Leviathan (22 page)

It wasn’t garbage. That much was clear to me from the first page, but as I worked my way through the rest of the draft, I also realized that Sachs was onto something remarkable. This was the book I had always imagined he could write, and if it had taken a disaster to get him started, then perhaps it hadn’t been a disaster at all. Or so I persuaded myself at the time. Whatever problems I found in the manuscript, whatever cuts and changes would ultimately have to be made, the essential thing was that Sachs had begun, and I wasn’t going to let him stop. “Just keep writing and don’t look back,” I told him over breakfast the next morning. “If you can push on to the end, it’s going to be a great book. Mark my words: a great and memorable book.”

It’s impossible for me to know if he could have pulled it off. At the time, I felt certain that he would, and when Iris and I said good-bye to him on the last day, it never even crossed my mind to doubt it. The pages I had read were one thing, but Sachs and I had also talked, and based on what he said about the book over the next two nights, I was convinced that he had the situation well in hand, that he understood what lay ahead of him. If that’s true, then I can’t imagine anything more sickening or terrible. Of all the tragedies my
poor friend created for himself, leaving this book unfinished becomes the hardest one to bear. I don’t mean to say that books are more important than life, but the fact is that everyone dies, everyone disappears in the end, and if Sachs had managed to finish his book, there’s a chance it might have outlived him. That’s what I’ve chosen to believe, in any case. As it stands now, the book is no more than the promise of a book, a potential book buried in a box of messy manuscript pages and a smattering of notes. That’s all that’s left of it, along with our two late-night conversations out in the open air, sitting under a moonless sky crammed full of stars. I thought his life was beginning all over again, that he had come to the brink of an extraordinary future, but it turned out that he was almost at the end. Less than a month after I saw him in Vermont, Sachs stopped working on his book. He went out for a walk one afternoon in the middle of September, and the earth suddenly swallowed him up. That was the long and the short of it, and from that day on he never wrote another word.

To mark what will never exist, I have given my book the same title that Sachs was planning to use for his:
Leviathan
.

I didn’t see him again for close to two years. Maria was the only person who knew where he was, and Sachs had made her promise not to tell. Most people would have broken that promise, I think, but Maria had given her word, and no matter how dangerous it was for her to keep it, she refused to open her mouth. I must have run into her half a dozen times in those two years, but even when we talked about Sachs, she never let on that she knew more about his disappearance than I did. Last summer, when I finally learned how much she had been holding back from me, I got so angry that I wanted to kill her. But that was my problem, not Maria’s,
and I had no right to vent my frustration on her. A promise is a promise, after all, and even though her silence wound up causing a lot of damage, I don’t think she was wrong to do what she did. If anyone should have spoken up, it was Sachs. He was the one responsible for what happened, and it was his secret that Maria was protecting. But Sachs said nothing. For two whole years, he kept himself hidden and never said a word.

We knew that he was alive, but as the months passed and no message came from him, not even that was certain anymore. Only bits and pieces remained, a few ghostlike facts. We knew that he had left Vermont, that he had not driven his own car, and that for one horrible minute Fanny had seen him in Brooklyn. Beyond that, everything was conjecture. Since he hadn’t called to announce he was coming, we assumed that he had something urgent to tell her, but whatever that thing was, they never got around to talking about it. He just showed up one night out of the blue (“all distraught and crazy in the eyes,” as Fanny put it) and burst into the bedroom of their apartment. That led to the awful scene I mentioned earlier. If the room had been dark, it might have been less embarrassing for all of them, but several lights happened to be on, Fanny and Charles were naked on top of the covers, and Ben saw everything. It was clearly the last thing he expected to find. Before Fanny could say a word to him, he had already backed out of the room, stammering that he was sorry, that he hadn’t known, that he hadn’t meant to disturb her. She scrambled out of bed, but by the time she reached the front hall, the apartment door had banged shut and Sachs was racing down the stairs. She couldn’t go outside with nothing on, so she rushed into the living room, opened the window, and called down to him in the street. Sachs stopped for a moment and waved up at her. “My blessings on you both!” he shouted. Then he blew her a kiss, turned in the other direction, and ran off into the night.

Fanny telephoned us immediately after that. She figured he might be on his way to our place next, but her hunch proved wrong. Iris and I sat up half the night waiting for him, but Sachs never appeared. From then on, there were no more signs of his whereabouts. Fanny called the house in Vermont repeatedly, but no one ever answered. That was our last hope, and as the days went by, it seemed less and less likely that Sachs would return there. Panic set in; a contagion of morbid thoughts spread among us. Not knowing what else to do, Fanny rented a car that first weekend and drove up to the house herself. As she reported to me on the phone after she arrived, the evidence was puzzling. The front door had been left unlocked, the car was sitting in its usual place in the yard, and Ben’s work was laid out on the desk in the studio: finished manuscript pages stacked in one pile, pens scattered beside it, a half-written page still in the typewriter. In other words, it looked as though he were about to come back any minute. If he had been planning to leave for any length of time, she said, the house would have been closed. The pipes would have been drained, the electricity would have been turned off, the refrigerator would have been emptied. “And he would have taken his manuscript,” I added. “Even if he had forgotten everything else, there’s no way he would have left without that.”

