Effing snorted at this, an ornery kind of laugh that seemed to dismiss the subject once and for all. Immediately after that he straightened himself up in his chair. It was remarkable how quickly this transformed his appearance. He was no longer a comatose semi-corpse lost in a twilight reverie; he had become all sinew and attention, a seething little mass of resurrected strength. As I even-tually learned, this was the real Effing, if real is a word that can be used in talking about him. So much of his character was built on falsehood and deception, it was nearly impossible to know when he was telling the truth. He loved to trick the world with his sudden experiments and inspirations, and of all the stunts he pulled, the one he liked best was playing dead.
He leaned forward in his chair, as if to tell me the interview was about to begin in earnest. In spite of the black patches over his eyes, his gaze was directed straight at me. “Answer me, Mr. Fogg,” he said. “Are you a man of vision?”
“I used to think I was, but I’m not so sure anymore.”
“When you see a thing before your eyes, are you able to identify it?”
“More often than not, yes. But there are times when it becomes rather difficult.”
“For example.”
“For example, I sometimes have trouble distinguishing men from women in the street. So many people have long hair now, a quick glance doesn’t always tell you enough. Especially when you find yourself looking at a feminine man or a masculine woman. The signals can get quite confused.”
“And when you find yourself looking at me, what words come to you then?”
“I say that I’m looking at a man in a wheelchair.”
“An old man?”
“Yes, an old man.”
“A very old man?”
“Yes, a very old man.”
“Have you noticed anything in particular about me, boy?”
“The patches over your eyes, I suppose. And the fact that your legs seem paralyzed.”
“Yes, yes, my infirmities. They fairly jump out at you, don’t they?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“Have you drawn any conclusions about the patches?”
“Nothing definite. My first thought was that you were blind, but that doesn’t really follow from the evidence. If a person can’t see, why would he bother to make sure that he can’t see? That wouldn’t make sense. New possibilities therefore occur to me. Perhaps the patches cover something worse than blindness. A hideous deformity, for example. Or perhaps you’ve just had an operation and have to wear the patches for medical reasons. On the other hand, it could be that you’re partially blind and that strong light irritates your eyes. Or it could be that you enjoy wearing patches for their own sake, because you think they’re attractive. There are any number of possible answers to your question. At this point, I don’t have enough information to say what that answer is. When it comes copy down to it, the only thing I know for certain is that you’re wearing black patches over your eyes. I can state that they are there, but I don’t know why they are there.”
“In other words, you won’t take anything for granted.”
“That can be dangerous. It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.”
“And my legs?”
“That question strikes me as somewhat simpler. From the looks of them under the blanket, they seem to have withered and atrophied, which would indicate that they haven’t been used in many years. If that’s the case, then it would be reasonable to assume that you aren’t able to walk. Perhaps you’ve never been able to walk.”
“An old man who can’t see and can’t walk. What do you think of that, boy?”
“I would think that such a man is more dependent on others than he would like to be.”
Effing grunted, leaned back in his chair, and then tilted his head toward the ceiling. For the next ten or fifteen seconds, neither one of us spoke.
“What kind of voice do you have, boy?” he said at last.
“I don’t know. I can’t really hear it when I talk. The few times I’ve heard it played back to me on a tape recorder, I thought it sounded awful. But apparently everyone thinks that.”
“Can it go the distance?”
“The distance?”
“Can it work over the long haul. Can you talk for two or three hours without growing hoarse. Can you sit there reading to me for an entire afternoon and still get the words out of your mouth. That’s what I mean by going the distance.”
“I think I can do that, yes.”
“As you yourself observed, I’ve lost the power of sight. My relationship with you will be composed of words, and if your voice can’t go the distance, you won’t be worth a goddamned thing to me.”
“I understand.”
Effing leaned forward again, then paused briefly for dramatic effect. “Are you afraid of me, boy?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You should be. If I make up my mind to hire you, you’ll learn what fear is, I guarantee it. I might not be able to see or walk, but I have other powers, powers that few men have ever mastered.”
