Mr. Vertigo

by Paul Auster

  “Well, well,” he said, oozing false amiability as he sauntered over to our table. “Fancy that. I come to the back of beyond on personal business, drop in at the local beanery for a cup of java, and who should I run into but my long-lost nephew? Little Walt, the apple of my eye, the freckle-faced boy wonder. It’s like destiny is what it is. Like finding a needle in a haystack.” Without a word from either the master or myself, he parked himself in the empty chair beside me. “You don’t mind if I sit down, do you?” he said. “I’m just so bowled over by this joyful occasion, I have to get off my pins before I pass out.” Then he banged me on the back and tousled my hair, still pretending how happy he was to see me—which maybe he was, but not for any of the reasons a normal person would be. It gave me the chills to be touched by him like that. I squirmed away from his hand, but he paid no attention to the rebuff, chattering on in that slimy way of His and baring his crooked brown teeth at every opportunity. “Well, old bean,” he continued, “it looks like the world’s been treating you pretty good these days, don’t it? From what the papers tell me, you’re the cat’s pajamas, the greatest thing since rye bread. Your mentor here must be flush with pride—not to speak of just plain flush, since his wallet can’t have suffered none in the process. I can’t tell you the good it does me, Walt, seeing my kin make a name for himself in the big world.”

  “State your business, friend,” the master said, finally breaking in on Slim’s monologue. “The kid and I were just on our way out, and we don’t have time to sit around shooting the breeze.”

  “Hell,” Slim said, doing his best to look offended, “can’t a guy catch up on the news with his own sister’s son? What’s the rush? From the looks of that machine you got parked at the curb, you’ll get where you’re going in no time.”

  “Walt’s got nothing to say to you,” the master said, “and as far as I’m concerned, you’ve got nothing to say to him.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Slim said, reaching for the crumpled cheroot in his pocket and lighting up. “He’s got a right to know about his poor Aunt Peg, and I’ve got the right to tell him.”

  “What about her?” I said, barely getting my voice above a whisper.

  “Hey, the kid can talk!” Slim said, pinching my cheek with mock enthusiasm. “For a moment there, I thought he’d cut out your tongue, Walt.”

  “What about her?” I repeated.

  “She’s dead, son, that’s what. She got took by that tornado that demolished Saint Louis last year. The whole house fell on top of her, and that was the end of sweet old Peg. It happened just like that.”

  “And you escaped,” I said.

  “It was the Lord’s will,” Slim said. “As chance would have it, I was on the other side of town, doing an honest day’s work.”

  “Too bad it wasn’t the other way around,” I said. “Aunt Peg was no great shakes, but at least she didn’t sock me around like you did.”

  “Hey, now,” Slim said, “that’s no way to talk to your uncle. I’m your own flesh and blood, Walt, and you don’t have to tell no fibs about me. Not when I’m here on such a vital errand. Mr. Yehudi and me got things to talk about, and I don’t need no cracks from you gumming up the works.”

  “I believe you’re mistaken,” the master said. “You and I have nothing to talk about. Walt and I are running late now, and I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse us.”

  “Not so fast, mister,” Slim said, suddenly forgetting his fake charm. His voice was seething with petulance and anger, just as I’d always remembered it. “You and I made a deal, and you’re not going to worm out on me now.”

  “Deal?” the master said. “What deal was that?”

  “The one we made in Saint Louis four years ago. Did you think I’d forget or something? I’m not stupid, you know. You promised me a cut of the profits, and I’m here to claim my fair share. Twenty-five percent. That’s what you promised, and that’s what I want.”

  “As I recall, Mr. Sparks,” the master said, trying to control his temper, “you just about kissed my feet when I told you I’d take the boy off your hands. You were slobbering all over me, telling me how glad you were to be rid of him. That was the deal, Mr. Sparks. I asked for the boy, and you gave him to me.”

  “I had my conditions. I spelled them out for you, and you agreed. Twenty-five percent. You’re not going to tell me there’s no deal. You promised me, and I took you at your word.”

  “Dream on, laddie. If you think there’s a deal, then show me the contract. Show me the piece of paper where it says you have one dime coming to you.”

