E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten
Auster Oracle Night
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-24616-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-24616-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Sunset Park, The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace and The New York Trilogy. He and Spencer Ostrander collaborated on Bloodbath Nation. In 2006, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. His other honours include the Prix Medicis Étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the Screenplay of Smoke, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Burning Boy, and the Carlos Fuentes Prize for his body of work. His novel 4 3 2 1 was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work was translated into more than forty languages. His final novel, Baumgartner, was published in November 2023. He died on 30 April 2024.
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BORN IN A TOILET,
BABY DISCARDED
High on crack, a 22-year-old reputed prostitute gave birth over a toilet in a Bronx SRO, then dumped her dead baby in an outdoor garbage bin, police said yesterday.
The woman, police said, had been having sex with a john about 1 a.m. yesterday when she left the room they were sharing at 450 Cyrus Pl. and walked into a bathroom to smoke crack. Sitting over a toilet, the woman ‘feels the water break, feels something come out,’ Sgt. Michael Ryan said.
But police said the woman – wasted on crack – apparently was not aware she had given birth.
Twenty minutes later, the woman noticed the dead baby in the bowl, wrapped her in a towel, and dropped her in a garbage bin. She then returned to her customer and resumed having sex, Ryan said. A dispute over payment soon broke out, however, and police said the woman stabbed her customer in the chest about 1:15 a.m.
Police said the woman, identified as Kisha White, fled to her apartment on 188th Street. Later, White returned to the Dumpster and recovered her baby. A neighbor, however, saw her return and called the police.
When I finished reading the article for the first time, I said to myself: This is the worst story I have ever read. It was hard enough to absorb the information about the baby, but when I came to the stabbing incident in the fourth paragraph, I understood that I was reading a story about the end of mankind, that that room in the Bronx was the precise spot on earth where human life had lost its meaning. I paused for a few moments, trying to catch my breath, trying to stop myself from trembling, and then I read the article again. This time, my eyes filled with tears. The tears were so sudden, so unexpected, that I immediately covered my face with my hands to make sure no one saw them. If the coffee shop hadn’t been crowded with customers, I probably would have collapsed in a fit of real sobbing. I didn’t go that far, but it took every bit of strength in me to hold myself back.
I walked home in the rain. Once I had peeled off my wet clothes and changed into something dry, I went into my workroom, sat down at my desk, and opened the blue notebook. Not to the story I had been writing earlier, but to the last page, the final verso opposite the inside back cover. The article had churned up so much in me, I felt I had to write some kind of response to it, to tackle the misery it had provoked head on. I kept at it for about an hour, writing backward in the notebook, beginning with page ninety-six, then turning to page ninety-five, and so on. When I finished my little harangue, I closed the notebook, stood up from my desk, and walked down the hall to the kitchen. I poured myself a glass of orange juice, and as I put the carton back into the refrigerator, I happened to glance over at the telephone, which sat on a little table in the corner of the room. To my surprise, the light was flashing on the answering machine. There hadn’t been any messages when I’d returned from my lunch at Rita’s, and now there were two. Strange. Insignificant, perhaps, but strange. For the fact was, I hadn’t heard the phone ring. Had I been so caught up in what I was doing that I hadn’t noticed the sound? Possibly. But if that were so, then it was the first time it had ever happened to me. Our phone had a particularly loud bell, and the noise always carried down the hall to my workroom – even when the door was shut.
The first message was from Grace. She was rushing to meet a deadline and wouldn’t be able to get out of the office until seven-thirty or eight o’clock. If I got hungry, she said, I should start dinner without her, and she would heat up the leftovers when she came home.
The second message was from my agent, Mary Sklarr. It seemed that someone had just called her from Los Angeles, asking if I was interested in writing another screenplay, and she wanted me to call her back so she could fill me in on the details.9 I called, but it took a while before she got down to business. Like everyone else who was close to me, Mary began the conversation by asking about my health. They’d all thought they had lost me, and even though I’d been home from the hospital for four months now, they still couldn’t believe I was alive, that they hadn’t buried me in some graveyard back at the beginning of the year.