“What kinds of powers?”
“Mental powers. A force of will that can bend the physical world into any shape I want.”
“Telekinesis.”
“Yes, if you wish. Telekinesis. Do you remember the blackout of a few years ago?”
“The fall of 1965.”
“Precisely. I was the one who caused it. I had recently lost my sight, and one day I found myself sitting alone in this room, cursing what fate had done to me. At approximately five o’clock, I said to myself: I wish the whole world had to live in the same darkness I do. In less than an hour, all the lights in the city went out.”
“It could have been a coincidence.”
“There are no coincidences. That word is used only by ignorant people. Everything in the world is made up of electricity, animate and inanimate things alike. Even thoughts give off an electrical charge. If they’re strong enough, a man’s thoughts can change the world around him. Don’t forget that, boy.”
“I won’t forget it.”
“And you, Marco Stanley Fogg, what powers do you have?”
“None that I’m aware of. I have the normal human powers, I suppose, but nothing beyond that. I can eat and sleep. I can walk from one place to another. I can feel pain. Occasionally, I can even think.”
“A rabble-rouser. Is that what you are, boy?”
“Hardly. I doubt that I could persuade anyone to do anything.”
“A victim, then. It’s either one or the other. You either do or get done to.”
“We’re all victims of something, Mr. Effing. If only of the fact that we’re alive.”
“Are you sure you’re alive, boy? Maybe you just imagine you are.”
“Anything is possible. It could be that you and I are figments, that we’re not really here. Yes, I’m willing to accept that as a possibility.”
“Do you know how to hold your tongue?”
“If it’s called for, I suppose I’m as good at being silent as the next man.”
“And what man would that be, boy?”
“Any man. It’s a form of expression. I can talk or be silent, depending on the nature of the situation.”
“If I take you on, Fogg, you’ll probably grow to hate me. Just remember that it’s all for your own good. There’s a hidden purpose to everything I do, and it’s not for you to judge.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind.”
“Good. Now come over here and let me feel your muscles. I can’t have some weakling pushing me around the streets, can I? If your muscles can’t do the job, you won’t be worth a goddamned thing to me.”
I said my good-byes to Zimmer that night, and the next morning I put the few things I owned into my knapsack and traveled uptown to Effing’s apartment. As chance would have it, I did not see Zimmer again for thirteen years. Circumstances pulled us
apart, and when I finally ran into him by accident in the spring of 1982 at the junction of Varick Street and West Broadway in lower Manhattan, he had changed so much that at first I did not recognize him. He was twenty or thirty pounds heavier, and as he walked along with his wife and two little boys, I actually took note of his utterly conventional appearance: the paunch and thinning hair of early middle age, the placid, bemused look of a seasoned family man. We were walking in opposite directions and passed each other by. Then, very suddenly, I heard him call out my name. It is a common occurrence, I suppose, to bump into someone from your past, but seeing Zimmer like that stirred up an entire world of forgotten things for me. It almost didn’t matter what had become of him, that he was teaching at a university somewhere in California, that he had published a four-hundred-page study of French film, that he had not written a poem in more than ten years. The important thing, quite simply, was that I had seen him. We stood there on the corner talking about the old days for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then he and his family scampered off to wherever it was they were going. I have not seen or heard from him since, but I suspect that the idea to write this book first came to me after that meeting four years ago, at the precise moment when Zimmer vanished down the street and I lost sight of him again.
After I arrived at Effing’s apartment, Mrs. Hume sat me down in the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Mr. Effing was taking his morning nap, she said, and he wouldn’t be up until ten o’clock. In the meantime, she told me what my duties in the house would be, when we would be eating our meals, how many hours I would be spending with Effing every day, and so on. She was the one who took care of the “body work,” as she put it, dressing and washing him, taking him in and out of bed, shaving him, getting him on and off the toilet, whereas my job was somewhat more complex and loosely defined. I was not exactly being hired to be his friend, but it was something very close to that: a sympathetic companion, a person to break the monotony of his loneliness. “Lord knows the man doesn’t have much time left,” she said. “The least we can do is see to it that his last days aren’t too miserable.” I said that I understood.
