by Paul Auster
That explains the confusion that followed. Not only was Sachs caught off balance when he entered the apartment, but he was in no condition to absorb the least new fact about anything. His brain was already overcharged, and he had gone home to Fanny precisely because he assumed there would be no surprises there, because it was the one place where he could count on being taken care of. Hence his bewilderment, his stunned reaction when he saw her rolling around naked on the bed with Charles. His certainty had dissolved into humiliation, and it was all he could do to mutter a few words of apology before rushing out of the apartment. Everything had happened at once, and while he managed to regain enough composure to shout his blessings from the street, that was no more than a bluff, a feeble, last-minute effort to save face. In point of fact, he felt as if the sky had fallen on his head. He felt as if his heart had been ripped out of him.
He ran down the block, running only to be gone, with no thought of what to do next. At the corner of Third Street and Seventh Avenue, he spotted a pay phone, and that gave him the idea to call me and ask for a place to spend the night. When he dialed my number, however, the line was busy. I must have been talking to Fanny at that moment (she called immediately after Sachs dashed away), but Sachs interpreted the busy signal to mean that Iris and I had taken our phone off the hook. That was a sensible conclusion, since it wasn’t likely that either one of us would be talking to someone at two o’clock in the morning. Therefore, he didn’t bother to try us again. When his quarter came back to him, he used it to call Maria instead. The ringing pulled her out of a deep sleep, but once she heard the desperation in his voice, she told him to come right over. Subways were scarce at that hour, and by the time he caught the train at Grand Army Plaza and traveled to her loft in Manhattan, she was already dressed and wide awake, sitting at the kitchen table and drinking her third cup of coffee.
It was the logical place for him to go. Even after his removal to the country, Sachs had stayed in touch with Maria, and when I finally talked to her about these things last fall, she showed me more than a dozen letters and postcards he had sent her from Vermont. There had been a number of phone conversations as well, she said, and in the six months he was out of town, she didn’t think more than ten days had gone by without news from him of one sort or another. The point was that Sachs trusted her, and with Fanny suddenly gone from his life (and with my phone ostensibly off the hook), it was a natural step for him to turn to Maria. Since his accident the previous July, she was the only person he had unburdened himself to, the only person he had allowed into the inner sanctum of his thoughts. When all was said and done, she was probably closer to him at that moment than anyone else.
Still, it turned out to be a terrible mistake. Not because Maria wasn’t willing to help him, not because she wasn’t prepared to drop everything to see him through the crisis, but because she was in possession of the one fact powerful enough to turn an ugly misfortune into a full-scale tragedy. If Sachs hadn’t gone to her, I’m certain that things would have been resolved rather quickly. He would have calmed down after a night’s rest, and after that he would have contacted the police and told them the truth. With the help of a good lawyer, he would have walked away a free man. But a new element was added to the already unstable mixture of the past twenty-four hours, and it wound up producing a deadly compound, a beakerful of acid that hissed forth its dangers in a billowing profusion of smoke.
Even now, it’s difficult for me to accept any of it. And I speak as someone who should know better, as someone who has thought long and hard about the issues at stake here. My whole adulthood has been spent writing stories, putting imaginary people into unexpected and often unlikely situations, but none of my characters has ever experienced anything as improbable as Sachs did that night at Maria Turner’s house. If it still shocks me to report what happened, that is because the real is always ahead of what we can imagine. No matter how wild we think our inventions might be, they can never match the unpredictability of what the real world continually spews forth. This lesson seems inescapable to me now. Anything can happen. And one way or another, it always does.
The first hours they spent together were painful enough, and they both remembered them as a kind of tempest, an inward pummeling, a maelstrom of tears, silences, and choked-off words. Little by little, Sachs managed to get the story out. Maria held him in her arms through most of it, listening in rapt disbelief as he told her as much as he was able to tell. That was when she made her promise, when she gave him her word and swore to keep the killings to herself. Later on, she planned to talk him into going to the police, but for now her only concern was to protect him, to prove her loyalty. Sachs was falling apart, and once the words started coming out of his mouth, once he started listening to himself describe the things he had done, he was seized by revulsion. Maria tried to make him understand that he had acted in self-defense—that he wasn’t responsible for the stranger’s death—but Sachs refused to accept her argument. Like it or not, he had killed a man, and no amount of talk would ever obliterate that fact. But if he hadn’t killed the stranger, Maria said, he would have been killed himself. Maybe so, Sachs answered, but in the long run that would have been preferable to the position he was in now. It would have been better to die, he said, better to have been shot and killed that morning than to have this memory with him for the rest of his life.
They kept on talking, weaving in and out of these tortured arguments, weighing the act and its consequences, reliving the hours Sachs had spent in the car, the scene with Fanny in Brooklyn, his night in the woods, going over the same ground three or four times, neither one of them able to sleep, and then, right in the middle of this conversation, everything stopped. Sachs opened the bowling bag to show Maria what he had found in the trunk of the car, and there was the passport lying on top of the money. He pulled it out and handed it to her, insisting that she take a look at it, intent on proving that the stranger had been a real person—a man with a name, an age, a place of birth. It made it all so concrete, he said. If the man had been anonymous, it might have been possible to think of him as a monster, to imagine that he had deserved to die, but the passport demythologized him, showed him to be a man like any other man. Here were his vital statistics, the delineation of an actual life. And here was his picture. Unbelievably, the man was smiling in the photograph. As Sachs told Maria when he put the document in her hand, he was convinced that smile would destroy him. No matter how far he traveled from the events of that morning, he would never manage to escape it.
