Mr. Vertigo

by Paul Auster

  “Shit, boss,” I said. “If you can swing a tour like that, we’ll rake in millions.”

  “I’ll swing it all right,” he said. “Just keep up the good work, and it’s in the bag. That’s all it takes, Walt. You keep on doing what you’ve been doing, and Rawley’s March is a sure thing.”

  Meanwhile, we were gearing up for my first theatrical performance in New York. We wouldn’t be there until Thanksgiving weekend, still a long way down the road, but we both knew it was going to be the highlight of the season, the pinnacle of my career so far. Just thinking about it was enough to make me dizzy. Add ten Bostons to ten Philadelphias, and they wouldn’t equal one New York. Put eighty-six performances in Buffalo together with ninety-three in Trenton, and the sum wouldn’t amount to a minute’s worth of stage time in the Big Apple. New York was top banana, ground zero on the show business map, and no matter how many raves I got in other cities, I wouldn’t be anything until I took my act to Broadway and let them see what I could do. That’s why the master had booked New York for so late in the tour. He wanted me to be an old hand by the time we got there, a seasoned, battle-tested soldier who knew what bullets tasted like and could roll with any punch. I became that vet with time to spare. By October twelfth, I’d done forty-four variety theater gigs, and I felt ready, as lean and mean as I’d ever be, and yet we still had more than a month to go. I had never endured such suspense. New York ate at me day and night, and after a while I didn’t think I could stand it anymore.

  We played Richmond on the thirteenth and fourteenth, Baltimore on the fifteenth and sixteenth, and then headed for Scranton, Pennsylvania. I turned in a good performance there, certainly up to snuff and no worse than any of the others, but immediately upon finishing the show, just as I took my bow and the curtain came down, I passed out and fell to the floor. I had felt perfectly fine until that moment, going through my aerial turns with all the ease and aplomb I was accustomed to, but as soon as my feet touched the stage for the last time, I felt as if I weighed ten thousand pounds. I held my position just long enough for the smile, the bow, and the closing of the curtain, and then my knees buckled, my back gave way, and my body was thrust to the ground. When I opened my eyes in the dressing room five minutes later, I felt a little light-headed, but it seemed that the crisis had passed. But then I stood up, and it was precisely then that the headache returned, ripping through me with a blast of savage, blinding pain. I tried to take a step, but the world was swimming, undulating like a belly dancer in a fun-house mirror, and I couldn’t see where I was going. By the time I took a second step, I had already lost my balance. If the master hadn’t been there to catch me, I would have fallen flat on my face again.

  Neither one of us was ready to panic at that point. The headache and dizziness could have been caused by any number of things—fatigue, a touch of the flu, an ear infection—but just to play it safe, the master called Wilkes-Barre and canceled my performance for the following night. I slept soundly in the Scranton hotel, and by the next morning I was well again, utterly free of pain and discomfort. My recovery defied all logic, but we both accepted it as one of those things, a fluke that didn’t deserve to be second-guessed. We set off for Pittsburgh in good spirits, glad of the day off, and once we got there and checked into the hotel, we actually took in a movie together to celebrate my return to form. The next night, however, when I did my show at the Fosberg Theatre, it was Scranton all over again. I turned in a jewel of a performance, and just as the curtain came down and the act was done, I collapsed. The headache started up again immediately after I opened my eyes, and this time it didn’t go away in one night. When I woke up the next morning, the daggers were still lodged in my skull, and they didn’t leave until four o’clock in the afternoon—several hours after Master Yehudi had been forced to cancel that night’s performance.

