Mr. Vertigo

by Paul Auster

  Such are the twists of fortune. The kidnaping was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, and yet it turned out to be my big break, the fuel that finally launched me into orbit. I’d been given a month’s worth of free publicity, and by the time I wriggled out of Slim’s grasp, I was already a household name, the number-one cause célèbre in the land. The news of my escape created a stir, a second sensation on top of the first, and after that I could do no wrong. Not only was I a victim, I was a hero, a mighty-mite of spunk and derring-do, and beyond just being pitied, I was loved. How to figure such a business? I’d been thrown into hell. I’d been bound and gagged and given up for dead, and one month later I was everybody’s darling. It was enough to fry your brain, to sizzle the boogers in your snout. America was at my feet, and with a man like Master Yehudi pulling the strings, the odds were it would stay there for a long time to come.

  I’d outfoxed Uncle Slim, all right, but that didn’t change the fact that he was still at large. The cops raided the shack in South Dakota, but other than a mess of fingerprints and a pile of dirty laundry, they found no trace of the culprits. I suppose I should have been scared, on the alert for more trouble, but curiously enough I didn’t spend much time worrying. It was too peaceful on Cape Cod for any of that, and now that I’d bested my uncle once, I felt confident I could do it again—quickly forgetting how close a shave I’d just had. But Master Yehudi had promised to protect me, and I believed him. I wasn’t going to stroll into any movie theaters on my own anymore, and as long as he was with me wherever I went, what could possibly happen? I thought about the kidnaping less and less as the days wore on. When I did think about it, it was mostly to relive my getaway and to wonder how badly I’d hurt Slim’s leg with the car. I hoped it was real bad—that the fender had clipped him in the kneecap, maybe hard enough to shatter the bone. I wanted to have done some serious damage, to know that he’d be walking with a limp for the rest of his life.

  But I was too busy with other things to feel much desire to look back. The days were full, crammed with preparations and rehearsals for my new show, and there weren’t any blanks on my nighttime dance card either, considering how ready my dick was for dalliance and diversion. Between these nocturnal escapades and my afternoon exertions, I didn’t have a spare moment to sulk or feel frightened. I wasn’t haunted by Slim, I wasn’t bogged down by Mrs. Witherspoon’s impending marriage. My thoughts were turned to a more immediate problem, and that was enough to keep my hands full: how to remake Walt the Wonder Boy into a theatrical performer, a creature fit for the confines of the indoor stage.

  Master Yehudi and I had some mammoth conversations on this subject, but mostly we worked out the new routines by trial and error. Hour after hour, day after day, we’d stand on the windy beach making changes and corrections, struggling to get it right as flocks of seagulls honked and wheeled overhead. We wanted to make every minute count. That was our guiding principle, the object of all our efforts and furious calculations. Out in the boondocks I’d had every show to myself, a good hour’s worth of performing time, even more if I’d felt in the mood. But vaudeville was a different brand of beer. I’d be sharing the bill with other acts, and the program had to be boiled down to twenty minutes. We’d lost the lake, we’d lost the impact of the natural sky, we’d lost the grandeur of my hundred-yard sallies and locomotion-struts. Everything had to be squeezed into a smaller space, but once we began to explore the ins and outs of it, we saw that smaller didn’t necessarily mean worse. We had some new tools at our disposal, and the trick was to turn them to our advantage. For one thing, we had lights. The master and I both drooled at the thought of them, imagining all the effects they made possible. We could go from pitch black to brightness in the blink of an eye—and vice versa. We could dim the hall to squinty obscurity, throw spots from place to place, manipulate colors, make me appear and disappear at will. And then there was the music, which would sound far more ample and sonorous when played indoors. It wouldn’t get lost in the background, it wouldn’t be drowned out by traffic and merry-go-round noises. The instruments would become an integral part of the show, and they’d navigate the audience through a sea of shifting emotions, subtly cueing the crowd on how it should react. Strings, horns, woodwinds, drums: we’d have pros down in the pit with us every night, and when we told them what to play, they’d know how to put it able. Undistracted by the buzzing of flies and the glare of the sun, people would be less prone to talk and lose their concentration. A hush would greet me the moment the curtain went up, and from beginning to end the performance would be controlled, advancing like clockwork from a few simple stunts to the wildest, most heart-stopping finale ever seen on a modern stage.