  “We shook hands on it. It was a gentlemen’s agreement, all on the up and up.”

  “You have a splendid imagination, Mr. Sparks, but you’re a liar and a crook. If you have a complaint against me, take it to a lawyer, and we’ll see how well your case stands up in court. But until that happens, kindly have the decency to remove your ugly face from my sight.” Then the master turned to me and said, “Come on, Walt, let’s go. They’re waiting for us in Urbana, and we don’t have a minute to lose.”

  The master threw a dollar on the table and stood up, and I stood up with him. But Slim wasn’t finished having his say, and he managed to get in the last word, delivering a few parting shots as we left the diner. “You think you’re smart, mister,” he said, “but you ain’t done with me yet. Nobody calls Edward J. Sparks a liar and gets away with it, you hear? That’s right, keep on walking out the door—it don’t matter. But that’s the last time you’ll ever turn your back on me. Be warned, pal. I’m coming after you. I’m coming after you and that scummy kid, and once I get to you, you’ll be sorry you ever talked to me like that. You’ll be sorry till the day you die.”

  He pursued us to the door of the restaurant, showering us with his deranged threats as we climbed into the Pierce Arrow and the master started up the engine. The noise drowned out my uncle’s words, but his lips were still moving, and I could see the veins bulging in his scrawny neck. That was how we left him: beside himself with fury as he watched us pull away, shaking his fist at us and mouthing his inaudible vengeance. My uncle had been wandering in the desert for forty years, and all he had to show for it was a history of stumbles and wrong turns, an endless string of failures. Watching his face through the rear window of the car, I understood that he had a purpose now, that the fucker had finally found a mission in life.

  Once we were out of town, the master turned to me and said, “That bigmouth doesn’t have a leg to stand on. It’s all a bluff, jive and nonsense from start to finish. The guy’s a born loser, and if he ever so much as lays a hand on you, Walt, I’ll kill him. I swear it. I’ll chop that grifter into so many pieces, they’ll still be finding bits of him in Canada twenty years from now.”

  I was proud of the way the master had handled himself in the diner, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t worried. My mother’s older brother was a slippery customer, and now that he’d set his mind on something, he wasn’t likely to be distracted from his goal. Personally speaking, I had no wish to consider his side of the dispute. Maybe the master had promised him twenty-five percent and maybe he hadn’t, but that was all water down the toilet now, and the only thing I wanted was to have that son-of-a-bitch out of my life for good. He’d bounced me off the walls too many times for me to feel anything but hatred for him, and whether he had a rightful claim to the money or not, the truth was he didn’t deserve a penny. But alas, what I felt didn’t count for a damn. Nor what the master felt. It was all up to Slim, and I knew in my bones that he was coming, that he’d keep on coming until his hands were pressed around my throat.

  These fears and premonitions didn’t leave me. They cast a pall over everything that happened in the days and months that followed, affecting my mood to the point where even the joy of my growing success was contaminated. It was particularly bad in the beginning. Everywhere we went, every town we traveled to, I kept expecting Slim to pop up again. Sitting in a restaurant, walking into a hotel lobby, ste
pping out of the car: my uncle was liable to appear at any humdrum moment, bursting through the fabric of my life with no warning. That was what made the situation so hard to bear. It was the uncertainty, the thought that all my happiness could be smashed in the blink of an eye. The only spot that felt safe to me anymore was standing before a crowd and doing my act. Slim wouldn’t dare to make a move in public, at least not when I was the center of attention like that, and given all the anxiety I carried around with me the rest of the time, performing became a kind of mental repose, a respite from the terror that stalked my heart. I threw myself into my work as never before, exulting in the freedom and protection it gave me. Something had shifted inside my soul, and I understood that this was who I was now: not Walter Rawley, the kid who turned into Walt the Wonder Boy for one hour a day, but Walt the Wonder Boy through and through, a person who did not exist except when he was in the air. The ground was an illusion, a no-man’s-land mined with traps and shadows, and everything that happened down there was false. Only the air was real now, and for twenty-three hours a day I lived as a stranger to myself, cut off from my old pleasures and habits, a cowering bundle of desperation and fright.