‘Tip-top,’ I said. ‘A few lulls and droops every now and then, but basically good. Better and better every week.’
‘There’s a rumor going around that you’ve started writing something. True or false?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘John Trause. He called this morning, and your name happened to come up.’
‘It’s true. But I don’t know where I’m going with it yet. It could be nothing.’
‘Let’s hope not. I told the movie people you’ve started a new novel and probably wouldn’t be interested.’
‘But I am interested. Very interested. Especially if there’s real money involved.’
‘Fifty thousand dollars.’
‘Good lord. With fifty thousand dollars, Grace and I would be out of the woods.’
‘It’s a dumb project, Sid. Not your kind of thing at all. Science fiction.’
‘Ah. I see what you mean. Not exactly my line of work, is it? But are we talking about fictitious science or scientific fiction?’
‘Is there a difference?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘They’re planning a remake of The Time Machine.’
‘H. G. Wells?’
‘Exactly. To be directed by Bobby Hunter.’
‘The guy who makes those big-budget action movies? What does he know about me?’
‘He’s a fan. Apparently, he’s read all your books and loved the movie of Tabula Rasa.’
‘I suppose I should be flattered. But I still don’t get it. Why me? I mean, why me for this?’
‘Don’t worry, Sid. I’ll call back and tell them no.’
‘Give me a couple of days to think about it first. I’ll read the book and see what happens. You never know. Maybe I’ll come up with an interesting idea.’
‘Okay, you’re the boss. I’ll tell them you’re considering it. No promises, but you want to mull it over before you decide.’
‘I’m pretty sure there’s a copy of the book in the apartment. An old paperback I bought in junior high school. I’ll start reading it now and call you back in a day or two.’
The paperback had sold for thirty-five cents in 1961, and it included two of Wells’s early novels, The Time Machine and War of the Worlds. The Time Machine was under a hundred pages, and it didn’t take me much more than an hour to finish it. I found it thoroughly disappointing – a bad, awkwardly written piece of work, social criticism disguising itself as adventure yarn and heavy-handed on both counts. It didn’t seem possible that anyone would want to do a straight adaptation of the book. That version had already been done, and if this Bobby Hunter character was as familiar with my work as he claimed to be, then it must have meant that he wanted me to take the story somewhere else, to leap out of the book and find a way of doing something fresh with the material. If not, why had he asked me? There were hundreds of professional screenwriters with more experience than I had. Any one of them could have translated Wells’s novel into an acceptable script – which, I imagined, would have wound up looking similar to the Rod Taylor–Yvette Mimieux film I’d seen as a boy, with more dazzling special effects.
If there was anything that grabbed me about the book, it was the underlying conceit, the notion of time travel itself. Yet Wells had somehow managed to get that wrong too, I felt. He sends his hero into the future, but the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that most of us would prefer to visit the past. Trause’s story about his brother-in-law and the 3-D viewer was a good example of how powerfully the dead keep their hold on us. If given the choice of going forward or backward, I for one wouldn’t have hesitated. I would much rather have found myself among the no-longer-living than the unborn. With so many historical enigmas to be solved, how not to feel curious about what the world had looked like in, say, the Athens of Socrates or the Virginia of Thomas Jefferson? Or, like Trause’s brother-in-law, how to resist the urge to reencounter the people you had lost? To see your mother and father on the day they met, for example, or to talk to your grandparents when they were young children. Would anyone turn down that opportunity in exchange for a glimpse of an unknown and incomprehensible future? Lemuel Flagg had seen the future in Oracle Night, and it had destroyed him. We don’t want to know when we will die or when the people we love will betray us. But we’re hungry to know the dead before they were dead, to acquaint ourselves with the dead as living beings.
I understood that Wells needed to send his man forward in time in order to make his point about the injustices of the English class system, which could be exaggerated to cataclysmic levels if placed in the future, but even granting him the right to do that, there was another, more serious problem with the book. If a man living in London at the end of the nineteenth century could invent a time machine, then it stood to reason that other people in the future would be able to do the same thing. If not on their own, then with the time traveler’s help. And if people from future generations could travel back and forth across the years and centuries, then both the past and the...