  So we hashed out our ideas, batting it back and forth for a couple of weeks, and eventually we came up with a blueprint. “Shape and coherence,” the master said. “Structure, rhythm, and surprise.” We weren’t going to give them a random collection of tricks. The act was going to unfold like a story, and little by little we’d build up the tension, leading the audience into bigger and better thrills as we went along, saving the best and most spectacular stunts for last.

  The costume couldn’t have been more basic: a white shirt open at the collar, loose black trousers, and a pair of white dance slippers on my feet. The white shoes were essential. They had to jump out at you, to create the greatest possible contrast with the brown floor of the stage. With only twenty minutes to work with, there was no time for costume changes or extra entrances and exits. We made the act continuous, to be performed without pause or interruption, but in our minds we broke it down into four parts, and we worked on each part separately, as if each was an act in a play:

  PART THE FIRST Solo clarinet, trilling a few bars of pastoral fluff. The melody suggests innocence, butterflies, dandelions bobbing in the breeze. The curtain goes up on a bare, brightly lit stage. I come on, and for the first two minutes I act like a know-nothing, a boob with a stick up my ass and pudding for brains. I bump into invisible objects strewn about me, encountering one obstacle after another as the clarinet is joined by a rumbling bassoon. I trip over a stone, I bang my nose against a wall, I catch my finger in a door. I’m the picture of human incompetence, a stumbling nincompoop who can barely stand on the ground—let alone rise above it. At last, after several near misses, I fall flat on my face. The trombone does a dipping glissando, I get some laughs. Reprise. But even clutzier than the first time. Again the sliding trombone, followed by a thumpity-thump on the snare drum, a boom on the kettle drum. This is slapstick heaven, and I’m on a collision course with thin ice. No sooner do I pick myself up and take a step than my foot snags on a roller skate and I fall again. Howls of laughter. I struggle to my feet, tottering about as I shake the cobwebs from my head, and then, just when the audience is beginning to get puzzled, just when it looks like I’m every bit as inept as I seem, I pull the first stunt.

  PART THE SECOND It has to look like an accident. I’ve just tripped again, and as I stagger forward, desperately trying to regain my balance, I reach out my hand and catch hold of something. It’s the rung of an invisible ladder, and suddenly I’m hanging in midair—but only for a split second. It all happens so fast, it’s hard to tell if I’ve left my feet or not. Before the audience can figure it out, I release my grip and tumble to the ground. The lights dim, then go off, plunging the hall into darkness. Music plays: mysterious strings, tremulous with wonder and expectation. A moment later, a spotlight is turned on. It wanders left and right, then stops at the place occupied by the ladder. I stand up and begin to look for the invisible rung. When my hands make contact with the ladder again, I pat it gingerly, gaping in astonishment. A thing that isn’t there is there. I pat it again, testing to make sure it’s steady, and then begin to climb—very cautiously, one agonizing rung at a time. There’s no doubt about it now. I’m off the ground, and the tips of my bright white shoes are dangling in the air to prove it. During my ascent, the spotlight expands, dissolving into a soft glow that ev
entually engulfs the entire stage. I reach the top, look down, and begin to grow frightened. I’m five feet off the ground now, and what the hell am I doing there? The strings vibrate again, underscoring my panic. I begin to climb down, but halfway to the floor I reach out with my hand and come against something solid—a plank jutting into the middle of the air. I’m flabbergasted. I run my fingers over this invisible object, and little by little curiosity gets the better of me. I slide my body around the ladder and crawl onto the plank. It’s strong enough to hold my weight. I stand up and begin to walk, slowly crossing the stage at an altitude of three feet. After that, one prop leads to another. The plank becomes a staircase, the staircase becomes a rope, the rope becomes a swing, the swing becomes a slide. For seven minutes I explore these objects, creeping and tiptoeing upon them, gradually gaining confidence as the music swells. It looks as if I’ll be able to cavort like this forever. Then, suddenly, I step off a ledge and begin to fall.

