made it to Mrs. Witherspoon’s house in Wichita, and for the rest of that summer the master’s grief was so bad I thought he might be in danger of dying himself. He scarcely stirred from his bed, he scarcely ate, he scarcely talked. Except for the tears that dropped from his eyes every three or four hours, there was no way to tell if you were looking at a man or a block of stone. The big fella was all done in, ravaged by sorrow and self-recrimination, and no matter how hard I wished he’d snap out of it, he only got worse as the weeks went by. “I saw it coming,” he’d sometimes mutter to himself. “I saw it coming, and I didn’t lift a finger to stop it. It’s my fault. It’s my fault they’re dead. I couldn’t have done a better job if I’d killed them with my own two hands, and a man who kills deserves no mercy. He doesn’t deserve to live.”

  I shuddered to see him like that, all useless and inert, and in the long run it scared me every bit as much as what had happened to Aesop and Mother Sioux—maybe even more. I don’t mean to sound coldhearted about it, but life is for the living, and shocked as I was by the massacre of my friends, I was still just a kid, a little jumping bean with ants in my pants and rubber in my knees, and I didn’t have it in me to walk around mewling and mourning for very long. I shed my tears, I cursed God, I banged my head against the floor, but after carrying on like that for a few days, I was ready to put it behind me and get on to other things. I don’t suppose that speaks too well of me as a person, but there’s no point in pretending I felt what I didn’t feel. I missed Aesop and Mother Sioux, I ached to be with them again—but they were gone, and no amount of begging was going to bring them back. As far as I was concerned, it was time to shake our toes and get cracking. My head was still stuffed with dreams about my new career, and piggish as those dreams might have been, I couldn’t wait to get started, to launch myself into the firmament and dazzle the world with my greatness.

  Imagine my disappointment, then, as I watched June turn into July and Master Yehudi still languished; imagine how my spirits sank when July became August and he still showed no signs of rebounding from the tragedy. Not only did it put a crimp in my plans, but I felt let down, bollixed, left in the lurch. An essential flaw in the master’s character had been revealed to me, and I resented him for his lack of inner toughness, his refusal to face up to the shittiness of life. I had depended on him for so many years, had drawn so much strength from his strength, and now he was acting like any other blithering optimist, another one of those guys who welcomed the good when it came but couldn’t accept the bad. It turned my stomach to see him fall apart like that, and as his grief dragged on, I couldn’t help but lose some faith in him. If not for Mrs. Witherspoon, there’s a chance I would have thrown in the towel and split. “Your master is a big man,” she said to me one morning, “and big men have big feelings. They feel more than other men—bigger joys, bigger angers, bigger sorrows. He’s in pain now, and it’s going to last longer for him than it would for someone else. Don’t let it frighten you, Walt. He’ll get over it eventually. You just have to be patient.”

  That’s what she said, but deep down I’m not so sure she believed those words herself. As time went on, I sensed that she was growing just as disgusted with him as I was, and I liked it that we saw eye to eye on such an important matter. She was one salty broad, Mrs. W., and now that I was living in her house and spending every day in her company, I understood that we had much more in common than I had previously suspected. She’d been on her best behavior when she visited the farm, all prim and fusty so as
not to offend Aesop and Mother Sioux, but now that she was on her own turf, she was free to let go and unfurl her true nature. For the first couple of weeks, nearly everything about that nature surprised me, riddled as it was with bad habits and unchecked bouts of self-indulgence. I’m not just talking about her penchant for booze (no less than six or seven gin and tonics per day), nor her passion for cigarettes (puffing on bygone brands like Picayunes and Sweet Caporals from morning to night), but a certain overall laxness, as if lurking behind her ladylike exterior there was a loose, slattern’s soul struggling to break free. The tipoff was her mouth, and once she’d imbibed a round or two of her favorite beverage, she’d lapse into some of the coarsest, most vulgar language I’ve ever heard from the lips of a woman, zinging out the pungent one-liners as fast as a tommy gun burps bullets. After all the clean living I’d done on the farm, I found it refreshing to mingle with someone who wasn’t bound by a high moral purpose, whose only aim in life was to enjoy herself and make as much money as she could. So we became friends, leaving Master Yehudi to his anguish as we sweated out the dog days and boredom of the hot Wichita summer.

  I knew she was fond of me, but I don’t want to exaggerate the depth of her affections, at least not at that early stage. Mrs. Witherspoon had a definite reason for keeping me happy, and while I’d like to flatter myself it was because she found me such a sterling companion, such a witty, devil-may-care fellow, the truth was that she was thinking about the future health of her bank account. Why else would a woman of her gumption and sex appeal bother to pal around with a stump-dicked brat like myself? She saw me as a business opportunity, a dollar sign in the shape of a boy, and she knew that if my career was handled with the proper care and acumen, it was going to make her the richest woman in thirteen counties. I’m not saying that we didn’t have some fun times together, but it was always in the service of her own interests, and she sucked up to me and won me over as a way to keep me in the fold, to make sure I didn’t sneak away before she’d cashed in on my talent.

