Mr. Vertigo

by Paul Auster

  “What’s this!” the master said, sizing up the situation in a single glance. He pushed me aside and bent down over Mrs. Hawthorne’s comatose body. “What the hell is this!”

  “Just a little accident,” I said.

  “Accident my foot,” he said, sounding angrier than I’d heard him in months, perhaps years. I suddenly regretted the whole stupid prank. “Go to your room, you idiot, and don’t come out until I tell you. We have company now, and I’ll deal with you later.”

  I never did get to eat those beets, nor any other of Mrs. Hawthorne’s dishes for that matter. Once she recovered from her swoon, she promptly picked herself up and marched out the door, vowing never to set foot in our house again. I wasn’t around to witness her departure, but that’s what the master told me the next morning. At first I thought he was pulling my leg, but when she didn’t show up by the middle of the day, I realized I’d scared the poor woman half to death. That’s exactly what I’d wanted to do, but now that I’d done it, it didn’t seem so funny to me anymore. She never even returned to collect her wages, and though we stayed on for another seventy-two hours ourselves, that was the last we ever saw of her.

  Not only did the meals deteriorate, but I suffered a final indignity when Master Yehudi made me clean the house on the morning we packed up and left. I hated to be punished like that—sent off to bed without any supper, consigned to KP duty and household chores—but fume and bitch as I did about it, he was well within his rights. It didn’t matter that I was the hottest child star since David loaded up his slingshot and let ‘er rip. I had stepped out of line, and before my head swelled to the size of a medicine ball, the master had no choice but to crack down and let me have it.

  As for Bigelow, the cause of my temperamental outburst, there isn’t much to be said. He hung around for only a few hours, and by late afternoon a taxi came to fetch him—presumably to drive him to the nearest railroad station, where he would begin his long trip back to Kansas. I watched him leave from my second-floor window, despising him for his moronic cheerfulness and the fact that he was a buddy of Orville Cox, the man Mrs. Witherspoon had chosen over me and the master. To make matters worse, Master Yehudi was on his best behavior, and it addled my spleen to see how politely he treated that twit of a bank clerk. Not only did he shake his hand, but he entrusted him with delivering his wedding present to the bride-to-be. Just as the cab door was about to close, he placed a large, beautifully wrapped package into the scoundrel’s hands. I had no idea what was hidden in the box. The master hadn’t told me, and though I fully intended to ask him about it at the first opportunity, so many hours passed before he released me from my prison, I clean forgot to when the moment arrived. As it turned out, seven years went by before I discovered what the gift was.

  From Cape Cod we went to Worcester, half a day’s drive to the west. It felt good to be traveling in the Pierce Arrow again, ensconced in our leather seats as of yore, and once we headed inland, whatever conflicts we’d been having were left behind like so many discarded candy wrappers, blowing out into the dune grass and the surf. Still, I didn’t want to take anything for granted, and just to make sure there was no bad blood between us, I apologized to the master again. “I done wrong,” I said, “and I’m sorry,” and just like that the whole business was as stale as yesterday’s news.

  We holed up in the Cherry Valley Hotel, a dingy hooker’s nest two doors down from the Luxor Theatre. That’s where I’d been slotted for my first performance, and we rehearsed in that music hall every morning and afternoon for the next four days. The Luxor was a far cry from the grand entertainment palace I’d been hoping for, but it had a stage and curtains and a setup for lights, and the master assured me that the theaters would get better once we hit some of the larger stops on the tour. Worcester was a good quiet place to begin, he said, to familiarize myself with the feel of the stage. I caught on fast, learning my marks and cues without much trouble, but even so there were all sorts of kinks and glitches to be worked on: perfecting the spotlight sequences, coordinating the music with the stunts, choreographing the finale to avoid the balcony that jutted out over half the seats in the orchestra. The master was consumed by a thousand and one details. He tested the curtains with the curtain man, he adjusted the lights with the lighting man, he talked endlessly about music with the musicians. At no small expense, he hired seven of them to join us for the last two days of rehearsals, and he kept scribbling changes and corrections onto their scores until the last minute, desperate to get everything just right. I got a kick out of working with those guys myself. They were a bunch of hacks and has-beens, old-timers who’d started out before I was born, and when you added it up, they must have spent twenty thousand nights in variety theaters and played for a hundred thousand different acts. Those geezers had seen everything, and yet the first time I came out and did my stuff for them, all hell broke loose. The drummer passed out, the bassoonist dropped his bassoon, the trombonist sputtered and went sour. It felt like a good sign to me. If I could impress those hard-boiled cynics, just think what I’d do when I got in front of a regular audience.