“It will improve his spirits to have a young person around,” she continued. “Not to speak of my spirits.”
“I’m just glad to have the job,” I said.
“He enjoyed your conversation yesterday. He said you gave him good answers.”
“I didn’t know what to say, really. He can be hard to follow sometimes.”
“Don’t I know it. But there’s always something cooking in that brain of his. He’s a bit loony, but I wouldn’t call him senile.”
“No, he’s a sharp customer. I suspect he’ll be keeping me on my toes.”
“He told me you had a pleasant voice. That’s a promising start, anyway.”
“I can’t imagine him using the word pleasant.“
“That might not have been the exact word, but that’s what he meant. He said your voice reminded him of someone he used to know.”
“I hope it was someone he liked.”
“He didn’t tell me. That’s one thing you’ll learn about Mr. Thomas. He never tells you anything he doesn’t want to.”
My room was at the end of a long hall. It was a spare little place with a single window that looked out onto the back alley, a rudimentary enclosure no larger than a monk’s cell. This was familiar territory to me, and it didn’t take me long to feel at home among the minimal furnishings: an old-fashioned iron bedstead with vertical bars at either end, a chest of drawers, and a bookcase along one wall, filled mostly with French and Russian books. There was only one picture in the room, a large etching in a black varnished frame that depicted a mythological scene crowded with human figures and a plethora of architectural details. Later on, I learned that it was a black-and-white rendering of one of the panels from a series of paintings by Thomas Cole entitled The Course of Empire, a visionary saga of the rise and fall of the New World. I unpacked my clothes and saw that everything I owned fit comfortably into the top drawer of the bureau. I had only one book with me, a paperback copy of Pascal’s Pensées that Zimmer had given to me as a going-away present. I placed it on top of the pillow for the time being and then stepped back to study my new room. It wasn’t much, but it was mine. After so many months of uncertainty, it comforted me just to be able to stand inside those four walls, to know there was a place in the world I could now call my own.
It rained steadily for the first two days I was there. With no chance to go out for an afternoon walk, we spent the whole time in the living room. Effing was less combative than he had been during the interview, and for the most part he sat there in silence, listening to the books I read to him. It was difficult for me to judge the nature of this silence, whether he was using it to test me in a way I did not understand, or whether it was simply a reflection of his mood. As with so much of Effing’s behavior during the time I stayed with him, I was torn between reading a dark purpose into his actions and dismissing them as the products of random impulse. The things he said to me, the books he chose for me to read, the strange errands he sent me on—were these part of an elaborate and obscure plan, or did it only come to look that way in retrospect? At times I felt that he was trying to pass on some mysterious and arcane knowledge to me, acting as a self-appointed mentor to my inner progress, but without letting me know it, forcing me to play a game without telling me the rules. This was Effing as crackpot spiritual guide, as an eccentric master struggling to initiate me into the secrets of the world. At other times, however, when his selfishness and arrogance thundered out of control, he struck me as nothing more than a vicious old man, a burnt-out maniac living in the borderland between madness and death. All in all, he heaped a considerable amount of abuse on me, and it wasn’t long before I grew wary of him, even as my fascination for him increased. Several times, when I was on the verge of giving up, Kitty talked me into staying, but in the long run I believe I wanted to stay, even when it felt impossible to last another minute. Whole weeks went by when I could barely stand to turn my eyes in his direction, when I had to gird myself merely to sit in the same room with him. But I stuck it out, I held on until the bitter end.