So Maria opened the passport, already thinking of what she would say to Sachs, already casting about for some words that would reassure him, and glanced down at the picture inside. Then she took a second look, moving her eyes back and forth between the name and the photograph, and all of a sudden (as she put it to me last year) she felt as if her head were about to explode. Those were the precise words she used to describe what happened: “I felt as if my head were about to explode.”
Sachs asked her if something was wrong. He had seen the change of expression in her face, and he didn’t understand it.
“Jesus God,” she said.
“Are you okay?”
“This is a joke, right? It’s all some kind of stupid gag, isn’t it?”
“You’re not making sense.”
“Reed Dimaggio. This is a picture of Reed Dimaggio.”
“That’s what it says. I have no idea if that’s his real name.”
“I know him.”
“You what?”
“I know him. He was married to my best friend. I was at their wedding. They named their little girl after me.”
“Reed Dimaggio.”
“There’s only one Reed Dimaggio. And this is his picture. I’m looking at it right now.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Do you think I’d make it up?”
“The man was a killer. He shot down a boy in cold blood.”
“I don’t care. I knew him. He was marri
ed to my friend Lillian Stern. If it hadn’t been for me, they never would have met.”
It was almost dawn then, but they went on talking for several more hours, staying up until nine or ten o’clock as Maria recounted the history of her friendship with Lillian Stern. Sachs, whose body had been crumbling with exhaustion, caught his second wind and refused to go to bed until she had finished. He heard about Maria and Lillian’s early days in Massachusetts, about their move to New York after high school, about the long period when they lost contact with each other, about their unexpected reunion in the entryway of Lillian’s apartment house. Maria went through the saga of the address book, she dug up the photographs she had taken of Lillian and spread them out on the floor for him, she told about their experiment in switching identities. This had led directly to Lillian’s meeting with Dimaggio, she explained, and to the whirlwind romance that followed. Maria herself never got to know him very well, and except for the fact that she liked him, she couldn’t say much about who he was. Only a few random details had stuck in her mind. She remembered that he had fought in Vietnam, but whether he had been drafted into the army or had enlisted wasn’t clear anymore. He must have been discharged some time in the early seventies, however, since she knew for a fact that he had gone to college on the G.I. bill, and when Lillian met him in 1976, he had already finished his B.A. and was about to go off to Berkeley as a graduate student in American history. All in all, she had met him only five or six times, and several of those encounters had taken place right at the beginning, just when he and Lillian were falling in love. Lillian went out to California with him the following month, and after that Maria saw him on only two other occasions: at the wedding in 1977, and after their daughter was born in 1981. The marriage ended in 1984. Lillian talked to Maria several times during the period of the breakup, but since then their contacts had been fitful, with wider and wider intervals between each call.
She had never seen any cruelty in Dimaggio, she said, nothing to suggest that he would have been capable of hurting anyone—let alone shooting down a stranger in cold blood. The man wasn’t a criminal. He was a student, an intellectual, a teacher, and he and Lillian had lived a rather dull life in Berkeley. He taught classes as a graduate assistant at the university and worked on his doctorate; she studied acting, held different part-time jobs, and performed in local theater productions and student films. Lillian’s savings helped get them through the first couple of years, but after that money was tight, and more often than not it was a struggle to make ends meet. Hardly the life of a criminal, Maria said.
Nor was it the life she had imagined her friend would choose for herself. After those wild years in New York, it seemed strange that Lillian would have settled down with someone like Dimaggio. But she had already been thinking about leaving New York, and the circumstances of their meeting were so extraordinary (so “rapturous” as Maria put it), that the idea of running off with him must have been irresistible—not so much a choice as a matter of destiny. It’s true that Berkeley wasn’t Hollywood, but neither was Dimaggio some cringing little bookworm with wire-rimmed spectacles and a caved-in chest. He was a strong, good-looking young man, and physical attraction couldn’t have been a problem. Just as important, he was smarter than anyone she had ever met: he talked better and knew more than anyone else, and he had all kinds of impressive opinions about everything. Lillian, who hadn’t read more than two or three books in her life, must have been overpowered by him. As Maria saw it, she probably imagined that Dimaggio would transform her, that just knowing him would lift her out of her mediocrity and help her to make something of herself. Becoming a movie star was only a childish dream anyway. She might have had the looks for it, she might even have had enough talent—but, as Maria explained it to Sachs, Lillian was far too lazy to pull it off, too impulsive to bear down and concentrate, too lacking in ambition. When she asked Maria for advice, Maria told her flat out to forget the movies and stick with Dimaggio. If he was willing to marry her, then she should jump at the chance. And that’s exactly what Lillian did.
