Leviathan

by Paul Auster

  On the second Sunday, Sachs proposed a family outing to the Rose Garden in the Berkeley Hills. For once, Maria seemed to be in good spirits, and after Lillian fetched an old quilt from the upstairs closet, the three of them climbed into the Buick and drove to the other end of town. Everything went well for the first hour. Sachs and Lillian lay on the quilt, Maria played on the swings, and the sun burned off the last of the morning fog. Even when Maria banged her head on the jungle gym a little while later, there didn’t seem to be any cause for alarm. She came running to them in tears, just as any other child would have done, and Lillian hugged her and soothed her, kissing the red mark on her temple with particular care and tenderness. It was good medicine, Sachs felt, the time-honored treatment, but in this case it had little or no effect. Maria went on crying, refusing to be consoled by her mother, and even though the injury was no more than a scratch, she complained about it vehemently, sobbing so hard that she nearly began to choke. Undaunted, Lillian hugged her again, but this time Maria recoiled from her, accusing her mother of squeezing her too hard. Sachs could see the hurt in Lillian’s eyes when this happened, and then, when Maria pushed Lillian away from her, a flash of anger as well. Out of nowhere, they seemed to be on the verge of a full-blown crisis. An ice cream vendor had set up a stand about fifty feet from their quilt, and Sachs, thinking it might be a useful diversion, offered to buy Maria a cone. It will make you feel better, he said, smiling as sympathetically as he could, and then he ran off to the multicolored umbrella parked on the footpath just below them. It turned out that there were sixteen different flavors to choose from. Not knowing which one to pick, he settled on a combination of pistachio and tutti frutti. If nothing else, he thought, the sounds of the words might amuse her. But they didn’t. Even though her tears had slackened by the time he returned, Maria eyed the scoops of green ice cream suspiciously, and when he handed the cone to her and she took her first tentative bite, all hell broke loose again. She made a terrible face, spat out the ice cream as though it were poison, and pronounced it “disgusting.” This led to another fit of sobbing, and then, as her fury mounted, she took the cone in her right hand and hurled it at Sachs. It hit him squarely in the stomach, splattering all over his shirt. As he glanced down at the damage, Lillian rushed over to where Maria was standing and slapped her across the face.

  “You brat!” she screamed at the little girl. “You miserable, ungrateful brat! I’ll kill you, do you understand! I’ll kill you right here in front of all these people!” And then, before Maria had time to put up her hands and protect her face, Lillian slapped her again.

  “Stop it,” Sachs said. His voice was hard, aghast with anger, and for a moment he was tempted to push Lillian to the ground. “Don’t you dare lay a hand on that child, do you hear me?”

  “Butt out, mister,” she said, every bit as angry as he was. “She’s my kid, and I’ll do what I damn please with her.”

  “No hitting. I won’t allow it.”

  “If she deserves to be hit, I’ll hit her. And no one interferes. Not even you, smartass.”

  It got worse before it got better. Sachs and Lillian ranted at each other for the next ten minutes, and if they hadn’t been in a public place, arguing in front of several dozen onlookers, God knows how far it might have gone. As it was, they eventually got a grip on themselves and reined in their tempers. Each one apologized to the other, they kissed and made up, and no more was said about it for the rest of the afternoon. The three of them went to the movies, then out to a Chinese restaurant for dinner, and by the time they returned home and Maria was put to bed, the incident had been all but forgotten. Or so they thought. In point of fact, that was the first sign of doom, and from the moment Lillian slapped Maria across the face until the moment Sachs left Berkeley five weeks later, nothing was ever the same for them again.

  5

  On January 16, 1988, a bomb went off in front of the courthouse in Turnbull, Ohio, blowing up a small, scale-model replica of the Statue of Liberty. Most people assumed it was a teenage prank, an act of petty vandalism without political motives, but because a national symbol had been destroyed, the incident was reported briefly by the wire services the next day. Six days after that, another Statue of Liberty was blown up in Danburg, Pennsylvania. The circumstances were almost identical: a small explosion in the middle of the night, no injuries, nothing damaged except the statue itself. Still, it was impossible to know if the same person was involved in both bombings or if the second blast was an imitation of the first—a so-called copy-cat crime. No one seemed to care much at that point, but one prominent conservative senator issued a statement condemning “these deplorable acts” and urged the culprits to stop their shenanigans at once. “It’s not funny,” he said. “Not only have you destroyed property, but you’ve desecrated a national icon. Americans love their statue, and they don’t take kindly to this brand of horseplay.”

