Leviathan Read Free Page A

difficult for anyone not to feel at home here. For me, the great lure of the house is its remoteness. It sits on top of a small mountain, four miles from the nearest village by way of a narrow dirt road. The winters must be ferocious on this mountain, but during the summer everything is green, with birds singing all around you, and the meadows are filled with countless wildflowers: orange hawkweed, red clover, maiden pink, buttercup. About a hundred feet from the main house, there’s a simple outbuilding that Sachs used as his work studio whenever he was here. It’s hardly more than a cabin, with three small rooms, a kitchenette, and a bathroom, and ever since it was vandalized twelve or thirteen winters ago, it has fallen into disrepair. The pipes have cracked, the electricity has been turned off, the linoleum is peeling up from the floor. I mention these things because that is where I am now—sitting at a green table in the middle of the largest room, holding a pen in my hand. For as long as I knew him, Sachs spent every summer writing at this same table, and this is the room where I saw him for the last time, where he poured out his heart to me and let me in on his terrible secret. If I concentrate hard enough on the memory of that night, I can almost delude myself into thinking that he’s still here. It’s as if his words were still hanging in the air around me, as if I could still reach out my hand and touch him. It was a long and grueling conversation, and when we finally came to the end of it (at five or six in the morning), he made me promise not to let his secret go beyond the walls of this room. Those were his exact words: that nothing he said should escape this room. For the time being, I’ll be able to keep my promise. Until the moment comes for me to show what I’ve written here, I can comfort myself with the thought that I won’t be breaking my word.

    The first time we met, it was snowing. More than fifteen years have gone by since that day, but I can still bring it back whenever I wish. So many other things have been lost for me, but I remember that meeting with Sachs as clearly as any event in my life.
    It was a Saturday afternoon in February or March, and the two of us had been invited to give a joint reading of our work at a bar in the West Village. I had never heard of Sachs, but the person who called me was too rushed to answer my questions over the phone. “He’s a novelist,” she said. “His first book was published a couple of years ago.” Her call came on a Wednesday night, just three days before the reading was supposed to take place, and there was something close to panic in her voice. Michael Palmer, the poet who was supposed to appear on Saturday, had just canceled his trip to New York, and she wondered if I would be willing to stand in for him. It was a somewhat backhanded request, but I told her I would do it anyway. I hadn’t published much work at that point in my life—six or seven stories in little magazines, a handful of articles and book reviews—and it wasn’t as though people were clamoring for the privilege of hearing me read out loud to them. So I accepted the frazzled woman’s offer, and for the next two days I fell into a panic of my own, frantically searching through the midget world of my collected stories for something that wouldn’t embarrass me, for one scrap of writing that would be good enough to expose to a roomful of strangers. On Friday afternoon, I stopped in at several bookstores and asked for Sachs’s novel. It seemed only right that I should know something about his work before I met him, but the book was already two years old, and no one had it in stock.
    As chance would have it, an immense storm blew in from theMidwest on Friday night, and by Saturday morning a foot and a half of snow had fallen on the city. The reasonable thing would have been to get in touch with the woman who had called me, but I had stupidly forgotten to ask for her number, and