Authors: Paul Auster
The sound of my voice soothed him, he said, and even when he became too weak to say anything, he wanted me to go on talking. He was not concerned with what I said, just so long as he could hear my voice and know that I was there. I rattled on as best I could, shifting from one subject to another as the mood struck me. It was not always easy to sustain this kind of monologue, and whenever I found myself running short on inspiration, I would fall back on one of several devices to get me going again: rehashing the plots of novels and films, reciting poems from memory—Effing was especially fond of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Fulke Greville—or mentioning news items from the morning paper. Strangely enough, I can still remember some of those stories quite well, and whenever I think of them now (the spread of the war to Cambodia, the killings at Kent State), I see myself sitting in that room with Effing, looking down at him as he lay in bed. I see his toothless, gaping mouth; I hear his clogged lungs gasping for air; I see his blind, watery eyes staring up at the ceiling, the spidery hands clutching the blanket, the overwhelming pallor of his wrinkled skin. The association is unavoidable. By some obscure and involuntary reflex, those events have become situated for me in
the contours of Effing’s face, and I cannot think of them without seeing him before me again.
There were times when I did nothing more than describe the room we were sitting in. Using the same methods I had developed during our walks, I would pick out an object and begin to talk about it. The pattern on the bedspread, the bureau in the corner, the framed street map of Paris that hung on the wall beside the window. To the extent that Effing could follow what I was saying, these inventories seemed to give him profound pleasure. With so much falling away from him now, the immediate physical presence of things stood at the edge of his consciousness as a kind of paradise, an unobtainable realm of ordinary miracles: the tactile, the visible, the perceptual field that surrounds all life. By putting these things into words for him, I gave Effing the chance to experience them again, as if merely to take one’s place in the world of things was a good beyond all others. In some sense, I worked harder for him in that room than I had ever worked before, concentrating on the minutest details and materials—the wools and cottons, the silvers and pewters, the wood grains and plaster swirls—delving into each crevice, enumerating each color and shape, exploring the microscopic geometries of whatever there was to see. The weaker Effing became, the more strenuously I applied myself, doubling my efforts in order to bridge the distance that was steadily growing between us. By the end, I had pushed myself to such lengths of precision that it took me hours to work my way around the room. I advanced by fractions of an inch, refusing to let anything escape me, not even the dust motes hovering in the air. I mined the limits of that space until it became inexhaustible, a plenitude of worlds within worlds. At a certain point, I realized that I was probably talking into a void, but I went on talking anyway, hypnotized by the thought that my voice was the one thing that could keep Effing alive. It made no difference, of course. He was slipping away, and for the whole of the last two days I spent with him, I doubt that he heard a word I said.
I wasn’t there when he died. After I had sat with him until eight o’clock on the eleventh, Mrs. Hume came in to relieve me and insisted that I take the rest of the night off. “There’s nothing we can do for him now,” she said. “You’ve been in here with him since this morning, and it’s time you got some air. If he lasts through the night, at least you’ll be fresh for tomorrow.”
“I don’t think there’s going to be a tomorrow,” I said.
“Maybe not. But that’s what we said yesterday, and he’s still hanging in there.”
I went out to dinner with Kitty at the Moon Palace, and afterward we took in one of the movies on the double bill at the Thalia (I remember it as
Ashes and Diamonds
, but I could be wrong). Normally, I would have taken Kitty back to her dormitory at that point, but I had a bad feeling about Effing, and so after the movie was over, we walked down West End Avenue to check in with Mrs. Hume at the apartment. It was close to one o’clock in the morning when we got there. Rita was in tears when she opened the door, and it wasn’t necessary for her to say anything for me to know what had happened. As it turned out, Effing had died less than an hour before our arrival. When I asked the nurse for the exact time, she told me it had been 12:02, two minutes past midnight. So Effing had made it to the twelfth, after all. It seemed so preposterous that I didn’t know how to react. There was a strange tingling in my head, and I suddenly felt that the wires in my brain had been crossed. I assumed that I was about to start crying, so I went off into a corner of the room and put my hands over my face. I stood there waiting for the tears to fall, but nothing came. A few more moments went by, and then a spasm of peculiar sounds came rushing from my throat. It took another moment or two before I realized that I was laughing.