  The work kept me going, and fortunately there was lots of it, an endless parade of winter bookings. After our return to Wichita, the master worked out an elaborate tour, with a record number of weekly performances. Of all the smart moves he made, his cleverest stroke was getting us to Florida for the worst of the cold weather. We were there from mid-January to the end of March, covering the peninsula from top to bottom, and for this one extended trip—the first and only time it ever happened—Mrs. Witherspoon tagged along with us. Contrary to all that garbage about being a jinx, she brought me nothing but good luck. Luck not only as far as Slim was concerned (we saw neither hide nor tail of him), but luck in terms of packed audiences, large box-office receipts, and good companionship (she liked going to the movies as much as I did). Those were the days of the Florida land boom, and rich people had begun flocking down there in their white suits and diamond necklaces to dance away the winter under the palm trees. It was my first experience going out in front of swells. I did my act at country clubs, golf courses, and dude ranches, and for all their polish and sophistication, those blue-bloods took to me with the same gusto as the wretched of the earth. It made no difference. My act was universal, and it floored everyone in the same way, rich and poor alike.

  By the time we returned to Kansas, I was beginning to feel more like myself again. Slim hadn’t shown his face in over five months, and I figured that if he was planning any surprises, he would have sprung them on us by now. When we took off again for the upper Midwest at the end of April, I had more or less stopped thinking about him. That scary scene in Gibson City was so far in the past, it sometimes felt as if it had never happened. I was relaxed and confident, and if there was anything on my mind beside the act, it was the hair that had started growing in my armpits and around my crotch, all that late-sprouting stuff that announced my entrance into the land of wet dreams and dirty thoughts. My guard was down, and just as I’d always known it would, just as I’d feared when the whole business started, the blade fell at the very moment I was least expecting it. The master and I were in Northfield, Minnesota, a little town about forty miles south of Saint Paul, and as was my custom prior to evening performances, I went to the local movie house to fritter away a couple of hours. The talkies were in full swing by then, and I couldn’t get enough of them, I went every chance I had, sometimes seeing the same picture three or four times. On that particular day, the feature show was Cocoanuts, the new Marx Brothers comedy set in Florida. I’d already seen it before, but I was crazy about those clowns, especially Harpo, the mute one with the nutty wig and the loud honker, and I hopped to when I heard it was playing that afternoon. The theater was a fair-size establishment, with seats for two or three hundred people, but owing to the good spring weather, there couldn’t have been more than half a dozen folks in attendance with me. Not that I cared, of course. I settled in with a bag of popcorn and proceeded to laugh my head off, oblivious to the other bodies scattered in the dark. About twenty or thirty minutes into it, I sniffed something strange, a curiously sweet medicinal odor wafting up from behind me. It was a strong smell, and it was getting stronger by the second. Before I could turn around to see what it was, a rag drenched in that pungent concoction was clamped over my face. I bucked and struggled to break free of it, but a hand pushed me back, and then, before I could gather my strength for a second effort, the fight suddenly went out of me. My muscles went limp; my skin melted into a buttery ooze; my head detached itself from my body. Wherever I was from then on, it wasn’t any place I’d been to before.

  I had imagined all kinds of battles and confrontations with Slim—fistfights, holdups, guns going off in dark alleys—but not once did it enter my mind that he’d kidnap me. It wasn’t in my uncle’s M. O. to do something that required such long-term planning. He was a hothead, a banjo-brain who jumped into things on the spur of the moment, and if he broke the mold on my account, it only shows how bitter he was, how deeply my success had rankled him. I was the one big chance he’d ever have, and he wasn’t going to blow it by flying off the handle. Not this time. He was going to act like a proper gangster, a slick professional who thought of all the angles, and he’d end up putting the screws to us but good. He wasn’t in it just for the money, and he wasn’t in it just for revenge—he wanted both, and snatching me for ransom was the magic combination, the way to kill those two birds with one stone.

