He figured he would be walking freely on his ankle again by the end of January, which would be more than enough time to vacate the apartment on East Eighty-ninth Street and prepare himself for the big move.
Then, on January first, as Ferguson was about to take the first bite of his first breakfast of the new decade, his mother told him the joke.
* * *
IT WAS AN old joke, apparently, one that had been circulating in Jewish living rooms for years, but for some unaccountable reason it had escaped Ferguson’s notice, somehow or other he had never been in one of those living rooms when someone had been telling it, but on that New Year’s Day morning of 1970 his mother finally told it to him in the kitchen, the classic story about the young Russian Jew with the long, unpronounceable name who arrives at Ellis Island and begins chatting with an older, more experienced Lantsman, and when the young one tells the old one his name, the old one frowns and says a name that long and unpronounceable won’t do the job for his new life in America, he needs to change it to something shorter, something with a nice American ring to it. What do you suggest? the young one asks. Tell them you’re Rockefeller, the old one says, you can’t go wrong with that. Two hours go by, and when the young Russian sits down to be interviewed by an immigration official, he can no longer dredge up the name the old man advised him to give. Your name? the official asks. Slapping his head in frustration, the young man blurts out in Yiddish, Ikh hob fargessen (I’ve forgotten)! And so the Ellis Island official uncaps his fountain pen and dutifully records the name in his ledger: Ichabod Ferguson.
Ferguson liked the joke, and he laughed hard when his mother told it to him over breakfast in the kitchen, but when he limped upstairs to his bedroom afterward, he found himself unable to stop thinking about it, and with nothing to distract him from his thoughts, he kept on thinking about the poor immigrant for the rest of the morning and into the early afternoon, at which point the story was released from the domain of jokes to become a parable about human destiny and the endlessly forking paths a person must confront as he walks through life. A young man is suddenly torn into three young men, each one identical to the others but each with a different name: Rockefeller, Ferguson, and the long, unpronounceable X that has traveled with him from Russia to Ellis Island. In the joke, he ends up as Ferguson because the immigration official doesn’t understand the language he is speaking. That was already interesting enough—to have a name forced on you because of someone’s bureaucratic error and then to go on bearing that name for the rest of your life. Interesting, as in bizarre or funny or tragic. A Russian Jew transformed into a Scottish Presbyterian with fifteen strokes from another man’s pen. And if the Jew is taken for a Protestant in white, Protestant America, if every person he encounters automatically assumes he is someone other than who he is, how will that affect his future life in America? Impossible to say exactly how, but one can assume it will make a difference, that the life he will lead as Ferguson will not be the same one he would have led as the young Hebrew X. On the other hand, young X was not opposed to becoming Rockefeller. He accepted his older compatriot’s advice about the need to choose another name, and what if he had remembered that name instead of letting it slip out of his mind? He would have become a Rockefeller, and from that day forth people would have assumed he was a member of the richest family in America. His Yiddish accent would have fooled no one, but how would that have prevented people from assuming he belonged to another branch of the family, one of the subsidiary foreign branches that could trace its bloodlines directly back to John D. and his heirs? And if young X had had the wherewithal to remember to call himself Rockefeller, how would that have affected his future life in America? Would he have had the same life or a different life? No doubt a different life, Ferguson said to himself, but in what ways it was impossible to know.
Ferguson, whose name was not Ferguson, found it intriguing to imagine himself having been born a Ferguson or a Rockefeller, someone with a different name from the X that had been attached to him when he was pulled from his mother’s womb on March 3, 1947. In point of fact, his father’s father had not been given another name when he arrived at Ellis Island on January 1, 1900—but what if he had?
Out of that question, Ferguson’s next book was born.
Not one person with three names, he said to himself that afternoon, which happened to be January 1, 1970, the seventieth anniversary of his grandfather’s arrival in America (if family legend was to be believed), the man who had become neither Ferguson nor Rockefeller and had been gunned down in a Chicago leather-goods warehouse in 1923, but for the purposes of the story Ferguson would begin with his grandfather and the joke, and once the joke was told in the first paragraph his grandfather would no longer be a young man with three possible names but one name, neither X nor Rockefeller but Ferguson, and then, after telling the story of how his parents met, were married, and he himself was born (all based on the anecdotes he had heard from his mother over the years), Ferguson would turn the proposition on its head, and rather than pursue the notion of one person with three names, he would invent three other versions of himself and tell their stories along with his own story (more or less his own story, since he too would become a fictionalized version of himself), and write a book about four identical but different people with the same name: Ferguson.
