The Book of Illusions Read Free Page A

I was able to make the bottle last until the end of the summer.
    I took a leave of absence for the fall semester, but rather than go away or look for psychological help, I stayed on in the house and continued to sink. By late September or early October, I was knocking off more than half a bottle of whiskey every night. It kept me from feeling too much, but at the same time it deprived me of any sense of the future, and when a man has nothing to look forward to, he might as well be dead. More than once, I caught myself in the middle of lengthy daydreams about sleeping pills and carbon monoxide gas. I never went far enough to take any action, but whenever I look back on those days now, I understand how close I came to it. The pills were in the medicine cabinet, and I had already taken the bottle off the shelf three or four times; I had already held the loose pills in my hand. If the situation had gone on much longer, I doubt that I would have had the strength to resist.
    That was how things stood for me when Hector Mann unexpectedly walked into my life. I had no idea who he was, had never even stumbled across a reference to his name, but one night just before the start of winter, when the trees had finally gone bare and the first snow was threatening to fall, I happened to see a clip from one of his old films on television, and it made me laugh. That might not sound important, but it was the first time I had laughed at anything since June, and when I felt that unexpected spasm rise up through my chest and begin to rattle around in my lungs, I understood that I hadn’t hit bottom yet, that there was still some piece of me that wanted to go on living. From start to finish, it couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds. As laughs go, it wasn’t especially loud or sustained, but it took me by surprise, and in that I didn’t struggle against it, and in that I didn’t feel ashamed of myself for having forgotten my unhappiness during those few moments when Hector Mann was on screen, I was forced to conclude that there was something inside me I had not previously imagined, something other than just pure death. I’m not talking about some vague intuition or sentimental yearning for what might have been. I had made an empirical discovery, and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof. If I had it in me to laugh, then that meant I wasn’t entirely numb. It meant that I hadn’t walled myself off from the world so thoroughly that nothing could get in anymore.
    It must have been a little past ten o’clock. I was anchored to my usual spot on the sofa, holding a glass of whiskey in one hand and the remote-control gadget in the other, mindlessly surfing channels. I came upon the program a few minutes after it started, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that it was a documentary about silent-film comedians. All the familiar faces were there—Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd—but they also included some rare footage of comics I had never heard of before, lesser-known figures such as John Bunny, Larry Semon, Lupino Lane, and Raymond Griffith. I followed the gags with a kind of measured detachment, not really paying attention to them, but absorbed enough not to switch to something else. Hector Mann didn’t come on until late in the program, and when he did, they showed only one clip: a two-minute sequence from The Teller’s Tale , which was set in a bank and featured Hector in the role of a hardworking assistant clerk. I can’t explain why it grabbed me, but there he was in his white tropical suit and his thin black mustache, standing at a table and counting out piles of money, and he worked with such furious efficiency, such lightning speed and manic concentration, that I couldn’t turn my eyes away from him. Upstairs, repairmen were installing new planks in the floor of the bank manager’s office. Across the room, a pretty secretary sat at her desk, buffing her nails behind a large typewriter. At first, it looked as though