Leviathan

by Paul Auster

  “But yours must be pretty good. If they weren’t, I doubt you’d be bothered so much.”

  “Maybe I get bothered because they’re bad. Everyone is a literary critic these days. If you don’t like a book, threaten the author. There’s a certain logic to that approach. Make the bastard pay for what he’s done to you.”

  “I suppose I should sit down and read one of them myself,” he said. “To see what all the fuss is about. You wouldn’t mind, would you?”

  “Of course I wouldn’t mind. That’s why they’re in the bookstores. So people can read them.”

  It was a curious way for the visit to end—writing down the titles of my books for an FBI agent. Even now, I’m hard-pressed to know what he was after. Perhaps he thinks he’ll find some clues in them, or perhaps it was just a subtle way of telling me that he’ll be back, that he hasn’t finished with me yet. I’m still their only lead, after all, and if they go on the assumption that I lied to them, then they’re not about to forget me. Beyond that, I haven’t the vaguest notion of what they’re thinking. It seems unlikely that they consider me a terrorist, but I say that only because I know I’m not. They know nothing, and therefore they could be working on that premise, furiously searching for something that would link me to the bomb that went off in Wisconsin last week. And even if they aren’t, I have to accept the fact that they’ll be on my case for a long time to come. They’ll ask questions, they’ll dig into my life, they’ll find out who my friends are, and sooner or later Sachs’s name will come up. In other words, the whole time I’m here in Vermont writing this story, they’ll be busy writing their own story. It will be my story, and once they’ve finished it, they’ll know as much about me as I do myself.

  My wife and daughter returned home about two hours after the FBI men left. They had gone off early that morning to spend the day with friends, and I was glad they hadn’t been around for Harris and Worthy’s visit. My wife and I share almost everything with each other, but in this case I don’t think I should tell her what happened. Iris has always been very fond of Sachs, but I come first for her, and if she discovered that I was about to get into trouble with the FBI because of him, she would do everything in her power to make me stop. I can’t run that risk now. Even if I managed to convince her that I was doing the right thing, it would take a long time to wear her down, and I don’t have that luxury, I have to spend every minute on the job I’ve set for myself. Besides, even if she gave in, she would only worry herself sick about it, and I don’t see how any good could come of that. Eventually, she’s going to learn the truth anyway; when the time comes, everything will be dragged out into the open. It’s not that I want to deceive her, I simply want to spare her for as long as possible. As it happens, I don’t think that will be terribly difficult. I’m here to write, after all, and if Iris thinks I’m up to my old tricks out in my little shack every day, what harm can come of that? She’ll assume I’m scribbling away on my new novel, and when she sees how much time I’m devoting to it, how much progress is being made from my long hours of work, she’ll feel happy. Iris is a part of the equation, too, and without her happiness I don’t think I would have the courage to begin.

