Authors: Paul Auster

Oracle Night (29 page)

BOOK: Oracle Night

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10
. I hadn’t made any serious progress, but I understood that I could improve Bowen’s condition somewhat without having to alter the central thrust of the narrative. The overhead light has burned out, but it no longer seemed necessary to keep Nick in total darkness. There could be other sources of illumination in Ed’s well-equipped fallout shelter. Matches and candles, for instance, a flashlight, a table lamp – something to prevent Nick from feeling he’s been buried alive. That would push any man over the edge of sanity, and the last thing I wanted was to turn Bowen’s predicament into a study of terror and madness. I had left Hammett behind, but that didn’t mean I intended to replace the Flitcraft story with a new version of ‘The Premature Burial.’ Give Nick light, then, and allow him a shred of hope. And even after the matches and candles have been used up, even after the batteries in the flashlight have lost their power, he can open the refrigerator door and cast some light into the room with the small bulb that burns inside the white enameled box.
More significant, there was the question of Grace’s dream. Listening to her talk that morning, I had been too shaken by the resemblances to the story I was writing to grasp how many differences there were as well. Her room was a sanctuary to be shared by two people, a small erotic paradise. My room was a bleak cell, inhabited by one man, whose only ambition is to escape. But what if I managed to get Rosa Leightman in there with him? Nick has already fallen for her, and if they’re trapped in the room together for any length of time, perhaps she would begin to reciprocate his feelings. Rosa was the physical and spiritual double of Grace, and therefore she would have the same sexual appetites as Grace – the same recklessness, the same lack of inhibition. Nick and Rosa could spend their time together reading passages out loud from
Oracle Night
, baring their souls to each other, making love. As long as there was enough food to sustain them, why would they ever want to leave?
That was the little fantasy I carried around with me through the streets of the Village. Even as I played it out in my mind, however, I knew it was deeply flawed. Grace had aroused me with her erotic dream, but in spite of the temptations it seemed to offer, it was just another dead end. If Rosa can get into the room, then Nick can get out, and once that opportunity is presented to him, he wouldn’t hesitate to leave. But the point is that he can’t leave. I had given him some light, but he was still locked inside that grim chamber, and without the proper tools to dig his way out, he was eventually going to die in there.

11
. When Chang told this story to me twenty years ago, I was certain he was telling the truth. There was too much conviction in his voice for me to doubt his sincerity. Several months ago, however, while preparing for another project, I read a number of works on China during the period of the Cultural Revolution. In one of them, I came across an account of the same incident by Liu Yan, who was a student at the Beijing Number Eleven Middle School at the time of the book burning and witnessed the event. No teacher named Chang is mentioned. A female language teacher is referred to, Yu Changjiang, who broke down and wept at the sight of the burning books. ‘Her tears provoked the Red Guards to give her a few extra lashes, and the belts left ugly scars on her skin.’ (
China’s Cultural
Revolution, 1966–1969
, edited by Michael Schoenhals; Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1996.)
I’m not saying this proves Chang was lying to me, but it does cast some suspicion over his story. Possibly, there were two teachers who wept, and Liu Yan didn’t notice the other one. But it should be pointed out that the book burning was a highly publicized event in Beijing at the time and, in Liu Yan’s words, ‘caused a major stir all over the city.’ Chang would have known about it, even if his father hadn’t been there. Perhaps he told this infamous story in order to impress me. I can’t say. On the other hand, his version was extremely vivid – more vivid than most secondhand accounts – which leads me to wonder if Chang wasn’t present at the book burning himself. And if he was, that must have meant he’d been there as a member of the Red Guard. Otherwise, he would have told me that he’d been a student at the school – which he never did. It is even possible (this is pure speculation) that he himself was the person who lashed the weeping teacher.

12
. Grace had been a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, off on a junior-year-abroad program in Paris. Trause was the one who had written to her about van Velde, whom he had met once or twice in the fifties and who was known, he said, to be Samuel Beckett’s favorite artist. (He included Beckett’s dialogue with Georges Duthuit about van Velde in his letter.
My case is that van
Velde is … the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare
fail, that failure is his world
.) Van Velde’s paintings were rare and expensive, but his graphic works from the sixties and early seventies were quite affordable at the time, and Grace had bought the piece in installments with her own money, skimping on food and other necessities in order to stay within the allowance sent each month by her father. The lithograph was an important part of her youth, an emblem of her growing passion for art as well as a sign of independence – a bridge between the last days of her girlhood and her first days as an adult – and it meant more to her than any other object she owned.