  Everything pointed to the knock on the head I’d received in New Haven. That was the most likely cause of my problem, and yet if I’d been walking around with a concussion for the past few weeks, it must have been the mildest concussion in medical history. How else to account for the odd and unsettling fact that as long as I kept my feet on the ground, I remained in good health? The headaches and dizzy spells came only after I performed, and if the link between levitating and my new condition was as definite as it seemed, then the master wondered if my brain hadn’t been jarred in such a way as to put undue pressure on my cranial arteries every time I went up into the air, which in turn caused the excruciating attacks when I came down. He wanted to put me in the hospital and have some X rays taken of my skull. “Why chance it?” he said. “We’ve hit the flat part of the tour, and a week or ten days off might be just what you need. They’ll do some tests, probe around in your neurological gearbox, and maybe they’ll figure out what this cursed thing is.”

  “No way,” I said. “I ain’t going into no hospital.”

  “The only cure for a concussion is rest. If that’s what it is, then you don’t have any choice.”

  “Forget it. I’d sooner work on a chain gang than park my butt in one of them joints.”

  “Think of the nurses, Walt. All those sweet little gals in white uniforms. You’ll have a dozen honeybuns doting on you night and day. If you play it smart, you might even see some action.”

  “You can’t tempt me. Nobody’s going to turn me into a sucker. We’re signed up to do some shows, and I aim to do them—even if it kills me.”

  “Reading and Altoona aren’t where the action is, son. We can skip Elmira and Binghamton, and it won’t make a peashooter’s worth of difference. I’m thinking about New York, and I know you are, too. That’s the one you’ve got to be in shape for.”

  “My head don’t hurt when I do the act. That’s the bottom line, chief. As long as I can go on, I gotta go on. Who cares if I smart some afterwards? I can live with pain. Life’s a pain anyway, and the only good thing about it is when I’m up on stage doing my act.”

  “Problem is, the act is wiping you out. You keep coming down with those headaches, and you won’t be Walt the Wonder Boy much longer. I’ll have to change your name to Mr, Vertigo.”

  “Mr. Who?”

  “Mr. Dizzy-in-the-Head. Mr. Fear-of-Heights.”

  “I ain’t afraid of nothing. You know that.”

  “You’re all guts, kid, and I love you for it. But there comes a time in every levitator’s career when the air is fraught with peril, and I’m afraid we’ve come to that time now.”

  We kept on jawing about these things for the next hour, and in the end I wore him down enough to give me one last chance. That was the bargain. I’d play Reading the next night, and headache or no headache, if I was well enough to go on in Altoona the night after that, I would perform as scheduled. It was a crazy thing to push for, but that second attack had scared me stiff, and I was afraid it meant I was losing my touch. What if the headaches were only the first step? I figured my only hope was to fight my way through it, to go on performing until I got better or couldn’t take it anymore—and then see what happened. I was so unhinged, I really didn’t care if my brain burst into a thousand pieces. Better to be dead than to lose my powers, I told myself. If I couldn’t be Walt the Wonder Boy, I didn’t want to be anyone.

  Reading turned out badly, much worse than I had feared. Not only did my gamble not pay off, but the results were even more catastrophic than before. I did the show and collapsed, just as I’d known I would, but this time I didn’t wake up in the dressing room. Two stagehands had to carry me across the street to the hotel, and when I opened my eyes fifteen or twenty minutes later, I didn’t even have to stand up to feel the pain. The instant the light hit my pupils, the agony began. A hundred trolley cars jumped the rails and converged on a spot behind my left temple; airplanes crashed there; trucks collided there; and then two little green gremlins picked up hammers and started driving stakes through my eyeballs. I writhed about on the bed, howling for someone to put me out of my misery, and by the time the master summoned the hot
el quack to come upstairs and administer a hypo, I was fit to be tied, a toboggan of flames twisting and plunging through the valley of the shadow of death.