  This is the second summer we’ve spent in this place. Back in the old days, when Sachs and his wife used to come here every July and August, they would sometimes invite me up to visit, but those were always brief excursions, and I rarely stayed for more than three or four nights. After Iris and I were married nine years ago, we made the trip together several times, and once we even helped Fanny and Ben paint the outside of the house. Fanny’s parents bought the property during the Depression, at a time when farms like this one could be had for next to nothing. It came with more than a hundred acres and its own private pond, and although the house was run-down, it was spacious and airy inside, and only minor improvements were needed to make it habitable. The Goodmans were New York City schoolteachers, and they could never afford to do much with the place after they bought it, so for all these years the house has kept its primitive, barebones look: the iron bedsteads, the potbellied stove in the kitchen, the cracked ceilings and walls, the gray painted floors. Still, there’s something solid in this dilapidation, and it would be difficult for anyone not to feel at home here. For me, the great lure of the house is its remoteness. It sits on top of a small mountain, four miles from the nearest village by way of a narrow dirt road. The winters must be ferocious on this mountain, but during the summer everything is green, with birds singing all around you, and the meadows are filled with countless wildflowers: orange hawkweed, red clover, maiden pink, buttercup. About a hundred feet from the main house, there’s a simple outbuilding that Sachs used as his work studio whenever he was here. It’s hardly more than a cabin, with three small rooms, a kitchenette, and a bathroom, and ever since it was vandalized twelve or thirteen winters ago, it has fallen into disrepair. The pipes have cracked, the electricity has been turned off, the linoleum is peeling up from the floor. I mention these things because that is where I am now—sitting at a green table in the middle of the largest room, holding a pen in my hand. For as long as I knew him, Sachs spent every summer writing at this same table, and this is the room where I saw him for the last time, where he poured out his heart to me and let me in on his terrible secret. If I concentrate hard enough on the memory of that night, I can almost delude myself into thinking that he’s still here. It’s as if his words were still hanging in the air around me, as if I could still reach out my hand and touch him. It was a long and grueling conversation, and when we finally came to the end of it (at five or six in the morning), he made me promise not to let his secret go beyond the walls of this room. Those were his exact words: that nothing he said should escape this room. For the time being, I’ll be able to keep my promise. Until the moment comes for me to show what I’ve written here, I can comfort myself with the thought that I won’t be breaking my word.

  The first time we met, it was snowing. More than fifteen years have gone by since that day, but I can still bring it back whenever I wish. So many other things have been lost for me, but I remember that meeting with Sachs as clearly as any event in my life.

  It was a Saturday afternoon in February or March, and the two of us had been invited to give a joint reading of our work at a bar in the West Village. I had never heard of Sachs, but the person who called me was too rushed to answer my questions over the phone. “He’s a novelist,” she said. “His first book was published a couple of years ago.” Her call came on a Wednesday night, just three days before the reading was supposed to take place, and there was something close to panic in her voice. Michael Palmer, the poet who was supposed to appear on Saturday, had just canceled his trip to New York, and she wondered if I would be willing to stand in for him. It was a somewhat backhanded request, but I told her I would do it anyway. I hadn’t published much work at that point in my life—six or seven stories in little magazines, a handful of articles and book reviews—and it wasn’t as though people were clamoring for the privilege of hearing me read out loud to them. So I accepted the frazzled woman’s offer, and for the next two days I fell into a panic of my own, frantically searching through the midget world of my collected stories for something that wouldn’t embarrass me, for one scrap of writing that would be good enough to expose to a roomful of strangers. On Friday afternoon, I stopped in at several bookstores and asked for Sachs’s novel. It seemed only right that I should know something about his work before I met him, but the book was already two years old, and no one had it in stock.

  As chance would have it, an immense storm blew in from the Midwest on Friday night, and by Saturday morning a foot and a half of snow had fallen on the city. The reasonable thing would have been to get in touch with the woman who had called me, but I had stupidly forgotten to ask for her number, and when I still hadn’t heard from her by one o’clock, I figured I should get myself downtown as quickly as possible. I bundled up in my overcoat and galoshes, stuck the manuscript of my most recent stor
y into one of the coat pockets, and then tramped out onto Riverside Drive, heading toward the subway station at 116th Street and Broadway. The sky was beginning to clear by then, but the streets and sidewalks were still clogged with snow, and there was scarcely any traffic. A few cars and trucks had been abandoned in tall drifts by the curb, and every now and then a lone vehicle would come inching down the street, skidding out of control whenever the driver tried to stop for a red light. I normally would have enjoyed this mayhem, but the weather was too fierce that day for me to lift my nose out of my scarf. The temperature had been falling steadily since sunrise, and by now the air was bitter, with wild surges of wind blowing off the Hudson, enormous gusts that literally pushed my body up the street. I was half-numb by the time I reached the subway station, but in spite of everything, it appeared that the trains were still running. This surprised me, and as I walked down the stairs and bought my token, I assumed that meant the reading was on after all.

