Leviathan by Paul Auster

Author:Paul Auster [Auster, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101562611
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1993-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

I left Sachs’s apartment thinking he would pull through the crisis. Not right away, perhaps, but over the long term I found it difficult to imagine that things wouldn’t return to normal for him. He had too much resiliency, I told myself, too much intelligence and stamina to let the accident crush him. It’s possible that I was underestimating the degree to which his confidence had been shaken, but I tend to think not. I saw how tormented he was, I saw the anguish of his doubts and self-recriminations, but in spite of the hateful things he said about himself that afternoon, he had also flashed me a smile, and I read that fugitive burst of irony as a signal of hope, as proof that Sachs had it in him to make a full recovery.

Weeks passed, however, and then months, and the situation remained exactly what it had been. It’s true that he regained much of his social poise, and as time went on his suffering became less obvious (he no longer brooded in company, he no longer seemed quite so absent), but that was only because he talked less about himself. It wasn’t the same silence as the one in the hospital, but its effect was similar. He talked now, he opened his mouth and used words at the appropriate moments, but he never said anything about what really concerned him, never anything about the accident or its aftermath, and little by little I sensed that he had pushed his suffering underground, burying it in a place where no one could see it. If all else had been equal, this might not have troubled me so much. I could have learned to live with this quieter and more subdued Sachs, but the outward signs were too discouraging, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were symptoms of some larger distress. He turned down assignments from magazines, made no effort to renew his professional contacts, seemed to have lost all interest in ever sitting behind his typewriter again. He had told me as much after he came home from the hospital, but I hadn’t believed him. Now that he was keeping his word, I began to grow frightened. For as long as I had known him, Sachs’s life had revolved around his work, and to see him suddenly without that work made him seem like a man who had no life. He was adrift, floating in a sea of undifferentiated days, and as far as I could tell, it was all one to him whether he made it back to land or not.

Some time between Christmas and the start of the new year, Sachs shaved off his beard and cut his hair down to normal length. It was a drastic change, and it made him look like an altogether different person. He seemed to have shrunk somehow, to have grown both younger and older at the same time, and a good month went by before I began to get used to it, before I stopped being startled every time he walked into a room.

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