Authors: Paul Auster
The sun appeared on the last day. I don’t remember doing it, but at some point I must have crawled from the cave and stretched myself out on the grass. My mind was in such a muddle that I imagined the warmth of the sun could evaporate my fever, literally suck the illness out of my bones. I remember pronouncing the words
Indian summer
over and over to myself, saying them so many times that they eventually lost their meaning. The sky above me was immense, a dazzling clarity that had no end to it. If I went on staring at it, I felt, I would dissolve in the light. Then, without any sense of falling asleep, I suddenly began to dream of Indians. It was 350 years ago, and I saw myself following a group of half-naked men through the forests of Manhattan. It was a strangely vibrant dream, relentless and exact, filled with bodies darting among the light-dappled leaves and branches. A soft wind poured through the foliage, muffling the footsteps of the men, and I went on following them in silence, moving as nimbly as they did, with each step feeling that I was closer to understanding the spirit of the forest. I remember these images so well, perhaps, because it was precisely then that Zimmer and Kitty found me: lying there on the grass with that odd and pleasant dream circulating in my head. Kitty was the one I saw first, but I didn’t recognize her, even though I sensed that she was familiar to me. She was wearing her Navaho headband, and my initial response was to take her for an afterimage, a shadow-woman incubated in the darkness of my dream. Later on, she told me that I smiled at her, and when she bent down to look at me more closely, I called her Pocahontas. I remember that I had trouble seeing her because of the sunlight,
but I have a distinct recollection that there were tears in her eyes when she bent down, although she would never admit that afterward. A moment later, Zimmer entered the picture as well, and then I heard his voice. “You dumb bastard,” he said. There was a brief pause, and then, not wanting to confuse me with too long a speech, he said the same thing again: “You dumb bastard. You poor dumb bastard.”
3
I
stayed in Zimmer’s apartment for more than a month. The fever broke on the second or third day, but for a long time after that I had no strength, could barely even stand up without losing my balance. In the beginning, Kitty came to visit about twice a week, but she never said very much, and more often than not she would leave after twenty or thirty minutes. Had I been more alert to what was going on, I might have wondered about this, especially after Zimmer told me the story of how I had been rescued. It was somewhat strange, after all, that a person who had spent three weeks turning the world upside-down to find me should suddenly act with such reserve the moment I was found. But that was the way it was, and I did not question it. I was too weak to question anything just then, and I accepted her comings and goings for what they were. They were natural events, and they carried the same force and inevitability as the weather, the motions of the planets, or the light that came filtering through the window at three o’clock every afternoon.
Zimmer was the one who took care of me during my convalescence. His new apartment was on the second floor of an ancient West Village tenement building, a dingy hogan of a place crowded with books and records: two small rooms with no door
between them, a rudimentary kitchen, a windowless bathroom. I understood what a sacrifice it was for him to put me up there, but every time I tried to thank him for it, Zimmer would wave me off, pretending it didn’t matter. He fed me out of his own pocket, allowed me to sleep in his bed, asked for nothing in return. At the same time, he was furious with me, and he made no bones about telling me how disgusted he was. Not only had I acted like an imbecile, but I had nearly killed myself in the process. It was inexcusable for a person of my intelligence to act like that, he said. It was grotesque, it was asinine, it was unhinged. If I was in trouble, why hadn’t I turned to him for help? Didn’t I know that he would have been willing to do anything for me? I said very little in response to these attacks. I understood that Zimmer’s feelings had been hurt, and I was ashamed of myself for having done that to him. As time went on, it became increasingly difficult for me to make sense of the disaster I had created. I had thought I was acting with courage, but it turned out that I was merely demonstrating the most abject form of cowardice: rejoicing in my contempt for the world, refusing to look things squarely in the face. I felt nothing but remorse now, a crippling sense of my own stupidity. The days went by in Zimmer’s apartment, and as I slowly put myself back together, I realized that I would have to start my life all over again. I wanted to atone for my errors, to make amends to the people who still cared about me. I was tired of myself, tired of my thoughts, tired of brooding about my fate. More than anything else, I felt a need to purify myself, to repent for all my excesses of self-involvement. From total selfishness, I resolved to achieve a state of total selflessness. I would think of others before I thought of myself, consciously striving to undo the damage I had done, and in that way perhaps I would begin to accomplish something in the world. It was an impossible program, of course, but I stuck to it with almost religious fanaticism. I wanted to turn myself into a saint, a godless saint who would wander through the world performing good works. No matter how absurd it sounds to me now, I believe that was precisely what I wanted.
