Man in the Dark by Paul Auster

Author:Paul Auster [Auster, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9789029566612
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2008-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

I don’t know what time it is. The hands on the alarm clock aren’t illuminated, and I’m not about to switch on the lamp again and subject myself to the blinding rays of the bulb. I keep intending to ask Miriam to buy me one of those glow-in-the-dark jobs, but every time I wake up in the morning, I forget. The light erases the thought, and I don’t remember it again until I’m back in bed, lying awake as I am now, staring up at the invisible ceiling in my invisible room. I can’t be certain, but I would guess it’s somewhere between one-thirty and two o’clock. Inching along, inching along . . .

The Web site was Miriam’s idea. If I had known what she was up to, I would have told her not to waste her time, but she kept it a secret from me (in collusion with her mother, who had saved nearly every scrap of writing I’d ever published), and when she came to New York for my seventieth-birthday dinner, she took me into my study, turned on my laptop, and showed me what she had done. The articles were hardly worth the trouble, but the thought of my daughter spending untold hours typing up all those ancient pieces of mine—for posterity, as she put it—more or less undid me, and I didn’t know what to say. My usual impulse is to deflect emotional scenes with a dry quip or wiseacre remark, but that night I simply put my arms around Miriam and said nothing. Sonia cried, of course. She always cried when she was happy, but on that occasion her tears were especially poignant and terrible to me, since her cancer had been detected only three days earlier and the prognosis was cloudy, touch-and-go at best. No one said a word about it, but all three of us knew that she might not be around for my next birthday. As it turned out, a year was too much to hope for.

I shouldn’t be doing this. I promised myself not to fall into the trap of Sonia-thoughts and Sonia-memories, not to let myself go. I can’t afford to break down now and sink into a despond of grief and self-recrimination. I might start howling and wake the girls upstairs—or else spend the next several hours thinking of ever more artful and devious ways to kill myself. That task has been reserved for Brick, the protagonist of tonight’s story. Perhaps that explains why he and Flora turn on her computer and look at Miriam’s Web site. It seems important that my hero should get to know me a bit, to learn what kind of man he’s up against, and now that he’s dipped into some of the books I’ve recommended, we’ve finally begun to establish a bond. It’s turning into a rather complicated jig, I suppose, but the fact is that the Brill character wasn’t in my original plan. The mind that created the war was going to

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