Authors: Paul Auster
One broken bone. Considering the thousands of games you took part in as a boy, you are surprised that there weren’t others, at least several others. Twisted ankles, bruised thighs, sprained wrists, tender knees, sore elbows, shin splints, clunks on the head, but only one broken bone, your left shoulder, incurred during a football game when you were fourteen, which has prevented you from fully raising your arm for the past fifty years, but nothing of any great consequence, and you probably wouldn’t bother to mention it now if not for the role your mother played in the story, which makes it her story in the end and not the story of how you, as the quarterback of your ninth-grade team, went diving for a fumbled ball in the backfield and wound up breaking your shoulder all by yourself, with no help from any of the players on the other team, leaping too far in your eagerness to recover the ball and landing in the wrong spot, on the wrong spot, and thereby breaking your bone when you crashed onto the hard ground. It was a frigid afternoon in late November, a game without referees or adult supervision, and after you hurt yourself you stood on the sideline and watched the rest of the game, disappointed that you couldn’t play anymore,
not yet understanding that your bone was broken but realizing that the injury was a bad one because you could no longer move your arm without feeling acute pain. Afterward, you hitchhiked back to your house with one of your friends, both of you still in your football uniforms, and you remember how difficult it was for you to remove your jersey and shoulder pads, so difficult in fact that you couldn’t do it without your friend’s help. It was a Saturday, and the house was empty. Your sister was off somewhere with friends, your father was at work, and your mother was at work as well, since Saturday was always a busy day for showing houses to prospective buyers. About two minutes after your friend helped you take off your shoulder pads, the telephone rang, and your friend went to answer it because you were finding it hard to move now without increasing the pain. It was your mother, and the first thing she said to your friend was: “Is Paul all right?” “Well,” he answered, “not so good, actually. He seems to have hurt his arm.” And then your mother said: “I knew it. That’s why I called—because I’ve been worried.” She told your friend that she was coming straight home and hung up. Later on, when she was driving you to the doctor for X-rays, she told you that a feeling had come over her that afternoon, a strange feeling that something had happened to you, and when you asked her when she had felt this feeling, it turned out that she had started worrying about you at the precise moment when you were diving onto the ground and breaking your shoulder.
You have no use for the
good old days
. Whenever you find yourself slipping into a nostalgic frame of mind, mourning the loss of the things that seemed to make life better then than it is now, you tell yourself to stop and think carefully, to look back at Then with the same scrutiny you apply to looking at Now, and before long you come to the conclusion that there is little difference between them, that the Now and the Then are essentially the same. Of course you have manifold grievances against the evils and stupidities of contemporary American life, not a day goes by when you are not wailing forth your harangues against the ascendency of the right, the injustices of the economy, the neglect of the environment, the collapsing infrastructure, the senseless wars, the barbarism of legalized torture and extraordinary rendition, the disintegration of impoverished cities like Buffalo and Detroit, the erosion of the labor movement, the debt we saddle our children with in order to attend our too-expensive colleges, the ever-growing crevasse that divides the rich from the poor, not to speak of the junk films we are making, the junk food we are eating, the junk thoughts we are thinking. It is enough to make one want to start a revolution—or live as a hermit in the Maine woods, feeding off berries and the roots of trees. And yet, go back to the year of your birth and try to remember what America looked like in its golden age of postwar prosperity: Jim Crow laws in full force throughout the South, anti-Semitic quota restrictions, back-alley abortions, Truman’s
executive order to establish a loyalty oath for all government workers, the trials of the Hollywood Ten, the Cold War, the Red Scare, the Bomb. Every moment in history is fraught with its own problems, its own injustices, and every period manufactures its own legends and pieties. You were sixteen when Kennedy was assassinated, a junior in high school, and the legend now says that the entire American population was bludgeoned into a state of wordless grief by the trauma that occurred on November twenty-second. You have another story to tell, however, for you and two of your friends happened to travel down to Washington on the day of the funeral. You wanted to be there because of your admiration for Kennedy, who had represented such a startling change after eight long years of Eisenhower, but you also wanted to be there because you were curious to know what it would feel like to participate in a
historical event
. It was the Sunday after the Friday, the day Ruby shot and killed Oswald, and you imagined that the crowds of onlookers lining the avenues as the funeral procession passed by would stand there in respectful silence,
in a state of wordless grief
, but what you encountered that afternoon was a throng of rowdy, rubbernecking gawkers, people perched in trees with their cameras, people shoving others out of the way to get a better look, and more than anything else, what you were reminded of was the atmosphere at a public hanging, the thrill that attends the spectacle of violent death. You were there, you witnessed those things with your own eyes, and yet in all the
years since then, not once have you heard anyone talk about what really happened.