13
. The conversation ended with my agreeing to visit Jacob – alone. I was willing to do John that small service, but I was appalled by what he’d said about the boy’s animosity toward Grace. Even if there was some cause for envy on his part (the neglected son cast off in favor of the beloved ‘goddaughter’), I felt no sympathy for him – only disgust and contempt. I would go to the clinic for his father’s sake, but I wasn’t looking forward to the time I would have to spend in his company.
As far as I could remember, I had met him only twice before. Knowing nothing about his history with Grace, it had never occurred to me to question why she hadn’t been with us on those occasions. The first was a Friday-night outing to Shea Stadium to see a game between the Mets and the Cincinnati Reds. Trause had been given tickets by someone who owned a season box, and because he knew I was a fan, he’d invited me to go along with him. That was in May 1979, just a few months after I’d fallen in love with Grace, and John and I had met for the first time only a couple of weeks earlier. Jacob was about to turn seventeen then, and he and one of his classmates rounded out the foursome. From the moment we entered the stadium, it was clear that neither boy had any interest in baseball. They sat through the first three innings with bored and sullen expressions on their faces, and then they stood up and left, supposedly to buy some hot dogs and ‘wander around for a while,’ as Jacob put it. They didn’t return until the bottom of the seventh – giggling, glassy-eyed, and in far better spirits than before. It wasn’t difficult to guess what they’d been up to. I was still teaching then, and I’d seen enough kids high on pot to recognize the symptoms. John was wrapped up in the game and seemed not to notice, and I didn’t bother to mention it to him. I scarcely knew him at the time, and I figured that what happened between him and his son was none of my business. Beyond saying hello and good-bye to each other, I don’t think Jacob and I exchanged more than eight or ten words the whole night.
The next time I saw him was about six months later. He was in the middle of his senior year and in danger of flunking all his courses, and John had called up with a last-minute invitation to spend an evening shooting pool. He and Jacob were barely on speaking terms then, and I think he wanted me to come along to serve as a buffer, a neutral third party to prevent war from breaking out between them in a public place. That was the night Jacob and I talked about the Bean Spasms and I acquired my reputation as a cool person. He struck me as an exceedingly bright and hostile kid, determined to screw up his life in every way he could. If I detected any shadow of hope, it was in his determination to beat his father at pool. I was a lousy player and quickly fell behind in every game, but John knew what he was doing, and somewhere along the line he must have taught his son how to play. It brought out the competitiveness in both of them, and the mere fact that Jacob was concentrating on something struck me as an encouraging sign. I didn’t know then that John had been an expert pool hustler in the army. If he’d wanted to, he could have run the table and wiped Jacob out, but he didn’t do that. He pretended to be trying, and in the end he let the boy win. Under the circumstances, it was probably the right thing to do. Not that it did them any good in the long run, but at least Jacob cracked a smile when they finished and walked over to his father and shook his hand. For all I knew, it could have been the last time that ever happened.

Author biography

Paul Auster was born in New Jersey in 1947. After attending Columbia University he lived in France for four years. Since 1974 he has published poems, essays, novels, screenplays, and translations. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Also by Paul Auster

Novels:

THE NEW YORK TRILOGY

IN THE COUNTRY OF LAST THINGS

MOON PALACE

THE MUSIC OF CHANCE

LEVIATHAN

MR VERTIGO

TIMBUKTU

THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS

Non-fiction:

THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE

THE ART OF HUNGER

HAND TO MOUTH

COLLECTED PROSE

Screenplays:

SMOKE & BLUE IN THE FACE

LULU ON THE BRIDGE

Poetry:

SELECTED POEMS

Editor:

TRUE TALES OF AMERICAN LIFE

Translation:

CHRONICLE OF THE GUAYAKI INDIANS

by Pierre Clastres

First published in the United Kingdom in 2004
by Faber and Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2008

All rights reserved
© Paul Auster, 2003

The right of Paul Auster to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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