Mr. Vertigo

by Paul Auster

  Was I happy to see the master again? You bet your life I was. Did my heart pound with joy when he opened his arms and smothered me in a long embrace? Yes, my heart pounded with joy. Did we weep over our good fortune? Of course we did. Did we laugh and celebrate and dance a hundred jigs? We did all that and more.

  Master Yehudi said: “I’ll never let you out of my sight again.”

  And I said: “I’ll never go nowhere without you, not for the rest of my days.”

  There’s an old adage about not appreciating what you have until you’ve lost it. Accurate as that wisdom is, I can’t say it ever applied to me. I knew what I’d lost all along: from the moment I was carried out of that movie theater in Northfield, Minnesota, to the moment I laid eyes on the master again in Rapid City, South Dakota. For five and a half weeks I mourned the loss of everything that was good and precious to me, and I stand before the world now to testify that nothing can compare to the sweetness of getting back what was taken from you. Of all the triumphs I ever notched in my belt, none thrilled me more than the simple fact of having my life returned to me.

  The reunion was held in Rapid City because that’s where I wound up after my escape. Penny-pincher that he was, Slim had neglected the health of his car, and the heap ran out of gas before I’d driven twenty miles. If not for a traveling salesman who picked me up just before dark, I might still be wandering around those Badlands now, vainly searching for help. I asked him to drop me at the nearest police station, and once those cops found out who I was, they treated me like the crown prince of Ballyball. They fed me soup and Coney Island hotdogs, they gave me new clothes and a warm bath, they taught me how to play pinochle. By the time the master arrived the next afternoon, I had already talked to two dozen reporters and posed for four hundred pictures. My kidnaping had been front-page news for more than a month, and when a stringer from the local press came snooping around the station house for some late-breaking crumbs, he recognized me from my photos and put out the word. The bloodhounds and ambulance chasers poured in after that. Flashbulbs popped like firecrackers all around me, and I bragged my head off into the wee hours of the morning, telling wild stories about how I’d outwitted my captors and stolen off before they could swap me for the loot. I suppose the bare facts would have done just as well, but I couldn’t resist the urge to exaggerate. I reveled in my newfound celebrity, and after a while I grew giddy from the way those reporters looked at me, hanging on my every word. I was a showman, after all, and blessed with an audience like that one, I didn’t have the heart to let them down.

  The master put a stop to the nonsense the moment he walked in. For the next hour our hugs and tears occupied all my attention—but none of that was seen by the public. We sat alone in a back room of the constabulary, sobbing into each other’s arms as two police officers guarded the door. After that, statements were made, papers were signed, and then he whisked me out of there, elbowing past a throng of gawkers and well-wishers in the street. Cheers went up, huzzahs rang out, but the master only paused long enough to smile and wave once to the rubber-neckers before hustling me into a chauffeur-driven car parked at the curb. An hour and a half later, we were sitting in a private compartment on an eastbound train, headed for New England and the sandy shores of Cape Cod.

  It wasn’t until nightfall that I realized we weren’t going to be stopping off in Kansas. With so much catching up to do with the master, so many things to describe and explain and recount, my head had been churning like a milkshake machine, and it was only after the lights were out and we were tucked into our berths that I thought to ask about Mrs. Witherspoon. The master and I had been together for six hours by then, and her name hadn’t come up once.

  “What’s the matter with Wichita?” I said. “Ain’t that just as good a place for us as Cape Cod?”

  “It’s a fine place,” the master said, “but it’s too hot this time of year. The ocean will be good for you, Walt. You’ll recuperate faster.”

  “And what about Mrs. W.? When’s she planning to join us?”

  “She won’t be along this time, kid.”

  “Why not? You remember Florida, don’t you? She loved it down there so much, we just about had to drag her out of the water. I never seen a body happier than she was sloshing around in them waves.”

  “That might be so, but she won’t be doing any swimming this summer. At least not with us.”

  Master Yehudi sighed, filling the darkness with a soft, plaintive flutter of sound, and even though I was dead tired, just on the brink of dozing off, my heart began to speed up, pumping inside me like an alarm.