  I made it to Nashe’s Tavern at ten past two. The place was open, but once my eyes adjusted to the darkness inside, I saw that no one was there. A bartender in a white apron stood behind the bar, methodically drying shot glasses with a red towel. He was a hefty man of about forty, and he studied me carefully as I approached, almost as if he regretted this interruption of his solitude.

  “Isn’t there supposed to be a reading here in about twenty minutes?” I asked. The moment the words left my mouth, I felt like a fool for saying them.

  “It was canceled,” the bartender said. “With all that slop out there today, there wouldn’t have been much point to it. Poetry’s a beautiful thing, but it’s hardly worth freezing your ass off for.”

  I sat down on one of the barstools and ordered a bourbon. I was still shivering from my walk in the snow, and I wanted to warm my innards before I ventured outside again. I polished off the drink in two swallows, then ordered a refill because the first one had tasted so good. Midway through that second bourbon, another customer walked into the bar. He was a tall, exceedingly thin young man with a narrow face and a full brown beard. I watched him as he stamped his boots on the floor a couple of times, smacked his gloved hands together, and exhaled loudly from the effects of the cold. There was no question that he cut an odd figure—towering there in his moth-eaten coat with a New York Knicks baseball cap perched on his head and a navy blue scarf wrapped around the cap to protect his ears. He looked like someone with a bad toothache, I thought, or else like some half-starved Russian soldier stranded on the outskirts of Stalin-grad. These two images came to me in rapid succession, the first one comic, the second one forlorn. In spite of his ridiculous getup, there was something fierce in his eyes, an intensity that quelled any desire to laugh at him. He resembled Ichabod Crane, perhaps, but he was also John Brown, and once you got past his costume and his gangly basketball forward’s body, you began to see an entirely different sort of person: a man who missed nothing, a man with a thousand wheels turning in his head.

  He stood in the doorway for a few moments scanning the empty room, then walked up to the bartender and asked more or less the same question that I had asked ten minutes earlier. The bartender gave more or less the same answer he had given me, but in this case he also gestured with a thumb in my direction, pointing to where I was sitting at the end of the bar. “That one came for the reading, too,” he said. “You’re probably the only two guys in New York who were crazy enough to leave the house today.”

  “Not quite,” said the man with the scarf wrapped around his head. “You forgot to count yourself.”

  “I didn’t forget,” the bartender said. “It’s just that I don’t count. I’ve got to be here, you see, and you don’t. That’s what I’m talking about. If I don’t show up, I lose my job.”

  “But I came here to do a job, too,” the other one said. “They told me I was going to earn fifty dollars. Now they’ve called off the reading, and I’ve lost the subway fare to boot.”

  “Well, that’s different, then,” the bartender said. “If you were supposed to read, then I guess you don’t count either.”

  “That leaves just one person in the whole city who went out when he didn’t have to.”

  “If you’re talking about me,” I said, finally entering the conversation, “then your list is down to zero.”

  The man with the scarf wrapped around his head turned to me and smiled. “Ah, then that means you’re Peter Aaron, doesn’t it?”

  “I suppose it does,” I said. “But if I’m Peter Aaron, then you must be Benjamin Sachs.”

  “The one and only,” Sachs answered, letting out a short, self-deprecatory laugh. He walked over to where I was sitting and extended his right hand. “I’m very happy you’re here,” he said. “I’ve been reading some of your stuff lately and was looking forward to meeting you.”

  That was how our friendship began—sitting in that deserted bar fifteen years ago, each one buying drinks for the other until we both ran out of money. It must have lasted three or four hours, for I distinctly remember that when we finally staggered out into the cold again, night had already fallen. Now that Sachs is dead, I find it unbearable to think back to what he was like then, to remember all the generosity and humor and intelligence that poured out of him that first time we met. In spite of the facts, it’s difficult for me to imagine that the person who sat with me in the bar that day was the same person who wound up destroying himself last week. The journey must have been so long for him, so horrible, so fraught with suffering, I can scarcely think about it without wanting to cry. In fifteen years, Sachs traveled from one end of himself to the other, and by the time he came to that last place, I doubt he even knew who he was anymore. So much distance had been covered by then, it wouldn’t have been possible for him to remember where he had begun.