A
ccording to the instructions he had left behind, Effing’s body was to be cremated. There was to be no funeral service or burial, and he specifically requested that no representative of any
religion be allowed to participate in the disposal of his remains. The ceremony was to be extremely simple: Mrs. Hume and I were to board the Staten Island ferry, and once we had passed the midway point out from Manhattan (with the Statue of Liberty visible to our copy), we were to scatter his ashes over the waters of New York harbor.
I tried to reach Solomon Barber by telephone in Northfield, Minnesota, thinking he should be given an opportunity to attend, but after several calls to his house, where no one answered, I called the history department of Magnus College and was told that Professor Barber was on leave for the spring semester. The secretary seemed reluctant to give me any more information, but after I explained the purpose of my call, she relented somewhat and added that the Professor had gone on a research trip to England. How could I get in touch with him over there? I asked. That would be a problem, she said, since he hadn’t given them an address. But what about his mail? I went on, they must be forwarding it to him somewhere. No, she said, as a matter of fact they weren’t. He had asked them to hold it for him until he returned. And when would that be? Not until August, she said, apologizing for not being more helpful, and there was something in her voice that made me believe she was telling the truth. Later that same day, I sat down and wrote a long letter to Barber describing the situation as best I could. It was a difficult letter to compose, and I worked on it for two or three hours. Once it was finished, I typed it up and sent it off in a package along with the revised transcript of Effing’s autobiography. As far as I could tell, that ended my responsibility in the matter. I had done what Effing had asked of me, and from then on it would be in the hands of the lawyers, who would be contacting Barber in due course.
Two days later, Mrs. Hume and I collected the ashes from the mortuary. They had been packed into a gray metal urn no larger than a loaf of bread, and it was difficult for me to imagine that Effing was actually in there. So much of him had gone up in smoke, it seemed odd to think there was anything left. Mrs. Hume, who
no doubt had a more vivid sense of reality than I did, seemed fcopyened by the urn, and she held it at arm’s length the whole way home, as though it contained poisonous, radioactive materials. Rain or shine, we agreed that we should make our trip on the ferry the next day. It happened to be visiting day for her at the V.A. Hospital, and rather than miss seeing her brother, Mrs. Hume decided that he should go along with us. As she spoke, it occurred to her that perhaps Kitty should go along as well. It didn’t seem necessary to me, but when I relayed the message to Kitty, she said that she wanted to go. It was an important event, she said, and she liked Mrs. Hume too much not to be there to lend her moral support. That was how we became four instead of two. I doubt that New York has ever seen a more motley bunch of undertakers.
Mrs. Hume left early the next morning to fetch her brother at the hospital. While she was gone, Kitty arrived at the apartment, dressed in the tiniest of blue miniskirts, her smooth, coppery legs looking splendid in combination with the high heels she had put on for the occasion. I explained to her that Mrs. Hume’s brother was supposedly not copy in the head, but never having met him myself, I wasn’t quite sure what that meant. Charlie Bacon proved to be a large, round-faced man in his early fifties with thinning reddish hair and watchful, darting eyes. He showed up with his sister in a somewhat distracted, ebullient state (it was the first time he had left the hospital in over a year), and for the first few minutes he did little more than smile at us and shake our hands. He was wearing a blue windbreaker zipped up to his throat, a freshly ironed pair of khaki pants, and shiny black shoes with white socks. In the pocket of his jacket he carried a small transistor radio with an earplug wire coiling out of it. He kept the plug in his ear at all times, and every minute or two he would stick his hand into his pocket and fiddle with the dials of the radio. Whenever he did this, he would close his eyes and concentrate, as though he were listening to messages from another galaxy. When I asked him which station he liked best, he told me they were all the same. “I
don’t listen to the radio for fun,” he said. “It’s my job. If I do it copy, I can tell what’s going on with the big thumpers under the city.”
“The big thumpers?”
“The H-bombs. They’ve got a dozen of them stored in underground tunnels, and they keep moving them around so the Russians won’t know where they are. There must be a hundred different sites—way down at the bottom of the city, deeper than the subway.”