  All in all, there are some one hundred and thirty scale-model replicas of the Statue of Liberty standing in public places across America. They can be found in city parks, in front of town halls, on the tops of buildings. Unlike the flag, which tends to divide people as much as it brings them together, the statue is a symbol that causes no controversy. If many Americans are proud of their flag, there are many others who feel ashamed of it, and for every person who regards it as a holy object, there is another who would like to spit on it, or burn it, or drag it through the mud. The Statue of Liberty is immune from these conflicts. For the past hundred years, it has transcended politics and ideology, standing at the threshold of our country as an emblem of all that is good within us. It represents hope rather than reality, faith rather than facts, and one would be hard-pressed to find a single person willing to denounce the things it stands for: democracy, freedom, equality under the law. It is the best of what America has to offer the world, and however pained one might be by America’s failure to live up to those ideals, the ideals themselves are not in question. They have given comfort to millions. They have instilled the hope in all of us that we might one day live in a better world.

  Eleven days after the Pennsylvania incident, another statue was destroyed on a village green in central Massachusetts. This time there was a message, a prepared statement phoned into the offices of the Springfield Republican the next morning. “Wake up, America,” the caller said. “It’s time to start practicing what you preach. If you don’t want any more statues blown up, prove to me that you’re not a hypocrite. Do something for your people besides building them bombs. Otherwise, my bombs will keep going off. Signed: The Phantom of Liberty.”

  Over the next eighteen months, nine more statues were destroyed in various parts of the country. Everyone will remember this, and there’s no need for me to give an exhaustive account of the Phantom’s activities. In some towns, twenty-four-hour guards were posted around the statues, manned by volunteer groups from the American Legion, the Elks Club, the high school football team, and other local organizations. But not every community was so vigilant, and the Phantom continued to elude detection. Each time he struck, there would be a pause before the next explosion, a long enough period to make people wonder if that was the end of it. Then, out of the blue, he would turn up somewhere a thousand miles away, and another bomb would go off. Many people were outraged, of course, but there were others who found themselves in sympathy with the Phantom’s objectives. They were in the minority, but America is a large place, and their numbers were by no means small. To them, the Phantom eventually became a kind of underground folk hero. The messages had a lot to do with it, I think, the statements he phoned in to newspapers and radio stations the morning after each explosion. They were necessarily short, but they seemed to get better as time went on: more concise, more poetic, more original in the way they expressed his disappointment in the country. “Each person is alone,” one of them began, “and therefore we have nowhere to turn but to each other.” Or: “Democracy is not a given. It must be fought for every day, or else we run the
risk of losing it. The only weapon at our disposal is the Law.” Or: “Neglect the children, and we destroy ourselves. We exist in the present only to the degree that we put our faith in the future.” Unlike the typical terrorist pronouncement, with its inflated rhetoric and belligerent demands, the Phantom’s statements did not ask for the impossible. He simply wanted America to look into itself and mend its ways. In that sense, there was something almost Biblical about his exhortations, and after a while he began to sound less like a political revolutionary than some anguished, soft-spoken prophet. At bottom, he was merely articulating what many people already felt, and in some circles at least, there were those who actually spoke out in support of what he was doing. His bombs hadn’t hurt anyone, they argued, and if these two-bit explosions forced people to rethink their positions about life, then maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

  To be perfectly honest, I didn’t follow this story very closely. There were more important things happening in the world just then, and whenever the Phantom of Liberty caught my attention, I shrugged him off as a crank, as one more transient figure in the annals of American madness. Even if I had been more interested, however, I don’t think I ever could have guessed that he and Sachs were the same person. It was too far removed from what I was capable of imagining, too alien to anything that seemed possible, and I don’t see how it ever would have occurred to me to make the connection. On the other hand (and I know this will sound odd), if the Phantom made me think about anyone, it was Sachs. Ben had been missing for four months when the first bombings were reported, and mention of the Statue of Liberty immediately brought him to mind. That was natural enough, I suppose—considering the novel he had written, considering the circumstances of his fall two years earlier—and from then on the association stuck. Every time I read about the Phantom, I would think about Ben. Memories of our friendship would come rushing back to me, and all of a sudden I would begin to ache, trembling at the thought of how much I missed him.

  But that was as far as it went. The Phantom was a sign of my friend’s absence, a catalyst for personal pain, but more than a year went by before I took any notice of the Phantom himself. That was in the spring of 1989, and it happened when I switched on my television set and saw the students of the Chinese democracy movement unveil their clumsy imitation of the Statue of Liberty in Tienanmen Square. I realized then that I had underestimated the power of the symbol. It stood for an idea that belonged to everyone, to everyone in the world, and the Phantom had played a crucial part in resurrecting its meaning. I had been wrong to dismiss him. He had caused a disturbance somewhere deep inside the earth, and the waves were now beginning to rise to the surface, touching every part of the ground at once. Something had happened, something new was in the air, and there were days that spring when I walked through the city and almost imagined that I could feel the sidewalks vibrating under my feet.