  PART THE THIRD I’m floating down to the ground with my arms spread, descending as slowly as someone in a dream. Just as I’m about to touch the stage, I stop. Gravity has ceased to count, and there I am, hovering six inches off the ground with no prop to support me. The theater darkens, and a second later I’m enclosed in the beam of a single spotlight. I look down, I look up, I look down again. I wiggle my toes. I turn my left foot this way and that. I turn my right foot this way and that. It’s really happened. It’s really true that I’m standing on air. A drum-roll breaks the silence: loud, insistent, nerve-shattering. It seems to announce terrible risks, an assault on the impossible. I shut my eyes, extend my arms to their fullest, and take a deep breath. This is the exact midpoint of the performance, the moment of moments. With the spotlight still fixed on me, I begin to rise into the air, slowly and inexorably taking myself upward, climbing to a height of seven feet in one smooth heaven-bound soar. I pause at the top, count three long beats in my head, and then open my eyes. Everything turns to magic after that. With the music playing at full throttle, I go through an eight-minute routine of aerial acrobatics, darting in and out of the spotlight as I turn twists and somersaults and full gainers. One contortion flows into another, each stunt is more beautiful than the last. There is no sense of danger anymore. Everything has been turned into pleasure, euphoria, the ecstasy of seeing the laws of nature crumble before your eyes.

  PART THE FOURTH After the final somersault, I glide back to my position at the center of the stage, seven feet off the ground. The music stops. A triple spotlight is thrown on me: one red, one white, one blue. The music starts up again: a stirring of cellos and French horns, loveliness beyond measure. The orchestra is playing “America the Beautiful,” the most cherished, most familiar song of all. When the fourth bar begins, I start to move forward, walking on the air above the heads of the musicians and out into the audience. I keep on walking as the music plays, traveling to the very back of the theater, eyes set before me as necks crane and people stand up from their seats. I reach the wall, turn, and begin to head back, walking in the same slow and stately manner as before. By the time I reach the stage again, the audience is one with me. I have touched them with my grace, let them share in the mystery of my godlike powers. I turn in midair, pause briefly once again, and then float down to the ground as the last notes of the song are played. I spread my arms and smile. And then I bow—just once—and the curtain comes down.

  It wasn’t too shabby. A trifle bloated at the end, perhaps, but the master wanted “America the Beautiful” come hell or high water, and I couldn’t talk him out of it. The Opening pantomime sketch came straight from yours truly, and the master felt so keen about those pratfalls that he got a little carried away. A clown suit would make them even funnier, he said, but I told him no, it was just the opposite. If people expect a joke, you have to work a lot harder to make them laugh. You can’t go whole hog from the start; you have to sneak up and goose them. It took me half a day of arguing to win that point, but on other matters I wasn’t nearly so persuasive. The bit I worried about most was the end—the part where I had to leave the stage and go off on an aerial tour of the audience. I knew it was a good idea, but I still didn’t have total confidence in my loft abilities. If I didn’t maintain a height of eight and a half or nine feet, all sorts of problems could arise. People could jump up and swat at my legs, and even a weak, glancing blow would be enough to knock me off course. And what if someone actually grabbed hold of my ankle and wrestled me to the ground? A riot would break Out in the theater, I’d wind up getting myself killed. This felt like a definite danger to me, but the master pooh-poohed my nervousness. “You can do it,” he said. “You got to twelve feet in Florida last winter, and I can’t even remember the last time you dipped under ten. Alabama maybe, but you had a cold that day and your heart wasn’t in it. You’ve gotten better, Walt. Little by little, you’ve shown improvement in every area. It’s going to take some concentration, but nine feet isn’t a stretch anymore. It’s just another day at the office, a walk around the block and then home. No sweat. One time and you’ll be over it. Believe me, son, it’s going to go like gangbusters.”