  I woke up in a Philadelphia hospital ten hours later, and for the next twelve days I didn’t budge. The headache continued for another forty-eight hours, and they kept me under such heavy sedation that I can’t remember anything until the third day, when I finally woke up again and discovered that the pain was gone. After that, they subjected me to all kinds of examinations and procedures. Their curiosity was inexhaustible, and once they got started they didn’t leave me alone. Every hour on the hour a different doctor would walk into the room and put me through my paces. My knees were tapped with hammers, cookie cutters were rolled over my skin, flashlights were shone in my eyes; I gave them piss and blood and shit; they listened to my heart and looked into my ears; they X-rayed me from conk to toe. There was nothing to live for anymore except science, and those boys in the white coats did a thorough job of it. Within a day or two they turned me into a quivering naked germ, a microbe trapped in a maze of needles, stethoscopes, and tongue depressors. If the nurses had been good to look at, there might have been some relief, but the ones I got were all old and ugly, with fat behinds and hair on their chins. I’d never come across such a crew of dog-show contestants, and whenever one of them came in to take my temperature or read my chart, I’d shut my eyes and pretend I was asleep.

  Master Yehudi sat by my side throughout this ordeal. The press had got wind of my whereabouts, and for the first week or so the papers were full of updates about my condition. The master read these articles out loud to me every day. I found some comfort in the hullaballoo while I was listening, but the moment he stopped reading, boredom and cussedness would close in on me again. Then the New York stock market crashed, and I got pushed off the front pages. I wasn’t paying much attention, but I figured the crisis was only temporary, and once that Black Tuesday business was over I’d be back in the headlines where I belonged. All those stories about people jumping out of windows and shooting themselves in the head struck me as tabloid flimflam, and I shrugged them off like so many fairy tales. The only thing I cared about was getting the show back on the road. My headache was gone and I felt terrific, one-hundred-percent normal. When I opened my eyes in the morning and saw Master Yehudi sitting by my bed, I would begin the day by asking the same question I’d asked the day before: When do I get out of here? And every day he would give me the same answer: As soon as the test results are in.

  When they did come in, I couldn’t have been more pleased. After all that rigmarole of pricking and poking, all those tubes and suction cups and rubber gloves, the doctors couldn’t find a thing wrong with me. No concussion, no brain tumor, no blood disease, no inner-ear imbalance, no lumps, no mumps, no bumps. They gave me a clean bill of health and declared me the fittest specimen of fourteen-year-old manhood they’d ever seen. As far as the headaches and dizziness went, they couldn’t determine the precise cause. It might have been a bug that had already passed through my system. It might have been something I’d eaten. Whatever it was, it wasn’t there anymore, and if by chance it was there, it was too small to be detected—not even by the strongest microscope on the planet.

  “Hot diggity,” I said, when the master broke the news to me. “Hot diggity dog.”

  We were alone in my room on the fourth floor, sitting side by side on the edge of the bed. It was early morning, and the light was pouring in on us through the slats of the Venetian blinds. For three or four seconds, I felt as happy as I’ve ever been in my life. I felt so happy I wanted to scream.

  “Not so fast, son,” the master said. “I haven’t finished yet.”

  “Fast? Fast’s the name of the game, boss. The faster the better. We’ve already missed eight shows, and the sooner we pack up and get me out of here, the sooner we get to where we’re going. Which city we booked in next? If it ain’t too far, we might even make it by curtain time.”

  The master took hold of one of my hands and squeezed. “Calm down, Walt. Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and listen to what I have to say.”

  It didn’t sound like a joke, so I did what he asked and tried to sit still.

  “Good.” He spoke that one word and stopped. There was a long pause before he spoke again, and in that interval of darkness and silence, I knew that something awful was about to happen. “There aren’t going to be any more shows,” he said at last. “We’re all washed up, kid. Walt the Wonder Boy is kaput.”

  “Don’t josh me, master,” I said, opening my eyes and looking at his glum, determined face. I kept waiting for him to throw me a wink and burst out laughing, but he just sat there gazing at me with those dark eyes of his. If anything, his expression grew even sadder.

  “I wouldn’t tease at a moment like this,” he said. “We’ve come to the end of the line, and there’s not a fucking thing we can do about it.”