  The hotel was conveniently located, but the nights in that flea-bag almost did me in. With all the whores walking up and down the stairs and sauntering through the halls, my dick throbbed like a broken bone and gave me no rest. The master and I shared a double room, and I’d have to wait until I heard him snoring in the next bed before I dared to beat my meat. The buildup could be interminable. He liked to talk in the dark, discussing small points about that day’s rehearsal, and rather than attend to the matter at hand (which was also in my hand), I’d have to think of polite answers to his questions. With every minute that passed, the agony became that much more crushing, that much more painful to bear. When he finally drifted off, I’d reach down and remove one of my dirty socks. That was my cum-catcher, and I’d hold it in my left hand while I got to work with my right, squirting jism into the bunched-up folds of cotton. After so much delay, it never took more than one or two tugs. I’d moan forth a quiet hymn of thanks and try to fall asleep, but once was rarely enough for me in those days. A hooker would burst out laughing in the hall, a bedspring would creak in an upstairs room, and my head would fill with every kind of fleshy obscenity. Before I knew it, my cock would stiffen, and I’d be at it again.

  One night, I must have made too much noise. It was the eve of the Worcester performance, and I was winging my way toward another sockful of bliss when the master suddenly woke up. Talk about a jolt to the nerves. When his voice broke through the darkness, it felt like the chandelier had landed on my head.

  “What’s the trouble, Walt?”

  I dropped my unit as if it had sprouted thorns. “Trouble?” I said. “What do you mean trouble?”

  “I mean that noise. That jostling and shaking and squeaking. That ruckus coming from your bed.”

  “I got an itch. It’s a doozy of an itch, master, and if I don’t scratch hard, it’ll never go away.”

  “It’s an itch, all right. An itch that starts in the loins and ends up all over the sheets. Give it a rest, kid. You’ll tire yourself out, and a tuckered showman is a sloppy showman.”

  “I ain’t tuckered. I’m fit as a fiddle and raring to go.”

  “For the time being maybe. But wanking takes its toll, and before long you’ll start to feel the strain. I don’t need to tell you what a precious thing a pecker is. You get too fond of it, though, and it’s liable to turn into a stick of dynamite. Preserve the bindu, Walt. Save it for when it really counts.”

  “Preserve the what?”

  “The bindu. An Indian term for the stuff of life.”

  “You mean the stickum?”

  “That’s right, the stickum. Or whatever else you want to call it. There must be a hundred names, but they all mean the same thing.”

  “I like bindu. It beats them others hands down.”

  “Just so long as you don’t beat yourself down, little man. We have some big days and nights ahead of
us, and you’re going to need every ounce of strength you’ve got.”

  None of it mattered. Tired or not tired, preserving the bindu or producing it in buckets, I broke from the gate like a bat out of hell. We stunned them in Worcester. We wowed them in Springfield. They dropped their drawers in Bridgeport. Even the mishap in New Haven proved to be a blessing in disguise, since it buttoned the lips of the doubters once and for all. With so much talk about me circulating in the air, I suppose it was natural that some people should begin to suspect fraud. They believed the world was set up in a certain way, and there was no place in it for a person of my talents. To do what I could do upset all the rules. It contradicted science, overturned logic and common sense, made mincemeat of a hundred theories, and rather than change the rules to accommodate my act, the big shots and professors decided I was cheating. The newspapers were full of that stuff in every town we went to: debates and arguments, charges and countercharges, all the pros and cons you could count. The master took no part in it. He stood outside the fray, grinning happily as the box-office receipts rolled in, and when reporters pressed him to give a comment, his answer was always the same: “Come to the theater and judge for yourself.”