  “Oh,” I said, trying not to betray my worry. “And why’s that?”

  “I wasn’t going to tell you tonight. But now that you’ve brought it up, I don’t suppose there’s any point in keeping it from you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Lady Marion is about to take the plunge.”

  “Plunge? What plunge?”

  “She’s engaged to be married. If all goes according to plan, she’ll be joined in holy wedlock before Thanksgiving.”

  “You mean hitched? You mean coupled in matrimony for the rest of her natural life?”

  “That’s it. With a ring on her finger and a husband in her bed.”

  “And that husband ain’t you?”

  “Perish the thought. I’m here with you, aren’t I? How can I be back there with her if I’m here with you?”

  “But you’re her main squeeze. She don’t have no right to ditch you like that. Not without your say-so.”

  “She had to do it, and I didn’t stand in her way. That woman’s one in a million, Walt, and I don’t want you breathing a word against her.”

  “I’ll breathe all the words I want. Somebody does you a bad turn, and I breathe fire.”

  “She didn’t do me a bad turn. Her hands were tied, and she made a promise that couldn’t be broken. If I were you, boy, I’d thank her for making that promise every hour on the hour for the next fifty years.”

  “Thank her? I spit on that trollop, master. I spit and curse on that two-faced bitch for doing you wrong.”

  “Not when you find out why she did it, you won’t. It’s all because of you, little man. She put herself on the line for a pipsqueak named Walter Claireborne Rawley, and it was about the bravest, most selfless thing I’ve ever seen a person do.”

  “Bullroar. I don’t have nothing to do with it. I wasn’t even there.”

  “Fifty thousand dollars, sport. You think that kind of money grows on bushes? When the ransom notes started coming in, we had to act fast.”

  “It’s a lot of dough, sure, but we must have earned twice that much by now.”

  “Not even close. Marion and I couldn’t even raise half that amount between us. We’ve done nicely for ourselves, Walt, but nowhere what you’d think. The overhead is enormous. Hotel bills, transportation, advertising—it all adds up, and we’ve just barely kept our heads above water.”

  “Oh,” I said, doing some quick mental calculations on how much money we must have spent—and growing dizzy in the process.

  “Oh is right. So what to do—that’s the question. Whither goest us before it’s too late? Old Judge Witherspoon turns us down. He hasn’t talked to Marion since Charlie killed himself, and he’s not about to interrupt his silence now. The banks laugh, the loan sharks won’t touch us, and even if we sell the house, we’re still going to fall short. So what to do—that’s the question burning a hole in our stomachs. The clock’s ticking, and every day we lose, the price is only going to go up.”

  “Fifty thousand bucks to save my ass.”

  “And a cheap price it was, too, considering your box-office potential in the years ahead. A cheap price, but we just didn’t have it.”

  “So where’d you go?”

  “As I’m sure you understand by now, Mrs. Witherspoon is a woman of manifold charms and allurements. I might have won a special place in her heart, but I wasn’t the only man who carried the torch
for her. Wichita teems with them, her suitors lurk behind every fencepost and fire hydrant. One of them, a young grain tycoon by the name of Orville Cox, has proposed to her five times in the past year. When you and I were out touring the sticks, young Orville was back in town, pressing his case pretty hard. Marion rebuffed him, of course, but not without a certain wistfulness and regret, and each time she said no, I think that wistfulness and regret grew a little stronger. Need I say more? She turned to Cox for the fifty thousand, a sum he was all too willing to part with, but only on the condition that she cast me aside and join him at the altar.”

  “That’s blackmail.”

  “More or less. But this Orville really isn’t such a bad character. A little on the dull side, maybe, but Marion’s going into it with her eyes open.”

  “Well,” I sputtered, not knowing what to make of all this, “I guess I owe her an apology. She came through for me like a real trooper.”

  “That she did. Like an honest-to-goodness heroine.”

