Leviathan

by Paul Auster

  Weeks passed, however, and then months, and the situation remained exactly what it had been. It’s true that he regained much of his social poise, and as time went on his suffering became less obvious (he no longer brooded in company, he no longer seemed quite so absent), but that was only because he talked less about himself. It wasn’t the same silence as the one in the hospital, but its effect was similar. He talked now, he opened his mouth and used words at the appropriate moments, but he never said anything about what really concerned him, never anything about the accident or its aftermath, and little by little I sensed that he had pushed his suffering underground, burying it in a place where no one could see it. If all else had been equal, this might not have troubled me so much. I could have learned to live with this quieter and more subdued Sachs, but the outward signs were too discouraging, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were symptoms of some larger distress. He turned down assignments from magazines, made no effort to renew his professional contacts, seemed to have lost all interest in ever sitting behind his typewriter again. He had told me as much after he came home from the hospital, but I hadn’t believed him. Now that he was keeping his word, I began to grow frightened. For as long as I had known him, Sachs’s life had revolved around his work, and to see him suddenly without that work made him seem like a man who had no life. He was adrift, floating in a sea of undifferentiated days, and as far as I could tell, it was all one to him whether he made it back to land or not.

  Some time between Christmas and the start of the new year, Sachs shaved off his beard and cut his hair down to normal length. It was a drastic change, and it made him look like an altogether different person. He seemed to have shrunk somehow, to have grown both younger and older at the same time, and a good month went by before I began to get used to it, before I stopped being startled every time he walked into a room. It’s not that I preferred him to look one way or the other, but I regretted the simple fact of change, of any change in and of itself. When I asked him why he had done it, his first response was a noncommittal shrug. Then, after a short pause, realizing that I expected a fuller answer than that, he muttered something about not wanting to take the trouble anymore. He was into low-maintenance, he said, the no-fuss approach to personal hygiene. Besides, he wanted to do his bit for capitalism. By shaving three or four times a week, he would be helping to keep the razor-blade companies in business, which meant that he would be contributing to the good of the American economy, to the health and prosperity of all.

  This was pretty lame stuff, but after we talked about it that one time, the subject never came up again. Sachs clearly didn’t want to dwell on it, and I didn’t press him for further explanations. That doesn’t mean it was unimportant to him, however. A man is free to choose how he looks, but in Sachs’s case I felt it was a particularly violent and aggressive act, almost a form of self-mutilation. The left side of his face and scalp had been badly cut from his fall, and the doctors had stitched up several areas around his temple and lower jaw. With a beard and long hair, the scars from these wounds had been hidden from sight. Once the hair was gone, the scars had become visible, the dents and gashes stood out nakedly for everyone to see. Unless I’ve seriously misunderstood him, I think that’s why Sachs changed his appearance. He wanted to display his wounds, to announce to the world that these scars were what defined him now, to be able to look at himself in the mirror every morning and remember what had happened to him. The scars were an amulet against forgetting, a sign that none of it would ever be lost.

  One day in mid-February, I went out to lunch with my editor in Manhattan. The restaurant was somewhere in the West Twenties, and after the meal was over I started walking up Eighth Avenue toward Thirty-fourth Street, where I planned to catch a subway back to Brooklyn. Five or six blocks from my destination, I happened to see Sachs on the other side of the street. I can’t say that I’m proud of what I did after that, but it seemed to make sense at the time. I was curious to know what he did on these rambles of his, desperate for some kind of information about how he occupied his days, and so instead of calling out to him I hung back and kept myself hidden. It was a cold afternoon, with a raw gray sky and a threat of snow in the air. For the next couple of hours, I followed Sachs around the streets, shadowing my friend through the canyons of New York. As I write about this now, it sounds a lot worse than it actually was, at least in terms of what I imagined I was doing. I had no intention of spying on him, no wish to penetrate any secrets. I was looking for something hopeful, some glimmer of optimism to assuage my worry. I said to myself: He’s going to surprise me; he’s going to do something or go somewhere that will prove he’s all right. But two hours went by, and nothing happened. Sachs wandered around the streets like a lost soul, roaming haphazardly between Times Square and Greenwich Village at the same slow and contemplative pace, never rushing, never seeming to care where he was. He gave coins to beggars. He stopped to light a fresh cigarette every ten or twelve blocks. He browsed in a bookstore for several minutes, at one point removing one of my books from the shelf and studying it with some attentiveness. He entered a porno shop and looked at magazines of naked women. He paused in front of an electronics-store window. Eventually, he bought a newspaper, walked into a coffeehouse on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets, and settled down at a table. That was where I left him, just as the waitress came over to take his order. I found it all so bleak, so depressing, so tragic, that I couldn’t even bring myself to talk to Iris about it when I got home.

