Oracle Night by Paul Auster: a fantasy chapter continuation

Oracle Night by Paul Auster

Additional chapter of Oracle Night by Paul Auster


When Grace came home from the hospital, we settled into a quiet routine of mutual care. We were kind to one another, affectionate. Her office was, as would be expected, cooperative. Co-workers stopped by to pick up the work until she was ready to show her still purple face to the world, but more than that, she wasn’t ready to talk to anyone but me, and, occasionally her parents on the phone.

We were both aware of all the losses: the baby, or course, and John, but Jacob’s head with its two bullet holes kept floating in front of my face at odd moments. Although his hair was black when he was killed, I remembered him with green hair and safety pins in his ears, the real Jacob, now with dead eyes and bullet holes in his forehead.  I seemed to have a list of things to avoid thinking about: dead people and Grace’s damaged body and then all the things that we had lost when Jacob burgled the apartment. Oddly, I dwelled on those losses obsessively, almost by default, Grace’s painting, her moonstone earrings, even the damn toaster of which I was reminded every time I put a bagel in the new appliance.

Writing was out of the question. Slashing the blue Portugal notebook seemed to have shut down any stream of words. Joining my museum of the newly dead was another person who had been thoughtlessly slaughtered in the past weeks: poor Bowen locked in the graveyard of phone books. He had, of course, died by now, while I was off getting a blow job from the African Princess and having my kidneys pummeled by Chang.  Bowen’s corpse, if I were to continue the story, might not be found for years and I can’t right now imagine what event might occasion the breaking down of that door, the discovery of the phone books, well-preserved in the airtight mausoleum by a young cop, perhaps, spooked by the rows of bookshelves of, yes, phone books, until he comes to the bedroom and finds the skeleton, still wearing those pants with the hole in the pocket that was the occasion of his terminal incarceration. History has its underground bunkers, that could be a book in itself, but none full of phone books, or a skeleton stripped bare of flesh by the inattention of a young author inspired by a small passage in The Maltese Falcon. Dashiell Hammett could not be held accountable for the death of poor Bowen

Good news. I got a call: the producers in Hollywood want me to take another stab at the Time Machine, but less cerebral this time, please.  Although the money was attractive, I couldn’t muster the energy to think about it, much less put pen to paper. My contact was annoyed and I wondered if I had burned that bridge. I imagined her on a burning bridge, flames shooting to the sky. We used John’s $36,000 to make payments on the pile of medical bills, living on the balance until things sorted out.  $50,000 from Hollywood would have made a big difference, of course. I didn’t dare tell Grace about the offer, although I assumed she would have shrugged and told me she understood, before turning her face to the wall, her usual posture in bed these days. In her sleep she ran from green-haired monsters.

In the midst of all this sadness, there was one bit of good news, and that started to put everything in a difference perspective. My health was improving. The vertigo was now a memory and although I had periods of the day when I still felt foggy, I often woke in the morning with something approaching my old energy. Cautiously, I began taking longer walks, past Chang’s empty palace, past the diner where I used to stop for coffee, into new parts of the city.

Grace had the same things to grieve about that I did, although one day on my walk I realized with a sudden stab of painful empathy that her grief was worse: the baby had been in her body, not mine, John had been her lover (of that I was sure now, time having settled my random suspicioun of more tumultuous days into a quiet pattern that made so much sense that I didn’t bother to question it) — maybe even her first lover? The objects lost had been her treasures, except, of course, for my precious first editions. And then there was the constant reminder of it all through the painful healing process as her body distanced itself from the beating.

Thoughts of my return to health and my understanding of Grace’s misery led me to a new mantra: Get over yourself.  In our coupleness, she was now the one who needed the attention, and so I found myself devoting myself to her, but quietly, without her noticing. I was attentive but never intrusive, allowing her the privacy, but making it my purpose in life to be good to her in the only way I could now—respectfully, like a handmaiden.  I brought her tea, cooked special dishes in limited quantities—Thai things, tapas—served on her favorite small plate, since she had no appetite. I spent hours at the library looking for novels that would be easy to read, uplifting. I read the television listings (I had replaced the stolen tv) to find movies that would not surprise us with dead babies, or babies at all, or gratuitous deaths at the end, movies with Tuscan landscapes and romantic plots. I bought flowers, a small bouquet with pastel colors, nothing too splashy. In everything, I was walking on eggshells, avoiding upsetting the fragile balance of her days of recovery. She accepted my kindnesses with tentative smiles, responded to what I said, initiating conversation only when silence became oppressive, speaking to let off a little pressure, filling the void just a bit before returning to whatever world she was inhabiting without me. 