  So be it. I don’t blame her for acting like that, and if I’d been in her shoes, I probably would have done the same thing. Still, I won’t deny that it sometimes bugged me to see how little an impression my magic made on her. Throughout those dreary weeks and months, I kept my hand in by practicing my routine no less than one or two hours a day. So as not to spook the people who drove past the house, I confined myself to the indoors, working in the upstairs parlor with the shades drawn. Not only did Mrs. Witherspoon rarely bother to watch these sessions, but on the few occasions when she did enter the room, she would observe the spectacle of my levitations without twitching a muscle, studying me with the blank-eyed objectivity of a butcher inspecting a slab of beef. No matter how extraordinary the stunts I performed, she accepted them as part of the natural order of things, no more strange or inexplicable than the waxing of the moon or the noise of the wind. Maybe she was too drunk to notice the difference between a miracle and an everyday event, or maybe the mystery of it just left her cold, but when it came to entertainment, she’d have sooner driven through a rainstorm to see some third-rate picture show than watch me float above the goddamn tables and chairs in her living room. My act was no more than a means to an end for her. As long as the end was assured, she couldn’t have cared less about the means.

  But she was good to me, I won’t take that away from her. Whatever her motives might have been, she didn’t stint on the amusements, and not once did she hesitate to fork out dough on my behalf. Two days after my arrival, she took me on a shopping spree in downtown Wichita, outfitting me with a whole new set of clothes. After that there was the ice cream parlor, the candy shop, the penny arcade. She was always one step ahead of me, and before I even knew I wanted something, she’d already be offering it to me, thrusting it into my hands with a wink and a little pat on the head. After all the hard times I’d been through, I can’t say I objected to whiling away my days in the lap of luxury. I slept in a soft bed with embroidered sheets and down pillows, I ate the gigantic meals cooked for us by Nelly Boggs the colored maid, I never had to put on the same pair of underpants two mornings in a row. Most afternoons, we’d escape the heat by taking a spin through the countryside in the emerald sedan, whizzing down the empty roads with the windows open and the air rushing in on us from all sides. Mrs. Witherspoon loved speed, and I don’t think I ever saw her happier than when she was pressing her foot on the gas pedal: laughing between snorts from her silver flask, her bobbed red hair fluttering like the legs of an overturned caterpillar. The woman had no fear, no sense that a car traveling at seventy or eighty miles an hour can actually kill someone. I did my best to stay calm when she floored it like that, but once we got to sixty-five or seventy I couldn’t help myself. The panic welling up inside me would do something to my stomach, and before long I’d be letting out one fart after another, a whole chain of stink bombs accompanied by loud staccato butt music. I needn’t add that I almost died of shame, for Mrs. Witherspoon was not someone to let indiscretions like that pass without comment. The first time it happened, she burst out laughing so hard I thought her head was going to fly off her shoulders. Then, without warning, she slammed her foot on the brakes and brought the car to a skidding, heart-pounding stop.

  “A few more corkers like those,” she said, “and we’ll have to drive around in gas masks.”

  “I don’t smell nothing,” I said, giving the only answer that seemed possible.

  Mrs. Witherspoon sniffed loudly, then screwed up her nose and made a face. “Smell again, sport. The whole bean brigade’s been traveling with us, tooting Dixie from your rear end.”

  “Just a little gas,” I said, subtly changing tactics. “If I’m not mistaken, a car won’t run if you don’t fill it with gas.”

  “Depends on the octane, honey. The kind of chemistry experiment we’re discussing here, it’s liable to get us both blown up.”

  “Yeah, well, at least that’s a better way to die than crashing into a tree.”

  “Don’t worry, snookums,” she said, unexpectedly softening her tone. She reached out and touched my head, gently running her fingertips through my hair. “I’m a hell of a driver. No matter how fast we’re going, you’re always safe with Lady Marion at the controls.”

  “That sounds good,” I said, enjoying the pressure of her hand against my scalp, “but I’d feel a lot better if you’d put that in writing.”

  She let out a short, throaty guffaw and smiled. “Here’s a tip for the future,” she said. “If you think I’m going too fast, just close your eyes and yell. The louder you yell, the more fun it’s going to be for both of us.”

  So that’s what I did, or at least what I tried to do. On subsequent outings I always made a point of shutting my eyes when the speedometer reached seventy-five, but a few times the farts came sneaking out at seventy, once even as low as sixty-five (when it looked like we were about to plow into an oncoming truck and veered away at the last second). Those lapses did nothing for my self-respect, but none was worse than the trauma that occurred in early August when my bunghole went for broke and I wound up crapping my pants. It was a brutally hot day. No rain had fallen in over two weeks, and every leaf on every tree in the whole flat countryside was covered with dust. Mrs. Witherspoon was a little more plastered than usual, I think, and by the time we left the city limits she’d worked herself into one of those charged-up, fuck-the-world moods. She pushed her buggy past fifty on the first turn, and after that there was no stopping her. Dust flew everywhere. It showered down on the windshield, it danced inside our clothes, it battered our teeth, and all she did was laugh, pressing down on the accelerator as if she meant to break the Mokey Dugway speed record. I shut my eyes and howled for all I was worth, clutching the dashboard as the car shimmied and roared along the dry, divot-scarred turnpike. After twenty or thirty seconds of mounting terror, I knew that my number was up. I was going to die on that stupid road, and these were my last moments on earth. That was when the turd slid out
of my crack; a loose and slippery cigar that thudded against my drawers with a warm, sickening wetness, then started sliding down my leg. When I realized what had happened, I couldn’t think of any better response than to burst into tears.

  Meanwhile, the ride continued, and by the time the car came to a halt some ten or twelve minutes later, I was soaked through and through—with sweat, with shit, with tears. My entire being was awash in body fluids and misery.

  “Well, buckaroo,” Mrs. Witherspoon announced, lighting up a cigarette to savor her triumph. “We did it. We broke the century mark. I’ll bet you I’m the first woman in this whole tight-assed state who ever did that. What do you think? Pretty good for an old bag like me, no?”