  Knowing what I know now, I can see how little I really understood. I was drawing conclusions from what amounted to partial evidence, basing my response on a cluster of random, observable facts that told only a small piece of the story. If more information had been available to me, I might have had a different picture of what was going on, which might have made me a bit slower to despair. Among other things, I was completely in the dark about the special role Maria Turner had assumed for Ben. Ever since October, they had been seeing each other on a regular basis, spending every Thursday together from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon. I only learned about this two years after the fact. As they each told me (in separate conversations at least two months apart), there was never any sex involved. Given what I know about Maria’s habits, and given that Sachs’s story tallied with hers, I see no point in doubting what they told me.

  As I look back on the situation today, it makes perfect sense that Sachs should have reached out to her. Maria was the embodiment of his catastrophe, the central figure in the drama that had precipitated his fall, and therefore no one could have been as important to him. I have already talked about his determination to hold on to the events of that night. What better method to accomplish this than by staying in touch with Maria? By turning her into a friend, he would be able to keep the symbol of his transformation constantly before his eyes. His wounds would remain open, and every time he saw her he could reenact the same sequence of torments and emotions that had come so close to killing him. He would be able to repeat the experience again and again, and with enough practice and hard work, perhaps he would learn to master it. That was how it must have begun. The challenge wasn’t to seduce Maria or to take her to bed, it was to expose himself to temptation and see if he had the strength to resist it. Sachs was searching for a cure, for a way to win back his self-respect, and only the most drastic measures would suffice. In order to find out what he was worth, he had to risk everything all over again.

  But there was more to it than that. It wasn’t just a symbolic exercise for him, it was a step forward into a real friendship. Sachs had been moved by Maria’s visits to the hospital, and even then, as early as the first weeks of his recovery, I think he understood how deeply the accident had affected her. That was the initial bond between them. They had both lived through something terrible, and neither one of them was inclined to dismiss it as a simple piece of bad luck. More importantly, Maria was aware of the part she had played in what happened. She knew
that she had encouraged Sachs on the night of the party, and she was honest enough with herself to admit what she had done, to realize that it would have been morally wrong to look for excuses. In her own way, she was just as troubled by the event as Sachs was, and when he finally called in October to thank her for coming to the hospital so often, she saw it as a chance to make amends, to undo some of the damage she had caused. I’m not just guessing when I say this. Maria held nothing back from me when we talked last year, and the whole story comes straight from her mouth.

  “The first time Ben came to my place,” she said, “he asked me a lot of questions about my work. He was probably just being polite. You know how it is: you’re feeling awkward, and you don’t know what to talk about, so you start asking questions. After a while, though, I could see that he was getting interested. I brought out some old projects for him to look at, and his comments struck me as very intelligent, a lot more perceptive than most of the things I hear. What he especially seemed to like was the combination of documentary and play, the objectification of inner states. He understood that all my pieces were stories, and even if they were true stories, they were also invented. Or even if they were invented, they were also true. So we talked about that for a while, and then we got onto various other things, and by the time he left I was already beginning to cook up one of my weird ideas. The guy was so lost and miserable, I thought maybe it would be a good thing if we started working on a piece together. I didn’t have anything specific in mind at that point—just that the piece would be about him. He called again a few days later, and when I told him what I was thinking, he seemed to catch on right away. That surprised me a little. I didn’t have to argue my case or talk him into it. He just said yes, that sounds like a promising idea, and we went ahead and did it. From then on, we spent every Thursday together. For the next four or five months, we spent every Thursday working on the piece.”

  As far as I am able to judge, it never really amounted to anything. Unlike Maria’s other projects, this one had no organizing principle or clearly defined purpose, and rather than start with a fixed idea as she always had in the past (to follow a stranger, for example, or to look up names in an address book), “Thursdays with Ben” was essentially formless: a series of improvisations, a picture album of the days they spent in each other’s company. They had agreed beforehand that they wouldn’t follow any rules. The only condition was that Sachs arrive at Maria’s house promptly at ten o’clock, and from then on they would play it by ear. For the most part, Maria took pictures of him, maybe two or three rolls’ worth, and then they would spend the rest of the day talking. A few times, she asked him to dress up in costumes. At other times, she recorded their conversations and took no pictures at all. When Sachs cut off his beard and shortened his hair, it turned out that he was acting on Maria’s advice, and the operation took place in her loft. She recorded the whole thing with her camera: the before, the after, and all the steps in between. It begins with Sachs in front of a mirror, clutching a pair of scissors in his right hand. With each successive shot, a little more of his hair is gone. Then we see him lathering up his stubbled cheeks, and after that he gives himself a shave. Maria stopped shooting at that point (to put the finishing touches on his haircut), and then there’s one last picture of Sachs: short-haired and beardless, grinning into the camera like one of those slick hairdo boys you see on barbershop walls. I found it a nice touch. Not only was it funny in itself, but it proved that Sachs was able to enjoy the fun. After I saw that picture, I realized there were no simple solutions. I had underestimated him, and the story of those months was finally much more complicated than I had allowed myself to believe. Then came the shots of Sachs outside. In January and February, Maria had apparently followed him around the streets with her camera. Sachs had told her that he wanted to know what it felt like to be watched, and Maria had obliged him by resurrecting one of her old pieces: only this time it was done in reverse. Sachs took on the role she had played, and she turned herself into the private detective. That was the scene I had stumbled across in Manhattan when I saw Sachs walking along the other side of the street. Maria had been there as well, and what I had taken as conclusive evidence of my friend’s misery was in fact no more than a charade, a little bit of play-acting, a silly reenactment of Spy versus Spy. God knows how I managed to miss seeing Maria that day. I must have been concentrating so hard on Sachs that I was blind to everything else. But she saw me, and when she finally told me about it when we talked last fall, I felt crushed with shame. Luckily, she didn’t manage to take any pictures of me and Sachs together. Everything would have been out in the open then, but I had been following him from too far away for her to catch us in the same shot.