Even in his most placid humors, Effing took pleasure in pulling little surprises. On that first morning, for example, he wheeled himself into the room wearing a pair of dark blind-man’s glasses. The black eyepatches, which had caused so much discussion during the interview, were nowhere to be seen. Effing made no comment about this switch. Taking my lead from him, I gathered that this was one of those instances when I was supposed to hold my tongue, and therefore I said nothing about it either. The next morning, he had on a pair of normal prescription glasses with metal frames and preposterously thick lenses. They magnified and distorted the shape of his eyes, making them look as large as bird’s eggs, bulging blue spheres that seemed about to spring from his head. It was hard for me to tell if those eyes could see or not. There were moments when I was convinced that it was all a bluff and that he could see as sharply as I did; at other moments, I became just as convinced that he was totally blind. That was how Effing wanted it, of course. He would cast out intentionally ambiguous signals and then revel in the uncertainty they caused, adamantly refusing to divulge the facts. On some days, he left his eyes uncovered, wearing neither patches nor glasses. On still other days, he would come in with a black blindfold tied around his head, which made him look like a prisoner about to be shot by a firing squad. It was impossible for me to know what these various costumes meant. He never said a word about them, and I never had the courage to ask. The important thing, I decided, was not to let his antics get under my skin. He could do what he pleased, but as long as I did not fall into his trap, none of it could affect me. That was what I told myself in any case. In spite of my resolve, it was sometimes hard to resist him. Especially on the days when he left his eyes uncovered, I would often find myself staring straight into them, unable not to look, defenseless against their power to lure me in. It was as thoug
h I was trying to discover some truth in them, some opening that would lead me directly into the darkness of his skull. I never got anywhere with it, however. For all the hundreds of hours I spent gazing into them, Effing’s eyes never told me a thing.
He had selected all the books in advance, and he knew exactly what he wanted to hear. These readings were not a form of recreation so much as a line of pursuit, a dogged investigation of certain precise and narrow subjects. That did not make his motives any more apparent to me, but at least there was a kind of subterranean logic to the enterprise. The initial sequence of books dealt with the question of travel, most often travel into the unknown and the discovery of new worlds. We began with the journeys of Saint Brendan and Sir John de Mandeville, then moved on to Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca, and Thomas Harriot. We read excerpts from Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, plodded through the whole of John Wesley Powell’s book about his mapping expedition down the Colorado River, and ended up by reading a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century captivity stories, firsthand accounts written by white settlers who had been abducted by Indians. I found these books uniformly interesting, and once my voice became accustomed to working for long stretches at a time, I believe I developed an adequate reading style. It all hinged on clarity of enunciation, which in turn depended on modulations of tone, subtle pauses, and a steadfast attentiveness to the words on the page. Effing rarely made any comments while I read, but I knew that he was listening from the occasional noises that escaped from him whenever we reached a particularly knotty or exciting passage. These reading sessions were probably when I felt in greatest harmony with him, but I soon learned not to confuse his silent concentration with good will. After the third or fourth book on travel, I made a casual suggestion that he might find it amusing to listen to parts of Cyrano’s journey to the moon. This got no more than a snarl from him. “Keep your ideas to yourself, boy,” he said. “If I wanted your opinion, I’d ask for it.”
The far wall of the living room was fitted with a bookcase that spanned from the floor to the ceiling. I don’t know how many books were on those shelves, but there must have been at least five or six hundred, perhaps a thousand. Effing seemed to know where all of them were, and when the time came for us to start a new book, he would tell me exactly where to go. “Second shelf,” he would say, “twelve or fifteen spaces from the left. Lewis and Clark. A red book with cloth binding.” He never made a mistake, and as the evidence of his powers of recall mounted, I could not help being impressed. I once asked him if he was familiar with the memory systems of Cicero and Raymond Lull, but he dismissed my question with a wave of the hand. “You can’t study those things,” he said. “It’s a talent you’re born with, a natural gift.” He paused for a moment, then continued in a sly, mocking voice. “But how can you be sure that I know where the books are? Stop and think about it. Maybe I creep out here at night and rearrange them while you’re asleep. Or maybe I move the books by telepathy when your back is turned. Isn’t that so, young man?” I took this to be a rhetorical question and didn’t say anything to contradict him. “Just remember, Fogg,” he continued, “never take anything for granted. Especially when you’re dealing with a person like me.”