  “But,” I continued, still not willing to give up, “but that’s all done with now. I mean, all bets is off. I got away from Slim on my own, and nobody had to fork out no fifty thousand. Orville’s still got his rotten dough, and by rights that means old Mrs. Witherspoon’s still free.”

  “Maybe so. But she’s still planning to marry him. I talked to her just yesterday, and that was how things stood. She intends to go ahead with it.”

  “We should break it up, master, that’s what we should do. Storm right into the wedding and snatch her away.”

  “Just like the movies, eh Walt?” For the first time since we’d started this dreadful conversation, Master Yehudi let out a laugh.

  “You’re damn straight. Just like a two-reeler punch-’em-up.”

  “Let her go, Walt. Her mind’s set on it, and there’s nothing we can do to stop her.”

  “But it’s my fault. If it wasn’t for that lousy kidnaping, none of this would have happened.”

  “It’s your uncle’s fault, son, not yours, and you mustn’t blame yourself—not now, not ever. Put it to rest. Mrs. Witherspoon is doing what she wants to do, and we’re not going to gripe about it. Understood? We’re going to act like gentlemen, and not only are we not going to hold it against her, we’re going to send her the prettiest wedding present any bride ever saw. Now get some sleep. We have a ton of work ahead of us, and I don’t want you fretting about this business a second longer. It’s done. The curtain is down, and the next act is about to begin.”

  Master Yehudi talked a good game, but when we sat down to breakfast in the dining car the next morning, his face looked wan and troubled—as if he’d been up all night, staring into the darkness and contemplating the end of the world. It occurred to me that he seemed thinner than he had in the past, and I wondered how this could have escaped my notice the day before. Had happiness made me that blind? I looked more closely, studying his face with as much detachment as I could. There was no question that something had changed in him. His skin was pinched and sallow, a certain haggardness had crept into the creases around his eyes, and all in all he looked somewhat diminished, less imposing than I’d remembered him. He’d been under duress, after all—first the ordeal of my kidnaping, then the blow of losing his woman—but I hoped that was all there was to it. Every now and then, I thought I detected a slight wince as he chewed his food, and once, toward the end of the meal, I unmistakably saw his hand dart under the table and clutch his belly. Was he unwell, or was it simply a passing attack of indigestion? And if he wasn’t well, how bad was it?

  He didn’t say a word, of course, and since I was looking none too healthy myself, he managed to keep the spotlight on me throughout the breakfast.

  “Eat up,” he said. “You’ve dwindled to a stick. Chomp down the waffles, son, and then I’ll order you some more. We’ve got to put some meat on your bones, get you back to full strength.”

  “I’m doing my best,” I said. “It’s not as though I got put up in some ritzy hotel. I lived on a steady diet of dog food with those bums, and my stomach’s shrunken to the size of a pea.”

  “And then there’s the matter of your skin,” the master added, watching me struggle to get down another rasher of bacon. “We’ll have to do something about that, too. All those blotches. It looks like you’ve broken out with a case of the chicken pox.”

  “No, sir, what I’ve got is the zits, and sometimes they’re so sore, it hurts me just to smile.”

  “Of course it does. Your poor body’s gone haywire from all that captivity. Cooped up without any sunshine, sweating bullets day and night—it’s no wonder you’re a mess. The beach is going to do you a world of good, Walt, and if those pimples don’t clear up, I’ll show you how to take care of them and keep the new ones at bay. My grandmother had a secret remedy, and it hasn’t failed yet.”

  “You mean I don’t have to grow another face?”

  “This one will do. If you didn’t have so many freckles, it wouldn’t look so bad. Combine those with the acne, and it creates quite an effect. But don’t brood, kid. Before long, the only thing you’ll have to worry about is whiskers—and that’s permanent, they stay with you until the bitter end.”