I was desperate for a certainty, and I was prepared to do anything to find it.
There was one more obstacle in my way, however. Luck got me around it in the end, but only by the smallest hair’s breadth of a margin. A day or two after my temperature returned to normal, I happened to get out of bed to go to the toilet. It was evening, I think, and Zimmer was working at his desk in the other room. As I shuffled back to bed after I was done, I noticed Uncle Victor’s clarinet case lying on the floor. I had not thought of it since my rescue, and I was suddenly horrified to see what poor condition it was in. The black leather covering was half gone, and much of what remained had bubbled and cracked apart. The storm in Central Park had been too much for it, and I wondered if the water had seeped through and damaged the instrument as well. I picked up the case and carried it into bed with me, fully prepared for the worst. I unsnapped the locks and opened it, but before I had a chance to examine the clarinet, a white envelope fluttered to the floor, and I realized that my troubles were only just beginning. It was the letter from the draft board. Not only had I forgotten the date of my physical, I had forgotten that the letter had been sent to me. In that one instant, everything closed in on me again. I was probably a fugitive from justice, I thought. If I had missed the physical, then the government would already have issued a warrant for my arrest—and that meant there would be hell to pay, consequences I could not even imagine. I tore open the envelope and found the date that had been typed into the blank on the form letter: September 16. This meant nothing to me, since I no longer knew what day it was. I had lost the habit of looking at clocks and calendars, and I couldn’t even make a guess.
“One small question,” I said to Zimmer, who was still bent over his work. “Do you happen to know what day it is?”
“It’s Monday,” he said, without looking up.
“I mean the date. The month and the number. You don’t have to give me the year. I’m fairly certain of that.”
“September fifteenth,” he said, still not bothering to look up.
“September fifteenth?” I said. “Are you sure of that?”
“Of course I’m sure. Beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
I sank back onto the pillow and closed my eyes. “It’s extraordinary,” I muttered. “It’s absolutely extraordinary.”
Zimmer turned from his desk at last and gave me a puzzled look. “Why on earth should it be extraordinary?”
“Because it means I’m not a criminal.”
“What?”
“Because it means I’m not a criminal.”
“I heard you the first time. Saying it again doesn’t make it any clearer.”
I held up the letter and waved it in the air. “Once you look at this,” I said, “you’ll understand what I mean.”
I was due to report at Whitehall Street the next morning. Zimmer had already been through his physical in July (he had been given a deferment because of asthma), and we spent the next two or three hours discussing what was in store for me. It was essentially the same conversation that millions of young men in America had during those years. Unlike the vast majority of them, however, I had done nothing to prepare myself for the moment of truth. I did not have a note from a doctor, I had not gorged myself on drugs to distort my motor responses, I had not staged a series of mental breakdowns to establish a history of psychological disturbance. I had always known that I would never join the army, but once I reached that conclusion, I had not given the subject much thought. As with so many other things, inertia had got the better of me, and I had steadfastly shut the problem out of my mind. Zimmer was appalled, but even he was forced to admit that it was too late to do anything about it now. I would either pass the physical or flunk it, and if I passed, there were only two options available to me: I could leave the country or go to prison. Zimmer told a number of stories about people who had gone abroad, to Canada, to France, to Sweden, but I wasn’t terribly interested. I had no money, I said, and I wasn’t in the mood to travel.
“So you’ll turn out to be a criminal anyway,” he said.