  I had started a new novel at the beginning of the year, and by the time Iris and I left New York for Vermont last summer, I was buried in my story, scarcely able to think about anything else. I settled into Sachs’s old studio on June twenty-fifth, and not even that potentially eerie situation could disrupt my rhythm. There is a point at which a book begins to take over your life, when the world you have imagined becomes more important to you than the real world, and it barely crossed my mind that I was sitting in the same chair that Sachs used to sit in, that I was writing at the same table he used to write at, that I was breathing the same air he had once breathed. If anything, it was a source of pleasure to me. I enjoyed having my friend close to me again, and I sensed that if he had known I was occupying his old space, he would have been glad. Sachs was a welcoming ghost, and he’d left behind no threats or evil spirits in his shack. He wanted me to be there, I felt, and even though I had gradually come around to Iris’s opinion (that he was dead, that he would never come back), it was as if we still understood each other, as if nothing between us had changed.

  In early August, Iris left for Minnesota to take part in the wedding of a childhood friend. Sonia went with her, and with David still off at summer camp until the end of the month, I hunkered down here alone and pushed on with my book. After a couple of days, I found myself slipping into the same patterns that set in whenever Iris and I are apart: too much work; too little food; restless, insomniac nights. With Iris in bed with me I always sleep, but the instant she goes away I dread just closing my eyes. Each night becomes a little harder than the night before, and in no time at all I’m up with the lamp on until one, two, or three o’clock in the morning. None of this is important, but because I was having these same troubles during Iris’s absence last summer, I happened to be awake when Sachs made his sudden, unexpected appearance in Vermont. It was nearly two o’clock, and I was lying in bed upstairs reading a trashy thriller, a murder mystery that some guest had left behind years before, when I heard the sound of a car chugging up the dirt road. I lifted my eyes from the book, waiting for the car to move on past the house, but then, unmistakably, the engine slowed, the headlights swept their beams across my window, and the car turned, scraping against the hawthorn bushes as it came to a halt in the yard. I pulled on a pair of pants and rushed downstairs, arriving in the kitchen just seconds after the engine was turned off. There was no time to think. I went straight for the utensils on the counter, grabbed the longest knife I could find, and then stood there in the darkness, waiting for whoever it was to walk in. I figured it was a burglar or a maniac, and for the space of the next ten or twenty seconds, I was as scared as I’ve ever been in my life.

  The light went on before I could attack him. It was an automatic gesture—stepping into the kitchen and turning on the light—and the instant after my ambush was foiled, I realized that Sachs was the person who had done it. There was the smallest interval between those two perceptions, however, and in that time I gave myself up for dead. He took three or four steps into the room and then froze. That was when he saw me standing in the corner—the knife still poised in the air, my body still ready to pounce.

  “Jesus God,” he said. “It’s you.”

  I tried to say something, but no words came out of my mouth.

  “I saw the light,” Sachs said, still staring at me in disbelief. “I thought it was probably Fanny.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not Fanny.”

  “No, it doesn’t look that way.”

  “But it’s not you either. It can’t be you, can it? You’re dead. Everyone knows that now. You’re lying in a ditch somewhere at the edge of a road, rotting under a mound of leaves.”

  It took some time to recover from the shock, but not long, not as long as I would have thought. He was looking well, I found, as clear-eyed and fit as I had ever seen him, and except for the gray that had spread through his hair now, he was essentially the same person he had always been. That must have reassured me. This was no specter who had returned—it was the old Sachs, as vibrant and full of words as ever. Fifteen minutes after he walked into the house, I was already used to him again, I was already willing to accept that he was alive.

  He hadn’t expected to run into me, he said, and before we sat down and began to talk, he apologized several times for having looked so stunned. Under the circumstances, I doubted that any apologies were necessary. “It was the knife,” I said. “If I’d walked in here and found someone about to stab me, I think I would have looked stunned, too.”

  “It’s not that I’m unhappy to see you. I just wasn’t counting on it, that’s all.”

  “You don’t have to be happy. After all this time, there’s no reason why you should be.”

  “I don’t blame you for feeling burned.”

  “I don’t. At least I didn’t until now. I admit that I was pretty angry at first, but that went away after a few months.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I began to feel scared for you. I suppose I’ve been scared ever since.”

  “And what about Fanny? Has she been scared, too?”


  “Fanny’s braver than I am. She’s never stopped thinking you were alive.”

  Sachs smiled, visibly pleased by what I had said. Until that moment, I hadn’t been sure if he was planning to stay or go, but now, suddenly, he pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and sat down, acting as though he had just come to an important decision. “What are you smoking these days?” he said, looking up at me with the smile still on his face.

  “Schimmelpennincks. The same thing I’ve always smoked.”

  “Good. Let’s have a couple of your little cigars, and then maybe a bottle of something to drink.”

  “You must be tired.”

  “Of course I’m tired. I’ve just driven four hundred miles, and it’s two o’clock in the morning. But you want me to talk to you, don’t you?”

  “It can wait until tomorrow.”

  “There’s a chance I’ll lose my nerve by tomorrow.”