Physical contact between was limited to my gentle touches, occasional kisses on the cheek (where there were no bruises). Once at the kitchen table, she put her hand over mine and then took her cinnamon toast and coffee back to the bedroom. Like our conversation, our physical contact was minimal, just enough to make its lack not be an issue.

As my health returned, so did an unexpected emotional sensitivity along with wayward thoughts about writing. When I tried to return to dead Bowen in the phone book catacombs, I was astonished to feel a wave of grief. My eyes filled with tears. I realized then that I could never go back and save him. He was dead and that was it. I also wondered if my grief was really for all the real tragedy in my life and not for a made up character that I had killed off more by inattention than anything else and whom I didn’t really care much about — I had, after all, rather callously left him to die, when I’m sure I could have, with not too much effort, figured some reasonably plausible escape for him.  If I had kept the last blank pages of the blue diary, I could have written him out of his terminal corner.  But no. He was dead and that was it. Thoughts of the destroyed blue notebook led inevitably to revisiting the red notebook that had existed on Chang’s shelf weeks ago and now was where? Still there to tantalize me? Had he taken it home? Sold it? Destroyed it to batter me further in absentia?

I began to think of ways to get that book, which I wanted as much as anything for the color. Blue had been right for the Phone Book Museum, but now I wanted the blood red one. Apologizing to Chang seemed useless, and besides, he might just beat me up again. Could I persuade someone else to go into the Palace? My stomach turned at the idea that Chang might hone his revenge by telling someone I knew about the Africa Princess. Perhaps I could hire a student to go in and buy it? Or steal it? Or torch his place and rush in to save the book from the conflagration (my muse screaming from beneath the crimson cover for me to save her?) At least I could scope out whether it was still on the shelf. I could break in. If it wasn’t there, I would follow Chang home, break into this house. None of my fantasies resulted in a way to have the red, or rather crimson, that was a better word, book in my hands.

The other object I coveted was Grace’s lost lithograph. If only the Bram von Velde could be returned, Grace might find a way back to the world and to me. What would Jacob have done with his loot? Maybe he pawned it. If so, would it still be somewhere in a pawn shop? Without much hope and perhaps only to have something to do, I made a list from the phone book of all the pawn shops close to Jacob’s place. There were twelve good candidates. Using a map that we had in the apartment, I looked up each address and marked it in red. I would begin with the three that were closest to Jacob’s rooming house, assuming that he would chose proximity over a careful search. Although I had already been out for my walk in the morning and it would be sensible to wait until the next day, the idea that Grace’s lithograph might be on one of those stores of lost dreams, might as I thought of it be under the scrutiny of a potential buyer, made me leave the apartment again after lunch.

I look a bus to the seedy area where Jacob had lived. The first pawnshop was quite small and smelled of objects saturated with years of ground-in smoke and poverty.  I had made a list of our stolen objects. The lithograph, the earrings, my books, the small television. Nothing. The man behind the counter, overweight and covered with tattoos of hopelessly dated poorly executed female body parts, was clearly uncooperative when I told him I was on a mission to recover stolen objects.

“I don’t buy stolen goods.”

Stupid. Of course that was a stupid approach. I would have to have a better story. The next had the same awful smell, with a tinge of rat droppings. I asked a frail Asian women if she had any jewelry, moonstones perhaps? Or art? I then told her that my brother had stolen things from my house and I wanted to buy them back before my mother returned from a trip. A reasonable story which she bought, but to no avail: she did not have the objects.

In the third and largest of the pawnshops in the vicinity of Jacob’s decrepit digs, I hit pay dirt.  No painting, no earrings, but there, on the shelf above the head of the proprietor, a thin man with a goatee, I saw our toaster. It could, of course, have been anyone’s toaster, but it was the same brand and color and looked so familiar that I was sure it was ours. I tried my story out, embellishing as I went, adding a good description of Jacob, that he may have had green hair or black hair and that he may or may not have had safety pins in his ears, and ending with the suggestion that the toaster on the shelf may have been part of the haul. I was especially interested, I said, in recovering a lithograph and a pair of earrings, fearing even to mention my first editions. Thin goatee listened carefully, but then dashed my hopes by denying anything of the sort.