  The hardest trick was the ladder jump, and I must have spent as much time on that one as all the others put together. Most of the act was a recombination of turns I already felt comfortable with. The invisible props, the skyward rushes, the midair acrobatics—all those things were old hat to me by then. But the ladder jump was new, and the entire program hinged on my being able to pull it off. It might not sound like a big deal compared to those dramatic flourishes—just three inches off the ground for one tick of the clock—but the difficulty was in the transition, the lightning-fast two-step required to get me from one state to another. From flopping and careening madly about the stage, I had to go straight into liftoff, and it had to be done in one seamless movement, which meant tripping forward, grabbing the rung, and going up at the same time. Six months earlier, I never would have attempted such a thing, but I had made progress on reducing the length of my prelevitation trances. From six or seven seconds at the beginning of my career, I had brought them down to less than one, a nearly simultaneous fusion of thought and deed. But the fact remained that I still lifted off from a standing position. I had always done it that way; it was one of the fundamental tenets of my art, and just to conceive of such a radical change meant rethinking the whole process from top to bottom. But I did it. I did it, by gum, and of all the feats I accomplished as a levitator, this is the one I’m proudest of. Master Yehudi dubbed it the Scattershot Fling, and that’s roughly what it felt like: a sensation of being in more than one place at the same time. Falling forward, I’d plant my feet on the ground for a fraction of a second, and then blink. The blink was crucial. It brought back the memory of the trance, and even the smallest vestige of that fibrillating blankness was enough to produce the necessary shift in me. I’d blink and raise my arm, latching my hand onto the unseen rung, and then I’d start going up. It wouldn’t have been possible to sustain such a convoluted stunt for very long. Three quarters of a second was the limit, but that was all I needed, and once I perfected the move, it became the turning point of the show, the axis on which everything else revolved.

  Three days before we left Cape Cod, the Pierce Arrow was delivered to our door by a man in a white suit. The driver had brought the thing all the way from Wichita, and when he stepped out and pumped the master’s hand, grinning and gushing his hearty hellos, I assumed I was looking at the infamous Orville Cox, My first thought was to kick the four-flusher in the shins, but before I could deliver my scout’s welcome, Master Yehudi saved me by addressing him as Mr. Bigelow. It didn’t take long to figure out that he was another one of Mrs. Witherspoon’s lunkhead admirers. He was a youngish guy of about twenty-four with a round face and a gee-whiz booster’s laugh, and every other word that came from his mouth was “Marion.” She must have done a hell of a snow job to conscript him into running such a long-distance errand for her, but he seemed pleased with himself and oh
-so-proud to have done it. It made me want to puke. By the time the master suggested going into the house for a cool drink, I had already turned my back on him and was clomping up the wooden stairs.

  I headed straight for the kitchen; Mrs. Hawthorne was in there washing the dishes from lunch, her small bony figure perched on a stool beside the sink. “Hi, Mrs. H.,” I said, still churning inside, feeling as if the devil himself were doing handsprings in my head. “What’s for dinner tonight?”

  “Flounder, mashed potatoes, and pickled beets,” she said, answering in her curt New England twang.

  “Yum. I can’t wait to sink my chompers into them beets. Make me a double portion, okay?”

  That got a little smile from her, “No problem, Master Buck,” she said, swiveling around on the stool to look at me. I took three or four steps in her direction, then went in for the kill.

  “Good as your cooking is, ma’am,” I said, “I’ll bet you ain’t never rustled up a dish half so tasty as this one.”

  And then, before she could say another word, I flashed her a big smile, spread my arms, and lifted myself off the ground. I went up slowly, taking myself as high as I could without bumping my head against the ceiling. Once I’d reached the top, I hung there looking down at Mrs. Hawthorne, and the shock and consternation that spread across her face were everything I’d hoped for. A choked howl died in her throat; her eyes rolled back into her head; and then she toppled off the stool, fainting onto the floor with a tiny thud.

  As it happened, Bigelow and the master were just entering the house at that point, and the thud brought them running into the kitchen. Master Yehudi got there first, bursting through the door in the middle of my descent, but when Bigelow arrived a couple of seconds later, my feet were already touching the ground.