  “But the docs just gave me the thumbs up. I’m healthy as a horse.”

  “That’s the trouble. There’s nothing wrong with you—which means there’s nothing to be cured. Not with rest, not with medicine, not with exercise. You’re perfectly well, and because you’re well, your career is over.”

  “That’s crazy talk, master. It don’t make a bit of sense.”

  “I’ve heard about cases like yours before. They’re very rare. The literature speaks of only two of them, and they’re separated in time by hundreds of years. A Czech levitator in the early nineteenth century had what you have, and before that there was Antoine Dubois, a Frenchman who was active during the reign of Louis the Fourteenth. As far as I know, those are the only two recorded cases. You’re the third, Walt. In all the annals of levitation, you’re just the third one to confront this problem.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Puberty, Walt, that’s what. Adolescence. The bodily changes that turn a boy into a man.”

  “You mean my boners and such? My curly hairs and the crack in my voice?”

  “Just so. All the natural transformations.”

  “Maybe I’ve been whacking off too much. What if I stopped that tomfoolery? You know, preserved the bindu a little more. Do you think that would help?”

  “I doubt it. There’s only one cure for your condition, but I wouldn’t dream of inflicting it on you. I’ve already put you through enough.”

  “I don’t care. If there’s a way to fix it, then that’s what we’ve got to do.”

  “I’m talking about castration, Walt. You cut off your balls, and then maybe there’s a chance.”

  “Did you say maybe?”

  “Nothing’s guaranteed. The Frenchman did it, and he went on levitating until he was sixty-four. The Czech did it, and it didn’t do an ounce of good. The mutilation went for naught, and two months later he jumped off the Charles Bridge and killed himself.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Of course you don’t. If I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t know what to say either. That’s why I’m suggesting we pack it in. I don’t expect you to do a thing like that. No man could ask that of another man. It wouldn’t be human.”

  “Well, seeing that the verdict is sort of fuzzy, it wouldn’t be too smart to risk it, would it? I mean, if I give up being Walt the Wonder Boy, at least I’ve got my balls to keep me company. I wouldn’t want to be in a position where I wound up losing both.”

  “Exactly. Which is why the subject is closed. There’s no point in talking about it anymore. We’ve had a good run, and now it’s over. At least you get to quit while you’re still on top.”

  “But what if the headaches go away?”

  “They won’t. Believe me they won’t.”

  “How can you know? Maybe those other guys still got them, but what if I’m different?”

  “You’re not. It’s a permanent condition, and there’s no cure for it. Short of taking the risk we’ve already rejected, the headaches will be with you for the rest of yo
ur life. For every minute you spend in the air, you’ll be racked with pain for three hours on the ground. And the older you are, the worse that pain will be. It’s gravity’s revenge, son. We thought we had it licked, but it turns out to be stronger than we are. That’s the way it goes. We won for a while, and now we’ve lost. So be it. If that’s what God wants’, then we have to bow to his will.”

  It was all so sad, so depressing, so futile. I’d struggled to make a success of myself for so long, and now, just when I was about to become one of the immortals of history, I had to turn my back on it and walk away. Master Yehudi swallowed this poison without flinching a muscle. He accepted our fate like a stoic and refused to make a fuss. It was a noble stance, I suppose, but it wasn’t in my repertoire to take bad news lying down. Once we’d run out of things to say, I stood up and started kicking the furniture and punching the walls, storming about the room like some nutso shadowboxer. I knocked over a chair, sent the night table clattering to the floor, and cursed my bad luck with vocal chords going at full blast. Wise old man that he was, Master Yehudi did nothing to stop me. Even when a couple of nurses rushed into the room to see what the trouble was, he calmly shooed them out, explaining he would cover any damages in full. He knew how I was built, and he knew that my fury needed a chance to express itself. No bottling up for me; no turning the other cheek for Walt. If the world hit me, I had to hit back.