  He had a partner this time, a corpulent yegg by the name of Fritz, and considering what mental lightweights they were, they did a pretty thorough job of keeping me hidden. First they stashed me in a cave on the outskirts of Northfield, a dank, filthy hole where I spent three days and nights, my legs bound in thick ropes and a gag tied around my mouth; then they gave me a second dose of ether and took me somewhere else, a basement in what must have been an apartment building in Minneapolis or Saint Paul. That lasted only a day, and from there we drove to the country again, settling into an abandoned prospector’s house in what I later learned was South Dakota. It looked more like the moon than the earth out there, all treeless and desolate and still, and we were so far back from any road that even if I’d managed to run away from them, it would have taken me hours to find help. They’d stocked the place with a couple of months’ worth of canned food, and all signs pointed to a long, nerve-racking siege. That was how Slim had chosen to play it: as slowly as he could. He wanted to make the master squirm, and if that meant dragging things out a little bit, so much the better. He wasn’t in any rush. It was all so delicious for him, why put a stop to it before he’d had his fun?

  I had never seen him so cocky, so buoyed up and satisfied with himself. He strutted around that cabin like a four-star general, barking out orders and laughing at his own jokes, a whirlwind of lunatic bravado. It disgusted me to see him like that, but at the same time it spared me from the full impact of his cruelty. With everything coming up aces for him, Slim could afford to be generous, and he never went at me with quite the savagery I was expecting. That isn’t to say he didn’t slap me around from time to time, zinging me across the mouth or twisting my ears when it struck his fancy, but most of his abuse came in the form of taunts and verbal digs. He never wearied of telling me how he’d “turned the tables on that lousy Jew,” or of making fun of the acne eruptions that mottled my face (“Look, boy, another pus-gusher”; “Whoa there, pal, get a load of them volcanoes stitched across your brow”), or of reminding me how my fate now rested in his hands. To emphasize this last point, he’d sometimes saunter over to me twirling a gun on his finger and press the tip of the barrel against my skull. “See what I mean, fella?” he’d say, and then burst out laughing. “A little squeeze on this trigger here, and your brains go splat against the wall.” Once or twice, he went ahead and pulled the trigger, but that was only to scare me. As long as he hadn’t pocketed the ransom money, I
knew he wouldn’t have the guts to load that gun with live ammunition.

  It was no picnic, but I found I could handle that stuff. Sticks and stones, as they say, and I realized it was a lot better to listen to his yammering than get my bones broken in two. As long as I kept my mouth shut and didn’t provoke him, he usually ran out of steam after fifteen or twenty minutes. Since they kept the gag on me most of the time, I didn’t have much choice in the matter anyway. But even when my lips were free, I did everything I could to ignore his cracks. I came up with scores of juicy rebuttals and insults, but I generally kept them to myself, knowing full well that the less I wrangled with the bastard, the less he would get under my skin. Beyond that, I didn’t have much to cling to. Slim was too crazy to be trusted, and there was nothing to guarantee he wouldn’t find a way to kill me once he’d collected the money. I couldn’t know what he had in mind, and that not knowing was the thing that tortured me most. I could endure the hardships of incarceration, but my head was never free of visions of what was to come: having my throat cut, having a bullet fired through my heart, having the skin peeled off my bones.

  Fritz did nothing to assuage these torments. He was little more than a yes-man, a blundering fatso who wheezed and shuffled his way through the various minor tasks that Slim doled out to him. He cooked the beans on the wood stove, he swept the floors, he emptied the shit buckets, he adjusted and tightened the ropes around my arms and legs. God knows where Slim had dug up that bovine gumball, but I don’t suppose he could have asked for a more willing henchman. Fritz was maid, butler, and errand boy, the stalwart ninny who never spoke a word of complaint. He sat through those long days and nights as if the Badlands were the finest vacation spot in America, perfectly content to bide his time and do nothing, to stare out the window, to breathe. For ten or twelve days he didn’t say much of anything to me, but then, after the first ransom note was sent to Master Yehudi, Slim started driving off to town every morning, presumably to post letters or make telephone calls or communicate his demands by some other means, and Fritz and I started spending a portion of every day alone together. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we developed an understanding, but at least he didn’t scare me the way Slim did. Fritz had nothing personal against me. He was just doing his job, and it wasn’t long before I realized that he was as much in the dark about the future as I was.