Nevertheless, there are things you miss from the old days, even if you have no desire to see those days return. The ring of the old telephones, the clacking of typewriters, milk in bottles, baseball without designated hitters, vinyl records, galoshes, stockings and garter belts, black-and-white movies, heavyweight champions, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, paperback books for thirty-five cents, the political left, Jewish dairy restaurants, double features, basketball before the three-point shot, palatial movie houses, nondigital cameras, toasters that lasted for thirty years, contempt for authority, Nash Ramblers, and wood-paneled station wagons. But there is nothing you miss more than the world as it was before smoking was banned in public places. From your first cigarette at age sixteen (in Washington with your friends at Kennedy’s funeral) until the end of the previous millennium, you were free—with just a few exceptions—to smoke anywhere you liked. Restaurants and bars to begin with, but also college classrooms, movie theater balconies, bookstores and record stores, doctors’ waiting rooms, taxicabs, ballparks and indoor arenas, elevators, hotel rooms, trains, long-distance buses, airports, airplanes, and the shuttle buses at airports that took you to the planes. The world is probably better off now with its militant anti-smoking laws, but something has also been lost, and whatever that thing is (a sense of ease? tolerance
of human frailty? conviviality? an absence of puritanical anguish?), you miss it.
Some memories are so strange to you, so unlikely, so outside the realm of the plausible, that you find it difficult to reconcile them with the fact that you are the person who experienced the events you are remembering. At the age of seventeen, for example, on a flight from Milan to New York after your first trip abroad (to visit your mother’s sister in Italy, where she had been living for the past eleven years), you sat next to an attractive, highly intelligent girl of eighteen or nineteen, and after an hour of conversation, you spent the rest of the journey kissing each other with lustful abandon, necking passionately in front of the other passengers without the slightest hint of shame or self-consciousness. It seems impossible that this could have happened, but it did. Even stranger, on the last morning of your European jaunt the following year, the one that began by crossing the Atlantic on the student ship, you boarded a plane at Shannon Airport in Ireland and found yourself sitting next to another pretty girl. After an hour of serious conversation about books, colleges, and your summer adventures, the two of you began necking as well, going at each other so fiercely that eventually you covered yourselves with a blanket, and under that blanket you moved your hands all over her body and up into her skirt, and it was only by sheer force of will that the two of you restrained yourselves from venturing into the forbidden territory of out-and-out fucking. How was it possible that such a thing
could have happened? Are the sexual energies of youth so powerful that the mere presence of another body can serve as an inducement to sex? You would never do such a thing now, would not even dare to think of doing such a thing—but then again, you are no longer young.