“Listen, I want to pay for everything. I really need to get it back before Mum notices it’s missing or my brother is in real trouble.” Goatee seemed to be weighing my story.  I added a cherry: “We don’t want the cops involved.”  And another: “Look, my brother has a drug problem. It’s the family secret. I have to get that stuff back.”

After a long silence, he said, “Ok. the kid was in. I bought the whole lot from him. He said it was his and he needed the money. Easy to see why.”  He led me to a crowded backroom, and there, in a pile, was all our stuff. Dead center: Grace’s lithograph, and beside it, a box of my books. We haggled a bit. In the end he over-valued the moonstones, undervalued the painting and threw the books, which were worth more than everything else together, as a gesture of good will, for which I in turn gave him the television. My passion, my nest egg: Hawthorne, Dickens, James, Fitzgerald, Stevens, Emerson. If I wished for Grace to have her art back, I did mostly lust after my first editions, and I’m glad now that the proprietor of the winning pawnshop did not notice their value.  I wrote him a check (bless John!! but there goes 10% of our money stash).  I put the moonstones in my pocket, checking almost superstitiously that I didn’t have a hole in it, remembering that Bowen wouldn’t have died in the phone book museum if he had been careful about holes in his pocket, and I carried the painting with me, telling the Thin Man that I would be back later for the rest. It was awkward hefting the painting, which was larger than I had remembered, and the frame was sturdy, and although I thought of taking a bus, the painting and my first editions were so precious to me right now that I didn’t want to risk being robbed or having them ripped off or the painting ripped, so I asked the pawn shop maitre d’  if he would help me wrap it and then call a cab. As he didn’t have wrapping paper, I bought a dirty green coat from him for a few dollars and used that. He told me to call a cab myself from his phone. Taking no chances, I waited inside his shop until the cab arrived and then headed straight home. With the moonstones securely in my pocket, I unloaded our returned treasures from the cab and into the lobby, hefted the awkward art object and my bag of first editions, up the stairs to our apartment. The disgusting smell of the pawn shop was in my nose from the proximity of the dirty green coat but my heart was beating in anticipation of Grace’s joy (or was it my health was still not back completely?) at my amazing investigative success. But when I opened the door, there was a feeling of emptiness about the apartment. Grace was not there. And there was no note.

The three hours that Grace was gone were the longest of my life. I sat in her blue plaid swivel armchair by the window and watched the evening light fade on the reds and blues of her Bram von Velde until it was no longer visible. I imagined crazy things. Grace, like Nick, had gone to the airport and booked a flight to Kansas City. She would not have had Ed Victory as a cabdriver:  last heard of he was dead on the operating table with his triple bypass failure glowing wetly in the amphitheater. Frugal Grace would go to a modest hotel. I would pay her credit cards until John’s money ran out. I would string out small payments at the end, until finally the cards were all cancelled having high balances and then I would declare bankruptcy. Maybe she realized that my only use had been to allow her to keep seeing (sleeping with) John; she was out looking for another John. But of course there was no other John.

If she didn’t return, what would I do with Bram von Velde?

At ten after nine, I heard a faint metallic scratching in the lock, then a tumble, and in came Grace. She turned on the dim hall light, which was just enough for me to see her shy apologetic smile as she came into the living room. But it was a smile. She came over quietly (I noticed she was wearing a coat and slippers, which is why I hadn’t heard her come up the stairs) and slipped into my lap, like a kitten— a kitten, she was so thin. When had she gotten this thin?  I held onto her with both arms and then began slowly to stroke her hair with the flat of my hand, asking no questions. After a long time, she started rambling. She had to get out. She had such cabin fever, she was afraid if she stopped to write a note, she wouldn’t go, and she only meant to go a little way, but then she went two blocks to the library, and went to the design section and started reading art books and got lost in them. When the library closed at nine, she was afraid to walk back. Sid was dead. But she was terrified of being alone on the street.  I only interrupted to say, why didn’t you call me? The library closed, she said, and she hadn’t been afraid until she was outside and it was dark.  She ran all the way home. And now was safe. We stayed in the chair quietly for a long time. I didn’t want to let her go, ever, out, or anywhere. Finally she reached up and turned on the reading lamp by the chair and twirped an odd, surprised sound as she saw her lithograph leaning against the far wall of the room.