A name born out of a joke about names. The punch line to a joke about the Jews from Poland and Russia who had boarded ships and come to America. Without question a Jewish joke about America—and the enormous statue that stood in New York Harbor.
Mother of exiles.
Father of strife.
Bestower of misbegotten names.
He was still traveling the two roads he had imagined as a fourteen-year-old boy, still walking down the three roads with Lazlo Flute, and all along, from the beginning of his conscious life, the persistent feeling that the forks and parallels of the roads taken and not taken were all being traveled by the same people at the same time, the visible people and the shadow people, and that the world as it was could never be more than a fraction of the world, for the real also consisted of what could have happened but didn’t, that one road was no better or worse than any other road, but the torment of being alive in a single body was that at any given moment you had to be on one road only, even though you could have been on another, traveling toward an altogether different place.
Identical but different, meaning four boys with the same parents, the same bodies, and the same genetic material, but each one living in a different house in a different town with his own set of circumstances. Spun this way and that by the effect of those circumstances, the boys would begin to diverge as the book moved forward, crawling or walking or galloping their way through childhood, adolescence, and early manhood as more and more distinct characters, each one on his own separate path, and yet all of them still the same person, three imaginary versions of himself, and then himself thrown in as Number Four for good measure, the author of the book, but the details of the book were still unknown to him at that point, he would understand what he was trying to do only after he started doing it, but the essential thing was to love those other boys as if they were real, to love them as much as he loved himself, as much as he had loved the boy who had dropped dead before his eyes on a hot summer afternoon in 1961, and now that his father was dead as well, this was the book he needed to write—for them.
God was nowhere, he said to himself, but life was everywhere, and death was everywhere, and the living and the dead were joined.
Only one thing was certain. One by one, the imaginary Fergusons would die, just as Artie Federman had died, but only after he had learned to love them as if they were real, only after the thought of seeing them die had become unbearable to him, and then he would be alone with himself again, the last man standing.
Hence the title of the book: 4 3 2 1.
* * *
SO ENDS THE book—with Ferguson going off to write the book. Loaded down with two heavy suitc
ases and a knapsack, he left New York on February third and traveled by bus to Montreal, where he spent one week with Luther Bond, and then he climbed onto a plane and headed across the ocean to Paris. For the next five and a half years, he lived in a two-room flat on the rue Descartes in the fifth arrondissement, working steadily on his novel about the four Fergusons, which grew into a much longer book than he had imagined it would be, and when he wrote the last word on August 25, 1975, the manuscript came to a total of one thousand one hundred and thirty-three double-spaced typed pages.
The most difficult passages for him to write were the ones that recounted the deaths of his beloved boys. How hard it was to conjure up the storm that killed the thirteen-year-old youth of the shining countenance, and how anguished he felt as he wrote down the details of the traffic accident that ended the life of the twenty-year-old Ferguson-3, and after those two necessary but horrendous obliterations, nothing caused him more pain than having to tell of Ferguson-1’s death on the night of September 8, 1971, a passage he put off writing until the last pages of the book, the account of the fire that consumed the house in Rochester, New York, when Charlie Vincent, Ferguson-1’s downstairs neighbor, fell asleep while smoking one of his Pall Malls in bed, igniting himself along with the sheets and blankets that covered him, and as the flames sprinted across the room, they eventually rose up and touched the ceiling, and because the wood in that old house was dry and crumbling, the fire burst through the ceiling and set the floor of the upstairs bedroom ablaze, and so rapidly did the fire advance upon the sleeping twenty-four-year-old journalist, translator, and lover of Hallie Doyle, that the entire room was burning before he had a chance to spring from the bed and crawl out the window.