As far as Maria could tell, it seemed to be a successful marriage. Lillian never complained about it in any case, and though Maria began to have some doubts after she visited California in 1981 (finding Dimaggio morose and overbearing, devoid of any sense of humor), she attributed it to the early flutters of parenthood and kept her thoughts to herself. Two and a half years later, when Lillian called to announce their impending separation, Maria was caught by surprise. Lillian claimed that Dimaggio was seeing another woman, but then in the next breath she mentioned something about her past “catching up with her.” Maria had always assumed that Lillian had told Dimaggio about her life in New York, but it seems that she had never gotten around to it, and once they moved to California, she decided it would be better for both of them if he didn’t know. One evening, while she and Dimaggio were eating dinner in a San Francisco restaurant, a former client of hers happened to sit down at the next table. The man was drunk, and after Lillian refused to acknowledge his stares and smiles and obnoxious winks, he stood up and made some loud, insulting remarks, spilling her secret right there in front of her husband. According to what she told Maria, Dimaggio went into a rage when they returned home. He pushed her to the ground, he kicked her, he threw pots and pans against the wall, he yelled “whore” at the top of his voice. If the baby hadn’t woken up, she said, there was a chance he would have killed her. The next day, however, when she talked to Maria again, Lillian never even referred to this incident. This time, her story was that Dimaggio “had gone weird on her,” that he was hanging out with “a bunch of idiot radicals” and had turned into a “creep.” So she had finally gotten fed up and kicked him out of the house. That made three different stories, Maria said, a typical example of how Lillian confronted the truth. One of the stories might have been real. It was even possible that all of them were real—but then again, it was just as possible that all of them were false. You could never tell with Lillian, she explained to Sachs. For all she knew, Lillian might have been unfaithful to Dimaggio, and he had walked out on her. It might have been that simple. And then again, it might not.
They were never officially divorced. Dimaggio, who finished his degree in 1982, had been teaching at a small private college in Oakland for the past couple of years. After the final rupture with Lillian (fall 1984), he moved to a one-room efficiency flat in the center of Berkeley. For the next nine months, he came to the house every Saturday to pick up little Maria and spend the day with her. He always arrived punctually at ten in the morning, and he always brought her back by eight at night. Then, after close to a year of this routine, he failed to show up. There was never any excuse, never any word of explanation. Lillian called his apartment several times over the next two days, but no one answered. On Monday, she tried to reach him at work, and when no one picked up the phone in his office, she redialed and asked for the secretary of the history department. It was only then that she learned that Dimaggio had quit his position at the college. Just last week, the secretary said, on the day he handed in his final grades for the semester. He had told the chairman that he’d been hired for a tenure-track job at Cornell, but when Lillian called the history department at Cornell, no one there had heard of him. After that, she never saw Dimaggio again. For the next two years, it was as if he had vanished from the face of the earth. He didn’t write, he didn’t call, he didn’t make a single attempt to contact his daughter. Until he materialized in the Vermont woods on the day of his death, the story of those two years was a complete blank.
In the meantime, Lillian and Maria continued to talk on the phone. After Dimaggio had been missing for a month, Maria suggested that Lillian pack a suitcase and come with little Maria to New York. She even offered to pay the fare, but considering how broke Lillian was just then, they both decided the money would be better spent on paying bills. So Maria wired Lillian a loan of three thousand dollars (every penny she could afford), and the trip was shelved for some future
date. Two years later, it still hadn’t happened. Maria kept imagining that she would go out to California to spend a couple of weeks with Lillian, but there never seemed to be a good time, and it was all she could do to keep up with her work. After the first year, they began calling each other less. At one point, Maria sent another fifteen hundred dollars, but it had been four months since their last conversation, and she suspected that Lillian was in rather poor shape. It was a terrible way to treat a friend, she said, suddenly giving in to a fresh round of tears. She didn’t even know what Lillian was doing anymore, and now that this wretched thing had happened, she saw how selfish she had been, she realized how badly she had let her down.
Fifteen minutes later, Sachs was stretched out on the sofa in Maria’s studio, drifting off to sleep. He could give in to his exhaustion because he had already worked out a plan, because he was no longer in doubt about what to do next. Once Maria had told him about Dimaggio and Lillian Stern, he understood that the nightmare coincidence was in fact a solution, an opportunity in the shape of a miracle. The essential thing was to accept the uncanniness of the event—not to deny it, but to embrace it, to breathe it into himself as a sustaining force. Where all had been dark for him, he now saw a beautiful, awesome clarity. He would go to California and give Lillian Stern the money he had found in Dimaggio’s car. Not just the money—but the money as a token of everything he had to give, his entire soul. The alchemy of retribution demanded it, and once he had performed this act, perhaps there would be some peace for him, perhaps he would have some excuse to go on living. Dimaggio had taken a life; he had taken Dimaggio’s life. Now it was his turn, now his life had to be taken from him. That was the inner law, and unless he found the courage to obliterate himself, the circle of damnation would never be closed. No matter how long he lived, his life would never belong to him again. By handing the money over to Lillian Stern, he would be putting himself in her hands. That would be his penance: to use his life in order to give life to someone else; to confess; to risk everything on an insane dream of mercy and forgiveness.