  After two or three weeks of mounting controversy, things finally came to a head in New Haven. I hadn’t forgotten that this was the home of Yale College—and that if not for the villainies and outrages committed in Kansas two years before, it also would have been my brother Aesop’s home. It saddened me to be there, and all day prior to the performance I sat in the hotel room with a heavy heart, remembering the crazy times we’d lived through together and thinking about what a great man he would have become. When we finally left for the theater at six o’clock, I was an emotional wreck, and try as I did to get my bearings, I turned in the flattest performance of my career. My timing was off, I wobbled during my spins, and my loft was a disgrace. When the moment came to crank it up and fly out over the heads of the audience, the dreaded bomb finally went off. I couldn’t maintain altitude. By sheer will-power I’d managed to lift myself to seven and a half feet, but that was the best I could do, and I started the finale with grave misgivings, knowing that a tall person with only moderate reach could nab me without bothering to jump. After that, things went from bad to worse. Halfway out over the orchestra seats, I decided to make a last gallant effort to see if I couldn’t get myself a little higher. I wasn’t hoping for miracles—just a little breathing room, maybe six or eight more inches. I paused for a moment to regroup, hovering in place as I shut my eyes and concentrated on my task, but once I started moving again, my altitude was just as dismal as before. Not only was I not going up, but after a few seconds I realized that I was actually beginning to sink. It happened slowly, ever so slowly, an inch or two for every yard I went forward, and yet the decline was irreversible—like air leaking out of a balloon. By the time I reached the back rows, I was down to six feet, a sitting duck for even the shortest dwarf. And then the fun began. A bald-headed goon in a red blazer shot out of his seat and whacked me on the heel of my left foot. I spun out from the blow, tilting like a lopsided parade float, and before I could right my balance, someone else batted my other foot. That second bump clinched it. I tumbled out of the air like a dead sparrow and landed forehead-first on the rim of a metal chair back. The impact was so sudden and so fierce, it knocked me out cold.

  I missed the bedlam that followed, but by all accounts it was a honey of a rumble: nine hundred people shouting and jumping every which way, an outbreak of mass hysterics that spread through the hall like a brushfire. Unconscious though I might have been, my fall had proved one thing, and it had proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt for all time. The act was real. There were no invisible wires attached to my limbs, no helium bubbles hidden under my clothes, no silent engines strapped around my waist. One by one, members of the audience passed my dormant body around the theater, groping and pinching me with their curious fingers as if I were some kind of medical specimen. They stripped off my costume, they looked inside my mouth, they spread my cheeks and peered into my bunghole, and not one of them found a damned thing that God himself hadn’t put there. Meanwhile, the master had sprung from his position backstage and was fighting his way toward me. By the time he’d leapfrogged over nineteen rows of customers and wrested me from the last pair of arms, the verdict was unanimous. Walt the Wonder Boy was the real goods. The act was on the up-and-up, and what you saw was what you got, amen.

  The first of the headaches came that night. Considering how I’d crash-landed on the chair back, it was no surprise that I should have felt some twinges and aftereffects. But this pain was monstrous—a horrific jackhammer assault, an endless volley of hailstones pounding against the inner walls of my skull—and it woke me from a deep sleep in the middle of the night. The master and I had connecting rooms with a bathroom in between, and once I’d found the courage to pry myself out of bed, I staggered toward the bathroom, praying I’d find some aspirins in the medicine cabinet. I was so woozy and distracted by the pain, I didn’t notice that the bathroom light was already on. Or, if I did notice, I didn’t pause to think about why that light should be burning at three o’clock in the morning. As I soon found out, I wasn’t the only person who had left his bed at that ungodly hour. When I opened the door and stepped into the dazzling white-tiled room, I nearly stumbled into Master Yehudi. Dressed in his lavender silk pajamas, he was clutching the sink with his two hands and doubled over in pain, gasping and retching as if his insides had caught fire. The siege lasted for another twenty or thirty seconds, and it was such a terrible thing to witness, I almost forgot I was in pain myself.

  Once he saw that I was there, he did everything he could to cover up what had just happened. He turned his grimaces into forced, histrionic smiles; he straightened up and threw back his shoulders; he slicked down his hair with his palms. I wanted to tell him that he should stop pretending, that I was on to his secret now, but my own pain was so bad that I couldn’t summon the words to do it. He asked me why I wasn’t asleep, and when he learned about my headache, he took charge of the situation by rushing about and playing doctor: shaking aspirins out of the bottle, filling up a glass with water, examining the bump on my forehead. He talked so much during these ministrations, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

  “We’re quite a pair, aren’t we?” he said, as he carried me to my room and tucked me into bed. “First you take a nosedive and clunk your bean, and then I gorge myself on rancid cherrystones. I should learn to lay off those buggers. Every time I eat them, I come down with the goddamn bends.”