Ferguson took a pause. He stood up from the desk, pulled out a cigarette from his shirt pocket, and walked around and back and forth between the two rooms of the small flat, and once he felt his mind was clear enough to start again, he returned to the desk, sat down in the chair, and wrote the final paragraphs of the book:
If Ferguson-1 had lived through the night, he would have woken the next morning and traveled to Attica with Gianelli, and for the next five days he would have written articles about the uprising at the prison, the mass takeover by more than a thousand men that shut down the facility as the strikers took thirty-nine guards hostage in order to press their demands for reform. There was little doubt that Ferguson-1 would have been heartened by the solidarity among the inmates. Nearly everyone in the racially divided prison stood together in backing the demands, and for the first time anyone could remember, black prisoners, white prisoners, and Latino prisoners were all on the same side. The other side budged a little, but not enough to offer any hope. They rejected the demand for amnesty, they rejected the demand to replace the prison superintendent, and they rejected the admittedly impossible demand to give the rebels safe passage out of the country, even after the Algerian government promised to accept them all. Four days of grinding, unsuccessful negotiations between the inmates and Department of Correctional Services commissioner Russell Oswald, and for four straight days Governor Rockefeller refused to come to the prison to help the two sides reach a settlement. Then, on September thirteenth, Rockefeller’s mystifying command to take back the prison by force. At 9:46 A.M., the battalion of corrections officers and New York State troopers poised on top of the prison’s outer walls opened fire on the men down in the yard, killing ten of the hostages and twenty-nine prisoners, among them Sam Melville, who was hunted down and executed at point-blank range minutes after the barrage of rifle fire had stopped. In addition to those thirty-nine deaths, three hostages and eighty-five inmates were wounded. The yard was awash in blood.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, word spread that the inmates had slit the throats of the ten murdered captives, but the following day in Rochester, when the Monroe County medical examiner looked over the bodies of the ten dead guards, he affirmed that not one of them had been killed by knife wounds. They had all been shot by their fellow officers. In a New York Times story written by Joseph Lelyveld on the fifteenth, a relative of one of the slain guards, Carl Valone, viewed the body and later said: “There was no slashing. Carl was not even touched. He was killed by a bullet that had the name Rockefeller on it.”
Nelson Rockefeller represented the liberal wing of the Republican Party, and until the Attica massacre he had always been seen as a man of moderation and good sense, but in May 1973 he again confounded the world when he pushed a series of laws through the New York State legislature that stipulated minimum penalties of fifteen years to life in prison for selling two ounces or more of heroin, morphine, opium, cocaine, or cannabis or for possessing four ounces or more of those same substances. The so-called Rockefeller Drug Laws were the most punitive ever imposed by any state in the country.
Perhaps he was still dreaming of becoming president and wanted to show how tough he was to the tough, law-and-order camp of the American public, but much as he had always wanted to become the leader of the Free World, he had failed to win his party’s nomination after running for president in 1960, 1964, and 1968, losing out to Nixon, Goldwater, and again to Nixon, but when the disgraced Nixon resigned from office in 1974, his vice president, Gerald Ford, who himself had been appointed after the resignation of the disgraced Spiro Agnew, took over as the new president and appointed Nelson Rockefeller to become his vice president, making them the only two men in American history to hold their offices without being elected by the American people, and so it was, on December 19, 1974, after a 287-to-128 vote in the House of Representatives and a 90-to-7 vote in the Senate, that Nelson Rockefeller was sworn in as the forty-first vice president of the United States.
He was married to a woman named Happy.
ALSO BY PAUL AUSTER
NOVELS
The New York Trilogy
(City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room)
In the Country of Last Things
Moon Palace
The Music of Chance
Leviathan
Mr. Vertigo
Timbuktu
The Book of Illusions
Oracle Night
The Brooklyn Follies
Day/Night
(Travels in the Scriptorium and Man in the Dark)
Invisible
Sunset Park
NONFICTION
The Invention of Solitude
Hand to Mouth
The Red Notebook
Collected Prose
Winter Journal
Here and Now
(with J. M. Coetzee)
Report from the Interior
SCREENPLAYS
Three Films: Smoke, Blue in the Face, Lulu on the Bridge
The Inner Life of Martin Frost
POETRY
Collected Poems
ILLUSTRATED BOOKS
The Story of My Typewriter
(with Sam Messer)
Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story
(with Isol)
City of Glass
(adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli)
EDITOR
The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry
I Thought My Father Was God and Other True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project
Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PAUL AUSTER is the bestselling author of Sunset Park, Invisible, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. Among his other honors are the Prix Médicis étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, and the Premio Napoli for Sunset Park. In 2012 he was the first recipient of the NYC Literary Honors in the category of fiction. He has also been a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (The Music of Chance), and the Edgar Award (City of Glass). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Lett
ers and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapters
1.0
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
5.1
5.2
5.3
5.4
6.1
6.2
6.3
6.4
7.1
7.2
7.3
7.4
Also by Paul Auster
About the Author
Copyright
4 3 2 1. Copyright © 2017 by Paul Auster. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.