  She took several thousand pictures of him in all, most of which were still on contact sheets when I saw them last September. Even if the Thursday sessions never developed into a coherent, ongoing work, they had a therapeutic value for Sachs—which was all Maria had hoped to accomplish with them in the first place. When Sachs came to visit her in October, he had withdrawn so far into his pain that he was no longer able to see himself. I mean that in a phenomenological sense, in the same way that one talks about self-awareness or the way one forms an image of oneself. Sachs had lost the power to step out from his thoughts and take stock of where he was, to measure the precise dimensions of the space around him. What Maria achieved over the course of those months was to lure him out of his own skin. Sexual tension was a part of it, but there was also her camera, the constant assault of her cyclops machine. Every time Sachs posed for a picture, he was forced to impersonate himself, to play the game of pretending to be who he was. After a while, it must have had an effect on him. By repeating the process so often, he must have come to a point where he started seeing himself through Maria’s eyes, where the whole thing doubled back on him and he was able to encounter himself again. They say that a camera can rob a person of his soul. In this case, I believe it was just the opposite. With this camera, I believe that Sachs’s soul was gradually given back to him.

  He was getting better, but that didn’t mean he was well, that he would ever be the person he had been. Deep down, he knew that he could never return to the life he had led before the accident. He had tried to explain that to me during our conversation in August, but I hadn’t understood. I had thought he was talking about work—to write or not to write, to abandon his career or not—but it turned out that he had been talking about everything: not just himself, but his life with Fanny as well. Within a month of coming home from the hospital, I think he was already looking for a way to break free of his marriage. It was a unilateral decision, a product of his need to wipe the slate clean and start over again, and Fanny was no more than an innocent victim of the purge. Months passed, however, and he couldn’t bring himself to tell her. This probably accounts for many of the puzzling contradictions in his behavior during that time. He didn’t want to hurt Fanny, and yet he knew he was going to hurt her, and this knowledge only increased his despair, only made him hate himself more. Thus the long period of waffling and inaction, of simultaneous recovery and decline. If nothing else, I believe it points to the essential goodness of Sachs’s heart. He had convinced himself that his survival hinged on committing an act of cruelty, and for several months he chose not to commit it, wallowing in the depths of a private torment in order to spare his wife from the brutality of his decision. He came close to destroying himself out of kindness. His bags were already packed, and yet he stayed on because her feelings meant as much to him as his own.

  When the truth finally emerged, it was scarcely recognizable anymore. Sachs never managed to come out and tell Fanny that he wanted to leave her. His nerve had failed him too badly for that; his shame was too profound for him to be capable of expressing such a thought. Rather, in a much more oblique and circuitous manner, he began to make it known to Fanny that he was no longer worthy of her, that he no longer deserved to be married to her. He was ruining her life, he said, and before
he dragged her down with him into hopeless misery, she should cut her losses and run. I don’t think there’s any question that Sachs believed this. Whether on purpose or not, he had manufactured a situation in which these words could be spoken in good faith. After months of conflict and indecision, he had hit upon a way to spare Fanny’s feelings. He wouldn’t have to hurt her by announcing his intention to walk out. Rather, by inverting the terms of the dilemma, he would convince her to walk out on him. She would initiate her own rescue; he would help her to stand up for herself and save her own life.

  Even if Sachs’s motives were hidden from him, he was at last maneuvering himself into a position to get what he wanted. I don’t mean to sound cynical about it, but it strikes me that he subjected Fanny to many of the same elaborate self-deceptions and tricky reversals he had used with Maria Turner out on the fire escape the previous summer. An overly refined conscience, a predisposition toward guilt in the face of his own desires, led a good man to act in curiously underhanded ways, in ways that compromised his own goodness. This is the nub of the catastrophe, I think. He accepted everyone else’s frailties, but when it came to himself he demanded perfection, an almost superhuman rigor in even the smallest acts. The result was disappointment, a dumbfounding awareness of his own flawed humanity, which drove him to place ever more stringent demands on his conduct, which in turn led to ever more suffocating disappointments. If he had learned how to love himself a little more, he wouldn’t have had the power to cause so much unhappiness around him. But Sachs was driven to do penance, to take on his guilt as the guilt of the world and to bear its marks in his own flesh. I don’t blame him for what he did. I don’t blame him for telling Fanny to leave him or for wanting to change his life. I just feel sorry for him, inexpressibly sorry for the terrible things he brought down on himself.