  It wasn’t a bad story, especially for one he’d made up on the spur of the moment, but it didn’t fool me. No matter how much I wanted to believe him, I wasn’t fooled for a second.

  By the middle of the next afternoon, the worst of the headache was gone. A dull throbbing persisted near my left temple, but it wasn’t enough to keep me off my feet. Since the bump was on the right side of my forehead, it would have made more sense for the tender spot to be there, but I was no expert on these matters and didn’t dwell on the discrepancy. All I cared about was that I was feeling better, that the pain was subsiding, and that I would be ready for the next performance.

  What worries I did have were centered around the master’s condition—or whatever it was that had caused the gruesome attack I’d seen in the bathroom. The truth couldn’t be hidden anymore. His sham had been exposed, and yet because he seemed so much better the next morning, I didn’t dare to mention it. My nerve simply failed me, and I couldn’t bring myself to open my mouth. I’m not proud of how I acted, but the thought that the master had been struck by some terrible disease was too frightening even to consider. Rather than jump to morbid conclusions, I let him cow me into accepting his version of the incident. Cherrystone clams my eye. He’d clammed up on me all right, and now that I’d seen what I shouldn’t have seen, he’d make sure I’d never see it again. I could count on him for that kind of performance. He’d gut it out, h
e’d put up a tough front, and little by little I’d begin to think I hadn’t seen it after all. Not because I would believe such a lie—but because I’d be too afraid not to.

  From New Haven we went to Providence; from Providence to Boston; from Boston to Albany; from Albany to Syracuse; from Syracuse to Buffalo. I remember all those stops, all those theaters and hotels, all the performances I gave, everything about everything. It was late summer, early fall. Little by little, the trees lost their greenness. The world turned red and yellow and orange and brown, and everywhere we went the roads were lined with the strange spectacle of mutating color. The master and I were on a roll now, and it seemed that nothing could stop us anymore. I played to packed houses in every city. Not only did the shows sell out, but hundreds more were turned away at the box office every night. Scalpers did a bang-up business, peddling tickets for three, four, even five times their face value, and every time we pulled up in front of a new hotel, there would be a crowd of people waiting at the entrance, desperate fans who’d stood for hours in the rain and frost just to get a glimpse of me.

  My fellow performers were a little envious, I think, but the truth was they’d never had it so good. When the mobs poured in to see my act, they saw the other acts, too, and that meant money in all our pockets. Over the course of those weeks and months, I topped bills that included every kind of wigged-out entertainment. Comics, jugglers, falsetto singers, birdcallers, midget jazz bands, dancing monkeys—they all took their spills and did their turns before I came on. I liked watching that loopy stuff, and I did my best to make pals backstage with anyone who seemed friendly, but the master wasn’t too keen on having me mix with my cohorts. He was standoffish with most of them and urged me to follow his example. “You’re the star,” he’d whisper. “Act like it. You don’t have to give those chumps the time of day.” It was a small bone of contention between us, but I figured I’d be on the vaudeville circuit for years to come, and I saw no point in making enemies when I didn’t have to. Unbeknownst to me, however, the master had been hatching his own plans for our future, and by the end of September he was already talking out loud about a one-man spring tour. That was how it was with Master Yehudi: the better things went for us, the higher he set his sights. The current tour wouldn’t be over until Christmas, and yet he couldn’t resist looking beyond it to something even more spectacular. The first time he mentioned it to me, I gulped at the pure ballsiness of the proposition. The idea was to work our way east from San Francisco to New York, playing the ten or twelve biggest cities for special command performances. We’d book the shows in indoor arenas and football stadiums like Madison Square Garden and Soldier’s Field, and no crowd would ever be smaller than fifteen thousand. “A triumphal march across America” was how he described it, and by the time he finished his sales pitch, my heart was pounding four times faster than normal. Christ, could that man talk. His mouth was one of the great huckster machines of all time, and once he got it going full tilt, the dreams poured out of it like smoke rushing through a chimney.