The situation refused to add up. No matter how thoroughly we analyzed it, we were always left with the same conundrum. On the one hand, Sachs’s departure had been unexpected. On the other hand, he had left of his own free will. If not for that fleeting encounter with Fanny in New York, we might have suspected foul play, but Sachs had made it down to the city unharmed. A bit frazzled, perhaps, but essentially unharmed. And yet, if nothing had happened to him, why hadn’t he returned to Vermont? Why had he left behind his car, his clothes, his work? Iris and I talked it out with Fanny again and again, going over one possibility after another, but we never
reached a satisfactory conclusion. There were too many blanks, too many variables, too many things we didn’t know. After a month of beating it into the ground, I suggested that Fanny go to the police and report Ben as missing. She resisted the idea, however. She had no claims on him anymore, she said, which meant that she had no right to interfere. After what had happened in the apartment, he was free to do what he liked, and it wasn’t up to her to drag him back. Charles (whom we had met by then and who turned out to be quite well off) was willing to hire a private detective at his own expense. “Just so we know that Ben’s all right,” he said. “It’s not a question of dragging him back, it’s a question of knowing that he disappeared because he wanted to disappear.” Iris and I both thought that Charles’s plan was sensible, but Fanny wouldn’t allow him to go ahead with it. “He gave us his blessings,” she said. “That was the same thing as saying good-bye. I lived with him for twenty years, and I know how he thinks. He doesn’t want us to look for him. I’ve already betrayed him once, and I’m not about to do it again. We have to leave him alone. He’ll come back when he’s ready to come back, and until then we have to wait. Believe me, it’s the only thing to be done. We just have to sit tight and learn to live with it.”

Months passed. Then it was a year, and then it was two years, and the enigma remained unsolved. By the time Sachs showed up in Vermont last August, I was long past thinking we would ever find an answer. Iris and Charles both believed that he was dead, but my hopelessness didn’t stem from anything as specific as that. I never had a strong feeling about whether Sachs was alive or dead—no sudden intuitions, no bursts of extrasensory knowledge, no mystical experiences—but I was more or less convinced that I would never see him again. I say “more or less” because I wasn’t sure of anything. In the first months after he disappeared, I went through a number of violent and contradictory responses, but these emotions gradually
burned themselves out, and in the end terms such as
sadness
or
anger
or
grief
no longer seemed to apply. I had lost contact with him, and his absence felt less and less like a personal matter. Every time I tried to think about him, my imagination failed me. It was as if Sachs had become a hole in the universe. He was no longer just my missing friend, he was a symptom of my ignorance about all things, an emblem of the unknowable itself. This probably sounds vague, but I can’t do any better than that. Iris told me that I was turning into a Buddhist, and I suppose that describes my position as accurately as anything else. Fanny was a Christian, Iris said, because she never abandoned her faith in Sachs’s eventual return; she and Charles were atheists; and I was a Zen acolyte, a believer in the power of nothing. In all the years she had known me, she said, it was the first time I hadn’t expressed an opinion.

Life changed, life went on. We learned, as Fanny had begged us, to live with it. She and Charles were together now, and in spite of ourselves, Iris and I were forced to admit that he was a decent fellow. Mid to late forties, an architect, formerly married, the father of two boys, intelligent, desperately in love with Fanny, beyond reproach. Little by little, we managed to form a friendship with him, and a new reality took hold for all of us. Last spring, when Fanny mentioned that she wasn’t planning to go to Vermont for the summer (she just couldn’t, she said, and probably never would again), it suddenly occurred to her that perhaps Iris and I would like to use the house. She wanted to give it to us for nothing, but we insisted on paying some kind of rent, and so we worked out an arrangement that would at least cover her costs—a prorated share of the taxes, the maintenance, and so on. That was how I happened to be present when Sachs turned up last summer. He arrived without warning, chugging into the yard one night in a battered blue Chevy, spent the next couple of days here, and then vanished again. In between,
he talked his head off. He talked so much, it almost scared me. But that was when I heard his story, and given how determined he was to tell it, I don’t think he left anything out.

He went on working, he said. After Iris and I left with Sonia, he went on working for another three or four weeks. Our conversations about
Leviathan
had apparently been helpful, and he threw himself back into the manuscript that same morning, determined not to leave Vermont until he had finished a draft of the whole book. Everything seemed to go well. He made progress every day, and he felt happy with his monk’s life, as happy as he had been in years. Then, early one evening in the middle of September, he decided to go out for a walk. The weather had turned by then, and the air was crisp, infused with the smells of fall. He put on his woolen hunting jacket and tramped up the hill beyond the house, heading north. He figured there was an hour of daylight left, which meant that he could walk for half an hour before he had to turn around and start back. Ordinarily, he would have spent that hour shooting baskets, but the change of seasons was in full swing now, and he wanted to have a look at what was happening in the woods: to see the red and yellow leaves, to watch the slant of the setting sun among the birches and maples, to wander in the glow of the pendant colors. So he set off on his little jaunt, with no more on his mind than what he was going to cook for dinner when he got home.