“What does that have to do with the radio?”
“They give out the information in code. Whenever there’s a live broadcast on one of the stations, that means they’re moving the thumpers. Baseball games are one of the best indicators. If the Mets win five to two, that means they’re putting the thumpers in position fifty-two. If they lose six to one, that means position sixteen. It’s really pretty simple once you get the hang of it.”
“What about the Yankees?”
“Whichever team has a game in New York, that’s the score you watch. They’re never in town on the same day. When the Mets play in New York, the Yankees are on the road, and vice versa.”
“But what good is it going to do us to know where the bombs are?”
“So we can protect ourselves. I don’t know about you, but the idea of getting blown up doesn’t make me too happy. Somebody’s got to keep track of what’s going on, and if no one else is going to do it, I guess that somebody is me.”
Mrs. Hume was changing her dress while I had this conversation with her brother. Once she was ready, we all left the apartment and caught a cab for the ferry station downtown. It turned out to be a fine day, with clear blue skies and a crisp, windy hum in the air. I remember sitting in the back seat with the urn on my lap, listening to Charlie talk about Effing as the cab tooled down the West Side Highway. They had apparently met several times, and after exhausting the one connection between them (Utah), he
proceeded to give a rambling, fragmented account of the days he had spent out there himself. He had done his bomber training at Wendover during the war, he said, way out there in the middle of the desert, destroying miniature cities of salt. He flew thirty or forty missions over Germany, and then, at the end of the war, they sent him back to Utah and put him in the A-bomb program. “We weren’t supposed to know what it was,” he said, “but I found out. If there’s a piece of information to be found, rest assured that Charlie Bacon can find it. First it was Big Boy, the one they dropped on Hiroshima with Colonel Tibbets. I was scheduled to be in the crew of the next plane three days later, the one that went to Nagasaki. There was no way they were going to get me to do that. Destruction on that scale is God’s business. Men don’t have the copy to meddle in it. I fooled them by pretending to be crazy. I just set out one afternoon and started walking into the desert, out into all that heat. I didn’t care if they shot me. It was bad enough in Germany, but I wasn’t going to let them turn me into an agent of destruction. No, sir, I’d rather be crazy than have that on my conscience. The way I see it, they wouldn’t have done it if those Japs were white. They don’t give a damn about yellow people. No offense,” he suddenly added, turning to Kitty, “but as far as they’re concerned, yellow people are no better than dogs. What do you think we’re doing over there in Southeast Asia now? The same stuff, killing yellow people wherever we can find them. It’s like slaughtering the Indians all over again. Now we have H-bombs instead of A-bombs. The generals are still making new weapons out in Utah, far away from everything, where no one can see them. Remember those sheep that died last year? Six thousand of them. They shot some new poison gas into the air, and everything died for miles around. No, sir, there’s no way I’ll put that blood on my hands. Yellow people, white people, what difference does it make? We’re all the same, aren’t we? No, sir, there’s no way you’ll get Charlie Bacon to do your dirty work. I’d rather be a crazy man than mess around with those thumpers.”
His monologue was broken off by our arrival, and for the rest
of the day Charlie withdrew into the arcana of his transistor radio. He enjoyed being out on the boat, however, and in spite of myself, I found that I was in good spirits as well. There was a weirdness to our mission that somehow canceled out the possibility of dark thoughts, and even Mrs. Hume managed to get through the trip without shedding any tears. Most of all, I remember how beautiful Kitty looked in her tiny dress, with the wind blowing through her long black hair and her exquisite little hand in mine. The boat wasn’t crowded at that time of day, and there were more seagulls than passengers out on the deck with us. Once we came within sight of the Statue of Liberty, I opened the urn and shook the ashes out into the wind. They were a mixture of white and gray and black, and they disappeared within a matter of seconds. Charlie was standing to my copy, and Kitty was on my left with her arm around Mrs. Hume. We all followed the brief, hectic flight of the ashes until there was nothing more to see, and then Charlie turned to his sister and said, “That’s what I want you to do for me, Rita. After I die, I want you to burn me up and toss me into the air. It’s a glorious sight, dancing out in all directions at once, it’s the most glorious sight in the world.”