Man in the Dark Read Free

of
Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
     
    Copyright © 2008 by Paul Auster
All rights reserved.
Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.
     
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
     
    Auster, Paul, 1947–
    Man in the dark / Paul Auster. — 1st ed.
               p. cm.
    ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8839-7
    ISBN-10: 0-8050-8839-3
     
        1. Autobiographical fiction, American. 2. Alternative histories (Fiction), American. 3. Imaginary wars and battles—Fiction. 4. Political fiction. I. Title.
     
        PS3551.U77M36 2008
    813'.54—dc22                                                                               2007037515
     
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    First Edition 2008
     
    Designed by Victoria Hartman
     
    Printed in the United States of America
     
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For David Grossman
and his wife Michal
his son Jonathan
his daughter Ruthi
and in memory of Uri
     

MAN IN THE DARK

 
     
     
     
    I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness. Upstairs, my daughter and granddaughter are asleep in their bedrooms, each one alone as well, the forty-seven-year-old Miriam, my only child, who has slept alone for the past five years, and the twenty-three-year-old Katya, Miriam’s only child, who used to sleep with a young man named Titus Small, but Titus is dead now, and Katya sleeps alone with her broken heart.
    Bright light, then darkness. Sun pouring down from all corners of the sky, followed by the black of night, the silent stars, the wind stirring in the branches. Such is the routine. I have been living in this house for more than a year now, ever since they released me from the hospital. Miriam insisted that I come here, and at first it was just the two of us, along with a day nurse who looked after me when Miriam was off at work. Then, three months later, the roof fell in on Katya, and she dropped out of film school in New York and came home to live with her mother in Vermont.
    His parents named him after Rembrandt’s son, the little boy of the paintings, the golden-haired child in the red hat, the daydreaming pupil puzzling over his lessons, the little boy who turned into a young man ravaged by illness and who died in his twenties, just as Katya’s Titus did. It’s a doomed name, a name that should be banned from circulation forever. I think about Titus’s death often, the horrifying story of that death, the images of that death, the pulverizing consequences of that death on my grieving granddaughter, but I don’t want to go there now, I can’t go there now, I have to push it as far away from me as possible. The night is still young, and as I lie here in bed looking up into the darkness, a darkness so black that the ceiling is invisible, I begin to remember the story I started last night. That’s what I do when sleep refuses to come. I lie in bed and tell myself stories. They might not add up to much, but as long as I’m inside them, they prevent me from thinking about the things I would prefer to forget. Concentration can be a problem, however, and more often than not my mind eventually drifts away from the story I’m trying to tell to the things I don’t want to think about. There’s nothing to be done. I fail again and again, fail more often than I succeed, but that doesn’t mean I don’t give it my best effort.
    I put him in a hole. That felt like a good start, a promising way to get things going. Put a sleeping man in a hole, and then see what happens when he wakes up and tries to crawl out. I’m talking about a deep hole in the ground, nine or ten feet deep, dug in such a way as to form