The next night we filled the dark patch on the wall above our bed that had been a reminder of the missing art and celebrated with champagne. As we lifted the right corner and slid the wire across the hanger so that the painting would be in exact register with the unfaded wall patch, I thought that in some way this painting put Grace’s year in Paris back in register as well, and with it, John’s memory. At least for me, John was no longer a cause for concern, recalling as I thought that my paranoid fantasy when Grace was missing that she had left me because she no longer needed me to keep her close to him. As she stood on the bed balancing carefully to align it perfectly, I had a deliciously improper thought: I was free of the dead.  Free of John’s hold on Grace, free of the druggy thief and batterer Jacob, and even, this thought gave me pause, free of the conflict that we had over having a child. I remembered our argument about an abortion: well, that decision made itself, albeit in a horrible way. We were free now to have a child by choice, without John’s love for Grace making it all more complicated. If we had a child now, it would be ours. Never mind that we still had no way of supporting ourselves, let alone a baby. My relief over the death of our child was something I could never tell Grace.

Grace went back to work, telling everyone to treat her normally, which they did, almost to the point of ignoring her. Her bruises had healed, but she had one troublesome leftover from Jacob’s attack: the fear of being alone outside at night. As much as it seemed irrational (he was, after all, dead, and we did live in a safe neighborhood), she was so frightened, no terrified, that at least for awhile I was given the job of meeting her at work and coming home with her on the subway, which, counting both directions, took more than an hour out of my day. Admittedly, my day was still not filled with writing, or anything more than the long walks, shopping for food, and cooking meals for us. I did start to read novels, hoping to spark some sort of kindred mental activity, but so far, nothing. Nothing that is, until a Friday when I received a package in the mail that made my heart skip.  It was addressed to me and in the upper left hand corner was John’s name and address.

I put off opening the package in order to savor the anticipation, the state of not knowing what I would find in this hefty envelop from beyond the grave. The handwriting was not John’s, still the return address was spooky. The package was at least two inches thick and the upper right corner had a banner of stamps adequate for the weight. I felt it and smelled it and wondered if it would be possible not to open it until the next day.  It was not. Sliding a knife through the right side, I dumped the contents out onto the table. In the package were a typed letter and two thick carbon copy manuscripts. The cover letter was signed by Mme Dumas.  The letter read:

Dear Sid,

Before he died, John left me a note asking me to send you both copies of the enclosed manuscript. Since they are quite old and were copies and not the original, they were in storage and so I was unable to send them to you right away.  Then John’s death put everything else aside.

I am just packaging his literary archive to be donated to Princeton, as he requested, and I found these manuscripts in one of the older boxes of his papers. This was written almost thirty years ago!

It seemed right at first to send one copy to you and one to the university, so that his archive would be more complete. I know this is an unpublished manuscript, and as such has value to those who treasure his work. However, John did ask that both (underlined by her in ink) copies were to be sent to you, and so I am following his wishes. If you do feel that one copy should by rights be in the papers at the university, I trust that you will forward a copy of Barbara Martin, who is in charge of John’s papers.

I would, of course, like to read this, but there is so much work in boxing all of John’s papers, that I would not get to it quickly in any case, and so I am sending it to you, despite my curiosity.

John was very appreciative of all you did for him while he was sick. I know he was especially grateful that you visited poor Jacob in treatment.

Mme Dumas

To buy myself one more moment of anticipation before I began to read, I made a full pot of coffee, steamed milk, and even ceremoniously shook cinnamon on the froth.  I then settled into the blue plaid chair to find out if John’s story of a romantic trilogy would, in any way, illuminate the triangle of John-Grace-Sid.  The paper was slightly yellow and crinkled. I think it used to be called onion-skin. Here and there on the pages were white dabs of correction fluid.

First novels are often so autobiographical (and often so stylistically inept) that authors put them in a drawer and get on with the second. Those that are published are as often as not an embarrassment years later and some of the unpublished ones are brought out at the end of a career, sometimes even posthumously, by greedy publishers eager to have one more book by a famous author, no matter how substandard.  I was half-way through the first paragraph when it struck me that John had never published this novella for just that reason: it was John’s story, a journal in every way except for divisions by date. Although my excitement urged me to speed read, I consciously read slowly to savor every word and make the first reading of this precious document last as long as possible.