  “I generally manage to keep up with what’s going on,” he said, untying the scarf from under his chin and removing it along with the baseball cap and his long brown overcoat. He flung the whole pile onto the barstool next to him and sat down. “Until two weeks ago, I’d never even heard of you. Now, all of a sudden, you seem to be popping up everywhere. To begin with, I ran across your piece on Hugo Ball’s diaries. An excellent little article, I thought, deft and nicely argued, an admirable response to the issues at stake. I didn’t agree with all your points, but you made your case well, and I respected the seriousness of your position. This guy believes in art too much, I said to myself, but at least he knows where he stands and has the wit to recognize that other views are possible. Then, three or four days after that, a magazine arrived in the mail, and the first thing I opened to was a story with your name on it. ‘The Secret Alphabet,’ the one about the student who keeps finding messages written on the walls of buildings. I loved it. I loved it so much that I read it three times. Who is this Peter Aaron? I wondered, and where has he been hiding himself? When Kathy what’s-her-name called to tell me that Palmer had bagged out of the reading, I suggested that she get in touch with you.”

  “So you’re the one responsible for dragging me down here,” I said, too stunned by his lavish compliments to think of anything but that feeble reply.

  “Well, admittedly it didn’t work out the way we thought it would.”

  “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” I said. “At least I won’t have to stand up in the dark and listen to my knees knock together. There’s something to be said for that.”

  “Mother Nature to the rescue.”

  “Exactly. Lady Luck saves my skin.”

  “I’m glad you were spared the torment. I wouldn’t want to be walking around with that on my conscience.”

  “But thank you for getting me invited. It meant a lot to me, and the truth is I’m very grateful to you.”

  “I didn’t do it because I wanted your gratitude. I was curious, and sooner or later I would have been in touch with you myself. But then the opportunity came along, and I figured this would be a more elegant way of going about it.”

  “And here I am, sit
ting at the North Pole with Admiral Peary himself. The least I can do is buy you a drink.”

  “I accept your offer, but only on one condition. You have to answer my question first.”

  “I’ll be glad to, as long as you tell me what the question is. I don’t seem to remember that you asked me one.”

  “Of course I did. I asked you where you’ve been hiding yourself. I could be mistaken, but my guess is that you haven’t been in New York very long.”

  “I used to be here, but then I went away. I just got back five or six months ago.”

  “And where were you?”

  “France. I lived there for close to five years.”

  “That explains it, then. But why on earth would you want to live in France?”

  “No particular reason. I just wanted to be somewhere that wasn’t here.”

  “You didn’t go to study? You weren’t working for UNESCO or some hot-shot international law firm?”

  “No, nothing like that. I was pretty much living hand to mouth.”

  “The old expatriate adventure, was that it? Young American writer goes off to Paris to discover culture and beautiful women, to experience the pleasures of sitting in cafes and smoking strong cigarettes.”

  “I don’t think it was that either. I felt I needed some breathing room, that’s all. I picked France because I was able to speak French. If I spoke Serbo-Croatian, I probably would have gone to Yugoslavia.”

  “So you went away. For no particular reason, as you put it. Was there any particular reason why you came back?”

  “I woke up one morning last summer and told myself it was time to come home. Just like that. I suddenly felt I’d been there long enough. Too many years without baseball, I suppose. If you don’t get your ration of double plays and home runs, it can begin to dry up your spirit.”

  “And you’re not planning to leave again?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Whatever I was trying to prove by going there doesn’t feel important to me anymore.”