No, you were never promiscuous, even if you sometimes wish you had allowed yourself to be wilder and more impulsive, but in spite of your temperate behavior, you had a couple of run-ins with the dreaded germs of intimacy. The clap. It happened to you once, when you were twenty years old, and once was more than enough. A viscous green slime oozing from the tip of your cock, a feeling that a metal pin had been jammed down your urethra, and the simple act of urination turned into an agony. You never knew how you contracted gonorrhea, the cast of possible candidates was limited, and none of them struck you as a likely carrier of that dismal scourge, but five years later, when you found yourself with a case of the crabs, you did know who was responsible. No pain this time, but an incessant itch in the pubic region, and when you finally looked down to see what was going on, you were astonished to discover that you had been infested with a battalion of midget crabs—identical in shape to the crabs that live in the ocean, but minute in size, no bigger than ladybugs. You were so ignorant about venereal diseases that you had never heard of this affliction until you caught it yourself, had no idea that such a thing as the crab louse even existed. Penicillin had cured the gonorrhea, but nothing
more than a powder was needed to rid you of the vermin who were camping out in your pubes. A minor complaint, then, rather comical when looked at from a distance, but at the time you found it sad, deeply sad, for the person who had contaminated you with those itchy devils had been the first great love of your life, the mad love that had struck you down at fifteen and had tortured you through the remaining years of your adolescence, and sleeping with her now, in your early adulthood, had made you feel that perhaps you were destined to love her again and that this time—if the gods were with you—your love would be fully requited. But the clandestine weekend you had spent together was not the beginning of a new story. It was the end of an old story—a happy end in its own way, but still the end, the very end, and the bugs crawling around in your crotch were nothing more than a sad little coda to that final chapter.
Ladybugs were considered good luck. If one of them landed on your arm, you were supposed to make a wish before it flew away. Four-leaf clovers were also agents of good fortune, and you spent countless hours in your early childhood on your hands and knees in the grass, searching for those small prizes, which did indeed exist but were found only rarely and therefore were a cause for much celebration. Spring was heralded by the appearance of the first robin, the brown, red-breasted bird who would suddenly and unaccountably show up in your backyard one morning, hopping around on the grass and digging for worms. You would count the robins after
that, taking note of the second one, the third one, the fourth one, adding more robins to the tally each day, and by the time you stopped counting them, the weather would be warm. The first summer after you moved into the house on Irving Avenue (1952), your mother planted a garden in the backyard, and among the clusters of annuals and perennials in the loamy earth of the flower bed, there was a single sunflower, which continued to grow as the weeks went by, first coming up to your shins, then up to your waist, then up to your shoulders, and then, after reaching the top of your head, shooting on past you to a height of about six feet. The sunflower’s progress was the central event of the summer, a bracing plunge into the mysterious workings of time, and every morning you would run into the backyard to measure yourself against it and see how fast it was gaining on you. That same summer, you made your first close friend, the first true comrade of your childhood, a boy named Billy whose house was just a short distance from yours, and because you were the only person who could understand him when he talked (he garbled his words, which seemed to sink back into his saliva-clogged mouth before they could emerge as cleanly articulated sound), he relied on you as his interpreter to the rest of the world, and you relied on him as an intrepid Huck to your more cautious Tom. The next spring, you spent every afternoon combing through the bushes together, looking for dead birds—mostly fledglings, you now realize, who must have fallen out of their nests and could not make their way back home. You buried them in a patch of dirt that ran along the side of your house—intensely
solemn rituals accompanied by made-up prayers and long moments of silence. You had both discovered death by then, and you knew that it was a serious business, something that did not allow for any jokes.
The first human death your remember with any clarity took place in 1957, when your eighty-year-old grandmother dropped down on the floor with a heart attack and died in a hospital later that day. You have no memory of going to the funeral, which would suggest you were not there, in all likelihood because you were ten years old and your parents thought you were too young. What you remember is the darkness that filled the house for days afterward, the people coming and going to sit shiva with your father in the living room, unknown men reciting incomprehensible Hebrew prayers in mumbled voices, the strangely quiet commotion of it all, your father’s grief. You yourself were almost entirely untouched by this death. You had felt no connection to your grandmother, no love from her, no curiosity about who you were, not the slightest glimmer of affection, and the few times she’d wrapped her arms around you for a grandmotherly hug, you had felt frightened, eager for the embrace to end. The 1919 murder was still a family secret then, you would not learn about it until you were in your early twenties, but you had always sensed that your grandmother was mad, that this small immigrant woman with her broken English and violent screaming spells was someone to be kept at arm’s length. Even as the mourners drifted in and out of the house, you went about
your ten-year-old-boy’s business, and when the rabbi put his hand on your shoulder and said it would be all right for you to go off and play in your Little League game that evening, you went up to your room, put on your baseball uniform, and ran out of the house.