  We spent more than a month in a little beach house on the Cape Cod shore, one day for every day I’d been locked up by Uncle Slim. The master rented it under a false name to protect me from the press, and for purposes of simplicity and convenience we posed as father and son. Buck was the alias he’d chosen. Timothy Buck for himself and Timothy Buck II for me, or Tim Buck One and Tim Buck Two. We got some good laughs out of that, and the funny thing was, it wasn’t a whole lot different from Timbuktu where we were, at least as far as remoteness was concerned: high up on a promontory overlooking the ocean, with no neighbors for miles around. A woman named Mrs. Hawthorne drove out from Truro every day to cook and clean for us, but other than kibbitzing with her, we pretty much kept to ourselves. We soaked up the sun, took long walks on the beach, ate clam chowder, slept ten or twelve hours every night. After a week of that loafer’s regimen, I was feeling fit enough to try my hand at levitation again. The master started me off slowly with some routine ground exercises. Push-ups, jumping jacks, jogs on the beach, and when the time came to test the air again, we worked out behind the cliff, where Mrs. Hawthorne couldn’t spy on us. I was a little rusty at first, and I took some flops and spills, but after five or six days I was back in my old form, as limber and bouncy as I’d ever been. The fresh air was a great healer, and even if the master’s remedy didn’t do all he’d promised (a warm towel soaked in brine, vinegar, and drugstore astringents, applied to my face every four hours), half my zits began to fade on their own, no doubt from the sunshine and the good food I was eating again.

  My strength would have returned even more quickly, I think, if not for a nasty habit I developed during that holiday among the dunes and foghorns. Now that my hands were free to move again, they began to show a remarkable independence. They were filled with wanderlust, fidgety with urges to roam and explore, and no matter how many times I told them to stay put, they traveled wherever they damn pleased. I had only to crawl under the covers at night, and they would insist on flying to their favorite hot spot, a forest kingdom just south of the equator. There they would visit their friend, the great finger of fingers, the all-powerful one who ruled the universe by mental telepathy. When he called, no subject could resist. My hands were in his thrall, and short of tying them up in ropes again, I had no choice but to give them their freedom. So it was that Aesop’s madness became my madness, and so it was that my pecker rose up to take control of my life. It no longer resembled the little squirt gun that Mrs. Witherspoon had once cupped in her palm. It had gained in both size and stature since then, and its word was law. It begged to be touched, and I touched it. It cried out to be fondled, yanked, and squeezed, and I bowed to its whims with a willing heart. Who cared if I went blind? Who cared if my hair fell out? Nature was calling, and every night I ran to it as breathl
essly and hungrily as Adam himself.

  As for the master, I didn’t know what to think. He seemed to be enjoying himself, and while his complexion and color undoubtedly improved, I witnessed three or four stomach-clutching episodes, and the facial twinges occurred almost regularly now, at every second or third meal. But his spirits couldn’t have been brighter, and when he wasn’t reading his Spinoza or working with me on the act, he kept himself busy on the telephone, haggling over arrangements for my upcoming tour. I was big stuff now. The kidnaping had seen to that, and Master Yehudi was more than ready to take full advantage of the situation. Hastily revising his plans for my career, he settled us into our Cape Cod retreat and went on the offensive. He was holding the chips now and could afford to play hard-to-get. He could dictate terms, press for new and unheard-of percentages from the booking agents, demand guarantees matched by only the biggest draws. I’d reached the top a lot sooner than either of us had expected, and before the master’s wheelings and dealings were done, he’d booked me into scores of theaters up and down the East Coast, a string of one- and two-night stands that would keep us going until the end of the year. And not just in puny towns and villages—in real cities, the front-line places I’d always dreamed of going to. Providence and Newark; New Haven and Baltimore; Philadelphia, Boston, New York. The act had moved indoors, and from now on we’d be playing for high stakes. “No more walking on water,” the master said, “no more farm-boy costume, no more county fairs and chamber of commerce picnics. You’re an aerial artist now, Walt, the one and only of your kind, and folks are going to pay top dollar for the privilege of seeing you perform. They’ll dress up in their Sunday finery and sit in plush velvet seats, and once the theater goes dark and the spotlight turns on you, their eyes will fall out of their head. They’ll die a thousand deaths, Walt. You’ll prance and spin before them, and one by one they’ll follow you up the stairs of heaven. By the time it’s over, they’ll be sitting in the presence of God.”