“A prisoner,” I corrected him. “A prisoner of conscience. There’s a difference.”
I was still in the first stages of recovery, and when I stood up the next morning to get dressed—in Zimmer’s clothes, which were several sizes too small for me—I realized that I was in no shape to be going anywhere. I was utterly depleted, and just trying to walk across the room demanded all my energy and concentration. Until then, I hadn’t been out of bed for more than a minute or two at a time, groping my way feebly to the toilet and back. If Zimmer hadn’t been there to hold me up, I doubt that I would have made it out the door. He literally kept me on my feet, walking me down the stairs with both arms around my body and then letting me lean on him as we staggered along to the subway. It was a sad and gruesome spectacle, I’m afraid. Zimmer took me to the front door of the building on Whitehall Street and then pointed to a restaurant directly opposite, where he said I could find him after I was done. He squeezed my arm for encouragement. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll make a hell of a soldier, Fogg. It’s written all over you.” “You’re fucking copy,” I answered. “Best fucking soldier in the whole goddamned Army. Any fool can see that.” I gave Zimmer a mock salute and then tottered into the building, clinging to the walls for support.
Much of what followed is lost to me now. Bits and pieces remain, but nothing that adds up to a full-fledged memory, nothing that I can talk about with any conviction. This inability to see what happened proves how wretchedly frail I must have been. It took all my strength just to stand there, trying not to fall down, and I did not pay attention as I should have. I think, in fact, that my eyes were mostly shut during those hours, and when I did manage to open them, it was seldom long enough for the world to get in. There were fifty or a hundred of us who marched through the process together. I remember sitting at a desk in a large room and listening to a sergeant talk to us, but I can’t remember what he said, am unable to bring back a single word of it. They gave
us forms to fill out, and then there was a written test of some kind, although it’s possible that the test came first and the forms second. I remember checking off the organizations I had belonged to and taking some time with that: SDS from college, SANE and SNCC from high school, and then having to explain the circumstances of my arrest the year before. I was the last one in the room to finish, and by the end the sergeant was standing over my shoulder, muttering something about Uncle Ho and the American flag.
After that, there is a break of several minutes, perhaps half an hour. I see corridors, fluorescent lights, clusters of young men standing around in their underpants. I can remember the intense vulnerability I felt then, but numerous other details have vanished. Where we changed out of our clothes, for example, and what we said to each other as we waited in line. More specifically, I have been unable to conjure up any images concerning our feet. Above the knees we had nothing on but our jockey shorts, but everything below them remains a mystery to me. Were we allowed to wear our shoes and/or our socks, or did they make us walk through those halls barefooted? I draw nothing but blanks on this subject, cannot detect even the faintest glimmer.
Eventually, I was told to enter a room. A doctor thumped me on the chest and back, looked into my ears, grabbed hold of my balls and asked me to cough. These things required little effort, but then it was time for him to take a blood sample, and suddenly the examination became more eventful. I was so anemic and emaciated that the doctor couldn’t find a vein in my arm. He poked a needle into me two or three times, jabbing and bruising my skin, but no blood flowed into the tube. I must have looked awful by then—all pale and queasy, like someone on the verge of blacking out—and after a while he gave up and told me to sit down on a bench. He was rather kind about it, I believe, or at least indifferent. “If you feel dizzy again,” he said, “just sit on the floor and wait until it passes. We don’t want you falling down and hitting your head, do we?”
I distinctly remember sitting on the bench, but after that I see
myself lying on a table in another room. It is impossible to know how much time elapsed between these two events. I don’t think I fainted, but when they tried to get blood from me again, they probably didn’t want to take any chances. A rubber cord was secured around my bicep to make the vein stand out, and when the doctor finally got the needle in—I can’t remember if it was the same doctor or another one—he said something about how thin I was and asked if I had eaten breakfast that morning. In what was surely my most lucid moment of the day, I turned to him and gave the simplest, most heartfelt answer I could think of. “Doctor,” I said, “do I look like someone who can go without eating breakfast?”